The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences

Have you lost track of developments in generative linguistics, i nding yourself unsure about
the distinctive features of Minimalism? Would you like to know more about recent advances in
the genetics of language, or about right hemisphere linguistic operation? Has your interest in
narrative drawn you to question the relation between stories and grammars? he Cambridge
Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences addresses these issues, along with hundreds of others.
It includes basic entries for those unfamiliar with a given topic and more speciic entries for
those seeking more specialized knowledge. It incorporates both well-established i ndings and
cutting-edge research as well as classical approaches and new theoretical innovations. he vol-
ume is aimed at readers who have an interest in some aspect of language science but wish to
learn more about the broad range of ideas, i ndings, practices, and prospects that constitute
this rapidly expanding ield, a ield arguably at the center of current research on the human
mind and human society.

Patrick Colm Hogan is a professor in the Department of English and the Program in Cognitive
Science at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of ten books, including Cognitive
Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists and he Mind and Its Stories: Narrative
Universals and Human Emotion (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Advance Praise for
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences

For both range and depth of exposition and commentary on the diverse disciplinary angles
that exist on the nature of language, there is no single volume to match this i ne work of
reference.
Akeel Bilgrami, Columbia University

he Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences is a very welcome addition to the ield
of language sciences. Its comprehensiveness is praiseworthy, as is the quality of its entries and
discussions.
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h is ambitious and comprehensive work, and the very high quality of the editors and con-
tributors, ensure that it will be a valuable contribution to the understanding of language and
its uses, for both professionals and a more general audience.
Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
THE CAMBRIDGE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF

THE LANGUAGE SCIENCES

Edited by
PATRICK COLM HOGAN
University of Connecticut
C AM BRIDG E U N I VE RSI T Y PRE SS
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he Cambridge encyclopedia of the language sciences / edited by Patrick Colm Hogan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-521-86689-7 (hardback)
1. Linguistics Encyclopedias. I. Hogan, Patrick Colm. II. Title.
P29.C28 2009
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GENERAL EDITOR
Patrick Colm Hogan
University of Connecticut, Storrs

ADVISORY EDITORIAL BOARD

Florian Coulmas Barbara Lust

German Institute of Japanese Studies Cornell University
and Duisberg-Essen University

William Croft Lee Osterhout

University of New Mexico University of Washington

Lyle Jenkins James Pustejovsky

Biolinguistics Institute Brandeis University

CONSULTING EDITORIAL BOARD

Mark Baker Howard Lasnik

Rutgers University University of Maryland

Deborah Cameron Loraine Obler

University of Oxford City University of New York

Nigel Fabb William OGrady

University of Strathclyde University of Hawaii

Carol Ann Fowler Susan Pintzuk

Haskins Laboratories University of York
and University of Connecticut

Ronald Geluykens Eleanor Rosch

University of Oldenburg University of California, Berkeley

Margaret Harris Jay Rueckl

Oxford Brookes University University of Connecticut

Zoltn Kvecses Mark Turner

Etvs Lornd University Case Western Reserve University
To the memory of B. N. Pandit (19162007)
philosopher, Sanskritist, father-in-law

Purua-artha-nyn gun pratiprasava kaivalya

sva-rpa-pratih v citi-aktir-iti
Patajali
CONTENTS

List of Entries page xi

A Note on Cross-References and the Alphabetization of the Entries xv
Preface: On the Very Idea of Language Sciences xvii
Acknowledgments xxiii

1 Language Structure in Its Human Context: New Directions

for the Language Sciences in the Twenty-First Century 1
William Croft

2 The Psychology of Linguistic Form 12

Lee Osterhout, Richard A. Wright, and Mark D. Allen

3 The Structure of Meaning 23

James Pustejovsky

4 Social Practices of Speech and Writing 35

Florian Coulmas

5 Explaining Language: Neuroscience, Genetics, and Evolution 46

Lyle Jenkins

6 Acquisition of Language 56
Barbara Lust

7 Elaborating Speech and Writing: Verbal Art 65

Patrick Colm Hogan

ENTRIES 77

List of Contributors 941

Index 953

ix
ENTRIES

A Biolinguistics Computational Linguistics

Abduction Birdsong and Human Language Concepts
Absolute and Statistical Universals Blended Space Conceptual Blending
Accessibility Hierarchy Blindness and Language Conceptual Development and Change
Acoustic Phonetics Bounding Conceptual Metaphor
Adaptation Brain and Language Conduit Metaphor
Ad Hoc Categories Brocas Area Connectionism and Grammar
Adjacency Pair Connectionism, Language Science, and
Age Groups C Meaning
Aging and Language Cartesian Linguistics Connectionist Models, Language
Agreement Case Structure, and Representation
Agreement Maximization Categorial Grammar Consciousness and Language
Alliteration Categorization Consistency, Truth, and Paradox
Ambiguity Causative Constructions Constituent Structure
Amygdala C-Command Constraints in Language Acquisition
Analogy Cerebellum Construction Grammars
Analogy: Synchronic and Diachronic Charity, Principle of Contact, Language
Analyticity Childrens Grammatical Errors Context and Co-Text
Anaphora Chirographic Culture Control Structures
Animacy Clitics and Cliticization Conversational Implicature
Animal Communication and Human Codeswitching Conversational Repair
Language Cognitive Architecture Conversation Analysis
Aphasia Cognitive Grammar Cooperative Principle
Areal Distinctness and Literature Cognitive Linguistics and Language Core and Periphery
Art, Languages of Learning Corpus Callosum
Articulatory Phonetics Cognitive Linguistics, Language Science, Corpus Linguistics
Artiicial Languages and Metatheory Creativity in Language Use
Aspect Cognitive Poetics Creoles
Auditory Processing Coherence, Discourse Critical Discourse Analysis
Autism and Language Coherence, Logical Critical Periods
Autonomy of Syntax Colonialism and Language Culture and Language
Color Classiication Cycle, he
B Communication
Babbling Communication, Prelinguistic D
Basal Ganglia Communicative Action Deconstruction
Basic Level Concepts Communicative Intention Dei nite Descriptions
Bilingual Education Comparative Method Deixis
Bilingualism, Neurobiology of Competence Descriptive, Observational, and
Bilingualism and Multilingualism Competence and Performance, Literary Explanatory Adequacy
Binding Compositionality Dhvani and Rasa

xi
List of Entries

Dialect Genes and Language Left Hemisphere Language Processing

Dialogism and Heteroglossia Gesture Legal Interpretation
Dif usion Government and Binding Lexical Acquisition
Digital Media Grammaticality Lexical-Functional Grammar
Diglossia Grammaticality Judgments Lexical Learning Hypothesis
Discourse Analysis (Foucaultian) Grammaticalization Lexical Processing, Neurobiology of
Discourse Analysis (Linguistic) Grooming, Gossip, and Language Lexical Relations
Discrete Ini nity Lexical Semantics
Disorders of Reading and Writing H Lexicography
Division of Linguistic Labor Habitus, Linguistic Linguistic Relativism
Dyslexia Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar Literacy
Hippocampus Literariness
E Historical Linguistics Literary Character and Character Types
Ellipsis Historical Reconstruction Literary Universals
Embodiment Holophrastic Stage, he Literature, Empirical Study of
Emergentism Homologies and Transformation Sets Logic and Language
Emergent Structure Logical Form
Emotion and Language I Logical Positivism
Emotion, Speech, and Writing Icon, Index, and Symbol
Emotion Words Ideal Speech Situation M
Emplotment Identity, Language and Mapping
Encoding Ideology and Language Markedness
nonc/Statement (Foucault) Idioms Market, Linguistic
Essentialism and Meaning Idle Talk and Authenticity Marxism and Language
Ethics and Language Ijtihd (Interpretive Efort) Meaning and Belief
Ethnolinguistic Identity I-Language and E-Language Meaning and Stipulation
Event Structure and Grammar Illocutionary Force and Sentence Types Meaning Externalism and Internalism
Evidentiality Image Schema Media of Communication
Evolutionary Psychology Implicational Universals Memes and Language
Exemplar Indeterminacy of Translation Memory and Language
Exemplar heory Indexicals Mental Models and Language
Extinction of Languages Inequality, Linguistic and Mental Space
Communicative Merge
F Infantile Responses to Language Metalanguage
Family Resemblance Information Structure in Discourse Metaphor
Feature Analysis Information heory Metaphor, Acquisition of
Felicity Conditions Innateness and Innatism Metaphor, Information Transfer in
Field (Bourdieu) Integrational Linguistics Metaphor, Neural Substrates of
Film and Language Intension and Extension Metaphor, Universals of
Filters Intentionality Meter
Focus Internal Reconstruction Methodological Solipsism
Foregrounding Interpretation and Explanation Methodology
Forensic Linguistics Interpretive Community Metonymy
Formal Semantics Intertextuality Minimalism
Forms of Life Intonation Mirror Systems, Imitation, and
Frame Semantics Irony Language
Framing Efects Modality
Frontal Lobe L Modern World-System, Language and
Functional Linguistics Language, Natural and Symbolic the
Language Acquisition Device (LAD) Modularity
G Language Change, Universals of Montague Grammar
Games and Language Language Families Mood
Gender and Language Language-Game Morpheme
Gender Marking Language-Learning Environment Morphological Change
Generative Grammar Language of hought Morphological Typology
Generative Poetics Language Policy Morphology
Generative Semantics Laws of Language Morphology, Acquisition of
Generic- and Speciic-Level Metaphors Learnability Morphology, Evolution and

xii
List of Entries

Morphology, Neurobiology of Poetic Language, Neurobiology of Rhythm

Morphology, Universals of Poetic Metaphor Right Hemisphere Language Processing
Motif Poetics Role and Reference Grammar
Movement Point of View Rule-Following
Music, Language and Politeness
Politics of Language S
N Possible Worlds Semantics Schema
Narrative, Grammar and Possible Worlds Semantics and Fiction Scripts
Narrative, Neurobiology of Pragmatic Competence, Acquisition of Second Language Acquisition
Narrative, Scientiic Approaches to Pragmatics Self-Concept
Narrative Universals Pragmatics, Evolution and Self-Organizing Systems
Narratives of Personal Experience Pragmatics, Neuroscience of Semantic Change
Narratology Pragmatics, Universals in Semantic Fields
Nationalism and Language Pragmatism and Language Semantic Memory
Natural Kind Terms Predicate and Argument Semantic Primitives (Primes)
Necessary and Suicient Conditions Preference Rules Semantics
Negation and Negative Polarity Prestige Semantics, Acquisition of
Network heory Presupposition Semantics, Evolution and
Neurochemistry and Language Primate Vocal Communication Semantics, Neurobiology of
Neuroimaging Priming, Semantic Semantics, Universals of
Number Principles and Parameters heory Semantics-Phonology Interface
Principles and Parameters heory and Semantics-Pragmatics Interaction
O Language Acquisition Semiotics
Occipital Lobe Print Culture Sense and Reference
Optimality heory Private Language Sentence
Oral Composition Projectibility of Predicates Sentence Meaning
Oral Culture Projection (Blending heory) Sexuality and Language
Ordinary Language Philosophy Projection Principle Signed Languages, Neurobiology of
Origins of Language Proposition Sign Language, Acquisition of
Overregularizations Propositional Attitudes Sign Languages
Prototypes Sinewave Synthesis
P Proverbs Situation Semantics
Parable Psychoanalysis and Language Socially Distributed Cognition
Paralanguage Psycholinguistics Sociolinguistics
Parameters Psychonarratology Source and Target
Parietal Lobe Psychophysics of Speech Speciic Language Impairment
Parsing, Human Speech-Acts
Parsing, Machine Q Speech Anatomy, Evolution of
Passing heories Qualia Roles Speech-Language Pathology
Performance Quantiication Speech Perception
Performative and Constative Quantitative Linguistics Speech Perception in Infants
Perisylvian Cortex Speech Production
Perlocution R Spelling
Person Radical Interpretation Spreading Activation
Philology and Hermeneutics Reading Standardization
Phoneme Realization Structure Standard heory and Extended Standard
Phonetics Rectiication of Names (Zheng Ming) heory
Phonetics and Phonology, Neurobiology Recursion, Iteration, and Stereotypes
of Metarepresentation Story and Discourse
Phonological Awareness Reference and Extension Story Grammar
Phonology Reference Tracking Story Schemas, Scripts, and Prototypes
Phonology, Acquisition of Register Stress
Phonology, Evolution of Regularization Structuralism
Phonology, Universals of Relevance heory Stylistics
Phrase Structure Religion and Language Stylometrics
Pidgins Representations Subjacency Principle
Pitch Rhetoric and Persuasion Suggestion Structure
Poetic Form, Universals of Rhyme and Assonance Syllable

xiii
List of Entries

Synchrony and Diachrony Transformational Grammar Verbal Reasoning

Syntactic Change Translation Verbal Reasoning, Development of
Syntax Truth Veriiability Criterion
Syntax, Acquisition of Truth Conditional Semantics Verse Line
Syntax, Evolution of Two-Word Stage Voice
Syntax, Neurobiology of Typology Voice Interaction Design
Syntax, Universals of
Syntax-Phonology Interface U W
Underlying Structure and Surface Wernickes Area
T Structure Word Classes (Parts of Speech)
Teaching Language Universal Grammar Word Meaning
Teaching Reading Universal Pragmatics Word Order
Teaching Writing Universals, Nongenetic Word Recognition, Auditory
Temporal Lobe Usage-Based heory Word Recognition, Visual
Tense Use and Mention Words
Text Working Memory and Language
Text Linguistics V Processing
halamus Vagueness Writing, Origin and History of
hematic Roles Verbal Art, Evolution and Writing and Reading, Acquisition of
heory of Mind and Language Acquisition Verbal Art, Neuropsychology of Writing and Reading, Neurobiology of
Tone Verbal Display Writing Systems
Topicalization Verbal Humor
Topic and Comment Verbal Humor, Development of X
Traces Verbal Humor, Neurobiology of X-Bar heory

xiv
A NOTE ON CROSS-REFERENCES AND THE ALPHABETIZATION
OF THE ENTRIES

Cross-references are signaled by small capitals (boldface when implicit). hey are designed
to indicate the general relevance of the cross-referenced entry and do not necessarily imply
that the entries support one another. Note that the phrasing of the cross-references does not
always match the entry headings precisely. In order to minimize the disruption of reading,
entries often use shortened forms of the entry headings for cross-references. For example, this
process involves parietal structures points to the entry Parietal Lobe. In some cases, a
cross-reference may refer to a set of entries. For example, architectures of this sort are found
in connectionism alerts the reader to the presence of entries on connectionism generally,
rather than to a single entry. Finally, a cross-reference may present a heading in a diferent
word order. For example, the target entry for here we see another universal of phonol-
ogy would be listed as Phonology, Universals of.
In general, entries with multiword headings are alphabetized under their main language
term. hus, the entry for Universals of Phonology is listed as Phonology, Universals of. he
main exceptions to this involve the words language and linguistic or linguistics, where another
term in the heading seemed more informative or distinctive in the context of language sciences
(e.g., Linguistic Market is listed as Market, Linguistic).

xv
PREFACE: ON THE VERY IDEA OF LANGUAGE SCIENCES
A title referring to language sciences tacitly raises at least three
questions. First, what is a science? Second, what is language?
Finally, what is a language science? I cannot propose answers
to these questions in a short preface. Moreover, it would not be
appropriate to give answers here. he questions form a sort of
background to the essays and entries in the following pages,
essays and entries that often difer in their (explicit or implicit)
answers. However, a preface of this sort can and should
indicate the general ideas about science and language that
governed the development of he Cambridge Encyclopedia of
the Language Sciences.
WHAT IS SCIENCE?
Philosophers of science have often been concerned to dei ne a
demarcation criterion, separating science from nonscience. I
have not found any single criterion, or any combination of cri-
teria, compelling in the sense that I have not found any argu-
ment that, to my satisfaction, successfully provides necessary
and sufficient conditions for what constitutes a science.
In many ways, ones acceptance of a demarcation criterion is
guided by what one already considers to be a science. More
exactly, ones formulation of a demarcation criterion tends to
be a function of what one takes to be a paradigmatic science or,
in some cases, an exemplary case of scientiic practice.
he advocates of strict demarcation criteria meet their mir-
ror opposites in writers who assert the social construction of
science, writers who maintain that the diference between
science and nonscience is simply the diference between dis-
tinct positions within institutions, distinct relations to power.
Suppose we say that one discipline or theory is a science and
another is not. h is is just to say that the former is treated as
science, while the latter is not. he former is given authority in
academic departments, in relevant institutions (e.g., banks, in
the case of economics), and so on.
Again, this is not the place for a treatise on the philosophy
of science. Here it is enough to note that I believe both sides
are partially correct and partially incorrect. First, as already
noted, I do not believe that there is a strict, dei nitive demar-
cation criterion for science. However, I do believe that there is
a complex of principles that roughly dei ne scientiic method.
hese principles do not apply in the same way to chemical
interactions and group relations and that is one reason why
narrow demarcation criteria fail. However, they are the same
general principles across diferent domains. Very simply,
scientiic method involves inter alia the following practices:
1) the systematic study of empirically ascertainable patterns
in a given area of research; 2) the formulation of general prin-
ciples that govern those patterns; 3) the attempt to uncover
cases where these principles do not govern observed pat-
terns; 4) the attempt to eliminate gaps, vagueness, ambiguity,
and the like from ones principles and from the sequences of
principles and data that produce particular explanations; and
5) the attempt to increase the simplicity of ones principles
and particular explanations. Discourses are scientiic to the
extent that they routinely involve these and related practices.
Note that none of this requires, for example, strict falsiica-
tion or detailed prediction. For example, social phenomena
are most often too complex to allow for signiicant prediction,
in part because one cannot gather all the relevant data before-
hand. h is does not mean that they are closed to systematic
explanations after the fact, as more data become available.
Of course, following such methodological guidelines is not
all there is to the actual practice of science. here are always
multiple options for formulating general principles that it
the current data. he evaluation of simplicity is never entirely
straightforward. heories almost invariably encounter anom-
alous data in some areas and fail to examine other areas.
Moreover, in many cases, the very status of the data is unclear.
Despite all this, we hierarchize theories. We teach some and do
not teach others. Agencies fund some and do not fund others.
he very nature of the enterprise indicates that even in ideal cir-
cumstances, this cannot be purely meritocratic. Moreover, real
circumstances are far from ideal. hus, in the real world, adher-
ence to methodological principles may be very limited (see, for
example, Faust 1984, Mahoney 1977, and Peters and Ceci 1982).
h is is where social constructionism enters. It seems undeni-
able that relations of institutional power, the political economy
of professions, and ideologies of nation or gender guide what is
institutionalized, valued, funded, and so forth.
xvii
Preface
In putting together a volume on science, then, I have tried
to incorporate the insights of both the more positive views
of science and the more social constructionist views. Put in
a way that may seem paradoxical, I have tried to include all
approaches that it the loose criteria for science just mentioned.
I believe that these loose criteria apply not only to paradigmatic
sciences themselves but also to many social critiques of sci-
ence that stress social construction. I have therefore included a
wide range of what are sometimes called the human sciences.
Indeed, the volume could be understood as encompassing the
language-relevant part of the human sciences which leads to
our second question.
WHAT IS LANGUAGE?
Like science, ones dei nition of language depends to a great
extent on just what the word calls to mind. Ones view of lan-
guage is likely to vary if one has in mind syntax or seman-
tics, hearers or speakers, dialogues or diaries, brain damage
or propaganda, storytelling or acoustic phonetics. A i rst
impulse may be to see one view of language as correct and the
others as false. And, of course, some views are false. However,
I believe that our understanding of language can and, indeed,
should sustain a great deal of pluralism.
In many ways, my own paradigm for human sciences is cog-
nitive science. Cognitive science brings together work from a
remarkable array of disciplines literally, from Anthropology
to Zoology. Moreover, it sustains a range of cognitive archi-
tectures, as well as a range of theories within those architec-
tures. hus, it is almost by its very nature pluralistic. Of course,
some writers wish to constrain this pluralism, insisting that one
architecture is right and the others are wrong. Certainly, one
can argue that particular architectures are wrong. However,
perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of cognitive science is
that it sustains a series of types of cognitive architecture. In
Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts (2003), I argued that
these types capture patterns at diferent levels of analysis. hus,
all are scientiically valuable.
More exactly, we may distinguish three levels of cognitive
analysis: bodies, minds, and groups or societies. hese lev-
els stand in a hierarchical relation such that bodies are more
explanatorily basic than minds, and minds are more explana-
torily basic than groups or societies. Lower levels provide
causally necessary principles for higher levels. Minds do not
operate without brains. People without minds do not interact
in groups. In other words, lower levels explain higher levels.
However, higher-level patterns provide interpretive principles
for understanding lower levels (see interpretation and
explanation). We explain the (mental) feeling of fear by ref-
erence to the (bodily) operation of the amygdala. But, at the
same time, we understand amygdala activity as fear because
we interpret that activity in terms of the mental level.
In the analysis of cognition, the most basic, bodily cogni-
tive architecture is provided by neurobiology. However, due
to the intricate particularity of neurobiology, we often draw
on more abstract associative models at this level. hese mod-
els serve to make the isolation and explanation of patterns
less computationally complex and individually variable. he
xviii
Group Dynamics
Society
Individual Interactions
Mental Representations
Mind
Intentions
Body Associative Networks
Brains
Figure 1. Levels of cognitive analysis. Between the levels, black
arrows represent the direction of explanation, while hollow arrows repre-
sent the direction of interpretation. Within the levels, the superior items
are more computationally tractable or algorithmically speciiable models
of the inferior items, either singly (in the case of brains and intentions)
or collectively (in the case of individual interactions). Tractability may be
produced by simpliication (as in the case of bodily architectures), by
systematic objectiication (as in the case of mental architectures), or by
statistical abstraction (as in the case of social analysis).
most important architectures of the latter sort are found in
connectionism.
As a wide range of writers have stressed, the distinctive fea-
ture of mind our second level of analysis is intentional-
ity. However, intentionality, as subjective and experiential, is
often not well suited for scientiic study. Many theorists have
therefore sought to systematize and objectify our understand-
ing of mind. Most cognitive treatments of the mental level
have their roots in folk psychology, a minimal, common-
sense objectiication of intention in terms of beliefs and aims.
But these cognitive treatments draw on empirical research
and principles of scientiic method to develop models of the
human mind that are sometimes very far removed from folk
psychology. Speciically, they most often replace belief by
mental representations and algorithmically speciiable
operations on those representations. We may therefore refer to
these models as representational. Representationalism serves
to make intention more tractable through a mentalistic archi-
tecture that is precisely articulated in its structures, processes,
and contents.
Finally, our treatment of societies may be loosely divided
into the more intentional or mental pole of individual inter-
action and the less subjective, more broadly statistical pole of
group dynamics. (See Figure 1.)
hese divisions apply to language no less than they apply
to other areas of human science. We draw on our represen-
tational account of syntax to understand certain brain pro-
cesses in the perisylvian cortex . Conversely, we explain
Preface
the impairment of (mental) syntactic capacities by reference
to (bodily) lesions in that area. For our purposes, the crucial
part of this analysis is its implication that language includes
all three levels and that the sciences of language should
therefore encompass brains, associative networks, intentions,
mental representations, individual interactions, and group
dynamics. h is takes us to our third question.
WHAT IS A SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE?
he preceding sections converge on a broad, pluralistic but
not indiscriminate account of what constitutes a language
science. Speciically, a language science is the application
of general principles of scientiic method to language phe-
nomena at any level. At the level of brain, we have neuro-
linguistics (see brain and language). At the level of
associative networks, we have connectionism. Intentionalism
leads us to certain forms of ordinary language philos-
ophy. Representational architectures are particularly well
developed, including Noam Chomskys various theories (see,
for example, minimalism), cognitive linguistics, and
other approaches. Personal interaction and group dynamics
are taken up in pragmatics, linguistic discourse analy-
sis, and sociolinguistics. Just as language encompasses
patterns at all these levels, language science necessarily
includes systematic accounts of language at all these levels.
Again, the levels of language are interrelated without being
reducible. Similarly, the various sciences are interrelated
systematically interrelated through upward explanation
and downward understanding or interpretation without
being reducible.
he preceding points should serve to clarify something that
is obvious, but rather vague, in ordinary speech: Language
science is not the same as language. Language science is a
systematic treatment of language that seeks to provide both
explanation and understanding. hus, an encyclopedia of
the language sciences does not present the same material as
an encyclopedia of language. It presents the current state of
theoretical explanation and understanding (along with some
historical background that is important for contextualizing
current theories). It does not present the current state of knowl-
edge about particular features of particular languages except
insofar as these features enter into research programs that aim
toward broader explanatory accounts or principles of more
general understanding. hus, the phonology of Urdu, the
morphology of Quechua, the metrical principles of English
verse lines, and the story and discourse structure of
Chinese narratives enter into the following essays and entries
only insofar as they enter into larger theoretical concerns.
Of course, to say this is only to mark out a general area for an
encyclopedia of the language sciences. It does not determine
precisely what essays and/or entries should make up such a
work. h is leads to our i nal concern.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE VOLUME
he preceding view of language science guided the formulation
of topics for the entries and the organization of the introductory
essays. However, it was not the only factor. In language sciences,
and indeed in human sciences generally, we need to add two
further considerations. he preceding analysis implicitly treats
language patterns as if they are comparable to any patterns
isolated in the natural sciences. However, there are two difer-
ences between patterns in language and, say, the patterns iso-
lated by physicists. First, language patterns are mutable. hey
are mutable in three ways at the level of groups, at the level of
individual minds or brains, and at the level of common genetic
inheritance. Insofar as language patterns change at the level
of groups, this mutability is comprehended by group dynam-
ics and related processes (most obviously in historical lin-
guistics). But mental and neurobiological theories do not
necessarily treat the other two sorts of mutability, for such the-
ories tend to focus on steady states of language. We therefore
account for changes in the individual mind or brain by refer-
ence to development or acquisition (see phonology, acqui-
sition of; syntax, acquisition of ; and so on). We account
for changes in common genetic properties through the evolu-
tion of language (see phonology, evolution of; syntax,
evolution of; and so on).
he second diference between patterns in language and pat-
terns isolated by physicists is related to the i rst. Just as we may
be insuicient in language, we may be more than suicient. In
other words, there is a diference between ordinary usage and
skilled usage. Rocks do not fall well or badly. hey simply fall,
and they do so at the same rate. People, however, speak well
or badly, efectively or inefectively, in a manner that is clichd
or unusually creative (see creativity in language use).
he point is most obvious in verbal art which leads us to the
most sweet and pleasing sciences of poetry, as Cervantes put
it (1950, 426).
In keeping with the preceding analysis, then, the main top-
ics in language science are treated initially in a series of seven
overview essays. he i rst essay provides a general introduc-
tion to the study of language. Its purpose is to orient readers
toward the ield as a whole. he second and third essays turn to
the mental level of language since this is the most widely ana-
lyzed. Due to the amount of work in this area, and due to the
diversity of approaches, the treatment of this level is divided
into two chapters. he i rst addresses formal aspects of lan-
guage syntax, phonology, and so forth. he second takes up
meaning. he fourth and i fth chapters address the other two
levels of language society (at the top) and the brain (at the
bottom). he latter also addresses the topics of genetics and
evolution, integrating these with the treatment of the brain. he
sixth chapter takes up language acquisition. hus, it turns from
the evolution of the general language capacities of the human
brain to the development of the particular language compe-
tence of individual human minds. Finally, the seventh chap-
ter considers the nonordinary use of language in verbal art.
he subsequent entries specify, elaborate, augment, and
revise the ideas of these essays. Here, of course, the editor of
a volume on language sciences faces the problem of just what
entries should be included. In other words, if language sciences
encompass the language-related part of neuroscience, social
science, and so forth, just what is that language-related part?
What does it include, and what does it exclude? One might dei ne
xix
Preface
this part very narrowly as including only phenomena that are
necessarily bound up with oral speech, sign languages,
or writing. More theoretically, one might dei ne this part as
comprising neurobiological, mental, or social phenomena that
occur only in connection with distinctive properties of speech,
signing, or writing.
Certainly, an encyclopedia treating language will focus
on phenomena that are inseparable from speech, sign lan-
guages, and/or writing and on such distinctive aspects of natu-
ral language as syntax. However, here, too, I believe it would
be a mistake to coni ne language sciences within a narrowly
dei ned domain. herefore, I have adopted a looser criterion.
he volume centrally addresses distinctive properties of natu-
ral language. However, it takes up a wider range of phenomena
that are closely connected with the architectural or, even more
importantly, the functional features of speech, sign languages,
and writing.
here are several cognitive operations for which speech,
signing, and writing appear to have direct functional conse-
quences. One is referential the speciication, compilation,
and interrelation of intentional objects (see the entries on
reference). Here I have in mind phenomena ranging from
the division of the color spectrum to the elaboration of causal
relations. A second area is mnemonic the facilitation and par-
tial organization of memory (see, for example, encoding). A
third is inferential the derivation of logical implications. A
fourth is imaginative the expansion and partial structuring
of simulation. One could think of the i rst and second func-
tions as bearing on direct, experiential knowledge of present
or past objects and events. he third and fourth functions bear,
rather, on indirect knowledge of actual or possible objects and
events. Two other functions are connected with action rather
than with knowledge. he i rst is motivational the extension
or elaboration of the possibilities for emotional response (see
emotion and language). A i nal area is interpersonal the
communication of referential intents, memories, inferences,
simulations, and motivations.
In determining what should be included in the volume,
I have taken these functions into account, along with archi-
tectural considerations. hus I see issues of interpretation
and emplotment (one of the key ways in which we organize
causal relations) as no less important than phonology or syn-
tactic structure. Of course, we have more i rmly established
and systematic knowledge in some areas than in others. hus
some entries will necessarily be more tentative, and make refer-
ence to a broader variety of opinion or a more limited research
base. But that is not a reason to leave such entries aside. Again,
the purpose of an encyclopedia of language science is not to
present a compilation of well-established particular facts, but
rather to present our current state of knowledge with respect to
explanation and understanding.
In keeping with this, when generating the entries (e.g.,
Phonology, Syntax, Neurobiology of Phonology, likelihood of intellectual progress, the likelihood of increasing
Neurobiology of Syntax, Acquisition of Phonology, and so
on), I have tried to be as systematic as possible. hus the vol-
ume includes some topics that have been under-researched
and under-theorized. For example, if neurobiology does in fact
provide a causal substrate for higher levels, then there should
xx
be important things to say, not only about the neurobiology
of syntax, but also about the neurobiology of pragmat-
ics and the neuropsychology of verbal art. he i rst has
certainly been more fully researched than the second or third.
But that is only more reason to stress the importance of the sec-
ond and third, to bring together what research has been done,
and to point to areas where this research could be productively
extended.
While it is possible to be systematic with research areas, one
cannot be systematic with theories. heories are more idiosyn-
cratic. hey difer from one another along many axes and can-
not be generated as a set of logical possibilities. I have sought to
represent theories that have achieved some level of acceptance
in scientiic communities. Given limitations of space, decisions
on this score have often been diicult particularly because
social constructionist and related analyses show that accep-
tance in scientiic communities is by no means a straightfor-
ward function of objective scientiic value.
h is leads us once again to the issue of the validity of theo-
ries. It should come as no surprise that my view of the issue in
efect combines a pluralistic realism with a roughly Lakatosian
advocacy of research programs and a Feyerabend-like practical
anarchism (Feyerabend 1975; Lakatos 1970). Speciically, I take
it that some theories are true and others are not. However, I do
not believe that only one theory is true. Diferent theories may
organize the world in diferent ways. here is no correct way of
organizing the world (though some ways will be more useful
than others for particular purposes). On the other hand, once
the world is organized in a certain way, then certain accounts of
the world are correct and certain accounts are incorrect. To take
a simple example, we may divide the color spectrum in difer-
ent ways (see color classification). No division is correct
or incorrect. But once we have a division, there are facts about
the color of particular objects. (h is view is related to Donald
Davidsons (1984) argument that truth is not relative to a con-
ceptual scheme, though it is, of course, relative to the mean-
ing of ones words. It also may have some similarity to Hilary
Putnams (1981) internal realism, depending on how that is
interpreted.)
Moreover, even for one organization of the world, we can
never dei nitively say that a given theory is or is not true. Note
that this means we cannot even strictly falsify a theory. We can
refer to the ongoing success of a research program and that is
important. Yet I do not share Imre Lakatoss (1970) optimism
about research programs. To some extent, research programs
appear to succeed insofar as they have powerful institutional
support, often for not very good intellectual reasons. Here, then,
I agree with Paul Feyerabend (1975) that orthodoxy in theori-
zation is wrong. It is wrong not only in explicitly or implicitly
identifying institutional support with validity. hus, it is wrong
not only for social constructionist reasons. It is wrong also for,
so to speak, positivist reasons. It is wrong in diminishing the
the validity of our theories, which is to say the scope of explana-
tion and understanding produced by these theories.
Whether or not this very brief sketch points toward a
good philosophy of science, it does, I believe, point toward
a good philosophy for an encyclopedia of science perhaps
Preface
particularly language science. I have tried to follow this phi-
losophy throughout the volume. Speciically, I have sought to
present a range of theoretical ideas (as well as more theory-
independent topics), placing them together in such a way as
to encourage a mutual sharpening of ideas and insights. To
borrow M. M. Bakhtins terms (1981), I have not set out to pro-
vide a monological source of authoritative discourse. Rather, I
have sought to present a heteroglot volume with which read-
ers may interact dialogically (see dialogism and hetero-
glossia) hopefully, to produce more intellectually adequate
theories later. Toward this end, I have encouraged authors to
be open about their own judgments and attitudes. here is a
common view that a piece of writing is biased if the speaker
frankly advocates one point of view. But, in fact, the opposite is
the case. A piece of writing is biased if a speaker acts as though
he or she is simply reporting undisputed facts, when in fact he
or she is articulating a partisan argument. Being open, dialogi-
cal, and multivocal does not mean being bland. Indeed, insight
is more likely to be produced through the tension among ideas
and hypotheses that are clearly delineated in their diferences.
h is is no less true in the language sciences than elsewhere.
Indeed, that is one reason why this volume treats language sci-
ences, not the science of language.
Patrick Colm Hogan
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. he Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed.
Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. 1950. he Adventures of Don Quixote.
Trans. J. M. Cohen . New York : Penguin.
Davidson, Donald. 1984. On the very idea of a conceptual scheme.
In Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 18398. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Faust, David. 1984. he Limits of Scientiic Reasoning. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Feyerabend, Paul. 1975. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic
heory of Knowledge. London: Verso.
Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2003. Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts:
A Guide for Humanists. New York : Routledge.
Lakatos, Imre. 1970. Falsiication and the methodology of scientiic
research programmes. In Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge,
ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, 91195. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Mahoney, Michael. 1977. Publication prejudices: An experimental
study of coni rmatory bias in the peer review system. Cognitive
herapy and Research 1: 16175.
Peters, Douglas, and Stephen Ceci. 1982. Peer-review practices of psy-
chological journals: he fate of published articles, submitted again.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 5.2: 18795.
Putnam, Hilary. 1981. Reason, Truth, and History. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
xxi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First of all, I must thank Phil Laughlin, who (inspired by the exemplary MIT Encyclopedia of
the Cognitive Sciences) suggested the project initially and invited me to make a more formal
proposal. Without Phils initial idea and subsequent encouragement, this volume would not
now exist. Eric Schwartz took over from Phil, then Simina Calin took over from Eric; both were
supportive and helpful, as were the several editorial assistants, most recently April Potenciano,
Christie Polchowski, and Jeanie Lee. Regina Paleski and Mark Fox ably shepherded this com-
plex project through the production process; Phyllis Berk worked with devotion on copy edit-
ing the manuscript; and Robert Swanson took on the tough job of indexing.
he members of the editorial board kindly provided comments on the list of entries and
suggested possible authors. hey also served as second readers for most of the entries. I am
indebted to them all. It is diicult and unrewarding work, but extremely valuable. Some entries
were evaluated by specialists not on the editorial board. I am deeply grateful to the following
scholars who agreed to read and comment on entries: J. Abutalebi, E. Ahlsn, A. Aikhenvald,
S. Anderson, A. Atkin, S. Barker, J. Beall, D. Beaver, H. Bejoint, H. Ben-Yami, A. Berger,
D. Bickerton, A. Bilgrami, S. Blackmore, J. Blommaert, C. Bowern, E. Brenowitz, J. Bybee,
J. Carroll, T. Deacon, M. DeGraf, J.-L. Dessalles, A. Edgar, C. Elgin, R. Ferrer i Cancho, J. Field,
H. Filip, D. Finkelstein, J. Forrester, R. Gibbs, R. Gibson, R. Giora, R. Gleave, K. Gluer-Pagin,
M. Goral, M. Hashimoto, J. Heath, D. Herman, R. Hilpinen, J. Hintikka, K. Hof man, K. Holyoak,
P. Hutchinson, J. Hyun, P. Indefrey, M. Israel, K. Johnson, M. Johnson, J. Kane, P. Kay, A. Kibort,
S. Kiran, C. Kitzinger, W. Labov, B. Laford, C. Larkosh, A. Libert, P. Livingston, K. Ludwig,
M. Lynch, J. Magnuson, G. Marcus, R. May, J. McGilvray, A. Mehler, S. Mills, D. Moyal-Sharrock,
K. Oatley, B. OConnor, L. Pandit, B. Partee, J. Pennebaker, P. Portner, C. Potts, J. Robinson,
S. Rosen, S. Ross, J. Saul, R. Schleifer, M. Shibatani, R. Skousen, S. Small, W. Snyder, M. Solms,
F. Staal, P. Stockwell, L. Talmy, H. Truckenbrodt, J. P. Van Bendeghem, W. van Peer, S. Wheeler,
and L. Zhang. hanks to M. Cutter for help with the illustrations.
For some time, a graduate assistant, Karen Renner, took care of many secretarial duties.
h is work was supported by the English Department at the University of Connecticut, with
some added funding from the University of Connecticut Research Foundation. he support of
the English Department was due to the kindness and commitment of our department head,
Bob Tilton without his help, this project would not have been possible.
Work for the entry on Ad Hoc Categories was supported by National Science Foundation
Grant BCS-0212134 and DARPA Contract FA865005-C-7256 to Lawrence W. Barsalou.
he entry on Dyslexia was prepared with support from a British Academy Research
Readership to Margaret J. Snowling.
Preparation of the manuscript for Speech Production was supported by NIDCD A-93 and
NIDCD grant DC-03782, both to Haskins Laboratories.
Research for Paisley Livingstons entries beneited from i nancial support from the Research
and Postgraduate Studies Committee of Lingnan University, Hong Kong.

xxiii

1 tive activity between two individuals can be dei ned in terms
LANGUAGE STRUCTURE IN ITS HUMAN
CONTEXT: NEW DIRECTIONS FOR THE LANGUAGE
SCIENCES IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
William Croft
he science of language in the twenty-i rst century is likely to
expand its scope compared to that of the twentieth century.
he twentieth-century science of language focused its atten-
tion on the analysis of language structure: the sound system
of a language (phonology) and its grammatical system
(morphology and syntax). he analysis of linguistic struc-
ture, or form, is central to the science of language. After the
middle of the twentieth century, however, greater attention
was placed on the relationship between language form and its
psychological and social context.
he analysis of linguistic structure will remain central to
the science of language. However, understanding language
in context will undoubtedly be a crucial feature of language
science in the twenty-i rst century. h is essay focuses on the
basic principles that have emerged in research on language in
its social and cognitive context, the ways that this context con-
strains language structure and use, and the new directions in
research implied by the integration of language structure and
context. h is essay is necessarily selective in the topics cov-
ered, and the selection represents a particular way to integrate
language form and its context. It also brings together theories
that have originated in philosophy, psychology, and sociology,
as well as diferent branches of linguistics. Such efort is neces-
sary in order to treat language as a unitary phenomenon, and
also to relate central questions of linguistic analysis to other
scientiic domains. Language structure cannot be fully under-
stood without situating it with respect to current theories of
joint action, social cognition, conceptualization of experience,
memory and learning, cultural transmission and evolution,
shared knowledge and practice in communities, and demo-
graphic processes in human history.
WHY TALK? THE PRAGMATICS OF LANGUAGE
Why do we talk? Why does language exist? It is only by answer-
ing these questions that we can understand how language its
in its context. he answer is that language plays an essential
role in social interaction, fundamentally at the level of joint
action between two or more individuals (Clark 1996; Tomasello,
2008). What makes a joint action joint is that it is more than just
the sum of individual actions performed by separate persons;
in particular, each individual involved must take into consid-
eration the other individuals beliefs, intentions, and actions in
a way that can be described as cooperative. A shared coopera-
of a set of attitudes held by the cooperating individuals and as
a way of carrying out the individual action (Bratman 1992). he
attitudes are as follows:
(a) Each individual participant intends to perform the
joint action. hat is, each participants intention is not
directed simply toward his/her individual action but
toward the joint action that is carried out by both partici-
pants together.
(b) Each participant intends to perform the joint action
in accordance with and because of each ones meshing
subplans. hat is, each participants individual actions are
intended to mesh with the other participants actions in
order to successfully achieve the joint action.
(c) Neither participant is coercing the other.
(d) Each participant has a commitment to mutual sup-
port. hat is, each one will help the other to carry out the
subplans; each participant is thus responsible for more than
just execution of his/her own subplan.
(e) All of (a)(d) are common ground, or shared knowl-
edge between the individuals. he concept of common
ground plays a central role in understanding the function
of language in social interaction; it is discussed more fully
toward the end of this essay.
Finally, in addition to these mental attitudes on the part
of the participants, there must be mutual responsiveness in
action. hat is, the participants will coordinate their individual
actions as they are executed in order to ensure that they mesh
with each other and, hence, that the joint action will be suc-
cessfully carried out (to the best of their abilities). Coordination
is essential in carrying out joint actions successfully, and this is
where language plays a central role in joint actions.
he social cognitive abilities necessary for shared cooper-
ative activity appear to be unique to humans, providing what
Michael Tomasello (2008) calls the social cognitive infrastruc-
ture necessary for the evolution of the capacity for modern
human language. Other species than humans have a capacity
for imitative learning of complex vocalizations (see animal
communication and human language). h is has not
been suicient to lead to the evolution of human-like language
among these species. Nonhuman primates have the ability to
plan actions and to recognize regularities in behavior of other
creatures, enough to manipulate their behavior. hese abilities
are preconditions for executing complex actions such as joint
actions, but they are not suicient for doing so.
Research on primate behavior in natural and experimen-
tal settings suggest that some primates even have the ability
to recognize conspeciics as beings with intentional states like
themselves in some circumstances (Tomasello, 2008; this abil-
ity develops in humans only at around nine months of age).
Nevertheless, it has not been demonstrated that nonhuman pri-
mates have the ability to engage in shared cooperative activity
1
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
as already dei ned. Tomasello (ibid.) suggests that in particu-
lar, helpfulness, Michael Bratmans condition (d), may be criti-
cal to the evolution of the ability to carry out joint actions.
he i nal condition for joint action is that the individual
actions must be coordinated in accordance with the shared
attitudes of the participants. Any joint action poses coordi-
nation problems between the participants (Lewis 1969). Any
means that is used to solve the coordination problem on a
particular occasion is a coordination device. here are vari-
ous coordination devices that human beings use to solve the
coordination problems of joint actions, of which the simplest is
joint attention to jointly salient properties of the environment
(Tomasello 1999, 2003). But by far the most efective coordina-
tion device is for the participants to communicate with each
other: By communicating their mental states, the participants
greatly facilitate the execution of any joint action.
communication is itself a joint action, however. he
speaker and hearer must converge on a recognition of the
speakers intention by the hearer (see communicative
intention; see also cooperative principle). h is is H.
Paul Grices dei nition of meaning ([1948] 1989), or Herbert
Clarks informative act (Clark 1992; see the next section). And
this joint action poses coordination problems of its own. he
essential problem for the joint action of communication is that
the participants cannot read each others minds. Language is
the primary coordination device used to solve the coordina-
tion problem of communication, which is in turn used to solve
the coordination problem for joint actions in general. Indeed,
that is the ultimate purpose of language: to solve the coordina-
tion problem for joint actions, ranging from the mundane to the
monumental (Clark 1999). h is fact is essential for understand-
ing the structure of discourse and the linguistic expressions
used in it, as Clark (1992, 1996) has shown for many aspects of
conversational interaction, and it also accounts for many fun-
damental properties of linguistic structure.
LANGUAGE, COMMUNICATION, AND CONVENTION
A language can be provisionally described as a conventional
system for communication (this dei nition is modiied later in
this section). David Lewis (1969) and Clark (1996, Chapter 5)
dei ne convention as follows:
(i) A regularity in behavior
(ii) that is partly arbitrary (that is, we could have equally
chosen an alternative regularity of behavior),
(iii) that is common ground in the community,
(iv) as a coordination device
(v) for a recurrent coordination problem.
In other words, conventions can emerge when members of
the community have shared knowledge that a certain repeated
behavior can act among them as a coordination device for a
recurrent coordination problem. h is dei nition of convention
is general: It applies to conventions such as shaking hands (or
kissing on the cheek) for greeting, or driving on the right (left)
side of the road. he dei nition also applies straightforwardly to
language: A string of sounds (i.e., a word or morpheme, such as
2
butterly) or a grammatical construction (such as the Modiier-
Head construction for English noun phrases) emerges as a con-
vention when it becomes a regularly used means for solving the
recurrent coordination problem of referring to a speciic expe-
rience that is to be communicated.
Linguistic convention actually operates at two levels: the
grammatical level of words and constructions, at which the
speakers intentions are formulated; and the phonological level
of the articulation and perception of the sounds that make up
the grammatical units. h is is the phenomenon described as
duality of patterning in language (Hockett 1960). One could
imagine in principle that linguistic convention possessed only
one level: perceivable sounds (or gestures or written images,
depending on the medium), corresponding to part (i) in the
dei nition of convention, that directly conveyed the speakers
intention (the recurrent coordination problem) as a whole, cor-
responding to part (v) in the dei nition of convention. hese
exist in interjections with speciic functions such as Hello and
hanks. However, most linguistic expressions are complex,
consisting of discrete, meaningful units. Complex linguistic
expressions evolved for two reasons: First, the number of difer-
ent speaker intentions to be communicated grew to be indei-
nitely large; and second, a speakers intended message came to
be broken down into recurrent conceptual parts that could be
recombined to produce the indei nite variety of messages.
Again, one could imagine that each conventional linguis-
tic unit consisted of a unique sound (gesture, image). But lan-
guages have distinct meaningful units that are made up of
diferent sequences of the same sounds: bat, sat, Sam, same,
tame, time, etc. h is system has evolved for the same two rea-
sons: the increasing number of meaningful units (even the
recurring ones) necessary to convey the indei nitely large num-
ber of speaker intentions, and an ability to break down a sound
signal (or gesture, or image) into parts that can be recombined
as a sequence of sounds (or gestures or images). hus, the dual-
ity of patterning characteristic of human language has evolved
to accommodate the huge number of speaker intentions that
people want to convey, and to exploit the facts that intentions
can be broken down into recombinable conceptual units and
that the medium of expression can be broken down into recom-
binable units as well.
Language is therefore a joint action that operates simulta-
neously at four levels (Clark 1996). he higher-numbered levels
are dependent on the lower-numbered levels; the individual
actions of the interlocutors are given in italics:
(4) proposing and taking up a joint project (joint action);
(3) signaling and recognizing the communicative intention;
(2) formulating and identifying the proposition;
(1) producing and attending to the utterance.
he highest level corresponds to the illocutionary
force in speech-act theory (Austin 1962); the next level to
Gricean meaning, or the informative act (Clark 1992); the next
level to the propositional act (Searle 1969); and the lowest level to
the utterance act (Austin 1962; Searle 1969). Each level enables
the level(s) above it, and succeeds only if the level(s) below has
been successfully achieved (e.g., one cannot recognize the
Language Structure in Its Human Context
communicative intention if one did not pay attention to the
utterance produced).
THE INCOMPLETENESS OF CONVENTION
he model of language as joint action describes the social cog-
nitive system that must have evolved in the human species for
modern human language to have emerged. It describes what
appears to be a stable system that led to the emergence of highly
complex cooperative activity among humans, namely, what is
called society or culture. But it is not a complete picture of the
nature of language in social interaction.
Linguistic convention can function as a coordination device
for communication because there are recurrent coordination
problems in communication: People have repeatedly wished
to convey similar intentions formulated in similar concepts.
Convention, linguistic or otherwise, is a regularity of behav-
ior that emerges in a community or society. But convention
must emerge from previous successful communication events
where a convention did not previously exist. In other words,
there must be a precedent: You and I use a coordination device
because we used it before (or observed it used before), and it
worked. Following a precedent is a coordination device, but it
is not (yet) convention; it is based not on regular behavior that
is mutually known in the community but only on previous suc-
cessful uses that we are aware of (Lewis 1969).
Following a precedent cannot be the ultimate root of con-
vention either. It always requires a successfully coordinated
communicative act as a precedent. he ultimate coordination
device is joint salience: Each participant can assume that in a
particular situation, certain features are salient to both partici-
pants (Lewis 1969). Joint salience is possible because humans
have the social cognitive capacity for joint attention to their
environment (Tomasello 2003). Joint attention forms a basis for
common ground, as discussed later in this article.
Linguistic convention, however, is not perfect; it does not
trump or replace the nonconventional coordination devices of
precedent and joint salience in the act of communication. h is
is partly because of the kind of conventions found in language,
and partly because of the nature of convention itself.
Linguistic conventions are incomplete because of the phe-
nomena of indexicality and ambiguity (Clark 1996). A lin-
guistic convention such as hat or ind represents a type, but on
a particular occasion of use, we often intend to convey a partic-
ular token of the category. hus, I found the hat communicates
a particular taking event involving a speciic hat. In order to
identify which i nding event and which hat, the interlocutors
must rely on joint salience in the context, facilitated in part by
the past tense of ind and the article the combined with hat, to
coordinate successfully on the right i nding event and the right
hat. Linguistic shifters, such as the pronoun I, more explicitly
require joint salience, namely, who is the speaker in the con-
text. Proper names denote tokens, but even a proper name such
as William Croft may be (and is) used for more than one indi-
vidual, for example, the contemporary linguist and the English
Baroque musical composer.
Most words are also highly ambiguous; that is, the same
regularity of behavior is used as a coordination device to solve
diferent recurrent coordination problems. For example, patient
is ambiguous between the linguistic semantic role (he patient
in sentence 25 is Roland ) and a role in the domain of medicine
(he patient in room 25 is Roland ). Linguistic convention alone
cannot tell which meaning is intended by the speaker. Only
joint salience, provided in the example sentences by the mean-
ings of the other words and the broader context of conversa-
tion, will successfully solve the coordination problem of what
is meant by patient.
Indexicality and ambiguity are so pervasive in language that
no utterance can be successfully conveyed without recourse to
nonconventional coordination devices. But convention itself is
also incomplete. h is is because every situation being commu-
nicated is unique and can be construed as the recurrence of
diferent coordination problems. he simplest example of this
phenomenon is that diferent words can be used to describe
the current situation, each representing a diferent construal
of the current situation in comparison to prior situations. For
example, one can refer to an individual as the prime minister,
Tony Blair, the Labour Party leader, my friend, that guy, he, etc.;
each expression construes reference to the current person as
the recurrence of a diferent coordination problem.
he need to use nonconventional coordination devices as
well as linguistic convention in communication is not generally
a problem for successful joint actions by cooperative human
beings. However, in some contexts, successful coordination
is quite diicult. For example, scholarly discourse on abstract
theoretical concepts often leads to alternative construals of
what is intended by particular scholars. What do we take Plato
to have meant? h is changes over time and across persons.
Alternative construals, not always accurately described as
misunderstandings, occur in more everyday circumstances
as well, as readers can verify for themselves.
In addition, human beings are not always cooperative. he
complexity of language as joint action here leaves open many
possible means of language abuse. For example, lying abuses
linguistic convention in its role of helping coordinate a shared
cooperative activity, namely, coming to a shared belief. Other
types of language abuse exploit nonconventional coordination
devices. For example, in one lawsuit, the courts ordered a gov-
ernment agency to destroy certain documents, intending the
term to denote their information content; the agency destroyed
the documents, that is, the physical objects, after making cop-
ies of them (Bolinger 1980). Here, the ambiguity of documents
requires recourse to joint salience, but the agency abused this
nonconventional coordination device (the lawsuit was about
privacy of information). Finally, the fact that a current situation
can be construed as an instance of diferent recurrent coordi-
nation problems leads to alternative framings of the situation,
such as referring to an entity as a fetus or an unborn baby. hese
alternative framings bias the conceptualization of the current
situation in ways that invite certain inferences and courses of
action, rather than others.
THE LINGUISTIC SYSTEM IN CONTEXT
In the preceding sections, language is described as a conven-
tional system for communication, and the role of convention
3
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
in language and of language in communication was discussed.
In this section, the linguistic system is described in broad out-
line. Linguistic structure has been intensively studied over the
past century ever since Ferdinand de Saussure inaugurated
the modern analysis of linguistic structure, Structuralism
(Saussure [1916] 1966). h is section focuses on those aspects of
linguistic structure that are generally agreed upon and shows
the extent to which they emerge from the principles that have
been presented in the preceding section.
he most fundamental structuralist principle is the central-
ity of the linguistic sign or symbol, that is, the notion that lan-
guage pairs form and meaning, and that particular linguistic
forms convey particular meanings. h is principle its directly
with the dei nition of convention. he regularity in behavior in
part (i) of the dei nition of convention is the expression of a lin-
guistic form by a speaker; the recurrent coordination problem
in part (v) of the dei nition is the communication of a meaning
between the interlocutors.
Also central to the structural analysis of language is the
arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. hat is, arbitrariness exists
in the particular form and meaning that are paired. h is con-
forms with part (ii) of the dei nition of convention, namely,
that the convention is partly arbitrary. Arbitrariness is usu-
ally dei ned in structuralist analysis as the principle that one
cannot entirely predict the form used from the meaning that is
intended. From a communicative point of view, arbitrariness
means that another choice could have served approximately
equally well. For example, the choice of producing the string
of sounds butterly for a particular meaning could have been
replaced with the choice of producing the string of sounds
Schmetterling a choice made by members of the German
speech community. Two diferent choices are communica-
tively equivalent in that neither choice is preferred for the
meaning intended and that is usually because the choice of
one expression over the other is arbitrary in the structuralist
sense.
Another principle that can be traced back to Saussure is
the distinction between the paradigmatic and syntagmatic
contrast of linguistic units. In a complex (multiword or multi-
morpheme) grammatical construction, such as he cat sat on
the mat, each word enters into two diferent types of contrast.
For example, the i rst word the contrasts with the word cat in
that the s role in the construction (determiner) contrasts with
cat s role (head noun). h is is a syntagmatic contrast. But the
also contrasts with another possible i ller of the same role in
the construction, such as a in A cat sat on the mat ; and cat con-
trasts with hamster, parakeet, etc. in the same way. hese are
paradigmatic contrasts.
More recent grammatical theories represent paradigmatic
contrast in terms of a set of elements belonging to a grammati-
cal category. hus, the and a belong to the category determiner,
and cat, hamster, parakeet, etc. belong to the category noun.
Syntagmatic contrasts are represented by contrasting roles in
the syntactic structure or constructions used in the utterance.
For example, the determiner category is functioning as a modi-
ier of the noun category in a noun phrase construction. Finally,
the syntagmaticparadigmatic distinction also applies to pho-
nology (sound structure): Paradigmatic contrast is represented
4
by phonological categories, and syntagmatic contrasts by the
phonological structure of words and larger prosodic units.
he syntagmaticparadigmatic distinction is the most basic
way to describe the fact that the linguistic system allows a (re-)
combination of meaningful units in diferent ways. he adap-
tive motivation for the emergence of such a communication
system was described previously: he number of intentions to
be communicated is so great that a set of simple (atomic) sym-
bols will not suice, but experience is such that it can be broken
down into recurrent parts for which conventional linguistic
expressions can develop. he same motivations gave rise to the
syntagmaticparadigmatic distinction in phonology as well.
Paradigmatic principles of structure in grammar and pho-
nology are represented in terms of linguistic categories, phono-
logical and grammatical. hese abstract linguistic categories
can be mapped onto the substantive categories of the actual
phonetic realization (for phonology) and of utterance meaning
(for grammar). Linguistic typology (Comrie 1989; Croft 2003),
which takes a cross-linguistic perspective on grammatical
analysis, has demonstrated that the ways in which phonologi-
cal categories are mapped onto phonetic space, and grammati-
cal or lexical categories are mapped onto conceptual space, are
not unlimited. For example, phonetic similarities and concep-
tual similarities constrain the structure of phonological and
grammatical categories, respectively.
Syntagmatic principles of structure are represented in var-
ious ways, but all such representations relect another basic
principle, the hierarchical organization of the structure of
utterances. Sentences are organized in a hierarchical struc-
ture, representing groupings of words at diferent levels. So
he cat sat on the mat is not just a string of roles that contrast
syntagmatically, as in [Determiner Noun Copula Preposition
Determiner Noun]. Instead, it is a set of nested groupings of
words: [[Determiner Noun] [Copula] [Preposition [Determiner
Noun]]]. he nested groupings are frequently represented in a
variety of ways, such as the syntactic trees of phrase (constitu-
ent) structure analysis. hey can also be represented as depen-
dency diagrams (for example, the determiner is related to the
noun as its modiier, which in turn is related to the copula as
its subject), and representations combining constituency and
dependency also exist.
he structure of a construction often appears to be motivated,
though not entirely predicted, by the structure of the meaning
that it is intended to convey. For example, the syntactic group-
ings in [[he cat] is [on [the mat]]] are motivated semantically;
the in the cat modiies cat semantically as well as syntactically
(indicating that the cats identity is known to both speaker and
hearer). he (partial) motivation of syntactic structure by its
meaning is captured by general principles in diferent theories.
hese principles can be described as variants of the broader
principle of diagrammatic iconicity (Peirce 1932): roughly, that
the abstract structure of the linguistic expression parallels the
abstract structure of the meaning intended, to a great extent.
It is diicult to evaluate the structure of meaning indepen-
dently of the structure of linguistic form. However, diferent
speech communities settle on a similar range of constructions
to express the same complex meaning the regularities dis-
covered in linguistic typology (see, for example, the studies
Language Structure in Its Human Context
published in Typological Studies in Language and the Oxford
Studies in Typology and Linguistic heory). h is fact suggests
that there are regularities in the meaning to be conveyed that
are then relected in the grammatical constructions used to
express them.
GRAMMAR AND THE VERBALIZATION OF EXPERIENCE
he preceding sections have described the general context of
language use and the basic principles of language structure.
he grammars of particular languages conform to the basic
principles of language structure in the preceding section. But
the grammars of particular languages, while diverse in many
ways, are similar to a much greater degree than would be pre-
dicted from the general principles in the preceding section, or
even the context of language use described in the earlier sec-
tions. For example, all languages have structures like clauses
in which some concept (prototypically an action concept,
usually labeled a verb) is predicated on one or more concepts
that are referred to (prototypically an object or person, usually
labeled a noun). he noun-like expressions are in turn orga-
nized into phrases with modiiers. Clauses are related to each
other by varying degrees of grammatical integration. Certain
semantic categories are repeatedly expressed across languages
as grammatical inlections or function words (e.g., articles,
prepositions, auxiliaries) that combine with the major lexical
categories of words in sentences.
hese universal patterns in grammar are attributable to the
way that experience is verbalized by human beings. he fun-
damental problem of verbalization is that each experience that
a speaker wishes to verbalize is a unique whole. But a linguis-
tic utterance is unlike an experience: An utterance is broken
down into parts, and these parts are not unique; they have
been used before in other utterances. (h is latter point is the
fact of convention; a particular linguistic form is used regularly
and repeatedly for a recurrent coordination problem.)
he process by which the unique whole of experience is
turned into a linguistic utterance made up of reusable parts has
been described by Wallace Chafe (1977). he i rst step is that
the speaker subchunks the experience into smaller parts, each
also a unique Gestalt similar in this way to the original experi-
ence. he subchunking process may be iterated (in later work,
Chafe emphasizes how consciousness shifts from one chunk
to another in the experience to be verbalized). A subchunk of
the experience is then propositionalized; this is the second
step. Propositionalizing involves breaking up an experience by
extracting certain entities that are (at least prototypically) per-
sistent, existing across subchunks. hese entities are the refer-
ents that function as arguments of the predicate; the predicate
is what is left of the subchunk after the arguments have been
separated. Propositionalizing therefore breaks down the expe-
rience into parts arguments and the predicate that are not of
the same type as the original experience (i.e., not a Gestalt).
Once the whole has been broken down into these parts,
the parts must be categorized, that is, assigned a category that
relates the parts of the current experience to similar parts of
prior experiences. Categorizing is the third step in the verbali-
zation process. hese categories are what are expressed by
content words, such as nouns and verbs. In this way, the speaker
has transformed the unique whole of the original experience
into parts that can be expressed by language.
h is is not the end of the verbalization process. Content
words denote only general categories of parts of the experi-
ence to be verbalized. In order to communicate the original
experience, the speaker must tie down the categories to the
unique instances of objects, events, and so forth in the expe-
rience, and the speaker must assemble the parts into a struc-
ture representing the original whole that the speaker intends
to verbalize. hat is to say, corresponding to the categorizing
step in verbalizing the parts of the experience, there is a par-
ticularizing step that indicates the unique parts; and corre-
sponding to the steps of propositionalizing and subchunking
are integrative steps of structuring and cohering, respectively
(Croft 2007). hese latter three steps give rise to grammar in the
sense of grammatical constructions, inlections, and particles,
and the semantic commonalities among grammatical catego-
ries across languages.
he particularizing step takes a category (a type) and selects
an instance (token) or set of tokens, and also identiies it by sit-
uating it in space and time. For object concepts, selecting can
be accomplished via the inlectional category of number, and
via the grammatical categories of number and quantiication
(three books, an ounce of gold ). For action concepts, selecting
is done via grammatical aspect, which helps to individuate
events in time (ate vs. was eating), and via agreement with sub-
ject and/or object, since events are also individuated by the
participants in them (I read the paper and She read the maga-
zine describe diferent reading events). Objects and events can
be situated in space via deictic expressions and other sorts of
locative expressions (this book, the book on the table). Events
and some types of objects can be situated in time via tense and
temporal expressions (I ate two hours ago; ex-mayor). Events
and objects can also be situated relative to the mental states
of the interlocutors: he article in the book indicates that the
particular object is known to both speaker and hearer, and the
modal auxiliary in She should come indicates that the event
exists not in the real world but in the attitude of obligation in
the mind of the speaker.
he structuring step takes participants and the predicated
event in a clause and puts them together, reassembling the
predicate and the argument(s) into the subchunk from which
they were derived by propositionalizing. Grammatically this is
a complex area. It includes the expression of grammatical rela-
tions in what is called the argument structure of a predicate, so
that She put the clock on the mantle indicates which referent is
the agent (the subject), which the thing moved (the object), and
which the destination of the motion (the prepositional phrase).
But it also includes alternative formulations of the same event,
such as he clock was put on the mantle (the passive voice con-
struction) and It was the mantle where she put the clock (a cleft
construction). he alternative constructions function to pres-
ent the information in the proposition in diferent ways to the
hearer, depending on the way the discourse is unfolding; they
are referred to as information structure or discourse function.
Finally, the cohering step takes the clauses (subchunks) and
reassembles them into a whole that evokes the original whole
5
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
experience for the hearer. h is step can be accomplished by
various clause-linking devices, including subordination of var-
ious kinds, coordination, and other clause-linking construc-
tions found in the worlds languages. Coherence of clauses
in discourse is also brought about by discourse particles and
reference tracking, that is, grammatical devices, such as
pronouns or ellipsis, which show that an event is related to
another event via a shared participant (Harry illed out the form
and _ mailed it to the customs oice).
he three steps of particularizing, structuring, and cohering
result in a grammatical structure that evokes a reconstituted
version of the original unique whole. hese six steps in verbal-
ization are not necessarily processed sequentially or indepen-
dently. he steps in the verbalization process are dependent on
the grammatical resources available in the language, which
constrain the possibilities available to the speaker. For exam-
ple, when a speaker takes a subchunk and extracts participants
from it, there must be a construction available in the language
to relate the participants to the predicate, as with put in the
earlier example. hus, subchunking must be coordinated with
propositionalizing and structuring. Also, the steps may not be
overtly expressed by grammatical inlections or particles. For
example, he book fell does not overtly express the singular
number of book, or that the event is situated in the real world
rather than a nonreal mental space of the speaker.
Finally, the reconstituted experience evoked by the linguis-
tic utterance is not the same as the unique whole with which
the speaker began. he cognitive processes humans use in ver-
balization do not simply carry out one or more of the six steps
described. hey also conceptualize the experience in diferent
ways, depending on the speakers choices. hese choices range
from the subtle diference between describing something as
leaves or foliage, or the more dramatic framing diferences
between fetus and unborn baby referred to previously. here
are a wide range of conceptualization processes or construal
operations that have been identiied in language (see, e.g.,
Langacker 1987; Talmy 2000). he construal operations can be
accounted for by processes familiar from cognitive psychol-
ogy: attention, comparison, perspective, and Gestalt (Croft
and Cruse 2004, Chapter 4). hese psychological processes are
part of the meaning of all linguistic units: words, inlections,
and constructions. As a consequence, every utterance presents
a complex conceptualization of the original experience that
the speaker intends to verbalize for the hearer. he conven-
tionalized conceptualizations embodied in the grammatical
resources of a language represent cultural traditions of ways to
verbalize experience in the speech community.
VARIATION AND THE USAGE - BASED MODEL
One of the results of recent research on language structure
and language use is the focus on the ubiquity of variation in
language use, that is, in the verbalization of experience and its
phonetic realization. he ubiquity of variation in language use
has led to new models of the representation of linguistic knowl-
edge in the mind that incorporate variation as an essential
characteristic of language. hese models are more developed in
phonetics and phonology. he phonological model is described
6
i rst and then recent proposals to apply it to grammar (syntax
and semantics) are examined.
One of the major results of instrumental phonetics is the
discovery that phonetic variation in speech is ubiquitous.
Variation in the realization of phonemes is found not just
across speakers but also in the speech of a single speaker. here
are at least two reasons why such variation in the speech signal
would exist. Presumably, the level of neuromuscular control
over articulatory gestures needed for identical (invariant) pro-
ductions of a phoneme is beyond a speakers ability. At least as
important, the variation in the speech signal does not prevent
successful communication (or not enough of the time to lead
to the evolution of even i ner neuromuscular control abilities
in humans).
here is evidence, moreover, that the mental representa-
tion of phonological categories includes the representation of
individual tokens of sounds and the words that contain them.
Speakers retain knowledge of i ne-grained phonetic detail
(Bybee 2001; Pierrehumbert 2003). Also, there are many fre-
quency efects on phonological patterns (Bybee 2001). For
example, higher-frequency forms tend to have more reduced
phonetic realizations of phonemes than lower-frequency
forms.
Finally, human beings are extremely good pattern detectors
from infancy on into adulthood. Infants are able to develop
sensitivity to subtle statistical patterns of the phonetic signals
they are exposed to. h is type of learning, which occurs with-
out actively attending to the stimulus or an intention to learn
is called implicit learning (Vihman and Gathercole, unpub-
lished manuscript). It contrasts with explicit learning, which
takes place under attention from the learner particularly
joint attention between an infant learning language and an
adult and is involved in the formation of categories and sym-
bolic processing. here is neuroscientiic evidence that implicit
learning is associated with the neocortex and explicit learning
with the hippocampus (ibid.).
A number of researchers have proposed a usage-based or
exemplar model of phonological representation to account
for these patterns (Bybee 2001; Pierrehumbert 2003). In this
model, phonological categories are not represented by speciic
phonetic values for the phoneme in the language, but by a clus-
ter of remembered tokens that form a density distribution over
a space of phonetic parameters. he phonetic space represents
the phonetic similarities of tokens of the phonological category.
h is model includes properties of implicit learning (the clus-
ter of individual tokens) and explicit learning (the labeling of
the density distribution as representing tokens of, say, /e/ and
not /i/). Consolidation of token memories also takes place
individual tokens decay in memory, highly similar tokens are
merged, and the distribution of tokens can be restructured
but new tokens are constantly being incorporated into the rep-
resentation and inluencing it.
Marilyn Vihman and S. Kunnari (2006) propose three types
of learning for an exemplar model. First, there is an initial
implicit learning of statistical regularities of the sensory input.
Second, explicit learning of linguistic categories, such as the
words that are templates containing the sound segments, takes
place. Finally, a second layer of implicit learning of statistical
Language Structure in Its Human Context
regularities gives rise to probability distributions for each lin-
guistic phonological and lexical category. he result of this
last layer of learning is the exemplar or usage-based model
described by Janet Pierrehumbert and Joan Bybee.
he application of the usage-based/exemplar model to
grammar is more complex. Most research in this area has
compared the range of uses of a particular word or grammati-
cal construction. However, this does not represent the process
of language production (that is, verbalization), analogous to
the phonetic variation found in the production of phonemes.
Studies of parallel verbalizations of particular scenes demon-
strate that variation in the verbalization of the same scene by
speakers in similar circumstances is ubiquitous, much like the
phonetic realization of phonological categories (Croft 2010).
here is also substantial evidence for frequency efects in
grammar. For example, English has a grammatical category of
auxiliary verb that has distinctive syntax in negation (I ca nt
sing vs. I didnt sing), questions (Can he sing? vs. Did he sing?).
hese syntactic patterns are actually a relic of an earlier stage
of English when word order was freer; it has survived in the
auxiliaries of modern English because of their higher token
frequency (Bybee and hompson 1997), as well as their seman-
tic coherence. Frequency plays a central role in the historical
process of Grammaticalization (Hopper and Traugott 2003), in
which certain constructions develop a grammatical function
(more precisely, they are recruited to serve the particularizing,
structuring, and cohering steps of the verbalization process).
Part of the grammaticalization process is that the construction
increases in frequency; it therefore undergoes grammatical
and phonological changes, such as i xation of word order, loss
of syntactic lexibility, and phonetic reduction (Bybee 2003). A
well-known example is the recruitment of the go + Ini nitive
construction for the future tense: She is going (to Sears) to buy
a food processor becomes future Shes going to buy a food pro-
cessor, with no possibility of inserting a phrase between go and
the ini nitive, and is i nally reduced to Shes gonna buy a food
processor.
Finally, early syntactic acquisition is driven by implicit
learning of patterns in the linguistic input (Tomasello 2003).
he process of syntactic acquisition is very gradual and induc-
tive, involving an interplay between detection of statistical reg-
ularities and the formation of categories that permit productive
extension of grammatical constructions. Children occasionally
produce overregularization errors, and these are also sensitive
to frequency (more frequent forms are more likely to be pro-
duced correctly, and less frequent forms are more likely to be
subject to regularization).
A usage-based model of grammatical form and meaning
is gradually emerging from this research. An exemplar model
of grammatical knowledge would treat linguistic meanings as
possessing a frequency distribution of tokens of remembered
constructions used for that meaning. hose constructions
would be organized in a multidimensional syntactic space
organized by structural similarity (e.g., Croft 2001, Chapter 8)
and whose dimensions are organized by the function played
by the construction in the verbalization process. he mean-
ings of constructions are themselves organized in a conceptual
space whose structure can be inferred empirically via cross-
linguistic comparison of the meanings expressed by grammat-
ical categories and constructions. he typological approach to
grammar has constructed conceptual spaces for a number of
semantic domains using techniques such as the semantic map
model (see Haspelmath 2003 for a survey of recent studies) and
multidimensional scaling (Croft and Poole 2008).
To sum up, the usage-based/exemplar model can be applied
to both phonological patterns in words and grammatical struc-
tures in constructions. A speakers knowledge of language
is the result of the interplay between two learning processes.
One learning process is the tallying of statistical regularities of
tokens of words and constructions with a particular phonetic
realization, performing a particular communicative act in a
speciic social interaction. he other is the organization of these
tokens into categories and the formation of generalizations that
allow the reuse or replication of these grammatical structures
to solve future coordination problems in communication.
VARIATION AND CHANGE: AN EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH
he view of language described in the preceding sections roots
both language structure and a speakers linguistic knowledge
in the individual acts of linguistic behavior that a speaker has
engaged in and will engage in. It is a dynamic view of language
in that linguistic behavior is essentially historical: a tempo-
ral series of utterances, each one linked to prior utterances as
repeated behavior to solve recurrent coordination problems in
social interaction. Each member of a speech community has a
history of his or her participation in linguistic events, either as
speaker or hearer. h is history is remembered in the exemplar-
based representation of that members linguistic knowledge,
but also consolidated and organized in such a way that each
unique experience is broken down and categorized in ways
that allow for reuse of words and constructions in future com-
munication events.
Each time a speaker produces an utterance, he or she rep-
licates tokens of linguistic structures sounds, words, and
constructions based on the remembering of prior tokens of
linguistic structures, following the principles of convention
and verbalization described earlier. However, the replication
process is never perfect: Variation is generated all of the time,
as described in the preceding section. he variation generated
in the process of language use can be called i rst-order varia-
tion. Variation in replication is the starting point for language
change. Language change is an instance of change by replica-
tion (rather than inherent change); change by replication is the
domain of an evolutionary model of change (Hull 1988; Croft
2000).
Change by replication is a two-step process. he i rst step is
the generation of variation in replication. h is requires a repli-
cator and a process of replication by which copies are produced
that preserve much of the structure of the original. In bio-
logical evolution, the canonical replicator is the gene, and the
process of replication takes place in meiosis (which in sexual
organisms occurs in sexual reproduction). Copies of the gene
are produced, preserving much of the structure of the original
gene. Variation is generated by random mutation processes
and by recombination in sexual reproduction.
7
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
In language, replication occurs in language use. he repli-
cators are tokens of linguistic structures in utterances (called
linguemes in Croft 2000). hese tokens are instances of lin-
guistic behavior. he process of language change is therefore
an example of cultural transmission, governed by principles
of evolutionary change. he replication process in language
change is governed by the principle of convention. As we have
seen in the preceding section, variation is generated in the pro-
cess of verbalization, including the recombination of linguistic
forms. h is represents innovation in language change. First-
order variation is the source of language change. Experiments
in phonological perception and production indicate that sound
change is drawn from a pool of synchronic variation (the title
of Ohala 1989). Indeterminacy in the interpretation of a com-
plex acoustic signal can lead to reanalysis of the phonological
categories in that signal. Likewise, it appears that grammati-
cal change is also drawn from a pool of synchronic variation,
namely, variation in verbalization. here is an indeterminacy
in the understanding of the meaning of a word or construction
because we cannot read each others minds, our knowledge of
linguistic conventions difers because we have been exposed
to diferent exemplars, and every situation is unique and can
be construed in diferent ways. h is indeterminacy gives rise
to variation in verbalization (Croft 2010), and can lead to the
reanalysis of the mapping of function into grammatical form
(Croft 2000).
he second step of the evolutionary process is the selection
of variants. Selection requires an entity other than the repli-
cator, namely, the interactor. he interactor interacts with its
environment in such a way that this interaction causes repli-
cation to be diferential (Hull 1988). In biological evolution, the
canonical interactor is the organism. he organism interacts
with its environment. In natural selection, some organisms
survive to reproduce and therefore replicate their genes while
others do not; this process causes diferential replication.
In language, selection occurs in language use as well. he
interactor is the speaker. he speaker has variant linguistic
forms available and chooses one over others based on his or
her environment. In language, the most important environ-
mental interaction is the social relationship between speaker
and hearer and the social context of the speech event. h is is, of
course, the realm of sociolinguistics (see, e.g., Labov 2001, and
the following section). Selection goes under the name of propa-
gation in language change.
Selection (propagation) is a function of the social value that
variants acquire in language use. First-order variation does
not have a social value. Socially conditioned variation is sec-
ond-order variation. Once a variant is propagated in a speech
community, it can lead to third-order variation, that is, varia-
tion in linguistic conventions across dialects and languages.
Linguistic diversity is the result of language change.
he evolutionary model requires a revision to the dei ni-
tion of language ofered near the beginning of this essay. In the
evolutionary model, a language is a population of utterances,
the result of the employment of linguistic conventions in a
speech community. he linguistic system is the result of the
ways in which speakers have consolidated the uses of language
in which they have participated into their knowledge of the
8
conventions of the speech community. Each speakers system-
atic knowledge of his or her language is diferent, because of
diferences in the range of language use to which each speaker
is exposed.
SPEECH COMMUNITIES AND COMMON GROUND
Language in this revised sense is the product of a speech com-
munity: the utterances produced by communicative interac-
tions among speakers. A speech community is dei ned by its
social interactions involving language: Members of the speech
community communicate with one another, and the commu-
nity is dei ned by communicative isolation from other com-
munities. Communicative isolation is relative, of course, and
in fact the structure of human speech communities is far more
complex than the structure of biological populations.
Two related phenomena serve to dei ne communities: com-
mon ground and shared practice. Common ground plays an
essential role in dei ning joint action and convention, both cen-
tral to understanding the nature of language. Common ground
consists of knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes presumed by two or
more individuals to be shared between them. Common ground
can be divided into two types: personal common ground and
communal common ground (Clark 1996, Chapter 4). Personal
common ground is shared directly in face-to-face interaction
by the persons. Personal common ground has two bases. he
i rst is the perceptual basis: We share knowledge of what is in
our shared perceptual ield. he perceptual basis is provided
by virtue of joint attention and salience, as mentioned earlier.
A shared basis for common ground has the following prop-
erties: he shared basis provides information to the persons
involved that the shared basis holds; the shared basis indicates
to each person that it provides information to every person that
the shared basis holds; and the shared basis indicates the prop-
osition in the common ground (Clark 1996, 94). A basis for com-
mon ground varies in how well it is justiied; hence, we may not
always be certain of what is common ground or not.
he second basis for personal common ground is a dis-
course basis. When I report on situations I have experienced
to you in conversation, and vice versa, these become part of
our personal common ground. Although we did not expe-
rience them perceptually together, we did experience the
reporting of them linguistically together. he discourse basis
thus involves joint attention (to the linguistic signal), as well as
the common ground of a shared language. he discourse basis
and the perceptual basis both require direct interaction by the
interlocutors. hey correspond to social networks, which are
instrumental in language maintenance and change (Milroy
1987).
he other type of common ground is communal common
ground. Communal common ground is shared by virtue of
common community membership. A person can establish
common ground with a stranger if they both belong to a com-
mon community (e.g., Americans, linguists, etc.). Some com-
munities are quite specialized while other communities are
very broad and even all-encompassing, such as the community
of human beings in this world, which gives rise to the possibil-
ity of communication in the i rst place.
Language Structure in Its Human Context
Clark argues that the basis of communal common ground
is shared expertise. tienne Wenger, on the other hand, dei nes
communities of practice in terms of shared practice: Individuals
engage in joint actions together, and this gives them common
ground and creates a community (Wenger 1998). Wengers
dei nition of a community of practice, therefore, requires face-
to-face interaction, like personal common ground. However,
shared practice can be passed on as new members enter the
community and share practice with remaining current mem-
bers. h is is cultural transmission and can lead to individuals
being members of the same community through a history of
shared practice, even if they do not interact directly with every
other member of the community.
Since communities are dei ned by shared practice, and
human beings engage in a great variety of joint actions with
diferent groups of people, the community structure of human
society is very complex. Every society is made up of multiple
communities. Each person in the society is a member of mul-
tiple communities, depending on the range of shared activities
he or she engages in. he diferent communities have only par-
tially overlapping memberships.
As a consequence, the structure of a language is equally
complex. A linguistic structure a pronunciation, a word, a
construction is associated with a particular community, or
set of communities, in a society. A pronunciation is recog-
nized as an accent characteristic of a particular community.
Words will have diferent meanings in diferent communi-
ties (e.g., subject is a grammatical relation for linguists but
a person in an experiment for psychologists). he same con-
cept will have diferent forms in diferent communities (e.g.,
Zinfandel for the general layperson, Zin to a wine aicionado).
hus, a linguistic convention is not just a symbol a pairing
of form and meaning but includes a third part, the commu-
nity in which it is conventional. h is is part (iii) of the dei ni-
tion of convention given in an earlier section. Finally, each
individual has a linguistic repertoire that relects his or her
knowledge and exposure to the communities in which he or
she acts.
he choice of a linguistic form on the part of a speaker is
an act of identiication with the community that uses it. h is
is the chief mechanism for selection (propagation) in language
change: Ihe propagation of variants relects the dynamics of
social change. More recent work in sociolinguistics has argued
that linguistic acts of social identity are not always pas-
sive: Individuals institute linguistic conventions to construct
an identity as well as to adopt one (Eckert 2000).
LANGUAGE DIVERSITY AND ITS ENDANGERMENT
Variation in language can lead to language change if it is prop-
agated through a speech community. Social processes over
human history have led to the enormous linguistic diversity
we i nd today a diversity that newer social processes also
threaten. he basic social process giving rise to linguistic
diversity is the expansion and separation of populations into
distinct societies. As groups of people divide for whatever rea-
son, they become communicatively isolated, and the common
language that they once spoke changes in diferent directions,
leading to distinct dialects and eventually to mutually unintel-
ligible languages.
h is ubiquitous demographic process is relected in the fam-
ily trees of languages that have been constructed by linguists
working on genetic classiication. hese family trees allow for
the possibility of reconstructing not just protolanguages but
also the underlying social processes that are traced in them.
Even sociolinguistic situations that obscure family trees leave
linguistic evidence of other social processes. Extensive bor-
rowing indicates a period of intensive social contact. Diiculty
in separating branches of a linguistic family tree indicates an
expansion through a new area but continued low-level con-
tact between the former dialects. hese can be seen in the dia-
lect continua found in much of Europe, where the Romance,
Germanic, and Slavic peoples expanded over a mostly continu-
ous terrain (Chambers and Trudgill 1998). Shared typological
(structural) traits may be due to intimate contact between lan-
guages with continued language maintenance, or to a major
language shift by a social group, resulting in a large proportion
of non-native speakers at one point in a languages history.
he spread of human beings across the globe led to the cre-
ation of a huge number of distinct societies whose languages
diverged. he number of distinct languages that have survived
until the beginning of the twenty-i rst century is about 6,000.
Most linguists generally accept the hypothesis that modern
human language evolved just once in human history, proba-
bly no later than 70,000 to 100,000 years ago. So in principle,
all modern human languages may have originated in a single
common ancestor. Tracing back the actual lineages of con-
temporary languages deep into human prehistory appears to
be extremely diicult, if not impossible. Nevertheless, there is
no doubt that contemporary linguistic diversity is extremely
ancient in human history. What we can discover about linguis-
tic history by the comparison of existing languages can poten-
tially shed important light on human history and prehistory.
here are linguistic descriptions of a small propor-
tion of existing human languages, though descriptive work
has increased and the overall quality of descriptions has
improved dramatically, thanks to advances in linguistic sci-
ence throughout the twentieth century. It would be safe to say
that the diversity of linguistic structure, and how that struc-
ture is manifested in phonetic reality on the one hand and in
the expression of meaning on the other, is truly remarkable
and often unexpected. Many proposed universals of language
have had to be revised or even abandoned as a consequence,
although systematic analysis of existing linguistic descriptions
by typologists have revealed many other language universals
that appear to be valid. Linguistic diversity has revealed alter-
native ways of conceptualizing experience in other societies, as
well as alternative methods of learning and alternative means
for communication for the accomplishment of joint actions.
But the single most important fact about the diversity of
human language is that it is severely endangered. Of the 6,000
diferent languages extant today, 5,000 are spoken by fewer
than 100,000 people. he median number of speakers for a
language is only 6,000 (Crystal 2000). Many languages are no
longer spoken by children in the community, and therefore
will go extinct in another generation. he loss for the science
9
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
of language, and more generally for our understanding of
human history, human thought, and human social behav-
ior, is immense. But the loss is at least as great for the speak-
ers themselves. Language use is a mode of social identity, not
just in terms of identifying with a speech community but as
the vehicle of cultural transmission. he loss of languages, like
other linguistic phenomena, is a relection of social processes.
he most common social processes leading to language loss are
disruption, dislocation, or destruction of the society (language
loss rarely occurs via genocide of its speakers). he enormous
consequences of language loss has led to a shift in linguistic
ieldwork from mere language description and documentation
to language revitalization in collaboration with members of
the speech community. But reversing language shift ultimately
requires a change in the social status of the speech community
in the local and global socioeconomic system.
SUMMARY
he scientiic study of language in its pragmatic, cognitive,
and social context beginning in the latter half of the twenti-
eth century is converging on a new perspective on language
in the twenty-i rst century. Linguistic conventions coordinate
communication, which in turn coordinates joint actions. he
fragility of social interaction by individuals leads to creativity,
variation, and dynamism in the verbalization and vocalization
of language. Individual linguistic knowledge (the linguistic
system) relects the remembered history of language use and
mediates processes of language change. he continually chang-
ing structure of society, dei ned by common ground emerging
from shared practices (joint actions), guides the evolution of
linguistic conventions throughout its history. Human history
in turn has spawned tremendous linguistic diversity, which
relects the diversity of human social and cognitive capacity.
But the unchecked operation of contemporary social forces is
leading to the destruction of speech communities and the mass
extinction of human languages today.
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do hings with Words. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Bolinger, Dwight. 1980. Language, the Loaded Weapon. London:
Longmans.
Bratman, Michael. 1992. Shared cooperative activity. Philosophical
Review 101: 32741.
Bybee, Joan L. 2001. Phonology and Language Use. Cambridge
Cambridge University Press.
. 2003. Mechanisms of change in grammaticalization: he role
of frequency. In Handbook of Historical Linguistics, ed. Brian Joseph
and Richard Janda, 60223. Oxford: Blackwell.
Bybee, Joan L ., and Sandra A. hompson. 1997. h ree frequency efects
in syntax. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley
Linguistics Society, ed. Matthew L. Juge and Jeri O. Moxley, 37888.
Berkeley : Berkeley Linguistics Society.
Chafe, Wallace. 1977. he recall and verbalization of past experi-
ence. In Current Issues in Linguistic heory, ed. Peter Cole, 21546.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Chambers, J. K., and Peter Trudgill. 1998. Dialectology. 2d ed.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
10
Clark , Herbert H. 1992. Arenas of Language Use. Chicago and
Stanford: University of Chicago Press and the Center for the Study of
Language and Information.
. 1996. Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clark , Herbert H.. 1999. On the origins of conversation. Verbum
21: 14761.
Comrie, Bernard. 1989. Language Universals and Linguistic Typology.
2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Croft, William. 2000. Explaining language change: An evolutionary
approach. Harlow, Essex : Longman.
. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic heory in
Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
. 2003. Typology and Universals. 2d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
. 2007. he origins of grammar in the verbalization of experi-
ence. Cognitive Linguistics 18: 33982.
. 2010. he origins of grammaticalization in the verbalization of
experience. Linguistics 48: 148.
Croft, William, and D. Alan Cruse. 2004. Cognitive Linguistics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Croft, William, and Keith T. Poole. 2008. Inferring universals from
grammatical variation: Multidimensional scaling for typological
analysis. heoretical Linguistics 34: 137.
Crystal, David. 2000. Language Death. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Eckert, Penelope. 2000. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice: he
Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High . Oxford: Blackwell.
Grice, H. Paul. [1948] 1989. Meaning. In Studies in the Way of Words,
21323. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2003. he geometry of grammatical mean-
ing: Semantic maps and cross-linguistic comparison. In he New
Psychology of Language. Vol. 2. Ed. Michael Tomasello, 21142.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Hockett, Charles F. 1960. he origin of speech. Scientiic American
203: 8896.
Hopper, Paul, and Elizabeth Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization. 2d
ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hull, David L. 1988. Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the
Social and Conceptual Development of Science. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change. Vol. 2. Social
Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.
Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 1.
heoretical Prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Lewis, David. 1969. Convention. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press.
Milroy, Lesley. 1987. Language and Social Networks. 2d ed. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
Ohala, John. 1989. Sound change is drawn from a pool of syn-
chronic variation. In Language Change: Contributions to the Study
of its Causes, ed. Leiv Egil Breivik and Ernst Hkon Jahr, 17398.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1932. Ground, object and interpretant. In
Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vol. 2: Elements of Logic,
ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, 13455. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Pierrehumbert, Janet B. 2003. Probabilistic phonology: discrimination
and robustness. In Probabilistic Linguistics, ed. Rens Bod, Jennifer
Hay, and Stefanie Jannedy, 177228. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. [1916] 1966. Cours de linguistique gnrale. Ed.
Ch. Bally and A. Sechehaye. (Course in General Linguistics. Trans.
Wade Baskin. New York : McGraw-Hill.)
Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Language Structure in Its Human Context
Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Vol. 1. Concept
Structuring Systems Cambridge, MA : MIT Press.
Tomasello, Michael. 1999. he Cultural Origins of Human Cognition.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
. 2003. Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based heory of
Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
. 2008. he Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge,
MA : MIT Press.
Vihman, Marilyn M., and V. M. Gathercole. Language Development.
Unpublished manuscript.
Vihman, Marilyn M., and S. Kunnari. 2006. he sources of pho-
nological knowledge: A crosslinguistic perspective. Recherches
Linguistiques de Vincennes 35: 13364.
Wenger, tienne. 1998. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning
and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
11

2
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LINGUISTIC FORM
Lee Osterhout, Richard A. Wright, and Mark D. Allen
Humans can generate and comprehend a stunning variety of
conceptual messages, ranging from sophisticated types of men-
tal representations, such as ideas, intentions, and propositions,
to more primal messages that satisfy demands of the immedi-
ate environment, such as salutations and warnings. In order
for these messages to be transmitted and received, however,
they must be put into a physical form, such as a sound wave
or a visual marking. As noted by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand
de Saussure ([2002] 2006), the relationship between mental
concepts and physical manifestations of language is almost
always arbitrary. he words cat, sat, and mat are quite similar
in terms of how they sound but are very dissimilar in meaning;
one would expect otherwise if the relationship between sound
and meaning was principled instead of arbitrary. Although the
relationship between linguistic form and meaning is arbitrary,
it is also highly systematic. For example, changing a phoneme
in a word predictably also changes its meaning (as in the cat,
sat, and mat example).
Human language is perhaps unique in the complexity of
its linguistic forms (and, by implication, the system underly-
ing these forms). Human language is compositional; that is,
every sentence is made up of smaller linguistic units that have
been combined in highly constrained ways. A standard view
(Chomsky 1965; Pinker 1999) is that units and rules of combina-
tion exist at the levels of sound (phonemes and phonology),
words (morphemes and morphology), and sentences (words
and phrases and syntax). Collectively, these rules comprise a
grammar that dei nes the permissible linguistic forms in the
language. hese forms are systematically related to, but dis-
tinct from, linguistic meaning (semantics).
Linguistic theories, however, are based on linguistic
description and observation and therefore have an uncertain
relation to the psychological underpinnings of human lan-
guage. Researchers interested in describing the psychologically
relevant aspects of linguistic form require their own meth-
ods and evidence. Furthermore, psychological theories must
describe not only the relevant linguistic forms but also the pro-
cesses that assemble these forms (during language production)
and disassemble them (during language comprehension). Such
theories should also explain how these forms are associated
12
with a speakers (or hearers) semantic and contextual knowl-
edge. Here, we review some of what we have learned about the
psychology of linguistic form, as it pertains to sounds, words,
and sentences.
SOUNDS
Sound units. Since the advent of speech research, one of the
most intensively pursued topics in speech science has been
the search for the fundamental sound units of language. Many
researchers have found evidence for phonological units that
are abstract (i.e., generalizations across any number of heard
utterances, rather than memories of speciic utterances) and
componential (constituent elements that operate as part of a
combinatorial system). However, there is other evidence for
less abstract phonological forms that may be stored as whole
words. As a result, two competing hypotheses about phonolog-
ical units have emerged: an abstract componential one versus
a holistic one.
he more widespread view is the componential one. It pos-
its abstract units that typically relate either to abstract versions
of the articulatory gestures used to produce the speech sounds
(Liberman and Mattingly 1985, Browman and Goldstein 1990),
or to ones derived from descriptive units of phonological the-
ory. Such descriptive units include the feature (see feature
analysis), an abstract subphonemic unit of contrast; the pho-
neme, an abstract unit of lexical contrast that is either a conso-
nant or a vowel; the phone or allophone, a surface variant of the
phoneme; the syllable, a timing unit that is made up of a vowel
and one or more of its lanking consonants; the prosodic word ,
the rhythmic structure that relates to patterns of emphasized
syllables; or various structures that related to tone, the lexi-
cally contrastive use of the voices pitch, and intonation, the
pitch-based tune that relates to the meaning of a sentence (for
reviews, see Frazier 1995; Studdert-Kennedy 1980).
In the holistic view, the word is the basic unit, whereas
other smaller units are considered to be epiphenomenal (e.g.,
Goldinger, Pisoni, and Logan, 1991). Instance-speciic mem-
ory traces of particular spoken words are often referred to as
episodes. Proponents of this view point out that while abstract
units are convenient for description and relate transparently
to segment-based writing systems, such as those based on
the alphabet, there is evidence that listeners draw on a vari-
ety of highly detailed and instance-speciic aspects of a words
pronunciation in making lexical decisions (for reviews, see
Goldinger and Azuma 2003; Nygaard and Pisoni 1995).
Some researchers have proposed hybrid models in which
there are two layers of representation: the episodic layer, in which
highly detailed memory traces are stored, and an abstract layer
organized into features or phones (Scharenborg et al. 2005). he
proponents of hybrid models try to capture the instance-spe-
ciic efects in perception that inspire episodic approaches, as
well as the highly abstracted lexical contrast efects.
PROCESSES. speech production refers to the process by
which the sounds of language are produced. he process nec-
essarily involves both a planning stage, in which the words and
other linguistic units that make up an utterance are assembled
The Psychology of Linguistic Form
in some fashion, and an implementation stage, in which the
various parts of the vocal tract, for example the articulators,
execute a motor plan to generate the acoustic signal. See Carol
A. Fowler (1995) for a detailed review of the stages involved in
speech production. It is worth noting here that even if abstract
phonological units such as features are involved in planning
an utterance, at some point the linguistic string must be imple-
mented as a motor plan and a set of highly coordinated move-
ments. h is has motivated gestural representations that include
movement plans, rather than static featural ones (Browman
and Goldstein 1990; Fowler 1986, 1996; Saltzman and Munhall
1989; Stetson 1951).
speech perception is the process by which human lis-
teners identify and interpret the sounds of language. It, too,
necessarily involves at least two stages: 1) the conversion of the
acoustic signal into an electrochemical response at the audi-
tory periphery and 2) the extraction of meaning from the neu-
rophysiological response at the cortical levels. Brian C. J. Moore
(1989) presents a thorough review of the physiological processes
and some of the issues involved in speech perception. A funda-
mental point of interest here is perceptual constancy in the face
of a massively variable signal. Restated as a question, how is
it that a human listener is able to perceive speech sounds and
understand the meaning of an utterance, given the massive
variability created by physiological idiosyncrasies and con-
textual variation? he various answers to this question involve
positing some sort of perceptual units, be they individual seg-
ments, subsegmental features, coordinated speech gestures, or
higher-level units like syllables, morphemes, or words.
It is worth noting here that the transmission of linguistic
information does not necessarily rely exclusively on the audi-
tory channel; the visible articulators, the lips and to a lesser
degree the tongue and jaw, also transmit information. A listener
presented with both auditory and visual stimuli will integrate
the two signals in the perceptual process (e.g., Massaro 1987).
When the information in the visual signal is unambiguous (as
when the lips are the main articulators), the visual signal may
even dominate the acoustic one (e.g., McGurk and Macdonald
1976). Moreover, writing systems convey linguistic informa-
tion, albeit in a low-dimensional fashion. Most strikingly, sign
languages are fully as powerful as speech-based communica-
tion systems and are restricted to the visual domain. Despite
the diferences between signed and spoken languages in terms
of the articulators and their perceptual modalities, they draw
on the same sorts of linguistic constituents, at least so far as
the higher-level units are concerned: syllable, morpheme,
word, sentence, and prosodic phrase (e.g., Brentari 1998). Some
linguists have also proposed the decomposition of signed lan-
guages into smaller units using manual analogs of phonologi-
cal features, despite the obvious diferences in the articulators
and the transmission media (for a review see Emmory 2002).
he parallel of signed and spoken language structure despite
the diferences in transmission modalities is often interpreted
as evidence for abstract phonological units at the level of the
mental lexicon (Meier, Cormier, and Quinto-Pozos 2002).
THE HISTORY OF THE DEBATE: EARLY PHONOLOGICAL UNITS. he
current debate about how to characterize speech sounds has
its roots in research that dates back over a century. Prior to
the advent of instrumental and experimental methods in the
late nineteenth century, it was commonly accepted that the
basic units of speech were discrete segments that were alpha-
betic in nature and serially ordered. While it was recognized
that speech sounds varied systematically depending on the
phonetic context, the variants themselves were thought to be
static allophones of an abstract and lexically contrastive sound
unit, that is, a phoneme. Translated into modern terminology,
phonological planning involved two stages: 1) determining the
contextually determined set of discrete surface variants, given
a particular lexical string, and 2) concatenating the resulting
allophones. he physiological implementation of the concat-
enated string was thought to result in a series of articulatory
steady states, or postures. he only continuous aspects of sound
production were believed to be brief transitional periods cre-
ated by articulatory transitions from one state to the next. he
transitional movements were thought to be wholly predictable
and determined by the physiology of a particular speakers
vocal tract. Translated again into modern terminology, percep-
tion (when considered) was thought to be simply the process
of translating the allophones back into their underlying pho-
nemes for lexical access. he earliest example of the phoneme-
allophone relationship is attributed to Pini, around 500 b.c.e.
whose sophisticated system of phonological rules and relation-
ships inluenced structuralist linguists of the early twentieth
century, as well as generative linguists of the late twentieth
century (for a review, see Anderson 1985; Kiparsky 1979).
he predominant view at the end of the nineteenth century
was typiied by Alexander M. Bells (1867) descriptive work on
English pronunciation. In it, he presented a set of alphabet-in-
spired symbols whose shapes and orientations were intended
to encode both the articulatory steady states and their result-
ing steady-state sounds. A fundamental assumption in the
endeavor was that all sounds of human language could be
encoded as a sequence of universal articulatory posture com-
plexes whose subcomponents were shared by related sounds.
For example, all labial consonants (p, b, m, f, v, w, etc.) shared
a letter shape and orientation, while all voiced sounds (b, d, g,
v, z, etc.) shared an additional mark to distinguish them from
their voiceless counterparts (p, t, k, f, s, etc.). Bells formaliza-
tion of a set of universal and invariant articulatory constituents,
aligned as an alphabetic string, inluenced other universal
transcription systems such as Henry Sweets (1881) Romic
alphabet, which laid the foundation for the development of the
International Phonetic Alphabet (Passy 1888). It also foreshad-
owed the use of articulatory features, such as those proposed
by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle (1968) in modern phonol-
ogy, in that each speech sound, and therefore each symbol, was
made up of a set of universal articulatory components.
A second way in which Bells work presaged modern research
was the connection between perception and production.
Implicit in his system of writing was the belief that perception
of speech sounds was the process of extracting the articulations
that produced them. Later perceptual models would incorpo-
rate this relationship in one way or another (Chistovich 1960;
Dudley 1940; Fowler 1986, 1996; Joos 1948; Ladefoged and
McKinney 1963; Liberman and Mattingly 1985; Stetson 1951).
13
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
THE HISTORY OF THE DEBATE: EARLY EXPERIMENTAL
RESEARCH. Prior to the introduction of experimental meth-
ods into phonetics, the dominant methodologies were intro-
spection about ones own articulations and careful but
subjective observations of others speech, and the measure-
ment units were letter-based symbols. hus, the observer and
the observed were inextricably linked while the resolution of
the measurement device was coarse. h is view was challenged
when a handful of phoneticians and psychologists adopted
the scientiic method and took advantage of newly available
instrumentation, such as the kymograph, in the late 1800s.
hey discovered that there were no segmental boundaries in
the speech stream and that the pronunciation of a particular
sound varied dramatically from one instance to the next (for
a review of early experimental phonetics, see Khnert and
Nolan 1999 and Miniie 1999). In the face of the new instru-
mental evidence, some scholars, like Eduard Sievers (1876), P.-J.
Rousselot (1897), and Edward Wheeler Scripture (1902), pro-
posed that the speech stream, and the articulations that pro-
duced it, were continuous, overlapping, and highly variable,
rather than being discrete, invariant, and linear. For them, the
fundamental sound units were the syllable or even the word or
morpheme. Rousselots research (18971901) revealed several
articulatory patterns that were coni rmed by later work (e.g.,
Stetson 1951). For example, he observed that when sounds that
are transcribed as sequential are generated by independent
articulators (such as the lips and tongue tip), they are initi-
ated and produced simultaneously. He also observed that one
articulatory gesture may signiicantly precede the syllable it
is contrastive in, thereby presenting an early challenge to the
notion of sequential ordering in speech.
Laboratory researchers like Raymond H. Stetson (1905,
1951) proposed that spoken language was a series of motor
complexes organized around the syllable. Stetson also i rst pro-
posed that perception was the process of perceiving the articu-
latory movements that generate the speech signal. However,
outside of the experimental phonetics laboratory, most speech
researchers, particularly such phonologists as Leonard
Bloomield (1933), continued to use phonological units that
remained abstract, invariant, sequential, and letter-like. h ree
events that occurred in the late 1940s and early 1950s changed
this view dramatically. he i rst event was the application to
speech research of modern acoustic tools like the spectrogram
(Potter 1945), sophisticated models of vocal tract acoustics
(e.g., House and Fairbanks 1953), reliable articulatory instru-
mentation, such as high-speed X-ray cinelourography (e.g.,
Delattre and Freeman 1968), and electromyographic studies of
muscle activation (Draper, Ladefoged, and Whitteridge 1959).
he second was the advent of modern perception research in
which researchers discovered complex relationships between
speech perception and the acoustic patterns present in the sig-
nal (Delattre, Liberman, and Cooper 1955). he third was the
development of distinctive feature theory in which phonemes
were treated as feature matrices that captured the relation-
ships between sounds (Jakobson 1939; Jakobson, Fant, and
Halle 1952).
When researchers began to apply modern acoustic and
articulatory tools to the study of speech production, they
14
rediscovered and improved on the earlier observation that the
speech signal and the articulations that create it are continu-
ous, dynamic, and overlapping. Stetson (1951) can be seen as
responsible for introducing kinematics into research on speech
production. His research introduced the notions of coproduc-
tion, in which articulatory gestures were initiated simulta-
neously, and gestural masking, in which the closure of one
articulatory gesture hides another, giving rise to the auditory
percept of deletion. Stetsons work provided the foundation for
current language models that incorporate articulatory ges-
tures and their movements as the fundamental phonological
units (e.g., Browman and Goldstein 1990; Byrd and Saltzman
2003; Saltzman and Munhall 1989).
In the perceptual and acoustic domains, the identiication
of perceptual cues to consonants and vowels raised a series
of questions that remain at the heart of the debate to this day.
he coextensive and covarying movements that produce the
speech signal result in acoustic information that exhibits a
high degree of overlap and covariance with information about
adjacent units (e.g., Delattre, Liberman, and Cooper 1955). Any
single perceptual cue to a particular speech sound can also be a
cue to another speech sound. For example, the onset of a vowel
immediately following a consonant provides the listener with
cues that identify both the consonant and vowel (Liberman et
al. 1954). At the same time, multiple cues may identify a single
speech sound. For example, the duration of a fricative (e.g., s),
the fricatives noise intensity, and the duration of the preceding
vowel all give information about whether the fricative is voiced
(e.g., z) or voiceless (e.g., s) (Soli 1982). Finally, the cues to
one phone may precede or follow cues to adjacent phones. he
many-to-one, the one-to-many, and the nonlinear relation-
ships between acoustic cues and their speech sounds pose a
serious problem for perceptual models in which features or
phones are thought to bear a linear relationship to each other.
More recently, researchers studying perceptual learning have
discovered that listeners encode speaker-speciic details and
even utterance-speciic details when they are learning new
speech sounds (Goldinger and Azuma 2003). he latest set of
i ndings poses a problem for models in which linguistic sounds
are stored as abstract units.
In distinctive feature theory, each phoneme is made up
of a matrix of binary features that encodes both the distinc-
tions and the similarities between one class of sounds and
the next in a particular language (Jakobson, Fant, and Halle
1952; Chomsky and Halle, 1968). he features are thought to be
drawn from a language universal set, and thus allow linguists
to observe similarities across languages in the patterning of
sounds. Moreover, segmenting the speech signal into units
that are hierarchically organized permits a duality of pattern-
ing of sound and meaning that is thought to give language its
communicative power. hat is, smaller units such as phonemes
may be combined according to language-speciic phonotactic
(sound combination) constraints into morphemes and words,
and words may be organized according to grammatical con-
straints into sentences. h is means that with a small set of
canonical sound units, together with recursion, the talker
may produce and the hearer may decode and parse a virtually
unbounded number of utterances in the language.
The Psychology of Linguistic Form
WORDS
In this section, we focus on those representations of form that
encode meaning and other abstract linguistic content at the
most minimally analyzable units of analysis namely, words
and morphemes. As such, we give a brief overview of the study
of lexical morphology, investigations in morphological process-
ing, and theories about the structure of the mental lexicon.
LEXICAL FORM. What is the nature of a representation at the
level of lexical form? We limit our discussion here largely to
phonological codes, but recognize that a great many of the the-
oretical and processing issues we raise apply to orthographic
codes as well. It is virtually impossible for the brain to store
exact representations for all possible physical manifestations of
linguistic tokens that one might encounter or produce. Instead,
representations of lexical form are better thought of as some-
what abstract structured groupings of phonemes (or graph-
emes) that are stored as designated units in long-term memory,
either as whole words or as individual morpheme constituents,
and associated with any other sources of conceptual or linguis-
tic content encoded in the lexical entries that these form repre-
sentations map onto. As structured sequences of phonological
segments, then, these hypothesized representational units
of lexical form must be able to account for essentially all the
same meaning-to-form mapping problems and demands that
individual phonological segments themselves encounter dur-
ing on-line performance, due to idiosyncratic variation among
speakers and communicative environments. More speciically,
representations of morphemes and words at the level of form
must be abstract enough to accommodate signiicant variation
in the actual physical energy proi les produced by the motor
systems of individual speakers/writers under various environ-
mental conditions. Likewise, in terms of language production,
units of lexical form must be abstract enough to accommo-
date random variation in the transient shape and status of the
mouth of the language producer.
FORM AND MEANING: INDEPENDENT LEVELS OF LEXICAL REPRE-
SENTATION. he previous description of words and morphemes
to some degree rests on the assumption that lexical form is rep-
resented independently from other forms of cognitive and lin-
guistic information, such as meaning and lexical syntax (e.g.,
lexical category, nominal class, gender, verbal subcategory,
etc.). Many theories of the lexicon have crucially relied on the
assumption of separable levels of representation within the
lexicon. In some sense, as explained by Allport and Funnell
(1981), this assumption follows naturally from the arbitrari-
ness of mapping between meaning and form, and would thus
appear to be a relatively noncontroversial assumption.
he skeptical scientist, however, is not inclined to simply
accept assumptions of this sort at face value without consid-
ering alternative possibilities. Imagine, for example, that the
various types of lexical information stored in a lexical entry
are represented within a single data structure of highly inter-
connected, independent, distributed features. h is sort of
arrangement is easy to imagine within the architecture of a
connectionist model (McClelland and Rumelhart 1986).
Using the lexical entry cat as an example, imagine a connec-
tionist system in which all the semantic features associated
with cat, such as [whiskers], [domestic pet], and so on (which
are also shared with all other conceptual lexical entities bear-
ing those features, such as <lion>, <dog>, etc.), are directly
associated with the phonological units that comprise its word
form /k/, /ae/, /t/ (which are likewise shared with all other
word forms containing these phonemes) by means of individ-
ual association links that directly tie individual semantic fea-
tures with individual phonological units (Rueckl et al. 1997).
One important consequence of this hypothetical arrangement
is that individual word forms do not exist as free-standing rep-
resentations. Instead, the entire lexical entry is represented as
a vector of weighted links connecting individual phonemes to
individual lexical semantic and syntactic features. It logically
follows from this model, then, that if all or most of the semantic
features of the word cat, for example, were destroyed or oth-
erwise made unavailable to the processor, then the set of pho-
nological forms /k/ /ae/ /t/, having nothing to link to, would
have no means for mental representation, and would therefore
not be available to the language processor. We will present
experimental evidence against this model that, instead, favors
models in which a full phonological word (e.g., /kaet/) is rep-
resented in a localist fashion and is accessible to the language
processor, even when access to its semantic features is partially
or entirely disrupted.
Several of the most prominent theories of morphology and
lexical structure within formal linguistics make explicit claims
about modularity of meaning and form. Ray Jackendof (1997),
for example, presents a theory that has a tripartite structure, in
which words have separate identities at three levels of represen-
tation form, syntax, and meaning and that these three levels
are suicient to encode the full array of linguistic information
encoded by each word. His model provides further details in
which it is proposed that our ability to store, retrieve, and use
words correctly, as well as our ability to correctly compose
morphemes into complex words, derives from a memorized
inventory of mapping functions that picks out the unique rep-
resentations or feature sets for a word at each level and asso-
ciates these elements with one another in a given linguistic
structure.
While most psycholinguistic models of language process-
ing have not typically addressed the mapping operations
assumed by Jackendof, they do overlap signiicantly in terms
of addressing the psychological reality of his hypothetical tri-
partite structure in the mental lexicon. Although most experi-
mental treatments of the multilevel nature of the lexicon have
been developed within models of language production, as will
be seen, there is an equally compelling body of evidence for
multilevel processing from studies of language comprehension
as well.
he most inluential lexical processing models over the
last two decades make a distinction between at least two lev-
els: the lemma level, where meaning and syntax are stored,
and the lexeme level, where phonological and orthographic
descriptions are represented. hese terms and the functions
associated with them were introduced in the context of a com-
putational production model by Gerard Kempen and Pieter
15
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
Huijbers (1983) and receive further rei nement with respect to
human psycholinguistic performance in the foundational lexi-
cal production models of Merrill F. Garrett (1975) and Willem
Levelt (1989). Much compelling evidence for a basic lemma/
lexeme distinction has come from analyses of naturally occur-
ring speech errors generated by neurologically unimpaired
subjects, including tip-of-the-tongue phenomena (Meyer and
Bock 1992), as well as from systematic analyses of performance
errors observed in patients with acquired brain lesions. A more
common experimental approach, however, is the pictureword
interference naming paradigm, in which it has been shown
that lemma- and lexeme-level information can be selectively
disrupted during the course of speech production (Schriefers,
Meyer, and Levelt 1990).
In terms of lexical comprehension models, perhaps the
most straightforward sources of evidence for a meaning/form
distinction have come from analyses of the performance of
brain-damaged patients. A particularly compelling case for
the independence of meaning and form might be demon-
strated if an individual with acquired language pathology
were to show an intact ability to access word forms in his/
her lexicon, yet remain unable to access meaning from those
form representations. h is is precisely the pattern observed in
patients designated as sufering from word meaning deafness.
hese patients show a highly selective pattern of marked dei-
cit in comprehending word meanings, but with perfect or near-
perfect access to word forms. A good example is patient WBN
as described in Mark D. Allen (2005), who showed an entirely
intact ability to access spoken word-form representations. In
an auditory lexical decision task, WBN scored 175/182 (96%)
correct, which shows that he could correctly distinguish real
words from nonwords (e.g., lag vs. l ig), presumably relying
on preserved knowledge of stored lexemes to do so. However,
on tasks that required WBN to access meaning from spoken
words, such as picture-to-word matching tasks, he performed
with only 40%60% accuracy (at chance in many cases).
LEXICAL STRUCTURE: COMPLEX WORDS. A particularly impor-
tant issue in lexical representation and processing concerns
the cognitive structure of complex words, that is, words com-
posed of more than one morpheme. One of the biggest debates
surrounding this issue stems from the fact that in virtually all
languages with complex word structures, lexical information
is encoded in consistent, rule-like structures, as well as in idio-
syncratic, irregular structures. h is issue can be put more con-
cretely in terms of the role of morphological decomposition in
single-word comprehension theories within psycholinguistics.
Consider the written word wanted, for example. A question for
lexical recognition theories is whether the semantic/syntactic
properties of this word [WANT, Verb, +Past, ] are extracted
and computed in a combinatorial fashion each time wanted
is encountered by accessing the content associated with
the stem want- [WANT, Verb] and combining it with the con-
tent extracted from the ai x -ed [+Past] or whether instead,
a single whole-word form wanted is stored at the lexeme level
and associated directly with all of its semantic/syntactic con-
tent. To understand the plausibility that a lexical system could
in principle store whole-word representations such as wanted,
16
one must recognize that in many other cases, such as those
involving irregularly inlected words, such as taught, the sys-
tem cannot store a stem and ai x at the level of form, as there
are no clear morpheme boundaries to distinguish these con-
stituents, but must instead obligatorily store it as a whole word
at the lexeme level.
Many prominent theories have favored the latter, non-
decompositional hypothesis for all words, including irregu-
lar words like taught, as well as regular compositional words
like wanted (Bybee 1988). Other inluential processing models
propose that complex words are represented as whole-word
units at the lexeme level, but that paradigms of inlectionally
related words (want, wants, wanted ) map onto a common rep-
resentation at the lemma level (Fowler, Napps, and Feldman
1985). In addition to this, another class of models, which has
received perhaps the strongest empirical support, posits full
morphological decomposition at the lexeme level whenever
possible (Allen and Badecker 1999). According to these fully
decompositional models, a complex word like wanted is rep-
resented and accessed in terms of its decomposed constitu-
ents want- and -ed at the level of form, such that the very same
stem want- is used during the recognition of want, wants, and
wanted. According to these models, then, the recognition rou-
tines that are exploited by morphological decomposition at the
level of form resemble those in theoretical approaches to sen-
tence processing, in which meaning is derived compositionally
by accessing independent units of representation of form and
combining the content that these forms access into larger lin-
guistic units, according to algorithms of composition speciied
by the grammar.
While there is compelling empirical support for decompo-
sitional models of morphological processing, researchers are
becoming increasingly aware of important factors that might
limit decomposition. hese factors are regularity, formal and
semantic transparency, and productivity.
Regularity refers to the reliability of a particular word-for-
mation process. For example, the plural noun kids expresses
noun plurality in a regular, reliable way, while the plural noun
children does not.
Formal transparency refers to the degree to which the mor-
pheme constituents of a complex structure are obvious from
its surface form. For example, morpheme boundaries are fairly
obvious in the transparently inlected word wanted, com-
pared to those of the opaquely (and irregularly) inlected word
taught.
Although an irregular form like taught is formally opaque,
as dei ned here, it is nonetheless semantically transparent,
because its meaning is a straightforward combination of the
semantics of the verb teach and the feature [+Past]. In contrast,
an example of a complex word that is formally transparent yet
semantically opaque is the compound word dumbbell, which
is composed of two recognizable morphemes, but the content
associated with these two surface morphemes do not combine
semantically to form the meaning of the whole word.
Productivity describes the extent to which a word-formation
process can be used to form new words freely. For example, the
sui x -ness is easily used to derive novel nouns from adjectives
(e.g., nerdiness, awesomeness, catchiness), while the ability to
The Psychology of Linguistic Form
form novel nouns using the analogous sui x -ity is awkward at
best (?nerdity) if not impossible.
Another phenomenon associated with these lexical proper-
ties is that they tend to cluster together in classes of morpholog-
ically complex word types across a given language, such that
there will often exist a set of highly familiar, frequently used
forms that are irregular, formally opaque, and nonproductive,
and also a large body of forms that are morphologically regular,
formally transparent, and productive. Given the large variety of
complex word types found in human languages with respect to
these dimensions of combinability, as well as the idiosyncratic
nature of the tendency for these dimensions to cluster together
from language to language, it would appear that empirical evi-
dence for morphological decomposition must be established
on a case-by-case basis for each word-formation type within
each language. h is indeed appears to be the direction that
most researchers have taken.
SENTENCES
On the surface, a sentence is a linear sequence of words. But in
order to extract the intended meaning, the listener or reader
must combine the words in just the right way. hat much is
obvious. What is not obvious is how we do that in real time,
as we read or listen to a sentence. Of particular relevance to
this essay are the following questions: Is there a representa-
tional level of syntactic form that is distinct from the meaning
of a sentence? And if so, exactly how do we extract the implicit
structure in a spoken or written sentence as we process it? One
can ask similar questions about the process of sentence pro-
duction: When planning a sentence, is there a planning stage
that encodes a speciically syntactic form? And if so, how do
these representations relate to the sound and meaning of the
intended utterance?
For purely practical reasons, there is far more research on
extracting the syntactic form during sentence comprehen-
sion (a process known as parsing ; see parsing , human) than
on planning the syntactic form of to-be-spoken sentences.
Nonetheless, research in both areas has led to substantive
advances in our understanding of the psychology of sentence
form.
SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS. A fundamental claim of a genera-
tive grammar is that syntax and semantics are clearly dis-
tinct. A fundamental claim of a cognitive grammar is that
syntax and semantics are so entwined that they cannot be easily
separated. h is debate among linguists is mirrored by a similar
debate among researchers who study language processing. A
standard assumption underlying much psycholinguistic work
is that a relatively direct mapping exists between the levels of
knowledge posited within generative linguistic theories and
the cognitive and neural processes underlying comprehension
(Bock and Kroch 1989). Distinct language-speciic processes
are thought to interpret a sentence at each level of analysis,
and distinct representations are thought to result from these
computations. But other theorists, most notably those working
in the connectionist framework, deny that this mapping exists
(Elman et al. 1996). Instead, the meaning of the sentence is
claimed to be derived directly, without an intervening level of
syntactic structure.
he initial evidence of separable syntactic and semantic pro-
cessing streams came from studies of brain-damaged patients
sufering from aphasia , in particular the syndromes known as
Brocas and Wernickes aphasia. Brocas aphasics typically pro-
duce slow, labored speech; their speech is generally coherent
in meaning but very disordered in terms of sentence structure.
Many syntactically important words are omitted (e.g., the, is),
as are the inlectional morphemes involved in morphosyntax
(e.g., -ing, -ed, -s). Wernickes aphasics, by contrast, typically
produce luent, grammatical sentences that tend to be inco-
herent. Initially, these disorders were assumed to relect dei-
cits in sensorimotor function; Brocas aphasia was claimed to
result from a motoric deicit, whereas Wernickes aphasia was
claimed to relect a sensory deicit. he standard assumptions
about aphasia changed in the 1970s, when theorists began to
stress the ungrammatical aspects of Brocas aphasics speech;
the term agrammatism became synonymous with Brocas
aphasia. Particularly important in motivating this shift was evi-
dence that some Brocas aphasics have a language-comprehen-
sion problem that mirrors their speech-production problems.
Speciically, some Brocas aphasics have trouble understanding
syntactically complex sentences (e.g., John was inally kissed by
Louise) in which the intended meaning is crucially dependent
on syntactic cues in this case, the grammatical words was
and by (Caramazza and Zurif 1976). h is evidence seemed to
rule out a purely motor explanation for the disorder; instead,
Brocas aphasia was viewed as fundamentally a problem con-
structing syntactic representations, both for production and
comprehension. By contrast, Wernickes aphasia was assumed
to relect a problem in accessing the meanings of words.
hese claims about the nature of the aphasic disorders are
still quite inluential. Closer consideration, however, raises
many questions. Pure functional deicits afecting a single lin-
guistically dei ned function are rare; most patients have a mix-
ture of problems, some of which seem linguistic but others of
which seem to involve motor or sensory processing (Alexander
2006). Many of the Brocas patients who produce agrammatic
speech are relatively good at making explicit grammaticality
judgments (Linebarger, Schwartz, and Saf ran 1983), suggest-
ing that their knowledge of syntax is largely intact. Similarly, it
is not uncommon for Brocas aphasics to speak agrammatically
but to have relatively normal comprehension, bringing into
question the claim that Brocas aphasia relects damage to an
abstract syntax area used in production and comprehension
(Miceli et al. 1983). Taken together, then, the available evidence
from the aphasia literature does not provide compelling evi-
dence for distinct syntactic and semantic processing streams.
Another source of evidence comes from neuroimaging
studies of neurologically normal subjects. One useful method
involves the recording of event-related brain potentials (ERPs)
from a persons scalp as he or she reads or listens to sentences.
ERPs relect the summed, simultaneously occurring postsyn-
aptic activity in groups of cortical pyramidal neurons. A par-
ticularly fruitful approach has involved the presentation of
sentences containing linguistic anomalies. If syntactic and
semantic aspects of sentence comprehension are segregated
17
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
into distinct streams of processing, then syntactic and seman-
tic anomalies might afect the comprehension system in dis-
tinct ways. A large body of evidence suggests that syntactic
and semantic anomalies do in fact elicit qualitatively distinct
ERP efects, and that these efects are characterized by distinct
and consistent temporal properties. Semantic anomalies (e.g.,
he cat will bake the food ) elicit a negative wave that peaks
at about 400 milliseconds after the anomalous word appears
(the N400 efect) (Kutas and Hillyard 1980). By contrast, syntac-
tic anomalies (e.g., he cat will eating the food ) elicit a large
positive wave that onsets at about 500 milliseconds after pre-
sentation of the anomalous word and persists for at least half a
second (the P600 efect [Osterhout and Holcomb 1992]). In some
studies, syntactic anomalies have also elicited a negativity over
anterior regions of the scalp, with onsets ranging from 100 to
300 milliseconds. hese results generalize well across types
of anomaly, languages, and various methodological factors.
he robustness of the efects seems to indicate that the human
brain does in fact honor the distinction between the form and
the meaning of a sentence.
SENTENCE COMPREHENSION. Assuming that sentence pro-
cessing involves distinct syntactic and semantic processing
streams, the question arises as to how these streams interact
during comprehension. A great deal of evidence indicates that
sentence processing is incremental, that is, that each succes-
sive word in a sentence is integrated into the preceding sen-
tence material almost immediately. Such a strategy, however,
introduces a tremendous amount of ambiguity that is,
uncertainty about the intended syntactic and semantic role of a
particular word or phrase. Consider, for example, the sentence
fragment he cat scratched. here are actually two ways to
parse this fragment. One could parse it as a simple active sen-
tence, in which the cat is playing the syntactic role of subject
of the verb scratched and the semantic role of the entity doing
the scratching (as in he cat scratched the ratty old sofa). Or one
could parse it as a more complex relative clause structure, in
which the verb scratched is the start of a second, embedded
clause, and the cat is the entity being scratched, rather than
the one doing the scratching (as in he cat scratched by the rac-
coon was taken to the pet hospital ). he ambiguity is resolved
once the disambiguating information (the ratty sofa or by the
raccoon) is encountered downstream, but that provides little
help for a parser that assigns roles to words as soon as they are
encountered.
How does an incremental sentence-processing system
handle such ambiguities? An early answer to this question
was provided by the garden-path (or modular) parsing models
developed in the1980s. he primary claim was that the initial
parse of the sentence is controlled entirely by the syntactic cues
in the sentence (Ferreira and Clifton 1986). As words arrive in
the linguistic input, they are rapidly organized into a structural
analysis by a process that is not inluenced by semantic knowl-
edge. he output of this syntactic process then guides semantic
interpretation. h is model can be contrasted with interactive
models, in which a wide variety of information (e.g., seman-
tics and conceptual/world knowledge) inluences the earliest
stages of sentence parsing. Initial results of numerous studies
18
(mostly involving the measurement of subjects eye movements
as they read sentences) indicated that readers tended to read
straight through such syntactically simple sentences as he cat
scratched the ratty old sofa but experienced longer eye i xations
and more eye regressions when they encountered by the rac-
coon in the more complex sentences. When confronted with
syntactic uncertainty, readers seemed to immediately choose
the simplest syntactic representation available (Frazier 1987).
When this analysis turned out to be an erroneous choice (that
is, when the disambiguating material in the sentence required
a more complex structure), longer eye i xations and more
regressions occurred as the readers attempted to reanalyze
the sentence.
A stronger test of the garden-path model, however, requires
the examination of situations in which the semantic cues in
the sentence are clearly consistent with a syntactically com-
plex parsing alternative. A truly modular, syntax-driven
parser would be unafected by the semantic cues in the sen-
tence. Consider, for example, the sentence fragment he
sofa scratched. Sofas are soft and inanimate and therefore
unlikely to scratch anything. Consequently, the semantic cues
in the fragment favor the more complex relative clause anal-
ysis, in which the sofa is the entity being scratched (as in he
sofa scratched by the cat was given to Goodwill ). Initial results
seemed to suggest that the semantic cues had no efect on the
initial parse of the sentence; readers seemed to build the syn-
tactically simplest analysis possible, even when it was incon-
sistent with the available semantic information. Such evidence
led to the hypothesis that the language processor is comprised
of a number of autonomously functioning components, each of
which corresponds to a level of linguistic analysis (Ferreira and
Clifton 1986). he syntactic component was presumed to func-
tion independently of the other components.
he modular syntax-i rst model has been increasingly chal-
lenged, most notably by advocates of constraint-satisfaction
models (Trueswell and Tanenhaus 1994). hese models pro-
pose that all sources of relevant information (including statisti-
cal, semantic, and real-world information) simultaneously and
rapidly inluence the actions of the parser. Hence, the implau-
sibility of a sofa scratching something is predicted to cause
the parser to initially attempt the syntactically more complex
relative-clause analysis. Consistent with this claim, numer-
ous studies have subsequently demonstrated compelling
inluences of semantics and world knowledge on the parsers
response to syntactic ambiguity (ibid.).
here is, however, a fundamental assumption underlying
most of the syntactic ambiguity research (regardless of theo-
retical perspective): that syntax always controls combinatory
processing when the syntactic cues are unambiguous. Recently,
this assumption has also been challenged. he challenge cen-
ters on the nature of thematic roles, which help to dei ne
the types of arguments licensed by a particular verb (McRae,
Ferretti, and Amyote 1997; Trueswell and Tanenhaus 1994).
Exactly what is meant by thematic role varies widely, especially
with respect to the amount of semantic and conceptual content
it is assumed to hold (McRae, Ferretti, and Amyote 1997). For
most syntax-i rst proponents, a thematic role is limited to a few
syntactically relevant selectional restrictions, such as animacy
The Psychology of Linguistic Form
(Chomsky 1965); thematic roles are treated as (largely mean-
ingless) slots to be i lled by syntactically appropriate i llers. A
second view is that there is a limited number of thematic roles
(agent, theme, benefactor, and so on), and that a verb selects a
subset of these (Fillmore 1968). Although this approach attri-
butes a richer semantics to thematic roles, the required gener-
alizations across large classes of verbs obscure many subtleties
in the meaning and usage of these verbs.
Both of these conceptions of thematic roles exclude knowl-
edge that people possess concerning who tends to do what to
whom in particular situations. Ken McRae and others have pro-
posed a third view of thematic roles that dramatically expands
their semantic scope: hematic roles are claimed to be rich,
verb-speciic concepts that relect a persons collective expe-
rience with particular actions and objects (McRae, Ferretti,
and Amyote 1997). hese rich representations are claimed to
be stored as a set of features that dei ne gradients of typical-
ity (situation schemas), and to comprise a large part of each
verbs meaning. One implication is that this rich knowledge
will become immediately available once a verbs meaning has
been retrieved from memory. As a consequence, the plausibil-
ity of a particular word combination need not be evaluated by
means of a potentially complex inferential process, but rather
can be evaluated immediately in the context of the verbs mean-
ing. One might therefore predict that semantic and conceptual
knowledge of events will have profound and immediate efects
on the way in which words are combined during sentence pro-
cessing. McRae and others have provided evidence consistent
with these claims, including semantic inluences on syntactic
ambiguity resolution.
he most compelling argument against the absolute pri-
macy of syntax, however, would be evidence that semantic and
conceptual knowledge can take control of sentence process-
ing even when opposed by contradicting and unambiguous
syntactic cues. Recent work by Ferranda Ferreira (2003) sug-
gests that this might happen on some occasions. She reported
that when plausible sentences (e.g., he mouse ate the cheese)
were passivized to form implausible sentences (e.g., he mouse
was eaten by the cheese), participants tended to name the wrong
entity as do-er or acted-on, as if coercing the sentences to
be plausible. However, the processing implications of these
results are uncertain, due to the use of postsentence rumina-
tive responses, which do not indicate whether semantic inlu-
ences relect the listeners initial responses to the input or some
later aspect of processing.
Researchers have also begun to explore the inluence of
semantic and conceptual knowledge on the on-line process-
ing of syntactically unambiguous sentences. An illustrative
example is a recent ERP study by Albert Kim and Lee Osterhout
(2005). he stimuli in this study were anomalous sentences that
began with a active structure, for example, he mysterious crime
was solving. he syntactic cues in the sentence require that
the noun crime be the Agent of the verb solving. If syntax drives
sentence processing, then the verb solving would be perceived
to be semantically anomalous, as crime is a poor Agent for the
verb solve, and therefore should elicit an N400 efect. However,
although crime is a poor Agent, it is an excellent heme (as in
solved the crime). he heme role can be accommodated simply
by changing the inlectional morpheme at the end of the verb
to a passive form (he mysterious crime was solved ).
herefore, if meaning drives sentence processing in this situa-
tion, then the verb solving would be perceived to be in the wrong
syntactic form (-ing instead of ed ), and should therefore elicit a
P600 efect. Kim and Osterhout observed that verbs like solving
elicited a P600 efect, showing that a strong semantic attrac-
tion between a predicate and an argument can determine
how words are combined, even when the semantic attraction
contradicts unambiguous syntactic cues. Conversely, in anom-
alous sentences with an identical structure but with no seman-
tic attraction between the subject noun and the verb (e.g., he
envelope was devouring ), the critical verb elicited an N400
efect rather than a P600 efect. hese results demonstrate that
semantics, rather than syntax, can drive word combinations
during sentence comprehension.
SENTENCE PRODUCTION. Generating a sentence requires the
rapid construction of novel combinations of linguistic units,
involves multiple levels of analysis, and is constrained by a vari-
ety of rules (about word order, the formation of complex words,
word pronunciation, etc). Errors are a natural consequence of
these complexities (Dell 1995). Because they tend to be highly
systematic, speech errors have provided much of the data upon
which current models of sentence production are based. For
example, word exchanges tend to obey a syntactic category rule,
in that the exchanged words are from the same syntactic category
(for example, two nouns have been exchanged in the utterance
Stop hitting your brick against a head wall). he systematicity of
speech errors suggests that regularities described in theories of
linguistic form also play a role in the speech-planning process.
he dominant model of sentence production is based
on speech error data (Dell 1995; Garrett 1975; Levelt 1989).
According to this model, the process of preparing to speak a
sentence involves three stages of planning: conceptualization,
formulation, and articulation, in that order. During the concep-
tualization stage, the speaker decides what thought to express
and how to order the relevant concepts sequentially. he for-
mulation stage begins with the selection of a syntactic frame to
encode the thought; the frame contains slots that act as place
holders for concepts and, eventually, speciic words. he phono-
logical string is translated into a string of phonological features,
which then drive the motor plan manifested in articulation.
h is model, therefore, posits the existence of representa-
tions of syntactic structure that are distinct from the represen-
tations of meaning and sound. Other evidence in support of this
view comes from the phenomenon of syntactic priming : Having
heard or produced a particular syntactic structure, a person
is more likely to produce sentences using the same syntactic
structure (Bock 1986). Syntactic priming occurs independently
of sentence meaning, suggesting that the syntactic frames are
independent forms of representation that are quite distinct
from meaning.
CONCLUSIONS
Collectively, the evidence reviewed in this essay indicates that
psychologically relevant representations of linguistic form
19
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
exist at all levels of language, from sounds to sentences. At each
level, units of linguistic form are combined in systematic ways
to form larger units of representation. For the most part, these
representations seem to be abstract; that is, they are distinct
from the motor movements, sensory experiences, and episodic
memories associated with particular utterances. However, it
is also clear that more holistic (that is, nondecompositional)
representations of linguistic form, some of which are rooted
in speciic episodic memories, also play a role in language
processing.
It also seems to be true that linguistic forms (e.g., the mor-
phological structure of a word or the syntactic structure of a
sentence) are dissociable from the meanings they convey.
At the same time, semantic and conceptual knowledge can
strongly inluence the processing of linguistic forms, as exem-
pliied by semantic transparency efects on word decomposi-
tion and thematic role efects on sentence parsing.
hese conclusions represent substantive progress in our
understanding of linguistic form and the role it plays in lan-
guage processing. Nonetheless, answers to some of the most
basic questions remain contentiously debated, such as the pre-
cise nature of the rules of combination, the relative roles of
compositional and holistic representations, and the pervasive-
ness of interactions between meaning and form.
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3 structure itself that allows the inference (i.e., if someone does
THE STRUCTURE OF MEANING
James Pustejovsky
1 INTRODUCTION
Semantics is the systematic study of meaning in language. As a
discipline, it is directed toward the determination of how humans
reason with language, and more speciically, discovering the pat-
terns of inference we employ through linguistic expressions.he
study of semantics has diverse traditions, and the current litera-
ture is quite heterogeneous and divided on approaches to some
of the basic issues facing the ield (cf. semantics). While most
things in the world have meaning to us, they do not carry mean-
ing in the same way as linguistic expressions do. For example,
they do not have the properties of being true or false, or ambigu-
ous or contradictory. (See Davis and Gillon [2004] for discussion
and development of this argument.) For this and other reasons,
this overview essay addresses the question of how linguistic
expressions carry meaning and what they denote in the world.
Where syntax determines the constituent structure of a sen-
tence along with the assignment of grammatical and thematic
relations, it is the role of semantics to compute the deeper
meaning of the resulting expression. For example, the two sen-
tences in (1) difer in their syntactic structures (through their
voice), but they mean essentially the same thing; that is, their
propositional content is identical.
(1) a. he child ate a cookie.
b. A cookie was eaten by the child.
Early on, such observations led philosophers and linguists to
distinguish meaning from the pure structural form of a sen-
tence (Saussure [1916] 1983; Russell 1905). Semantic theories in
linguistics assume that some sort of logical form is computed
from the constituent structure associated with a sentence, and
it is this meaning representation that allows us to make cate-
gorical and truth-conditional judgments, such as the equiva-
lence in meaning of the two sentences in (1).
Another role played by semantics is in the computation of
inferences from our utterances, such as entailments, implica-
tures, and presuppositions. For example, consider the var-
ious notions of entailment. From the logical form (LF) of the
sentence in (2a), semantics enables us to infer (2b) as a legiti-
mate inference.
(2) a. he girl laughed and sang.
b. he girl laughed.
h is is an example of structural entailment, because it is the
both A and B, then someone does A). h is particular rule is
essentially the classical inference rule of conjunction elimina-
tion from propositional logic; that is,
AB
(3)
A
While this relies on a largely syntactic notion of entailment,
semantics should also explain how (4b) is a legitimate infer-
ence from (4a).
(4) a. he drought killed the crops.
b. he crops died.
Such lexical entailments involve an inference that is tied directly
to the meaning of a word, namely, the verb kill; that is, when
something is killed, it dies. Hence, the role of lexical informa-
tion in the construction of logical forms and the inferences we
can compute from our utterances is an important area of lin-
guistics, and one we return to in Section 3.5 below.
here is an important distinction in semantics among prop-
ositions, sentences, and utterances. We can think of an
utterance as a speech-act, situated in time and space, that is,
which happens at a particular time and location. A sentence, on
the other hand, is a expression that is inherently linguistic, and
can be expressed on multiple occasions by multiple utterances.
he notion of a proposition is more complex and contentious, but
it is that object that is traditionally taken as being true or false,
expressed by the sentence when uttered in a speciic context.
1.1 Historical Remarks
he study of meaning has occupied philosophers for centuries,
beginning at least with Platos theory of forms and Aristotles
theory of meaning. Locke, Hume, and Reid all pay particular
attention to the meanings of words in composition, but not until
the late nineteenth century do we see a systematic approach to
the study of logical syntax emerge, with the work of Bertrand
Russell and Gottlob Frege. Russell and Frege were not interested
in language as a linguistic phenomenon, but rather as a medium
through which judgments can be formed and expressed. Freges
focus lay in formulating the rules that create meaningful expres-
sions in a compositional manner, while also introducing an
important distinction between an expressions sense and its ref-
erence (cf. sense and reference, reference and exten-
sion). Russells work on the way in which linguistic expressions
denote introduced the problem of definite descriptions
and referential failure, and what later came to be recognized as
the problem of presupposition (cf. pragmatics).
Ferdinand de Saussure ([1916] 1983), working within an
emerging structuralist tradition, developed relational tech-
niques for linguistic analysis, which were elaborated into a
framework of componential analysis for language meaning.
he idea behind componential analysis is the reduction of a
words meaning into its ultimate contrastive elements. hese
23
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
contrastive elements are structured in a matrix, allowing for
dimensional analysis and generalizations to be made about
lexical sets occupying the cells in the matrix.
h is technique developed into a general framework for lin-
guistic description called distinctive FEATURE ANALYSIS. h is is
essentially the inspiration for J. Katz and J. Fodors 1963 the-
ory of lexical semantics within transformational grammar. On
this theory, usually referred to as markerese, a lexical entry in
the language consists of grammatical and semantic markers,
and a special feature called a semantic distinguisher. In the
subsequent discussion by U. Weinreich (1972) and many oth-
ers, this model was demonstrated to be far too impoverished to
characterize the compositional mechanisms inherent in lan-
guage. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, alternative models of
word meaning emerged (Fillmore 1968 [frame semantics];
Lakof [1965] 1970 [generative semantics]; Gruber 1976;
Jackendof 1972), which respected the relational structure of
sentence meaning while encoding the named semantic func-
tions in lexical entries. In D. R. Dowty (1979), a model theoretic
interpretation of the decompositional techniques of G. Lakof,
J. D. McCawley, and J. R. Ross was developed.
In the later twentieth century, montague grammar
(Montague 1973, 1974) was perhaps the most signiicant develop-
ment in the formal analysis of linguistic semantics, as it brought
together a systematic, logically grounded theory of composition-
ality, with a model theoretic interpretation. Subsequent work
enriched this approach with insights from D. Davidson (1967),
H. P. Grice (1969), Saul Kripke ([1972] 1980), David Lewis (1976),
and other philosophers of language (cf. Partee 1976; Davidson
and Harman 1972).
Recently, the role of lexical-syntactic mapping has become
more evident, particularly with the growing concern over projec-
tion from lexical semantic form, the problem of verbal alternations
and polyvalency, and the phenomenon of polysemy. he work of
R. Jackendof (1983, 1997) on conceptual semantics has come to
the fore, as the ield of lexical semantics has developed into a more
systematic and formal area of study (Pustejovsky and Boguraev
1993; Copestake and Briscoe 1995, 1567).
Finally, one of the most signiicant developments in the
study of meaning has been the dynamic turn in how sentences
are interpreted in discourse. Inspired by the work of Irene Heim
(1982) and H. Kamp (1981), the formal analysis of discourse has
become an active and growing area of research, as seen in the
works of Jeroen Groenendijk and Martin Stokhof (1991), Kamp and
U. eyle (1993), and Nicholas Asher and Alex Lascarides (2003).
In the remainder of this essay, we examine the basic prin-
ciple of how meanings are constructed. First, we introduce
the notion of compositionality in language. Since words are
the building blocks of larger meanings, we explore various
approaches to lexical semantics. hen, we focus on how units
of meaning are put together compositionally to create proposi-
tions. Finally, we examine the meaning of expressions above
the level of the sentence, within a discourse.
1.2 Compositionality
Because semantics focuses on how linguistic expressions come
to have meaning, one of the most crucial concepts in the ield
24
is the notion of compositionality (cf. compositionality). As
speakers of language, we understand a sentence by under-
standing its parts and how they are put together. he principle
of compositionality characterizes how smaller units of mean-
ing are put together to form larger, more meaningful expres-
sions in language. he most famous formulation of this notion
comes from Frege, paraphrased as follows:
he meaning of an expression is a function of the meanings of
its parts and the way they are syntactically combined. (Partee
1984)
h is view has been extremely inluential in semantics
research over the past 40 years. If one assumes a compositional
approach to the study of meaning, then two things immediately
follow: 1) One must specify the speciic meaning of the basic
elements of the language, and 2) one must formulate the rules
of combination for how these elements go together to make
more complex expressions. he i rst aspect includes determin-
ing what words and morphemes mean, that is, lexical seman-
tics, which we address in the next section. he second aspect
entails dei ning a calculus for how these elements compose to
form larger expressions, that is, argument selection and modi-
ication. Needless to say, in both of these areas, there is much
divergence of opinion, but semanticists generally agree on the
basic assumptions inherent in compositionality.
2 LEXICAL MEANING
Semantic interpretation requires access to knowledge about
words. he lexicon of a grammar must provide a systematic and
eicient way of encoding the information associated with words
in a language. lexical semantics is the study of what words
mean and how these meanings are structured. he lexicon is
not merely a collection of words with their semantic forms, but
rather a set of structured objects that participate in larger opera-
tions and compositions, both enabling syntactic environments
and acting as signatures to semantic entailments and implica-
tures in the context of larger discourse.
here are four basic questions in modeling the semantic
content and structure of the lexicon: 1) What semantic infor-
mation goes into a lexical entry? 2) How do lexical entries
relate semantically to one another? 3) How is this informa-
tion exploited compositionally by the grammar? 4) How is this
information available to semantic interpretation generally?
he lexicon and lexical semantics have traditionally been
viewed as the most passive modules of language, acting in the ser-
vice of the more dynamic components of the grammar. his view
has its origins in the generative tradition (Chomsky [1955] 1975)
and has been an integral part of the notion of the lexicon ever
since. While the Aspects-model of selectional features (Chomsky
1965) restricted the relation of selection to that between lexical
items, work by McCawley (1968) and Jackendof (1972) showed
that selectional restrictions must be available to computations
at the level of derived semantic representation rather than at
deep structure. Subsequent work by Joan Bresnan (1982), Gerald
Gazdar et al. (1985), and C. Pollard and I. Sag (1994) extend the
range of phenomena that can be handled by the projection and
exploitation of lexically derived information in the grammar.
The Structure of Meaning
Natural Entity
Physical Abstract
Mass Individuated Mental Experiential
inanimate animate
rock human
Figure 1.
Recently, with the convergence of several areas in linguis-
tics (lexical semantics, computational lexicons, type theories),
several models for the determination of selection have emerged
that put even more compostional power in the lexicon, making
explicit reference to the paradigmatic systems that allow for
grammatical constructions to be partially determined by selec-
tion. Examples of this approach are generative lexicon theory
(Pustejovsky 1995; Bouillon and Busa 2001), and construc-
tion grammar (Goldberg, 1995; Jackendof 1997, 2002). hese
developments have helped to characterize the approaches to
lexical design in terms of a hierarchy of semantic expressive-
ness. here are at least three such classes of lexical description,
dei ned as follows: sense enumerative lexicons, where lexical
items have a single type and meaning, and ambiguity is treated
by multiple listings of words; polymorphic lexicons, where lexi-
cal items are active objects, contributing to the determination of
meaning in context, under well-dei ned constraints; and unre-
stricted sense lexicons, where the meanings of lexical items are
determined mostly by context and conventional use. It seems
clear that the most promising direction seems to be a careful
and formal elucidation of the polymorphic lexicons, and this will
form the basis of our subsequent discussion.
Lexical items can be systematically grouped according to
their syntactic and semantic behavior in the language. For this
reason, there have been two major traditions of word cluster-
ing, corresponding to this distinction. Broadly speaking, for
those concerned mainly with grammatical behavior, the most
salient aspect of a lexical item is its argument structure; for those
focusing on a words entailment properties, the most important
aspect is its semantic class. In this section, we examine these
two approaches and see how their concerns can be integrated
into a common lexical representation.
2.1 Semantic Classes
One of the most common ways to organize lexical knowledge
is by means of type or feature inheritance mechanisms (Evans
and Gazdar 1990; Carpenter 1992; Copestake and Briscoe
1992; Pollard and Sag 1994). Furthermore, T. Briscoe, V. de
Paiva, and A. Copestake (1993) describe a rich system of types
for allowing default mechanisms into lexical type descrip-
tions. Similarly, type structures, such as that shown in Figure
1, can express the inheritance of syntactic and semantic fea-
tures, as well as the relationship between syntactic classes
and alternations, among other relations (cf. Pustejovsky and
Boguraev 1993).
2.2 Argument Structure
Once the basic semantic types for the lexical items in the
language have been speciied, their subcategorization and
selectional information must be encoded in some form. he
argument structure for a word can be seen as the simplest spec-
iication of its semantics, indicating the number and type of
parameters associated with the lexical item as a predicate. For
example, the verb die can be represented as a predicate taking
one argument, and kill as taking two arguments, while the verb
give takes three arguments.
(5) a. die(x)
b. kill(x,y)
c. give(x,y,z)
What originally began as the simple listing of the parameters
or arguments associated with a predicate has developed into
a sophisticated view of the way arguments are mapped onto
syntactic expressions. E. Williamss (1981) distinction between
external (the underlined arguments for kill and give) and
internal arguments and J. Grimshaws proposal for a hierarchi-
cally structured representation (cf. Grimshaw 1990) provide
us with the basic syntax for one aspect of a words meaning.
Similar remarks hold for the argument list structure in HPSG
(head-driven phrase structure grammar) and LFG
(lexical-functional grammar).
One inluential way of encoding selectional behavior has
been the theory of thematic relations (cf. thematic roles;
Gruber 1976; Jackendof 1972). hematic relations are now gen-
erally dei ned as partial semantic functions of the event being
denoted by the verb or noun, and behave according to a pre-
dei ned calculus of role relations (e.g., Carlson 1984; Dowty
1991; Chierchia 1989). For example, semantic roles, such as
agent, theme, and goal, can be used to partially determine
the meaning of a predicate when they are associated with the
grammatical arguments to a verb.
(6) a. put< AGENT,THEME,LOCATION>
b. borrow<RECIPIENT,THEME,SOURCE>
hematic roles can be ordered relative to each other in terms
of an implicational hierarchy. For example, there is consider-
able use of a universal subject hierarchy such as shown in the
following (cf. Fillmore 1968; Comrie 1981).
(7) AGENT > RECIPIENT/BENEFACTIVE > THEME/PATIENT >
INSTRUMENT > LOCATION
Many linguists have questioned the general explanatory
coverage of thematic roles, however, and have chosen alter-
native methods for capturing the generalizations they prom-
ised. Dowty (1991) suggests that theta-role generalizations
are best captured by entailments associated with the predi-
cate itself. A theta-role can then be seen as the set of predicate
entailments that are properties of a particular argument to the
verb. Characteristic entailments might be thought of as proto-
type roles, or proto-roles; this allows for degrees or shades of
25
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
meaning associated with the arguments to a predicate. Others
have opted for a more semantically neutral set of labels to
assign to the parameters of a relation, whether it is realized as
a verb, noun, or adjective. For example, the theory of argument
structure as developed by Williams (1981), Grimshaw (1990),
and others can be seen as a move toward a more minimal-
ist description of semantic diferentiation in the verbs list of
parameters.
he interaction of a structured argument list and a rich
system of types, such as that presented previously, provides
a mechanism for semantic selection through inheritance.
Consider, for instance the sentence pairs in (8).
(8) a. he man / the rock fell.
b. he man / *the rock died.
Now consider how the selectional distinction for a feature
such as animacy is modeled so as to explain the selectional
constraints of predicates. For the purpose of illustration, the
arguments of a verb will be identiied as being typed from the
system shown previously.
(9) a. x :physical[fall(x)]
b. x :animate[die(x)]
In the sentences in (8), it is clear how rocks cant die and men
can, but it is still not obvious how this judgment is computed,
given what we would assume are the types associated with
the nouns rock and man, respectively. What accomplishes this
computation is a rule of subtyping, , that allows the type asso-
ciated with the noun man (i.e., human) to also be accepted as
the type animate, which is what the predicate die requires of its
argument as stated in (9b) (cf. Gunter 1992; Carpenter 1992):
(10) [human animate]: human animate
he rule applies since the concept human is subtyped under
animate in the type hierarchy. Parallel considerations rule out
the noun rock as a legitimate argument to die since it is not sub-
typed under animate. Hence, one of the concerns given for the
way that syntactic processes can systematically keep track of
which selectional features are entailed and which are not is par-
tially addressed by such lattice traversal rules as the one pre-
sented here.
2.3 Decomposition
he second approach to the aforementioned lexical speciica-
tion is to dei ne constraints internally to the predicate itself.
Traditionally, this has been known as lexical decomposition.
Since the 1960s, lexical semanticists have attempted to for-
mally model the semantic relations between such lexical items
as the adjective dead and the verbs die and kill (cf. Lakof [1965]
1970; McCawley 1968) in the sentences that follow.
(11) a. John killed Bill.
b. Bill died.
c. Bill is dead.
Assuming that the underlying form for a verb like kill directly
encodes the stative predicate in (11c) and the relation of causation,
generative semanticists posited representations such as (12).
26
12 CAUSE x, BECOME NOT ALIVE y
Here, the predicate CAUSE is represented as a relation between
an individual causer x and an expression involving a change
of state in the argument y. R. Carter ([1976] 1988) proposes a
representation quite similar, shown here for the causative verb
darken:
13 x CAUSE y BE.DARK CHANGE
Although there is an intuition that the cause relation
involves a causer and an event, neither Lakof nor Carter makes
this commitment explicitly. In fact, it has taken several decades
for Davidsons (1967) observations regarding the role of events
in the determination of verb meaning to i nd their way con-
vincingly into the major linguistic frameworks. Recently, a new
synthesis has emerged that attempts to model verb meanings
as complex predicative structures with rich event structures
(cf. Parsons 1990; Pustejovsky 1991b; Tenny 1992; Krifka 1992).
h is research has developed the idea that the meaning of a verb
can be analyzed into a structured representation of the event
that the verb designates, and has furthermore contributed to
the realization that verbs may have complex, internal event
structures. Recent work has converged on the view that com-
plex events are structured into an inner and an outer event,
where the outer event is associated with causation and agency
and the inner event is associated with telicity (completion) and
change of state (cf. Tenny and Pustejovsky 2000; Levin and
Rappaport Hovav 2005).
Jackendof (1990) develops an extensive system of what he
calls Conceptual Representations, which parallel the syntactic
representations of sentences of natural language. hese employ
a set of canonical predicates, including CAUSE, GO, TO, and ON,
and canonical elements, including hing, Path, and Event. hese
approaches represent verb meaning by decomposing the predi-
cate into more basic predicates. h is work owes obvious debt to
the innovative work within generative semantics, as illustrated
by McCawleys (1968) analysis of the verb kill. Recent versions
of lexical representations inspired by generative semantics can
be seen in the Lexical Relational Structures of K. Hale and S.
J. Keyser (1993), where syntactic tree structures are employed
to capture the same elements of causation and change of state
as in the representations of Carter, Levin and T. Rapoport,
Jackendof, and Dowty. he work of Levin and Rappaport, build-
ing on Jackendof s Lexical Conceptual Structures, has been
inluential in further articulating the internal structure of verb
meanings (see Levin and Rappaport 1995).
J. Pustejovsky (1991b) extends the decompositional approach
presented in Dowty (1979) by explicitly reifying the events and
subevents in the predicative expressions. Unlike Dowtys treat-
ment of lexical semantics, where the decompositional calcu-
lus builds on propositional or predicative units (as discussed
earlier), a syntax of event structure makes explicit reference
to quantiied events as part of the word meaning. Pustejovsky
further introduces a tree structure to represent the temporal
ordering and dominance constraints on an event and its subev-
ents. For example, a predicate such as build is associated with
a complex event such as that shown in the following (cf. also
Moens and Steedman 1988).
The Structure of Meaning
(14) [transition [e1:PROCESS ] [e2:STATE ] ]
he process consists of the building activity itself, while the State
represents the result of there being the object built. Grimshaw
(1990) adopts this theory in her work on argument structure,
where complex events such as break are given a similar represen-
tation. In such structures, the process consists of what x does to
cause the breaking, and the state is the resultant state of the bro-
ken item. he process corresponds to the outer causing event as
discussed earlier, and the state corresponds in part to the inner
change of state event. Both Pustejovsky and Grimshaw difer
from earlier authors in assuming a speciic level of representa-
tion for event structure, distinct from the representation of other
lexical properties. Furthermore, they follow J. Higginbotham
(1989) in adopting an explicit reference to the event place in the
verbal semantics. Recently, Levin and Rappaport (2001, 2005)
have adopted a large component of the event structure model for
their analysis of verb meaning composition.
2.4 Noun Meaning
hus far, we have focused on the lexical semantics of verb
entries. All of the major categories, however, are encoded with
syntactic and semantic feature structures that determine their
constructional behavior and subsequent meaning at logical
form. In Generative Lexicon heory (Pustejovsky, 1995), it is
assumed that word meaning is structured on the basis of four
generative factors (qualia roles) that capture how humans
understand objects and relations in the world and provide the
minimal explanation for the linguistic behavior of lexical items
(these are inspired in large part by Moravcsiks (1975, 1990)
interpretation of Aristotelian aitia). hese are: the formal
role: the basic category that distinguishes the object within
a larger domain; constitutive role: the relation between an
object and its constituent parts; the telic role: its purpose and
function; and the agentive role: factors involved in the objects
origin or coming into being.
Qualia structure is at the core of the generative properties of
the lexicon, since it provides a general strategy for creating new
types. For example, consider the properties of nouns such as
rock and chair. hese nouns can be distinguished on the basis
of semantic criteria that classify them in terms of general cat-
egories, such as natural kind or artifact object. Although very
useful, this is not suicient to discriminate semantic types in a
way that also accounts for their grammatical behavior. A cru-
cial distinction between rock and chair concerns the properties
that diferentiate natural kinds from artifacts : Functionality
plays a crucial role in the process of individuation of arti-
facts, but not of natural kinds. h is is relected in grammatical
behavior, whereby a good chair or enjoy the chair are well-
formed expressions relecting the speciic purpose for which
an artifact is designed, but good rock or enjoy a rock are
semantically ill-formed since for rock the functionality (i.e.,
telic) is undei ned. Exceptions exist when new concepts are
referred to, such as when the object is construed relative to a
speciic activity, for example, as in he climber enjoyed that
rock; rock itself takes on a new meaning, by virtue of having
telicity associated with it, and this is accomplished by inte-
gration with the semantics of the subject noun phrase (NP).
Although chair and rock are both physical objects, they difer
in their mode of coming into being (i.e., agentive): Chairs are
man-made; rocks develop in nature. Similarly, a concept such
as food or cookie has a physical manifestation or denotation,
but also a functional grounding pertaining to the relation of
eating. hese apparently contradictory aspects of a category
are orthogonally represented by the qualia structure for that
concept, which provides a coherent structuring for diferent
dimensions of meaning.
2.5 The Problem of Polysemy
Given the compactness of a lexicon relative to the number of
objects and relations in the world, and the concepts we have
for them, lexical ambiguity is inevitable. Add to this the cul-
tural, historical, and linguistic blending that contributes to the
meanings of our lexical items, and ambiguity can appear arbi-
trary as well. Hence, homonymy where one lexical form has
many meanings is to be expected in a language. Examples of
homonyms are illustrated in the following sentences:
(15) a. Mary walked along the bank of the river.
b. She works for the largest bank in the city.
(16) a. he judge asked the defendant to approach the bar.
b. he defendant was in the pub at the bar.
Weinreich (1964) calls such lexical distinctions contrastive
ambiguity, where it is clear that the senses associated with
the lexical item are unrelated. For this reason, it is generally
assumed that homonyms are represented as separate lexical
entries within the organization of the lexicon. h is accords with
a view of lexical organization that has been termed a sense enu-
meration lexicon (cf. Pustejovsky 1995). Words with multiple
senses are simply listed separately in the lexicon, but this does
not seem to compromise or complicate the compositional pro-
cess of how words combine in the interpretation of a sentence.
h is model becomes diicult to maintain, however, when
we consider the phenomenon known as polysemy. Polysemy is
the relationship that exists between diferent senses of a word
that are related in some logical manner, rather than arbitrarily,
as in the previous examples. It is illustrated in the following
sentences (cf. Apresjan 1973; Pustejovsky 1991a, 1998).
(17) a. Mary carried the book home.
b. Mary doesnt agree with the book.
(18) a. Mary has her lunch in her backpack.
b. Lunch was longer today than it was yesterday.
(19) a. he l ight lasted three hours.
b. he l ight landed on time in Los Angeles.
Notice that in each of these pairs, the same nominal form
is assuming diferent semantic interpretations relative to its
selective context. For example, in (17a), the noun book refers
to a physical object, while in (17b), it refers to the informa-
tional content. In (18a), lunch refers to the physical manifes-
tation of the food, while in (18b), it refers to the eating event.
Finally, in (19a), light refers to the l ying event, while in
(19b), it refers to the plane. h is phenomenon of regular (or
logical) polysemy is one of the most challenging in semantics
27
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences

and has stimulated much research recently (Bouillon 1997;

Bouillon and Busa 2001; Cooper 2006). he determination
of what such lexical items denote will of course have conse-
quences for ones theory of compositionality, as we will see in
a later section.

3 BUILDING SENTENCE MEANINGS

3.1 Function Application
he principle of compositionality follows the view that syntax
is an initial guide to the interpretation process. Hence, there
would appear to be a strong relationship between the meaning
of a phrase and where it appears in a sentence, as is apparent
from grammatical function in the following sentences.
(20) a. he woman loves the child.
b. he child loves the woman.
However, this is not always a reliable association, as seen
in languages that have freer word order restrictions, such as
German.
(21) a. Die Frau liebt das Kind.
he woman loves the child.
b. Das Kind liebt die Frau.
he child loves the woman.
In German, both word orders are ambiguous, since infor-
mation about the grammatical case and gender of the two NPs
is neutralized.
Although there is often a correlation between the gram-
matical relation associated with a phrase and the meaning
assigned to it, this is not always a reliable association. Subjects
are not always doers and objects are not always undergoers
in a sentence. For example, notice how in both (22a) and (22b),
the NP the watch is playing the same role; that is, it is undergo-
ing a change, even though it is the subject in one sentence and
the object in the other.
(22) a. he boy broke the watch.
b. he watch broke.
To handle such verbal alternations compositionally requires
either positing separate lexical entries for each syntactic con-
struction associated with a given verb, or expressing a deeper
relation between diferent verb forms.
For most semantic theories, the basic mechanism of com-
positionality is assumed to be function application of some
sort. A rule of application, apply, acts as the glue to assign (or
discharge) the argument role or position to the appropriate
candidate phrase in the syntax. hus, for a simple transitive
sentence such as (23a), two applications derive the proposi-
tional interpretation of the sentence in (23d).
(23) a. John loves Mary.
b. love(Arg1,Arg2)
c. APPLY love(Arg1,Arg2) to Mary = love(Arg1,Mary)
d. APPLY love(Arg1,Mary) to John = love(John,Mary)
One model used to dei ne the calculus of compositional
combinations is the -calculus (Barendregt 1984). Using the
Figure 2.
language of types, we can express the rule of APPLY as a prop-
erty associated with predicates (or functions), and application
as a relationship between expressions of speciic types in the
language.
(24) Function Application:
If is of type a, and is of type a b, then () is of type b.
Viewed as typed expressions, the separate linguistic units
in (23a) combine as function application, as illustrated in
Figure 2.
As one can see, the -calculus is an expressive mechanism
for modeling the relation between verbs and their arguments
interpreted as function application.
One important extension to the type language used here
provides a compositional analysis of the semantics of proposi-
tional attitude verbs, such as believe and think (Montague 1973).
he sentential complements of such verbs, as is well known,
create opaque contexts for substitutions under identity. For
example, if Lois is unaware of Supermans true identity, then
the belief statement in (25b) is false, even though (25a) is true.
(25) a. Lois believes Superman rescued the people.
b. Lois believes Clark Kent rescued the people.
On this view, verbs such as believe introduce an inten-
sional context for the propositional argument, instead of an
extensional one. In such a context, substitution under identity is
not permitted without possibly afecting the truth value (truth
conditional semantics). h is is an important contribution
to the theory of meaning, in that a property of opacity is associ-
ated with speciic types within a compositional framework.
One potential challenge to a theory of function application
is the problem of ambiguity in language. Syntactic ambiguities
arise because of the ways in which phrases are bracketed in a
sentence, while lexical ambiguity arises when a word has mul-
tiple interpretations in a given context. For example, in the fol-
lowing sentence, the verb treat can mean one of two things:
(26) he doctor treated the patient well.
Either 1) the patient is undergoing medical care, or 2) the doc-
tor was kind to the patient. More often than not, however, the
context of a sentence will eliminate such ambiguities, as shown
in (27).
(27) a. he doctor treated the patient with antibiotics. (Sense 1)
b. he doctor treated the patient with care. (Sense 2)
In this case, the interpretation is constructed from the appro-
priate meaning of the verb and how it combines with its
arguments.

28
The Structure of Meaning
3.2 Quantiiers and Scope
Another type of ambiguity, one that is not associated with
the constituent structure of the sentence or lexical senses in
any obvious way, involves quantiied noun phrases (e.g., every
cookie, some cake, and most pies). It is interesting that when a
sentence has more than one of these phrases, one often sees
more than one interpretation possible because of the ways the
quantiied NPs relate to each other. h is is not the case in the
following sentence, however, where there is only one interpre-
tation as to what happened with the cookie.
(28) Some student ate a cookie.
Now consider the sentences in (29), where there is a combi-
nation of a some-NP and an every-NP.
(29) a. Every student saw a movie.
b. Every cookie was eaten by a student.
he sentence in (29a) can mean one of two things: 1) that
there was one movie, for example, Star Wars, that every stu-
dent saw; or 2) that everyone saw a movie, but it didnt have to
be the same one. Similarly, for (29b), there could be one stu-
dent who ate all the cookies, or each cookie that was eaten
by a diferent student. h is kind of quantiier scope ambiguity
has to be resolved in order to determine what kind of infer-
ences one can make from a sentence. Syntax and semantics
must interact to resolve this kind of ambiguity, and it is the
theory of sentence meaning that dei nes this interaction (cf.
quantification).
One of the roles of semantic theory is to correctly derive the
entailment relations associated with a sentences logical form,
since this has an obvious impact on the valid reasoning pat-
terns in the language. How these interpretations are computed
has been an area of intense research, and one of the most inlu-
ential approaches has been the theory of generalized quan-
tiiers (cf. Barwise and Cooper 1981). On this approach, the
denotation of an NP is treated as a set of sets of individuals, and
a sentence structure such as [NP VP] is true if and only if the
denotation of the VP is a member of the family of sets denoted
by the NP. hat is, the sentence in (30) is true if and only if sing-
ing (the denotation of the VP) is a member of the set of proper-
ties denoted by every woman.
(30) Every woman sang.
On this view, quantiiers such as most, every, some, and so
on are actually second-order relations between predicates,
and it is partly this property that allows for the compositional
interpretation of quantiier scope variation seen previously.
he intended interpretation of (30) is (31b), where the subject
NP every woman is interpreted as a function, taking the VP as
its argument.
(31) a. P x[woman(x) P (x)](sang)
b. x[woman(x) sang (x)]
When combined with another quantiied expression, as in
(32a), the relational interpretation of the generalized quantii-
ers is crucial for being able to determine both scope interpreta-
tions shown in (32).
(32) a. Every woman sang a song.
b. xy[woman(x) [song ( y) & sang (x, y)]]
c. yx[[song ( y) & woman(x)] sang (x, y)]]
An alternative treatment for handling such cases is to posit a
rule of quantiier raising, where the scope ambiguity is reduced
to a diference in syntactic structures associated with each
interpretation (May 1985).
3.3 Semantic Modiication
In constructing the meaning of expressions, a semantic the-
ory must also account for how the attribution of properties
to an entity is computed, what is known as the problem of
modiication. he simplest type of modiication one can imag-
ine is intersective attribution. Notice that in the phrases in (33),
the object denoted correctly has both properties expressed in
the NP:
(33) a. black cofee x[black (x) & cofee (x)]
b. Italian singer x[Italian(x) & singer (x)]
c. metal cup x[metal(x) & cup (x)]
here are two general solutions to computing the meaning
of such expressions: a) Let adjectives be functions over com-
mon noun denotations, or b) let adjectives be normal predi-
cates, and have a semantic rule associated with the syntax of
modiication.
Computing the proper inferences for relative clauses will
involve a similar strategy, since they are a sort of intersective
modiication. hat is, for the relative clause in (34), the desired
logical form will include an intersection of the head noun and
the relation predicated in the subordinated clause.
(34) a. writer who John knows
b. x[writer (x) & know ( j, x)]
Unfortunately, however, most instances of adjectival modi-
ication do not work so straightforwardly, as illustrated in (35).
Adjectives such as good, dangerous, and fast modify polyse-
mously in the following sentences.
(35) a. John is a a good teacher.
b. A good meal is what we need now.
c. Mary took a good umbrella with her into the rain.
In each of these sentences, good is a manner modiier whose
interpretation is dependent on the noun it modiies; in (35a), it
means to teach well; in (35b), it means a tasty meal; and in
(35c), it means something keeping you dry. Similar remarks
hold for the adjective dangerous.
(36) a. h is is a dangerous road at night.
b. She used a dangerous knife for the turkey.
hat is, the road is dangerous in (36a) when one drives on it,
and the knife is dangerous in (36b) when one cuts with it.
Finally, the adjective fast in the following sentences acts as
though it is an adverb, modifying an activity implicit in the
noun, that is, programming in (37a) and driving in (37b).
(37) a. Mary is the fastest programmer we have on staf.
b. he turnpike is a faster road than Main Street.
29
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
To account for such cases, it is necessary to enrich the mode of
composition beyond simple property intersection, to accom-
modate the context dependency of the interpretation. Analyses
taking this approach include Borschev and Partee (2001),
Bouillon (1997), and Pustejovsky (1995).
3.4 Arguments versus Adjuncts
In our discussion thus far of how predicates select arguments to
create compositionally complex expressions, we have assumed
that the matrix predicate (the main verb of the sentence) acts
as the only function over other phrases. In fact, what an argu-
ment of the verb is and what an adjunct is are questions just as
much of meaning as of syntax. In this section, we examine the
semantic issues involved.
In this overview, we have adopted the position that lan-
guage relects the workings of our deeper conceptual sys-
tems in some direct and nonidiosyncratic manner. Lexical
choice as well as speciic grammatical phenomena can be
constrained by underlying conceptual bias. Well-known
examples of this transparency include count/mass noun
distinctions in the lexicon, and case marking and valence
distinctions in the syntax. For example, concepts entail-
ing unindividuated stuf or material will systematically be
semantically typed as mass nouns in the grammar, whereas
naturally individuating (countable) substances will assume
the status of count nouns, with their respective grammatical
consequences, as illustrated in (38). (Some mass terms are
not shared by all languages, such as the concept of paper
or furniture.)
(38) a. {not much/all/lots of } gold/water/dirt/sand
b. {every/two/several} chairs/girls/beaches
Similarly, as presented in previous sections, the classii-
cation of verbs appears to relect their underlying relational
structure in fairly obvious ways.
(39) a. Mary arrived.
b. John greeted Mary.
c. Mary gave a book to John.
hat is, the argument structure of each verb encodes the
semantics of the underlying concept, which in turn is relected
in the projection to the speciic syntactic constructions, that
is, as intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive constructions,
respectively. For unary, binary, and ternary predicates, there
is a visible or transparent projection to syntax from the under-
lying conceptual structure, as well as a predictable composi-
tional derivation as function application.
So, the question arises as to what we do with nonselected
arguments and adjuncts within the sentence. It is well known,
for example, that arguments not selected by the predicate
appear in certain contexts (cf. Jackendof 1992; Levin and
Rappaport Hovav 2005).
(40) a. he man laughed himself sick.
b. he girl danced her way to fame.
c. Mary nailed the window shut.
30
Each of the italicized phrases is an argument of something,
but is it selected by the matrix predicate? Jackendof has pro-
posed a solution that relies on the notion of construction,
as introduced by A. E. Goldberg (1995) (cf. construction
grammars).
Another problem in compositionality emerges from the
interpretation of adjuncts. he question posed by the exam-
ples in (41) is this: Which NPs are arguments semantically and
which are merely adjuncts?
(41) a. Mary ate the soup.
b. Mary ate the soup with a spoon.
c. Mary ate the soup with a spoon in the kitchen.
d. Mary ate the soup with a spoon in the kitchen at 3:00 p.m.
For Davidson (1967), there is no semantic distinction between
arguments and adjuncts in the logical form. Under his pro-
posal, a two-place predicate such as eat contains an additional
argument, the event variable, e, which allows each event par-
ticipant a speciic role in the interpretation (cf. Parsons 1990;
event structure and grammar).
(42) yxe[eat(e, x, y)]
hen, any additional adjunct information (such as locations,
instruments, etc.) is added by conjunction to the meaning
of the main predicate, in a fashion similar to the interpreta-
tion of intersective modiication over a noun. In this man-
ner, Davidson is able to capture the appropriate entailments
between propositions involving action and event expressions
through conventional mechanisms of logical entailment. For
example, to capture the entailments between (41bd) and (41a)
in the following, each more speciically described event entails
the one above it by virtue of conjunction elimination (already
encountered) on the expression.
(43) a. e[eat(e, m, the-soup)]
b. e[eat(e, m, the-soup) & with(e, a spoon)]
c. e[eat(e, m, the-soup) & with(e, a spoon) & in(e, the
kitchen)]
d. e[eat(e, m, the-soup) & with(e, a spoon) & in(e, the
kitchen) & at (e, 3:00 p.m.)]
h is approach has the advantage that no special inference
mechanisms are needed to derive the entailment relations
between the core propositional content in (43a) and forms
modiied through adjunction. h is solution, however, does not
extend to cases of verbs with argument alternations that result
in diferent meanings. For example, how do we determine what
the core arguments are for a verb like sweep?
(44) a. John swept.
b. John swept the loor.
c. John swept the dirt.
d. John swept the dirt of the sidewalk.
e. John swept the loor clean.
f. John swept the dirt into a pile.
he semantics of such a verb should determine what its argu-
ments are, and how the diferent possible syntactic realizations
relate to each other semantically. hese cases pose an interest-
The Structure of Meaning
ing challenge for the theory of compositionality (cf. Jackendof
2002).
3.5 Presupposition
In computing the meaning of a sentence, we have focused
on that semantic content that is asserted by the proposition.
h is is in contrast to what is presupposed. A presupposition
is that propositional meaning that must be true for the sen-
tence containing it to have a proper semantic value (Stalnaker
1970; Karttunen 1974; Potts 2005). (Stalnaker makes the dis-
tinction between what a speaker says and what a speaker
presupposes.)
Such knowledge can be associated with a word, a grammat-
ical feature, or a syntactic construction (so-called presuppo-
sition triggers). For example, in (45) and (46), the complement
proposition to each verb is assumed to be true, regardless of the
polarity assigned to the matrix predicate.
(45) a. Mary realized that she was lost.
b. Mary didnt realize that she was lost.
(46) a. John knows that Mary is sick.
b. John doesnt know that Mary is sick.
here are similar presuppositions associated with aspectual
predicates, such as stop and inish, as seen in (47).
(47) a. Fred stopped smoking.
b. John i nished painting his house.
In these constructions, the complement proposition is assumed
to have been true before the assertion of the sentence.
Such conventional presuppositions are also triggered by
interrogative contexts, such as seen in (48).
(48) a. Why did you go the store?
b. When did you see Mary?
As with all presuppositions, however, they are defeasible, as
the answer to (48b) in (49) illustrates.
(49) But I didnt see Mary.
Conversational presuppositions, on the other hand, are impli-
cated propositions by virtue of a context and discourse situation.
he response in (50b) conversationally implicates that I am not
hungry (Recanati 2002); conversational implicature).
(50) a. Are you hungry?
b. Ive had a very large breakfast.
he meaning of such implicatures is not part of the asserted
content of the proposition, but computed within a conversa-
tional context in a discourse. We will return to this topic in a
later section.
3.6 Noncompositionality
While semantic theory seems to conform to the principles of
compositionality in most cases, there are many constructions
that do not it into the conventional function application par-
adigm. A phrase is noncompositional if its meaning cannot
be predicted from the meaning of its parts. We have already
encountered modiication constructions that do not conform to
simple intersective interpretations, for example, good teacher.
here are two other constructions that pose a problem for the
principle of compostionality in semantics:
(51) a. Idioms: hear it through the grapevine, kick the bucket ;
b. Coercions: begin the book , enjoy a cofee.
he meaning of an idiom such as leave well enough alone is
in no transparent way composed of the meanings of its parts.
Although there are many interesting syntactic properties and
constraints on the use of idiomatic expressions in languages,
from a semantic point of view its meaning is clearly associated
with the entire phrase. Hence, the logical form for (52),
(52) Every person kicked the bucket.
will make reference to quantiication over persons, but not
over buckets (cf. [53]).
(53) x[ person(x) & kick.the.bucket (x)]
We confront another kind of noncompositionality in
semantics when predicates seem to appear with arguments of
the wrong type. For example, in (54a), a countable individ-
ual entity is being coerced into the food associated with that
animal, namely, bits of chicken, while in (54b), the mass terms
water and beer are being packaged into unit measures (Pelletier,
1975). In (55), the aspectual verbs normally select for an event,
but here are coercing entities into event denotations. Similarly,
in (56), both object NPs are being coerced into propositional
interpretations. (Cf. Pustejovsky 1995 and Jackendof 2002 for
discussions of coercion phenomena and their treatment.)
(54) a. heres chicken in the salad.
b. Well have a water and two beers.
(55) a. Roser i nished her thesis.
b. Mary began the novel.
(56) a. Mary believes Johns story.
b. Mary believes John.
hese examples illustrate that semantics must accommodate
speciic type-shifting and coercing operations in the language
in order to remain compositional. In order to explain just such
cases, Pustejovsky (2007) presents a general theory of compo-
sition that distinguishes between four distinct modes of argu-
ment selection: a) function application, b) accommodation,
c) coercion by introduction, and d) coercion by exploitation.
4 DISCOURSE STRUCTURE
hus far we have been concentrating on the meaning of single
sentences. But no sentence is really ever uttered outside of a
context. Language is used as a means of communication and is
as much a way of acting as a means of representing (Austin 1975;
Searle 1969). In this section, we briely survey the major areas
of research in discourse semantics. We begin by examin-
ing the semantic models that have emerged to account for
dynamic phenomena in discourse, such as intersentential
31
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
anaphora. We then look at how discourse relations can be used
to model larger units of meaning.
From our previous discussion, we have assumed the sen-
tence as the unit for semantic interpretation, including the
level for the interpretation of quantiier scope and anaphoric
binding, as in (57).
(57) a. Every actress said she was happy.
b. Every actress came in and said hello.
Notice that the anaphoric link between the quantiier and the
pronoun in (57a) is acceptable, while such a binding is not pos-
sible within a larger discourse setting, as in (58) and (59).
(58) a. Every actress came in.
b. *She said she was happy.
(59) a. Every actress came in.
b. *She said hello.
So, in a larger unit of semantic analysis, a bound variable inter-
pretation of the pronoun does not seem permitted.
Now notice that indei nites do in fact allow binding across
the level of the sentence.
(60) a. An actress came in.
b. She said hello.
he desired interpretation, however, is one that the semantic
model we have sketched out is unable to provide.
(61) a. x[actress (x) & come.in(x)]
b. [& say.hello (x)]
What this example points out is that the view of meaning we
have been working with so far is too static to account for phe-
nomena that are inherently dynamic in nature (Chierchia 1995;
Groenendijk and Stokhof 1991; Karttunen 1976). In this exam-
ple, the indei nite NP an actress is being used as a discourse
referent, and is available for subsequent reference as the story
unfolds in the discourse.
Following Kamp and Reyles (1993) view, an indei nite NP
introduces a novel discourse referent, while a pronoun or def-
inite description says something about an existing discourse
referent. Using the two notions of novelty and familiarity, we
can explain why she in (60b) is able to bind to the indei nite;
namely, she looks for an accessible discourse referent, the
indei nite. he reason that (58) and (59) are not good discourses
is due to the universally quantiied NP every actress, which is
inaccessible as an antecedent to the pronoun.
One inluential formalization of this approach is Dynamic
Predicate Logic (Groenendijk and Stokhof, 1991), which com-
bines conventional interpretations of indei nites as existentials
with the insight from incremental interpretations, mentioned
previously. On this view, the interpretation of a sentence is a
function of an ordered pair of assignments, rather than a static
single assignment. he output condition for a sentence with
an indei nite NP, such as (60a), speciies that a subsequent sen-
tence with a pronoun can share that variable assignment: he
meaning of a sentence lies in the way it changes the representa-
tion of the information of the interpreter (ibid.). hat is, when
a quantiied expression is used in discourse, something new
32
is added to the listeners interpretation state so that the lis-
tener can use the quantiier to help understand future utter-
ances. In this way, the meaning of a sentence is interpreted
dynamically.
he dynamics of discourse, of course, involve more than the
binding of anaphors to antecedents across adjacent sentences.
Every utterance is made in the context of a common ground
of shared knowledge (presuppositions), with a communica-
tive intent, and in a particular time and place (cf. discourse
analysis, communicative intention). Just as sentences
have internal structure, with both syntactic and semantic
dependencies, discourse can also be viewed as a sequence of
structured segments, with named dependencies between them.
For example, the sentences in (62) form a discourse structured
by a relation of narration, implying temporal sequence (Dowty,
1986).
(62) a. John entered the room.
b. He sat down.
In (63), on the other hand, the two sentences are related by the
dependency of explanation, where (63b) temporally precedes
and explains (63a).
(63) a. Max fell.
b. John pushed him.
heories of discourse relations, such as rhetorical struc-
ture theory (Mann and hompson 1986), segmented dis-
course representation theory (SDRT) (Asher and Lascarides 3),
and that of Hobbs (1985) attempt to model the rhetorical func-
tions of the utterances in the discourse (hence, they are more
expressive of discourse structure and speaker intent than dis-
course representation theory [DRT], which does not model
such parameters). For the simple discourses above, SDRT, for
example extends the approach from dynamic semantics with
rhetorical relations and their semantic values, while provid-
ing a more complex process of discourse updates. Rhetorical
relations, as used in SDRT, carry speciic types of illocution-
ary force (cf. Austin 1975; Searle 1969, 9), namely, explanation,
elaboration, giving backgrounds, and describing results.
5 CONCLUSION
In this essay, I have attempted to outline the basic components
for a theory of linguistic meaning. Many areas of semantics were
not touched on in this overview, such as issues relating to the
philosophy of language and mind and the psychological conse-
quences of various semantic positions. Many of the accompa-
nying entries herein, however, address these issues directly.
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4 writing both depend on the available technology and lead to tech-
SOCIAL PRACTICES OF SPEECH AND WRITING
Florian Coulmas
INTRODUCTION
Language is constitutive for human society. As a social fact
it cannot be thought of in the abstract, for the medium of
communication is what allows it to serve social functions. he
nature of the social relationship that exists by virtue of language
partially depends on the externalization of language, that is, on
how it is transmitted from one actor to another as speech, writ-
ing, sign, or Braille. he anatomy of speech organs (cf. Liberman
and Blumstein 1988) provides the biological foundation of
human society in the most general sense, which is why oral
speech is considered fundamental for socialization both in the
phylogenetic and ontogenetic sense. But unless we study human
society like that of other primates from the point of view of physi-
cal anthropology, other forms of language externalization must
also be taken into account as communication potential from
the beginning. here are two reasons for this. One is that the
invention of writing (sign language, Braille) cannot be undone.
he other, which follows therefrom, is that writing has brought
about basic changes in the nature of human communication. It
brought in its wake a literate mindset that cannot be reversed.
Research about language in literate societies is carried out by
researchers who, growing up, were socialized into a literate
world organized by and large on the basis of literate principles.
It is not fortuitous, therefore, that social practices of speech and
writing are dealt with here under one heading.
he scientiic enterprise in general, linguistics in particular, is
a social practice involving speech and writing. Even the investi-
gation of unwritten languages happens against the background
of literate society and by means of the tools developed for what
Goody (1977, 151) felicitously called the technology of the intel-
lect. For the language sciences, it is important to keep in mind
that it is not just the technicians who use a tool to do what they
need to do and want to do, but that the tool restricts what can
be done. his holds true for the hardware, that is, the writing
implements, as well as for the software, the code or the writing
systems.
he social aspects of speech and writing encompass a wide
range of topics many of which are dealt with in other entries of
this encyclopedia (sociolinguistics, discourse analysis,
diglossia, culture and language, digital media, lit-
eracy). his essay is focused on the issue of the media of com-
munication and the social conditions and consequences of their
evolution. he reason is that the social practices of speech and
nological and social innovation. As has been argued by Marshall
McLuhan (1964), Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (1979), Jan Assmann
(1991), David R. Olson (1994), and Nicholas Negroponte (1995)
among others, civilizations are characterized by the media they
predominantly use and which shape the way they exchange,
store, and administer information, thus exercising a profound
inluence on social practice.
he nexus between speech and writing is variable and more
obvious in some cases than in others. For instance, when the
lyrics of a song are read on the monitor and sung in a karaoke
bar, speech and writing are joined together in one activity. On
the other hand, the songs of bards handed down by word of
mouth from one generation to another are part of the culture of
spoken, as opposed to written, language (Ong 1982, Olson 1991;
oral culture, oral composition). However, the very idea
of orality is predicated on literacy and would not have become
an object of study without it. Just as there is no silence without
sound, illiteracy exists but in a literate society. On the face of it,
many kinds of verbal behavior, such as speech contests, bidding
at an auction, and election campaign addresses, do not involve
writing. he institutional frameworks in which they take place in
modern society, school, trade and government, though, rely to a
very large extent on written texts. To analyze social practices of
speech and writing, then, it is necessary to consider technologi-
cal aspects of writing and institutional aspects of literacy.
TECHNOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF WRITING
Many social practices and ligatures of contemporary society
would be impossible without writing. his does not imply that the
externalization of language by technological means is the only
force that shaped modern society. he assumption of an unme-
diated cause-and-efect relationship between writing and social
organization, of a watershed between primitive oral life and com-
plex literate civilization, is a simpliication that fails to do justice
to the complexity of the interaction. It is surely tempting to argue
that what all great early civilizations had in common was writing
and that it was hence writing that caused complex societies to
come into existence. However, if we look at the uses of writing
in early civilizations, many diferences are apparent. For exam-
ple, economic administration was preeminent in Mesopotamia
(Nissen, Damerow, and Englund 1990), whereas cult stood out
in Egypt (Assmann 1991). In both cases, it is untenable to argue
that accounting and the cult of the dead, respectively, were an
outlow of the invention of writing. Yet the opposite proposition,
claiming that the demands of bookkeepers and priests led to the
creation of writing, is no less simplistic.
Similarly, the invention of the printing press and mov-
able type has often been seen as a technological breakthrough
with vast social consequences (Febvre and Martin [1958] 1999;
Eisenstein 1979). In our day, the digital turn (Fischer 2006),
described as the third media revolution after chirographic
culture (Schmandt-Besserat 1992) and print culture
35
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
(Olson 1994), is regarded as a driving force of globalization
(Kressel 2007). Both of these propositions are defensible, but
not in a unidirectional, monocausal sense. Equally true are the
opposite propositions, that socioeconomic developments led to
the emergence of a larger reading public, thus paving the way for
a simpler and more eicient reproduction technology than the
copying of manuscripts, and that modern industrial society with
mass participation generated pressure for the development of a
technology of mass dissemination of information. he invention
of writing facilitated complex social organization, and the print-
ing press was conducive to the spread of education. However,
writing has been a common possession of humanity for more
than 5,000 years and the printing press for half a millennium, if
we disregard the use of cast-metal movable type in Korea in the
early thirteenth century.
Yet we are living in a world with hundreds of millions of adult
illiterates, even, or rather particularly, where writing irst emerged,
that is, in Mesopotamia, in Egypt, in China, and in Mesoamerica.
According to unesco (2006), there were 781 million adult illiter-
ates worldwide and 100 million school-age children not attend-
ing school in 2005. In spite of the uneven distribution of illiterates
in the world, these igures suice to discredit the notion that a
new technology of communication of and by itself brings about
social change. Economic development, social structure, ethnic
and linguistic composition, fecundity, ideology, and tradition
are intervening variables that determine how a society makes use
of and adjusts to a new technology. It is necessary, therefore, to
reckon with the contemporaneity of diferent levels of develop-
ment, diferent technologies, and diferent literacies. Assuming
a dialectic relationship of mutual inluence between writing and
social change is a more promising approach for understanding
the transition from oral to literate society.
New technologies both respond to practical needs and create
new practices. Any technology is an artifact, but to conclude that
its creators rule over it is a fallacy, for the applications of techno-
logical innovations are often recognized not in advance but after
the fact, when they have been used for some time. Like the genie
let out of the bottle, they may have unplanned and sometimes
unwelcome consequences. he material and functional proper-
ties of writing technologies determine their potential uses, which,
however, are not necessarily evident at the outset.
he locus of writing is the city. Even a supericial look at
present-day urban environments reveals that city dwellers are
surrounded by written messages wherever they go. Of late, this
has given rise to a new branch of scholarship known as linguis-
tic landscape research (Landry and Bourhis 1997; Backhaus
2007), as it were, a social epigraphy for posterity. he variety
of writing surfaces on which the literate culture of modern
cityscapes manifests itself is striking. It testiies to the traces of
history in the present and to the contemporaneity of diferent
stages of development, for it includes some of the oldest mate-
rials used for writing side by side with the most recent devices.
his contemporaneity is one of the foremost characteristics
of writing. For writing arrests change and enables accumula-
tion of information. Some genuine monuments from antiquity
speak to us today, such as the Egyptian obelisk of Ramses II of
the 19th Dynasty, 13041237 b.c.e., re-erected on the Place de la
Concorde in the center of Paris. Around the corner, the passerby
36
can read the latest stock quotes of a scrolling light-emitting
diode (LED) display. Brand-new buildings are adorned with the
old technique of cutting messages in stone. Stelae with com-
memorative inscriptions, gravestones, and buildings bearing
the names of their owners or occupants are still being put up,
much as in ancient times. here are hardly any material objects
to which writing cannot be aixed. Since the earliest times of
literate culture, few have been discarded and many added. he
choice continues to expand. Hard surfaces made for endurance
are stone, marble, metal, ceramics, wood, and, today, plastics.
Inscriptions are incised, engraved, etched, carved, and chiseled
into them as they were in the past, and malleable surfaces such
as moist clay and molten metal are impressed or molded into
shape.
In addition to monumental inscriptions, writing is found on
various other surfaces, such as whitewashed walls, street signs,
posters, billboards, handbills, notice boards, memorial plaques,
cloth, clothing, commercials carried around by sandwichmen
and mounted on trucks, advertising pillars, buses and other
vehicles covered with commercials, shop windows, and digital
display panels. hese and some other surfaces, such as palm
leaves, papyrus, parchment, and wax tablets that have gone
out of fashion, are variously suitable for realizing the functional
potential of writing.
Two fundamental functions of writing are memory support
and communication. hey are not mutually exclusive, but dif-
ferent surfaces lend themselves better to one than to the other.
Hard surfaces answer the requirement of durability. hey are
inscribed only once, but with a lasting trace that can be recov-
ered after years, decades, even millennia. Baked clay tablets,
the hallmark of cuneiform civilization, and mural inscriptions
on Egyptian monuments embody this type. Memory is in time
turned into history, the recording of the past and the collection
of knowledge, which are the cardinal functional character-
istics of this technology. Inscriptions on hard surfaces are, of
course, also communicative but stationary. Clay tablets can be
transported in limited numbers only, and monumental inscrip-
tions have to be visited to be read. In order to allow written
signs to travel and thus to realize a potential that fundamen-
tally distinguishes writing from speech, freeing the message
from the copresence of sender and receiver, lighter materials
are needed. In antiquity, three main writing surfaces met this
requirement: papyrus, parchment, and paper.
For millennia, Egypt was practically the only producer of
papyrus because the reed of which it is made grows in abun-
dance along the banks of the Nile. he papyrus scroll hieroglyph
is attested in the most ancient known Egyptian inscriptions, and
the oldest papyrus fragments covered with writing date from the
third millennium b.c.e. Papyrus came to be commonly used for
documentary and literary purposes throughout Greece, Asia
Minor, and the Roman Empire. As of the fourth century c.e.,
parchment (processed animal hide), a more durable writing
material than the brittle papyrus, began to be more widely used in
Europe, where the scroll was gradually edged out by the book in
codex form (Roberts and Skeat 1983). he word paper is derived
from papyrus, but paper making is quite diferent from papyrus
making. It was invented by the Chinese some 1,900 years ago
(Twitchett 1983). he earliest Chinese documents on paper date
Social Practices of Speech and Writing
from the second century c.e. In the wake of the Islamic expan-
sion to Central Asia, the Arabs acquired the paper-making tech-
nology in the eighth century c.e., which they in turn introduced
to Europe in the eleventh century. Relatively cheap, lexible, and
convenient to carry, paper replaced parchment as the principal
writing surface in Europe and in other parts of the world.
Since its invention in China, paper, which Pierre-Marc De
Biasi (1999) called the greatest invention of all time, gave a
boost to the production of written text wherever it was intro-
duced. In China, it was used for block printing as of the seventh
century. In the tenth century, the entire Buddhist scripture was
printed using 130,000 printing blocks (Taylor and Taylor 1995,
156). Paper was the irst writing material that spread around the
world. In the West, Johannes Gutenbergs invention of print-
ing with movable type would hardly have had the same impact
without it. Of the 180 copies of the Bible he printed, 150 were on
paper and only 30 on parchment, one indication of the impor-
tance of paper for the dissemination of written text. Its position
in this regard is undiminished. he paperless oice is far from a
reality even in the most advanced countries; rather, many ancil-
lary devices that presuppose writing on paper form the mainstay
of the thriving oice machines industry: printers, scanners, copi-
ers, and fax machines. Although nowadays paper holds only a
tiny fraction of all new information released, it is still the unchal-
lenged surface for the formal publication of information. World
paper consumption for information storage and distribution is at
an all-time high. Notwithstanding the shift of many periodicals
and scholarly journals to online publication most continue to
be printed on paper for archival purposes, for paper has a much
longer duration of life than can be guaranteed for any digital
storage medium.
his brings to light a more general trade-of of information
processing. Weight and storage capacity are inversely related. A
tablet measuring about 10 10 cm is the ideal size for writing on
wet clay. It holds about 300 characters. Depending on the thick-
ness of the tablet, this yields an information/weight ratio of .2 kg
to 1 kg per 1,000 characters. A text of 300,000 characters would
weigh between 200 kg and 1000 kg. In modern terms, that would
be a short book of fewer than 190 pages, assuming an informa-
tion density of 1,600 characters per page. Give it a solid cover
and it comes to a total of 250 g. With respect to the information/
weight ratio, paper thus outperforms clay by a factor of 4,000.
Such a rough-and-ready calculation may suice to illustrate
the point. Papyrus was similarly superior to clay with regard to
storage capacity and transportability; however, many more clay
tablets than papyrus documents have come down to us through
the millennia. How many papyrus rolls were lost in the legendary
blaze of the library of Alexandria is not known, but when in 2004
a ire broke out in the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, 50,000
books were destroyed, many of them unique or rare. Another
65,000 volumes were severely damaged by ire and water. Baked
clay tablets would have withstood the lames and the water used
to put them out.
his line of thought can be extended into the digital age
by another calculation. Computer technology has exponen-
tially increased information storage density. he 50,000 burnt
books of the Anna Amalia Library took up some 1,660 meters of
shelf space. Assuming an average of 300 pages per book, their
digitalized contents would require some 750 gigabyte (GB) stor-
age space, which easily its on an external hard disk the size of
a small book. As compared to print, digital information storage
thus reduces the necessary physical space by a factor of 50,000.
Again, this is a coarse measure only. here is considerable
variation in the bytes per book page, both in actual fact and
in model calculations, but the correlation between informa-
tion amount and storage space of print media and digital media
transpires from it.
In sum, as clay was followed by paper and paper by digi-
tal storage media, information density per square centimeter
increased exponentially, while the weight and size of written
records decreased. It became, accordingly, ever easier to store
and to transmit written text with many consequences for read-
ing and writing behavior, for reproducing text, and for the role
texts play in everyday life. What the history of writing shows is
that new technologies do not always replace old ones. Rather,
the new supplements the old and often transforms its use. For
instance, parchment was marginalized by paper but for centu-
ries never completely driven out; print never replaced handwrit-
ing and has not become obsolete by texts typed on a cell phone
keypad. Advances in writing technology have greatly expanded
the repertoire of tools that humanity has acquired for handling
information in the form of written language. he fact that old
technologies continue to be used side by side with new ones
testiies not just to inertia and path dependency but also to the
diferent properties of the materials used. For centuries after
the introduction of paper, it was considered too feeble a mate-
rial to hold contracts and other important documents, which
were preferably executed on parchment. Similarly, although it
is technically possible to keep birth registers as electronic iles
only, birth certiicates on paper continue to be issued. One of the
reasons is that digital information storage is subject to physical
decay and technical obsolence not less but much more than pre-
decessor media.
Writing has made record keeping for posterity and accumu-
lation of knowledge possible. However, with the introduction of
every new writing material, the storage problem that it seemed to
solve became more acute. An archive of records on paper takes
up much less space than one for clay tablets, but it is beset by
dangers that pose no threat to baked clay: dust, humidity, insects,
ire, and water. heft, too, is a greater threat to libraries than to
clay tablet archives and a greater threat to computers than to
libraries. Keeping books in a usable physical state requires more
work than keeping clay tablets. he same kind of relationship
holds between libraries and digital data archives. Much more
can be stored, but preservation for future use becomes ever more
diicult as time intervals of technical innovation shrink. Only a
few specialists are able to handle data stored with software that
ceased to be produced 20 years ago, whereas a book would last
for centuries. he problem of preserving and organizing the ever-
swelling lood of information remains unsolved, and at the same
time many traditional libraries and collections of documents fall
into decay. Technology has hugely expanded human memory,
but it has not yet eliminated the risk that many parts of the heri-
tage committed to writing will disappear forever.
To guard against collective memory loss, the United Nations
Educational, Scientiic and Social Orgnization (UNESCO) has
37
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
launched the Memory of the World Programme to assist in the
preservation of archive holdings and library collections all over
the world. For the time being, this is the endpoint of a develop-
ment begun with the advent of literacy in ancient civilizations: the
institutionalization of writing and the bureaucratization of soci-
ety. he more serviceable writing became to human society, the
more it penetrated social relations and the more attention it
came to require on the part of society.
INSTITUTIONAL ASPECTS OF LITERACY
From its inception, writing has been an instrument of power. In
ancient civilizations of restricted literacy, its mastery was jeal-
ously guarded by the elite. It was indispensable for the work-
ings of the temple-centered economies of ancient Near Eastern
city states (Nissen 1988), symbolized the rule of the pharaohs in
Egypt (Posener 1956), became the bedrock of Chinas Confucian
bureaucratic state (Lewis 1999), and was a sine qua non of
Athenian democracy (homas 1992). Certainly, literacy levels
varied widely as did the uses of literacy, but the general ten-
dency of the extension of the human mind by means of writing to
engender and necessitate institutions is unmistakable. he most
important institutions produced by literate culture have to do
with government, cult, schooling, and economic organization.
Government
Writing was used early on to extend the reach of authority and to
mediate the relationship between ruler and ruled. Monuments
that embody power, such as the Rosetta Stone inscribed with a
decree to commemorate the reception of rulership by Pharaoh
Ptolemy V on March 27, 197 b.c.e. (Parkinson 1999, 29), as well
as stelae appealing with regulations to the literate public, were
erected throughout the Ancient Near East. heir inscriptions
were drafted by scribes who created the irst bureaucratic states.
he Egyptian vizier was responsible for the collection of taxes,
the maintenance of archives, and the appointment of oicials.
he skills of the scribe aforded privilege in Egyptian society. As
one of them put it, the scribe is released from manual tasks; it
is he who commands (Goody and Watt 1968, 37). A thousand
years later, Mencius (372289 b.c.e.) made the same point in
China: Some labour with their hearts and minds; some labour
with their strength. hose who labour with their hearts and
minds govern others. hose who labour with their strength are
governed by others (Book of Mencius, quoted from Lloyd and
Sivin 2002, 16). hese observations bring to light the connection
between literacy and social hierarchy that persists to this day.
Wherever societies obtained the art of writing, the literati
were close to the powers that be, but the Chinese institutional-
ized literacy like no other culture. In Confuciuss day, literacy was
already the preeminent mark of the gentleman, and as of the sec-
ond century b.c.e., the study of the Confucian classics gradually
became institutionalized as the key to attaining public oice and
inluence. he civil service examination system was employed
with few adjustments from the Han Dynasty (206 b.c.e.220 c.e.)
until the closing stages of the Qing Dynasty at the beginning of
the twentiethth century. It was based entirely on the study of
texts. To prepare for the highest degree, students spent up to 20
38
years memorizing the Confucian classics and commentaries.
hey were then able to recite, understand, and interpret every
clause of the ive canonical works Book of Changes, Book of
Documents, Book of Poetry, Records of Rites, and Spring
and Autumn Annals said to have been redacted by Confucius
himself, as well as a collection of commentaries by subsequent
scholars.
hat such an education was an adequate preparation for
bureaucrats charged with administering the country was rarely
called into question. It was irmly rooted in the past, and the clas-
sics were thought to hold a solution to any problem that might
arise. he authority of writing and the conservatism of literature
were never more efective. he strength of the system lay in the
fact that it encouraged respect for learning and provided the
emperor with a bureaucracy educated in one standard curricu-
lum. Its weakness was its emphasis on commentary that stiled
inquisitiveness and deviation from the trodden path. he civil
service exam system institutionalized the transmission of texts
down a lineage and was, thus, inherently averse to change. In its
early days, it helped to loosen the hereditary aristocracys grip
on power by rewarding merit rather than birth for recruiting
bureaucrats. In actual fact, however, learning remained largely
a prerogative of aristocratic families out of reach for most com-
moners. Women were not permitted to sit for the exams. In the
end, the civil service examinations served as a system to perpetu-
ate the power of the thin elite of literati bureaucrats.
Controlling literacy has always been the other side of its rela-
tion to authority. he powerful have lived in fear of the power
of the pen and have had little interest in promoting the art of
writing among the masses. Illiterates are powerless, unable to
challenge the letter of the law or to invoke the laws on the books
to their own advantage. hat which is written down acquires
authority in its own right as a reference source independent of
the ruler. While helping to project power far beyond earshot, it
gains a measure of objectivity, thereby reducing the arbitrari-
ness of rule. But only the literate can hold the ruler accountable
to his own decrees. he institutionalization of writing to this end
occurred in ifth-century Greece where government was estab-
lished in the polis through written laws. hese were not God-
given but man-made laws, aiding the development of a division
between cosmic order and human society (Stratton 1980), so
characteristic of the Greek Weltanschauung and so diferent
from the Chinese.
From the objectiication of language in writing follows
another function with important implications for the exercis-
ing and curbing of power. Writing detaches the author from
his message, which makes it easier and less risky to express the
unspeakable. Two examples suice to illustrate. In Athens, ostra-
cism was institutionalized as a procedure to protect democratic
rule. In the event that a charismatic politician (a demagogue)
became too inluential or was otherwise disruptive, the demos
(people) were entitled to exile him from the polis. To this end,
every citizen was given a potsherd (ostrakon) on which to write
the name of the man to be sent into exile. he degree of literacy in
Athens that can be inferred from this practice is a question that
has given rise to much research and speculation (Burns 1981;
Harvey 1966; Havelock 1982; W. Harris 1989; homas 1992). It is
unlikely that it will be possible ever to quote even approximately
Social Practices of Speech and Writing
correct igures, but what we know of the literate culture of the
Greek city-states is that, unlike in China, there was no scribal
class. Minimal competence such as was necessary to scratch a
name on a potsherd was relatively widespread. Both written law
as the basis of social order and ostracism as a check on power
exemplify the institutionalization of writing as a precondition
for political participation and as a seed of the public sphere. It
enabled the people to express discontent with a leader without
raising their hand individually or speaking out. Anonymity was
a protection from reprisals.
he other example is from Babylon, as reported in the
Old Testament. Writing means empowerment and, there-
fore, has to be controlled. he proverbial writing on the wall,
mene-tekel-parsin, an Aramaic phrase that, according to Daniel
5:25, mysteriously appeared on the wall of King Belshazzars pal-
ace, cautioning him that his days were numbered and his empire
was doomed, exempliies the potential of criticism. A message
by an unknown author exposing abuse of power to the public is
a direct challenge to authority. While it would be problematic to
voice disapproval in the presence of others, writing afords the
originator the protection of anonymity.
he dialectics of technological innovation come to bear
here. While the mighty use writing to establish, exercise, and
consolidate their power, it also lends itself to embarrassing and
undermining them. his was clearly understood in antiquity.
Power holders always tried to curtail the power of the written
word. Confuciuss Analects were burned in 200 b.c.e. on order
of Emperor Pinyin Qin Shi Huang Di. Plato was convinced that
the state had to control the content of what pupils read. Tacitus
refers to banned books (Anales 4,34), and his own books were
later banned in return. Censorship is ubiquitous throughout
history (Jones 2001). Many of the inest literary works were
at one time or another put on a list of forbidden books, such
as the papal Index Auctorum et Librorum Prohibitorum, irst
published in 1559. It took another 500 years for censorship to
be universally censured as an illegitimate means of exercising
power. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
adopted by the United Nations in 1948 states that everyone has
the right to freedom of expression and information, regardless
of frontiers.
he struggle against censorship worldwide is far from over.
With every new writing technology it is rekindled, as the debate
about controlling the Internet illustrates. he power elites try to
control the new media, which they perceive as a threat, although,
ironically, they are often involved in its development. he battle-
ield shifts with technological advance. What were scriptoria and
publishing houses in the past are servers and the low of data
through cyberspace today. In the long run, attempts on the part
of governments to defend their lead and keep new information
technology out of reach of their adversaries have failed because
it is the very nature of these technologies that they can be utilized
to uphold and to counter the claim to power.
Cult
In nonliterate societies religious, order and social order are
merged without clear division. Writing tends to introduce a
fracture between spheres, although the diferentiation of the
sacred and the profane may take a long time to complete. he
Ten Commandments, written by God and given to Moses, were
a code of conduct regulating the relations between God and the
people, as well as the people among themselves. he spheres of
spiritual and worldly power were only beginning to be separated
in antiquity, a process to which writing and the ensuing inter-
pretation of texts contributed a great deal. Of Moses legendary
Ten Commandments stone tablets no archaeological evidence
remains, but the Aoka edicts are a tangible example of the
closeness of cult and social order. Engraved in rocks and stone
pillars that have been discovered in dozens of sites throughout
northern India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, these edicts
served to inform the subjects of King Aokas (304232 b.c.e.)
reforms and make them lead a moral life according to the truth
of Buddhism. Moral precepts hewn in stone on public display
once again raise the question of the degree of literacy. It must
have been high enough to disseminate the message through-
out the vast realm. In the rich spiritual world of the Indian sub-
continent, much emphasis was always given to the importance
of oral tradition. Competing with other religious movements,
Buddhism established itself by rigidly regulating monastic life
and assembling a canon of scriptures. At the time of Aoka,
Buddhism was an institutionalized religion that spread from
northern India to other parts of the subcontinent, irst and sub-
sequently to South and Southeast Asia, as well as Central Asia
and China.
he history of Buddhism and its emergence as a major world
religion is a history of translation. Translation means writ-
ing, turning one text into another and all it involves: exegesis,
doctrine, scholasticism, and schism. As Ivan Illich and Barry
Sanders (1988: 52) have argued, there is no translation in oral-
ity, but only the collaborative endeavor to understand ones
partner in discourse. Writing eternalizes spiritual enlighten-
ment (e.g., the word of God), which must be preserved with
the greatest care and does not allow alteration at will. Of all
religions, Buddhism has produced by far the largest corpus
of sacred texts. Signiicantly, diferent canons resulted from
translation, the Pali canon, the Tibetan canon, and the Chinese
canon. With translation came schism, and with that the delimi-
tation of religious sects and districts. In the evolution of other
book religions, translation had similar consequences. hese
other religions share with Buddhism the vital importance they
attach to scriptures. he holy book is what distinguishes world
religions from other cults. heir legitimacy is derived from the
revelation embodied in the scriptures, which are considered the
true source of enlightenment. he major world religions vary in
the role they assign sacred texts, in how they make use of them
for purposes of propaganda and the regulation of life, but the
reverence accorded to writing is a feature they share, as is the
question of translation.
Translation is a problem for two reasons that can be labeled
authenticity and correspondence. First, the idea of authentic-
ity of the word of God does not agree with its transposition into
another form. Some book religions are very strict in this regard.
According to believers, God himself chose the Arabic language
for his inal testament, the Quran, and created every one of the
letters of the Arabic alphabet. Consequently, the only true ver-
sion of the holy book of Islam is the Quran in Classical Arabic.
39
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
he Christian tradition until the Reformation movement knew
similar limitations, recognizing only the three sacred tongues of
Hebrew, Greek, and Latin as legitimate languages of the Bible.
In many cases, other languages were considered unit for the
expression of divine revelations, if only because they lacked the
ixity that comes with being reduced to writing. Indeed, trans-
lations of religious scriptures, when they were eventually pro-
duced, were for many languages their irst literary texts, serving
as an anchor in the luidity of oral discourse and as a starting
point of literacy and textual transmission.
he other reason for the problematic nature of translation
is that through it, a stable correspondence is to be established
between two codes that though obviously diferent in lexical,
grammatical, and phonetic makeup, must express the same
contents. In order to translate, the meaning of the text has to
be established unequivocally, the assumption being that this
is possible. he text is thus elevated to the source of meaning.
Authority that formerly accrued to the sage, the reciter, and the
soothsayer was relocated in text. his transition from utterance
to text (Olson 1977) implies that in order to understand a mes-
sage, at issue no longer is what the speaker means but what the
text contains. his is what translation is all about. Language itself
in objectiied form thus becomes a force in its own right with far-
reaching implications in the domains of knowledge production
and social regulation. Preservation of the word of God in text
has provided an objectiied reference plane incorporating the
true meaning waiting to be extracted from it. Olsons notion
of autonomous text that results from the transition from utter-
ance to text as he conceptualizes it has been criticized because
it ignores the readers involvement in constructing meaning
(Nystrand 1986) and because it underestimates the oral ele-
ments in literate culture (Wiley 1996). he soundness of these
criticisms in detail, however, does not invalidate the general idea
that writing gives language a measure of stability that it does not
have in speech, and brings with it a shift from the intentional to
the conventional aspects of linguistic meaning, a shift from I
mean to the word means. he high prestige that the written
word acquired through its association with and instrumentaliza-
tion by organized religion has greatly contributed to the coming
into existence of autonomous text.
he reverence for holy books had various consequences for
language attitudes and practices, two of which can be men-
tioned here: code choice and script choice (Coulmas 2005).
Writing introduces functional domain diferentiation into a
communitys linguistic ecology. hat the language of cult difers
from that of everyday pursuits has always been the rule rather
than the exception, but with writing the distinction becomes
more pronounced. he important position of religious texts in
combination with restricted literacy encouraged the perpetu-
ation of the split between spoken and written language. While
the codiication of the latter was aided by the desire to transmit
the sacred texts inviolately to later generations, the former was
subject to perpetual change. he result was a situation of coexist-
ing codes, called diglossia in modern scholarship (Ferguson
1959; Krishnamurti 1986; Schifman 1996). Although every case
of diglossia is diferent, the deining characteristic is a domain-
speciic usage of varieties that coincides by and large with the
spoken/written language divide. hese varieties can be diferent
40
languages or varieties of the same stock. In multilingual envi-
ronments like medieval Europe, where Latin was the only writ-
ten language, or in present-day India, cultivated languages are
often reserved for writing and formal communication, while ver-
nacular varieties are used in informal settings. A similar division
is found between linguistic varieties of the same stock, where
one is deined by reference to a corpus of classical texts, such as
Classical Arabic, whereas the others luctuate without artiicial
restriction.
Writing introduces an element of art and artiiciality into the
history of language. Every language is the collective product of
its speakers, but a written language is more clearly an artefact
than a vernacular, and the script that it uses more clearly yet.
Historically, the difusion of scripts coincided in large measure
with that of religions, a connection that is still visible today.
Chinese characters arrived in Japan together with Buddhism.
he spread of Roman traces the expansion of both the Roman
Empire and the Catholic Church, while Orthodox Christianity
uses Cyrillic. Armenian Christians have their own alphabet
designed in the ifth century by St. Mesrob. Estrangela is the script
of the Syrian Church. he Hebrew square script is the script of
Judaism, the Arabic alphabet that of Islam. Many other examples
could be added; clerks were churchmen (Coulmas 1996, 435 f.).
he historical interconnectedness of writing and religion is one
of the reasons that scripts tend to function as symbols of iden-
tity, but ethnic, national, and political identity are also readily
expressed by means of a distinct script or even slightly diferent
orthographic conventions. As Peter Unseth (2005) has pointed
out, there are clear sociolinguistic parallels between choos-
ing scripts and languages. Because of the visibility and the artii-
cial nature of writing, however, the choice of scripts is generally a
more deliberate departure from tradition in that it involves con-
scious planning.
Schooling
Language is a natural faculty, writing an artifact. hat is the rea-
son why children acquire language, but not writing, without
guidance. he diicult art of writing requires skills that must be
taught, memorized, and laboriously practiced. he place to do it
is school. For writing to be useful to the community, conventions
have to be established, individual variation curtailed, norms set.
Collective instruction following a curriculum is a more eicient
way to achieve this than is private tutoring. Already in antiquity,
school became, and still is, the institution that most explicitly
exercises authority over the written language by controlling its
transmission from one generation to the next.
With schooling came the regimentation and the decontex-
tualization of language. Because in writing the continuous low
of speech has to be broken down into discrete units, analytic
relection about the units of language was fostered. As writing,
language became an object of investigation and normalization.
Both grammar and lexicon are products of writing. his is not to
deny the grammaticality of oral speech or that oral people have
a mental lexicon. It just means that the notions of grammar and
lexicon as we know them are entirely dependent upon writing.
At school, units of writing had to be practiced with the stylus, the
brush, or the pen, mechanically through repetition without any
Social Practices of Speech and Writing
communicative intent. hese units could be given a phonetic
interpretation; they could be pronounced and thus acquired
as words, an existence as units of language. In time, the image
became the model. Since the correct form of the written sign was
a matter to which the scribe and his pupils had to pay attention,
standards of correctness irst developed with reference to writing
and written language.
Only much later, and as an efect of schooling, did these
notions come to be applied to speech. he twin questions of
what the units of writing were and how they were to be conjoined
led to the more general and profound question What is a lan-
guage? Right up to the present, answers to this question exhibit
what Roy Harris (1980) has called a scriptist bias. Only trained
linguists readily recognize unwritten vernaculars as languages,
and even they have to admit that while it is easy to count written
languages, the question of how many speech forms on this planet
qualify as distinct languages is impossible to answer without lay-
ing down analytic criteria that are no less arbitrary than decisions
as to what dialects, varieties, idioms, and speech forms should
be reduced to writing. Languages, as well as the units into which
they are analyzed, are a product of writing, for only in writing can
the low of speech be arrested and broken down into indepen-
dent stable components with a presumed inherent, rather than
vague and contextually determined meaning.
Among the irst results of school mastering the language
in the Ancient Near East were word lists, the paradigm case of
decontextualized language. hese lists were the foundation of
lexicography (Civil 1995), the science of words. In China, lexi-
cography began with lists of characters, and characters are still
the basic units of dictionaries. Dictionaries provide entries for
lexical items. A lexical item is a word contained in a dictionary.
More reined and less circular deinitions of the orthographic
word, as distinct from the phonological word and the abstract
lexeme have been proposed in great number, but it remains
diicult if not impossible to deine word without reference to
writing. he word stands at the beginning of grammatical schol-
arship, which was, as the word grammatical itself indicates,
exclusively concerned with written language. Grammatike,
combining the Greek words grammata (letters) and techne
(art), was the art of knowing letters. hese beginnings of the
systematic study of language left a lasting imprint which, as
Per Linell (2005) has convincingly shown, still informs modern
linguistics. he word, the sentence, and even the phoneme
are analytic concepts derived from the discrete segments of
writing, not vice versa. he conceptualization of writing as
a representation of speech is therefore highly problematic
(R. Harris 1980, 2000). To sum up this section, the institution-
alization of writing in school resulted in a changed attitude to
language. It became an object of study and regulation. Both of
these concepts were not in the irst instance developed for, and
applied to, speech.
Under conditions of restricted literacy and diglossia, a wide
divide between spoken and written language was taken for
granted. Speech and writing were two modes of communication
involving varieties or languages that were both grammatically
and stylistically quite separate from each other. It was only when
literacy became accessible to wider sections of the population
that the relationship between speech and writing became an
issue. In medieval Europe, the ad litteras reform during the reign
of Charlemagne aimed at unifying spoken and written language,
as the widening gap between both was perceived as a problem.
It was eventually reduced, not so much by enforcing a uniform
standard for pronouncing Latin than by dethroning it as the only
written language and transforming lingua illiteratae (Blanche-
Benveniste 1994), that is, Romance, Germanic, and Slavonic
vernaculars, into written languages in their own right. Literacy
in these emerging national languages was bolstered by the
Reformation movement that wrested the interpretation monop-
oly of Christian scriptures from the Catholic clergy. Write as you
speak, a maxim that can be traced back to antiquity, became
an increasingly important principle for teaching writing
(Mller 1990). Although it unrealistically denies the speech/
writing distinction, generations of teachers have repeated it to
their pupils. It never meant that their writing should be as ellip-
tical, situation-bound, and variable as their speech. he impli-
cation is that if you cannot write as you speak, something must
be wrong with your speech. Universal education on the basis of
this maxim resulted in a conceptual reduction of the distance
between speech and writing, with some notable consequences.
Mass literacy through schooling led to the disappearance of
diglossia from most European speech communities, although
the dichotomy of speech and writing continued to be expressed
in stylistic diferences.
In other parts of the world, where universal education was
realized later or is still only a desideratum, the split between
spoken and written language remained. In todays world, the
1953 UNESCO declaration recommending mother tongue lit-
eracy notwithstanding, literacy education in the language of
the nation-state often means learning to read and write in a
second language. he extent to which progress in the promo-
tion of literacy depends on the language of instruction is still
a matter of controversy, as is whether the writing system is a
signiicant variable. To some extent, this can be explained by
the fact that deinitions of literacy are shifting with changing
socioeconomic needs and technical innovations, and because
the range of what are considered varieties of a given language
is variable (as is evident, for example, in the context of decre-
olization and discussions about elevating certain varieties,
such as black English in the United States, to language status).
here is, however, wide agreement that the crucial variable
is the efectiveness of the educational system. Mastering the
written language is a diicult task, which is best executed by
the institution that at the same time administers the written
language: school.
Since the time of the French Revolution, schools have been
charged with establishing the national language and, by way of
spreading the national language ideology, a link between lan-
guage and nationalism. As a result, the demands of multilin-
gual education are often at variance with the state-sponsored
educational system. Because of the nationalization of languages
in the modern nation-state and their privileged position in the
school system, however, the language of literacy training became
a political issue. Minority speech communities in many indus-
trialized countries aspired to the prestige for their language that
comes with a written standard and started to lobby for the inclu-
sion of their language in the school curriculum. Fueled by the
41
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
growing awareness of the importance of minority protection,
such movements have met with a measure of success, leading to
a highly complex situation of multiple and multilingual literacies
in modern societies, which of late has attracted scholarly atten-
tion (Martin-Jones and Jones 2000; Daswani 2001; Cook and
Bassetti 2005).
he prevailing view sees the establishment of a single national
language with a uniied written standard as facilitating universal
literacy. International comparisons of literacy rates are notori-
ously diicult (Gurin-Pace and Blum 1999), but there is little
doubt that Europe, where national language academies irst
implemented the national language ideology, led the way. Today,
however, the monolingual model of literacy is called into ques-
tion by developments that, on the one hand, favor English as a
supplementary universal written language in many non-English-
speaking countries, and on the other, allow minority languages
to make inroads into the domains of writing. he question of
whether the diversiication of literacy will help achieve the goal
of eradicating illiteracy or whether it will compromise the alleged
economic advantage of having one written standard language
continues to be discussed by academics and politicians, while
the complementary developments of globalization of markets
and (re)localization of cultures unfold.
Economic Organization
he critical importance of writing for economic processes
in early civilizations is best documented for Mesopotamia.
It is widely agreed now that in Sumer, number concepts and
numerical representation stood at the beginning of writing
that evolved into cuneiform (Schmandt-Besserat 1992). he
overwhelming majority of archaeological inds from Ur, Uruk,
Nineveh, and Babylon are records of economic transactions
kept in clay tablet archives by accountants of the palace admin-
istration (Nissen, Damerow, and Englund 1990). he Sumerians
and their Akkadian successors were the irst to develop book-
keeping into a sophisticated technique of balancing income and
expenditure. Hammurabi, King of Babylon (17281686 b.c.e.),
created the irst commercial code, 282 articles written on a large
stone monument, which was erected in a public place for all to
observe. Every business transaction was to be in writing and
signed, usually with a seal, by the contracting parties. At the
time, the public-sector economy was far too highly developed
and too complex to function without writing. Tribute quota lists
had to be kept, rations for laborers involved in public works cal-
culated, inventories recorded. Deeds were issued in duplicate
and receipts stored for future reference. Large-scale trading,
often involving credit and futures, had to be regulated and
overseen by the bureaucracy, consisting of a huge scribal class
charged with creating and servicing these documents.
Ancient Mesopotamia is the paradigm case of the close inter-
connectedness of economy and the institutionalization of writ-
ing, but if economic behavior is understood in the wide sense of
human adaptations to the needs and aspirations of society at a
given moment in history, this interconnectedness can be identi-
ied in every literate society. Complex socioeconomic systems of
managed production, distribution and trade, taxation, and credit
did not evolve in cultures that had no writing. Yet the nature of
42
the relationship between writing and economy is not a simple
one. For one thing, the degree of literacy necessary for economic
growth is a matter of controversy and depends on how economic
growth is measured. Illiteracy is considered a strong indicator of
economic underdevelopment, correlating as it does with infant
mortality, low life expectancy, and poverty; but the question of
whether high literacy drives economic growth or is a function
thereof remains unresolved. Functional illiteracy rates of up to
20 percent in Western countries, notably in the United States,
suggest that at least in the developed world, literacy rates are
more indicative of economic disparity than of overall national
economic development. Similarly, in developing countries,
illiterates are largely rural and without access to public services
(Varghese 2000). he distribution of wealth and the division of
labor in todays national economies are such that they allow for,
or perhaps even sustain, substantial residues of illiteracy. Both in
the developed and the developing world, people who partake of
the practice of writing live side by side with others who continue
to conduct their life in the oral mode.
It is fair to say that the evolution of writing in antiquity both
happened in response to and propelled economic develop-
ment. Yet although writing technology has been available for
economic pursuits for more than ive millennia, fully liter-
ate societies remain an ideal. his shows that the relationship
between economy and institutionalized writing is subject to
interference by other variables, notably those discussed in the
previous sections, that is, government, religion, culture, and
education. In antiquity, these spheres and the economy were
not separate. It was a long process that led to their diferentia-
tion in modern times. As the chief instrument of knowledge
management and growth, writing was indispensable for ratio-
nalization and what Max Weber (1922) called the disenchant-
ment of the world, which, as the religious associations and
emotional values attached to various written languages testify,
is still incomplete.
he interaction of writing with the economy has been studied
from various points of view. Writing can accordingly be under-
stood as
- a tool,
- social choice,
- a common good,
- human capital,
- transaction cost.
Writing is a tool that enables individuals to expand their com-
munication range and communities to increase social integra-
tion and differentiation. It is useful and valuable. Since writing
systems, as discussed previously, are artifacts, this raises
the question of how this tool evolves so that it is functional.
Students of writing, notably I. J. Gelb (1963), have invoked
the principle of least effort, which predicts that in time, writ-
ing systems become simpler and easier to use. The relative
simplicity of the Greek alphabet, as compared, for example,
with Egyptian hieroglyphs and early cuneiform, lends support
to this hypothesis. However, intuitive though it is, there are
problems. Obvious counterexamples are found outside the
ancient Near Eastern civilizations mainly studied by Gelb. In
Social Practices of Speech and Writing
its long history, the Chinese writing system and its adaptation
in Japan increased rather than decreased in complexity. On
the other hand, it took 500 years for the much simpler Korean
Hangul to be accepted as an alternative to Chinese. If sim-
plicity and adaptability were the forces that drive the spread
of writing systems, Hangul should have supplanted Chinese
characters, not just in Korea but in China and elsewhere long
ago. Looking at the evolution of individual systems, certain
letter forms in the Tibetan script were simplified to the extent
of becoming indistinguishable, rendering the system almost
dysfunctional. One has to conclude that if the principle of
least effort is at work in the evolution of the technology of the
intellect, then it is often compromised by other principles,
such as path dependency, that is, the fact that change in soci-
ety depends on established ways, identity affirmation (see
ethnolinguistic identity ), and cultural exclusivism.
Considering writing and written language from the point
of view of social choice leads to a similar conclusion. A writ-
ten language can be understood as an institution with certain
properties that is shaped by the agents involved in its opera-
tion. However, a single criterion of optimization of reasonable
target functions cannot explain the diversity of systems that
evolved, the multiplicity of uses, or the actual shape of indi-
vidual systems, such as, for example, English spelling or the
Japanese usage of Chinese characters (Coulmas 1994). Clearly,
established writing conventions are the result of public choice.
No individual can introduce a better standard, even though its
superior qualities may be indubitable, for conformity with the
existing norm is crucial for the functionality of the institution.
Penalties on norm violations are therefore high, and proposals
for changing established practice invariably meet with strong
resistance. Change is not impossible, but it comes at a cost and
rarely uncompromisingly follows functional optimization.
A written language, if used by a community, has properties of
a common good. Like a public transport system, it is beneicial
for most members of that community and therefore deserving of
the attention of the state. his is the rationale underlying the legal
protection enjoyed by national languages, explicitly or implicitly,
in modern nation-states. A written language not used by every-
one is not a common good and treated accordingly. Not serving
anyones interest, dead languages are of interest to the historian
at best. For the same reason, it has always been diicult to ele-
vate a vernacular to the status of written language; not providing
access to information and not being used by many members of
the community in the beginning, it does not count as a common
good. Its claim to written language status is supported not by its
instrumental value but only by the symbolic value for its commu-
nity. To reconcile the idea of a dominant language as a common
good with the recognition of minority rights is therefore prob-
lematic. With Pierre Bourdieu (1982), it can be conceptualized
as a struggle over legitimacy, competence, and access (market,
linguistic; habitus, linguistic). Only if social harmony is
made part of the equation will accommodation be possible.
A written language, the cognitive abilities its mastery implies,
and the information to which it provides access are a resource.
Partaking in it adds to an individuals human capital and hence
to his or her marketability. In the information economy of
the knowledge society, this view on written language is more
pertinent than ever (Levine 1994) and can explain processes such
as the accelerated spread of English. he globalization of mar-
kets and the information technology revolution ofer ever more
people the opportunity to enhance their human capital and, at
the same time, compel them to do so. However, the commodii-
cation of written language (Heller 2003) and the new forms and
uses it takes on in the new media have consequences, some of
which become apparent only as technology spreads.
Conceptualizing written language as transaction cost brings
market forces into view. Reducing transaction costs is consid-
ered a quasi-natural precondition of economic growth, which
partly explains the spread of trade languages. Once in place and
controlled by relevant agents, their use is less costly than transla-
tion. In todays world, this principle seems strongly to favor the
further spread of English. However, the efects of technological
innovation are, as always, hard to foresee and even to assess
when it unfolds in front of our eyes. When the Internet ceased
to be a communication domain reserved to the U.S. military,
partly due to the available software at the time, it seemed to be
poised to become an English-only medium. But it turned out
that as the technology caught on, the share of English in cyber-
space communication rapidly declined. he new information
technology made it much easier for speech communities big and
small around the world to communicate in writing, a possibility
eagerly exploited wherever the hardware became available. For
some communities this meant using their language in writing for
the irst time. In others it led to the suspension of norms, blur-
ring, in many ways yet to be explored, the traditional distinctions
between spoken and written language.
David Crystal (2001) suggests that Netspeak or computer-
mediated language is a new medium, neither spoken language
nor written language. he implications of Internet communica-
tion for literacy in the electronic age are only beginning to be
explored (Richards 2000). New multilayered literacies are evolv-
ing, responding as they do to the complementary and sometimes
conlicting demands of economic rationality, social reproduc-
tion through education, ideology, and the technical properties of
the medium. hese developments open up a huge new area of
research into how, since the invention of writing, the range of lin-
guistic communication options has been constantly expanding.
CONCLUSION
Writing is a technology that interacts with social practices in
complex ways, exercising a profound inluence on the way we
think, communicate, and conceptualize language. Since it is an
artifact, it can be adjusted deliberately to the evolving needs
of society, but it also follows its own inherent rules that derive
from the properties of the medium. his essay has analyzed the
tension between the properties of the medium and the designs
of its users from two points of view, technological advance and
institutionalization. Harnessed by institutions, the technology
of writing is made serviceable to the intellectual advance of
society and modiied in the process, sometimes gradually and
sometimes in revolutionary steps. hree consequences of writ-
ing remain constant: segmentation, linearization, and accu-
mulation. he linear and discrete-segmental structure that all
writing systems both derive from and superimpose on language
43
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences

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45

5 in driving language evolution.
EXPLAINING LANGUAGE: NEUROSCIENCE,
GENETICS, AND EVOLUTION
Lyle Jenkins
Before undertaking a discussion of the explanation of language,
we should point out that we are using this word in a special sense.
As Noam Chomsky has noted (see Jenkins 2000), while we can-
not ask serious questions about general notions like vision or
language, we can ask them of speciic systems like insect vision
or human language. In what follows, our focus is on the biologi-
cal foundations of language. As a result, certain areas commonly
referred to as languages are excluded from consideration, for
example, some invented logical systems, computer languages
such as Java, encrypted languages, the language of DNA, and
so on. hese are all important and interesting areas of investi-
gation. In fact, signiicant insights into human language may
be gained from the study of some of these ields. For example,
it has been argued that particular systems of logical form
may shed light on the semantics of human language. Both bio-
logical factors and nonbiological factors interact in such areas as
pragmatics and sociolinguistics. In addition, the study of
formal languages (e.g., the Chomsky hierarchy) has also led
to some important contributions. However, these areas cannot
be completely accounted for by a consideration of the biology of
human language. It is important to keep in mind that an account
of cognitive systems like human language (as well as systems of
animal communication) often exhibit a signiicant degree
of modularity. In this view, biological factors interact with
other factors to provide a uniied explanation. Sometimes the
term i-language is used to distinguish the biological object in
the mind-brain that biolinguists study from other uses of word
language.
he same is true of other areas of study that are even more
closely related to human language, such as the role of language
in poems and novels, or the inluence of economic factors and
conquests and invasions on language change. historical lin-
guistics may involve factors both within and outside of the
scope of human language biology. Again, although analysis of
the biology of human language may shed some light on these
areas (e.g., the study of phonetics and phonology may be
useful in the analysis of poetry), in general it will not provide an
exhaustive account of these areas. Similarly, there has been great
interest in language as a system of communication. For the
reasons discussed here, there is not much to say about arbitrary
46
systems of communication (semaphores, bee language, etc.),
but the study of the biology of language might shed some light
on the case of human language communication. In this essay, I
consider some diverging ideas about the role of communication
he study of the biology of language (see biolinguistics) is
traditionally divided into the investigation of three questions: 1)
What is knowledge of language? 2) How does language develop in
the child? 3) And how does language evolve in the species? (See
Chomsky 1980, 2006; Jenkins 2000, 2004.) Note that the study of
the neuroscience of language cross-cuts with all three questions.
hat is, we can ask: 1) What are the neurological underpinnings
of the faculty of language? 2) How does the language faculty
develop in the nervous system of the individual? 3) How did the
language faculty evolve in the species? (See Chomsky and Lasnik
1995.)
hese three questions are sometimes referred to as the what
and how questions of biolinguistics. here is another question,
the why question, which is more diicult to answer. his is the
question of why the principles of language are what they are
(Chomsky 2004). Investigations into these why questions has in
recent years been termed the minimalist program (or minimal-
ism), but interest in and discussion of these questions go back to
the earliest days of biolinguistics (Chomsky 1995; Boeckx 2006).
Properties of the attained language derive from three factors
(Chomsky 2005b): 1) genetic endowment for language, 2) expe-
rience, and 3) principles not speciic to the faculty of language.
Principles in 3) might even be non-domain-speciic or non-
organism-speciic principles. Examples of such principles are
principles of eicient computation. Note that similar questions
can be posed about any biological system viruses, protein fold-
ing, bacterial cell division, sunlowers, bumblebees, falling cats,
nervous systems, and so on.
Furthermore, similar kinds of questions arise in every linguis-
tics research program (Chomsky 2005b). To make the discussion
manageable, in what follows I draw examples and discussion
from minimalism. However, the issues and problems carry over
to all other research programs concerned with providing expla-
nations for properties of human language and accounting for
them in terms of neurobiology, genetics, and evolution. For
example, any theory of the language faculty will generate ini-
nitely many expressions that provide instructions to the senso-
rimotor and semantic interfaces. All such generative systems
will have an operation that combines structures (e.g., in mini-
malism, merge), such as the phrase the boy with the phrase saw
the cat, and so on, formed from the lexical items of the language.
Applying this operation over and over (unbounded Merge), we get
a discrete ininity of expressions, part of property 1), our genetic
endowment, in this particular case of the genetic component of
the language faculty.
Many well-known accounts of the evolution of language pro-
pose communication as the primary selective force involved
in the origin of language (see Works Cited). Here, for purposes
of comparison, we present a noncommunicative account of
the origins of language, suggested by Chomsky and based on
work in minimalism. However, we stress again that this kind of
account is also compatible with approaches based on other lin-
guistic research programs. We then discuss another viewpoint
Explaining Language
based on the idea that language evolved from gestures, an idea
that is represented by a number of approaches to the evolution
of language. After that, we present an example of the compara-
tive approach to evolution in biolinguistics and discuss language
and the neurosciences, focusing on leftright asymmetries of the
language areas to illustrate this research. Finally, we discuss the
genetics of language, using the studies of the FOXP2 gene system
to show how studies of language phenotype, neurobiology, and
molecular biology, as well as comparative and evolutionary stud-
ies with other animal systems, are being carried out.
Work on the principles of eicient computation governing the
application of the operation of Merge seem to suggest an asym-
metry, namely, that the computational principles are optimized
for the semantic interface, not the sensorimotor interface. his is
because conditions of computational eiciency and ease of com-
munication conlict, as is familiar from the theory of language
parsing. his in turn has led Chomsky to suggest that external-
ization of language, and hence communication, was a secondary
adaptation of language. his would mean that language arose
primarily as an internal language of thought. Supporting
this idea is the existence of sign languages, which develop in
a diferent modality but in other respects are very similar to spo-
ken language (Kegl 2004; Pettito 2005).
hese design features of language have led Chomsky to pro-
pose the following scenario for the evolution of language. Several
decades ago Chomsky suggested, on the basis of results from non-
human primate studies, that the higher apes might well have a
conceptual system with a system of object reference and notions
such as agent, goal, instrument, and so on. What they lack, how-
ever, is the central design feature of human language, namely,
the capacity to deal with discrete ininities through recursive
rules (Chomsky 2004, 47). He proposed that when you link that
capacity to the conceptual system of the other primates, you get
human language, which provides the capacity for thought, plan-
ning, evaluation and so on, over an unbounded range, and then
you have a totally new organism (Chomsky 2004, 48).
hus, let us assume that some individual in the lineage to mod-
ern humans underwent a genetic change such that some neural
circuit(s) were reorganized to support the capacity for recursion.
his in turn provided the capacity for thought and so on over an
unbounded range. his in itself provided that individual and any
ofspring with a selective advantage that then spread through the
group. hus, the earliest stage of language would have been just
that: a language of thought, used internally (Chomsky 2005a, 6).
At some later stage, there was an advantage to externalization, so
that the capacity would be linked as a secondary process to the
sensorimotor system for externalization and interaction, includ-
ing communication (7).
he evolutionary scenario just outlined is derived from design
principles suggested from work on human languages. Many other
evolutionary scenarios have been proposed that assume that
communication or other social factors played a more primary
role. hese include accounts involving manual and facial ges-
tures (Corballis 2002), protolanguage (Bickerton 1996), groom-
ing (Dunbar 1998), and action and motor control (Rizzolatti
and Arbib 1998). However, the two kinds of accounts are not
incompatible and may represent diferent aspects or stages in
the evolution of language. We cannot review all of these research
directions here (but see the discussion of population dynamics
in a later secion; Nowak and Komarova 2001).
A number of these accounts attempt to interconnect the evo-
lution of manual gestures, sign language, spoken language, and
motor control in various ways. Some of this work is based on the
discovery of a system of mirror neurons (mirror systems,
imitation, and language) (Gallese, Fadiga, et al. 1996). his
and later work demonstrated the existence of neurons in area F5
of the premotor cortex of the monkey, which are activated when
the monkey executes an action, for example, grasping an object,
and also when the monkey observes and recognizes the action
carried out by another monkey, or even the experimenter. In
addition, a subset of audiovisual mirror neurons were discov-
ered that are activated when the sound of an action is perceived,
for example, the tearing of paper (Kohler et al. 2002). In addi-
tion to hand mirror neurons, communicative mouth mirror
neurons were discovered that were activated both for ingestive
actions and for mouth actions with communicative content,
such as lip smacking in the monkey (Ferrari et al. 2003).
Since it had been suggested on the basis of cytoarchitectonic
studies that there was a homology between area F5 of the mon-
key and area 44 (in brocas area) of the human brain (Petrides
and Pandya 1994), researchers looked for and found mirror
neuron systems in humans, using fMRI (Iacoboni et al. 1999)
and event-related magnetoencephalography (MEG) (Nishitani
and Hari 2000) in place of single neuron studies. Mirror neu-
rons discharge whether the action is executed, observed, or
heard. Moreover, they even discharge in the human system
when subjects are exposed to syntactic structures that describe
goal-directed actions (Tettamanti et al. 2005). In an fMRI study,
17 Italian speakers were asked to listen to sentences describing
actions performed with the mouth (I bite an apple), with the
hand (I grasp a knife), and with the leg (I kick the ball). In
addition, they were presented a control sentence with abstract
content (I appreciate sincerity). In the case of the action-
related words, the left-hemispheric fronto-parietaltemporal
network containing the pars opercularis of the inferior frontal
gyrus (Brocas area) was activated. Other areas were diferen-
tially activated, depending on the body part. hey conclude that
the experiment showed that the role of Brocas area was in the
access to abstract action representations, rather than in syntactic
processing per se (277).
On the basis of these outlined indings, it has been sug-
gested that speech may have evolved from gesture rather than
from vocal communication by utilizing the mirror neuron sys-
tem (Rizzolatti and Arbib 1998; Gentilucci and Corballis 2006;
Fogassi and Ferrari 2007). Leonardo Fogassi and Pier Francesco
Ferrari note that the motor theory of speech perception its well
with an account in terms of mirror neurons in that the objects
of speech perception are the intended phonetic gestures of the
speaker, represented in the brain as invariant motor commands
(Liberman and Mattingly 1985, 2). However, Fogassi and Ferrari
note that, even if the mirror neuron system is involved in speech,
the currently available evidence does not appear to support a
dedicated mirror-neuron system for language in humans.
Additional accounts of the evolution of language may also
be found in Maynard Smith and Szathmary (1998), Lieberman
(2006), and Christiansen and Kirby (2003). See also adaptation;
47
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
grooming, gossip, and language; mirror systems, imi-
tation, and language; evolutionary psychology;
morphology, evolution and; origins of language;
phonology, evolution of; pragmatics, evolution and;
primate vocalizations; semantics, evolution and;
speech anatomy, evolution of; syntax, evolution of;
verbal art, evolution and.
THE COMPARATIVE APPROACH IN BIOLINGUISTICS
hroughout the modern era of biolinguistics, a question that has
been much debated is to what degree the faculty of language
is uniquely human. Marc D. Hauser and colleages (2002) have
stressed the importance of the comparative approach in the
study of this question. Early on, Chomsky, in making a case for
the genetic determination of language, used arguments from
animal behavior (ethology) to note the similarities in learning
between birdsong and animals, in particular, rapidity of learn-
ing, underdetermination of data, and so on (Chomsky 1959).
Hauser, Chomsky, and their colleagues have emphasized a
number of methodological points concerning the comparative
approach, using a distinction between the faculty of language
in the broad sense (FLB) and the faculty of language in the nar-
row sense (FLN). he basic idea is that before concluding that
some property of language is uniquely human, one should study
a wide variety of species with a wide variety of methods. And
before concluding that some property of language is unique to
language, one should consider the possibility that the property
is present in some other (cognitive) domain, for example, music
or mathematics. hey tentatively conclude that recursion may
be a property of language that is unique to language and, if so,
belongs to the faculty of language in the narrow sense.
An example of the application of the comparative method is
the investigation of the computational abilities of nonhuman pri-
mates by W. Tecumseh Fitch and Hauser (2004), who tested the
ability of cotton-top tamarins, a New World primate species, as
well as human controls, to process diferent kinds of grammars.
Using a familiarization/discrimination paradigm, they found
that the tamarins were able to spontaneously process inite-state
grammars, which generate strings of syllables of the form (AB)n,
such as ABAB, ABABAB. However, they were unable to process
context-free grammars, which generate strings of syllables of the
form AnBn, such as AABB, AAABBB. It is known from formal lan-
guage theory (the Chomsky hierarchy) that context-free gram-
mars are more powerful than inite-state grammars. Moreover,
the humans tested were able to rapidly learn either grammar.
he authors conclude that the acquisition of hierarchical pro-
cessing ability, that is, the ability to learn context-free gram-
mars, may have represented a critical juncture in the evolution
of the human language faculty (380).
In a later study, Timothy Q. Gentner and colleagues (2006)
showed that European starlings, in contrast to tamarins, can
recognize acoustic patterns generated by context-free gram-
mars. Using an operant conditioning paradigm, they found that
9 of 11 starlings were able to learn both inite-state grammar and
context-free grammar sequences accurately. he (AB)n and AnBn
sequences in this case were made up of acoustic units (motifs)
from the song of the starlings. In this case, A corresponded to
48
a rattle and B to a warble. As for possible reasons why the
starlings succeeded with the context-free task while the tamarins
failed, and for alternative explanations of the learning results, see
additional discussion in Fitch and Hauser (2004), M. Liberman
(2004), Gentner et al. (2006), and Hauser et al. (2007).
LANGUAGE AND THE NEUROSCIENCES
Turning to the neurosciences (see questions 13), with the
advent of more tools both experimental, such as imaging and
the methods of comparative genomics, and theoretical, such
as computational theories of linguistics we can look forward
to more informative models of language and the brain. David
Poeppel and Gregory Hickok (2004) note three problems with
classical models of language (involving such concepts as Brocas
area and wernickes area): 1) hey are inadequate for aphasic
symptomatology, 2) they are based on an impoverished linguis-
tic model, and 3) there are anatomical problems.
As for aphasic symptomatology, the classical models do not
explain certain subtypes of aphasia, like anomic aphasia. Also,
clusters of aphasic symptoms are highly variable and dissocia-
ble, indicating that there is a more complex architecture under-
lying the syndromes.
As for the second problem, there has been a tendency of some
implementations of classical models to incorporate a monolithic
picture of linguistic components, for example, production versus
comprehension, or semantics versus syntax, without regard for
iner computational subdivisions.
And inally, certain anatomical problems came into view. For
example, Brocas aphasia and Wernickes aphasia did not always
correspond to damage in the areas that bore their names. In addi-
tion, these classical areas were not always anatomically or func-
tionally homogenous. In addition, areas outside these regions
were found to be implicated in language processing, including,
for example, the anterior superior temporal lobe, the middle
temporal gyrus (MTG), the temporo-parietal junction, the
basal ganglia, and many right hemisphere homologs
(Poeppel and Hickok 2004, 5). As noted, in the last few decades
many new approaches and tools have been developed in neuro-
linguistics and neurology, genetics and molecular neurobiology
(examples follow), and these have helped to overcome the kinds
of issues pointed out by Poeppel and Hickok.
For a review of some of the attempts to develop a new func-
tional anatomy of language, see the essays published along
with Poeppel and Hickock (2004) in Cognition 92 (2004). For
new approaches to the study of Brocas area, see Grodzinsky and
Amunts (2006).
LEFTRIGHT ASYMMETRIES OF THE LANGUAGE AREAS
Ever since Paul Pierre Brocas and Carl Wernickes seminal dis-
coveries of areas involved in language processing, questions
about asymmetries in the brain has been a lively area of research.
As early as 1892, Daniel J. Cunningham reports that he found
the left sylvian issure longer in the chimpanzee and macaque.
Cunningham, in turn, cites earlier work by Oskar Eberstaller on
the Sylvian issure in humans, who had concluded that it was
longer in the left hemisphere than in the right (on average). He
Explaining Language
postulated that this region held the key to what he called the sen-
sible Sprachcentrum (sensible/cognizant language center).
Claudio Cantalupo and William D. Hopkins (2001) report
inding an anatomical asymmetry in Brocas area in three great
ape species. hey obtained magnetic resonance images (MRI)
(neuroimaging) from 20 chimpanzees (P. troglodytes), 5
bonobos (P. paniscus), and 2 gorillas (G. gorilla). In humans,
Brodmanns area 44 corresponds to part of Brocas area within
the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). his area is larger in the left
hemisphere than in the right. Furthermore, it is known that
Brocas area is vital for speech production (with the qualiica-
tions discussed earlier).
Although the great apes were known to have a homolog of
area 44 on the basis of cytoarchitectonic and electrical stimu-
lation studies, no leftright anatomical asymmetry had been
shown. Cantalupo and Hopkins found a pattern of morpholog-
ical asymmetry similar to that found in the homologous area in
humans. his would place the origin of the asymmetry for the
anatomical substrate for speech production to at least ive mil-
lion years ago.
Since the great apes exhibit only primitive vocalizations, these
authors speculate that this area might have subserved a gestural
system (see earlier discussion). hey note the presence in mon-
keys of mirror neurons in area 44 that subserve the imitation of
hand grasping and manipulation (Rizzolatti and Arbib 1998).
hey also observe that captive great apes have a greater right-
hand bias when gesturing is accompanied by vocalization. Hence
in the great apes, the asymmetry may have subserved the pro-
duction of gestures accompanied by vocalizations, whereas, for
humans, this ability was selected for the development of speech
systems, accompanied by the expansion of Brodmanns area 45
(which, along with Brodmanns area 44, makes up Brocas area)
(Cantalupo and Hopkins 2001, 505).
However, additional studies of Brodmanns area 44 in
African great apes (P. troglodytes and G. gorilla) call into ques-
tion whether the techniques used in Cantalupo and Hopkins
study were suicient to demonstrate the leftright asymmetry.
Chet C. Sherwood and colleagues (2003) found considerable
variation in the distribution of the inferior frontal sulci among
great ape brains. hey also constructed cytoarchitectural maps of
Brodmanns area 44, examining myeloarchitecture and immu-
nohistochemical staining patterns. When they studied the IFG
of great ape brains, they found a poor correspondence between
the borders observed in the cytoarchitectural maps and the bor-
ders in the surface anatomy (e.g., sulcal landmarks). here were
similar indings for human brains in an earlier study (Amunts et
al. 1999). Sherwood and colleagues conclude that in the study
by Cantalupo and Hopkins, it is unlikely that the sulci used to
deine the pars opercularis coincided with the borders of cyto-
architectural area 44 (2003, 284). In general then, macrostruc-
ture is a poor predictor of microstructure.
Sherwood and colleagues also point out that even if human-
like asymmetries of the inferior frontal gyrus and of the planum
temporale are conirmed, these gross asymmetries will not suf-
ice to explain the unique neural wiring that supports human
language (284). To that end, comparative studies of microstruc-
ture in humans and great apes are needed. For example, a com-
puterized imaging program was used to examine minicolumns
in a region of the planum temporale in human, chimpanzee,
and rhesus monkey brains. It was found that only human brains
exhibited asymmetries in minicolumn morphology, in particu-
lar, wider columns and more neuropil space (Buxhoeveden et al.
2001).
It is possible that circuits could be reorganized within a lan-
guage region without a signiicant volumetric change so that a
novel function in language could evolve. Sherwood and col-
leagues conclude: herefore, it is likely that Brodmanns area
44 homolog in great apes, while similar in basic structure to that
in humans, difers in subtle aspects of connectivity and lacks
homologous function (284).
Allen Braun (2003) notes that MRI could still turn out to be
useful for the study of microstructure at higher ield strengths,
with the addition of MR contrast agents, and with the use of
difusion-weighted MR methods. He also notes that the pars
orbitalis has often been arbitrarily excluded from the deinition
of Brocas area, and might be important in the search for ante-
cedents of language in nonhuman primates. In particular, some
studies suggest that the pars orbitalis is selectively activated by
semantic processes (as opposed to phonological or syntactic
processes) (Bookheimer 2002).
It is known that nonhuman primates have structures homolo-
gous to the perisylvian areas involved in human language, that
is, support both expressive and receptive language (Galaburda
and Pandya 1983; Deacon 1989). Ricardo Gil-da-Costa and col-
leagues (2006) presented species-speciic vocalizations in rhesus
macaques and found that the vocalizations produced distinct
patterns of brain activity in areas homologous to the perisyl-
vian language areas in humans using H215O positron emission
tomography (PET). Two classes of auditory stimuli were pre-
sented to the monkeys. One was species-speciic macaque
vocalizations (coos and screams). As a control, nonbiologi-
cal sounds were presented that matched the species-speciic
vocalizations in frequency, rate, scale, and duration. hey found,
for example, a greater response to species-speciic calls than to
nonbiological sounds in the perisylvian system with homologs
in humans, for example, to the area Tpt of the temporal planum
and to the anterior perisylvian cortex, roughly corresponding to
the areas studied by Wernicke and Broca in humans. However,
they did not ind any clear lateralization efects in the macaque
brain comparable to the anatomical and functional asymmetries
documented in humans and anatomical asymmetries in apes
(Gannon et al. 1998).
Gil-da-Costa and colleagues (2006) note that the perisylvian
regions are not performing linguistic computations in the
macaque, but could be performing a prelinguistic function in
associating the sound and meaning of species-speciic vocal-
izations. Furthermore, this would position the perisylvian sys-
tem to be recruited for use during the evolution of language.
More speciically, it may have been exapted during the emer-
gence of more complex neural mechanisms that couple sound
and meaning in human language (2006, 1070). Although I have
focused here on the perisylvian system, it should be emphasized
that areas outside this system have also been demonstrated to be
involved in language.
K. A. Shapiro and colleagues (2006) provide another example
of the application of imaging studies to investigate how linguistic
49
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
categories like nouns, verbs, and adjectives are organized in the
brain. An event-related functional MRI imaging study has found
speciic brain sites that are activated by either nouns or verbs,
but not both. In a series of experiments, subjects were asked to
produce nouns and verbs in short phrases as real words (the
ducks, he plays), as well as pseudowords (the wugs, he zibs), both
with regular inlections and irregular inlections (geese, wrote),
including both concrete and abstract words. Speciic brain
areas were selectively activated for either verb production (left
prefrontal cortex and left superior parietal lobule) or for noun
production (left anterior fusiform gyrus) across the entire bat-
tery of tests. Moreover, the areas were nonoverlapping, leading
the authors to conclude that these regions are involved in rep-
resenting core conceptual properties of nouns and verbs (2006,
1644).
In recent years, it has become possible to study asymmetries
on a molecular level as well (Sun and Walsh 2006). As discussed
earlier, there are functional, anatomical, and cytoarchitectonic
diferences between the left and right cerebral hemispheres in
humans. To determine what the molecular basis for these asym-
metries might be, Tao Sun and colleagues (2005) compared left
and right embryonic cerebral hemispheres for leftright difer-
ences in gene expression, using serial analysis of gene expres-
sion (SAGE). hey discovered 27 genes whose transcriptions
were diferentially expressed on the left and right sides. In par-
ticular, the gene LMO4, which asymmetrically expressed the Lim
Domain Only 4 transcription factor, is more highly expressed in
the perisylvian regions of the right hemisphere than in the left
at 12 weeks and 14 weeks. Further studies are needed to deter-
mine how LMO4 expression is regulated by factors still earlier in
development.
Mouse cortex was also examined, and it was found that
although Lmo4 expression was moderately asymmetrical in every
individual mouse brain, the expression was not consistently lat-
eralized to either the left or the right. his may be related to the
fact that asymmetries like paw preference are seen in individual
mice but are not biased in the population as a whole, as hand
preference is in humans.
he results of this study are also consistent with the observa-
tion that the genes involved in visceral asymmetries (e.g., of the
heart) are not measurably implicated in cerebral asymmetries. It
had been noted earlier that situs inversus mutations in humans
do not appear to interfere with the left-hemisphere localization of
language and handedness (Kennedy et al. 1999). In these earlier
studies, it had been found that the pattern of language laterali-
zation in patients with situs inversus was identical to that found
in 95 percent of right-handed individuals with normal situs. It
was concluded that the pathway afecting language dominance
and handedness was most likely distinct from that afecting the
asymmetry of the visceral organs.
GENETICS AND SPEECH DISORDERS
Biolinguists would like to understand the wiring of networks
underlying language function at the level of genes. We have seen
that one way to study this question is to use such diferential gene
expression methods as SAGE. Another key way of investigating
the genetics of language is by studying language disorders (see
50
dyslexia, specific language impairment, and autism
and language). By understanding how genetic changes can
cause the operation of language to break down, we get an idea of
the genes that are important for language acquisition, process-
ing, and, ultimately, language evolution.
An autosomal-dominant and monogenic disorder of speech
and language was found in the KE family with a 3-generation
pedigree. A monogenic disorder involves a mutation in a single
gene, and here the individuals have one copy of the mutant gene
and one normal gene on two autosomal (non-sex) chromosomes.
he disorder was mapped to the region 7q31 on chromosome 7,
and it was shown that the gene (called FOXP2) had a mutation
in a forkhead-domain of the protein it encoded in the afected
family (Lai et al. 2001).
he individuals were diagnosed as having developmental ver-
bal dyspraxia. he phenotype was found to be quite complex,
afecting orofacial sequencing, articulation, grammar, and cog-
nition and is still incompletely understood and under investiga-
tion (see also genes and language; Jenkins 2000).
he FOXP2 gene was found to code for a transcription factor,
that is, a protein that regulates gene expression by turning a gene
on or of or otherwise modulating its activity. It is natural to ask
what other genes FOXP2 may regulate and how it regulates these
genes (turning them on or of, for example), as well as to deter-
mine whether any of these genes downstream are involved in
speech and language in a more direct way.
To ind the gene targets of FOXP2 in the brain and to deter-
mine the efects on those genes, methods are being developed to
identify these neural targets both in vitro and in vivo (Geschwind
and Miller 2001). he laboratory of D. H. Geschwind has devel-
oped a genomic screening approach that combines 1) chromatin
immunoprecipitation and 2) microarray analysis (ChIP-Chip).
In chromatin immunoprecipitation, an antibody that recognizes
the protein of interest (e.g., foxp) is used to ish out a protein-
DNA complex. he DNA is then hybridized to arrays with DNA
from thousands of human genes. his allows the identiication of
binding sites for transcription factors (in this case, FOXP2). he
goal is to discover potential gene candidates involved in the devel-
opment of neural circuits supporting speech and language.
he homologue to the human FOXP2 gene has been discov-
ered in a number of diferent species, including mice (Foxp2)
and songbirds, such as the zebra inch (FoxP2). Whatever ones
views on the relationship between human language and other
animal communication systems, it is important to study the evo-
lutionary origin of genes that afect language, such as FOXP2, for
one can learn about the neural pathways constructed by these
genes, which might not otherwise be possible in experiments
with humans.
It has been found that the zebra inch and human protein
sequence is 100 percent identical within the DNA-binding
domain, suggesting a possible shared function (White et al. 2006;
Haesler et al. 2004). In addition, Constance Scharf and Sebastian
Haesler (2005) report that the FoxP2 pattern of expression in the
brain of birds that learn songs by imitation resembles that found
in rodents and humans. In particular, FoxP2 is expressed in the
same cell types, for example, striatal medium spiny neurons.
Moreover, FoxP2 is expressed both in the embryo and in the
adult. To ind out whether FoxP2 is required for song behavior in
Explaining Language
the zebra inch, the Scharf laboratory is using RNA to downregu-
late FoxP2 in Area A, a striatal region important for song learning
(Scharf and Nottebohm 1991). It is known that young male zebra
inches express more FoxP2 bilaterally in Area X when learning
to sing (Haesler et al. 2004). hey will then be able to determine
whether the bird is still able to sing normal song as well as copy
the song of an adult male tutor.
Weiguo Shu and colleagues (2005) found that disrupting the
Foxp2 gene in mice resulted in impairing their ultrasonic vocal-
ization. In addition to their more familiar sonic vocalizations,
mice also make ultrasonic sounds, for example, when they are
separated from their mothers.
In order to study the efect of disrupting the Foxp2 gene on
vocalization, these researchers constructed two versions of
knockout mice. One version had two copies of the defective
Foxp2 gene (the homozygous mice) and the other version had
one copy of the defective Foxp2 gene, as well as one gene that
functioned normally (the heterozygous mice). he homozygous
mice (double knockout) sufered severe motor impairment,
premature death, and an absence of ultrasonic vocalizations
that are normally produced when they are separated from their
mother. On the other hand, the heterozygous mice, with a sin-
gle working copy of the gene, exhibited modest developmental
delay and produced fewer ultrasonic vocalizations than normal.
In addition, it was found that the Purkinje cells in the cerebel-
lum, responsible for ine motor control, were abnormal. It is con-
cluded that the indings support a role for Foxp2 in cerebellar
development and in a developmental process that subsumes
social communication functions (Shu et al. 2001, 9643).
Timothy E. Holy and Zhongsheng Guo (2005) studied the
ultrasonic vocalizations that male mice emit, when they encoun-
ter female mice or their pheromones. hey discovered that the
vocalizations, which have frequencies ranging from 30100 kHz,
have some of the characteristics of song, for example, birdsong.
In particular, they were able to classify diferent syllable types
and found a temporal sequencing structure in the vocalizations.
In addition, individual males, though genetically identical, pro-
duced songs with characteristic syllabic and temporal structure.
hese traits reliably distinguish them from other males. Holy
notes that these discoveries increase the attractiveness of mice
as model systems for study of vocalizations (White et al. 2006,
10378).
We have focused on the FOXP2 gene here because there is no
other gene afecting speech and language about which so much
information is available that bears on questions of neurology and
evolution of language. However, the search is underway for other
additional genes.
For example, genetics researchers have also discovered a
DNA duplication in a nine-year-old boy with expressive language
delay (Patient 1) (Fisher 2005; Somerville et al. 2005). Although
his comprehension of language was at the level of a seven-year-
old child, his expression of language was comparable to that of
only a two-and-a-half-year-old.
he region of DNA duplication in Patient 1 was found to be
on chromosome 7, and interestingly, was found to be identical to
the region that is deleted in Williams-Beuren syndrome (WBS).
Patients with WBS have relatively good expressive language but
are impaired in the area of spatial construction. Lucy Osborne,
one of the researchers on the study, noted that, in contrast,
Patient 1 had normal spatial ability but could form next to no
complete words. When asked what animal has long ears and eats
carrots, he could only pronounce the r in the word rabbit but was
able to draw the letter on the blackboard and add features such
as whiskers (McMaster 2005).
he duplicated region on chromosome 7 contains around 27
genes, but it is not yet known which of the duplicate gene copies
are involved in the expressive language delay, although certain
genes have been ruled out.
A gene (SRPX2) responsible for rolandic seizures that are
associated with oral and speech dyspraxia and mental retarda-
tion has been identiied (Roll et al. 2006). It is located on Xq22.
he SPRX2 protein is expressed and secreted from neurons in the
human adult brain, including the rolandic area. his study char-
acterizes two diferent mutations.
he irst mutation was found in a patient with oro-facial dys-
praxia and severe speech delay. he second mutation was found
in a male patient with rolandic seizures and bilateral perisylvian
polymicrogyria. he authors also note that Sprx2 is not expressed
during murine embryogenesis, suggesting that SPRX2 might play
a speciic role in human brain development, particularly of the
rolandic and sylvian areas.
RECOVERING ANCIENT DNA
In addition to classical studies of fossils, there is currently
renewed interest in work on ancient DNA. he Neanderthals
(Homo neanderthalensis) were an extinct group of hominids that
are most closely related to modern humans (Homo sapiens). Up
to now, information about Neanderthals has been limited to
archaeological data and a few hominid remains. Comparing the
genetic sequences of Neanderthals and currently living humans
would allow one to pinpoint genetic changes that have occurred
during the last few hundred thousand years. In particular, one
would be able to examine and compare diferences in such
genes as FOXP2 in living humans, Neanderthals, and nonhuman
primates.
Partial DNA sequences of the Neanderthal have now been
published by two groups led by Svante Pbo and Edward Rubin
(Green et al. 2006; Noonan et al. 2006). Pbos group identi-
ied a 38,000-year-old Neanderthal fossil from the Vindija cave
(the Neanderthals became extinct around 30,000 years ago). he
fossil was free enough from contamination to permit DNA to be
extracted and subjected to large-scale parallel 454 sequencing, a
newer and faster system for sequencing DNA.
Pbos group was able to sequence and analyze about one
million base pairs of Neanderthal DNA. Note that the genomes of
modern humans and Neanderthals each have about three billion
base pairs (3 gigabases). Among the conclusions they reached
on the basis of the comparison to human DNA was that modern
human and Neanderthal DNA sequences diverged on average
about 500,000 years ago. hey also expected to produce a draft of
the Neanderthal genome within two years. (For their preliminary
results, see Pennisi 2009.)
Rubins group obtained around 65,000 base pairs of
Neanderthal sequence. hey used a combination of the Sanger
method of DNA sequencing and the (faster) pyrosequencing
51
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
method. Although the Sanger method yields less amounts of
sequence than pyrosequencing, the error rate is lower. From the
sequence data they estimated that Neanderthals and humans
shared a most recent common ancestor around 706,000 years
ago. here has been interest in whether Neanderthals might
have contributed to the European gene pool. For example, one
study suggests that humans may have acquired the microceph-
alin gene, which regulates brain size during development, by
interbreeding with another species, possibly the Neanderthals.
However, the data here do not support this possibility, although
more sequence data will be needed to answer the admixture
question deinitively (Evans et al. 2006). However, they did
establish the validity of their sequencing approach, which
allows for the rapid recovery of Neanderthal sequences of
interest from multiple independent specimens, without the
need for whole-genome resequencing (Noonan et al. 2006,
1118).
GENETICS AND EVOLUTION
he work on comparative animal studies and comparative neu-
roanatomy discussed earlier are being increasingly informed by
the rapidly emerging ield of comparative genomics. Work in
the ield of evolutionary development (evo-devo) has provided
substantial support for the idea that gene regulation is key to
understanding evolution. Among the methods now available to
us to study the evolution of anatomy (including neural circuits)
and behavior at the genome level are comparative genomics,
gene-expression proiling, and population genetics analysis. We
have already seen an example of the proiling of gene expression
in the left and right cerebral hemispheres using serial analysis
of gene expression. Such methods have also been applied to
FOXP2.
As we noted earlier, the FOXP2 gene was discovered to code
for a transcription factor and is therefore involved in regulating
the expression of other genes. In general, transcription factors
are highly conserved. In this case, the FOXP2 protein is diferent
from the chimpanzee and gorilla sequence at two amino acids,
and from the orangutan sequence at three amino acids. he
human and mouse protein sequence difer at three amino acids.
he question arises whether these amino acid replacements are
of functional signiicance, that is, whether they played a crucial
role in the evolution of language.
A population genetic study of the FOXP2 locus concluded
that it had been subjected to a selective sweep during the past
200,000 years, correlating closely with estimated age of Homo
sapiens. However, Sean B. Carroll (2005) notes that one cannot
immediately conclude from the fact that the FOXP2 gene has
been a target of selection during human evolution that it is the
amino acid replacements just discussed that were the function-
ally important targets. Since the FOXP2 gene is 267 kilobases
in size, we should ind more than 2,000 diferences in DNA
sequence between chimpanzees and humans (assuming an
average base pair divergence of 1.2%). his means that there are
many more possibilities for functionally signiicant mutations
in noncoding regulatory areas than in coding regions (the
FOXP2 protein is made from coding regions, while the noncod-
ing regions contain the regulatory information). It is, of course,
52
diicult to discover the signiicance of nucleotide changes in
noncoding regions, since one cannot determine their functional
signiicance by visual inspection. Nonetheless, until this infor-
mation is available, there is no reason to favor the idea that the
two changes in the FOXP2 protein are functional. Carroll notes
that while it may be tempting to reach for the low-hanging fruit
of coding sequence changes, the task of unravelling the regula-
tory puzzle is yet to come (1165).
In fact, some data favor the regulatory sequence hypothesis.
Carroll notes that in evaluating whether FOXP2 is involved in the
evolution of the neural circuits of language, one must ask several
questions. he irst is, is the gene product used in multiple tis-
sues? (1164).
It is known that FOXP2 appears to act as a repressor in lung
tissue (Shu et al. 2001). Moreover, studies in mice have revealed
that in addition to Foxp2, two other transcription factors, Foxp1
and Foxp4 are expressed in pulmonary and gut tissues (Lu et al.
2002). Foxp4 is also expressed in neural tissues during embry-
onic development. It is not at all surprising to ind that a gene
that may be involved in language development is also active in
nonlanguage areas. he reason for this is that transcription fac-
tors like FOXP2 often act in a combinatorial fashion in conjunc-
tion with other transcription factors in diferent ways in diferent
tissues.
As another example, suppose that a cell has three regula-
tory proteins and that with each cell division a new regulatory
protein becomes expressed in one of the daughter cells, but
not the other. Hence, we only need three regulatory proteins
acting in combination to produce eight diferent cell types.
Combinatorial control is thought to be widespread as a means
of eukaryotic gene regulation. For those familiar with linguistic
models of language acquisition, it may help to think of parame-
ter settings, whereby three binary parameters can specify eight
diferent language types with respect to some structural feature.
he idea, then, is that FOXP2 can work in conjunction with cer-
tain factors in the lung to repress gene activity in the epithelium,
whereas it might work together with other factors in the brain to
regulate genes there directly (or indirectly) involved in speech
and language.
he second question to ask is are mutations in the coding
sequence known or likely to be pleiotropic [i.e., causing multiple
efects]? (1164) It is well known that patients with the FOXP2
mutation have multiple defects in speech, orofacial praxis, lan-
guage, and cognition. he third question to ask is does the locus
contain multiple cis-regulatory elements? (ibid.) (Cis-elements
are regulatory elements located on the same nucleic acid strand
as the gene they regulate.) Again, since FOXP2 is expressed in
multiple areas in the brain and in other organs, this is a clear
indication that it does. Carroll concludes on this basis that reg-
ulatory sequence evolution is the more likely mode of evolution
than coding sequence evolution (ibid.).
Finally, Carroll notes that some of the data from experi-
ments with birdsong learners and nonlearners also support the
idea of regulatory evolution. When FoxP2 mRNA and protein
levels during development were studied, a signiicant increase
of FoxP2 expression was found in Area X, a center required for
vocal learning. he increase occurred at a time when vocal learn-
ing in zebra inches was underway. Moreover, FoxP2 expression
Explaining Language
levels in adult canaries varied with the season and correlated
with changes in birdsong. hese facts suggest regulatory control
in development and in the adult brain.
EVOLUTION AND DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS
Another tool used in the study of language evolution is the theory
of dynamical systems (see also self-organizing systems)
(Nowak 2006). However, applications of dynamical systems to
language include studies not only of evolution of language but
of language change and language acquisition as well (Niyogi
2004, 2006). Martin A. Nowak and Natalia Komarova (2001,
292) assume for the case of language acquisition that Universal
Grammar (UG) contains two parts: 1) a rule system that gener-
ates a search space of candidate grammars and 2) a [learning]
mechanism to evaluate input sentences and to choose one of
the candidate grammars that are contained in his [the learners]
search space. One of the main questions to be determined is
what is the maximum size of the search space such that a spe-
ciic learning mechanism will converge (after a number of input
sentences, with a certain probability) to the target grammar.
he question for language evolution then is what makes a
population of speakers converge to a coherent grammatical sys-
tem. A homogenous population (all individuals have the same
UG) is assumed. Nowak and Komarova derive a set of equations,
which they call the language dynamics equations (293), which
give the population dynamics of grammar evolution.
he equations represent the average payof (for mutual under-
standing) for all those individuals who use a particular grammar
and contribute to biological itness (the number of ofspring they
leave), and include a quantity to measure the accuracy of gram-
mar acquisition of the ofspring from their parents. Another
variable denotes the relative abundance of individuals who use
a particular grammar. Still another variable denotes the average
itness or grammatical coherence of the population, the mea-
sure for successful communication in a population (293).
Nowak and Komarova use the language dynamics equations
to study the conditions under which UG will result in grammati-
cal coherence. A number of factors can be varied in order to run
computer simulations: population size, assumptions about UGs
search space, and assumptions about the learning mechanism
(e.g., memoryless or batch learning, etc.).
A similar kind of dynamical systems analysis has been pro-
posed by Partha Niyogi for language change (2004, 58), for what
he calls the emerging ield of population linguistics. Such con-
cepts as symmetry and stability (stable and unstable equilibria)
are used in the study of the language dynamics equations. Niyogi
uses symmetric and asymmetric nonlinear dynamical models to
study lexical and syntactic change. Nowak and Komarova note
that dynamical systems analysis is compatible with a wide range
of diferent kinds of linguistic analysis and learning theories.
here are a number of other approaches to the study of language
evolution with dynamical systems and simulation, some of which
may be found in the suggestions for further reading (Christiansen
and Kirby 2003; Cangelosi and Parisi 2001; Lyon et al. 2006).
More than 25 years ago, Chomsky observed that the study of
the biological basis for human language capacities may prove to
be one of the most exciting frontiers of science in coming years
(1980, 216). Not only has that proven to be the case, but with the
explosion of knowledge in many areas, including (comparative)
linguistics, comparative neuroanatomy, evolutionary devel-
opment, comparative genomics, to take just a few examples,
biolinguistics promises to be a fascinating ield for decades to
come.
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55

6 the country or culture the child is born into, no matter what the
ACQUISITION OF LANGUAGE
Barbara Lust
INTRODUCTION
How does the child, within the irst few years of life, come to
understand and to produce Hop on Pop or Cat in the Hat
(Dr. Seuss)?
(1) We all play ball
Up on a wall
Fall of the Wall (Dr. Seuss [1963] 199l, 1013)
(2) We looked!
And we saw him!
he Cat in the Hat!
And he said to us (Dr. Seuss [1957] 1985, 6)
How does the child come to know the precise sound varia-
tions that distinguish hop and pop or wall and ball, the Baron 1977, deGraf 1999, and Crain, Gloro, and hornton 2006
multiple meanings of words like play or in, the reference
of pronouns like we or him, the meaning of quantiiers (see
quantiication) like all, the functional categories determining
noun phrases like the, the idioms like play ball, the system-
atic order and structure necessary for even simple sentences,
the ininite recursion of sentences allowed by the coordinate
connective and, the ininite possibilities for propositions based
on the manipulation of even a few sound units and word units,
and the ininite possibilities for meaning and truth, which
Dr. Seuss continually demonstrated?
Even more stunning, how does the child both attain the ininite
set of possibilities and, at the same time, know the ininite set of
what is impossible, given this ininitely creative combinatorial sys-
tem? Just as there is no limit to what is possible, there is no limit to
what is impossible in language, for example, (3), or an ininite set
of other impossible word and structure combinations, for example,
(4). his provides an essential paradox for language learners: How
do they both acquire the ininite possibilities and, at the same time,
the constraints on the ininite set of impossible expressions?
(3) *Ylay
*lla
(4) *Play all we ball
*in cat the hat
56
Yet normally, by about three years of age, a child will have
attained the fundamental knowledge of an ininite combinato-
rial multileveled system as well as essential constraints on this
ininite system, no matter what the language, no matter what
limitless contextual, environmental variations across children,
cultures, and countries. his mystery, and the paradox of con-
strained ininity, drives the ield of language acquisition. How
is this fundamental knowledge acquired? How is it represented
and efected in the mind and brain?
THE FIELD OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
In many ways, the study of language acquisition stands at the
center of the language sciences, subsumes all of its areas, and
thus, perhaps, supersedes all in its complexity. It entails the
study of linguistic theory in order that the systems and com-
plexities of the end state of language knowledge be understood,
so that the status of their acquisition can be evaluated. his
involves all areas of linguistics, in addition to phonetics: pho-
nology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and prag-
matics (cf. Chierchia 1999). It entails language typology
because acquisition of any speciic language is possible, and
because this acquisition relects any possible typological varia-
tion. Barbara Grimes (2000) proposes that between 6,000 and
7,000 languages now exist in the end state. he study of language
acquisition also entails the study of language typology because
language acquisition at any state of development represents a
form of manifestation of language knowledge, itself subject to
typological variation. It entails language change, because
the course of acquisition of language over time reveals changing
manifestations of language; language change must be related to
language acquisition, in ways still not understood (although see
for initial attempts to relate these areas; see also age groups.).
It involves psycholinguistics because any particular mani-
festation of language during language acquisition is revealed
through the cognitive and psychological infrastructure of the
mind and brain during hearing and speaking in real time,
potentially within a visual modality as in sign languages,
thus always involving language processing integrated with lan-
guage knowledge. It involves neurolinguistics, not only because
the knowledge and use of language must in some way relate
to its biological and neural instantiation in the brain, but also
because explanations of the gradual course of language acqui-
sition over time must critically evaluate the role of biological
change. (See brain and language and biolinguistics.)
At the same time, the study of language acquisition also stands
at the center of Cognitive Science. It cannot be divorced from other
closely related disciplines within Cognitive Science. he relation
between language and thought is never dissociated in natural
language, thus crucially calling for an understanding of cognitive
psychology and philosophy; and the formal computation involved
in grammatical systems is not fruitfully divorced from computer
science. Any use of language involves possibilities for vagueness
and ambiguities in interpretation, given the particular prag-
matic context of any language use. For example, how would one
fully understand the meaning of an ostensibly simple sentence like
Acquisition of Language
Shes going to leave without understanding the particular con-
text in which this sentence is used, and there is an ininite set of
these contexts possible. he challenge of developing an ininitely
productive but constrained language system embedded in the
ininite possibilities for pragmatic determination of interpretation
remains a central challenge distinguishing machine language and
the language of the human species. All areas of cognitive science
must be invoked to study this area. Finally, especially with regard to
language acquisition in the child, developmental psychology must
be consulted critically. he child is a biologically and cognitively
changing organism. Indeed, an understanding of commonalities
and/or diferences between language acquisition in child and adult
requires expertise in the ield of developmental psychology.
In addition, the fact that the human species, either child or
adult, is capable not only of single language acquisition but also
of multilanguage acquisition, either simultaneously or sequen-
tially, exponentially increases the complexity of the area (see
bilingualism and multilingualism). he fact that these
languages may vary in their parametric values (see parame-
ters) and be either oral or visual further complicates the area.
THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS
Not surprisingly, then, the ield of research involving the study of
language acquisition is characterized by all the complexity and
variation in theoretical positions that characterize the ield of lin-
guistics and the language sciences in general. he area of language
acquisition research relects varying approaches to the study of
grammar, that is, variations regarding viewpoints on what consti-
tutes the end state of language knowledge that must be acquired,
for example, generative or functionalist approaches. At
the same time, it is characterized by variation in approach to the
study of language acquisition, in particular, ranging from vari-
ous forms of logical to empirical analyses, and including disputes
regarding methodological foundations and varying attempts
at explanatory theories (ranging from rationalist to empiricist
types). (Lust 2006, Chapter 4, provides a review.)
he ield is led by a strong theory of what is necessary logi-
cally for a strong explanatory theory of language acquisition in
the form of Noam Chomskys early proposal for a language
acquisition device (LAD). his model not only involved
explication of what needed to be explained but also spawned
decades of research either for or against various proposals bear-
ing on components of this model. Yet, today, no comprehensive
theory of language acquisition exists, that is, no theory that would
fully account for all logically necessary aspects of a LAD.
At the same time, decades of research have now produced an
explosion of new discoveries regarding the nature of language
acquisition. hese empirical discoveries, combined with theo-
retical advances in linguistic theory and with the development
of the interdisciplinary ield of cognitive science, bring us today
to the verge of such a comprehensive theory, one with irm sci-
entiic foundations.
STRUCTURE OF THIS OVERVIEW
In this overview, I irst briely characterize and distill focal ten-
sions in the ield of language acquisition and briely survey
varying positions in the ield on these focal issues, then exem-
plify a range of research results, displaying crucial new discover-
ies in the ield. Ill conclude by formulating leading questions for
the future. For those interested in pursuing these topics further, I
close with selected references for future inquiry in the ield.
Focal Tensions
Classically, approaches to the study of language acquisition have
been categorized as nativist or empiricist (see innateness and
innatism). hese approaches, which correspond generally to
rationalist or empiricist approaches to epistemology (see Lust
2006 for a review), have been typically associated with claims
that essential faculties responsible for language acquisition in
the human species involve either innate capabilities for language
or not. However, now the debates have become more restricted,
allowing more precise scientiic inquiry. No current proposals, to
our knowledge, suggest that nothing at all is innate. (See Elman
et al, 1996 for example). No one proposes that every aspect of
language knowledge is innate. For example, in the now-classic
Piaget-Chomsky Debate (see Piatelli-Palmarini 1980), Chomsky
did not deny that experience was necessary for a comprehensive
theory of language acquisition. On the other hand, Jean Piaget
proposed an essentially biological model of cognitive develop-
ment and an antiempiricist theory, coherent with Chomskys
position in this way.
Rather, the current issue that is most central to the ield of
language acquisition now is whether what is innate regarding
language acquisition involves components speciic to linguistic
knowledge, for example, speciic linguistic principles and
parameters, or whether more general cognitive knowledge or
learning principles themselves potentially innate can account
for this knowledge. his issue corresponds to the question of
whether organization of the mental representation of language
knowledge is modular or not. Proponents of the view that spe-
ciically linguistic factors are critical to an explanation of human
language acquisition generally work within a linguistic theory of a
modular language faculty, that is, a theory of universal gram-
mar (UG), which is proposed to characterize the initial state
of the human organism, that is, the state of the human organ-
ism before experience. his current descendant of Chomskys
LAD provides speciic hypotheses (working within a genera-
tive grammar framework) regarding the identity of linguistic
principles and parameters that may be innately, or biologically,
determined in the human species (e.g., Anderson and Lightfoot
2002). Proponents of the alternative view generally assume a
functionalist theory and a model of cultural learning, that is,
a model where culture in some ways provides the structure of
language, potentially without speciic linguistic printiples, with
only general learning principles (e.g., Van Valin 1991; Tomasello
2003; Tomasello, Kruger, and Ratner 1993).
Positions in the Field
Debates in the ield of language acquisition continue today
around issues of innateness and modularity (e.g., Pinker, 1994;
Tomasello 1995; Edelman 2008). Research in the ield is often
polarized according to one paradigm or the other. Several
57
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
speciic issues focalize these debates. Two of the most pressing
currently concern the nature of development, and the nature of
the childs use of language input.
Critically, all approaches must confront the empirical fact
that childrens language production and comprehension develop
over time. Language acquisition is not instantaneous. he ques-
tion is whether childrens language knowledge also develops
over time, and if it does, does it change qualitatively, and if it does
change qualitatively, what causes the change. his question of
development is parallel to questions regarding cognitive devel-
opment in general, where stage theories are debated against
continuity theories. Positions in the ield today vary in several
ways regarding their understanding of the nature of develop-
ment in language acquisition. Even within researchers working
within a rationalist paradigm that pursues universal grammar as
a speciically linguistic theory of a human language faculty, there
is disagreement. he theory of UG does not a priori include an
obvious developmental component. Positions in the ield can be
summarized as in iiv.
(i) Some propose that essential language knowledge is fun-
damentally innate, and do not centrally address the issue of
what change in language knowledge may occur during language
development (e.g., Crain 1991). In this view, apparent cases of
language knowledge change in a young childs production or
comprehension are often mainly attributed to methodological
failures, for example, involving the researchers choice of spe-
ciic tasks for testing childrens knowledge. he view of language
development is characterized by the following: On the account
we envision, childrens linguistic experience drives children
through an innately speciied space of grammars, until they hit
upon one that is suiciently like those of adult speakers around
them, with the result that further data no longer prompts further
language change (Crain and Pietroski 2002, 182). (Compare
LAD and a recent proposal by Yang 2006.) On this view, it would
appear that grammars are predetermined and available for
choice. Presumably, speciic lexicons, as well as other periph-
eral aspects of language knowledge, would be exempt from this
claim of predetermined knowledge. he range and nature of the
innately speciied space of grammars would have to be expli-
cated, as this framework develops.
(ii) Some propose that UG itself develops over time in a man-
ner that is biologically driven, that is, through maturation. Major
aspects of language development, for example late acquisition of
the passive construction (such as he ball was thrown by Mary
in English), are attributed to biologically determined changes in
UG (e.g., Wexler 1999; Radford 1990). his maturation is proposed
to be the major explanation of language development. Speciic
language grammars (SLGs) are not, for the most part, treated as
essential independent components of the language acquisition
challenge, but often as simply triggered by UG parameters. Any
learning that would be involved for the child in language devel-
opment would involve merely peripheral aspects of language,
with the nature of the periphery yet to be speciied.
(iii) Some propose that UG is continuous, but UG is inter-
preted as involving just those principles and parameters that con-
strain and guide the language acquisition process. SLG develops
over time through experience with data from a speciic language
and through the childs active construction of it. (See examples
58
of a proposal for grammatical mapping in Lust 1999, 2006 and
Santelmann et al. 2002.) he task of language acquisition goes
beyond the periphery of grammatical knowledge and beyond
mere triggering of parameters; it lies in constructive synthesis of
a speciic language grammatical system, which is constrained by
UG but not fully determined by it.
(iv) Some propose that UG is irrelevant to language acquisi-
tion; the process can be described by an alternative mechanism,
critically involving some form of usage-based learning (e.g.,
Elman et al. 1996; Tomasello 2003, 2005): In general, the only
fully adequate accounts of language acquisition are those that give
a prominent role to childrens comprehension of communicative
function in everything from words to grammatical morphemes to
complex syntactic constructions (Tomasello 2005, 183).
Within the proposals of iiii which all work within a generative
UG framework, (i) and (iii) propose a strong continuity hypothesis
of language development, although they difer crucially in what
is claimed to be continuous. In (iii), it is only the essential set of
principles and parameters of UG constituting the initial state
that is proposed to be biologically programmed and to remain
constant over development, while in (i), it is comprehensive
grammatical knowledge, with no distinction made between UG
and SLG. While a maturational approach such as in (ii) would
appear to maintain the premise of biological programming of
language knowledge, and thus be consistent with a theory of
UG, it raises several critical theoretical and empirical issues that
are still unresolved. For example, theoretically, the question
arises: What explains the change from one UG state to another, if
this determination is not programmed in UG itself? Empirically,
in each area where a maturational account has been proposed,
further advanced research has often revealed grammatical com-
petence that was thought to be missing in early development,
for example, early knowledge of functional categories. (See Lust
1999 and Wexler 1999 for debate.)
All proposals must now confront the fundamental develop-
mental issues: what actually changes during language devel-
opment and why. hose within the generative paradigm must
sharpen their vision of what in fact constitutes UG, and those
outside of it must sharpen their view of how ininitely creative but
ininitely constrained grammatical knowledge can be attained
on the basis of communicative function alone. All proposals
must be accountable to the wide and cumulative array of empir-
ical data now available. (See, for example, Discoveries in the
next section.)
Researchers are also opposed in their view of how the child
uses input data. (See Valian 1999 for a review.) All approaches
must confront this fundamental area, whether the UG frame-
work is involved (e.g., in explaining how the environment trig-
gers parameter setting) or whether an empiricist framework is
involved (where the mechanism of imitation of individual words
and/or utterances may be viewed as an essential mechanism of
data processing and grammar development for the child, e.g.,
Tomasello 1995, 2002, 2005). Indeed, the very nature of imitation
of language stimuli is under investigation (e.g., Lust, Flynn, and
Foley 1996). In each case, the mechanism proposed must reli-
ably account for the childs mapping from these input data to the
speciic knowledge of the adult state, thus solving what has been
called the logical problem of language acquisition and it must
Acquisition of Language
also be empirically veriied, that is, be a veridical account of how
the child actually does use surrounding data. hose approach-
ing the logical problem of language acquisition are formally
diagnosing the properties of syntactic and semantic knowledge
that must be acquired, and assessing varied formal learnability
theories that may possibly account for the childs mapping from
actual input data to this knowledge. (e.g., Lightfoot 1989). (See
also projection principle.)
Discoveries
Fortunately, not only have the last decades seen continuous
theoretical developments in areas of linguistics regarding the
nature of language knowledge, and continuous sharpening
of the debate on the nature of language development, but the
ield of language acquisition has also produced a wealth of new
empirical discoveries, all of which promise to inform the crucial
questions and debates in the ield, and to eventuate in a more
comprehensive theory of language acquisition than has yet been
available. Ill exemplify only some of these here, all of which are
foci of intense current research. (See Lust 2006 for a more com-
prehensive review.)
THE FIRST 12 MONTHS. Informed by developed methodologies
for investigating infant perception of language, we now know
that neonates show early sensitivities to language variations
and categorize these variations (e.g., Ramus et al. 2000; Mehler
et al. 1996, 1988). For example, given varying sound stimuli from
Japanese and varying sound stimuli from English speech, new-
born infants distinguish variation from Japanese to English sig-
niicantly more than variation within either English or Japanese,
including speaker variation. In this sense, the infant is seen to
be categorizing variation across languages. (See infantile
responses to language.) More speciically, we also know
that formal aspects of language (phonetic, phonological, and
syntactic) begin to develop at birth, even before language com-
prehension, and provide the foundations for the appearance of
overt language production and comprehension in the child at
about 12 months of age. Now we also know something of how
that development proceeds even during the irst 12 months of
life.
In the area of acquisition of phonology, we have discovered
the very ine, precise, and extensive phonetic sensitivities of the
newborn, sensitivities that appear to be exactly the right ones
to underlie all potential cross-linguistic phonological contrasts,
for example, contrasts in voicing or place and manner features
that characterize speech sounds. Once again, these sensitivities
are categorical (as in categorical perception; see speech per-
ception in infants). We know that by about 6 months, these
sensitivities reveal appropriate cross-linguistic selection and
modulation, and by 12 months, this process is nicely attuned to
the childs irst productive words of their speciic language (e.g.,
Werker 1994; see Jusczyk 1997 and de Boysson-Bardies 1999 for
reviews). For example, while the 12-month-old infant acquir-
ing Hindi will have maintained sensitivity to Hindi contrasts in
aspiration, the infant acquiring English will show diminished
response to such distinctions, which are not linguistically con-
trastive in English. Although labials appear in irst words across
languages, the proportion of labials in both late babbling and
irst words will relect the input of labials in the adult language
being acquired (de Boysson-Bardies, Vihman, and Vihman
1991).
In fact, children are picking out words as formal elements from
the speech stream even before they understand them. For exam-
ple, 8-month-olds who were exposed to stories read to them for
10 days (30 minutes of prerecorded speech, including three short
stories for children) during a two-week period, two weeks later
distinguished lists of words that had appeared in these stories,
for example, (5a), from those which had not, for example, (5b)
(Jusczyk and Hohne 1997).
(5) a. sneeze
elephant
python
peccaries
b. aches
apricot
sloth
burp
Given the age of the children and the nature of the words
tested, it is clear that children are engaged both in word segmen-
tation and in long-term storage of these formal elements, even
without their semantic content. Moreover, like the acquisition of
phonology, childrens sensitivities to the language-speciic struc-
ture of words begins to show reinement after the sixth month.
American 9-month-olds, though not 6-month-olds, listened
longer to English words than to Dutch words, while Dutch
9-month-old infants showed the reverse preference (Jusczyk
et al. 1993).
Simultaneously, and in parallel, in the area of syntax, infants
have also been found to be laying the formal foundations for
language knowledge even within the irst 12 months. hey are
carving out the formal elements that will form the basis for the
syntax of the language they are acquiring. Precise sensitivities
to linear order, as well as to constituent structure, have
been discovered in these irst few months of life. For example,
infants as young as 4 months of age have been found to dis-
tinguish natural well-formed clause structure, like (6a) from
non-natural ones, like (6b), in stories read to them (where /
represents clause breaks through pauses, and the stimuli are
matched in semantic and lexical content) (Hirsh-Pasek et al.
1987).
(6) a. Cinderella lived in a great big house/ but it was sort of dark/
because she had this mean, mean, mean stepmother
b. in a great big house, but it was/ sort of dark because she
had/ this mean
Experimental research has begun to reveal how infants
accomplish this discrimination in the speech stream, suggest-
ing that the mapping of prosodic phrasing to linguistic units may
play an important role.
Again, sensitivities become more language speciic after the
sixth month. Although 6-month-olds did not distinguish natu-
ral (e.g., 7a) and non-natural phrasal (verb phrase) structures
(e.g., 7b), that is, phrasal constituents smaller than the clause,
9-month-olds did:
59
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences

(7) a. he little boy at the piano/ is having a birthday party category sensitivities appear to be available even within the irst
b. he little boy at the piano is having/ a birthday party 12 months (e.g., Shady 1996; Demuth 1994).
Contrary to the widespread view that the contentful lexicon
In all these cases, both phonological and syntactic develop-
(involving nouns and verbs) is the privileged basis for acquisition
ment does not reduce either to simple loss of initial sensitivities
of syntax in early language acquisition, these results are begin-
or to simple accrual or addition of new ones, but a gradual inte-
ning to suggest that, in fact, functional categories are fundamen-
gration of a speciic language grammatical system.
tal (see lexical learning hypothesis).
More recently, research has begun to reveal even more pre-
cisely how these early sensitivities are related to later language
PRINCIPLES AND PARAMETERS. Principles and parameters that
development, thus foreshadowing a truly comprehensive theory
are hypothesized to provide the linguistic content of UG and
of language acquisition (Newman et al. 2006; Kuhl et al. 2005).
of the human language faculty provide leading hypotheses for
language acquisition research. (See principles and param-
BEYOND FIRST WORDS: LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE. Continuous with
eters theory and language acquisition.) Investigators
advances in our understanding of early infant development, we
continue to search not only for theoretical motivation for such
are now also seeing a potential revolution in our understand-
principles and parameters but also for empirical evidence of the
ing of the early stages of overt language acquisition, that is,
role of UG-based principles and parameters in early language
those periods within the irst three years of life, where the child
acquisition. A wide range of empirical research has now accrued
is beginning to overtly manifest language knowledge in terms
in this paradigm, paralleling theoretical developments (e.g.,
of language production and comprehension. Child language in
Snyder 2007; Crain and Lillo-Martin 1999; Guasti 2002; Roeper
these early periods has traditionally been referred to as holo-
2007; Lust 2006, among others). his research reveals a wide
phrastic or, a little later, telegraphic (see two-word stage)
array of evidence regarding very fundamental linguistic prin-
in nature. Even in these early periods, numerous studies are now
ciples, including the central and perhaps most fundamental UG
revealing childrens very early sensitivity to functional categories
principle of structure dependence:
(FCs) in language, that is, to grammatical elements that function
formally to a large degree, often with little or no semantic con- he rules operate on expressions that are assigned a certain struc-
tent. hese functional categories play a critical role in deining ture in terms of a hierarchy of phrases of various types. (Chomsky
constituent structure in language, and in deining the locus of 1988, 45)
syntactic operations. hus, the evidence that infants and tod-
Evidence for this fundamental linguistic principle has been
dlers are accessing these FCs in their early language knowledge
adduced in studies of childrens acquisition of several areas,
begins to provide crucial data on the foundations for linguistic
including various types of question formation (e.g., Crain and
systems in the child. (Such FC are relected in diferent ways
McKee 1985; Crain and Nakayama 1987; deVilliers, Roeper, and
across languages. In English they are relected in determiners
Vainikka 1990), empty category and pronoun interpretation (e.g.,
such as the, auxiliary verbs like do, complementizers like
Cohen Sherman and Lust 1993; Nuez del Prado, Foley, and Lust
that, or inlection of verbs, for example.)
1993; Lust and Cliford 1986), and quantiier scope (e.g., Chien
Early research had revealed that young children perceive and
1994).
consult functional categories, such as determiners, even when
Results from young children at early stages of development
they are not overtly producing them regularly in their natural
across languages have shown that they very early distinguish
speech. For example, L. Gerken, B. Landau, and R. Remez (1990)
coordinate and subordinate structures and that they diferenti-
showed that 2-year-olds recognize the distinction between
ate syntactic processes in these diferent structures accordingly.
grammatical and ungrammatical function words, contrasting
For example, in English, they very early distinguish sentences like
these, for example (8a) and (8b), in their elicited imitation of
(10a) and (10b) in both comprehension and production (Cohen
these sentences. Gerken and Bonnie McIntosh (1993) showed
Sherman and Lust 1993):
that 2-year-olds used this knowledge in a picture identiication
task, discriminating between (9a) and (9b), where grammatical (10) a. [he turtle tickles the skunk] and [0 bumps the car]
forms facilitated semantic reference. b. Tom [promises/tells Billy [0 to eat the ice cream cone]]

(8) a. Pete pushes the dog
b. Pete pusho na dog
(9) a. Find the bird for me
b. Find was bird for me
More recently, a wide range of experimental researchers work-
ing with expanded infant testing methods have replicated these
results, and also revealed similar functional category distinctions
even in younger children. For example Yarden Kedar, Marianella
Casasola, and Barbara Lust (2006) showed that infants as young
as 18 months also distinguish sentences like (9a) and (9b) in a
preferential looking task, and again, object reference is facili-
tated by the grammatical form. Precursors to these functional
Chinese children diferentiate coordinate and embedded
structures and diferentiate subjects and topics (see topic
and comment) in Chinese accordingly (Chien and Lust 1985).
Across English, Japanese, and Sinhala, children diferentiate pos-
sibilities for anaphora according to the embedded or adjoined
structure in which proforms appear (Lust and Cliford 1986;
Oshima and Lust 1997; Gair et al. 1998; Eisele and Lust 1996).
In general, very early linguistic knowledge including knowl-
edge of language involving diminished content, where direct
overt phonetic information is not available is attested in stud-
ies of childrens acquisition of sentences with ellipses. For exam-
ple, in sentences such as (11), young children have been found
to reveal not only competence for empty category interpretation

60
Acquisition of Language
(in the does too clause, where the second clause does not
state what Bert did), but also competence for construction of the
multiple interpretations allowed in this ambiguous structure (as
in 11ad), and constraint against the ungrammatical possibili-
ties (as in 11 ei). (See Foley et al. 2003 for an example.) In other
words, they evidence early control of and constraints on empty
category interpretation and on other forms of ellipsis. Studies
of Chinese acquisition show similar results (Guo et al. 1996).
Without structure dependence and grammatical computation
over abstract structure underlying such sentences (e.g., recon-
structing the verb phrase [VP] in the second clause), children
would not be expected to evidence this competence (see Foley
et al. 2003). All interpretations are pragmatically possible.
(11) Oscar bites his banana and Bert does too.
Possible Interpretations:
a. O bites Os banana and B bites Bs banana.
b. O bites Os banana and B bites Os banana.
c. O bites Bs banana and B bites Bs banana.
d. O bites Es banana and B bites Es banana.
Impossible Interpretations
*e. O bites Os banana and B bites Es banana.
*f. O bites Bs banana and B bites Os banana.
*g. O bites Bs banana and B bites Es banana.
*h. O bites Es banana and B bites Os banana.
*i. O bites Es banana and B bites Bs banana.
As is the case in this study of VP ellipsis acquisition, empiri-
cal research results in the Principles and Parameters framework
mutually inform theoretical development; they contribute to and
help to resolve theoretical debates on the representation of this
area of linguistic knowledge.
Evidence for early parameter setting with regard to linear
order in natural language is now provided by a wide range of
cross-linguistic studies showing very early language-speciic
sensitivity to the clausal head direction and directionality of
RECURSION in the language being acquired (e.g., Lust, in prep-
aration; Lust and Chien 1984). Very early diferentiation of the
pro drop (i.e., argument omission wherein subjects may not be
overtly expressed) possibilities of a language have been attested
across languages (e.g., Italian and English, Spanish and English)
(Valian 1991; Austin et al. 1997, after Hyams 1986). In fact, chil-
dren have been found to critically consult the complementizer
phrase, and the subordinate structure domain in order to make
this diferentiation (Nuez del Prado, Foley, and Lust 1993).
FROM DATA TO GRAMMAR. Our understanding of how the infant,
from birth, consults the surrounding speech stream is now also
expanding quickly. Research has revealed very ine sensitivities
to particular aspects of the speech stream (e.g., Safran, Aslin,
and Newport 1996), and research has begun to isolate the pre-
cise role of particular cues in this process, for example, STRESS,
phonotactic constraints, and statistical distributions (e.g, Johnson
and Jusczyk 2001). Various forms of bootstrapping may be avail-
able to the child (phonological or prosodic or syntactic bootstrap-
ping, for example). Here, bootstrapping generally refers to that
process by which the child, in the initial state, might initiate new
learning by hanging on to some aspect of the input that it can
access. Research is beginning to provide evidence on how and
when these forms of bootstrapping may work in the young child
(e.g, work of Gleitman 1990 and others on syntactic bootstrap-
ping and its role in early lexical learning and the the collection of
papers in Morgan and Demuth 1996). Precise hypotheses are now
being formed regarding the mechanisms by which certain param-
eters may be set very early by the infant, even before the irst word,
by consulting prosodic and other aspects of the speech stream
(Mazuka 1996).
CROSS-SPECIES COMPARATIVE METHOD. Advances in cross-
species comparisons now provide an additional dimension to the
study of language acquisition, allowing reinement of our speci-
ication of what is particularly human and of what is particularly
linguistic about human acquisition of language (e.g., Hauser,
Chomsky, and Fitch 2002; Call and Tomasello 2007; Ramus et al.
2000). For example, comparative studies with cotton-top tamarin
monkeys revealed certain capabilities in this species to discrimi-
nate language stimuli (e.g., Dutch and Japanese) that were com-
parable to human infants (Ramus et al. 2000). his implied that
a general auditory process was involved in the discrimination. In
contrast, other processes discovered in early acquisition of phonol-
ogy have been found not to generalize. (See, for example, the work
of Kuhl et al. 2005.)
RESILIENCE. Finally, the tremendous resilience of the language
acquisition feat in the face of varying input, including dearth of
input, has been revealed through important work on young deaf
childrens spontaneously created home sign (Goldin-Meadow
2003). he role of community in sign language creation is also
revealed through in-depth studies of the creation of Nicaraguan
Sign Language in young children (Senghas 1995; Kegl, Senghas,
and Coppola 1999).
Toward the Future
FIRST AND SECOND LANGUAGE IN CHILD AND ADULT. Current and
future studies that seek to triangulate the language faculty by
precise comparative studies between child irst language acquisi-
tion and adult second language and between child monolingual
irst language acquisition and multilanguage acquisition promise
to be able to dissociate factors related to biological maturation,
universal grammar, and speciic language grammar in ways not
achievable by studies of irst language acquisition alone (e.g.,
Flynn and Martohardjono 1994; Yang and Lust 2005).
PRAGMATIC AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT AND GRAMMATICAL
DEVELOPMENT. Studies of the integration of childrens developing
pragmatic knowledge with their grammatical knowledge have only
begun; yet this integration characterizes every aspect of a childs
use of language (cf. Clark 2003). Such studies may critically inform
our understanding of childrens early syntax development (e.g.,
Blume 2002). Similarly, studies involving interactions between
general cognition and speciic aspects of linguistic knowledge (e.g.,
Gentner and Goldin-Meadow 2003) will be critical for resolving
issues of modularity in language acquisition. (See constraints
in language acquisition.)
61
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
A NEUROSCIENCE PERSPECTIVE AND BEYOND. Current advances
in brain imaging methods (such as fMRI, and neurophysiologi-
cal measures, such as EEG [electroencephalography] and MEG
[magnetoencephalography]) and in genome mapping (Greally
2007) promise new discoveries regarding fundamental issues
still open in the ield of language acquisition: How are language
knowledge and language acquisition represented in the brain?
(See neuroimaging and genes and language). More pre-
cisely, what is the content of the initial state and how is it biologi-
cally represented? How is development in language knowledge
either determined by biological changes or a cause of them?
here have been many neuroscientiic results regarding language
in the adult state (e.g., Friederici 2002; Binder and Price 2001;
see syntax, neurobiology of; phonetics and phonology,
neurobiology of; and semantics, neurobiology of, for
example), including multilingual language (e.g. Paradis 2000; see
bilingualism, neurobiology of). Research on brain devel-
opment has also begun to yield fundamental descriptive results
(e.g., Casey, Galvan and Hare 2005). Nevertheless, it appears that
the issue of the language-brain relationship during early develop-
ment is a terra incognita. he issue of how brain development
and cognitive development in the area of language development
co-occur in early development and over a lifetime will be one of
the key issues in the coming decades of the third millennium
(Friederici 2000, 66). Advances in the description of brain devel-
opment (e.g., Almi et al. 2007) have not yet been related precisely
to advances in language acquisition.
Not only will advances in this area require technology appli-
cable to a young and changing brain but also advances in the
interdisciplinary ield of cognitive science. hey will depend
on the development of strong linguistic theory, but also on the
development of a theory that maps the elements of linguistic the-
ory to the activation of language in the brain. At present, there is
still no theory of how an NP relates to a neuron (Marshall 1980)
or how an abstract linguistic principle like structure dependence
or a particular linguistic constraint could be represented at a
neural level. Most imaging results to date provide evidence on
the processing of language, rather than on the knowledge of, or
representations of, language per se.
METHODOLOGY. Advances in this area will also require advance-
ment on issues of methodology: Simply put, we need to under-
stand, precisely, how our behavioral methodologies relect on,
and interact with, the language processes we are attempting to
study and deine (Swinney 2000, 241). Advancement in this
area is a prerequisite to advancement in our understanding of
language processing, language knowledge, and their interaction
in language acquisition, as well as in the interpretation of brain
imaging results. Many persistent sources of disagreement in
the ield of language acquisition depend on resolution of issues
related to methodology (e.g., Crain and Wexler 1999; Lust et al.
1999), including those surrounding new infant-based methods
related to preferential looking.
LINGUISTIC THEORY AND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION. Finally, the
study of language acquisition will be advanced when linguistic
studies of the knowledge that must underlie the adult state of
language knowledge, no matter what language, are brought into
62
line more fully with studies of the language acquisition process.
(See Baker 2005 for an example of an argument for representa-
tion of this integration.) Many current disputes regarding the
fundamentals of language acquisition cannot be resolved until
disputes regarding the nature of the adult state of language
knowledge are further resolved, and until the ield of Linguistics
and Psychology are more fully integrated in the ield of Cognitive
Science.
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7 Stanley Fish. Some philosophers working in other areas of the
ELABORATING SPEECH AND WRITING:
VERBAL ART
Patrick Colm Hogan
he past half century has seen considerable interaction between
the sciences of language and the study of literature. But this
interaction has been largely unidirectional, with inluence
lowing from language science to literature. his may be seen
most clearly in the massive impact of Ferdinand de Saussure on
literary study since the 1960s. However, generative gram-
mar, cognitive linguistics, connectionism, and other
approaches have also had efects on poetics and literary theory.
In the following pages, I wish to consider the general issues of
what distinguishes verbal art as an object of study in language
science. However, before I turn to this, it is important to get a
sense of how the analysis of literature and the analysis of lan-
guage have been interconnected since the current phase of lan-
guage study began 50 years ago.
THEORIES OF LANGUAGE AND THEORIES
OF LITERATURE
When the inluence of language science on literary theory is
considered, it is helpful to begin with a division between literary
theorists who have drawn on broad methodological principles
and literary theorists who have taken up particular linguistic
theories. For example, my own work on literary universals
(Hogan 2003) does not rely on any particular account of lan-
guage universals. However, I do follow the general methodologi-
cal principles for isolating genetic and areal distinctness (though
see areal distinctness and literature), distinguishing
diferent varieties of statistically unexpected cross-cultural pat-
terns, and so on.
his type of inluence, however, is the exception rather than
the rule. Other writers have drawn on particular theories of
language, using them literally or analogically to explore liter-
ature. Taking up the structure set out in the Preface, we may
distinguish neurobiological, mentalistic, and social theories,
as well as theories that bear on acquisition and evolution.
Mentalistic theories have been the most prominent. As noted
in the Preface, within mentalistic theories, we may distinguish
intentionalist accounts of language (referring to human subjec-
tivity and intention) from representationalist accounts (treat-
ing algorithmic operations on mental symbols). Intentionalist
theories of language have been developed most prominently
within ordinary language philosophy. he ideas of Ludwig
Wittgenstein and the principles of speech-act theory have
been taken up by literary theorists, such as Mary Louise Pratt and
analytic philosophy of language, such as Donald Davidson, have
also had considerable inluence (see Dasenbrock 1993).
While intentionalist theories of language have certainly been
inluential in literary study, their use has been limited and, so
to speak, instrumental. hey tend to be taken up for particular
interpretive aims. his is often the case with literary borrowings
from linguistics and the philosophy of language. However, the
uses of representationalist theories have been diferent. In these
cases, the literary and linguistic theories have been much more
thoroughly integrated. his is the result of two factors. First, the
research areas of the linguistic and literary theories overlap.
Second, there has been collaboration between linguists and lit-
erary theorists in treating these areas.
More exactly, there are two important representationalist
schools that have had signiicant impact in literary study. One
is cognitive linguistics. Some of the most important work in
cognitive linguistics has treated metaphor. While cognitive lin-
guists were initially interested in ordinary uses of metaphor, they
quickly extended their analyses to poetic metaphor. his was
facilitated by the collaboration of a linguist, George Lakof, and a
literary theorist, Mark Turner.
A similar point may be made about Chomskyan or generative
representationalism. One part of Chomskyan theory treats pho-
nology. Patterns in sound and stress are of obvious importance
in verse. hus, certain aspects of poetic form may be included
within the framework of generative linguistic theories. Work in
this area has been facilitated by collaborations between linguists
and literary critics as well (see Fabb and Halle 2006). (heorists
have used Chomskyan generative principles as a model for other
aspects of literary theory also; see generative poetics.)
Brain-related theorization on language and literature is less
developed, in part because it is highly technical and in part
because neuroscientiic theorization about language itself is
much more recent. Turning again to the divisions in the Preface,
we may distinguish between connectionist approaches and neu-
robiological approaches proper.
here has been some work on verbal art and parallel distrib-
uted processing. For example, some writers have used connec-
tionist models to discuss creativity (see Martindale 1995) and
there has been some work on connectionism and metaphor
(e.g., Chandler 1991). hough limited, the work done in this ield
is generally well integrated into connectionist theories (i.e., it is
not solely instrumental).
Recently, there has been considerable interest in neuro-
biology and art. his work has addressed many nonlinguistic
aspects of brain function. However, some has focused specii-
cally on language. Much of this addresses hemispheric speciali-
zation, exploring distinctive features of verbal art (see Kane 2004;
poetic language, neurobiology of).
Given the general orientation of literary critics, it is unsur-
prising that social aspects of speech and language have igured
more prominently in literary study. At the level of dialogue, lit-
erary theorists have drawn on, for example, Paul Grices account
65
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
of conversational implicature, as well as various ideas of
Mikhail Bakhtin (see dialogism and heteroglossia). In
terms of larger groups, literary theory has been highly inluenced
by historian Michel Foucaults ideas about discourse and social
power (see discourse analysis [foucaultian]). hey
have also drawn on the sociological ideas of Pierre Bourdieu
(see field; market, linguistic; and habitus, linguistic)
and others. Broader social movements, such as Marxism and
feminism (see marxism and language, gender and lan-
guage, and sexuality and language) and their associated
theories, have also contributed importantly to literary discus-
sion, though not necessarily in a way that bears particularly on
language science.
he literary use of most social theories has tended to be
instrumental. However, more narrowly sociolinguistic analy-
ses of literature have been integrated into research programs
in sociolinguistics. his is largely because, here too, the areas of
research overlap, and language scientists have been involved in
research along with literary interpreters. For example, William
Labovs studies of oral narrative and the researchers of writers in
corpus linguistics have contributed to the advancement of
both sociolinguistics and literary study.
he same general point holds for the study of acquisition.
here has been valuable work done on, for example, the acqui-
sition of metaphor and the development of verbal
humor.
Finally, evolutionary theory has inspired many literary theo-
rists in recent years (see verbal art, evolution and). Its
advocates propose sweeping evolutionary explanations for a
wide range of literary phenomena. It is not clear that this pro-
gram has gone beyond the stage of conjecture. In any case, it is
general and often not tied speciically to language.
As I have suggested, much work in the preceding areas is
very signiicant. However, much of it begins, like the classical
European epic, in medias res. It does not set out a clear ield of
study for a language science of verbal art. Rather, the most suc-
cessful work tends to focus on those areas of verbal art that fall
within the purview of nonliterary research programs. Put difer-
ently, it tends to treat verbal art as a case of something else (e.g.,
cognitive metaphor or phonology). In the remainder of this essay,
then, I do not explore these particular approaches and connec-
tions in more detail. Such a review is, in any case, redundant, as
this material is covered in the following entries. Instead, I con-
sider what is distinctive about verbal art and why, as a result, it is
an important area of study for language science.
THE PARTIAL AUTONOMY OF VERBAL ART: INDIRECT
ADDRESS, SIDE PARTICIPATION, AND PLAY
Perhaps the most obvious diferentiating characteristics of verbal
art are that it is normative and rare. While all cultures have verbal
art (see Kiparsky 1987, 1956), few people in any culture produce
works of verbal art (though, of course, they do produce many con-
stituents of such works novel metaphors, allusions, wit, and so
forth). On the other hand, these diferences are not deinitive in
themselves. Rather, they seem to result from other factors.
Consider two samples of speech actions: 1) the following
excerpt from recorded speech Go away, Im cooking. Excuse vost she is doing so for my beneit. My wife knows perfectly well
66
me please, Im trying to cook. I havent got enough potatoes
(Biber, Conrad, and Reppen 2006, 69); and 2) the following
excerpt from Shakespeares Sonnet 97 How like a winter hath
my absence been/From thee, the pleasure of the leeting year!
he irst piece of speech calls to mind a particular, active con-
text. he second is removed from any such context. Perhaps,
then, works of verbal art are more separable from their imme-
diate context. As a irst approximation, we might say that verbal
art has other verbal art as its primary, distinctive context, and
the current material context has largely inhibitory force. In other
words, our understanding and evaluation of a work of verbal art
are distinguished from other sorts of understanding and evalua-
tion, irst of all, by their relation to other works of verbal art our
sense of storytelling techniques, our awareness of the larger story
cycle in which a particular narrative occurs, our expectations
about characters, and so forth.
his does not mean that verbal art is entirely insensitive to
immediate context. Our response to stories may be inlected, pri-
marily in an inhibitory way, by current material circumstances.
Consider jokes, a form of verbal art. One standard type of joke
is ethnic. he standard formats of such jokes (e.g., How many
xs does it take to screw in a light bulb?), the general function of
jokes, and so forth provide the broad, distinctive context for inter-
pretation and response. he most obvious function of the immedi-
ate, material context comes when a member of the relevant ethnic
community is present and that function is usually inhibitory.
Removal from immediate context cannot be quite the crucial
property, however. Consider, for example, the present essay.
Physically, I am alone as I am writing. Anyone who reads this
essay will be removed from the material context in which I am
writing, and that material context will be irrelevant to the readers
response and understanding. But that does not make this essay
verbal art. Perhaps, then, the most important diference between
the aforementioned speech actions is not context per se but
something closely related to context. he joke suggests that this
has something to do with the audience. Perhaps the diference is
a matter of the way the speaker addresses his or her audience.
To consider this, we might return to those cases. It is clear that
the person who says, Go away, Im cooking, is talking to his or
her audience. I, too, am addressing my readership in writing this
essay even if my idea of that readership is rather amorphous.
But the sonnet, as a socially circulated poem, is not addressing
its readership. Even if Shakespeare initially drafted the poem as
a private message to a particular person, he made the decision
that its readership would not be its addressee when he made it
a public poem.
More exactly, works of verbal art tend to be marked by indi-
rect address, rather than direct address. When considered from
the perspective of the reader rather than the author, indirect
address is roughly the same as side participation, as discussed
by Richard Gerrig and Deborah Prentice (1996). Gerrig and
Prentice distinguish several possible roles in a conversation.
Obvious roles include speaker, addressee, and overhearer. he
authors add a fourth role side participant. Suppose I am with
my wife at the grocery store. She sees von Humboldt, a colleague
of hers. he colleague says, Oh, that meeting with de Saussure,
our new provost, is on the twelfth. When she says the new pro-
Elaborating Speech and Writing
who de Saussure is. he conversation does not really concern
me. If I had been standing a few feet away, I would have merely
been an overhearer and von Humboldt would have said only,
Oh, that meeting with de Saussure is on the twelfth. But since I
was closer, I became a side participant and von Humboldt had to
take my knowledge and interest into account when speaking.
he diiculty with the account of Gerrig and Prentice is that
it is, for the most part, analogical. It suggests an area of research
and theorization. However, it does not develop this in algorith-
mic speciicity (i.e., spelling out how it will work, step by step)
in relation to the structures, processes, and contents of human
cognition. To explore the idea further, we might consider a sim-
ple model of speech (oral or written). his model begins from
the premise that language is a form of action. hus, it has the
usual components of action goals, motivations or emotions,
anticipated outcomes, and so forth.
Here, I wish to isolate two stages in the production of speech.
One is the basic generative phase in which the initial utterance
is formulated. he second is an adjustment phase, which follows
our realization of just what we are saying. Intuitively, we might
expect that awareness of speech would precede generation.
But it does not. Indeed, a moments relection suggests why. In
order to realize that I am about to say Hello, I must in some
sense have already generated the Hello, even if my lips have
not yet moved. More importantly, empirical research indicates
that human action generally involves just this sort of duality. For
example, as Henrik Walter points out, our brains initiate or proj-
ect actions approximately .5 to .7 seconds before the actions are
performed. We are able to modify or inhibit the action .3 to .5
seconds after it is projected (see Walter 2001, 24850). In keeping
with this temporal sequence, adjustment may precede, interrupt,
or follow the execution of an action.
Suppose someone asks me if I need a ride. I begin to say, No,
thanks. Duns is picking me up. I realize that the person does not
know who Duns is. I may adjust the sentence before speaking
My cousin Duns is picking me up. Or I may succeed in making
the change only after beginning the sentence Duns uh, hes
my cousin hes picking me up. When the adjustment takes
place before speaking, we might refer to it as implicit. When
it occurs in the course of speaking or after speaking, we may
refer to it as explicit. Finally, it is important to note that actions
have two broad sources. One is extrinsic, or externally derived;
the other is intrinsic, or internally derived (see MacNeilage 1998,
2256 on the neural substrates for this division).
Now we are in a position to clarify the nature of indirect
address or, more generally, indirect action. Indirect action,
as I am using the phrase, involves a relative decrease in the
extrinsic aspects of action. hus, the sources of both generation
and adjustment are more intrinsic than is commonly the case.
Moreover, when they occur, extrinsic adjustments tend to be
implicit rather than explicit.
To get a better sense of how indirect action operates, it is use-
ful to look at a paradigmatic case of such action play. Indeed,
play and side participant interaction have a great deal in com-
mon. When Jane and Jill play school, each of them must keep
in mind that the other person has a real identity outside the role
she is playing. Moreover, each of them must continually adjust
her speech and behavior to take that into account. For example,
suppose Jane is in third grade and Jill is in second grade. Jane
begins to play a third grade teacher. She starts by referring to
what the class did last week. However, she has to keep in mind
that Jill does not know what the third grade class did last week.
hus, she may have to say Now, class, you remember that last
week we began by discussing government and binding
theory. As this suggests, play is a purer case of indirection than
ordinary side participation. In the case of side participation,
our adjustments are more likely to be explicit. For example, my
wifes colleague is likely to turn to me when explaining that de
Saussure is the new provost. In play, explicit adjustments occur
when the pretense of play is disrupted. Suppose Jill accidentally
addresses Jane as Jane, then explicitly adjusts that to I mean,
Frau Doktor Wittgenstein. Jane is likely to get annoyed with this
breach in the play, perhaps responding, Jill, you should never
call your teacher by her irst name. Now you have to sit in the cor-
ner and wear the Aversive Stimulus Operant Conditioning Cap.
Following this usage, we may say that verbal art is a form of
indirect speech action in the same sense as one inds in play.
Indeed, verbal art is, in certain respects, a form of play. Note,
however, that in verbal art, in play, and elsewhere, there is not an
absolute separation between direct and indirect action. Again,
indirect action reduces extrinsic factors. It does not eliminate
them. he diference is one of degree.
Indeed, the diference between extrinsic and intrinsic is not
ine grained enough to clarify the distinctiveness of verbal art.
his becomes clear as soon as we notice that almost all writing
is predominantly intrinsic in that it is not generated or adjusted
primarily by reference to external circumstances. Moreover,
the opportunities for extensive revision in writing allow for virtu-
ally all adjustments to be implicit in the inal text. How, then, do
we distinguish ordinary writing from writing that is verbal art?
Here, too, the distinction is a matter of degree. Writing
involves diferent gradations of removal from direct address.
Take, for example, a letter. Suppose von Humboldt is not speak-
ing to my wife about a faculty meeting, but is instead writing her
a note. In an obvious way, von Humboldts address to my wife is
indirect and intrinsic. After all, my wife is not present. However,
von Humboldts address to my wife is direct in another way, for it
is oriented precisely toward her. It remains guided by her as von
Humboldt imagines her.
In order to understand how this works, and how it bears on
verbal art, we need to have a clearer understanding of imagina-
tion and action. When I begin to act, I tacitly project or imagine
possible outcomes for my action. For example, when I see a car
coming toward me, I run to the curb. his is bound up with a tacit
imagination of where I should be in order to fulill my purpose
of not being run over. More exactly, we may understand imagi-
nation, like speech, as involving two (continuously interacting)
processes. One generates possible scenarios. he other makes
adjustments. I project running to the curb, but then notice a man-
hole in my path. his leads me to adjust my imagination of the
precise trajectory. he nature of the generation and the nature of
the adjustment will change, depending on the guiding purposes
of the action. In some cases of speech action, the purpose involves
a real addressee. In some cases, it does not. In a face-to-face dia-
logue, a speaker will continually generate, adjust, and regener-
ate what he or she is saying in part due to the addressees actual
67
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
response. In writing a letter, a writer will be guided by his or her
tacit imagination of the addressee. hough that imagination is not
adjusted by reference to actual responses, it nonetheless serves as
a guide for the generation of the speech. Crucially, this imagined
addressee maintains his or her external, independent existence
for the speaker. As such, that addressee is, so to speak, a pseudo-
extrinsic guide to the generation of the speech.
Here, then, we may adjust our account of indirect address
in verbal art. Verbal art minimizes both extrinsic and pseu-
doextrinsic elements in the production and adjustment of
speech and in the imaginations that are connected with speech.
Moreover, it minimizes explicit markers of adjustments for side
participants.
We began with the idea that verbal art is relatively indepen-
dent of direct, material context. hat context involves authors
and readers. In this connection, we have been considering
the relation between the author and readers as one of indirect
address. he other crucial element of material context is, of
course, reference. Indeed, verbal art, as commonly understood,
has an even more obvious relation to reference than to address,
for verbal art is paradigmatically conceived of as iction. As such,
it has an unusual degree of referential autonomy. In other words,
it tends to be characterized by indirect reference as well as indi-
rect address. his, too, is illustrated most clearly in play. Suppose
Jane and Jill are playing telephone. Jane picks up a banana, puts
it up to the side of her face, then holds it out to Jill and says, Its
for you. In saying it, she is not referring to a banana. She is
referring to a telephone.
In sum, verbal art is not just partially autonomous with
respect to immediate circumstances. It is largely independent of
the extrinsic and pseudoextrinsic aspects of the generation and
adjustment of speech action and associated imagination. his is
true with respect to both address and reference.
ART AND ACTION: THE PURPOSES OF VERBAL ART
In discussing action-related imagination, we noted that the pre-
cise nature of imagination varies according to the purposes of the
action. Generally speaking, the goals of physical action concern
the alteration of some situation. To a great extent, speech actions
have the same function. One crucial diference between speech
actions and bodily actions is that speech actions have their efects
only through minds. However much I plead with the packet of
noodles, they wont turn themselves into pad thai. But, if I sweetly
ask someone to make the noodles into pad thai, perhaps that
person will do so. Speech actions, then, tend to aim at altering
the world by altering peoples actions. In order to alter peoples
actions, they aim at altering two things irst, the way those peo-
ple understand the world and, second, the way they feel about it,
including the way they feel about the speaker himself or herself.
More exactly, we may distinguish two psychological pur-
poses of speech actions. hese are informational and emotional.
Informational purposes may be further divided into pragmatic
and regulative. Pragmatic information concerns factual, direc-
tional, or other information that facilitates our pursuit of goals.
Regulative information concerns broad ethical, prudential, or
related principles, which tend to serve an adjusting function.
For example, feeling hungry, I form the goal of eating something.
68
his combines with pragmatic information about the presence of
cookies in the cookie jar to initiate the action of getting a cookie
out of the cookie jar. However, before I reach for the cookie jar,
prudential information stops me as I recall the deleterious efects
that cookies are likely to have on my lithe and shapely form.
For imaginations or actions to result from pragmatic infor-
mation, there must be some motivation present as well. In other
words, I must have some emotion. Emotion is what leads us to
act, whether the action is speech or larger bodily movement. It is
also what leads us to refrain from acting. We may divide emotions
into two sorts, depending on their function in action sequences.
he irst might be called the initiating emotion. An initiating
emotion is any emotion that one feels in current circumstances
and that impels one to act. Action here includes the initiation of
movement and the initiation of imagination. We imagine various
outcomes of our actions. For example, feeling hungry, I swiftly
and unrelectively imagine eating a cookie. But my imagination
does not stop there. I may imagine my wife seeing me with the
crescent of cookie in my hand and the telltale crumbs sticking to
my lips, then chastising me, reminding me of the doctors warn-
ings, and explaining once again that the cookies are for my nieces
and nephew. Or I may suddenly see an image of myself with wob-
bly love-handles. In each case, I experience what might be called
a hypothetical emotion. A hypothetical emotion is a feeling that
I experience in the course of imagining the possible trajectories
of my action. While initiating emotions give rise to (or generate)
the action sequence initially, hypothetical emotions qualify (or
adjust) that action sequence. Hypothetical emotions may inten-
sify the initiating emotion; they may inhibit it; they may respecify
the precise goals of the action sequence (e.g., from eating cook-
ies to eating carrots), or they may afect the precise means that I
adopt (e.g., checking that my wife is not around).
From the preceding example, it may seem that hypothetical
emotions are all egocentric. However, hypothetical emotions
may also be empathic. For example, I may forego my plan to eat
cookies because I imagine my tiny nephews disappointed face
when he reaches into the empty jar. Empathic hypothetical emo-
tions may have the same qualifying efects on initiating emotions
and actions as do egocentric hypothetical emotions.
Hypothetical emotions are critical for all types of action,
including verbal action. Consider again the case where von
Humboldt explains that de Saussure is the new provost. In doing
this, von Humboldt tacitly imagines the conversation from my
perspective and, sensing that I may not follow and, more impor-
tantly, that I might feel left out she provides the information.
If I wish to alter someones emotions through speech, I will
appeal primarily to initiating emotions. hus, the alteration of
initiating emotions is usually a central purpose of speech action.
However, certain sorts of hypothetical emotions are important
as well. For example, when requesting a favor, I may foreground
how grateful I will be. One purpose is to encourage my addressee
to imagine my gratitude and experience the related hypothetical
emotion (roughly, feeling appreciated).
In sum, ordinary speech actions involve an informational
aim and an emotional aim, usually coordinated to produce some
change in the world, currently or at some time in the future. he
informational aim involves both pragmatic and regulatory com-
ponents, though in ordinary speech, the pragmatic component
Elaborating Speech and Writing
is probably dominant. he emotional aim involves both initiat-
ing and hypothetical emotions. In ordinary speech, the initiating
emotion is probably dominant.
In being removed from direct address and direct reference,
works of verbal art commonly do not have a goal of directly alter-
ing particular material conditions. Nonetheless, verbal art is ani-
mated by the same two psychological goals that animate other
forms of speech action. Verbal art, too, has an informational
component and an emotional component. Indeed, cross-cultur-
ally, aestheticians and critics tend to see verbal art as successful
insofar as it afects us emotionally and insofar as it develops sig-
niicant ideas or themes.
he emphasis in verbal art, however, tends to be diferent
from that of other speech actions in both cases. Speciically, ver-
bal art commonly does not stress pragmatic aspects of informa-
tion. Certainly, there are, for example, political works that set
out to give the audience pragmatic information. However, this
is not the general tendency of verbal art. Rather, verbal art tends
to develop regulative concerns. hese regulative concerns make
their appearance in literary themes. When we interpret a work
and seek to understand its point, we are commonly looking
for a theme, which is to say, some sort of regulative informa-
tion. Moreover, in terms of emotion, verbal art tends to inspire
not initiating emotions but hypothetical emotions particularly
empathic hypothetical emotions.
THE MAXIMIZATION OF RELEVANCE
Up to this point, I have been speaking of the content of speech
action generally and verbal art in particular. But the form of ver-
bal art is widely seen as crucial, perhaps its deinitive feature. he
content/form division is somewhat too crude to form the basis
for a sustained analysis of verbal art. However, it does point to
an important aspect of verbal art, and an important diferentiat-
ing tendency the partial autonomy and patterning of distinct
linguistic levels in verbal art.
All linguistic levels phonology, morphology, syn-
tax, and so forth are, of course, relevant to speech actions of
all types. However, most components are, in most cases, only
instrumentally relevant. Morphology is relevant for communi-
cating whether I want one cookie or two cookies. But it has no
separate function. Put diferently, the speciication of phonology,
morphology, and syntax is a sort of by-product of my pragmatic
aims. I want to get two cookies. In English, I signal that I want
two cookies rather than one by using the word two, putting
that word before cookie, adding s to cookie, and so forth. ers. For example, it is a fundamental principle of conversation
I do not set out to do anything with phonology, morphology, or
syntax. One might even argue that I do not set out to do anything
special with semantics or with discourse principles. I just run
my language processors to achieve the active goal. Features of
phonology and so forth are relevant to my action only insofar
as my speech processor makes them relevant. hey have, in this
way, minimal relevance.
A number of literary theorists, prominently the Russian
Formalists, have stressed that verbal art foregrounds its lan-
guage (see foregrounding). In cognitive terms, we might say
that verbal art tends to enhance linguistic patterns to the point
where they are likely to be encoded by readers (i.e., perceived
and integrated with other information; see encoding) and
may even draw attentional focus. his occurs most obviously
in the phonetic/phonological aspect of language. Poets pattern
stress beyond what occurs spontaneously. hey organize vowel
sounds and initial consonants to produce assonance and allit-
eration. he point is less clear in morphology, though corpus
linguistic studies have pointed to diferential tendencies (see
Biber, Conrad, and Reppen 2006, 5865)
Syntax is a complex and thus particularly interesting case.
Verbal art does undoubtedly tend to pattern syntactic usage in
encodable ways. But the poetic patterns in these cases tend to
be intensiications of the ways in which ordinary speech actions
pattern syntax. For example, in ordinary speech, we have some
tendency to use parallel syntactic structures. In poetry, we are
more likely to use these. A more obtrusive foregrounding of syn-
tax occurs when we violate expectations of patterning in verbal
art. Such violation is the other primary way in which verbal art
treats linguistic levels more autonomously. In the case of syn-
tax, there are several ways in which this may occur. One obvious
way is through disjoining syntactic units and line units, such that
line breaks do not coincide with syntactic breaks (see Tsur 2006,
14652). Another is by rejecting standard principles of word
order.
Verbal art also manifests distinctive tendencies in semantics.
hese are found most obviously in lexical preferences and meta-
phor. In the case of lexical preferences, verbal art may draw on
rarer or more unexpected words. Perhaps more importantly, it
may pattern the suggestions and associations of terms. In ordi-
nary speech, we tend to concern ourselves with the associative
resonance of a term only in extreme cases (e.g., when its con-
notations may be ofensive to a particular addressee). In verbal
art, however, the writer is much more likely to organize his or her
lexical choices so that the suggestions of the terms are consistent
(e.g., in emotional valence; see dhvani and rasa).
As to metaphor, our use of tropes in ordinary speech is surpris-
ingly constrained. here are aspects of everyday metaphor that
are creative. However, on the whole, we follow well-worn paths.
Lakof and Turner have argued that a great deal of literary meta-
phor draws on the same broad structures as ordinary speech.
However, literary metaphors extend, elaborate, and combine
these structures in surprising ways (see poetic metaphor).
Finally, we ind parallel tendencies in discourse practices.
Consider the principles of conversation articulated by Grice
(see cooperative principle). hese principles form a set of
practical conditions for any sort of interaction between speak-
that one should not say things that are irrelevant to the con-
versation. Grice points out, however, that one may lout these
principles, violating them in gross and obvious ways. Flouting a
principle of conversation gives rise to interpretation. Jones and
Smith are discussing who should be hired as the new assistant
professor in the Hermeneutics of Suspicion. Jones says, heres
a new applicant today Heidegger. What do you think of him?
Smith replies, Nice penmanship. Since penmanship is clearly
irrelevant to the topic, Smith may be said to be louting the prin-
ciple of relevance. Jones is likely to interpret Smiths comment
as indicating a dim view of Heideggers qualiications. Literary
works often lout conversational principles.
69
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
All these points indicate signiicant diferences between ver-
bal art and other sorts of speech action. Again, these diferences
do not create a hard-and-fast division between verbal art and
all other types of speech. here is a continuum here, with many
parameters and degrees of variation. Nonetheless, there is a clear
diferential tendency.
he diferences we have just been considering are a matter
of the various linguistic levels of a literary text bearing autono-
mously or separately on our understanding and experience of
the work. his is irst of all and most obviously a matter of creat-
ing patterns. However, given the violations of syntactic rules and
the louting of conversational principles, it seems clear that ver-
bal art does not simply create extra patterns on top of the usual,
instrumental patterns produced by ordinary language pro-
cesses. It also violates patterns of ordinary language processes.
Most importantly, in both cases, the result renders the linguis-
tic level in some way directly (rather than just instrumentally)
relevant to our experience of the work. hus, it maximizes the
relevance of language features.
But in what way are these features relevant? As with any sort
of speech action, relevance is, irst of all, relevance to the aims of
the action. Again, the primary aims of verbal art are thematic and
emotional. hus, the maximization of relevance is the thematic
or emotional use of (ordinarily unexpected) noninstrumental
patterns or violations of (ordinarily expected) instrumental
patterns from diferent linguistic levels.
In touching on these issues, literary critics have tended to
emphasize thematic relevance. Some writers have seen patterns
and violations of patterns in phonology, morphology, and syntax
as consequential for interpretation. It is probably true that such
formal features are thematically interpretable in some cases.
However, it seems doubtful that such features are generally rele-
vant to interpretation. In contrast, extended patterns or violations
in semantics and pragmatics are almost always interpretively
relevant. In these aspects, the main diference between verbal art
and other forms of speech action is where the interpretive pro-
cess ends. We will consider this issue later.
If anything, the maximization of relevance applies more fully
to the communication of emotion than to the communication of
themes. here are two types of afective response that bear impor-
tantly on verbal art, and thus on the maximization of relevance. We
might refer to the irst as pre-emotional and the second as speciic
emotional. Pre-emotional efects are efects of interest. Interest is
pre-emotional in two senses. First, it is often an initial stage in an
emotion episode. Second, it is a component of all speciic emo-
tions after those emotions have been activated. Speciic emotions
are simply our ordinary feelings sorrow, joy, disgust, and so on.
More exactly, interest is the activation of our attention system.
hat activation occurs whenever we experience something new
or unexpected (see Frijda 1986, 2723, 318, 325, 386). Such acti-
vation prepares us for events that have emotional signiicance.
It directs our attention to aspects of the environment or our own
bodies that may be emotion triggers. Once a speciic emotion is
activated, that emotion system reactivates our attention system,
focusing it on properties relevant to that emotion in particular.
For example, suppose I am out in the woods and hear something
move. hat arouses my attention. I carefully listen and look. If
I see a friend at a distance, I feel some joy. hat joy keeps my
70
attention on the friend and simultaneously directs my attention
to ways in which I can reach him. If I see some sort of animal, I
feel fear. hat fear keeps my attention on the animal and simulta-
neously directs my attention to ways that I can escape.
he arousal of interest is obviously crucial to literary experi-
ence. It is also important to other speech actions. However, in
nonliterary cases, a great deal of the interest comes from the
direct relation between the people involved (thus, the speaker
and addressee), as well as the practical situation referenced in
the speech action. In other words, a great deal comes from direct
address and direct reference, both of which are greatly inhibited
in verbal art. Nonetheless, verbal art has other means of produc-
ing interest. We have just been discussing two such means the
multiplication of non-normal patterns and violations of normal
or expected patterns at various linguistic levels. Both are precisely
the sorts of deviation from normalcy that produce interest.
Speciic emotional efects are fostered most obviously by
semantics and pragmatics. For example, a great deal of our
emotional response to verbal art seems to be bound up with the
patterning of associative networks that spread out from lexical
items (see Oatley 2002 and suggestion structure). he
extension and elaboration of metaphorical structures are clearly
consequential in this regard, particularly as the concreteness
of metaphors often enhances associations with concrete expe-
riential memories, including emotional memories. he speciic
emotional impact of phonological, morphological, and syntactic
features is less obvious, but no less real, at least in some cases.
For example, the interplay between nonlinguistic organization
(e.g., in line divisions) and linguistic organization (e.g., in sen-
tence divisions) may serve to convey a sense of a speakers voice
and, along with this, an emotional tone.
hus, once more, we see both continuity and diference
between verbal art and other sorts of speech action. Most speech
actions involve a minimal, incidental patterning of linguistic lev-
els. In contrast, the general tendency of literary art is toward the
maximization of the relevance of diferent linguistic levels. his
relevance is a function of the main purposes of the text, thematic
and emotional. Again, this need not be relevance that increases
informational content. Indeed, I suspect that it most often is not.
It need not even contribute to the speciic emotions of the text.
It may be a matter of enhancing interest or of qualifying the spe-
ciic emotions fostered by the text. In each case, though, there is
some partially autonomous variation in the organization of the
linguistic level in question, through the addition of unexpected
patterning, through the violation of expected patterning, or both.
ON INTERPRETATION AND THE USES OF TEXTS
In the preceding section, I referred briely to the point at which
interpretation ends. When verbal art is considered in relation to
interpretation, the irst thing to remark is that verbal art is notori-
ous for its hermeneutic promiscuity (see philology and her-
meneutics). It is widely seen as almost ininitely interpretable.
At one level, this is surprising. Novels, for example, are devel-
oped in great detail and with considerable elaboration of the
characters attitudes and actions. It might seem that this would
constrain interpretation relative to the much vaguer and more
elliptical speech actions of ordinary life. But that is not generally
Elaborating Speech and Writing
believed to be the case. his suggests that the degree of interpret-
ability of a text is not a function of its elaboration. Rather, inter-
pretability appears to be a function of a texts distance from direct
address and direct reference to practical conditions, particularly
as these are connected with pragmatic information. Put difer-
ently, the limits of interpretation are not so much a matter of
the words themselves. hey are, irst of all, a matter of action.
Here as elsewhere, action is animated by the agents goals,
emotions, expectations, and so forth. In ordinary life, then, we
usually understand validity in interpretation as a function of
the speakers intention (see intentionality). More techni-
cally, our prototype of interpretive validity almost certainly
includes the intention of the speaker or author as a critical norm.
(he point is related to the argument of Steven Knapp and Walter
Benn Michaels that we invariably interpret for speakers inten-
tion, though it is not identical, for there are cases where we do
not adhere to this prototype and thus do not interpret for the
speakers intention.) However, intention is an abstract criterion.
We do not have access to speakers intentions. So even interpret-
ing for intention, we need an operational criterion for validity
as well. hat is where our own action enters. Action commonly
guides our sense of when we have gotten an interpretation right.
At the dinner table, someone says, Could you pass the that? I
am not sure what he means by that. Unable to read his mind, I
engage in an action either a bodily action (passing the beans) or
a speech action (asking if he meant the beans). When I pass the
beans, he knows that I have understood his intention. When he
accepts the beans, I infer that I understood his intention.
he interpretation of verbal art is as removed from such prac-
tical action as possible. hus, our ordinary operational criterion
is rendered inefective. he only obvious practical behaviors
relating to literary interpretation are professional for example,
the acceptance or rejection of articles in academic journals.
(he point is codiied in Fishs contention that validity in liter-
ary interpretation is deined by the norms of interpretive
communities.)
A number of further problems for intentional inference arise
in connection with this removal of literary interpretation from
practical action. First, many texts are read or performed, and
thus interpreted, far from their authors and even after their
authors are dead. If we take a strict intentionalist view of valid-
ity, then the author is the only one who has the authority to
determine that a given action does indeed satisfy an operational
criterion. Suppose Jones leaves instructions for his funeral. he
funeral director follows them as well as she can. But Jones is not
around to conirm that she got things right. Obviously, there
are things that she might do to ascertain Joness intention. For
example, she might talk to Joness friends and relatives or she
might try to learn something about Joness religion and ethnic
background. hese are the sorts of concerns that lead writers
such as Hans-Georg Gadamer to stress tradition as a crucial
guide to interpretation.
A second problem is more distinctively connected with ver-
bal art per se. Both informational and afective patterns are
more complex in verbal art than in most other speech actions.
For example, a literary work communicates thematically rel-
evant information by maximizing the relevance of virtually
every semantic and discursive detail in the text. If I am meeting
someone for the irst time, I may describe my outit so that he
or she can recognize me. It has pragmatic consequences. But
if an author describes a characters outit, that description may
bear on our understanding of the characters emotions, class
status, or religious beliefs. hose features may in turn bear on
our broader understanding of human relations, class conlict,
or religious practice as portrayed in the work. In short, ordi-
narily incidental details may have thematic (thus regulative)
consequences.
Moreover, literary narratives tend to develop subtle and vari-
able ainities and ambivalences (see Hogan 2003, 12251). In
some cases, the development of these ainities actually runs con-
trary to the authors self-conscious sense of his or her own aims.
he most famous case may be Miltons portrayal of Satan. Satan
has often been seen as the most engaging igure in Paradise Lost,
but this was certainly not Miltons self-conscious intention.
his is part of a larger point that intention is not a single, uni-
ied operation. here are diferent sorts of intention with diferent
objects, constraints, and processes. Perhaps the most important
form of intention for verbal art is what we might call aestheti-
cal intent (see Hogan 1996, 16393). he aesthetical intent of an
author is to produce a work that has the right sort of experiential
efect. his right efect is not something that the author is likely
to be able to articulate separately from the work itself. It is simply
what he or she experiences when he or she feels that the work
is now complete. In composing the work, the author generates
and adjusts the text, testing the outcome against his or her own
response. he authors sense that the work is complete need not
mean that the work conforms to the authors self-conscious atti-
tudes and commitments.
One way of explaining aesthetical intent is that the author
adopts an aesthetical attitude toward the work, or a dhvani atti-
tude, as Anand Amaladass put it. his is a matter of broaden-
ing ones attention to the work, expanding ones encoding of the
work, to include its multiple resonances and emotive patterns.
In short, it involves approaching the text as a work in which dif-
ferent linguistic levels are maximally relevant. Correlatively, it
involves approaching the text as a work that is removed from
constraints of direct reference or address, constraints that ordi-
narily orient our judgment of informational relevance and our
construal of emotional bearing. When approaching a work as
verbal art, readers and audience members adopt this attitude as
well to varying degrees.
he mention of readers approaches to texts brings us to a
inal complication. We have been considering ways in which
works produced as verbal art tend to be diferent from other
speech actions. But the nature of a given text is not determined
solely by authorial intent. Despite our prototypical concern for
authorial intent, we are free to approach works of verbal art in
pragmatic ways and to approach other works with an aesthetical
attitude. As writers in cultural studies have stressed, practices of
literary analysis may be applied to a wide range of texts that were
not initially intended to be literary. In short, literariness may
be deined by interpretation or reception no less than it may be
deined by production; it may be deined by readers no less than
by authors. In this way, the usual characteristics of verbal art may
be extended to other texts or withdrawn from texts (as when a
novel is studied for its authors psychology).
71
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
On the other hand, the expansion of hermeneutic liberality
results from the existence of verbal art. Interpretive autonomy
arises in the irst place through the removal of speech action
from direct address and direct reference, along with the attenu-
ation of pragmatic information and initiating emotion. In this
way, interpretive practices that bridge literary and nonliterary
speech actions are themselves a distinctive product of literary
speech action.
SHAKESPEAREAN INDIRECTION
As the preceding discussions have been rather abstract, it is
valuable to end with a more developed example. Consider
Shakespeares Sonnet 97:
How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the leeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old Decembers bareness every where!
And yet this time removed was summers time,
he teeming autumn big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,
Like widowed wombs after their lords decease:
Yet this abundant issue seemd to me
But hope of orphans, and unfathered fruit,
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And thou away, the very birds are mute;
Or if they sing, tis with so dull a cheer
hat leaves look pale, dreading the winters near.
he poem presents a straightforward instance of indirect
address. here is, of course, a narratee in the poem, an explicit
thee. But the poem only plays at addressing this thee. he
point is clear, for example, when the reader is brought in as a side
participant with the otherwise superluous information, this
time removed was summers time. If there were a deining, mate-
rial context and if there were direct address in this speech action,
the speaker would not need to explain that the separation had
occurred over the summer. he beloved would surely remember
this. he point is reinforced more subtly by the shifts in spatial ori-
entation in the poem (what some writers see as particular types of
deixis [see Stockwell 2002, 4157]). hese may be understood as a
matter of indirect reference. If this speech action were grounded
in a particular situation, then there would almost certainly be
some ixed reference point, a speciic home that would deine
which of the lovers was stationary and which had departed. But
the poem is contradictory on this score. In the opening lines,
the speaker refers to my absence /From thee and his time
removed. But toward the end of the poem, he reverses the spatial
orientation and related direction of movement. Now, the beloved
is away and summer will wait for her return.
he introduction of summer in this context suggests some-
thing else. he poet is not only like little Jane, covertly explaining
what the third graders did in their last class. He may also be like
Jane in referring to a telephone by way of a banana. Put difer-
ently, the indirectness of both address and reference make the
reference of summer itself uncertain. Without a context, read-
ers are free to associate summer tacitly with anything that can,
72
in play, be summer (e.g., a time of professional success for the
speaker). In short, summer becomes a metaphor.
he mention of metaphors points us toward the maximization
of relevance. However, before going on to this, it is important to
remark on some other contextual features of the poem, contex-
tual features that are themselves bound up with metaphor. As I
indicated earlier, the entire tradition of poetry forms an implicit
context for any given poem (a point stressed by T. S. Eliot). One
obvious way in which Shakespeare suggests a context of verbal
art is in his use of seasonal imagery. Winter is a standard literary
image of romantic separation. his is, of course, related to the
conceptual metaphor, discussed by Lakof and others: LIFE
IS A YEAR. As Lakof and Turner explain, there are several pro-
cesses poets use to create novel instances of these schemas.
Shakespeare is clearly creating such a novel instance when he
maps the source metaphor of winter onto the target, summer
(see source and target). Moreover, in making summer into
(metaphorical) winter, he is intensifying the efect of the meta-
phor by contrast. But he does not say summer only. He expands
the target time to summer and autumn. In a way, this is pecu-
liar. he contrast would have been more obviously enhanced
by making the target time period spring and summer. Why does
Shakespeare choose autumn? here are several reasons. Two
are closely interrelated. First, he wishes to intensify the tacit
emplotment of the speakers isolation. hat speaker is now
anticipating the very worst, for if summer was like winter, how
devastating will winter be? Second, he wishes to hold out hope
for something beyond that period of terrible loneliness spring.
hat hope is possible only through an indirect reference to the
broader, literary context in which spring is the season when the
lovers are inally reunited.
he indirection of the poem makes it unlikely that it will
have any pragmatic information as its aim. Pragmatic informa-
tion most often involves reference to particular situations, or to
forms of general knowledge. Of course, there is not a strict divi-
sion between general pragmatic knowledge and, say, prudential
regulatory information. But to the degree that the poem com-
municates thematic points, those points do incline toward pru-
dential regulatory information. For example, suppose summer
is metaphorical (i.e., winter is metaphorical for summer,
which is itself metaphorical for, say, professional success). hen
the poem suggests that the enjoyment of external conditions
(e.g., professional success) is lost when it cannot be shared a
point with clear regulatory consequences.
he indirection of the poem also indicates that it is unlikely
to be aimed at the elicitation of initiating emotions. his can be
seen if we contrast it with a similar letter, sent by the poet to his
beloved. Such a letter could be aimed at convincing the beloved
to return home. he poem, in contrast, does not have any such
initiating emotional aim. Its emotional aim is, rather, conined to
provoking empathic hypothetical emotions.
he maximization of relevance contributes to the poems
achievement of its primary aims. As usual, this maximization is
most obvious at the phonological level. Consider only the irst
two lines. he poem is in iambic pentameter. However, when
spoken naturally, these lines do not follow the meter. Indeed,
there is considerable tension between spontaneous stress
Elaborating Speech and Writing
patterns and the meter. One natural way of speaking the lines
would be as follows:
Hw lke wntr hth m bsnce ben
Frm the, th plasre f th letng yar!
here are several things one might remark on here. First, in
natural speech, the lines are in a somewhat irregular tetram-
eter. However, this irregularity is not unpatterned. here is a
striking rhythmic motif that occurs in the middle of both lines.
he sequences lke wntr hth m bsnce and the, th properties and relations of address, reference, informational
plasre f th letng have the same stress pattern. his is not structure and orientation, and type and force of emotional
monotonous because the lines also manifest three variations.
First, a caesura appears in only one of the sequences. Second,
the irst word of the line changes from stressed to unstressed.
Finally, the last word changes from unstressed to stressed. hus
we ind novelty, therefore the triggering of at least mild interest,
at two levels.
In addition, there are interpretive and speciic emotional con-
sequences. he disjunction of syntactic and verse breaks may help
to give the poem a sense of voice. Speciically, it suggests to me a
speaker who pauses before saying what is most painful about his
absence. Being away from home means that one is absent from
many things. But, here, there is only one crucial attachment. he
line break imitates the emotion that so often interrupts ones
speech when such occasions are real and directly addressed.
here may also be efects of tempo in these lines. Hw lke
wntr is heavy with accents and thus slower than th letng
yar. his provides an instance of sound echoing sense. It also
suggests an interpretive point time lies in the sense that life
passes quickly, leaving us little time together; but, being apart, we
experience each moment of that leeting time as a slow drag.
We would have many further points to interpret if we were
to consider lexical choice, metaphorical patterning, the louting
of conversational principles, and so forth. Each of these directs
us toward the endless interpretability of verbal art. As in other
works, there is no clear operational criterion that would tell us
that we have reached the end of our interpretation or that our
interpretation is correct. Of course, as Fish indicates, there are
professional constraints on our judgments in these areas. A
psychoanalytic critic might discuss how the poet seems to shift
between the position of a separated lover and that of an orphan,
suggesting an oedipal relation to the beloved. A writer in queer
theory might stress that the poet puts his beloved in the position
of the (deceased) father, not the mother, thus suggesting a male
beloved.
his brings us back to interpretation and reception. Again, we
are always free to take indirect address and put it into a more
directly referential context. For example, we may seek to read
through the sonnets to Shakespeares own life and sexual feel-
ings. Indeed, as Walter Ong pointed out many years ago, we have
a strong tendency to do just that, placing the decontextualized
voice of the poem back in a human body at a particular place in a
particular time. hat sense of concrete human embodiment is
itself no doubt a crucial part not only of literary response but also
of all human communication.
he preceding point suggests once again the distinctive-
ness of verbal art and its continuity with other speech actions.
Verbal art both fosters the proliferation of interpretations
and sharpens our sense of the human embodiment that lim-
its those interpretations. We ind the same tension between
sameness and diference in all the characteristics we have con-
sidered. Although I have been stressing diference, the same-
ness is no less consequential. For example, in the context of
an encyclopedia of language sciences, it is important that in
studying verbal art, we are likely to isolate properties and rela-
tions in language that we might otherwise have passed over
consequence or function. In short, verbal art is a critical ele-
ment of human life. As such, it is a critical object of study in its
own right. It is also a crucial part of human speech action. As
such it is a crucial, if sometimes neglected, part of the language
sciences as well.
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Amaladass, Anand. 1984. Philosophical Implications of Dhvani:
Experience of Symbol Language in Indian Aesthetics. Vienna: De Nobili
Research Library.
Biber, Douglas, Susan Conrad, and Randi Reppen. 2006.
Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chandler, Steven. 1991. Metaphor comprehension: A connection-
ist approach to implications for the mental lexicon. Metaphor and
Symbolic Activity 6.4: 22758.
Dasenbrock, Reed Way, ed. 1993. Literary heory After Davidson.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Eliot, T. S. 2001. Tradition and the individual talent. In he Norton
Anthology of heory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch, 10928. New
York: W. W. Norton.
Fabb, Nigel, and Morris Halle. 2006. Metrical complexity in Christina
Rossettis verse. College Literature 33.2: 91114.
Fish, Stanley. 1980. Is here a Text in his Class? he Authority of
Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Frijda, Nico. 1986. he Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989. Truth and Method. 2d ed. Trans. Joel
Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall. New York: Crossroad.
Gerrig, Richard, and Deborah Prentice. 1996. Notes on audience
response. In Post-heory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David
Bordwell and Nol Carroll, 388403. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press.
Grice, Paul. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Hogan, Patrick Colm. 1996. On Interpretation: Meaning and Inference
in Law, Psychoanalysis, and Literature. Athens: University of Georgia
Press.
. 2003. he Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human
Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jakobson, Roman. 1987. Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska
and Stephen Rudy. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Kane, Julie. 2004. Poetry as right-hemispheric language. Journal of
Consciousness Studies 11.5/6: 2159.
Kiparsky, Paul. 1987. On theory and interpretation. In he Linguistics
of Writing: Arguments Between Language and Literature, ed. Nigel
Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant, and Colin MacCabe, 18598.
New York: Methuen.
73
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
Knapp, Steven, and Walter Benn Michaels. 1985. Against theory. In
Against heory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism, ed. W. J. T.
Mitchell, 1130. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Labov, William. 1972. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black
English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Lakof, George, and Mark Turner. 1989. More han Cool Reason: A Field
Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
MacNeilage, Peter. 1998. Evolution of the mechanism of language
output: Comparative neurobiology of vocal and manual commu-
nication. In Approaches to the Evolution of Language: Social and
Cognitive Bases, ed. James Hurford, Michael Studdert-Kennedy, and
Chris Knight, 22241. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Martindale, Colin. 1995. Creativity and connectionism. In he Creative
Cognition Approach, ed. Steven Smith, homas Ward, and Ronald
Finke, 24968. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Oatley, Keith. 2002. Emotions and the story worlds of iction. In Narrative
Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations, ed. Melanie Green, Jefrey
Strange, and Timothy Brock, 3969. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
74
Ong, Walter J., S.J. he jinnee in the well wrought urn. In he
Barbarian Within and Other Fugitive Essays and Studies, 1525. New
York: Macmillan.
Pratt, Mary Louise. 1977. Toward a Speech Act heory of Literary Discourse.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Shakespeare, William. 2006. he Sonnets, ed. G. Blakemore Evans.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stockwell, Peter. 2002. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction.
London: Routledge.
Tsur, Reuven. 2006. Kubla Khan: Poetic Structure, Hypnotic Quality and
Cognitive Style A Study in Mental, Vocal and Critical Performance.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Walter, Henrik. 2001. Neurophilosophy of Free Will: From Libertarian
Illusions to a Concept of Natural Autonomy. Trans. Cynthia Klohr.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
THE CAMBRIDGE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF

THE LANGUAGE SCIENCES

Abduction
A
ABDUCTION
Abduction is a form of reasoning irst explicated by the nine-
teenth-century philosopher C. S. Peirce. he central concept
he wishes to introduce is that of generating new hypotheses to
explain observed phenomena partly by guesswork or specu-
lation. In his early work, Peirce tried to explain abductive rea-
soning, as distinct from deductive and inductive reasoning, by
reference to syllogistic form. For instance, the following schema
is an example of deductive reasoning:
All the beans in the bag are white
hese beans came from this bag
herefore, these beans are white
his is distinct from inductive reasoning which, Peirce argues,
follows this pattern:
hese beans came from this bag
hese beans are white
herefore, all the beans in this bag are white
And both these forms are distinct from abductive reasoning
which, Peirce argues, follows this pattern:
hese beans are white
All the beans in this bag are white
herefore, the beans came from this bag
In later work, however, Peirce felt that trying to it abduc-
tive reasoning into such a strict syllogistic form was restric-
tive, and instead he opted for the following schema to explain
abduction:
he surprising fact C is observed
But if A were true, C would be a matter of course
Hence, there is a reason to suspect that A is true.
(Peirce 1935, 189)
For example, suppose I observe that my car will not start.
One good explanation for this would be that it is out of fuel.
Consequently, it seems that we have a good reason to think that
my cars refusal to start is due to its being out of fuel. Of course,
we may very quickly discover that my car has plenty of fuel,
and a diferent hypothesis must be adopted, but Peirce always
intended that abductive reasoning was fallible and conjectural,
awaiting conirmation from other testing.
Peirces account of abduction has been widely adopted in
the philosophy of science, but it has also been of some interest
to linguists. One particularly prominent use of abduction has
been in historical linguistics for explaining language
change (see, for instance, Anderson 1973). he systematic
features of a language that govern the use of one generation
are opaque to the following generation as they acquire that lan-
guage the only access is through language output. It appears,
then, that following generations must use abductive inferences
to access the rules of language before applying those rules to
new cases. And, of course, since abduction is fallible, the rules
Absolute and Statistical Universals
and system of language that following generations infer often
difer from the system earlier generations are using. his often
results in semantic change, syntactic change, and sound
change.
Albert Atkin
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Anderson, Henning. 1973. Abductive and deductive change. Language
49: 76593.
Burks, Arthur. 1946. Peirces theory of abduction. Philosophy of Science
13: 3016.
McMahon, April. 1994. Understanding Language Change.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Peirce, C. S. 1935. he Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce. Vol. 5.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
ABSOLUTE AND STATISTICAL UNIVERSALS
Language universals are statements that are true of all lan-
guages; for example, all languages have stop consonants. But
beneath this simple deinition lurks deep ambiguity, and this
triggers misunderstanding in both interdisciplinary discourse
and within linguistics itself. A core dimension of the ambiguity
is captured by the opposition absolute versus statistical uni-
versal, although the literature uses these terms in varied ways.
Many textbooks draw the boundary between absolute and statis-
tical according to whether a sample of languages contains excep-
tions to a universal. But the notion of an exception-free sample
is not very revealing, even if the sample contained all known
languages: here is always a chance that an as yet undescribed
language, or an unknown language from the past or future, will
provide an exception.
It is impossible, in principle, to survey all languages of our spe-
cies. If we nevertheless want to make claims about all languages,
only two routes are open: a priori deduction of necessarily true
statements or statistical extrapolation from empirical samples to
the entire set. Absolute universals can then be deined as those
that are necessarily true, statistical universals as those that are
extrapolated from samples.
Absolute Universals
For statements to be necessarily true, they must follow from a
priori assumptions. he assumptions that linguists make are
diverse and heavily debated. An example is the assumption that
words consist of morphemes, that is, minimal form-mean-
ing pairs. If one accepts this, then it is necessarily true that all
languages have morphemes, and there cannot be exceptions.
Why? Suppose someone claims to have discovered a language
without morphemes. One can of course simply analyze the lan-
guage without mentioning morphemes, but obviously that can-
not challenge the universal just because one can always defend
it by reanalyzing the language with morphemes. he only true
challenge would be to show that analyzing some data in terms
of morphemes leads to structures that are in conlict with other
assumptions, for example, that form-meaning pairs combine
exclusively by linear concatenation. he conlict can be illustrated
by languages with morphologies like the English plural geese,
where the meanings plural and goose do not correspond to linear
77
Absolute and Statistical Universals
strings of morphemes. Confronted with such data, there are
three options:
(i) give up the notion of morpheme;
(ii) give up the assumption of linear concatenation;
(iii) add additional assumptions that reconcile the conlict.
On any of these options, the universal remains exception-
less: On solution (i), no language has morphemes; on solu-
tions (ii) and (iii), all languages have morphemes. As a result,
absolute universals can never be falsiied by individual data.
heir validity can only be evaluated by exploring whether they
are consistent with other absolute universals that are claimed
simultaneously.
Absolute universals can also be thought of as those aspects
of ones descriptive metalanguage often called a theoreti-
cal framework that are necessarily referred to in the analysis
of every language, that is, that constitute the descriptive a priori.
Depending on ones a priori, this includes, apart from the mor-
pheme, such notions as distinctive feature, constituent (see con-
stituent structure), argument, predicate (see predicate
and argument), reference, agent, speaker, and so on. In some
metalanguages, the a priori also includes more speciic assump-
tions, for example, that constituents can only be described by
uniform branching (all to the left, or all to the right), or only by
binary branching, and so on.
he status of absolute universals is controversial. For many
linguists, especially in typology and historical linguis-
tics, absolute universals are simply the descriptive a priori,
with no additional claim on biological or psychological real-
ity. he choice between equally consistent universals/meta-
languages for example, among options (i), (ii), and (iii) in
the previous example is guided by their success in describing
structures and in deining variables that capture distributional
patterns, an evaluation procedure comparable to the way in
which technical instruments for analyzing objects are evaluated
in the natural sciences. In the morphology problem, typologists
would most likely chose option (ii) because it allows for deining
a variable of stem-internal versus aixal plural realization that
has an interesting distribution (suggesting, for example, that
within-stem realization is favored by a few families in Africa and
the Near East).
In generative grammar, by contrast, absolute universals
are thought of not only as descriptively a priori but also as bio-
logically given in what is called universal grammar: they are
claimed to be innate (see innateness and innatism) and to
be identical to the generalizations that a child makes when learn-
ing language. hus, if the morpheme is accepted as a universal,
that is, a priori term of our metalanguage, it will also be claimed to
be part of what makes languages learnable (see learnability)
and to be part of our genetic endowment. An immediate conse-
quence of such an approach is that something can be claimed as
universal even if it is not in fact necessary in the analysis of every
language. For example, even if some language (e.g., the Rotokas
language of Bougainville) lacks evidence for nasal sounds, one
could still include a distinctive feature [ nasal] in Universal
Grammar. Rotokas speakers are then said to have the feature as
part of their genetic endowment even if they dont use it.
78
his view of absolute universals is highly controversial: Many
linguists limit absolute universals to what is descriptively necessary
in every language; many psychologists propose that children apply
diferent and much more general principles in acquiring a lan-
guage than those found in linguists metalanguages; and to date,
no absolute universal has been conirmed by genetic research.
Statistical Universals
What is not an absolute universal is a variable (or character, or
parameter): some languages have a certain structure or they
dont have it, or to diferent degrees. It is interesting to note that
most variables show some skewing in their distribution; some val-
ues of a variable are favored only in certain geographical areas (rel-
ative pronouns in Europe) or only in certain families (stem-internal
inlection in Afroasiatic). But some values are globally favored (e.g.,
nasals) or, what is more typical, globally favored under certain
structural conditions (e.g., postnominal relative clauses among
languages with objects following the verb). hese global prefer-
ences are called unconditional (unrestricted) and conditional
(restricted) statistical universals, respectively. (An alternative term
for conditional statistical universals is implicational univer-
sals, but this invites confusion because their probablistic nature
diferentiates them from logical implications; cf. Cysouw 2005)
Statistical universals are mostly motivated by theories of how
languages develop, how they are used, how they are learned,
and how they are processed. One such theory, for example, pro-
poses that processing preferences in the brain lead to a universal
increase in the odds for postnominal structures among verb-ob-
ject languages (Hawkins 2004).
Statistical universals take the same forms as statistical hypoth-
eses in any other science for example, they can be formulated
in terms of regression models. hey can be tested with the same
range of statistical methods as in any other science, and, again
as in other sciences, the appropriate choice of models, popula-
tion assumptions, and testing methods is an issue of ongoing
research (e.g. Cysouw 2005; Janssen, Bickel, and Ziga 2006;
Maslova 2008).
A central concern when testing statistical universals is to
ascertain true globality, that is, independence of area and fam-
ily. Areas can be controlled for by standard factorial analysis, but
it is an unsettled question just what the relevant areal relations
are; for example, should one control for the inluence of Europe
or the entire Eurasia or both? A quick solution is to assume a
standard set of ive or six macroareas in the world and accept as
universal if a distribution is independent of these areas (Dryer
1989). But the rationale for such a set is problematic, and this
has led to a steep surge of interest in research on areas and their
historical background (e.g., Nichols 1992; Haspelmath et al.
2005).
Controlling for family relations poses another problem.
Under standard statistical procedures, one would draw ran-
dom samples of equal size within each family and then model
families as levels of a factor. However, over a third of all known
families are isolates, containing only one member each. And
picking one member at random in larger families is impossible
if at the same time one wants to control for areas (e.g., admitting
an Indo-European language from both Europe and South Asia).
Absolute and Statistical Universals
In response to this problem, typologists seek to ensure represen-
tativity of a sample not by random selection within families but
by exhaustive sampling of known families, stratiied by area. In
order to then control for unequal family sizes, one usually admits
only as many data points per family as there are diferent values
on the variables of interest (Dryer 1989; Bickel 2008).
Samples that are not based on random sampling do not
support parametric inference by statistical tests. An alternative
to this is randomization methods (Janssen, Bickel, and Ziga
2006): he null hypothesis in these methods is that an observed
preference can be predicted from the totals of the sample (e.g.,
that an observed 90% postnominal relatives in VO [verb-object]
languages could be predicted if 90% of the entire sample had
postnominal relatives) not that the sample stems from a popu-
lation without the observed preference. Extrapolation to the total
population (the entire of set of human languages) can then only
be based on plausibility arguments: If a preference signiicantly
deviates from what is expected from the totals of the observed
sample, it is likely that the preference holds in all languages. A
key issue in such argumentation is whether the tested variables
are suiciently unstable over time so that a present sample can
be assumed to not relect accidental population skewings from
early times in prehistory (Maslova 2000). In response to this,
typologists now also seek to test universals by sampling language
changes instead of language states a move that is sometimes
called the dynamization of typology (Greenberg 1995; Croft
2003).
While the number of proposed statistical universals is
impressive the Universals Archive at Konstanz has collected
more than 2,000 (Plank and Filimonova 2000) very few of them
have been rigorously tested for independence of area, family,
and time.
Balthasar Bickel
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bickel, B. 2008. A reined sampling procedure for genealogical control.
Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 61: 2233.
Croft, W. 2003. Typology and universals. 2d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Cysouw, M. 2005. Quantitative methods in typology. In Quantitative
Linguistics: An International Handbook, ed. G. Altmann, R. Khler, and
R. Piotrowski, 55478. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Cysouw, M, ed. 2008. Special issue on analyzing he World Atlas of
Language Structures. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 61.
Dryer, M. S. 1989. Large linguistic areas and language sampling. Studies
in Language 13: 25792.
Greenberg, J. H. 1995. he diachronic typological approach to lan-
guage. In Approaches to Language Typology, ed. M. Shibatani and T.
Bynon, 14366. Oxford: Clarendon.
Haspelmath, M., M. S. Dryer, D. Gil, and B. Comrie, eds. 2005. he World
Atlas of Language Structures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hauser, M. D., N. Chomsky, and W. T. Fitch. 2002. he faculty of lan-
guage: What it is, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science 298: 1569
79. his paper and the response by S. Pinker and R. Jackendof 2005
launched an ongoing debate on the nature and extent of absolute uni-
versals in generative grammar.
Hawkins, J. A. 2004. Eiciency and Complexity in Grammars.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Janssen, D., B. Bickel, and F. Ziga. 2006. Randomization tests in lan-
guage typology. Linguistic Typology 10: 41940.
Accessibility Hierarchy
Maslova, E.. 2000. A dynamic approach to the veriication of distribu-
tional universals. Linguistic Typology 4: 30733.
. 2008. Meta-typological distributions. Sprachtypologie und
Universalienforschung 61: 199207.
Newmeyer, F. J. 2005. Possible and Probable Languages: A Generative
Perspective on Linguistic Typology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Nichols, J. 1992. Language Diversity in Space and Time. Chicago: he
University of Chicago Press.
Pinker, S., and R. Jackendof. 2005. he faculty of language: Whats spe-
cial about it? Cognition 95: 20136.
Plank, F., and E. Filimonova. 2000. he Universals Archive: A
brief introduction to prospective users. Sprachtypologie und
Universalienforschung 53: 10923.
Plank, F., ed. 2007. Linguistic Typology 11.1 (Special issue treating the
state of typology.)
ACCESSIBILITY HIERARCHY
Edward L. Keenan and Bernard Comrie (1972, 1977) introduce
the accessibility hierarchy (AH) as a basis for several cross-
linguistic generalizations regarding the formation of relative
clauses (RCs).
AH: SUBJ > DO > IO > OBL > GEN > OCOMP
he terms of the AH are main clause subject, direct object, indi-
rect object, object of pre- or postposition, genitive (possessor), and
object of comparison. Keenan and Comrie cross-classiied RCs
along two parameters: 1) the head noun precedes or follows the
restrictive clause (RestCl), and 2) the case of the position relativ-
ized, NPrel, is pronominally marked or not. In (1), from German,
the RestCl, underlined, follows the head in (1a) and precedes it
in (1b). In (2a,b), from Hebrew and Russian, NPrel is pronomi-
nally marked but not in English.
(1) a. der Mann, der in seinem Bro arbeitet
the man, who in his study is+working
the man who is working in his study
b. der in seinem Bro arbeitende Mann
the in his study working man
the man who is working in his study
(2) a. ha-isha she Dan natan la et ha-sefer
the-woman that Dan gave to+her acc the-book
the woman that Dan gave the book to
b. devuka, kotoruju Petr ljubit
girl, who(acc) Peter loves
the girl who Peter loves
A given choice of values for the two parameters deines an
RC-forming strategy. A strategy that applies to SUBJ is called pri-
mary. German has two primary strategies, a postnominal, +case
one, (1a), and a prenominal, case one, (1b). Keenan and Comrie
support three hierarchy generalizations:
(3) a. All languages have a primary strategy
b. A given RC-forming strategy must apply to a continuous
segment of the AH
c. A primary strategy may cease to apply at any position on
the AH
For example, many West Austronesian languages, such as
Malagasy (Madagascar), only have primary strategies. So we can
only relativize the agent in (4a).
79
Accessibility Hierarchy
(4) a. Manolotra (m+aN+tolotra) vary ho anny vahiny aminny
lovia vaovao ny tovovavy
ofers (pres+act+ofer) rice forthe guests onthe dishes new the
young+woman
he young woman ofers rice to the guests on the new dishes
b. ny tovovavy (izay) manolotra vary ho anny vahiny aminny
lovia vaovao
the woman (that) ofers rice tothe guests onthe dishes new
the young woman who ofers rice to the guests on the new dishes
c. *ny vary (izay) manolotra ho anny vahiny aminny lovia
vaovao ny tovovavy
the rice (that) ofers tothe guests onthe dishes new the
young+woman
the rice that the young woman ofers to the guests on the new
dishes
he irst four words in (4c) claim that the rice is doing the
ofering a nonsense. Malagasy does not, however, have an
expressivity gap here since it has a rich voice system allow-
ing any major NP in a clause as subject. he form of ofer that
takes theme subjects is atolotra, recipient subjects tolorana,
and oblique subjects anolorana. (5a,b) illustrate heme and
Instrument RCs.
(5) a. ny vary (izay) atolo-dRasoa ho anny vahiny aminny lovia
vaovao
the rice (that) ofered-by+Rasoa forthe guests onthe new
dishes
the rice that the young+woman ofers to the guests on the
new dishes
b. ny lovia vaovao (izay) anoloran-dRasoa vary ho anny
vahiny
the dishes new (that) ofered-by+Rasoa rice for the guests
the new dishes on which the young woman ofered rice to the
guests
Bantu languages, such as Luganda, (6), illustrate the DO cutof.
Only subjects and objects are directly relativizable. Obliques can
be promoted to object using applicative aixed verbs. So the
instrumental in (6a) is only relativizable from (6c).
(6) a. John yatta enkoko n (= na) ekiso
John killed chicken with knife
b. *ekiso John kye-yatta enkoko (na) knife
John rel-killed chicken (with)
c. John yattisa (yatt+is+a) ekiso enkoko
John kill+with knife chicken
John killed+with a knife the chicken
d. ekiso John kye-yattisa enkoko knife
John rel-kill+with chicken
the knife John killed the chicken with
Independent support for the AH: Keenan (1975) shows that
stylistically simple texts used RCs formed high on the AH pro-
portionately more than texts independently judged stylistically
hard. Second, Comries work (1976) supports the conclusion that
the positioning of demoted subjects in morphological causatives
tends to assume the highest function on the AH not already illed.
hus in the French Jai fait rire les enfants I made-laugh the chil-
dren, the children surfaces as a DO as laugh lacks a DO. But in
80
Acoustic Phonetics
causativizing a transitive verb, its agent argument may surface as
an IO (Jai fait manger les pinards aux enfants I made-eat the
spinach to the children). Lastly, S. Hawkins and Keenan (1987)
show psycholinguistically that recall of RCs formed on high posi-
tions on the AH was better than recall of ones formed on low
positions.
One interesting modiication to the hierarchy generaliza-
tions concerns syntactic ergativity. Keenan and Comrie noted
that Dyirbal (Dixon 1972) relativizes absolutives intransitive
subjects and transitive objects, but not transitive subjects. A
verbal aix (antipassive) derives intransitive verbs from transi-
tive ones with the agent as subject, hence relativizable. Mayan
languages such as Jacaltec (Craig 1977, 196) are similar. his is
an elegant solution to the requirement that agents be relativ-
izable, analogous to Bantu applicatives or Austronesian voices
aixes.
(7) a. x s watxe naj hun-ti
asp 3abs 3erg make cl:man one-this
He made this
b. naj x watxe n hun-ti
cl:man asp 3abs make ap one-this
the man (who) made this
Edward L. Keenan
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Comrie, Bernard. 1976. he syntax of causative constructions: Cross-
language similarities and divergences. In he Grammar of Causative
Constructions, Syntax and Semantics 6, ed. Masayoshi Shibatani, 261
312. Amsterdam: Academic Press.
Craig, Colette. 1977. Jacaltec. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Dixon, Robert M. W. 1972. he Dyirbal Language of North Queensland.
Oxford: Cambridge University Press.
Hawkins, Sarah, and Edward L. Keenan. 1987. he psychological validity
of the accessibility hierarchy. In Universal Grammar: 15 Essays, ed. E.
L. Keenan, 6089. London: Croom Helm.
Keenan, Edward L. 1975. Variation in Universal Grammar. In Analyzing
Variation in English, ed. R. Fasold and R. Shuy, 13648. Washington,
DC: Georgetown University Press.
Keenan, Edward L., and Bernard Comrie. 1972. Noun phrase accessibil-
ity and Universal Grammar. Paper presented at the Annual Meetings
of the Linguistic Society of America, Atlanta.
. 1977. Noun phrase accessibility and Universal Grammar.
Linguistic Inquiry 8.1: 6399.
ACOUSTIC PHONETICS
Like the rest of linguistics, acoustic phonetics combines descrip-
tion with theory. Descriptions are images of acoustic properties
and quantitative measures taken from these images, and theory
accounts for the way in which a sounds articulation determines
its acoustics.
Description
he three most commonly used images of speech are the wave-
form, spectrum, and spectrogram (Figure 1). he waveform dis-
plays diferences in sound pressure level (in pascals) over time
(Figure 1a, d), the spectrum diferences in sound pressure level
Acoustic Phonetics
(in deciBels) over frequency (Figure 1b, e), and the spectrogram
diferences in frequency over time (Figure 1c, f,); darkness indi-
cates the sound pressure level at particular frequencies and
moments in the spectrogram.
he images in Figures 1ac difer from those in Figure 1df
in every conceivable respect: Sound pressure level varies more
or less regularly and repetitively, every 0.0073 second, in the
vowel [i] (as in heed), while in the fricative [s] (as in see), it
instead varies nearly randomly. he vowel is thus nearly peri-
odic, while the fricative is decidedly aperiodic. his diference
gives the vowel a clear pitch, while making the fricative instead
sound noisy.
A single cycles duration in a periodic sound is its period (T);
the distance it travels in space is its wavelength (). As measures
of a single cycles extent, both period and wavelength are recip-
rocally related to frequency (F), the number of cycles per second,
or Hz:
1
(1) F (cycles/sec) =
T (sec/cycle)
c (cm/sec)
(2) F (cycles/sec) =
(cm/cycle)
Figure 1. Waveforms, spectra, and
spectrograms of 30 ms intervals of
the vowel [i] (ac), and the fricative
[s] (df).
Note that the numerator in (2) is not 1 but instead c, the speed
of sound.
he spectrum and spectrogram of [i] (Figures 1b, c) show peaks
and horizontal bands, respectively, known as formants, at roughly
300, 2,200, and 2,800 Hz. he corresponding images of [s] (Figures
1e, f) show a broad energy band spanning 4,0007,000 Hz.
Whether a sound is periodic and where in its spectrum energy
is concentrated are nearly suicient to distinguish all speech
sounds from one another acoustically, and these two proper-
ties also relect the two components of the theoretical model for
transforming articulations into acoustics. All voiced sounds are
periodic, as are trills. Sonorants (vowels, glides, liquids, nasals)
are usually periodic, while obstruents (fricatives, stops, afri-
cates) are aperiodic. Voiced obstruents are both periodic and
aperiodic. Diferences in vowel quality and consonantal place of
articulation are both realized acoustically as diferences in where
energy is concentrated in their spectra. he remaining property
is duration, which besides conveying short:long contrasts also
contributes to the conveying of tense:lax contrasts between vow-
els and the voicing and manner contrasts between consonants.
Theory
Speech sounds are the product of the application of a ilter that
determines the frequencies in which energy is concentrated
81
Acoustic Phonetics

First resonance
released or continuously through a fricatives narrow con-
Glottis = closed Lips = open
striction. In strident sounds, the jet breaks up against a baffle
just downstream, increasing turbulence and noise intensity
considerably.

Minimum Maximum RESONANCE. Both periodic and aperiodic sound sources intro-
duce acoustic energy into the oral cavity across a broad enough
range of frequencies to excite any resonance of the air inside
0 2.5 5 7.5 10 12.5 15 17.5
the oral cavity. If the articulators are in their rest positions
Distance from glottis (cm) (a) and vocal folds are in the voicing position, this cavitys shape
approximates a uniform tube, closed at the glottis and open at
the lips (Figure 2). A resonance is produced by the propaga-
Second resonance
tion of acoustic energy away from the source and its relection
back and forth of the two ends of the tube, which establishes a
standing wave. In a standing wave resonance, the locations of
zero and maximum pressure variation are ixed.To understand
how air resonates, it is easier to consider the change in pressure
level in the standing wave, rather than pressure level itself, that
is, the extent to which the air molecules are being displaced
0 2.5 5 7.5 10 12.5 15 17.5 longitudinally, or equivalently the velocity of the pressure
Distance from glottis (cm) (b) change, rather than the extent of their instantaneous compres-
sion or rarefaction. Air is most freely displaced longitudinally
at the open end, the lips, and least freely at the closed end, the
Third resonance glottis. As a result, the standing waves that it best inside the
oral cavity are those whose wavelengths, and thus frequencies,
are such that they have a velocity maximum (antinode) at the
lips, and a velocity minimum (node) at the glottis. Because the
air resonates more robustly at these frequencies than at oth-
ers, the oral cavitys resonant response ilters the sound source,
passing energy in the source at some frequencies and stopping
it at others.
0 2.5 5 7.5 10 12.5 15 17.5
Figures 2ac show the three lowest-frequency standing
Distance from glottis (cm) (c) waves that fit these boundary conditions. How are their fre-
Figure 2. The oral cavity as a tube closed at one end and open at the quencies determined? Figures 2ac show that one-quarter
other: (ac) standing waves corresponding to the irst three resonances, of the first resonances wavelength spans the distance from
each with a velocity minimum at the closed end and a velocity maximum the glottis to the lips (the oral cavitys length, Loc), three-
at the open end. quarters of the seconds, and five-quarters of the thirds. More
generally:

(3) 2n 1
Loc = n
in the sounds spectrum to a periodic and/or aperiodic sound 4
source.
where n is the resonance number. Solving for wavelength and
SOUND SOURCES. Sound sources are produced by using valves substituting into (2) yields:
that control air low through the vocal tract to transform the
energy in that low into sound.In periodic sound sources, the c
(4) Fn =
low of air causes a valve to open and close rapidly and regularly, 4
Loc
which in turn causes air pressure to rise and fall just downstream. 2n 1
he repeated opening and closing of the glottis, known as vocal
fold vibration, is the most common periodic sound source; oth- Substituting 35,000 cm/sec for c and 17.5 cm for Loc (the aver-
ers are uvular, alveolar, and bilabial trills. age adult males oral cavity length) yields 500, 1,500, and 2,500
Aperiodic sound sources are produced by keeping a valve Hz as the irst three resonances frequencies, values close to
completely or nearly closed, in stops and fricatives, respec- schwas.
tively. Either way, oral air flow is obstructed enough that Because the variable Loc is in the denominator, resonance
oral air pressure rises behind the obstruction. This pressure frequencies are lower in adults and mens longer oral cav-
rise speeds up flow enough to turn it into a turbulent and ities than in childrens or womens shorter ones, and like-
thus noisy jet, in either a brief burst when a stop closure is wise when the lips are protruded in a rounded vowel, such

82
Acoustic Phonetics
Figure 3. Spectra of the vowels (a) [i] as in heed, (b) [u] as in whod,
and (c) [a] as in hod. The individual peaks are the harmonics of the fun-
damental frequency (F0) of voice sound source, and the formants are the
ranges of ampliied harmonics. Peaks corresponding to F1F3 are labeled
at the top of each panel.
as the [u] in whod, rather than spread in an unrounded one,
such as the [i] in heed. These observations yield the length
rule: Resonance frequencies vary inversely with resonating
cavity length.
he irst three formants of [i] (Figures 1b, c) difer decid-
edly in frequency from those of schwa, because raising the
tongue body toward the front of the palate decreases the oral
cavitys cross-sectional area there and increases it in the phar-
ynx, while spreading the lips, which shortens the oral cavity.
Although the length rule predicts how shortening changes for-
mant frequencies, an additional rule is needed to predict how
decreasing and increasing cross-sectional area afects formant
frequencies.
The predictions of two heuristics that are widely used for
this purpose are tested here against the observed formant
frequency differences between the three vowels [i, u, a], and
between the three places of articulation of the stops in [b,
d, g]. F1 is lower in the high vowels [i, u] (Figures 3a, b)
than in schwa, but higher in the low vowel [a] (Figure 3c). F2
Figure 4. Spectrograms of the irst 150 ms of the words (a) bad, (b)
dad, and (c) gad. The onsets of F1F3 are labeled.
is higher in front unrounded [i] than schwa but lower in low
back unrounded [a] and especially high back rounded [u]. F1
varies inversely with tongue height, and F2 varies directly with
tongue backness and lip rounding. The formant frequencies
of all other vowel qualities lie between the extremes observed
in these vowels, just as all other vowels lingual and labial
articulations lie between those of these vowels. F1 starts low
and rises following [b, d, g] (Figure 4), both F2 and F3 start low
following [b] (Figure 4a), both formants start higher following
[d] (Figure 4b), and they diverge from very similar frequencies
following [g] (Figure 4c). Although consonants are articulated
at other places of articulation, these three places are distin-
guished in nearly all languages, and many distinguish only
these three.
he irst heuristic treats the constriction as dividing the oral
cavity into separate resonating cavities (Figure 5), and it applies
the length rule independently to each of them. he irst three for-
mants are the three lowest of the six resonances produced by the
two cavities. his heuristic may be called the cavity association
heuristic because each formant can be associated with the cavity
from which it came. here are two complications. First, the cav-
ity behind the constriction is efectively closed at both ends, and
83
Acoustic Phonetics
constriction
back 8 cm2 1 cm2
3 cm
6 cm
Figure 5. The coniguration of the oral cavity with a constriction partway along its length.
so its resonances must have velocity minima at both ends. heir
frequencies are predicted by:
c
(5) Fn =
2
n Lrc
where Lrc is the length of the resonating cavity. he second com-
plication is that the acoustic interaction of the constriction with
the cavity behind it produces a Helmholtz resonance. Its fre-
quency (Fh) is:
c Ac
(6) Fh =
2 Ab Lb Lc
Ac is the constrictions cross-sectional area, Lc is its length, and
Ab and Lb are the cross-sectional area and length of the cavity
behind the constriction. If a 3 cmlong constriction with a cross-
sectional area of 1 cm2 is moved incrementally from 3 cm above
the glottis to 0.5 cm back of the lips along a 17.5 cm oral cavity,
the back and front cavities produce the resonance frequencies
displayed in Figure 6, along with the Helmholtz resonance. he
arrows projected down from the intersections between back and
front cavity resonances show where F2 and F3 change associa-
tion from the front to the back cavity.
he constriction centers in [a, u, i] are roughly one-quarter
(4.5 cm), two-thirds (11.5 cm), and three-quarters (13 cm) of the
distance from the glottis to the lips. he constriction of [g] is close
to [u]s, while [d]s is about seven-eighths the distance from the
glottis (15.5 cm), and [b]s is of course at the lips (17.5 cm).
he Helmholtz resonance is lowest for all constriction loca-
tions and thus constitutes F1. It also lowers progressively as the
constriction is moved forward because the cavity behind the
constriction lengthens. he cavity-association heuristics suc-
cessful predictions include the following : 1) he low or pharyn-
geal vowel [a] has a higher F1 than the high or velar and palatal
vowels [u, i]; 2) F1 is low following [g, d, b]; 3) [a]s F2 (the front
cavitys irst resonance) is low, 4) F2 and F3 (the front and back
cavities irst resonances) start at very similar frequencies follow-
ing [g], because a velar constriction is close to where the front
and back cavities irst resonances cross at 11 cm from the glottis;
5) F2 and F3 start low following [b] (the back cavitys irst and
second resonances). It incorrectly predicts: 6) he F2 of [i] (the
back cavitys irst resonance) is low, indeed lower than [u]s; and
7) F2 and F3 (the back cavitys irst and second resonances) are
low following [d]. For [u], the calculations leave out the acoustic
84
front
8.5 cm
Figure 6. The irst three resonance frequencies of the back cavity (illed
symbols) and front cavity (empty symbols) and the Helmholtz resonance
(crosses) produced by incremental movement of the constriction in
Figure 5.
efects of lip rounding, which closes the front cavity at both ends
and introduces another Helmholtz resonance. None of the reso-
nances produced by this front cavity are lower than the back cav-
ity resonances, but the additional Helmholtz resonance is low
enough to constitute the F2 observed in [u] (657 Hz if the labial
constriction has a cross-sectional area of 1 cm2 and a length of 2
cm, and the front cavity is 4.5 cm long).
In the second, perturbation, heuristic, a constrictions prox-
imity to a resonances velocity minimum or maximum deter-
mines how it perturbs that resonances frequency away from its
schwa-like value: A constriction near a velocity minimum raises
the formants frequency, while one near a maximum lowers it
instead (expansions have the opposite efects). Figures 4ac show
that minima occur at even quarters of a resonances wavelength
and maxima at odd quarters, and that their locations are at ixed
proportions of the length of the oral cavity. Because constric-
tion locations are also a certain proportion of the distance from
the glottis to the lips, whether they coincide with a minimum or
maximum can be calculated by multiplying both sides of (4) by
the proportion of the oral cavitys length that corresponds to the
constrictions location and rounding the result on the right-hand
side to the nearest quarter (Table I).
he perturbation heuristic successfully predicts the efects of
the bilabial, palatal, velar, and pharyngeal constrictions on all
three formants of [b, i, g, a], and likewise the efects of the alveo-
lar and velar constrictions on F1 and F3 in [d, u], but it fails to
predict F2 raising after [d], and F2 lowering in [u]. he latter can
Adaptation

Table 1. Calculating a constrictions proximity to a resonances velocity minimum or maximum from the constrictions proportional distance from
the glottis to the lips.

Place of Segment Proportion of oral Proximity to minimum or maximum

constriction cavity length
Calculation Odd/even Lower/higher
Labial b 1 1*1/4=1/4 Odd F1 lower
1*32/4=3/4 Odd F2 lower
1*53/4=1/4 Odd F3 lower
Alveolar d 7/8 7/8*1/4=7/321/4 Odd F1 lower
7/8*32/4=21/323/4 Odd F2 lower
7/8*53/4=35/324/4 Even F3 higher
Palatal i 3/4 3/4*1/4=3/161/4 Odd F1 lower
3/4*32/4=9/162/4 Even F2 higher
3/4*53/4=15/164/4 Even F3 higher
Velar g, u 2/3 2/3*1/4=2/121/4 Odd F1 lower
2/3*32/4=6/122/4 Even F2 higher
2/3*53/4=10/123/4 Odd F3 lower
Pharyngeal a 1/4 1/4*1/4=1/160/4 Even F1 higher
1/4*32/4=3/161/4 Odd F2 lower
1/4*53/4=5/161/4 Odd F3 lower

again be predicted once the acoustic efects of lip rounding are
added, as the simultaneous labial constriction, together with the
protrusion of the lips, lowers F2 along with all other formants.
Summary
Speech sounds articulations produce sound sources by trans-
forming aerodynamic energy into acoustic form, and those
sound sources in turn cause air inside the oral cavity to resonate,
at frequencies determined by the length of the resonating cavi-
ties and where they are constricted.
John Kingston
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Fant, C., and M. Gunnar. 1960. Acoustic heory of Speech Production. he
Hague: Mouton.
Jakobson, Roman, C. Fant, M. Gunnar, and Morris Halle. 1952.
Preliminaries to Speech Analysis, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ladefoged, Peter, and Ian Maddieson. 1996. Sounds of the Worlds
Languages. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Stevens, Kenneth N. 1998. Acoustic Phonetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
ADAPTATION
An adaptation is a characteristic in an organism that evolved
because it helped the organism or its relatives to survive and
reproduce. Examples include the vertebrate eye, claws, mam-
mary glands, the immune system, and the brain structures that
underlie the human capacity for language. More completely,
an adaptation is 1) a reliably developing set of characteristics
2) whose genetic basis became established and organized in the
species (or population) over evolutionary time because 3) the
adaptation interacted with recurring features of the body or envi-
ronment 4) in a way that, across generations, typically caused
this genetic basis to increase its gene frequency.
If a characteristic lacks any of these features, it is not an adap-
tation. An adaptation is not, therefore, simply anything in an
individual with a good or functional outcome, or that has
useful efects by intuitive standards. Rice cultivation, useful as it
is, is not a biological adaptation because it lacks a speciic genetic
basis. Similarly, the English language is not an adaptation,
however useful it might be. In contrast, if a mutation occurred
that modiied a neural structure so that the vocal chords could
more reliably produce distinct phonemes, and this gene spread
throughout the species because its bearers prospered due to the
advantages resulting from a lifetime of more eicient communi-
cation, then the modiied neural structure would qualify as an
adaptation.
Researchers judge whether something is an adaptation by
assessing how likely or unlikely it is that its functional organiza-
tion was produced by random mutation and spread by genetic
drift. For example, the eye has hundreds of elements that are
arranged with great precision to produce useful visual inputs. It is
astronomically unlikely that they would have arrived at such high
levels of mutual coordination and organization for that function
unless the process of natural selection had diferentially retained
them and spread them throughout the species. Consequently,
the eye and the visual system are widely considered to be obvi-
ous examples of adaptations. For the same reason, evolutionary
scientists consider it overwhelmingly likely that many neurocog-
nitive mechanisms underlying language are adaptations for
communication (a proposition that Noam Chomsky has dis-
puted; see Lyle Jenkinss essay, Explaining Language, in this
volume). Language competence reliably develops, is believed
to have a species-typical genetic basis, and exhibits immensely
complex internal coordination that is functionally organized to
produce eicient communication, which vastly enhances the
achievement of instrumental goals, plausibly including those
linked to itness.

85
Ad hoc Categories
Within the evolutionary sciences, the concept of adaptation
plays an indispensable role not only in explaining and under-
standing how the properties of organisms came to be what they
are, but also in predicting and discovering previously unknown
characteristics in the brains and bodies of species.Evolutionary
psychologists, for example, analyze the adaptive problems our
ancestors were subjected to, predict the properties of previ-
ously unknown cognitive mechanisms that are expected to have
evolved to solve these adaptive problems, and then conduct
experimental studies to test for the existence of psychological
adaptations with the predicted design (see evolutionary
psychology). An understanding that organisms embody sets
of adaptations rather than just being accidental agglomerations
of random properties allows organisms to be properly studied as
functional systems. If language is accepted as being the product
of adaptations, then there is a scientiic justiication for studying
the underlying components as part of a functional system.
he concept of adaptation became more contentious when
human behavior and the human psychological architecture
began to be studied from an adaptationist perspective. Critics
have argued that not every characteristic is an adaptation an
error adaptationists also criticize. More substantively, critics
have argued that it is impossible to know what the past was like
well enough to recognize whether something is an adaptation.
Adaptationists counter that we know many thousands of things
about the past with precision and certainty, such as the three-
dimensional nature of space and the properties of chemicals, the
existence of predators, genetic relatives, eyes, infants, food and
fertile matings, and the acoustical properties of the atmosphere,
and that these can be used to gain an engineers insight into why
organisms (including humans) are designed as they are.
Julian Lim, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Gould, S. J., and R. C. Lewontin. 1979. he spandrels of San Marco and
the Panglossian paradigm: A critique of the adaptationist programme.
Proceedings of he Royal Society of London, Series B 205.1161: 58198.
Pinker, Steven. 1994. he Language Instinct. New York: Morrow.
. 2003. Language as an adaptation to the cognitive niche. In
Language Evolution, ed. M. Christiansen and S. Kirby, 1637. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Tooby, John, and I. DeVore. 1987. he reconstruction of hominid
behavioral evolution through strategic modeling. In he Evolution
of Primate Behavior: Primate Models. ed. W. G. Kinsey, 183237. New
York: SUNY Press.
Williams, George C. 1966. Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique
of Some Current Evolutionary hought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
AD HOC CATEGORIES
An ad hoc category is a novel category constructed spontane-
ously to achieve a goal relevant in the current situation (e.g., con-
structing tourist activities to perform in Beijing while planning a
vacation). hese categories are novel because they typically have
not been entertained previously. hey are constructed sponta-
neously because they do not reside as knowledge structures in
long-term memory waiting to be retrieved. hey help achieve a
86
relevant goal by organizing the current situation in a way that
supports efective goal pursuit.
Ad hoc categories contrast with thousands of well-established
categories associated with familiar words (e.g., cat, eat, happy).
Extensive knowledge about these latter categories resides in
memory and may often become active even when irrelevant to
current goals. When ad hoc categories are used frequently, how-
ever, they, too, become highly familiar and well established in
memory. he irst time that someone packs a suitcase, the cate-
gory things to pack in a suitcase is ad hoc. Following many trips,
however, it becomes entrenched in memory.
Ad hoc categories constitute a subset of role categories,
where roles provide arguments for verbs, relations, and sche-
mata. Some role categories are so familiar that they become
lexicalized (e.g., seller, buyer, merchandise, and payment name
the agent, recipient, theme, and instrument roles of buy). When
the conceptualization of a role is novel, however, an ad hoc cate-
gory results (e.g., potential sellers of gypsy jazz guitars). Pursuing
goals requires the constant speciication and instantiation of
roles necessary for achieving them. When a well-established cat-
egory for a role doesnt exist, an ad hoc category is constructed
to represent it.
Both conceptual and linguistic mechanisms appear central to
forming ad hoc categories. Conceptually, people combine exist-
ing concepts for objects, events, settings, mental states, proper-
ties, and so on to form novel conceptual structures. Linguistically,
people combine words in novel ways to index these concepts.
Sometimes, novel concepts result from perceiving something
novel and then describing it (e.g., seeing a traditional opera set in
a modern context and describing this newly encountered genre
as modernized operas). On other occasions, people combine
words for conceptual elements before ever encountering an
actual category instance (e.g., describing mezzo sopranos who
have power, tone, and lexibility before experiencing one). he
conceptual and linguistic mechanisms that formulate ad hoc
categories are highly productive, given that components of these
categories can be replaced systematically with alternative values
from semantic ields (e.g., tourist activities to perform in X, where
X could be Rome, Florence, Venice, etc.). Syntactic structures
are also central for integrating the conceptual/linguistic com-
ponents in these categories (e.g., the syntax and accompanying
closed class words in tourist activities to perform in Rome).
Lawrence Barsalou (1983) introduced the construct of ad hoc
categories in experiments showing that these categories are not
well established in memory and do not become apparent without
context. Once constructed, however, they function as coherent
categories, exhibiting internal structures as indexed by typicality
gradients. Barsalou (1985) showed that these gradients are orga-
nized around ideal values that support goal achievement and
also around frequency of instantiation. He also showed (1987)
that these internal structures are generally as stable and robust
as those in familiar taxonomic categories.
Barsalou (1991) ofered a theoretical framework for ad hoc
categories (see also Barsalou 2003). Within this framework, ad
hoc categories provide an interface between roles in knowl-
edge structures (e.g., schemata) and the environment. When a
role must be instantiated in order to pursue a goal but knowl-
edge of possible instantiations does not exist, people construct
Ad hoc Categories
an ad hoc category of possible instantiations (e.g., when going
camping for the irst time, constructing and instantiating
activities to perform on a camping trip). he particular instan-
tiations selected relect their it with a) ideals that optimize
goal achievement and b) constraints from the instantiations
of other roles in the knowledge structure (e.g., activities to
perform on a camping trip should, ideally, be enjoyable and
safe and should depend on constraints such as the vacation
location and time of year). Once established, the instantiations
of an ad hoc category are encoded into memory and become
increasingly well established through frequent use (e.g., estab-
lishing touring back roads and socializing around the camp-
ground as instances of activities to perform on a camping trip).
Barsalou (1999) describes how this framework can be realized
within a perceptual symbol system. Speciically, categories
(including ad hoc categories) are sets of simulated instances
that can instantiate the same space-time region of a larger
mental simulation (where a simulation is the reenactment of
modality-speciic states, as in mental imagery).
Ad hoc categories have been studied in a variety of empiri-
cal contexts. S. Glucksberg and B. Keysar (1990) proposed that
ad hoc categories underlie metaphor (e.g., the metaphor jobs are
jails conceptualizes the category of conining jobs). C. J. Cech, E.
J. Shoben, and M. Love (1990) found that ad hoc categories are
constructed spontaneously during the magnitude comparison
task (e.g., forming the ad hoc category of small furniture, such
that its largest instances anchor the upper end of the size dimen-
sion). F. Vallee-Torangeau, S. H. Anthony, and N. G. Austin
(1998) found that people situate taxonomic categories in back-
ground settings to form ad hoc categories (e.g., situating fruit
to produce fruit in the produce section of a grocery store). E. G.
Chrysikou (2006) found that people rapidly organize objects into
ad hoc categories that support problem solving (e.g., objects that
serve as platforms).
Research has also addressed ad hoc categories that become
well established in memory, what Barsalou (1985, 1991) termed
goal-derived categories (also called script categories, slot iller
categories, and thematic categories). J. Luciarello and K. Nelson
(1985) found that children acquire goal-derived categories associ-
ated with scripts before they acquire taxonomic categories (e.g.,
places to eat). B. H. Ross and G. L. Murphy (1999) examined how
taxonomic and goal-derived concepts simultaneously organize
foods (e.g., apples as belonging simultaneously to fruit and snack
foods). D. L. Medin and colleagues (2006) found that goal-derived
categories play central roles in cultural expertise (e.g., tree experts
form categories relevant to their work, such as junk trees).
Although ad hoc and goal-derived categories are ubiquitous
in everyday cognition, they have been the subject of relatively
little research. Much further study is needed to understand
their structure and role in cognition. Important issues include
the following: How do productive conceptual and linguistic
mechanisms produce ad hoc categories? How do these catego-
ries support goal pursuit during situated action? How do these
categories become established in memory through frequent use?
How does the acquisition of these categories contribute to exper-
tise in a domain?
Lawrence W. Barsalou
Adjacency Pair
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Barsalou, L. W. 1983. Ad hoc categories. Memory & Cognition
11: 21127.
. 1985. Ideals, central tendency, and frequency of instan-
tiation as determinants of graded structure in categories. Journal
of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
11: 62954.
. 1987. he instability of graded structure: Implications for the nature
of concepts. In Concepts and Conceptual Development: Ecological
and Intellectual Factors in Categorization, ed. U. Neiser, 10140.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 1991. Deriving categories to achieve goals. In he Psychology of
Learning and Motivation: Advances in Research and heory. Vol. 27.
Ed. G. Bower, 164. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
. 1999. Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences
22: 577660.
. 2003. Situated simulation in the human conceptual system.
Language and Cognitive Processes 18: 51362.
Cech, C. J., E. J. Shoben, and M. Love. 1990. Multiple congru-
ity efects in judgments of magnitude. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 16: 114252.
Chrysikou, E. G. 2006. When shoes become hammers: Goal-derived cat-
egorization training enhances problem-solving performance. Journal
of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Performance
32: 93542.
Glucksberg, S., and B. Keysar. 1990. Understanding metaphorical com-
parisons: Beyond similarity. Psychological Review 97: 318.
Lucariello, J., and K. Nelson. 1985. Slot-iller categories as mem-
ory organizers for young children. Developmental Psychology
21: 27282.
Medin, D. L., N. Ross, S. Atran, D. Cox, J. Coley, J. Proitt, and S. Blok.
2006. Folkbiology of freshwater ish. Cognition 99: 23773.
Ross, B. H., and G. L. Murphy. 1999. Food for thought: Cross-classiication
and category organization in a complex real-world domain. Cognitive
Psychology 38: 495553.
Valle-Tourangeau, F., S. H. Anthony, and N. G. Austin. 1998. Strategies
for generating multiple instances of common and ad hoc categories.
Memory 6: 55592.
ADJACENCY PAIR
conversation analysis, an inductive approach to the micro-
analysis of conversational data pioneered by Harvey Sacks
(1992), attempts to describe the sequential organization of
pieces of talk by examining the mechanics of the turn-taking sys-
tem. Adjacency pairs relect one of the basic rules for turn-taking
(Sacks, Scheglof, and Jeferson 1974), in which a speaker allo-
cates the conversational loor to another participant by uttering
the irst part of a paired sequence, prompting the latter to pro-
vide the second part. Examples are question-answer, greeting-
greeting as in (1), and complaint-excuse:
(1) A: Hi there
B: Oh hi
he constitutive turns in adjacency pairs have the following
structural characteristics:
(i) hey are produced by two diferent speakers.
(ii) hey are, as the term suggests, adjacent. his is not a strict
requirement, as the two parts can be separated by a so-called
insertion sequence, as in (2):
87
Age Groups
(2) A: Whats the time now? (Question 1)
B: Dont you have a watch? (Question 2)
A: No. (Answer 2)
B: I think its around three. (Answer 1)
(iii) hey are organized as a irst and a second part, that is,
they are nonreversible. his is the case, incidentally, even in
ostensibly identical irst and second parts, such as the greet-
ing-greeting pair in (1), where reversing the order results in
an aberrant sequence.
(iv) hey are ordered, so that a particular irst part requires a
relevant second part (e.g., greetings do not follow questions).
he fact that the second part is conditionally relevant on the irst
part does not mean that only one option is available; in fact, cer-
tain irst parts typically allow for a range of possible second parts.
If two (or more) options are possible, one will be the more socially
acceptable, preferred response, the other(s) being dispreferred;
this phenomenon is known as preference organization, as in:
(3) A: Have a piece of cake (irst part)
B1: Great thanks I will (preferred second)
B2: Ehm actually Ive just eaten but thanks anyway (dispre-
ferred second)
As illustrated in (3), dispreferred second parts tend to be structur-
ally diferent from preferred seconds (B2 being indirect, includ-
ing an explanatory account, and containing hesitation markers,
unlike B1).
Another, related phenomenon that merits mention here is
presequencing: Certain adjacency pairs can be introduced or
foreshadowed by a preceding exchange, as in:
(4) A1: Do you sell fresh semiskimmed milk?
B1: We sure do
A2: Ill have two bottles then please
B2: OK
his whole exchange forms one unit, in the sense that the occur-
rence of the question-answer pair A1-B1 is only interpretable
given the subsequent request-compliance adjacency pair A2-B2.
Phenomena such as this are indicative of a level of sequential
organization in conversation beyond two-turn sequencing (see
Scheglof 2007).
Ronald Geluykens
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Sacks, Harvey. 1992. Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Scheglof, and Gail Jeferson. 1974. A sim-
plest systematics for the organization of turn-taking in conversation.
Language 50: 696735.
Scheglof, Emanuel A. 2007. he Language of Turn and Sequence.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
AGE GROUPS
Age is one of the primary independent variables in
sociolinguistics, along with social class, sex, ethnicity, and
region. Age is the primary social correlate for determining that
language is changing and for estimating the rate of change and
its progress.
88
Static versus Dynamic Theories
Mundane observations make it abundantly clear that language
change is not punctual but gradual, and not categorical but
variable. Traditional views of language change imposed meth-
odological restrictions to avoid viewing change while it was pro-
gressing. Linguists had little conidence in their ability to discern
change precisely and accurately amid the apparent lawlessness
of social phenomena, as Edward Sapir incisively put it (1929,
213). However, in the 1960s, linguists began studying language in
its social context. By that time, economics, anthropology, sociol-
ogy, and other social sciences were well established, and linguis-
tic studies belatedly admitted sociolinguistics, its social science
adjunct (Chambers 2002b).
Viewing language changes as they progressed entailed the
admission of coexisting linguistic entities as data. Linguists
were required to study the social distribution of, for example,
both sneaked and snuck as variants of the past tense of sneak
(as in the example to be discussed). Dealing coherently with
variables necessitated determining the distribution of vari-
ants with certain social factors, including the age of the speak-
ers. Uriel Weinreich, William Labov, and Marvin I. Herzog, in
the document that became the manifesto for viewing language
change in its social context, said: A model of language which
accommodates the facts of variable usage and its social and
stylistic determinants not only leads to more adequate descrip-
tions of linguistic competence, but also naturally yields a theory
of language change that bypasses the fruitless paradoxes with
which historical linguistics has been struggling for half a cen-
tury (1968, 99). Primary among those paradoxes, of course,
were concepts of change as punctual, categorical, and static. By
admitting social variables, it became possible to view change as
gradual, variable, and dynamic, consistent with commonsense
observations.
Real-Time Change
he study of the progress of change can be carried out in real time
by revisiting survey sites at intervals and observing changes in the
social distribution of variants from one time to the next. Because
changes will not necessarily be completed in the interval but will
be continuing, their progress must be calculated by some kind
of proportional measure, such as the percentage of the variants,
their relative frequency, or their probabilities. he proportional
diferences from one visit to the next provide a quantitative mea-
sure of the progress of the change.
Studying change in real time has a number of methodologi-
cal disadvantages. Most obvious is the time required before
attaining a result. Locating subjects on subsequent visits also
poses obvious problems because of mobility, cooperation, or
death. Furthermore, subsequent visits require the addition of
new subjects at the youngest age group each time. his is nec-
essary because of the manner in which linguistic innovations
typically difuse (see diffusion ) throughout the population.
Instead of spreading outward from the source and afecting
almost everybody in their sphere of inluence, as infectious
diseases do in epidemics and technological adoptions do
when, say, spin dryers replace washboards, linguistic inno-
vations tend to be stratiied. Under ordinary circumstances,
people acquire their accents and dialects in their formative
Age groups
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
0ver 80
7079
6069
5059
4049
3039
2029
1419
years, between 8 and 18, and maintain them throughout their
lives. People who grow up saying sneaked as the past tense
of sneak tend to use that form all their lives, even after they
come to know that younger people in their region say snuck
instead. Because of this stratiication, the progress of a linguis-
tic change is not measurable in the life span of an individual
or one age group but only in comparison between individuals
whose formative years are not the same, that is, between dif-
ferent age groups.
Change in Progress
Correlating linguistic variants with their use by age groups in
the community as the change is taking place is a way of measur-
ing its progress. Inductively, change is evident when a linguistic
variant occurs with greater frequency in the speech of younger
people than in the speech of their elders. here are some excep-
tions (such as age grading), but the inference of change can be
made with reasonable conidence when the frequency of the
variant is stratiied from one age group to the next (Labov 2001).
hat is, linguistic changes are almost never bimodal, with one
variant occurring in the speech of younger people and a difer-
ent one in the speech of older people. Instead, the variants are
typically dispersed along the age continuum in a progressive
gradation.
Figure 1 provides a case study. he variable is the past tense of
the verb sneak, with variants sneaked and snuck. he community
is the Golden Horseshoe, the densely populated region in south-
ern Ontario, Canada. Figure 1 shows the percentage of people
who say snuck, not sneaked, correlated with their age, from octo-
genarians to teenagers. he correlation shows a progression from
18 percent in the oldest group to 98 percent in the youngest, with
gradation in the intermediate age groups (29 percent of 70s, 42
percent of 60s, and so on).
Other things being equal, it is possible to draw historical
inferences from apparent-time displays like Figure 1. The sur-
vey from which the data are drawn took place in 1992. Among
people born 80 or more years prior, that is, before 1913,
sneaked was the standard variant and snuck had very little
Figure 1. Percentage of people in different age groups who
say snuck, not sneaked, as past tense of sneak in the
Golden Horseshoe, Canada (Chambers 2002a, 36466).
currency. It gained currency steadily thereafter, however, and
accelerated most rapidly in the speech of the 50-year-olds,
people born in 193342, increasing by some 25 percent and
becoming the variant used by almost 70 percent of them. In
subsequent decades, it was adopted by ever-greater numbers.
In the 1980s, the formative years for people born in 19738, the
teenagers in this survey, snuck virtually eliminated sneaked as
a variant.
Changes normally take place beneath the level of conscious-
ness. Young people seldom have a sense of the history of the
variants. In this case, people under the age of 30 often con-
sider the obsolescent form sneaked to be a mistake when they
hear someone say it. here is no communal sense that sneaked
was the historical standard and accepted form for centuries.
Occasionally, changes become self-conscious in the early stages
if teachers, writers, or parents openly criticize them. Such criti-
cisms almost never succeed in reversing trends, though they
may slow their momentum. When the incoming variant gains
enough currency, usually around 2030 percent, its use accel-
erates rapidly. It then slows again as it nears completion. he
graphic pattern is known as the S-curve in innovation difusion,
with relatively slow (or lat) movement up to 2030 percent, a
rapid rise through the middle stages, and lattening again in the
inal stages.
Lack of communal consciousness of linguistic changes
in progress is a consequence of its social stratiication (see
inequality, linguistic and communicative ). Changes
generally progress incrementally, so that diferences between
the most proximate age groups are small and barely noticeable.
In Figure 1, 30-year-olds difer from 40-year-olds by about 10
percent and from 20-year-olds almost not at all. he difer-
ence between 30-year-olds and 70-year-olds, by contrast, is
over 60 percent. Social relations are closest among age-mates,
and the gradation of diferences so that proximate age groups
are most like one another blunts the perception of genera-
tion gaps within the community. By minimizing awareness of
changes as they progress, social gradation is a unifying force in
communities.
89
Age groups
Apparent-Time Hypothesis
Figure 1 draws historical inferences of change based on the
behavior of age groups surveyed at the same time. he replace-
ment of sneaked by snuck is not directly observed as it would be
in real-time studies, in which researchers go to communities at
intervals and track the changes from one time to the next. Instead,
the inference of change is based on the assumption that under
normal circumstances, people retain the accents and dialects
acquired in their formative years. hat assumption is known as
the apparent-time hypothesis. Common experience tells us that
the hypothesis is not without exceptions. People are sometimes
aware of expressions that they once used and no longer do, and
sometimes they will have changed their usage after their forma-
tive years. If such linguistic capriciousness took place throughout
the entire community, it would invalidate historical inferences
drawn from apparent-time surveys.
However, community-wide changes beyond the formative
years are rare. Real-time evidence, when available, generally
corroborates apparent-time inferences. In the case of sneaked/
snuck, for instance, earlier surveys made in the same region in
1950 and 1972 show proportional distributions of the variants
that approximate the apparent-time results. However, inferring
linguistic changes from the speech of contemporaneous age
groups is not a direct observation of that change. It remains a
hypothesis, and its validity must be tested wherever possible.
Age-Graded Changes
Deeper understanding of linguistic change in progress should
ultimately lead to predictable classes of deviation from the
apparent-time hypothesis. One known deviation is age-graded
change. hese are changes that are repeated in each generation,
usually as people reach maturity (Chambers 2009, 200206).
Age-graded changes are usually so gradual as to be almost
imperceptible, so that tracking their progress is challenging.
As an example, in all English-speaking communities, there is a
rule of linguistic etiquette that requires compound subject noun
phrases (NPs) to list the irst-person pronoun (the speaker) last.
Adults say Robin and I went shopping, and never say I and
Robin went shopping. here is no linguistic reason for this rule
(that is, the sentences mean the same thing either way), but
putting oneself irst is considered impolite (see politeness).
Children, however, do not know this and tend to say Me and
Robin went shopping. At some as-yet-undetermined age, chil-
dren become aware of the rule and change their usage to con-
form to adult usage.
Age-graded changes like these violate the apparent-time
hypothesis because the variants used by young people do not
persist throughout their lifetimes. Instead, young people change
as they reach maturity and bring their usage into line with adults.
he occurrence of age-graded changes does not refute the appar-
ent-time hypothesis, but they provide a well-deined exception
to it. Failure to recognize them as age-graded can lead to an erro-
neous inference that change is taking place.
Age and Language Change
Introducing age groups into linguistic analysis as an indepen-
dent variable yielded immediate insights into the understanding
90
Aging and Language
of how languages change, who the agents of change are, and how
changes difuse throughout communities. he sociolinguistic
perspective on language change as dynamic, progressive, and
variable represents an advance in language studies. he prin-
cipal theoretical construct, the apparent-time hypothesis, pro-
vides a comprehensive view of historical sequences from a single
methodological vantage point.
J. K. Chambers
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Chambers, J. K. 2002a. Patterns of variation including change. In he
Handbook of Language Variation and Change, ed. J. K. Chambers,
Peter Trudgill, and Natalie Schilling-Estes, 34972. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing.
. 2002b. Studying language variation: An informal epistemol-
ogy. In he Handbook of Language Variation and Change, ed.
J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill, and Natalie Schilling-Estes, 314.
Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
. 2009. Sociolinguistic heory: Linguistic Variation and Its Social
Signiicance. 3rd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change: Social Factors.
Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Sapir, Edward. 1929. he status of linguistics as a science. Language
5: 20714.
Weinreich, Uriel, William Labov, and Marvin I. Herzog. 1968. Empirical
foundations for a theory of language change. In Directions for
Historical Linguistics: A Symposium, ed. Winfred P. Lehmann and
Yakov Malkiel, 95188. Austin: University of Texas Press.
AGING AND LANGUAGE
It is well-documented that in healthy aging, some aspects of lin-
guistic ability, for example, phonology, syntax, and vocab-
ulary, remain generally preserved into very old age. However,
other domains of language, for example, naming, comprehen-
sion and spoken discousre, undergo declines, albeit only at very
late stages in the adult life span. It is interesting to note that
although these linguistic changes occur generally in the older
adult population as a group, there are many older adult individu-
als who do not experience these deicits but, rather, continue to
perform as well as younger individuals. hus, the inding of great
inter-individual variability should be considered.
his entry presents a detailed review of the three main linguis-
tic domains experiencing decline with age. Additionally, a review
of language changes due to cognitive deterioration, for example,
dementia, is presented.
Naming
A common complaint among the healthy aging population is the
increased frequency of word-inding problems in their everyday
speech. A subset of these naming problems is often colloqui-
ally described as the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon. In
terms of cognitive models of lexical access, TOTs are described
as a type of word retrieval failure whereby individuals are able to
access the conceptual, semantic, syntactic, and even some
phonological/orthographic information (e.g., number of
syllables or initial sound/letters) of the target word, not enough
information, however, to fully phonologically encode the word
Aging and Language
for articulation. Research clearly supports the view that there is a
general breakdown in phonological encoding (James and Burke
2000). However, since this stage of processing involves various
substages (e.g., segment retrieval, syllable encoding) that occur
at very fast rates, as per Willem J. M. Levelt, Ardi Roelofs and
Antje S. Meyers (1999) model, behavioral methods are limited
in their ability to identify the locus of processing diiculty.
Evidence from priming studies has strongly demonstrated
that TOTs are due to a failure in transmission of available
semantic information to the phonological system, as explained
in the transmission deicit hypothesis (TDH; Burke et al. 1991).
his theory proposes that older people are especially prone to
word-retrieval problems due to weakened connections at the
phonological level. he phonological level, as compared to
the semantic level, is particularly vulnerable to breakdowns
in retrieval because this level generally has fewer connections
(e.g., phoneme-sound), whereas the semantic system has mul-
tiple joined connections (e.g. many words/concepts linked to
a given word). Factors such as word frequency or recency of
use inluence the strength of phonological connections; that
is, the lower the word frequency and the less recently used the
word, the weaker the connections, leading to greater retrieval
diiculties.
Both younger and older individuals beneit from phonologi-
cal primes as opposed to unrelated primes during moments of a
TOT state, supporting the TDH model. he inding that priming
leads to better retrieval is consistent with the claim that priming
strengthens the inherently weak phonological connections and
thus facilitates resolution of the TOT state. Furthermore, stud-
ies using semantic versus phonological cues have demonstrated
that in both younger and older people, provision of phonological
information was more efective, as a retrieval aid, than semantic
cues (Meyer and Bock 1992). his illustrates that in older indi-
viduals, semantic information is intact, although there is some
degradation in the use of phonological information.
In summary, much evidence supports the TDH and the claim
that the locus of the breakdown in TOT states is at the phono-
logical stage. he exact phonological substage responsible for
this problem still remains unclear; however, there are indica-
tions from phonological cuing studies, self-reports of individuals
experiencing TOT states (Brown 1991), and an electrophysiolog-
ical study of lexical retrieval in healthy younger and older adults
(Neumann 2007) that the irst two substages (segmental and syl-
labic retrieval) are particular points at which breakdowns occur.
Language Comprehension
It is relatively well known that comprehension in older adults
is compromised in comparison to younger adults. hese prob-
lems in comprehension may arise from individual or combined
efects of decline in their sensory/perceptual, linguistic, or cog-
nitive domains. Current research is focused on disambiguating
the efects of these processes on phonological, lexical-semantic,
and syntactic aspects of language decline in the elderly.
Research shows that speech perception in older adults is espe-
cially afected by noise. his means that even with normal hear-
ing, older adults experience diiculties understanding speech
(e.g., sentences) under noisy conditions such as a cocktail party
or cafeteria. Experiments focusing on sentence perception show
that older adults beneit more from context in noise than do their
younger cohorts.
Lexical comprehension is one aspect of language that is
largely preserved or even enhanced with age. Studies on vocabu-
lary comprehension in older adults using a picture selection task
for auditorily presented words show that they are comparable to
younger adults in this task (Schneider, Daneman, and Pichora-
Fuller 2002). However, lexical-semantic integration at the level of
sentence comprehension may be afected in older adults.
Sentence comprehension in the elderly is known to be poor
in comparison to younger listeners. A number of reasons, both
linguistic and cognitive, have been discussed, including decline
in auditory perceptual skills and lexical-semantic and syntactic
processing capacity, as well as working memory capacity, speed
of processing, and ability to process with competing stimuli and
inhibit noise (Wingield and Stine-Morrow 2000). Studies on syn-
tactic comprehension of language in older adults demonstrate
that they are slower at judging sentences that are syntactically
complex and semantically improbable (Obler et al. 1991). It has
also been found to be relatively more diicult for this population
than for younger adults to take advantage of constraining context
in a sentence. his leads to diiculties in situations where older
adults need to rely on context but are not able to do so skillfully.
However, in other aspects of sentence comprehension such as
disambiguation, no age-related diferences has been reported.
It is apparent that sentence comprehension is largely medi-
ated by the ability to hold these sentences in working memory
while they are being processed. Working-memory decline has
been reported in older adults (Grossman et al. 2002). Moreover,
syntactic-processing diiculties have also been attributed to
reduction in working-memory capacity (Kemptes and Kemper
1997). Executive functions such as inhibition and task switching
have been reported as negatively afected in the elderly.
Comprehension problems eventually afect the older adults
discourse abilities. Often, the elderly ind that it gets harder to
follow discourse with advancing age. Studies have shown that
older adults are signiicantly poorer than younger adults in fully
understanding and inferring complex discourse, and this dii-
culty is enhanced further with increased perceptual or cognitive
load (Schneider, Daneman, and Pichora-Fuller 2002), such as
noise and length or complexity of the material. A combination of
general cognitive decline and a deterioration of speciic linguis-
tic and sensory-perceptual processes contribute to the general
slowing observed in the elderly while they engage in conversa-
tion and discourse.
Spoken Discourse
Results from many types of tasks requiring sentence produc-
tion, such as cartoon description tasks (Marini et al. 2005), have
indicated that older adults tend to produce grammatically sim-
pler, less informative and more fragmented sentences than do
younger adults. Middle-aged and young elderly adults tend to
be better and more eicient story constructors than younger
or older adults. However, older adults usually produce a larger
number of words in their narrative speech, but they can show
diiculties in morpho-syntactic and lexico-semantic processing
by making more paragrammatic errors and semantic parapha-
sias than younger adults.
91
Aging and Language
Older adults also show a decreased ability to coherently link
adjacent utterances in a story. Adults older than 75 use a larger
number of missing or ambiguous referents and more units of
irrelevant content that afect the coherence of the narratives
(Marini et al. 2005). Older people show a huge variation in story-
telling abilities, and they can also compensate for their storytell-
ing diiculties due to their greater accumulated life experience,
which they can use to combine diferent themes and to empha-
size relevant details.
In spoken discourse, some changes in conversational-in-
teraction style can occur in young elderly people (6074 years),
but the most noticeable changes are likely to take place in older
elderly people (7788 years), who show excessive verbosity, fail-
ure to maintain topic, poor turn-taking, and unclear referencing
(James et al. 1998).
Diiculties in grammatical processing in the aging can be
attributed to cognitive deterioration involving reduced working
memory (Kemper, Herman, and Liu 2004) and inhibitory deicits
(James et al. 1998), but they can also be a sign of impaired access
to the lemma level during lexical retrieval (Marini et al. 2005).
In summary, there are clear diferences between younger and
older adults in their sentence production, storytelling, and con-
versational abilities. hese diferences are manifest as changes
in morpho-syntactic and lexico-semantic processing, excessive
verbosity, and reduced informativeness and coherence.
Dementia
Diiculties in language production, as well as comprehension,
become obvious in dementia. Word-inding diiculties are char-
acteristic of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), Alzheimers dis-
ease (AD), and vascular dementia (VaD).
Arto Nordlund and colleagues (2004) indicated that 57.1 per-
cent of the individuals with MCI had signiicantly lower scores
in diferent language tasks than did typical aging adults. In AD,
language-processing diiculties are early signs of the disease.
In particular, AD appears to cause a breakdown of the seman-
tic domain of language, which can be relected in the impaired
comprehension and use of semantic relations between words
(Garrard et al. 2001) and in the reduced semantic noun and verb
luency performance (Pekkala 2004) in this population.
Comparative studies between AD and VaD have indicated that
cognitive and linguistic performance cannot clearly diferentiate
the two types of dementia from each other. Elina Vuorinen, Matti
Laine, and Juha Rinne (2000) indicated that both AD and VaD
involved similar types of semantic deicits early in the disease,
including diiculties in comprehension, naming, and produc-
tion of semantic topics in narrative speech, while word repeti-
tion, oral reading, and luency of speech output were preserved
in both types of dementia.
Yael Neumann, Seija Pekkala, and Hia Datta
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Brown, Alan S. 1991. A review of the tip-of-the-tongue experience.
Psychological Bulletin 109.2: 20423.
Burke, Deborah M., Donald G. MacKay, Joanna S. Worthley, and
Elizabeth Wade. 1991. On the tip of the tongue: What causes word
inding failures in young and older adults? Journal of Memory and
Language 30: 54279.
92
Garrard, Peter, Matthew A. Lambon Ralph, John R. Hodges, and Karalyn
Patterson. 2001. Prototypicality, distinctiveness, and intercorrela-
tions: Analysis of the semantic attributes of living and nonliving con-
cepts. Cognitive Neuropsychology 18.2: 12574.
Grossman, Murray, Ayanna Cooke, Christian DeVita, David Alsop, John
Detre, Willis Chen, and James Gee. 2002. Age-related changes in
working memory during sentence comprehension: An fMRI study.
NeuroImage 15: 30217.
James, Lori E., and Deborah M. Burke. 2000. Phonological priming
efects on word retrieval and tip-of-the-tongue experiences in young
and older adults. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory, and Cognition 26.6: 137891.
James, Lori E., Deborah M. Burke, Ayda Austin, and Erika Hulme. 1998.
Production and perception of verbosity in younger and older adults.
Psychology and Aging 13: 35567.
Kemper, Susan, Ruth E. Herman, and Chiung-Ju Liu. 2004. Sentence
production by young and older adults in controlled contexts. Journal
of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences
59: 2204.
Kemptes, Karen A., and Susan Kemper 1997. Younger and older adults
on-line processing of syntactically ambiguous sentences. Psychology
and Aging 12: 36271.
Levelt, Willem J. M., Ardi Roelofs, and Antje S. Meyer 1999. A theory
of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral Brain Sciences
22: 175.
Marini, Andrea, Anke Boewe, Carlo Caltagirone, and Sergio Carlomagno.
2005. Age-related diferences in the production of textual descrip-
tions. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 34: 43963.
Meyer, Anje S., and Kathryn Bock. 1992. he tip-of-the-tongue phe-
nomenon: Blocking or partial activation? Memory and Cognition
20: 71526.
Morris, John, Martha Storandt, J. Phillip Miller, Daniel W. McKeel, Joseph
L. Price, Eugene H. Rubin, and Leonard Berg. 2001. Mild cognitive
impairment represents early-stage Alzheimers disease. Archives of
Neurology 58.3: 397405.
Neumann, Yael. 2007. An Electrophysiological Investigation of the Efects
of Age on the Time Course of Segmental and Syllabic Encoding dur-
ing Implicit Picture Naming in Healthy Younger and Older Adults.
Publications of the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing
Sciences. New York: City University of New York.
Nordlund, Arto, S. Rolstad, P. Hellstrm, M. Sjgren, S. Hansen, and A.
Wallin. 2004. he Goteborg MCI study: Mild cognitive impairment is
a heterogeneous condition. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and
Psychiatry 76: 148590.
Obler, Loraine K., Deborah Fein, Marjorie Nicholas, and Martin L. Albert
1991. Auditory comprehension and aging: Decline in syntactic pro-
cessing. Applied Psycholinguistics 12: 43352.
Pekkala, Seija. 2004. Semantic Fluency in Mild and Moderate Alzheimers
Disease. Publications of the Department of Phonetics 47, University of
Helsinki. Available online at: http://ethesis.helsinki.i/.
Reuter-Lorenz, Patricia A., John Jonides, Edward E. Smith, Alan Hartlye,
Andrea Miller, Christina Marshuetz, and Robert A. Koeppe. 2000. Age
diferences in the frontal lateralization of verbal and spatial working mem-
ory revealed by PET. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 12: 17487.
Schneider, Bruce A., Meredith Daneman, and M. Kathleen Pichora-
Fuller. 2002. Listening in aging adults: From discourse comprehen-
sion to psychoacoustics. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology
56: 13952.
Vuorinen, Elina, Matti Laine, and Juha Rinne. 2000. Common pattern
of language impairment in vascular dementia and in Alzheimers dis-
ease. Alzheimer Disease and Associated Disorders 14: 816.
Wingield, Arthur, and Elizabeth A. L. Stine-Morrow. 2000. Language
and aging. In he Handbook of Cognition and Aging, ed. Craig and
Salthouse, 359416. Mahwah, NJ: Psychology Press.
Agreement
AGREEMENT
Agreement is a form of featural dependency between diferent
parts of a sentence: he morphological shape of a word is a func-
tion of particular morphological features of a diferent, often dis-
tant, word. Since the Middle Ages, agreement was taken to be in
complementary distribution with government, and, hence, it
became important to determine both the context of each type of
relation and the reasons why this diference exists (Covington
1984). his rich tradition has survived in generative grammar, all
the way up to the minimalist program (see mimimalism), where
it is embodied under the notion agree.
Depending on the features and occurrences in an expression,
agreement can be characterized as external or internal (Barlow
and Fergusson 1988). External agreement typically involves per-
son and number features, taking place between verbs and cor-
responding dependents. We can witness it in you are friendly
versus he is friendly. Internal agreement (concord) normally
involves gender and number features, and typically takes place
internal to nominal expressions, between adjectives or relative
clauses and the head noun, freely iterating. Concord is easily
observed in modiied nominal expressions in Spanish: atractivas
damas attractive ladies versus atractivos caballeros attractive
gentlemen (agreeing elements are boldfaced). Genitive agree-
ment internal to nominal expressions normally falls within the
external (not the internal) rubric.
he principles and parameters system concentrated on
external agreement, through the relation (head, speciier) (Aoun
and Sportiche 1983). However, since agreement is possible also
in situations where no such relation seems relevant, the mini-
malist program (Chomsky 2000) proposes a relation between
a probe and a goal. he probe contains a value-less attribute in
need of valuation from a distant feature of the same type, which
the probing mechanism achieves. he goal cannot be contained
within a derivational cycle (a phase) that is too distant from the
probe. When the probe inds an identical category within its com-
plement domain, it attempts to get its valuation from it, thereby
sanctioning the relevant agreement. To illustrate, observe the
Spanish example in (1); note also the internal agreement mani-
fested within the noun phrase:
(1) Parecen [haber quedado [los locos soldados] en la guarnicin]
seem-3rd/pl. have remained the-m./pl. crazy-m./pl.
soldiers-m./pl. in the garrison
(2) Probe1 [ [Goal]]] (plus iteration of -os within the nominal)
( ) person pl. number
( ) number m. gender
Agreement adds a strange redundancy to the language faculty.
In languages where the phenomenon is overt, the extra layer of
manifest dependency correlates with difering surface orders. But
it is unclear whether that justiies the linguistic emergence of the
agreement phenomenon, particularly since the probe/goal mech-
anism can be present without overt manifestations. his results in
much observed variation, from the almost total lack of overt agree-
ment of Chinese to the poly-personal manifestation of Basque.
Juan Uriagereka
Agreement Maximization
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Aoun, J. and D. Sportiche. 1983. On the formal theory of government.
Linguistic Review 2: 21136.
Barlow, M., and C. Barlow, eds. 1988. Agreement in Natural Language.
Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Boeckx, C., ed. 2006. Agreement Systems, Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Chomsky, N. 2000. Minimalist inquiries: the framework. In Step by
Step, ed. R. Martin, D. Michaels, and J. Uriagereka, 89155. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press
Covington, M. 1984 Syntactic heory in the High Middle Ages,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
AGREEMENT MAXIMIZATION
Maximizing, or optimizing, agreement between speaker and
interpreter is part of the principle of charity (see charity, prin-
ciple of) that, according to philosophers of language in the
tradition of W. V. O. Quine and Donald Davidson, governs the
interpretation of the speech and thought of others and guides
the radical interpretation of a radically foreign language.
According to Davidson, correct interpretation maximizes truth
and coherence across the whole of the beliefs of a speaker. For an
interpreter, maximizing truth across the beliefs he ascribes to a
speaker necessarily amounts to maximizing agreement between
himself and the speaker: He can only go by his own view of what
is true.
Take one of Davidsons own examples: Someone says here
is a hippopotamus in the refrigerator, and he continues: Its
roundish, has a wrinkled skin, does not mind being touched.
It has a pleasant taste, at least the juice, and it costs a dime. I
squeeze two or three for breakfast (1968, 100). he simplest way
of maximizing agreement between this speaker and us will prob-
ably be interpreting his expression hippopotamus as meaning
the same as our expression orange. Davidson himself, however,
soon came to consider maximizing agreement as a confused
ideal (1984, xvii) to be substituted with optimizing agreement
(1975, 169). he idea here is that some disagreements are more
destructive of understanding than others (1975, 169). Very
generally, this is a matter of epistemic weight; the more basic a
belief is, and the better reasons we have for holding it, the more
destructive disagreement on it would be: he methodology of
interpretation is, in this respect, nothing but epistemology seen
in the mirror of meaning (1975, 169). According to Davidson, it
is impossible to codify our epistemology in simple and precise
form, but general principles can be given: [A]greement on laws
and regularities usually matters more than agreement on cases;
agreement on what is openly and publicly observable is more
to be favored than agreement on what is hidden, inferred, or ill
observed; evidential relations should be preserved the more they
verge on being constitutive of meaning ([1980] 2004, 157).
Agreement optimization does not exclude the possibility of
error; speakers are to be interpreted as right only when plau-
sibly possible (Davidson 1973, 137). In certain situations this
prevents the interpreter from ascribing beliefs of his own to
the speaker, for instance, perceptual beliefs about objects the
speaker is in no position to perceive. Moreover, if the speaker
has other beliefs that provide him or her with very good reasons
for believing something false, optimizing agreement across all
93
Agreement Maximization
of his or her beliefs might well require ascription of outright
mistakes.
Optimizing agreement provides an interpreter with a method
for arriving at correct interpretations because of the way belief
content is determined, Davidson holds. he arguments for this
claim have changed over the years; initially, the idea was that a
belief is identiied by its location in a pattern of beliefs; it is this
pattern that determines the subject matter of the belief, what the
belief is about (1975, 168). Later, however, the role played by
causal connections between objects and events in the world and
the beliefs of speaker and interpreter becomes more and more
prominent: In the most basic, perceptual cases, the interpreter
interprets sentences held true (which is not to be distinguished
from attributing beliefs) according to the events and objects in
the outside world that cause the sentence to be held true ([1983]
2001,150). In the later Davidson, the account of content deter-
mination underlying the method of charitable interpretation
takes the form of a distinctive, social and perceptual meaning
externalism: In the most basic cases, the objects of thought
are determined in a sort of triangulation as the shared causes
of the thoughts of two interacting persons, for instance, a child
and its teacher (cf. Davidson [1991] 2001, 2001). According to
Davidson, such triangulation is a necessary condition for thought
with empirical content; moreover, he derives a quite far-reaching
epistemic antiskepticism from it and claims that belief is in its
nature veridical ([1983] 2001, 146; cf. also [1991] 2001, 211f).
Probably the most inluential argument against the idea that
any kind of maximizing agreement results in correct interpreta-
tion derives from Saul Kripkes attack on description theories
of proper names. According to such theories, the referent of a
proper name, for instance, Gdel is determined by a descrip-
tion, or cluster of descriptions, held true by the speaker(s), for
instance, the description the discoverer of the incompleteness
of arithmetic. Kripke argued, among other things, that such
theories fail because all of the relevant descriptions, all of the rel-
evant beliefs that a speaker, or even a group of speakers, holds
about Gdel could turn out to be false (cf. 1972, 83f). Kripke gave
an analogous argument for natural-kind terms such as gold or
tiger, and many philosophers today believe that these arguments
can be generalized even further. While it is quite clear, however,
that most of the descriptions a speaker associates, for instance,
with a name could turn out to be false when taken one by one,
it is far less obvious that all (or most, or a weighted majority) of
them could do so at the same time. According to Davidson, for
instance, optimizing agreement amounts to reference determi-
nation by epistemically weighted beliefs. A signiicant number
of these are very elementary beliefs like the belief that Gdel
was a man, that he was human, that he worked on logic, that he
lived on Earth, and so on. If a speaker did not believe any of these
things about Gdel, it has been argued with Davidson, it is far
less clear that this speaker was in fact talking about Gdel: Too
much mistake simply blurs the focus (Davidson 1975, 168).
Kathrin Gler
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Davidson, Donald. 1968. On saying that. In Davidson 1984, 93108.
. 1973. Radical interpretation. In Davidson 1984, 12539. 1995, 169). Alliteration is, therefore, a reliable criterion used by
94
Alliteration
. 1975. hought and talk. In Davidson 1984, 15570.
. [1980] 2004. A uniied theory of thought, meaning, and action.
Problems of Rationality, 15166. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
. [1983] 2001. A coherence theory of truth and knowledge.
Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, 13753. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
. 1984. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
. [1991] 2001. hree varieties of knowledge. Subjective,
Intersubjective, Objective, 20520. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
. 2001. Externalisms. Interpreting Davidson, ed. P. Kotatko, P.
Pagin, and G. Segal, 116. Stanford, CA: CSLI.
Gler, Kathrin. 2006. Triangulation. he Oxford Handbook of Philosophy
of Language, ed. E. Lepore and B. Smith, 100619. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Grandy, Richard. 1973. Reference, meaning, and belief. Journal of
Philosophy 70: 43952.
Kripke, Saul. 1972. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
ALLITERATION
Linguistically, alliteration, also known as initial or head rhyme,
is deined as the selection of identical syllable onsets within a
speciic phonological, morphosyntactic, or metrical domain.
It is usually coupled with stress, as in the three Rs in educa-
tion: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Etymologically, the term
alliteration (from L. ad- to + littera letter) includes the repe-
tition of the same letters at word beginnings; its dual association
with sounds and letters relects a common cognitive crisscross-
ing between spoken and written language in highly literate
(see literacy) societies well illustrated by the famous phrase
apt alliterations artful aid, where the alliteration is primarily
orthographic.
Alliteration based on the sameness of letters is found in visual
poetry, advertising, and any form of playful written language.
Phonologically based alliteration is a frequent mnemonic and
cohesive device in all forms of imaginative language: Examples
from English include idioms (beat about the bush), reduplicative
word-formation (rifraf), binominals (slowly but surely), catch
phrases, refrains, political slogans, proverbs, and clichs. In
verse, alliteration serves both as ornamentation and as a struc-
tural device highlighting the metrical organization into feet, cola,
verses, and lines. Along with rhyme, alliteration is a common fea-
ture of folk and art verse in languages as diverse as Irish, Shona,
Mongolian, Finnish, and Somali.
he most frequent type of alliteration requires identity of the
onsets of stressed syllables, which makes it a preferred poetic
device in languages with word-initial stress, such as the older
Germanic languages. Within the Germanic tradition, metrically
relevant alliteration occurs on the stressed syllables of the irst
foot of each verse (or half-line), where it is obligatory. For Old
English, the language of the richest and most varied surviv-
ing alliterative poetry in Germanic, the second foot of the irst
half-line may also alliterate. Alliteration is disallowed on the last
stressed syllable in the line.
In Old English verse, alliteration appears with remark-
able regularity: Only 0.001% of the verses lack alliteration and
less than 0.05% contain unmetrical alliteration (Hutcheson
Ambiguity
modern editors to determine the boundaries of verses and lines,
though no such divisions exist in the manuscripts. he rein-
vented alliterative tradition of fourteenth-century England also
uses alliteration structurally, while its ornamental function is
enhanced by excessive verse-internal and run-on alliteration.
As a cohesive device in verse, alliteration refers to the under-
lying distinctions in the language and relies on identity of pho-
nological categories. he interpretation of onset identity for the
purpose of poetic alliteration varies from tradition to tradition
and can include whole clusters, optionally realized segments,
and even the whole syllable up to the coda. In Germanic, all
consonants alliterated only with one another, the clusters st-,
sp-, sk- could not be split, and all orthographic stressed vowels
alliterated freely among themselves, most likely because their
identity was signaled by the presence of a prevocalic glottal stop
in stressed syllable onsets.
Donka Minkova
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Fabb, Nigel. 1997. Linguistics and Literature: Language in the Verbal Arts
in the World. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hutcheson, Bellenden Rand. 1995. Old English Poetic Metre.
Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.
Minkova, Donka. 2003. Alliteration and Sound Change in Early English.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
AMBIGUITY
Ambiguity refers to the potential of a linguistic expression to have
more than one meaning. Although many expressions (words,
phrases, and even sentences) are ambiguous in isolation, few
remain so when used in a particular context. In fact, people typi-
cally resolve all ambiguities without even detecting the potential
for other interpretations. Ambiguity does not imply vagueness;
rather, ambiguity gives rise to competing interpretations, each of
which can be perfectly concrete. Although ambiguity is pervasive
and unavoidable in natural languages, artiicial languages devel-
oped for mathematics, logic, and computer programming strive
to eliminate it from their expressions.
Ambiguity can be lexical, structural, referential, scopal,
or phonetic. he examples of these phenomena that follow
include well-known classics in English.
Lexical ambiguity refers to the fact that some words, as writ-
ten or spoken, can be used in diferent parts of speech (see
word classes) and/or with diferent meanings. For example,
duck can be used as a noun or a verb and, as a noun, can refer to
a live animal or its meat. Structural ambiguity arises when dif-
ferent syntactic parses give rise to diferent interpretations. For
example, in addition to being lexically ambiguous, hey saw her
duck is also structurally ambiguous:
1. hey saw [NP her duck] (the bird or its meat belongs to her)
2. hey saw [NP her] [VP duck] (the ducking is an action she carries
out)
A common source of structural ambiguity involves the attach-
ment site for prepositional phrases, which can be at the level
of the nearest noun phrase (NP) or the clause. In the sentence
Danny saw the man with the telescope, either Danny used the
telescope to help him see the man (3) or the man whom Danny
saw had a telescope (4).
3. Danny [VP saw [NP the man] [PP with the telescope]]
4. Danny [VP saw [NP the man [PP with the telescope]]]
Referential ambiguity occurs when it is not clear which entity
in a context is being referred to by the given linguistic expression.
Although deictics (see deixis), such as pronouns, are typical
sources of referential ambiguity, full noun phrases and proper
nouns can also give rise to it.
5. (at a boys soccer game) He kicked him! Who kicked who?
6. (at a boat race) hat boat seems to be pulling ahead. Which
one?
7. (in a university corridor) Im of to meet with Dr. Sullivan.
Chemistry or math? (here are two Dr. Sullivans in difer-
ent departments.)
Scopal ambiguity occurs when a sentence contains more than
one quantiied NP and the interpretation depends on the rela-
tive scopes of the quantiiers. For example, Some children saw
both plays can mean that a) there exist some children such that
each of them saw both plays or b) both plays were such that each,
individually, was seen by some children but not necessarily the
same children. Phonetic ambiguity arises when a given sound
pattern can convey diferent words, for example, two ~ too ~ to;
new deal ~ nude eel.
Although people typically do not notice the ambiguities
that they efortlessly resolve through context, they are certainly
aware of the potential for ambiguity in language. In fact, such
awareness is a precondition for getting the joke in Abbott and
Costellos Whos on First? skit or in headlines like Iraqi Head
Seeks Arms.
Whereas ambiguity does not frequently hinder efective
communication among people, it is among the biggest hurdles
for the machine processing of language. his is not surprising if
one considers how much reasoning is required to resolve ambi-
guity and how much knowledge of language, the context, and
the world must underpin such reasoning. As an example of the
large scale of the task, consider the short sentence he coach
lost a set, which you probably interpreted to mean the person
who is the trainer of some athletic team experienced the loss of
a part of a match in an athletic competition (whether the coach
was playing or the team was playing is yet another ambiguity).
Other interpretations are also valid, given speciic contexts. For
example, the person who is the trainer of some team might have
lost a set of objects (keys, golf clubs) or a railroad car might have
lost a set of objects (door handles, ball bearings). If this sentence
were used as input to an English-Russian machine translation
system that relied on a standard English-Russian dictionary,
that system would have to select from among 15 senses of coach,
11 senses of lose, and 91 senses of set a grand total of 15,015
combinations, if no further knowledge were brought to bear. Of
course, all machine translation systems incorporate some heu-
ristic knowledge, and lexicons developed for natural language
processing typically do not permit the amount of sense splitting
found in dictionaries for people. On the other hand, it is common
95
Amygdala
for sentences to contain upward of 20 words, in which case there
is still the threat of combinatorial explosion.
Marjorie J. McShane
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Cruse, D. A. 1986. Lexical Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. Includes features of and tests for ambiguity.
Small, Steven, Garrison Cottrell, and Michael Tanenhaus, eds. 1988.
Lexical Ambiguity Resolution: Perspective from Psycholinguistics,
Neuropsychology and Artiicial Intelligence. San Mateo, CA: Morgan
Kaufmann.
Zwicky, Arnold M., and Jerrold M. Sadock. 1975. Ambiguity Tests and
How to Fail hem. In Syntax and Semantics, ed. J. Kimball, IV: 136.
New York: Academic Press. Discusses tests to distinguish ambiguity
from lack of speciication.
AMYGDALA
Studies in animals have established a clear role for the amygdala
in social and emotional behavior, especially as related to fear
and aggression (Le Doux 1996). Human studies, including lesion
studies, electrophysiology, and functional neuroimaging,
have further elucidated the role of the amygdala in the process-
ing of a variety of emotional sensory stimuli, as well as its rela-
tionship to behavioral and cognitive responses (Adolphs 2001).
hese responses not only guide social behavior but also aid in the
acquisition of social knowledge. he focus of this entry is on the
amygdala and its role in the processing of language, in particu-
lar language relevant to social and emotional behavior (see also
emotion and language and emotion words).
he amygdala is an almond-shaped group of neurons located
in the rostral medial temporal region on both left and right sides
of the brain (see left hemisphere language process-
ing and right hemisphere language processing). It
has reciprocal connections to regions, such as the hypothala-
mus, that are important for coordinating autonomic responses
to complex environmental cues for survival, as well as premo-
tor and prefrontal areas that are necessary for rapid motor and
behavioral responses to perceived threat. Visual, somatosen-
sory, and auditory information is transmitted to the amygdala
by a series of indirect, modality-speciic thalamocorticoamygda-
lar pathways, as well as by direct thalamoamygdalar pathways.
Within the amygdaloid complex, information processing takes
place along numerous highly organized parallel pathways with
extensive intraamygdaloid connections. he convergence of
inputs in the lateral nucleus enables stimulus representations
to be summated. Speciic output pathways from the central
nucleus and amygdalohippocampal area mediate complemen-
tary aspects of learning and behavioral expressions connected
with various emotional states. he amydgala is thus well posi-
tioned to play a role in rapid cross-modal emotional recognition.
It is important for the processing of emotional memory and for
fear conditioning.
In addition, anatomical studies of the primate amygdala dem-
onstrate connections to virtually all levels of visual processing in
the occipital and temporal cortex (Amaral 2003). herefore,
the amygdala is also critically placed to modulate visual input,
based on afective signiicance, at a variety of levels along the
96
cortical visual processing stream. Hence, through its extensive
connectivity with sensory processing regions, the amygdala is
ideally located to inluence perception based on emotion.
Language
In order to survive in a changing environment, it is especially
important for the organism to remember events and stimuli
that are linked with emotional consequences. Furthermore, it is
important to be vigilant of emotional stimuli in the environment
in order to allow for rapid evaluation of and response to these
emotional stimuli. In humans, emotional cues are transmitted
linguistically, as well as through body posture, voice, and facial
expression (see gesture).
In the irst imaging study to examine language and the
amygdala, a modiied Stroop task was utilized, along with a
high-sensitivity neuroimaging technique, to target the neu-
ral substrate engaged speciically when processing linguistic
threat (Isenberg et al. 1999). Healthy volunteer subjects were
instructed to name the color of words of either threat or neutral
valence, presented in diferent color fonts, while neural activity
was measured by using positron emission tomography. Bilateral
amygdalar activation was signiicantly greater during color nam-
ing of threat words than during color naming of neutral words
(see Color Plate 1). Associated activations were also noted in
sensory-evaluative and motor-planning areas of the brain. hus,
our results demonstrate the amygdalas role in the processing
of danger elicited by language. In addition, the results reinforce
the amygdalas role in the modulation of the perception of, and
response to, emotionally salient stimuli. his initial study further
suggests conservation of phylogenetically older mechanisms of
emotional evaluation in the context of more recently evolved lin-
guistic function. In a more recent study that examines the neural
substrates involved when subjects are exposed to an event that is
verbally linked to an aversive outcome, activation is observed in
the left amygdala (Phelps et al. 2001, 43741).
his activation correlated with the expression of the fear
response as measured by skin conductance response, a periph-
eral measure of arousal. he laterality of response may relate to
the explicit nature of the fear, as well as to the fact that the stim-
ulus is learned through verbal communication. Fears that are
simply imagined and anticipated nonetheless have a profound
impact on everyday behavior. he previous study suggests that
the left amygdala is involved in the expression of fear when antic-
ipated and conveyed in language. Another study that sought to
examine the role of the amygdala in the processing of positive as
well as negative valence verbal stimuli also demonstrated activ-
ity in the left amygdala (Adolphs, Baron-Cohen, and Tranel 2002,
126474). During magnetic resonance (MR) scanning, subjects
viewed high-arousal positive and negative words and neutral
words. In this study, activity was found in the left amygdala while
subjects viewed both negative and positive words in comparison
to neutral words. Taken together, these studies suggest that the
amygdala plays a role in both positive and negative emotional
responses. Furthermore, they suggest that the left amygdala may
be preferentially involved in the processing of emotion as con-
veyed through language.
Lesion studies have generally suggested that the amygdala
is not essential for recognizing or judging emotional and social
Analogy
information from explicit, lexical stimuli, such as stories (see
narrative, neurobiology of) (Amaral 2003, 33747).
However, while recognition of emotional and social information
may be relatively preserved in amygdalar damage, the aware-
ness that unpleasant emotions are arousing appears to be lost. In
a lesion study, normal subjects judge emotions such as fear and
anger to be both unpleasant and highly arousing; however, patient
S. M. 046, who sustained early amygdalar damage, judged these
same stimuli to be unpleasant but of low arousal. For example,
when told a story about someone driving down a steep mountain
who had lost the car brakes, she identiied the situation as unpleas-
ant but also gave a highly abnormal judgment that it would make
one feel sleepy and relaxed. It is interesting to note that S. M. 046
was able to judge arousal normally from positive emotions.
he human amygdala is important both for the acquisition
and for the online processing of emotional stimuli. Its role is dis-
proportionate for a particular category of emotional information,
that pertaining to the evaluation of potential threat in the envi-
ronment. he amygdalas role in enhanced, modality-speciic
processing required for the rapid evaluation and response to
threat is highlighted. Furthermore, this review suggests conser-
vation of phylogenetically older limbic mechanisms of emotional
evaluation in the context of more recently evolved language.
Nancy B. Isenberg
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Adolphs, R. 2001. he neurobiology of social cognition. Current
Opinions in Neurobiology 11.2: 2319.
Adolphs, R., S. Baron-Cohen, and D. Tranel. 2002. Impaired recognition
of social emotions following amygdala damage. Journal of Cognitive
Neuroscience 14.8: 126474.
Amaral, D. G. 2003. he amygdala, social behavior, and danger detection.
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1000 (Dec.): 33747.
Freese, J. L., and D. G. Amaral. 2006. Synaptic organization of projections
from the amygdala to visual cortical areas TE and V1 in the macaque
monkey. Journal of Comparative Neurology 496.5: 65567.
Isenberg, N., D. Silbersweig, A. Engelien, S. Emmerich, K. Malavade, B.
Beattie, A. C. Leon, and E. Stern. 1999. Linguistic threat activates the
human amygdala. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
USA 96.18: 104569.
Le Doux, J. 1996. he Emotional Brain: he Mysterious Underpinnings of
Emotional Life. New York: Touchstone.
Phelps, E. A. 2006. Emotion and cognition: Insights from studies of the
human amygdala. Annual Review of Psychology 57: 2753.
Phelps, E. A., K. J. OConnor, J. C. Gatenby, J. C. Gore, C. Grillon, and M.
Davis. 2001. Activation of the left amygdala to a cognitive representa-
tion of fear. Nature Neuroscience 4.4: 43741.
ANALOGY
Two situations are analogous if they share a common pattern of
relationships among their constituent elements, even though
the elements are dissimilar. Often one analog, the source, is more
familiar or better understood than the second analog, the target
(see source and target). Typically, a target situation serves
as a retrieval cue for a potentially useful source analog. A map-
ping, or set of systematic correspondences aligning elements
of the source and target, is then established. On the basis of the
mapping, it is possible to derive new inferences about the target.
In the aftermath of analogical reasoning about a pair of cases,
some form of relational generalization may take place, yielding a
schema for a class of situations (Gick and Holyoak 1983).
Psychological Research
Within psychology, work in the intelligence tradition focused on
four-term or proportional analogies, such as ARM: HAND :: LEG: ?
Charles Spearman (1946) reviewed studies that found high cor-
relations between performance in solving analogy problems and
the g factor (general intelligence). he ability to solve analogy-
like problems depends on a neural substrate that includes sub-
areas of the prefrontal cortex (Bunge, Wendelken, and Wagner
2005; see frontal lobe). Although there have been reports of
great apes being successfully trained to solve analogy problems,
these results are controversial (Oden, hompson, and Premack
2001). Complex relational thinking appears to be a capacity that
emerged in homo sapiens along with the evolutionary increase
in size of the frontal cortex. he ability to think relationally
increases with age (Gentner and Rattermann 1991). Greater
sensitivity to relations appears to arise with age due to a com-
bination of incremental accretion of knowledge about relational
concepts (Goswami 1992), increases in working memory
capacity (Halford 1993), and increased ability to inhibit mis-
leading featural information (Richland, Morrison, and Holyoak
2006). Analogy plays a prominent role in teaching mathematics
(Richland, Zur, and Holyoak 2007).
Dedre Gentner (1983) developed the structure-mapping the-
ory of analogy, emphasizing that analogical mapping is guided
by higher-order relations relations between relations. Keith
Holyoak and P. hagard (1989) proposed a multiconstraint the-
ory, hypothesizing that people ind mappings that maximize
similarity of corresponding elements and relations, structural
parallelism, and pragmatic importance for goal achievement.
Several computational models of human analogical thinking
have been developed. Two inluential models are SME (Structure
Mapping Engine; Falkenhainer, Forbus, and Gentner 1989),
based on a classical symbolic architecture, and LISA (Learning
and Inference with Schemas and Analogies; Hummel and
Holyoak 2005), based on a neural-network architecture. LISA has
been used to simulate some efects of damage to the frontal and
temporal cortex on analogical reasoning (Morrison et al. 2004).
Analogy and Language
Analogy is related to metaphor and similar forms of symbolic
expression in literature and everyday language. In metaphors,
the source and target domains are always semantically distant
(Gentner, Falkenhainer, and Skorstad 1988). Rather than simply
comparing the source and target, the target is identiied with the
source (Holyoak 1982), either directly (e.g., Juliet is the sun)
or by applying a predicate drawn from the source domain to the
target (e.g., he romance blossomed). As a domain-general
learning mechanism linked to human evolution, analogy ofers
an alternative to strongly nativist views of language acquisition
(Vallauri 2004; see innateness and innatism). Gentner and
L. L. Namy (2004) review evidence that analogical comparison
plays important roles in speech segmentation, word learning,
and possibly acquisition of grammar.
Keith Holyoak
97
Analogy: Synchronic and Diachronic
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bunge, Silvia, C. Wendelken, and A. D. Wagner. 2005. Analogical rea-
soning and prefrontal cortex: Evidence for separable retrieval and inte-
gration mechanisms. Cerebral Cortex 15: 23949.
Falkenhainer, Brian, K. D. Forbus, and D. Gentner. 1989. he Structure-
mapping engine: Algorithm and examples. Artiicial Intelligence
41: 163.
Gentner, Dedre. 1983. Structure-mapping: A theoretical framework for
analogy. Cognitive Science 7: 15570.
Gentner, Dedre, B. Falkenhainer, and J. Skorstad. 1988. Viewing meta-
phor as analogy. In Analogical Reasoning: Perspectives of Artiicial
Intelligence, Cognitive Science, and Philosophy, ed. D. Helman, 1717.
Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer.
Gentner, Dedre, K. J. Holyoak, and B. N. Kokinov , eds. 2001. he Analogical
Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
his book contains survey articles on topics in analogy.
Gentner, Dedre, and L.L. Namy. 2004. he role of comparison in chil-
drens early word learning. In Weaving a Lexicon, ed. D. Hall and S.
Waxman, 53368. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gentner, Dedre, and M. Rattermann. 1991. Language and the career of
similarity. In Perspectives on hought and Language: Interrelations
in Development, ed. S. Gelman and J. Byrnes, 22577.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gick, Mary, and K. J. Holyoak. 1983. Schema induction and analogical
transfer. Cognitive Psychology 15: 138.
Goswami, Usha. 1992. Analogical Reasoning in Children. Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Halford, Graeme. 1993. Childrens Understanding: he Development of
Mental Models. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Holyoak, Keith. 1982. An analogical framework for literary interpreta-
tion. Poetics 11: 10526.
Holyoak, Keith, and P. hagard. 1989. Analogical mapping by constraint
satisfaction. Cognitive Science 13: 295355.
. 1995. Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative hought. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press. his book provides a broad introduction to the nature
and uses of analogy.
Hummel, John, and K. J. Holyoak. 2005. Relational reasoning in a neu-
rally-plausible cognitive architecture: An overview of the LISA Project.
Current Directions in Cognitive Science 14: 1537.
Morrison, Robert, D. C. Krawczyk, K. J. Holyoak, J. E. Hummel, T. W.
Chow, B. L. Miller, and B. J. Knowlton. 2004. A neurocomputational
model of analogical reasoning and its breakdown in frontotemporal
lobar degeneration. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 16: 26071.
Oden, David, R. K. R. hompson, and D. Premack. 2001. Can an ape rea-
son analogically? Comprehension and production of analogical prob-
lems by Sarah, a chimpanzee (Pan Troglodytes). In Gentner, Holyoak,
and Kokinov 2001, 47197.
Richland, Lindsey, R. G. Morrison, and K. J. Holyoak. 2006. Childrens
development of analogical reasoning: Insights from scene analogy
problems. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 94: 24971.
Richland, Lindsey, O. Zur, and K. J. Holyoak. 2007. Cognitive supports
for analogy in the mathematics classroom. Science 316: 11289.
Spearman, Charles. 1946. heory of a general factor. British Journal of
Psychology 36: 11731.
Vallauri, Edoardo. 2004. he relation between mind and language: he
innateness hypothesis and the poverty of the stimulus. Linguistic
Review 21: 34587.
ANALOGY: SYNCHRONIC AND DIACHRONIC
Analogy involves two (or more) systems, A and B, which are con-
stituted by their respective parts, that is, a1, a2, a3 (etc.) and b1,
98
b2, b3 (etc.). here is some relation R between a1, a2, and a3,
expressed as R(a1,a2,a3), just as there is another such relation
S between b1, b2, and b3, expressed as S(b1,b2,b3). For A and
B to be analogous, it is required that R and S be exempliica-
tions of the same abstract structure X, as evidenced by a map-
ping between a1/a2/a3 and b1/b2/b3. his is what is meant by
saying that analogy (e.g., between A and B) is a structural sim-
ilarity, or a similarity between relations (e.g., R and S). It is not
a material similarity, or a similarity between things (e.g., a1
and b1). More and more abstract analogies are constituted by
similarities between similarities between relations between
things.
In its purely synchronic use (see synchrony and dia-
chrony), analogy is understood to be the centripetal force that
holds the units of a structure together. To simplify an example
given by N. S. Trubetzkoy ([1939] 1958, 6066), in a structure
containing just /p/, /b/, /t/, and /d/, the phoneme /p/ acquires
the distinctive features voiceless and bilabial by being contrasted
with, respectively, (voiced) /b/ and (dental) /t/. he relation
between the pairs /p/ & /b/ and /t/ & /d/ is the same, and so is
the relation between /p/ & /t/ and /b/ & /d/, which means by
deinition that there is in both cases an analogy between the
two pairs. his type of analogy-based analysis applies to any well-
articulated structure, linguistic or nonlinguistic: A unit is what
the other units are not (as /p/ is neither /b/ nor /t/ nor, of course,
/d/); and this otherness is based on corresponding oppositions
(like voiceless vs. voiced and bilabial vs. dental).
Synchronic analogy may be characterized as analogy-as-
structure. Its counterpart is analogy-as-process,that is, discovery,
manipulation, or invention of structural similarity. Traditionally,
language acquisition was thought to be based on analogy: From
innumerable sentences heard and understood [the child] will
abstract some notion of their structure which is deinite enough
to guide him in framing sentences of his own (Jespersen [1924]
1965, 19). After a period of neglect, this traditional view has
again become fashionable in some quarters (Pinker 1994, 417;
Tomasello 2003, 1639).
Only if analogy-as-process leaves a permanent trace that devi-
ates from the current norm is there reason to speak of language
change, the province of diachronic linguistics. Traditionally, the
term analogical change was restricted to morphology, or to cases
where irregularities brought about by sound change are elimi-
nated so as to achieve, or to approach, the goal of one meaning
one form. However, this same goal is involved in such large-scale
changes as have generally been ascribed to a need for harmony
or symmetry. In syntactic change, analogy consists in extending a
reanalyzed structure to new contexts (Anttila 1989, 1024).
Esa Itkonen
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Anttila, Raimo. 1989. Historical and Comparative Linguistics.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Jespersen, Otto. [1924] 1965. Philosophy of Grammar. London: Allen and
Unwin.
Pinker, Stephen. 1994. he Language Instinct. New York: Morrow.
Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a Language. A Usage-Based
heory of Language-Acquisition. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Analyticity
Trubetzkoy, N. S. [1939] 1958. Grundzge der Phonologie. Gttingen:
Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht.
ANALYTICITY
Analyticity is a property that a statement has when its truth is
in some special way determined by its meaning. Many believe
that no such property exists. Led by W. V. O. Quine (1953), phi-
losophers complain that no one has been able to deine the con-
cept of analyticity in a way that is precise and that also fulills the
purposes to which it is typically put.
To some people, it seems that all uncles are either mar-
ried or have a sibling is true just because of the meaning of its
constituent words, most prominently because of the meaning
of uncle. But all uncles are less than eight feet tall is true not
because of meanings but because of how the world has turned
out to be. he irst sort of statement is said to be analytic, the
second synthetic.
his distinction has far-reaching interest and application.
Empiricists have always had diiculty accounting for the seem-
ingly obvious fact that the truths of logic and mathematics are
both necessary (i.e., they could not be false) and a priori (i.e., they
are known independently of sensory experience). For most of the
twentieth century, it was agreed that analyticity could explain
this obvious fact away as a merely linguistic phenomenon.
he idea that all necessity could be explained away by ana-
lyticity fell out of fashion when S. Kripke (1980) convinced most
philosophers that some necessary truths are neither analytic nor
a priori (e.g., water = H2O). But as L. BonJour (1998, 28) points
out, many still think that the unusual modal and epistemic sta-
tus of logic and mathematics is due to a special relation between
truth and meaning.
However we apply the concept, trouble for analyticity begins
when we remind ourselves that every truth depends, to some
extent, on the meanings of its constituent terms. If the word
uncle had meant oak tree, then both previous examples would
be false. In response, it is said that an analytic truth is one whose
truth depends solely on the meanings of its terms. Our linguistic
conventions alone make the irst example true, and the second is
true party because of meaning and partly because of the way the
world is. But how can linguistic convention alone make some-
thing true?
We can distinguish the sentence all uncles are either mar-
ried or have a sibling from the proposition that this sentence
now expresses. Meaning or linguistic convention alone makes
this sentence true in the following way. Given that this sentence
expresses the proposition that it does (i.e., given our current lin-
guistic conventions), it is true. his cannot be said of our other
example. hat this sentence means what it does is not suicient
to determine its truth or falsity (see also sentence meaning).
he world plays a part.
here are three serious problems. First, if this is what it is for
a sentence to be true solely in virtue of its meaning, then it is just
another way of saying that it expresses a necessary truth, and that
tells us nothing about how we know it. hus, appeal to analyticity
cannot explain the necessity and a priority of logic, mathemat-
ics, or anything else. Second, the proposition now expressed
by our irst example would be true no matter how we ended up
expressing it. hus, our current linguistic conventions do not
make it true. hird, our irst example certainly does say some-
thing about the world. Indeed, it says something about every
object in the universe. If it is an uncle, then either it is married
or it has a sibling.
Some philosophers have called the sort of analyticity dis-
cussed so far, where things are said to be true in virtue of mean-
ing, metaphysical analyticity. his is distinguished from epistemic
analyticity. A statement is epistemically analytic when under-
standing it suices for being justiied in believing it (Boghossian
1996). While these considerations make trouble for metaphys-
ical analyticity, they allegedly leave its epistemic counterpart
untouched.
he purpose of introducing epistemic analyticity is similar to
that of its older ancestor. he hope is that mathematical, logical,
and conceptual truths can be designated as a priori without pos-
tulating a special faculty of reason or intuition. his is done by
building certain kinds of knowledge in as preconditions for pos-
sessing or understanding concepts. If part of what it is to under-
stand the word uncle is to be disposed to accept that all uncles
are either married or have a sibling, then it could be argued
that once we understand that sentence, we know that it is true.
No experience (beyond what is required for understanding) is
necessary.
he best candidates for epistemically analytic truths are sim-
ple truths of logic. But even the most obvious logical truths are
not immune to challenge. For example, a few philosophers and
logicians have claimed that some statements can be both true
and false (Preist 1987) and that modus ponens is invalid (McGee
1985). Yet these sophisticated theoreticians certainly understand
the meanings of their own words. herefore, acceptance of some
speciic truth of logic is not necessary for understanding any log-
ical concept. And since we might someday have good reason to
reject any particular truth of logic while continuing to understand
our logical concepts, understanding some logical concept is not
suicient for being justiied in believing any particular truth of
logic. And if logic is not epistemically analytic, nothing is.
hese considerations make the existence of analyticity dubi-
ous. But there still appears to be a deep diference between the
two examples. If there is really a diference, it is not one of true in
virtue of meaning versus true in virtue of reality, but one of nec-
essary and a priori versus contingent and empirical.
Michael Veber
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
BonJour, L. 1998. In Defense of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Boghossian, P. 1996. Analyticity reconsidered. Nous 30.3: 36091.
Kripke, S. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
McGee, V. 1985. A counterexample to modus ponens. Journal of
Philosophy 82: 46271.
Priest, G. 1987. In Contradiction. Boston: Kluwer.
Quine, W. V. O. 1953. Two dogmas of empricism. In From a Logical
Point of View, 2046. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Veber, M. 2007. Not too proud to beg (the question): Why inferential-
ism cannot account for the a priori. Grazer Philosophische Studien
73: 11331. A critique of Boghossian 1996 and similar views.
99
Anaphora
ANAPHORA
Languages have expressions whose interpretation may involve
an entity that has been mentioned before: Subsequent reference to
an entity already introduced in discourse approximates a general
deinition of the notion of anaphora (Sair 2004, 4). his works
well for core cases of nominal anaphora as in (1) (Heim 1982):
(1) a. his soldier has a gun. Will he shoot?
b. Every soldier has a gun. ??Will he shoot?
He in (1a) can be interpreted as the same individual as this soldier.
In (1b) every soldier is quantiicational, hence does not denote an
entity he can refer to, which makes anaphora impossible. Possible
discourse antecedents are as diverse as soldiers, water, beauty,
headaches, dissatisfaction, and so on. In addition to nominal
expressions, sentences, verb phrases, prepositional phrases,
adjective phrases, and tenses also admit anaphoric relations.
hus, the notion discourse entity must be broad enough to cap-
ture all these cases of anaphora yet restrictive enough to separate
them from quantiicational cases such as every soldier.
he notion of anaphora is closely related to the notion of
interpretative dependency. For instance, in (2), he can depend for
its interpretation on every soldier, and here, too, it is said that he
is anaphorically related to every soldier.
2. Every soldier who has a gun says he will shoot.
However, (1) versus (2) shows that two diferent modes of inter-
pretation must be distinguished: i) directly assigning two (or
more) expressions the same discourse entity from the inter-
pretation domain (ID) as a value: co-reference as in (1a), and ii)
interpreting one of the expressions in terms of the other by gram-
matical means: binding (Reinhart 1983). his contrast is repre-
sented in (3).
Coreference in (3a) is restricted in terms of conditions on dis-
course entities, binding in (3b) in terms of grammatical conig-
uration. Expr1 can only bind expr2 if it c-commands the latter
(Reinhart 1983). his condition is met in (2), but not in (1b),
hence the contrast.
Virtually all languages have words and expressions that are ref-
erentially defective they cannot be used deictically (see deixis).
In much of the linguistic literature, these are called anaphors, as
they appear specialized for anaphoric use. Examples vary from
English himself, Dutch zich(zelf), Icelandic sig, Russian sebja,
Chinese (ta) ziji, to Georgian tav tavis, and so on. Such expres-
sions cannot be assigned a discourse value directly. Rather, they
must be bound, often in a local domain approximately the
domain of the nearest subject but subject to variation in terms
of speciic anaphor type and language. Furthermore, under
100
Animacy
restrictive conditions, some of these expressions may yet allow a
free logophoric interpretation.
It is an important task to arrive at a detailed understanding
of the ways in which languages encode interpretive relations
between their expressions and of the division of labor between
the components of the language system involved.
Eric Reuland
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht,
the Netherlands: Foris.
Heim, Irene. 1982. he semantics of deinite and indeinite noun phrases.
Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Reinhart, Tanya. 1983. Anaphora and Semantic Interpretation.
London: Croom Helm.
Reuland, Eric. 2010. Anaphora and Language Design. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Sair, Ken. 2004. he Syntax of Anaphora. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
ANIMACY
Languages often treat animate and inanimate nouns diferently.
Animacy can afect many aspects of grammar, including word
order, and verbal agreement. For example, in Navajo, the
more animate noun must come irst in the sentence (Hale 1973),
and in some Bantu languages, a more animate object must come
before a less animate object. Verbs are more likely to agree with
more animate nouns (Comrie 1989). Animacy can also afect the
choice of case, preposition, verb form, determiner (article), or
possessive marker (Comrie 1989).
What counts as animate difers cross-linguistically. he gram-
matical category of animates may include certain objectively
inanimate things, such as ire, lightning, or wind. Languages may
make additional distinctions among pronouns, proper nouns,
and common nouns, or between deinites and indeinites, and
these are sometimes viewed as part of an animacy hierarchy by
linguists (Comrie 1989). person and number distinctions may
also be included in an animacy hierarchy in this broader sense.
For example, according to Michael Silverstein (1976), subjects
with features at the less animate end of the Animacy Hierarchy in
(1) are more likely to be marked with morphological case, while
the reverse holds of objects.
(1) Animacy Hierarchy
1pl > 1sing > 2pl > 2sing > 3human.pl > 3human.sing >
3anim.pl > 3anim.sing > 3inan.pl > 3inan.sing
Dyirbal exhibits this pattern in that only third person sub-
jects have morphological case, whereas all human objects do.
Silverstein (1976) postulates that the function of such diferen-
tial case marking is to lag less animate subjects and more ani-
mate objects to avoid ambiguity. It is interesting to note that
the patterns of such diferential animacy marking are far more
complex and diverse cross-linguistically for objects than for sub-
jects (Aissen 2003). his may be traced to a relation between ani-
macy and object shift, which produces an associated change in
case or verbal agreement (Woolford 2000, 2007). he less diverse
animacy efects on subject case, which do not afect agreement
Animal Communication and Human Language
(Comrie 1991), may be purely morphological, markedness efects
(Woolford 2007).
Ellen Woolford
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Aissen, Judith. 2003. Diferential object marking: Iconicity vs. economy.
Natural Language and Linguistic heory 21: 43583.
Comrie, Bernard. 1989. Language Universals and Linguistic Typology.
Oxford: Blackwell.
. 1991. Form and function in identifying cases. In Paradigms, ed.
F. Plank, 4155. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Hale, Kenneth L. 1973. A note on subject-object inversion in Navajo. In
Issues in Linguistics: Papers in Honor of Henry and Rene Kahane, ed. B.
B. Kachru et al., 300309. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Silverstein, Michael. 1976. Hierarchy of features and ergativity. In
Grammatical Categories in Australian languages, ed. R. M. Dixon,
11271. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.
Woolford, Ellen. 2000. Object agreement in Palauan. In Formal Problems
in Austronesian Morphology and Syntax, ed. I. Paul , V. Phillips, and L.
Travis, 21545. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer.
. 2007. Diferential subject marking at argument structure, syn-
tax, and PF. In Diferential Subject Marking, ed. H. de Hoop and P. de
Swart, 1740. Dordrecht: Springer.
ANIMAL COMMUNICATION AND HUMAN LANGUAGE
An understanding of the communicative capacities of other ani-
mals is important on its face both for an appreciation of the place
of human language in a broader context and as a prerequisite to
discussion of the evolution of language (see, for example, evo-
lutionary psychology). On closer examination, however,
the diferences between human language and the systems of
other animals appear so profound as to make both projects more
problematic than they appear at irst.
In the 1950s and 1960s, ethologists like Konrad Lorenz and
Niko Tinbergen revolutionized behavioral biologists views of
the cognitive capacities of animals, but consideration of ani-
mal communication focused on the properties of quite simple
systems. A prime example of communication in the texts of
the time was the stickleback. A crucial component of the mat-
ing behavior of this common ish is the pronounced red color-
ation of the males underbelly when he is in mating condition,
which furnishes a signal to the female that she should follow him
to his preconstructed nest, where her eggs will be fertilized. On
this model, communication was viewed as behavioral or other
signals emitted by one organism, from which another organism
(typically, though not always, a conspeciic) derives some infor-
mation. he biological analysis of communication thus came to
be the study of the ways in which such simple signals arise in the
behavioral repertoire of animals and come to play the roles they
do for others who perceive them. hose discussions make little if
any contact with the analysis of human language.
In the intervening half century, we have come to know vastly
more about the nature and architecture of the human lan-
guage faculty and to have good reason to think that much of it
is grounded in human biology. One might expect, therefore, to
ind these concerns relected in the behavioral biology literature.
A comprehensive modern textbook on animal communication
within this ield (e.g., Bradbury and Vehrenkamp 1998) reveals
a great deal about the communicative behavior of many species
and its origins, but within essentially the same picture of what
constitutes communication in (nonhuman) animals, conined to
unitary signals holistically transmitted and interpreted. Little if
any of what we have come to know about human linguistic com-
munication inds a place here.
Biologists have not, in general, paid much attention to the
speciics of linguistic research (though their attention has been
caught by the notion that human language is importantly based
in human biology) and are often not as sophisticated as one
might wish about the complexity of natural language. But the
consequences may not be as serious as linguists are inclined to
think. In fact, the communicative behavior of nonhumans in gen-
eral is essentially encompassed within the simple signal-passing
model. he complexities of structure displayed by human lan-
guage are apparently quite unique to our species and may not
be directly relevant to the analysis of animal communication
elsewhere.
What (Other) Animals Do
Communication in the sense of emission and reception of infor-
mative signals is found in animals as simple as bacteria (quorum
sensing). Most familiar, perhaps, are visual displays of various
sorts that indicate aggression, submission, invitations to mate,
and so on. In some instances, these may involve quite complex
sequences of gestures, reciprocal interactions, and the like, as in
the case of the nesting and mating behavior of many birds. In
others, a simple facial expression, posture, or manner of walking
may provide the signal from which others can derive information
about the animals intentions and attitudes.
hese diferences of internal structure are, of course, crucial
for the correct expression and interpretation of a particular sig-
nal, but they play little or no role in determining its meaning. hat
is, the individual components of the signal do not in themselves
correspond to parts of its meaning, in the sense that varying one
subpart results in a corresponding variation in what is signaled.
Animal signals, however complex in form (and however elaborate
the message conveyed), are unitary wholes. An entire courtship
dance, perhaps extending over several minutes or even longer,
conveys the sense I am interested in mating with you, providing
a nesting place, and care for our ofspring. No part of the dance
corresponds exactly to the providing care part of the message;
the message cannot be minimally altered to convey I am inter-
ested in mating but not in providing care for our ofspring, I was
interested in mating (but am no longer), and so on. Variations in
intensity of expression can convey (continuous) variations in the
intensity of the message (e.g., urgency of aggressive intent), but
that is essentially the only way messages can be modulated.
he most widely discussed apparent exception to this gen-
eralization is the dance language of some species of honeybees.
he bees dance conveys information about a) the direction, b)
the distance, and c) the quality of a food source (or potential
hive site), all on quasi-continuous scales and each in terms of
a distinct dimension of the dance. Although the content of the
message here can be decomposed, and each part associated
with a distinct component of the form of the signal, there is no
element of free combination. Every dance necessarily conveys
101
Animal Communication and Human Language
exactly these three things, and it is only the relative value on each
dimension that is variable. As such, the degree of freedom avail-
able to construct new messages is not interestingly diferent from
that involved in conveying diferent degrees of fear or aggression
by varying degrees of piloerection.
Visual displays do not at all exhaust the modalities in which
animal communication takes place, of course. Auditory signals
are important to many species, including such classics of the ani-
mal communication literature as frog croaks and the calls and
songs of birds (see birdsong and human language). In
some species, portions of the auditory spectrum that are inac-
cessible to humans are involved, as in the ultrasound communi-
cation of bats, some rodents, and dolphins, and the infrasound
signals of elephants. Chemical or olfactory communication is
central to the lives of many animals, including moths, mice, and
lemurs, as well our pet cats and dogs. More exotic possibilities
include the modulation of electric ields generated (and per-
ceived) by certain species of ish.
In some of these systems, the internal structure of the signal
may be quite complex, as in the songs of many oscine songbirds,
but the general point still holds: However elaborate its internal
form, the signal has a unitary and holistic relation to the message
it conveys. In no case is it possible to construct novel messages
freely by substitutions or other ways of varying aspects of the sig-
nals form.
In most animals, the relation of communicative behavior to
the basic biology of the species is very direct. Perceptual systems
are often quite precisely attuned to signals produced by con-
speciics. hus, the frogs auditory system involves two separate
structures (the amphibian papilla and the basilar papilla) that are
sensitive to acoustic signals, typically at distinct frequencies. he
frequencies to which they are most sensitive vary across species
but are generally closely related to two regions of prominence
in the acoustic structure of that species calls. Mice (and many
other mammals) have two distinct olfactory organs, projecting
to quite distinct parts of the mouse brain. he olfactory epithe-
lium is responsive to a wide array of smells, but the vomeronasal
organ is sensitive primarily to the pheremones that play a major
role in communication and social organization. In this case, as in
many, many others, the perceptual system is matched to produc-
tion in ways that optimize the organisms sensitivity to signals
that play a crucial ecological role in the life of the animal.
he essential connection between a species system of com-
munication and its biology is also manifested in the fact that
nearly all such systems are innately speciied. hat is, the ability
to produce and interpret relevant signals emerges in the individ-
ual without any necessary role of experience. Animal commu-
nication is not learned (or taught) but, rather, develops (in the
absence of speciic pathology, such as deafness) as part of the
normal course of maturation. Animals raised under conditions
in which they are deprived of exposure to normal conspeciic
behavior will nonetheless communicate in the fashion normal to
their species when given a chance.
Exceptions to this generalization are extremely rare, apart
from human language. Vocal learning, in particular, has been
demonstrated only to a limited extent in cetaceans and some bats
and, more extensively, in 3 of the 27 orders of birds. he study of
birds, especially oscine songbirds, is particularly instructive in
102
this regard. In general, their song is learned on the basis of early
exposure to appropriate models, from which they in turn com-
pose their own songs. It is interesting to note there appear to be
quite close homologies in the neurophysiology of vocal learn-
ing and perhaps even in its underlying genetic basis between
birds and humans, although what is learned in birds is a uni-
tary, holistic signal like those in other nonhuman communica-
tion systems, rather than individual lexical items subject to free
recombination to produce diferent meanings.
here is much variation across bird species, but a clear gen-
eralization emerges: For each, there is a speciic range of song
structures that individuals of that species can learn. Experience
plays a role in providing the models on which adult song is based,
but (with the exception of a few very general mimics, such as the
lyrebird) this role is quite narrowly constrained by the song-
learning system of the individual species.
What Humans Do, and How It Is Different
Like the systems of communication of other animals, human
language is deeply embedded in human biology. Unlike others,
however, it provides an unbounded range of distinct, discrete
messages. Human language is acquired at a speciic point in
development from within a limited range of possibilities, simi-
lar to the acquisition of song in birds. Unlike the communicative
signals of other species, human language is under voluntary con-
trol, with its underlying neurobiology concentrated in cortical
structures, as opposed to the subcortical control characteristic of
those other species that have been studied in this regard.
Human language is structurally a discrete combinatorial sys-
tem, in which elements from a limited set combine in a recursive,
hierarchical fashion to make an unlimited number of potentially
novel messages (see recursion, iteration, and metarep-
resentation). he combinatorial structure of language is gov-
erned by two quite independent systems: A small inventory of
individually meaningless sounds combine to make meaningful
words, on the one hand (phonology), while these words are
combined by a quite diferent system to make phrases, clauses,
and sentences (see syntax). hese properties (discrete com-
bination, recursive hierarchical organization, and duality of pat-
terning) are not simply idiosyncratic ornaments that could in
principle be omitted without afecting the overall communicative
capacity of the system. Rather, they are what make large vocabu-
laries practical and unbounded free expression possible. Contrast
the unlimited range of potentially novel utterances that any (nor-
mal) speaker of a language can produce, and another speaker of
the same language comprehend, with the strictly limited range of
meaningful signals available to other organisms. No other form of
communication found in nature has these properties. Although
song in some species of birds does display a limited amount of
phonological combinatoriality, there is no analog even here to
meaningful syntax. Human language, and especially its syntactic
organization, is quite unique in the animal world.
Furthermore, eforts to teach systems with these essential
properties to other animals have not succeeded. Despite wide-
spread claims to the contrary in the popular literature, there is
no evidence that any nonhuman animal is capable of acquiring
and using such a system. his should not be seen as particularly
surprising. If language is indeed embedded in human biology,
Aphasia
there is no reason to expect it to be accessible to organisms with
a diferent biological endowment, anymore than humans are
capable of acquiring, say, the echolocation capacities of bats, a
system that is equally grounded in the speciic biology of those
animals.
Conclusion
Human language is often considered as simply one more instan-
tiation of the general class of animal communication systems.
Indeed, like others it appears to be highly species speciic.
Although relevant experience is required to develop the system
of any particular language, the overall class of languages acces-
sible to the human learner is apparently highly constrained, and
the process of language learning is more like genetically gov-
erned maturation than like learning in general. he structural
characteristics of human language are quite diferent from those
of other communication systems, and it is the freedom of expres-
sion subserved by those distinctive properties that gives language
the role it has in human life. (See also primate vocalizations
and grooming, gossip, and language).
Stephen R. Anderson
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Anderson, Stephen R. 2004. Doctor Dolittles Delusion: Animals and the
Uniqueness of Human Language. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Bradbury, J. W., and Sandra Vehrenkamp. 1998. Principles of Animal
Communication. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer.
Hauser, Marc D. 1996. he Evolution of Communication. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
APHASIA
Aphasia is a language impairment caused by brain injury that
afects speech content, auditory comprehension, reading, and
writing to varying degrees. Mild aphasia may result in occasional
word-inding problems, while more severe forms can cause pro-
found deicits in all language domains. Aphasia difers from
developmental disorders in that it occurs after a brain injury to a
person with otherwise normal language skills.
Typically, aphasia results from damage to the left hemi-
sphere of the brain due to stroke, traumatic brain injury, tumor,
or degenerative neurological disease. Nearly all right-handed
individuals and most left-handers are thought to have core lin-
guistic functions semantics, phonology, syntax, and
morphology lateralized to the left hemisphere, while other
aspects of language, speciically prosody and pragmatics, are
associated with the right hemisphere. Approximately one
million people in the United States are alicted with aphasia,
which is a prevalence rate similar to that of Parkinsons disease.
Roughly 80,000 more acquire aphasia annually.
Recent advances in the study of language have provided greater
insight into aphasia syndromes. Modern neuroimaging tech-
nology has helped reine classic models of language localization,
as well as our understanding of aphasia treatment and recovery.
In particular, brain-imaging techniques such as magnetic reso-
nance imaging (MRI), computerized tomography (CT), positron
emission tomography (PET), and functional MRI (fMRI) have
helped deine functions of core speech and language areas.
Aphasia Syndromes
Aphasia has traditionally been categorized into seven subtypes,
including Brocas, Wernickes, global, anomic, conduction,
transcortical sensory, and transcortical motor. hese aphasia
variants are characterized by diferent patterns of speech luency,
auditory comprehension, repetition, and naming. Although
patients may be classiied as having one type of aphasia in the
early period after a brain injury, this classiication may change as
language problems resolve with time and treatment.
Brocas aphasia is characterized by a constellation of symp-
toms, including slow, halting speech with impaired grammar;
disturbed auditory comprehension for grammatically complex
phrases and sentences; and poor repetition. Word-inding prob-
lems and diiculty with reading and writing are common. Motor
speech disorders, such as apraxia of speech, a disorder of articu-
latory planning or coordination, and dysarthria, an impairment
in muscle strength, tone, or coordination, very often co-occur.
Patients with Brocas aphasia often talk in a series of nouns and
verbs, as is the case in the following sample from a patient describ-
ing the picnic scene from the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB):
I know it tree house car man with uh woman kid
over here with lag i can know it nice sun shiny day
[unintelligible word]
Patients with Brocas aphasia can participate relatively well
in everyday conversation by using single words or phrases,
often combined with meaningful gestures and facial expres-
sions. Some patients use writing and drawing to compensate for
restricted verbal output. As is true with all aphasia syndromes,
there is a wide range of symptom severity. hose with severe
Brocas aphasia may present with such profound verbal deicits
that their speech is limited to a single recurrent utterance (e.g.,
yeah, yeah). In these patients, comprehension is usually pre-
served for short, simple phrases, but is signiicantly impaired for
more complex information.
Classic aphasia models assume that lesions to brocas area
(See Figure 1) result in Brocas aphasia, but research has indi-
cated that this is not always the case. Reports as early as 1870
documented cases that did not support this linear relationship
(e.g., Bateman 1870; Marie 1906; Moutier 1908; Dronkers et al.
2007). Modern research has found that chronic Brocas aphasia
typically results from large lesions that encompass left frontal
brain regions, underlying white matter, the insula, and the ante-
rior parietal lobe. Lesions restricted to Brocas area tend to
cause transient mutism that spontaneously resolves within days
or weeks (Mohr 1976). In some cases, Brocas aphasia can occur
without damage to Brocas area (e.g., Basso et al. 1985; Mazzocchi
and Vignolo 1979).
Patients with Wernickes aphasia present a reverse pattern of
symptoms when compared to those with Brocas aphasia: While
speech is luent, comprehension is impaired. Patients speak in
a normal or rapid rate. However, they often use meaningless
words, jargon, or semantic paraphasias (e.g., using a related
word, bike for a target word, car). Reading and writing may
be similarly disrupted. he following exempliies the speech
103
Aphasia

Figure 1. Several of the key brain regions affected

in aphasia. Areas depicted as typical lesions are
derived from patient data obtained at the Center
for Aphasia and Related Disorders.

content of a patient with Wernickes aphasia describing the Initial reports that conduction aphasia arose from lesions
WAB picnic scene: to the arcuate fasciculus (the white matter tract connecting
Wernickes and Brocas areas; see Figure 1) have been reined
And the man and hers and Ill say I dont think shes working. over the years. Modern studies have shown that conduction
heyre not doing the thing. hen the ladder then the tree aphasia results most often from lesions to the posterior supe-
and the /let/ [points to kite] and lady here [points to boy] rior temporal gyrus (Dronkers et al. 1998), the auditory cortex
have to clean that. (Damasio and Damasio 1980), or periventricular white matter
underlying the supramarginal gyrus (Sakurai et al. 1998).
In contrast to patients with Brocas aphasia, those with
Global aphasia, the most severe syndrome, is characterized
Wernickes aphasia may understand very little in conversation
by profound impairments in all language modalities. Speech,
because of their impaired comprehension of single words. In
auditory comprehension, naming, repetition, reading, and writ-
addition, successful communication is made challenging by ver-
ing are all afected, leaving the patient with very little functional
bal output that is empty, coupled with an inability to monitor
communication. Speech may be limited to single stereotyped
speech content. Using visual information to compensate for com-
or automatic words and phrases (e.g., yes, no, I dont know).
prehension deicits is often beneicial (e.g., providing pictures,
Auditory comprehension may be impaired for even simple yes/
drawing, or writing key words during conversational exchanges).
no questions. Such a severe loss of language typically results
Persisting cases of Wernickes aphasia are not caused by injury
from a large cortical lesion, encompassing the frontal, temporal,
to wernickes area alone but, rather, by much larger lesions
and parietal lobes. Patients often rely on preserved nonverbal
afecting most of the middle temporal gyrus and underlying white
skills to aid in communication (e.g., the recognition of pictures
matter (Dronkers, Redfern, and Ludy 1995; see Figure 1). Such
and gestures to support auditory comprehension and the ability
damage amounts to a poorer prognosis for recovery. Patients
to draw or gesture to aid in expression).
with lesions conined to Wernickes area tend to have symptoms
Anomic aphasia, the mildest of the syndromes, results in
of Wernickes aphasia that resolve, resulting in milder forms of
word-inding deicits (anomia), while other language skills are
aphasia, most often conduction aphasia or anomic aphasia, if
typically well preserved. When attempting to ind a target word,
the lesion spares the middle temporal gyrus.
patients with anomic aphasia may describe its function or use a
Conduction aphasia is a luent aphasia characterized by an
synonym. Speech may be slow and halting, due to anomia, but
inability to repeat. Auditory comprehension is relatively pre-
grammar is unafected. Anomic aphasia can result from lesions
served, and patients use speech that is largely understandable
anywhere within the perisylvian region.
but may be rife with phonemic paraphasias (substituting sounds
he transcortical aphasias are rare and characterized by a
in words, e.g., netter for letter). While high-frequency words
preserved ability to repeat, despite impairments in other lan-
and short phrases may be repeated accurately (e.g., the tele-
guage domains. Transcortical motor aphasia (TCMA) is simi-
phone is ringing), low-frequency items are more diicult (e.g.,
lar to Brocas aphasia, in that patients present with nonluent
irst British ield artillery). Patients may retain the meaning
speech and relatively intact comprehension, but repetition skills
of such phrases, owing to their preserved comprehension, but
are markedly well preserved. Lesions typically spare core lan-
the phonological trace is disrupted, thereby disturbing verba-
guage areas, are smaller than those that cause Brocas aphasia,
tim repetition. he following typiies the speech of a patient with
and are restricted to anterior and superior frontal lobe regions.
conduction aphasia, again describing the WAB picnic scene:
Although patients may be mute initially, their symptoms tend
Well theres a house near a clearing, evidently its on the water. to resolve quickly, resulting in anomic aphasia. Patients with
Further, theres a stick with a banner in the foreground transcortical sensory aphasia (TCSA) present much like patients
[referring to the lag]. I dont know what thats called a pier with Wernickes aphasia, with empty, luent speech and poor
a tier? heres a bucket and a /kovel/. It looks like theres comprehension, but they too retain a striking ability to repeat.
someone playing in the water. Lesions typically involve portions of the posterior temporal

104
Aphasia
and parietal regions, but tend to be much smaller than those of
Wernickes aphasia. Acute symptoms usually resolve to produce
an anomic aphasia.
While aphasia most often occurs suddenly, as the result
of injury, a degenerative form of aphasia was irst described
over a century ago by Arnold Pick, a Czech neurologist, and
later expanded upon by Marsel Mesulam in a landmark paper
in which he described six patients who presented with lan-
guage deicits, in the absence of other behavioral abnormalities
(Mesulam 1982). Speech or language deicits remained the only
impairment for the irst two years in these patients, but as the
disease progressed, more generalized dementia emerged. his
progressive disorder was distinct from other dementias, such as
Alzheimers disease, because language problems, rather than
memory complaints, were the most salient symptoms.
Since then, numerous cases of what is now termed pri-
mary progressive aphasia (PPA) have been described, in which
patients present with both luent and nonluent variants of the
disorder (Snowden, et al. 1992; Gorno-Tempini et al. 2004).
Neuroimaging typically shows left perisylvian atrophy, encom-
passing frontal regions in progressive nonluent aphasia and
anterior temporal and temporo-parietal regions in the more lu-
ent semantic dementia and logopenic variants. here are many
underlying pathologies that cause the clinical syndrome of PPA,
including Picks disease, progressive supranuclear palsy, corti-
cobasal degeneration, dementia lacking distinctive pathology,
and Alzheimers disease.
Treatment for Aphasia
Critical reviews of aphasia treatment studies (e.g., Bhogal,
Teasell, and Speechley 2003; Holland et al. 1996) have shown
that treatment can be efective in improving language skills past
the point that might be expected from spontaneous recovery
alone. Although it remains diicult to predict the treatment that
will result in the greatest amount of change for an individual,
there are many options from which to choose.
Patients with aphasia are typically referred to speech lan-
guage pathologists for diagnostic testing aimed at developing
treatment goals. herapy may focus on improving impaired skills
or developing compensatory strategies to overcome obstacles to
successful communication. Patient-speciic factors (e.g., aphasia
severity, cognitive ability, general health, and motivation) also
inluence treatment decisions. Research is inconclusive, how-
ever, as to the prognostic weight that these variables contribute
to recovery and treatment planning for an individual.
Nina F. Dronkers, Jennifer Ogar
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Basso, A., A. R. Lecours, S. Moraschini, and M. Vanier. 1985. Anatomo-
clinical correlations of the aphasias as deined through computerized
tomography: On exceptions. Brain and Language 26: 20129.
Bateman, F. 1870. On Aphasia. London: Churchill.
Bhogal, S. K., R. Teasell, and M. Speechley. 2003. Intensity of aphasia
therapy, impact on recovery. Stroke 34.4: 98793.
Damasio, H., and A. R. Damasio. 1980. he anatomical basis of conduc-
tion aphasia. Brain 103: 33750.
Dronkers, N. F., B. B. Redfern, and C. A. Ludy. 1995. Lesion localization
in chronic Wernickes aphasia. Brain and Language 51: 6265.
Areal Distinctness and Literature
Dronkers, N. F., O. Plaisant, M. T. Iba-Zizen, and E. A. Cabanis. 2007.
Paul Brocas historic cases: High resolution MR imaging of the brains
of Leborgne and Lelong. Brain 130: 143241.
Dronkers N. F., B. B. Redfern, C. Ludy, and J. Baldo. 1998. Brain regions
associated with conduction aphasia and echoic rehearsal. Journal of
the International Neuropsychological Society 4: 234.
Gorno-Tempini, M. L., N. F. Dronkers, K. P. Rankin, et al. 2004. Cognition
and anatomy in three variants of primary progressive aphasia. Annals
of Neurology 55: 33546.
Holland, A. L., D. S. Fromm, F. DeRuyter, M. Stein. 1996. Treatment ei-
cacy. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 39.5: S2736.
Marie P. 1906. Revision de la question de laphasie: La troisieme circon-
volution frontale gauche ne joue aucun role special dans la fonction du
langage. Semaine Medicale 26: 2417.
Mazzocchi, F., and L. A. Vignolo. 1979. Localization of lesions in
aphasia: Clinical CT-scan correlations in stroke patients. Cortex
15: 62754.
Mesulam, M. M. 1982. Slowly progressive aphasia without generalized
dementia. Annals of Neurology 11: 5928.
Mohr, J. P. 1976. Brocas area and Brocas aphasia. In Studies in
Neurolinguistics. Vol. 1. Ed. H. Whitaker and H. Whitaker, 20133. New
York: Academic Press.
Moutier, F. 1908. LAphasie de Broca. Paris: Steinheil.
Sakurai, Y., S. Takeuchi, E. Kojima, et. al. 1998. Mechanism of short-
term memory and repetition in conduction aphasia and related cogni-
tive disorders: a neuropsychological, audiological and neuroimaging
study. Journal of Neurological Sciences 154.2: 18293.
Snowden, J. S., D. Neary, D. M. Mann, et al. 1992. Progressive language
disorder due to lobar atrophy. Annals of Neurology 31: 17483.
AREAL DISTINCTNESS AND LITERATURE
here are two criteria for determining whether a linguistic prop-
erty is a universal. First, it must occur across languages with a
frequency greater than chance. Second, the presence of the prop-
erty in some of these languages should not have been caused by
its presence in other languages. In linguistics, the causal crite-
rion is often operationally speciied into two subcriteria genetic
and areal distinctness, which is to say, distinctness in origin and
in cross-language interaction.
Researchers in literary universals also adopt the pre-
ceding criteria. However, literature is diferent from language
in being more readily open to inluence. Speciically, the opera-
tional criterion of areal distinctness becomes much more diicult
to satisfy in the case of literature. Even a single work, transported
across continents, may produce signiicant changes in the recipi-
ent literature.
here are three ways of responding to this problem. he irst is
to focus on literary works produced before the period of extensive
global interaction. Research of this sort must form the primary basis
for any serious study of literary universals. Moreover, such research
indicates that there are some signiicant universals, for example the
narrative universals of heroic, romantic, and sacriicial tragi-
comedy. However, this approach to areal distinctness cannot be as
rigorous as one might like. Global interaction extends back through
the formation of all the major literary traditions.
he second response involves a more nuanced approach for
isolating inluence from a source tradition to a recipient tradi-
tion. Here, we may distinguish between self-conscious and
implicit learning. Self-conscious learning can occur with a single
105
Art, Languages of
exposure to salient features of a literary work. Implicit learning,
however, is likely to require many exposures, commonly while
immersed in the culture and language of the source tradition. In
isolating literary universals, then, we may take into account the
degree to which a particular property is likely to have been trans-
ported from one tradition to another by learning of either sort,
given the degree of contact between the traditions. For example,
the practice of dramatic performance may be transmitted from
one tradition to another through limited interaction, as this may
be learned through a single exposure. he same point does not
hold for background imagery.
Finally, we may wish to expand our study of cross-cultural
patterns to actual borrowings. Here, too, it is crucial to distin-
guish diferent types of inluence. We may roughly divide inlu-
ence into two categories hegemonic and nonhegemonic.
Hegemonic inluence occurs when the source tradition has
greater economic power (e.g., in the publication and distribu-
tion of literary works), more pervasive control of government
or education, or a higher level of prestige (due, for example, to
military strength), or when it is otherwise in a position of cul-
tural domination over the recipient society. Obvious cases are
to be found in colonialism. Common properties that result
from non-hegemonic inluences are not universals themselves.
However, they may tell us something about cross-cultural aes-
thetic or related propensities. Common properties that result
from hegemonic inluences, in contrast, may simply relect the
efects of power.
Patrick Colm Hogan
WORK CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Comrie, Bernard. 1981. Language Universals and Linguistic Typology.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2005. Literary universals and their cultural tra-
ditions: he case of poetic imagery. Consciousness, Literature, and
the Arts 6.2. Available online at: http://www.aber.ac.uk/cla/archive/
hogan.html.
ART, LANGUAGES OF
Languages of Art, a book by Nelson Goodman (190698), was
irst published in 1968, with a second edition in 1976. he pres-
ent entry focuses solely on this book, which raises interesting
questions about language in a general sense and its role in
aesthetic experience. his entry does not attempt to contextu-
alize Goodmans book relative to his philosophy, for which see
Daniel Cohnitz and Marcus Rosenberg (2006) and Catherine Z.
Elgin (1992); Goodmans later and related Ways of Worldmaking
is also recommended (Goodman and Elgin 1978).
By languages (of art), Goodman means more generally sym-
bol systems; natural language is one of the symbol systems, which
include, for example, musical notation or the symbol system of
cubist painting. Certain characteristics of symbol systems, when
used in an artwork, place cognitive demands on its audience,
which make the artwork good to think (to borrow Claude Lvi-
Strausss term). he symbol systems from which artworks are
composed enable us to be exploratory, drawing on our cognitive
(including emotional) resources. his is because artworks are
106
made from symbol systems that have one or more of the symp-
toms of the aesthetic: syntactic density, semantic density, syntac-
tic repletenesss, and exempliication. hese notions are deined
later in this entry.
According to Goodman, A symbol system consists of a sym-
bol scheme correlated with a ield of reference ([1968] 1976,143).
Goodmans primary interest in deining a symbol system is to
diferentiate the notational from the non-notational schemes,
where notation is a technical notion to which his Chapter 4
is devoted. His concern about notations follows from a concern
about forgeries and fakes and with the fact that some types of
art (such as painting) can be faked while others (such as per-
formance of a speciic piece of music) cannot. Where a work is
deined by compliance to a score (i.e., it has a notation), it cannot
be faked; such works are called allographic. Where a work is not
deined by compliance to a score, as in the case of a painting, its
authenticity can be established only by tracing the history of its
production back to its origin, and this permits faking; such works
are called autographic.
A symbol system is built on a symbol scheme, which con-
sists of characters (and usually modes of combination for these
characters). For example, for a natural language, a character is a
class of marks, where marks might include anything from single
sounds or letters up to whole spoken or written texts, as in the let-
ter P, a character that is the class whose members are all the writ-
ings-down of the letter P. Symbol systems are either notations or
not notations. If the symbol system is a notation, the characters
of which its scheme is comprised must meet two conditions, as
follows:
(1) For a character in a notation, the members can be
interchanged, where diferent characters can be true cop-
ies of one another; this is called the condition of character-
indiference and is true, for example, of letters of the English
alphabet.
(2) Characters in a notation must be initely diferentiated
or articulate; for a mark that does not belong to two charac-
ters, it must be theoretically possible to determine that it does
not belong to at least one of them (this is explained further
shortly).
(1, 2) are the two syntactic requirements that deine a sym-
bol system as notational.
Characters in a scheme are correlated with things outside
the scheme. For example, the marks that make up a score are
correlated with elements in the performance of the score; the
mark that is a written word is correlated with a pronunciation of
that word; and the mark that is a written word is (also and inde-
pendently) correlated with that words referent. Goodman uses
the term complies and says that the performance complies
with the score, or the referent, or pronunciation, complies with
the written word. he set of things that comply with an inscrip-
tion (e.g., the set of things named that can be denoted by a
name) is called the compliance class of the inscription. For the
symbol system to be a notation, it must irst include a symbol
scheme that is notational (i.e., that satisies the two syntactic
conditions), and it must also satisfy three semantic conditions,
as follows.
Art, Languages of
(3) Notational systems must be unambiguous; it must be
clear which object complies with each unique element of the
scheme.
(4) In a notation, compliance classes must be disjoint; for
example, a performance cannot comply with two diferent
scores.
(5) A notational system must be semantically initely difer-
entiated; for an object that does not comply with two char-
acters, it must be theoretically possible to determine that the
object does not comply with at least one of them.
he notion of inite diferentiation is important both in the
syntax and semantics of notational systems; inite diferentiation
is articulation, and its lack constitutes density. As we will see,
though articulation is important for a notational system, density
is more generally important in deining works as aesthetic. Finite
diferentiation requires gaps between elements in the system
(between characters, or between compliants); if between two
adjacent elements a third can always be inserted, the scheme
lacks inite diferentiation. For example, a scheme lacks inite
diferentiation if it has two characters, where all marks not lon-
ger than one inch belong to one character and all longer marks
belong to the other, and where marks can be of any length.
Between a mark belonging to the character of marks not longer
than one inch and a mark belonging to the character of longer
marks, it is always (theoretically) possible to have a third that
falls between them (this ever-diminishing between-space is a
kind of Derridean mise-en-abme).
A symbol system is called a notation if it meets the ive condi-
tions. Goodman asks whether various types of symbol systems
that have been developed in the arts are notations. (A type of
artistic practice may be non-notational just because no notation
has been developed for it; in principle, notations might be devel-
oped for all of them, but in practice they have not been.) A tra-
ditional musical score is a character in a notational system. he
compliants of the score are the performances, which collectively
constitute the work of music. Similar comments are made for
Labanotation, a scoring system developed for dance. A literary
work is a character in a notational scheme (but not a character
in a notational system): Like the language from which it is com-
posed, it meets the syntactic requirements for a notation, but not
the semantic requirements. A painting is a work that is in a sym-
bol system that is not notational.
Having developed these notions, Goodman uses them as
a way of deining a representation, a problem raised and not
solved in the irst part of the book, where, for example, he argues
that we cannot distinguish a representation by criteria such
as resemblance to the represented object. Representation for
Goodman is distinct from description (i.e., the term representa-
tion does not correspond to current cognitive science or linguistic
uses, in which propositions or tree structures are representa-
tions). A description uses a symbol scheme that is (syntactically)
articulate, whereas a representation uses a symbol system that is
dense (or uses symbols from a dense part of a symbol scheme).
He distinguishes between two types of dense (representational)
schemes, diferentiating a diagram from a picture. His example is
a pair of representations that are visually identical, consisting of a
peaking line, one an electrocardiogram and the other a picture
of the outline of Mount Fuji. What makes the electrocardiogram
a diagram is that not every aspect of its form is relevant; the line
can vary in thickness or color without constituting a diferent
character. In contrast, every aspect of the form of the picture is
relevant; pictures have much fewer contingent features than dia-
grams, and pictures are thus said to be relatively (syntactically)
replete. he diference between diagram and picture is a matter
of degree; repleteness is a relative characteristic.
Goodman concludes his book by using these notions to
develop four symptoms of the aesthetic. Objects have aes-
thetic symptoms when they use symbol systems that are syn-
tactically dense, semantically dense, and syntactically replete.
he fourth symptom of the aesthetic is that aesthetic objects
exemplify. (In Ways of Worldmaking, Goodman explores the
notion of style and proposes that the style of an artwork is one
of the referents exempliied by its symbols, where style consists
of those features of the symbolic functioning of a work that are
characteristic of author, period, place or school [1978, 35]. In the
same book, he introduces a ifth symptom of the aesthetic, which
is multiple and complex reference.) Note that the irst three of
these symptoms are characteristic of non-notational symbol sys-
tems; all three are associated with density in some more gen-
eral sense, which, Goodman says arises out of, and sustains, the
unsatisiable demand for absolute precision, thus engaging our
interest in aesthetic works ([1968] 1976, 253).
Goodman concludes his discussion by asking what gives an
aesthetic object its value, both relative to other aesthetic objects
and, more generally, to us: What makes us want to know it? He
argues that aesthetic objects invite our interest by asking us to
understand what they are, including how their symbol systems
operate, and what they exemplify; these tasks are made particu-
larly diicult by the four symptoms of the aesthetic, which thus
particularly stimulate our interest in aesthetic objects. He sum-
marizes three criteria, drawn from general ideas about aesthet-
ics: Engagement with artworks improves our itness to cope with
the world, just manifests our playfulness (i.e., homo ludens),
or communicates special kinds of knowledge to us. hese are
partial insights into the primary purpose of our engagement with
aesthetic objects: he primary purpose is cognition in and for
itself; the practicality, pleasure, compulsion, and communica-
tive utility all depend on this ([1968] 1976, 258). he symbol
systems or languages of art serve this purpose, allowing
for the possibility of producing symbolic objects that engage us.
Furthermore, the characteristic density of the symbolic systems
used in artworks, and the characteristic unparaphrasability of
what they express both permit a person to reenter the same art-
work and repeatedly to discover new things in it.
Nigel Fabb
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Cohnitz, Daniel, and Marcus Rosenberg. 2006. Nelson Goodman.
Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press.
Elgin, Catherine Z. 1992 . Depiction. In A Companion to Aesthetics, ed.
David Cooper, 11316. Oxford: Blackwell.
. 1992. Nelson Goodman. In A Companion to Aesthetics, ed. David
Cooper, 1757. Oxford: Blackwell.
Goodman, Nelson. [1968] 1976. Languages of Art. 2d ed.
Indianapolis: Hackett.
107
Articulatory Phonetics
. 1988. Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences.
London: Routledge.
Goodman, Nelson, and Catherine Z. Elgin. 1978. Ways of Worldmaking.
Indianapolis: Hackett.
ARTICULATORY PHONETICS
Articulatory phonetics is that part of phonetics that studies how
speech is produced by the lips, tongue, velum (soft palate), lar-
ynx, and lungs to alter the air pressures and airlows and turbulent
noises in the vocal tract and to create the air spaces that yield the
resonances that diferentiate speech sounds. he basic vocabulary
of articulatory phonetics is used for the taxonomic, that is, clas-
siicatory, description of speech sounds. For example, the initial
sound in the French word pre, father, would be described as
a voiceless bilabial stop, symbolized using the IPA (International
Phonetic Alphabet) symbol [p]. he initial sound in the English
word pear would be described as a voiceless aspirated bilabial
stop and symbolized using the IPA symbol [ph]. However, besides
this essential taxonomic function, articulatory phonetics stud-
ies the mechanisms (e.g., muscular, aerodynamic) that produce
speech and especially the how and why of variability in speech
sounds. he following is a brief overview of the subject; for in-
depth accounts, the readings listed below should be consulted.
History
he study of speech articulation and the development of a
descriptive terminology has an impressive history, with the irst
surviving instance being the Adhyy of the Sanskrit gram- ness), but although some sociolinguistic or pragmatic contrast
marian, Pini (ca. 500 b.p.e.), who gave an articulatory account
of the relatively large sound inventory of Sanskrit. Other notable
achievements in the characterization of speech sounds were
given by many Greek grammarians, notably Dionysius hrax
(irst cent. b.p.e.); the Arab and Persian grammarians al Khalil
Ibn Ahmad and Sbawaihi of the eighth century, who described
the Arabic of their times; the First Grammarian of Iceland
(twelfth cent.); and the work commissioned by and credited to
the Korean King Sejong (ifteenth cent.), which provided not only
an articulatory description of Korean as spoken then but also a
transcription, now the oicial orthography for Korean, hangul,
which is partially iconic in its representation of how the sounds
are produced.
In Europe, the Baroque and modern eras saw dozens of
proposals for the description of speech sounds, for example,
by John Wilkins, Johan Conrad Amman, William Holder,
Francis Lodwick, Alexander J. Ellis, Robert Nares, Ernst Brcke,
Richard Lepsius, Alexander Melville Bell, Henry Sweet, and Otto
Jespersen. Although there is still some variation in the descrip-
tive terms, works such as Catford (1977) and Maddieson (1984)
have helped to standardize the terminology.
The Basics
Speech articulations enable communication between speakers
and listeners because they create sound; it is the sound trans-
mitted to listeners and the perception of these sounds that are
the ultimate goal in speaking. Descriptions of articulation are
intended to capture the gestures that create these distinctive ele-
ments in the speech code.
108
Sound is short-term variations or disturbances in ambient
air pressure. hese pressure disturbances are created when air
moves from a region of high pressure to a region of low pressure.
here are three piston-like articulatory movements that can
create such pressure diferentials with respect to atmospheric
pressure. hese, which J. C. Catford calls the initiation mecha-
nisms, are pulmonic, glottalic, and velaric. hese mechanisms
can either create a positive pressure vis--vis atmospheric pres-
sure, in which case they are called egressive, or a negative pres-
sure, and then they are called ingressive.
Pulmonic egressive initiation is by far the most common. All
languages use it and most use it exclusively. he chest cavity, by
virtue of decreasing its volume as in normal respiratory expira-
tion, compresses the air in the lungs, thus raising lung pressure
above that of the atmospheric pressure. Since speech neces-
sarily involves valves that impede the exiting airlow (e.g., the
adducted vocal cords and/or whatever articulations are made in
the oral cavity), the pulmonic or subglottal pressures developed
in speech are much larger than those seen in quiet respiratory
expiration. Because such initiation is so common, it is normally
not included in the usual phonetic descriptions; for example,
the [p] in French pre, which would otherwise be described as
pulmonic expiratory voiceless bilabial stop, is usually designated
simply as voiceless bilabial stop.
Pulmonic ingressive initiation (so-called ingressive voice)
is possible and is encountered in many cultures, notably in
Scandinavia and France, where short interjections, ja, oui, non,
can be uttered on ingressive voice (usually with some breathi-
may be associated with this trait, no language documented so
far uses pulmonic ingressive initiation to make lexical contrasts.
Ingressive phonation may also be encountered as a (not very
efective) vocal disguise, and it is universally encountered as a
kind of coda to very young babies cries where the vocal cords are
still approximated but the respiration has shifted from expiratory
to inspiratory.
If the vocal cords are tightly closed and the larynx as a whole
is raised, acting like a piston, while there is a complete closure in
the oral cavity (and with the velum raised), a positive pressure
may be developed. Such sounds, glottalic egressives or ejectives,
are not uncommon, being found in various African languages
(from diferent language families), in some languages of South
and Central America and the Paciic Northwest (in the Americas),
and in the Caucasus. For example, Quechua bread is [tanta].
Glottalic ingressives or implosives involve the larynx most
commonly when the vocal cords are in voicing position being
lowered during the stop closure, thus creating a negative pres-
sure in the oral cavity or at least moderating the buildup of pos-
itive pressure. Historically, such stops often come from voiced,
especially geminated (long), stops, for example, Sindhi /pauni/
lotus plant fruit < Prakrit *paba. Enlarging the oral cavity helps
to maintain a positive pressure drop across the glottis, which
favors voicing. Although ejective fricatives are attested, there are
no implosive fricatives probably because the noise of a fricative
is generated when the air jet expands after leaving the narrow
constriction. Such expansion would occur inside the vocal tract
if made implosively, and the sound would be attenuated by the
oral constriction.
Articulatory Phonetics
If an air pocket is trapped between the tongue and palate or
the tongue dorsum and lips, and the tongue is lowered, a large
negative pressure can be generated, which, when released, can
create quite a loud sound. Such sounds, so-called clicks have
velaric ingressive initiation. hey are common in cultures all over
the world as interjections, signals to animals, and so on. However,
they are used as speech sounds to diferentiate words only in a
few languages of southern and East Africa. hey are very com-
mon in the Khoisan languages and a few neighboring Bantu lan-
guages. For example, Khoi one is [|ui] where the [|] is a dental
africated click (the sound often symbolized in Western orthog-
raphies as tsk or tut). In the Khoisan languages, clicks can be
freely combined with pulmonic and/or glottalic egressives either
simultaneously or in clusters. Velaric egressives, where a posi-
tive pressure is created by upward and forward movement of the
tongue, are not found in any languages lexicon but are used in
some cultures as a kind of exaggerated spitting sound, where the
positive pressure creates a brief bilabial trill.
In general, after the mechanism of initiation is speciied for
speech sounds, there are three main categories of terms to fur-
ther characterize them: place, manner, qualiiers. For example,
the Russian [bratj] to take has in word-inal position a voiceless
palatalized dental stop. he manner is stop, the place is den-
tal, and voiceless and palatalized are qualiiers.
Manners
here are two fundamental categories of manners, obstruent and
sonorant, each with subcategories. An obstruent is a sound that
substantially impedes the low of air in the vocal tract to a degree
that turbulent noise is generated either as continuous frication or
as a noise burst. Obstruents may be stops or fricatives. (Ejectives,
implosives, and clicks are inherent stops.) Sonorants, which do
not impede airlow, are subdivided generally into laterals, glides,
approximants, nasals, and vowels.
Stops present a complete blockage of the airlow, for exam-
ple, the glottal stop in the name of the Hawaiian island Oahu
[oahu]. A special subclass of stops are africates, which are stops
with a fricative release, as in the initial and inal consonants of
English judge []. Another subclass, often categorized in
other ways, is comprised of trills, for example, the initial sound
of Spanish roja red [roxa].
Fricatives present a partial blockage, but with noise gener-
ated due to air being forced through a relative narrow constric-
tion, for example, the velar fricative in Dutch groot large [xot].
Fricatives may be further divided into sibilants (s-like fricatives)
made by an apical constriction on or near the alveolar ridge. he
essential characteristic of this class, as opposed to other nonsibi-
lant fricatives, is relatively loud high-frequency noise that exploits
the small downstream resonating cavity, for example, English
schist a category of rock [st] which contains two diferent
sibilant fricatives. Nonsibilant fricatives either have no down-
stream resonating cavity (e.g., the bilabial fricative in Japanese
Fuji name of the famous mountain [u i]) or, like the velar
fricative, are made further upstream of the alveolar region and so
have a longer downstream resonating cavity and, thus, lower fre-
quencies. Presence or absence of voicing also afects fricatives
loudness: Even if paired voiced and voiceless fricatives have the
same degree of constriction, voiceless fricatives will have more
intense frication noise, because with no resistance to the airlow
at the glottis, the velocity of airlow will be greater at the oral con-
striction, and that also afects the degree and loudness from the
air turbulence.
Subcategories of sonorants include laterals, where the con-
striction is on one side of the palate, the other being open, for
example, the medial geminate (or long) alveolar lateral in Hindi
palla loose end of a sari used as a head covering [pla]. Nasals
are consonants made with a complete closure in the oral cav-
ity (at any place farther forward of the uvular region) but with a
lowered velum, for example, Tswana [ku] sheep with an ini-
tial velar nasal. Glides and approximants have nonlateral oral
constrictions that are not suicient to generate turbulence, for
example, the labial-velar glide at the beginning of the English
word [wd]. Vowels are considered to have the least constriction
(descriptive terms follow).
Place
he primary places of articulation of speech sounds, proceeding
from the farthest back place to the farthest forward: glottal, pha-
ryngeal, uvular, velar, palatal, alveolar, dental, and labial. Some
of these places have already been illustrated. Finer place distinc-
tions can easily be made if necessary by appending the preixes
pre- and post-, and multiple simultaneous constrictions can be
diferentiated by concatenating these terms as was done with the
labial-velar glide [w]. In most cases, these anatomical landmarks
on the upper side of the vocal tract are suicient; if necessary, an
indication of the lower (movable) articulator can be speciied, for
example, the voiced labial-dental fricative [v] as in French voir
to see [vw] (as opposed to, say, the voiced bilabial fricative
[] in Spanish cerveza beer [sesa]).
State of the Glottis
In most cases, specifying whether the vocal cords are apart and
not vibrating (voiceless), lightly approximated and vibrating
(voiced), or tightly pressed together (glottal stop) is suicient.
However, voicing itself occasionally needs to be further diferen-
tiated as breathy (a more lax type of voicing lacking energy in the
higher harmonics), tense (rich in higher harmonics), or creaky
(irregular staccato type of phonation, also with much energy in
the higher frequencies, though since it is irregular, one cannot
clearly identify harmonics as such). Many of the Indic languages
employ a distinctive breathy voice associated with voiced stops,
for example, Hindi bhsh language [b::], and many lan-
guages and many speakers voiced phonation changes to creaky
at a point of low F0 in intonation. (Low F0 is a low rate of vibra-
tion of the vocal cords due to lesser tension giving rise to low
pitch or note of the voice.) Creaky voice is also a common vari-
ant of glottal stop.
Vowels
he descriptors for vowels deviate from those for consonants.
An imaginary quadrilateral space in the mouth (seen sagittally)
is posited, and vowels are said to have the high point of tongue
at regions in this space whose dimensions vertically are high
mid low and horizontally, front central back. (hese may
also have further qualiiers. In French the high front unrounded
vowel contrasts with a high front rounded vowel [i] and with a
109
Articulatory Phonetics
high back rounded vowel [u], e.g., dit (s/he) said [di] vs. du of
the [dy] vs. doux soft [du].) Although ostensibly referring to
anatomical features, it is now accepted that these descriptors
actually correspond to acoustic-auditory features of vowels: he
height dimension correlates inversely with their irst formant,
the front dimension correlates directly with their second for-
mant, and unrounded-rounded correlates roughly with their
third formant. It is still technically possible to apply the tradi-
tional anatomical-physiological descriptors to vowels, in which
case [i] would be a close palatal vowel with spread lips, and [u] a
close velar vowel with lip rounding, and [] a pharyngeal vowel
with a widely open mouth shape. Other vowels would just be
variants of these with either less constriction or intermediate
places of constriction. here is merit in applying the anatomical-
physiological labels, for example, to explain the Danish dialectal
variant pronunciations [bi] ~ [bi] bee. he latter variant with
the voiceless palatal fricative can arise simply from the vowel ter-
minus being devoiced (since, it will be recalled, the degree of tur-
bulence is determined not only by the degree of closure but also
by the velocity of the airlow, which, in a voiceless vowel, is high
to generate turbulence at the point of constriction).
Secondary Articulations or Modiications
here are dozens of ways a speech sound can be qualiied.
Typically, these are additional modiications or lesser constric-
tions that can be done simultaneously with the primary con-
striction, or are in such close temporal proximity to or invariably
linked to it that they are considered inherent to it. he label
breathy voiced is an example. Some additional examples (where
the italicized term is the qualiier): voiceless aspirated velar stop,
as in English key [khi]; the English phoneme //, often phoneti-
cally a voiceless post-alveolar labialized fricative as in ship [wip];
the nasalized mid-front vowel as in French faim hunger [f].
Prosody, Tone, Intonation
he terminology describing distinctive uses of voice pitch and
relative timing of sounds (and, perhaps, diferent voice qualities)
is still relatively nonstandardized except in the case of tones. he
International Phonetic Associations transcription recognizes
a variety of possible tone shapes, for example, hai [kha\|] (with
falling tone) servant versus [kha/|] (with rising tone) leg. Here,
the vertical line is supposed to represent the range of voice pitch
characteristic of the speaker, the sentence context, and so on,
and the attached line the range and direction of the distinctive
pitch modulation.
Beyond Taxonomy
he conventional descriptions of speech just reviewed form the
basis for scientiic investigations of considerable sophistication
and with applications in ields as diverse as medicine (especially
speech pathology), man-machine communication, irst (and
subsequent) language learning, and phonology. hese investiga-
tions involve study of more than just the anatomical-physiological
character of speech sounds, but also, as was hinted at in the
preceding discussion, speech aerodynamics, speech acoustics,
speech perception, and neurophonetics. Space allows just one
example in the area of phonology: Medial stops emerge seemingly
out of nowhere in words such as glimpse < gleam + s (nominalizing
110
Artiicial Languages
suix), dempster judge < deem + ster, hompson > hom + son,
youngster [jkst] < young [j] + ster. One has to ask where the
medial stop came from in these nasal + fricative clusters, neither
element of which is a stop. he answer emerges when one con-
siders that these speech sounds are opposite in the state of the
oral and velic exit valves. he nasal has all oral exit valves closed
and the velic valve open whereas the fricative has an oral valve
open, and the nasal valve closed. If in the transition between the
nasal and fricative the velic valve should close prematurely, then
all exit valves will be closed and thus a brief epiphenomenal stop
will emerge. (For more examples, see Ohala 1997.)
John Ohala
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Browman, C. P., and L. Goldstein. 1986. Towards an articulatory phonol-
ogy. In Phonology Yearbook 3, ed. C. Ewan and J. Anderson, 21952.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Catford, J. C. 1977. Fundamental Problems in Phonetics. Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press.
Goldstein, L., and C. P. Browman. 1986. Representation of voicing con-
trasts using articulatory gestures. Journal of Phonetics 14: 33942.
Hardcastle, W. J., and J. Laver. 1999. he Handbook of Phonetic Sciences.
Oxford: Blackwells.
Hufman, M. K. and R. Krakow, eds. 1993. Nasals, Nasalization and the
Velum: Phonetics and Phonology, Vol. 5. San Diego, CA: Academic
Press.
Ladefoged, P. 1964. A Phonetic Study of West African Languages: An
Auditory-Instrumental Survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Ladefoged, P., and I. Maddieson. 1995. he Sounds of the Worlds
Languages. Oxford: Blackwell.
MacNeilage, P. F., ed. 1983. he Production of Speech. New York: Springer-
Verlag.
Maddieson, I. 1984. Patterns of Sounds. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Ohala, J. J. 1990. Respiratory activity in speech. In Speech Production and
Speech Modelling, ed. W. J. Hardcastle A. Marchal, 2353. Dordrecht,
the Netherlands: Kluwer.
. 1997. Emergent stops. Proc. 4th Seoul International Conference
on Linguistics [SICOL] 1115 Aug 1997: 8491.
Rothenberg, M. 1968. he Breath-Stream Dynamics of Simple-Released-
Plosive Production. Basel: Karger.
Silverman, D. 2006. A Critical Introduction to Phonology: Of Sound, Mind,
and Body. London and New York: Continuum International Publishing
Group.
Sol, M-J. 2002. Aerodynamic characteristics of trills and phonological
patterning. Journal of Phonetics 30: 65588.
ARTIFICIAL LANGUAGES
An artiicial language can be deined as a language, or language-
like system, that has not evolved in the usual way that natural
languages such as English have; that is, its creation is due to
conscious human action. However, this deinition leaves open
some questions. For one thing, what do we mean by language
or language-like system? Among the systems of communica-
tion that could be, and have been, called artiicial languages
are systems of logic, for example, predicate calculus, and com-
puter languages, such as BASIC. However, the functions of these
languages are diferent from the function of natural languages,
Artiicial Languages
which is communication among humans. I, therefore, focus on
artiicial languages that have this latter function, for example,
Esperanto. Under the heading of artiicial languages, one might
also include languages that have been made up in connection
with novels, ilms, television programs, and so on, for example,
Klingon (ictional or imaginary languages), or as part of some
other imaginary world, or those that have been created for the
enjoyment of their designer (personal languages).
Some languages (philosophical languages) were designed
to relect the real world better than natural languages. Some of
the earliest known ideas on artiicial languages, from the sev-
enteenth century, involve this type. he terms constructed lan-
guage (or conlang) and planned language are roughly equivalent
to artiicial language (although one could point out that some
natural languages have undergone a degree of planning), while
(international) auxiliary language covers only those languages
intended for international communication (of course, some nat-
ural languages are also used for this); many, if not most, artiicial
languages have been created for this purpose.
Another question concerns our notions of artiicial and natu-
ral. On the one hand, many (arguably all) natural languages have
been subjected to some human manipulation. Consider, for exam-
ple, the long line of English prescriptivists who have tried to elimi-
nate some constructions of the language, or organizations such as
the French Academy, which has attempted to keep some English
words out of French. Although many of these manipulations have
not completely succeeded, they have had some efect, and there-
fore one could argue that English and French are partly artiicial.
On the other hand, many consciously created languages were
built from elements of one or several natural languages and could
thus be considered not entirely artiicial. herefore, the boundary
between natural and artiicial languages is not entirely clear.
In fact, a common classiication of artiicial languages is in
terms of whether they are based on natural languages: a poste-
riori languages are, while a priori languages are not (the philo-
sophical languages belonging to the second group). hat is, a
priori languages are (supposedly) built from scratch, not tak-
ing anything from natural languages. his is a simpliication, as
few, if any, languages are entirely a priori; many contain both a
posteriori and a priori components. herefore, the distinction
should, rather, be seen as a spectrum, with languages at diferent
points having difering ratios of a priori and a posteriori compo-
nents. Artiicial languages consisting of substantial proportions
of both types are called mixed languages.
Esperanto stands far above other artiicial languages in terms
of success it has vastly more speakers than any others (and
even some native speakers). It has been claimed to have more
than a million speakers, though some would disagree with such
a large number, and of course, the question hinges on how one
deines a speaker. Only a relatively small number of artiicial lan-
guages have achieved much of a community of speakers. hese
include Volapk, Interlingua, and Ido, the latter being a modiied
Esperanto. Many artiicial languages were not used by anyone
other than their designer and perhaps several other people. In
fact, a large number of artiicial languages were never fully devel-
oped, with only incomplete descriptions having been published.
Let us now see some examples of sentences in artiicial lan-
guages. Because the a priori languages do not (intentionally) use
Aspect
elements from any natural languages, on the surface they may
seem rather strange, as shown by the following examples from the
language Oz (which, in spite of its name, was a serious project):
(1) ap if-blEn-vOs
he HABITUAL-seldom-study
he seldom studies(Elam 1932, 20)
(2) ep ip-Qks ap
I PAST-see him
I saw him (ibid.)
However, one could assert that since even a priori languages
are human creations, they cannot be that diferent from natural
languages.
A posteriori languages can draw from several languages or
from just one. In the latter case, they are usually or always sim-
pliications of the language. here have been many such simpli-
ications of Latin, some of English, and some of other languages.
Following is a Latin sentence and its equivalent in SPL (or SIMP-
LATINA), an artiicial language created from Latin.
(3) Nuntium audiverat antequam domum venit.
Fin audit nntium ntequam in venit in domus.
He had heard the news before he came home. (Dominicus
1982, 21)
One might be surprised to learn that there are a thousand
or more artiicial languages, even excluding ictional ones (but
including languages that were not fully elaborated). It might also
be unexpected that people have continued to devise new artii-
cial languages for international communication, given how many
have already been proposed and not achieved their goal. he
existence of the Internet may have served as an impetus, since it
is now easy for language creators to present their languages to a
wide audience. he number of artiicial languages will probably
keep increasing, though with none of them achieving the status
of a universal second language.
Alan Reed Libert
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Albani, Paolo, and Berlinghiero Buonarroti. 1994. Aga Magra Difra.
Bologna: Zanichelli. An encyclopaedia with many entries for artiicial
languages, including ictional languages, and their creators.
Dominicus, Richardius. 1982. SPL. Wisconsin: Dominicus Publishing
House.
Elam, Charles Milton. 1932. he Case for an A Priori Language. Cincinnati,
OH: he Open Sesame Press.
Large, Andrew. 1985. he Artiicial Language Movement. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
Pei, Mario. 1968. One Language for the World. New York: Biblo and
Tannen.
ASPECT
Situations unfold over time. When we talk about them, we often
specify how they unfold over time (or not). here are many ways
in which language conveys such temporal information. While
tense speciies location of an event in relation to other points
in time (e.g., past, present, future, pluperfect), aspect speciies
111
Aspect
internal temporal structure of a situation (e.g., whether it is
ongoing or completed). his is important information to convey
for our linguistic communication to be successful, and many lan-
guages convey it by various means lexical, grammatical, and/
or pragmatic. English grammatically marks tense (-ed, -s, will),
while Chinese does not, relying instead on lexical and pragmatic
means. English also grammatically marks aspect (progressive
be V-ing), while Hebrew does not.
Grammatical marking of aspect, often encoded in auxilia-
ries and inlections, is known as grammatical aspect, or view-
point aspect. It is called viewpoint aspect because it signiies
the speakers viewpoint. When one chooses to say He ran a
mile, one is viewing the situation from outside, disregarding
its internal structure (perfective aspect), while if one says He
was running a mile, the beginning and end of this situation
are disregarded and one is focusing on the internal structure of
this situation (imperfective aspect) (Comrie 1976; Smith 1997).
he former is often used to push the narrative storyline forward
(foreground), while the latter is associated with background
information (Hopper 1979).
Equally important in conveying aspectual information is lex-
ical aspect also known as inherent (lexical) aspect, situation
aspect (or situation type), aktionsart, event type, and so on. his
is deined by the temporal semantic characteristic of the verb
(and its associated elements) that refers to a particular situation.
Although there are numerous proposals, the most well known is
the classiication proposed by Zeno Vendler (1957):
Achievement: that which takes place instantaneously, and is
reducible to a single point in time (e.g., recognize, die, reach
the summit)
Accomplishment: that which has dynamic duration, but has a
single clear inherent endpoint (e.g., run a mile, make a chair,
walk to the store)
Activity: that which has dynamic duration, but with an arbi-
trary endpoint, and is homogeneous in its structure (e.g., run,
sing, play, dance)
State: that which has no dynamics, and continues without
additional efort or energy being applied (e.g., see, love, hate,
want)
Lexical aspect has proved to be important in linguistic analy-
sis, acquisition, and processing of aspect. In linguistic analysis,
Carlota S. Smith (1997) proposed the two-component theory, a
system in which the aspectual meaning of a sentence is deter-
mined by the interaction between lexical aspect and grammati-
cal aspect. For example, imperfective aspect (e.g., progressive in
English) takes the internal view, and, therefore, it is compatible
with durative predicates of activity and accomplishment and
yields progressive meaning. In contrast, achievement, since it is
nondurative, is not so compatible with imperfective aspect, and
such pairing is often anomalous (e.g., *He is noticing the error) or
results in preliminary stages meaning (e.g., He is dying).
In acquisition, this interaction of lexical and grammatical
aspect has been observed since the 1970s. Cross-linguistically,
when children acquire (perfective) past tense marking, they
show strong association between telic verbs (achievements and
accomplishments), between general imperfective marking (such
112
as French imparfait) and atelic verbs (states and activities), and
between progressive (i.e., dynamic imperfective) marking and
activity verbs (see Li and Shirai 2000 for a review). Psychologists
and linguists alike have tried to explain this observation. One
important proposal relies on innateness (the language biopro-
gram hypothesis, Bickerton 1981), while an alternative proposal
is based on input frequency (Shirai and Andersen 1995).
he notion of compatibility is crucial when we discuss the
interaction of lexical and grammatical aspect since some combi-
nations are more natural, prototypical, and frequent. Telic verbs
are more compatible with perfective aspect, while activities
are most naturally associated with progressive marking. his is
relected in frequency distribution cross-linguistically (Andersen
and Shirai 1996). For example, about 60 percent of past tense
markers in child-directed speech in English were attached to
achievement verbs, while almost 95 percent of past tense forms
in childrens speech were used with achievement verbs (e.g.,
broke, dropped) when children started using them (Shirai and
Andersen 1995).
his frequency efect is not yet well recognized in the area of
language processing. Carol J. Madden and Rolf A. Zwaan (2003)
and Todd Feretti, Marta Kutas, and Ken McRae (2007) found
the strong efect of grammatical aspect in their experiments on
aspectual processing, but they did not manipulate the efect
of lexical aspect. Although Madden and Zwaan (2003) found a
facilitating efect of perfective aspect on processing but not of
imperfective aspect, their experiments used only accomplish-
ment verbs, which are telic and more compatible with perfective
aspect (i.e., past tense in English). Foong Ha Yap and colleagues
(2009) replicated facilitating efects of perfective aspect with
accomplishments and, in addition, of imperfective (progressive)
aspect with activities in Cantonese. hus, the interaction of lexi-
cal and grammatical aspect is pervasive and cannot be ignored
in any research involving aspectual phenomena.
Yasuhiro Shirai
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Andersen, Roger W., and Yasuhiro Shirai. 1996. Primacy of aspect in
irst and second language acquisition: he Pidgin/Creole connection.
In Handbook of Second Language Acquisition, ed. W. Ritchie and T.
Bhatia, 52770. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Bickerton, Derek. 1981. Roots of Language. Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma.
Comrie, Bernard. 1976. Aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ferretti, Todd R., Marta Kutas, and Ken McRae. 2007. Verb aspect
and the activation of event knowledge. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 33.1: 18296.
Hopper, Paul J. 1979. Aspect and foregrounding in discourse. In Syntax
and Semantics. Vol. 12: Discourse and Syntax. ed. T. Givon, 21341.
New York: Academic Press.
Li, Ping, and Yasuhiro Shirai. 2000. he Acquisition of Lexical and
Grammatical Aspect. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Madden, Carol. J., and Rolf A. Zwaan. 2003. How does verb aspect con-
strain event representation? Memory & Cognition 31: 66372.
Shirai, Yasuhiro, and Roger W. Andersen. 1995. he acquisition of tense-
aspect morphology: A prototype account. Language 71: 74362.
Smith, Carlota S. 1997. he Parameter of Aspect. 2d ed. Dordrecht, the
Netherlands: Kluwer.
Vendler, Zeno. 1957. Verbs and times. Philosophical Review
66: 14360.
Auditory Processing
Yap, Foong Ha, Patrick Chun Kau Chu, Emily Sze Man Yiu, Stella Fay
Wong, Stella Wing Man Kwan, Stephen Matthews, Li Hai Tan, Ping Li,
and Yasuhiro Shirai. 2009. Aspectual asymmetries in the mental rep-
resentation of events: Role of lexical and grammatical aspect. Memory
& Cognition 37: 58795.
AUDITORY PROCESSING
Auditory processing refers to the cognitive processes that enable
a listener to extract a message from the raw material of a speech
signal. he study of auditory processing draws upon a range of
sources within the linguistic sciences: most notably cognitive
psychology, discourse analysis, phonetics, phonology
and neurolinguistics (see brain and language). It is distinct
from theories of empathetic listening (what makes a good lis-
tener) in areas such as counseling.
It was not until the 1960s that a signiicant body of listen-
ing research developed with the advent of more sophisticated
recording equipment and the increased availability of spec-
trograms to display the physical characteristics of the speech
signal (see acoustic phonetics). he many advances in our
understanding of the skill since then include early work on
phoneme perception by the Haskins Laboratories; the recog-
nition that processing occurs on line rather than waiting for
an utterance to be completed; and insights into how listeners
identify word boundaries in connected speech. Evidence of
the extent to which listeners have to build a message for them-
selves on the basis of inference has resulted in a sharp move
away from a view of listening as a passive skill and the recog-
nition that a listener actively engages in a process of meaning
construction.
Auditory processing falls into two closely linked operations:
Decoding, where acoustic stimuli are translated into linguistic
units;
Meaning construction, which embellishes the bare meaning
of the utterance by reference to knowledge sources outside
the signal. It also requires listener decisions as to the impor-
tance of what has been said and how it is linked to the dis-
course that preceded it.
he listener thus draws upon four information sources. he irst
is perceptual, based on the signal reaching the listeners ear. he
second is linguistic, consisting of the listeners stored knowledge
of the phonology, lexis, and syntax of the language being
spoken. he third is external: drawing upon the listeners knowl-
edge of the world, the speaker, the topic, and the type of situa-
tion. A inal component is the listeners ongoing model of what
has been said so far.
Decoding
Decoding is principally a matching operation in which evidence
from the signal is mapped onto stored representations in the
listeners mind of the phonemes, words, and recurrent chunks
of a language (see mapping). he process was once represented
as taking place in a linear and bottom-up way, with phonemes
shaped into syllables, syllables into words, and words into
clauses. In fact, listeners appear to draw upon several levels of
representation at once, with their knowledge of higher-level units,
such as syllables, words, and formulaic chunks, inluencing their
decisions as to what has been heard. Decoding is also assisted
by context, in the form of world knowledge, knowledge of the
speaker, and recall of what the speaker has said so far.
here has been much discussion as to whether these pieces of
information combine in the mind of the listener during decoding
or whether they are handled separately. he argument behind
the irst (interactive) view is that all the evidence can be con-
sidered simultaneously; the argument behind the second view
(modularity) is that the processor operates more rapidly if it
employs localized criteria speciic to the phoneme, the word, or
the context.
Decoding can be discussed at three levels.
he irst is phoneme recognition (see speech perception).
Translating acoustic evidence into the sounds of the target lan-
guage does not involve simple one-to-one matching. here
is, irstly, an issue of noninvariance: researchers have not suc-
ceeded in inding clusters of cues that uniquely identify individ-
ual phonemes. Indeed, they have discovered that the same set of
cues may be interpreted diferently according to the phonemes
that precede and follow them. here is also an issue of nonline-
arity: he phonemes within a word are not clearly bounded units
but blend into each other in a process known as co-articulation.
A further complication is speaker variation: A listener has to
adjust to diferences between individual speakers in pitch of
voice, accent, speech rate, and so on.
One solution holds that listeners employ a more reliable
unit of analysis than the phoneme. hey might map direct from
acoustic stimuli to words stored in their minds, or they might use
the syllable as their principal perceptual unit. Another solution
views phoneme recognition as the outcome of cue trading, where
the listener weighs competing evidence until a particular candi-
date emerges as the most likely.
hese accounts tend to assume that we have in our minds
a set of idealized templates for the sounds of a language and
match imperfect real-life examples to them by normalization
by editing out features that are nonstandard or irrelevant. An
alternative approach shifts the focus away from processing and
onto how the listener represents the sounds. A variant of the
template notion suggests that a phoneme may be represented
in an underspeciied way that stores only a few features essen-
tial to its recognition. A second possibility is that phonemes
are stored as prototypes with a range of permissible varia-
tion associated with each. But there is now increasing support
for a view that we do not construct a central representation of a
phoneme but instead store multiple examples of the words we
hear, uttered in their variant forms. his exemplar account
accords with evidence that the human mind is better at storing
massive amounts of information than was previously supposed.
It explains how we are able to adjust to unfamiliar accents in
our native language and to recognize the same word uttered in a
range of diferent voices.
he second level is word recognition. he listening pro-
cess takes place on line, with a listener able to shadow (repeat)
what a speaker says at a delay of about a quarter of a second.
Cohort theory (Marslen-Wilson 1987) postulates that a listener
retrieves a bank of possible word matches when the initial pho-
nemes of a word are uttered, then gradually narrows them down
113
Auditory Processing
as more of the word is heard. he correct item is identiied when
the words uniqueness point is reached and the cohort is reduced
to one possible match.
However, many words do not have a uniqueness point (the
sequence man might be a complete word or the irst syllable of
manner or manager), and there are no consistent gaps between
words in connected speech to mark where boundaries fall.
Locating boundaries (lexical segmentation) is unproblematic
when one is listening to languages that bear ixed stress on the
irst, penultimate, or last syllable of the word but becomes an
issue when processing languages with variable stress. Research
suggests that listeners exploit certain prosodic features of these
languages in order to establish the most likely points for words to
begin or end. In English, they take advantage of the fact that the
majority of content words in running speech are monosyllabic or
begin with a strong syllable (Cutler 1990).
A further problem for lexical recognition is that many words
in connected speech (particularly function words) occur in
a reduced form. hey might be brief, of low saliency, and very
diferent from their citation forms. Using the gating method,
which presents connected speech in gradually increasing seg-
ments, researchers have demonstrated that word identiication
in listening is sometimes a retrospective process, with listeners
unable to identify a word correctly and conidently until two or
more syllables after its ofset.
here have also been attempts to model lexical recognition
using connectionist computer programs that analyze spoken
input in brief time slices rather than syllables. Early matches
are continually revised as evidence accumulates across slices
(see connectionist models, language structure, and
representation). he most well known of these programs is
TRACE (McClelland and Elman 1986).
he speed with which a word is identiied by a listener is
subject to variation. High-frequency words are more rapidly
retrieved than low-frequency ones and are said to be more eas-
ily activated. Recognition is also faster when the listener has
recently heard a word that is closely associated with the target.
hus, encountering a word like doctor facilitates (or primes; see
priming, semantic ) later recognition of nurse, patient, and
hospital. his process, known as spreading activation,
is highly automatic and is distinct from the normal efects of
context.
Syntactic parsing is the third level. hough speech is received
linearly, syllable by syllable, a listener needs to build larger-scale
syntactic structures from it. Listeners appear to retain a verbatim
record of the words heard until a major syntactic boundary. A
wrap-up process then turns the words into an abstract propo-
sition, and they cease to be available to report. Intonation con-
tours frequently coincide with syntactic units and assist listeners
in locating clause and sentence boundaries.
Where there is ambiguity early in an utterance, a listener
has to carry forward parallel hypotheses about how the utter-
ance will end, with one prioritized and the others held in reserve.
Researchers employ garden path sentences (example: he law-
yer questioned by the judge apologized) to establish the crite-
ria that inluence the preferred interpretation. Listeners appear
to be swayed by multiple factors, including syntactic simplicity,
semantic probability, and argument structure.
114
Decoding in ones irst language (L1) is highly automatic
which is why decoding skills in a second language are diicult
to acquire. Studying vocabulary and syntax is not suicient; a lis-
tener needs to recognize the relevant linguistic forms as they occur
in connected speech. he listener is likely to perceive the sounds
of the second language by reference to the phoneme categories of
the irst and may also transfer processing routines, such as the L1s
lexical segmentation strategy or the relative importance it accords
to word order, inlection, and animacy. Second language lis-
teners often ind themselves heavily dependent upon contextual
cues in order to compensate strategically for failures of decoding.
Meaning Construction
he outcome of decoding is an abstract proposition, which
represents the literal meaning of the utterance independently of
the context. A listener has to build a more complex meaning rep-
resentation (or mental model), which
(a) adds to and contextualizes the proposition;
(b) links it conceptually to what has gone before. his opera-
tion takes place locally as well as at a discourse level. Listeners
need to make local connections between ideas, associating
pronouns with their referents and recognizing logical connec-
tives (in addition, however). But they also have to carry forward
a developing representation of the whole discourse so far.
Meaning construction embraces several diferent processes.
Many of them are more cognitively demanding in listening than
in reading because the listener is entirely dependent upon the
mental representation that he/she has built up and cannot look
back to check understanding.
ENRICHMENT. he listener adds depth and relevance to the
proposition by drawing upon external information: knowledge
of the world, the topic, the speaker, and the current situation.
Understanding is also deepened by relating the proposition to
the current topic and to the points made so far by the speaker.
INFERENCE. Listeners supply connections that the speaker does
not make explicitly. hey might employ scripts to provide
default components for common activities. If a speaker men-
tions going to a restaurant, the listener takes for granted a waiter,
a menu, and a conventional procedure for ordering.
SELECTION. Listeners do not simply record facts; they select
some, they omit some, and they store some in reduced form. he
same utterance may result in diferently constituted messages
in the minds of diferent listeners. One important factor is the
listeners perception of the intentions of the speaker. Another is
the listeners own purpose for listening. A further consideration
is redundancy: Spoken discourse is often repetitive, with the
speaker reiterating, rephrasing, or revisiting information that has
already been expressed.
INTEGRATION. Listeners integrate the incoming information into
what has been heard so far. Heed is paid to whether it extends an
established topic or whether it initiates a new one.
SELF-MONITORING. Listeners check to see whether incoming
information is consistent with the meaning representation built
Autism and Language
up so far. If it is not, one or the other needs to be adjusted, or a
comprehension check needs to be made.
DISCOURSE STRUCTURE. Listeners impose an argument struc-
ture upon the meaning representation, with major points dis-
tinguished from minor. Here, they may be assisted by analogy
with previous speech events.
John Field
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Brown, Gillian. 1995. Speakers, Listeners and Communication.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Discourse-based account of
meaning construction in listening.
Cutler, Anne. 1990. Exploiting prosodic possibilities in speech segmen-
tation. In Cognitive Models of Speech Processing, ed. G. Altmann,
10521. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Garrod, Simon, and Martin Pickering, eds. 1999. Language Processing.
New York: Psychology Press. Papers on lexical, syntactic, and dis-
course processing.
Marslen-Wilson, William. 1987. Functional parallelism in spoken word-
recognition. Cognition 25: 71102.
McClelland, J. L., and J. L. Elman. 1986. he TRACE model of speech per-
ception. Cognitive Psychology 18: 186.
Miller, Joanne L., and Peter D. Eimas, eds. 1995. Speech, Language and
Communication. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Papers by L. Nygaard
et al. and Anne Cutler review issues in perception.
Pisoni, David B., and Robert E. Remez. 2005. he Handbook of Speech
Perception. Oxford: Blackwell. Papers covering most major issues in
decoding.
AUTISM AND LANGUAGE
Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is among the most
prominent of disorders afecting language. While its causes are
unknown, research has focused on cognitive, neurological, and
genetic explanations. Autism afects more than one domain of
functioning, with language and communication as primary
deicits.
Since Leo Kanner published the irst account of children with
autism in 1943, widening diagnostic criteria have increased the
identiication of cases. here have also been dramatic changes in
classiication: Autism is no longer regarded as an isolated disor-
der but includes Asperger syndrome and atypical autism under
the rubric autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in order to relect
that variability in expression. Diagnoses along the spectrum
are characterized by a common set of features: impairments in
social communication, restricted interests, and repetitive activi-
ties, with behaviors varying at diferent ages as well as diferent
levels of functioning (DSM-IV, American Psychiatric Association
1994). Autism occurs in at least 0.2 percent of the population,
afecting three times more males than females, while the other
disorders on the spectrum are estimated to afect another 0.4%
(Fombonne et al. 2006).
he social communication problems in ASD vary widely.
Parents of young children later diagnosed with ASD often
observe an absence of simple communicative behaviors, such
as shared attention (e.g., pointing to something to share inter-
est) and make-believe play. Although many children with autism
never acquire functional speech, others develop speech that
difers remarkably from that of age-matched peers. Speech char-
acteristics typical of autism include pronoun reversal (referring
to self as you); unvaried or atypical intonation; neologisms
(Volden and Lord 1991); the use of stereotyped, repetitive, and
idiosyncratic language; and echolalia. Barry Prizant and Judith
Duchan (1981, 246) suggest that echolalia may serve important
communicative and cognitive functions, such as turn-taking for
people with autism.
Signiicantly, social communication in ASD often fails even
in the presence of apparently intact grammatical skills. his
can be seen in Asperger syndrome, where language skills can
be advanced, vocabulary extensive, and syntax formally cor-
rect, even bookish. he speech of individuals with Asperger
syndrome is often pedantic, exhibiting unvaried, stereotyped
phrases and expressions associated with contexts or registers
not presupposed by the immediate situation of talk. he speech
patterns associated with ASD are part of the broader spectrum of
impaired reciprocal social interaction.
Conversation may be the most diicult area of communica-
tion for people with ASD. Conventional rules of turn-taking are
often ignored. Speakers may fail to sustain conversation beyond
yes/no answers or speak at length on circumscribed interests,
and they may resist attempts to shift topic. Speakers may also
fail to attend to the conversational needs of listeners and may
have diiculty applying contextual and cultural knowledge in
conversation. hey may thus encounter problems interpreting
deictic references, as the following example illustrates: Speaker
1: What did you do on the weekend? Speaker 2: What weekend?
Here, the conventional response to the question posed would be
to interpret the weekend as the one that had just passed. Such
problems with relevance appear to be related to the tendency
in ASD toward an overliteral understanding of communication,
including diiculties interpreting indirect requests and meta-
phor (Happ 1993).
A number of cognitive theories are currently being explored
to explain the core features of ASD. Executive dysfunction is one
widely accepted cognitive explanation for some behavior dif-
iculties in ASD. his refers to decision-making processes that
are necessary for performing goal-directed activities, which
are thought to originate in the frontal lobes (Russell 1997).
Weak central coherence theory posits a detail-oriented process-
ing style at the expense of global and contextual information
and alludes to poor connectivity between brain regions (Happ
and Frith 2006). Intriguingly, this information-processing style
can often lead to superior performance on certain tasks, such as
the Embedded Figures Task (Witkin et al. 1971), underscoring
the fact that ASD is not merely a set of impairments but involves
unique ways of processing information. he theory most fre-
quently cited to explain communication diiculties in ASD is
theory of mind (ToM) (Baron-Cohen 1995). ToM explains
these diiculties in terms of a cognitive mechanism underly-
ing the ability to recognize others mental states. Many of the
pragmatic impairments that are known to occur in ASD can
be linked to a lack of intuitive mentalizing ability, for example,
diiculties understanding pretense, irony, deception, and
nonliteral language. he ToM hypothesis does not preclude
the presence of assets and islets of ability as suggested by weak
central coherence theory. Cognitive theories and hypothesized
115
Autonomy of Syntax
neural correlates with respect to facial and emotion informa-
tion processing in the amygdala have so far provided the most
compelling explanations for the communication impairments
seen in ASD. Research into genetic causes appears promis-
ing, since some of the strongest genetic efects in autism seem
related to language abilities.
Jessica de Villiers
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
American Psychiatric Association. 1994. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). 4th ed. Washington, DC: American
Psychiatric Association.
Baron-Cohen, Simon. 1995. Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and
heory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fombonne, Eric, Rita Zakarian, Andrew Bennett, Linyan Meng, and
Diane McLean-Heywood. 2006. Pervasive developmental disorders
in Montreal, Quebec, Canada: Prevalence and links with immuniza-
tions. Pediatrics 118.1: 13950.
Frith, Uta. 2003. Autism: Explaining the Enigma. 2d ed. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Happ, Francesca. 1993. Communicative competence and theory of
mind in autism: A test of relevance theory. Cognition 48.2: 10119.
Happ, Francesca, and Uta Frith. 2006. he weak coherence
account: Detail-focused cognitive style in autism spectrum disorders.
Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 36.1: 525.
Kana, Rajesh K, Timothy A. Keller, Vladimir L. Cherkassky, Nancy J.
Minshew, and Marcel Adam Just. 2006. Sentence comprehension in
autism: hinking in pictures with decreased functional connectivity.
Brain 129: 248493.
Kanner, Leo. 1943. Autistic disturbances of afective contact. Nervous
Child 2: 21750.
Prizant, Barry, and Judith Duchan. 1981. he functions of immediate
echolalia in autistic children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders
46: 2419.
Russell, James, ed. 1997. Autism as an Executive Disorder. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Volden, Joanne, and Catherine Lord. 1991. Neologisms and idiosyncratic
language in autistic speakers. Journal of Autism and Developmental
Disorders 21.2: 10930.
Witkin, H., P. Oltman, E. Raskin, and S. Karp. 1971. A Manual for the
Embedded Figures Test. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.
AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX
Autonomy of syntax refers to what in recent times has been the
dominant assumption concerning the formulation of syntactic
regularities: syntax is determined independently of phonolog-
ical realization or semantic interpretation. he formal prop-
erties of syntax are manipulated purely formally.
Such an assumption is familiar to modern students of lin-
guistics from numerous textbook presentations, such as Andrew
Radfords (1988, 31):
autonomous syntax principle. No syntactic rule can make ref-
erence to pragmatic, phonological, or semantic information.
Some such assumption is already in place in Noam Chomsky
(1957, 17): I think that we are forced to conclude that grammar
is autonomous and independent of meaning. And in a later
espousing of the assumption, Chomsky traces the idea back to
what he refers to as structural linguistics (1972, 119):
116
A central idea of much of structural linguistics was that the formal
devices of language should be studied independently of their use.
he earliest work in transformational-generative grammar took
over a version of this thesis, as a working hypothesis. I think it has
been a fruitful hypothesis. It seems that grammars contain a sub-
structure of perfectly formal rules operating on phrase-markers
in narrowly circumscribed ways. Not only are these rules inde-
pendent of meaning or sound in their function
his passage is very pertinent in seeking to understand the
assumption and its status and origins (and cf. Chomsky 1975,
1822; 1977, 3858). But let us observe some things about origins
that it doesnt entirely convey.
Firstly, Chomskys much of structural linguistics should
not be taken to include most of the work done in early structural
linguistics in Europe, even by self-declared autonomists (see
Anderson 2005). It is notably the followers of Leonard Bloomield
(1926) and proponents of transformational grammar who
insist on the autonomy of syntax from meaning. And, even for
the post-Bloomieldians, syntax is far from autonomous from
phonology.
Perhaps more signiicantly, we should fully register the extent
to which the autonomy assumption is an innovation (Anderson
2005). Gram mar or syntax before structuralism was not
conceived of as autonomous; syntactic rules and principles can
refer to semantically and/or phonologically deined categories.
Consider as an example of this earlier tradition Otto Jespersens
description of the syntax of the SPEECH-ACT category of ques-
tion: [T]he formal means by which questions are expressed,
are (1) tone; (2) separate interrogative words ; (3) word-order
(1924, 305). Syntax (and intonation) is expressive of meaning.
However, autonomy requires that elements that participate
in purely syntactic regularities be syntactic themselves. hus, the
feature Q for interrogative clauses of Chomsky (1995, 4.5.4)
is part of syntax. It is interpretable, but its interpretation is
not pertinent to syntax (see illocutionary force and sen-
tence types). But from a traditional point of view, it is the cat-
egorial meaning of Q that, as with other syntactic elements,
drives its syntax. Its status as (prototypically) a request for infor-
mation is what demands, for instance, the presence in the sen-
tence of an open element, marked, for example, by wh-, or by
intonation or some such indication of openness of the truth of the
sentence itself.
he autonomy hypothesis is falsiiable only if there is an inde-
pendent notion of what constitutes syntax; otherwise, any appar-
ent counterexample can be relegated to interaction between
syntax and some other module (see modularity). An unfalsii-
able assumption of autonomy deines a research program, rather
than constituting an empirical hypothesis: It is methodological
rather than ontological. he program, as well as the hypothesis,
is based on the premise that it is fruitful to operate as if syntax
is autonomous, in contrast with the more traditional view that
nonreference by a syntactic regularity to interpretation is excep-
tional, involving demotivation (grammaticalization) within
a syntax whose central concern is with the role of sound and
structure as expressive of meaning.
Opponents of the autonomy assumption, whatever its sta-
tus, tend to interpret it in the absolute form described here (as
Babbling
Langacker 1987,155). Chomsky, however, envisages autonomy
theses of varying degrees of strength (1977, 43), whereby syn-
tax is not necessarily exhausted by the substructure of perfectly
formal rules (1972, 119) of his formulation. hus, the signiicant
question with regard to the autonomy thesis may not be a ques-
tion of yes or no, but rather of more or less, or more correctly,
where and how much (Chomsky 1977, 42). Certainly, provided
again that we have an independent characterization of syntax,
the extent of autonomy and its accommodation are in themselves
interesting empirical questions, with consequences for modular-
ity, universal grammar, and the autonomy of language itself.
And seeking to answer them might be more comprehensible to
opponents of a strong interpretation of autonomy.
Work within the autonomist program(s), whatever the status
of the assumption, has undoubtedly had important results, but
there is room for debate as to how fruitful has been the pursuit of
the autonomy assumption as such. And in addition to the ques-
tion of how it relates to independent notions of what syntax is, a
major diiculty in evaluating the assumption, and its contribu-
tion to these results, is the changing nature of the grammatical
enterprise(s) in which autonomy has been invoked, as well as the
varying degrees of emphasis with which it has been put forward
or denied.
John M. Anderson
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Anderson, John M. 2005. Structuralism and autonomy: From Saussure
to Chomsky. Historiographia Linguistica 32: 11748.
Bloomield, Leonard. 1926. A set of postulates for the science of lan-
guage. Language 2: 15364.
Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. he Hague: Mouton.
. 1972. Some empirical issues in the theory of transformational
grammar. In Goals of Linguistic heory, ed. Stanley Peters, 63130.
Englewood Clifs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
. 1975. he Logical Structure of Linguistic heory. New York: Plenum
Press.
. 1977. Essays on Form and Interpretation. Amsterdam: North-
Holland.
. 1995. he Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jespersen, Otto. 1924. he Philosophy of Grammar. London: George Allen
and Unwin.
Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar,
I: heoretical Prerequisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Radford, Andrew. 1988. Transformational Grammar: A First Course.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
B claims regarding the phones that occur in the irst words were, on
BABBLING
Babbling can be deined as infant vocal production that is broadly
adultlike in phonetic shape but that lacks any identiiable
adult model or intended meaning. he formal criterion broadly
adultlike limits study to the period that follows the childs irst
temporally regular or rhythmic C-V (Consonant-Vowel)-syllable
production, also known as canonical babbling (Oller 1980); these
vocal forms include both a complete or nearly complete supra-
glottal closure and a transition to a recognizable vocalic nucleus,
for example, [dada], [babababa], [aaa]. Prior to that, the
child vocalizes in more primitive ways that are not thought to be
directly related to language.
he lack of an adult model is a question of interpretation
since the irst word forms are highly similar in form to concur-
rent babbling. In fact, there is in most cases a gradual shift from
a predominance of unidentiiable vocalizations, beginning with
the emergence of canonical babbling (at 6 to 10 months), to a
predominance of word use identiiable in the situational con-
text (16 to 22 months). he extent to which the shift is relatively
abrupt or gradual is highly individual.
Finally, there are vocal forms that do not appear to be
based on an adult model but that are nevertheless used with
consistent broad communicative meaning such as request,
rejection, or interest; these transitional forms or protowords
(Vihman and Miller 1988) should thus be distinguished from
babbling, which lacks any apparent communicative goal.
Babbling is a largely self-directed process of exploration
(Elbers 1982, 45).
Brief Modern History
THE CONTINUITY ISSUE: THE RELATIONSHIP OF BABBLE TO
WORDS. Roman Jakobson ([1941] 1968) was the irst linguist to
pay serious theoretical attention to babbling if only to deny its
relevance to language learning. On the basis of the diary accounts
available to him, Jakobson developed the (discontinuity) view
that babbling was merely random sound production, express-
ing the full range of human phonetic possibility but unrelated to
the more austere or constrained repertoire of the irst words.
Jakobson saw the latter as relecting a well-ordered universal
scheme for the emergence of phonological oppositions, such
that the low vowel /a/ is primary, with contrast with /i/ following,
while anterior stops are the irst consonants produced (labial /b/
or dental /d/), followed by nasals and only later by other places
and manners of articulation.
his impressively articulated universalist theory held sway
for many years but was challenged in the 1970s when diary data
began to be supplemented by planned recordings of infants (typi-
cally in free interaction with an adult). Charles A. Ferguson and
Olga K. Garnica (1975) and Paul Kiparsky and Lise Menn (1977)
were among the irst to raise objections to Jakobsons ideas of
gradual phonemic diferentiation, which disregarded the efect
of word position on order of segment acquisition and which would
be diicult to defend on the basis of the very few words produced
in a childs earliest lexical period. On the other hand, Jakobsons
the whole, quite accurate, based as they were on decades of diary
records provided by linguists and psychologists.
What was not supported by later studies was the strong
separation required by Jakobsons theory between words (or
phonology) and babble (or phonetic production). Far from
babbling being unrelated to word production, later studies have
established that the irst words draw their phonetic resources
from the particular inventory of sound patterns developed by
the individual child through babbling (Vihman et al. 1985; con-
tinuity has also been reported for babbled gesture and irst
117
Babbling
signs: Cheek et al. 2001). For example, a French child whose
prelinguistic babbling made considerable use of liquids (mainly
[l]) was found to develop several irst words with [l(j)], which is
uncommon in early phonology: allo hello (on the telephone)
[ailo], [hailo], [haljo], [alo]; lolo bottle (babytalk term) [ljoljo];
donne (le) give (it) [d], [dl], [ld], [heldo] (Vihman 1993).
BABBLING DRIFT: THE EFFECT OF PERCEPTION ON PRODUCTION. A
second issue that has aroused interest for half a century is that
of possible drift in babbling toward the sounds of the native lan-
guage (Brown 1958). he issue has generated considerable heat
and is important since it concerns the extent to which infants can
be taken to be capable of translating their perceptual experience
of the sound patterns of the ambient language into their limited
production repertoire. hat is, any identiiable ambient language
inluence on prelinguistic vocalizations means that infants have
both perceived the typical sounds of their language and adjusted
their vocal production accordingly.
Many studies, from Atkinson, MacWhinney, and Stoel
(1968) to Engstrand, Williams, and Lacerda (2003), have used
adult perceptual judgments of recorded vocalizations to deter-
mine whether infants language of exposure can be identiied,
as that would provide evidence of drift; the indings remain
inconclusive, however. Meanwhile, Bndicte de Boysson-
Bardies and colleagues, using acoustic analyses of vowels
(1989) and tallies of transcribed consonant types (Boysson-
Bardies and Vihman 1991), established signiicant prelinguis-
tic adult language inluence, although the mechanism for such
an efect remained unclear. More recent work demonstrating
the extent of early implicit or distributional learning (Safran,
Aslin, and Newport 1996) suggests that infants are capable of
registering dominant patterns of their language within the irst
year. hus, the mechanism needed to account for drift may be
the efect of implicit perceptual learning on production: hose
vocalizations that, as the producing child perceives them, acti-
vate perceptual responses already familiar from input pattern-
ing would strengthen perceptuomotor connections, leading to
their repeated use.
Theoretical approaches
FRAME AND CONTENT: THE ARTICULATORY BASIS OF BABBLING. he
most widely accepted current model of babbling is that of
Peter F. MacNeilage and Barbara L. Davis (1990 and Davis and
MacNeilage 1990, 1995 (for a review of competing ideas, see Chen
and Kent 2005). he articulatory basis of babbling is claimed to
be frame dominance, meaning that the patterns produced largely
relect mandibular oscillation without independent control of
lip and tongue movement. he result is strong C-V associations,
such that alveolars are followed by front vowels, labials by central
vowels (the pure frames, requiring no particular tongue setting),
and velars by back vowels. Furthermore, the model predicts that
changes in the mandibular cycle will result in height changes for
vowels and manner changes for consonants in variegated bab-
bling sequences. he work of this team and collaborators investi-
gating a range of other languages (e.g., Dutch, French, Romanian,
Turkish: Davis et al. 2005) have largely supported the predictions
and have demonstrated a tendency for adult languages to show
the C-V associations as well (MacNeilage and Davis 2000) but
118
Chen and Kent (2005) report an association of labials with back
vowels in their extensive Mandarin data, both child and adult.
he balance of ambient language (perceptual) inluence versus
universal (physiological or motoric) tendencies thus remains
controversial. Any early C-V associations can be expected to
fade with lexical growth as infants follow their individual paths
toward segmental independence (freeing the content from the
frame).
VOCAL MOTOR SCHEMES AND THE EFFECT OF PRODUCTION ON
PERCEPTION. Lorraine McCune and Marilyn M. Vihman (2001)
introduced the concept of vocal motor schemes (VMS), or gen-
eralized action patterns that yield consistent phonetic forms (p.
673), identiied on the basis of repeated high-frequency produc-
tion of one or more consonants over the course of several record-
ings. VMS index emergent stability in consonant production, a
reliable predictor of lexical advance.
Vihmans articulatory ilter model (1993) posits that an
infants babbling patterns will efectively highlight related forms
in the input. Once one or more VMS are established, it is possible
to test the model by measuring infants attentional response to
a series of short sentences featuring nonwords that do or do not
include that childs VMS. Capitalizing on wide infant variability
in the timing and nature of irst vocal forms (within the limits of
the strong universal contraints), Rory A. DePaolis (2006) estab-
lished an efect of infant production on the perception of speech.
His indings support the idea that the irst words, typically pro-
duced in priming situations (context-limited words: McCune
and Vihman 2001), are based on infant experience of a rough
match between vocal forms established through babbling prac-
tice and words heard frequently in input speech (Vihman and
Kunnari 2006). Such selection of words to attempt based on
the vocal forms available for matching would account for the rel-
ative accuracy of irst words (Ferguson and Farwell 1975), their
constrained shapes (e.g., one or two syllables in length, with little
variegation across word position or syllables), and their strong
rootedness in the biomechanical basis of babbling as established
by Davis and MacNeilage. It also explains the diiculty of distin-
guishing words from babble (continuity) and the subtlety of the
ambient language efect on babbling and early words (drift).
Marilyn Vihman
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Catherine Durand. 1989. A crosslinguistic investigation of vowel for-
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Boysson-Bardies, Bndicte de, and Marilyn M. Vihman. 1991.
Adaptation to language. Language 67: 297319.
Brown, Roger. 1958. Words and hings. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
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Prelinguistic gesture predicts mastery and error in the production of
early signs. Language 77: 292323.
Chen, L. M., and Raymond D. Kent. 2005. Consonant-vowel co-
occurrence patterns in Mandarin-learning infants. Journal of Child
Language 32: 50734.
Babbling
Davis, Barbara L., and Peter F. MacNeilage. 1990. Acquisition of correct
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Ferguson, Charles A., and Carol B. Farwell. 1975. Words and sounds in
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production: Frames, then content. In Attention and Performance. Vol.
13: Motor Representation and Control. Ed. Marc Jeannerod, 45375.
Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
. 2000. On the origin of internal structure of word forms. Science
288: 52731.
McCune, Lorraine, and Marilyn M. Vihman. 2001. Early phonetic
and lexical development. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing
Research 44: 67084.
Oller, D. Kimbrough. 1980. he emergence of the sounds of speech
in infancy. In Child Phonology. Vol. 1: Production. Ed. Grace Yeni-
komshian, James F. Kavanagh, and Charles A. Ferguson, 93112. New
York: Academic Press.
. 2000. he Emergence of the Speech Capacity. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum. his book provides a thorough review of babbling studies
conducted with hearing, hearing-impaired, premature, and low SES
(socioeconomic status) infants, as well as provocative ideas about the
evolution of language based on evidence from ontogeny.
Safran, Jenny R., Richard N. Aslin, and Elissa L. Newport. 1996. Statistical
learning by 8-month-old infants. Science 274: 19268.
Vihman, Marilyn M. 1993. Variable paths to early word production.
Journal of Phonetics 21: 6182.
. 1996. Phonological Development. Oxford: Blackwell. his book
provides an overview of research in infant speech perception and pro-
duction and their interactions, as well as of theories of phonological
development, early word patterning, and the nature of the transition
into language.
Vihman, Marilyn M., and Sari Kunnari. 2006. he sources of phonologi-
cal knowledge. In Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes 35: 13364.
Vihman, Marilyn M., Marlys A. Macken, Ruth Miller, Hazel Simmons,
and James Miller. 1985. From babbling to speech: A re-assessment of
the continuity issue. Language 61: 397445.
Vihman, Marilyn M., and Ruth Miller. 1988. Words and babble at the
threshold of lexical acquisition. In he Emergent Lexicon, ed. Michael
D. Smith and John L. Locke, 15183. New York: Academic Press.
Basal Ganglia
BASAL GANGLIA
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
Dobzhansky 1973
he basal ganglia are subcortical structures that can be traced
back to frogs and are traditionally associated with motor control.
However, current studies show that complex behaviors generally
are regulated by neural circuits that link local processes in difer-
ent parts of the brain. In humans, the basal ganglia play a critical
role in neural circuits regulating cognitive processes, including
language, as well as motor control and emotion. he capacities
that diferentiate humans from other species, such as being able
to talk, forming and comprehending sentences that have com-
plex syntax, and possessing cognitive lexibility, devolve from
neural circuits that link activity in diferent regions of the cortex
through the basal ganglia. he neural bases of human language
thus involve the interplay of processes that regulate motor con-
trol, other aspects of cognition, mood, and personality. Given the
involvement of multiple regions of the brain that are involved in
many activities, it is diicult to see how any organ of the brain
could be speciic to language and language alone, such as the
narrow faculty of language that, according to Marc D. Hauser,
Noam Chomsky, and W. T. Fitch (2002) yields the recursive prop-
erties of syntax.
Evidence from experiments-in-nature that attempt to link
speciic behavioral deicits with damage to a particular part of
a patients brain led to the traditional Broca-Wernicke theory.
his traditional theory claims that linguistic processes are local-
ized in these two regions of the neocortex, the outermost part of
the brain. However, evidence from brain-imaging techniques,
such as computer augmented tomography (CT scans), demon-
strated that aphasia, permanent loss of language, never occurs
in the absence of subcortical damage (Stuss and Benson 1986).
Subsequent indings from techniques such as functional mag-
netic resonance imaging (fMRI see neuroimaging) that
indirectly map neural activity show that although Brocas area
and Wernickes area are active when neurologically intact sub-
jects perform various linguistic tasks; these areas are elements of
complex neural circuits that link activity in other cortical regions
and subcortical structures (Kotz et al. 2003). Studies of neurode-
generative disorders, such as Parkinsons disease (Lieberman,
Friedman, and Feldman 1990; Grossman et al. 1992), revealed
the role of the basal ganglia in regulating speech and language.
Speech production and the comprehension of distinctions in
meaning conveyed by syntax deteriorated when basal ganglia
function was impaired. Basal ganglia dysfunction is implicated
in seemingly unrelated conditions, such as obsessive-compul-
sive disorder, schizophrenia, Parkinsons disease, and verbal
apraxia a condition in which orofacial, laryngeal, and respira-
tory control during speech is impaired (Lieberman 2006)
Neural Circuits
hese syndromes follow from the basal ganglia activity in difer-
ent neural circuits. Neural circuits that link activity in diferent
parts of the brain appear to be the bases for most, if not all, com-
plex mammalian behaviors. In humans, a class of neural circuits
that links activity in diferent regions of the cortex through the
119
Basal Ganglia
basal ganglia and other subcortical structures appears to play a
key role in regulating aspects of human linguistic ability, such
as talking and comprehending the meaning of a sentence, as
well as such seemingly unrelated phenomena as decision mak-
ing, walking, attention, and emotional state. To understand the
nature of neural circuits, we must take account of the distinction
that exists between local operations that are carried out within
some particular part of the brain and an observable behavior
that results from many local operations linked in a neural cir-
cuit. Complex brains, including the human brain, perform local
operations involving tactile, visual, or auditory stimuli in partic-
ular regions of the brain. Other neural structures perform local
operations that regulate aspects of motor control or hold infor-
mation in short-term (working) memory, and so on.
he basic computational elements of biological brains are
neurons. Local operations result from activity in an anatomically
segregated, population (a group) of neurons. A given part of the
brain many contain many distinct anatomically segregated neu-
ronal populations that each carry out similar local operations.
But these local operations do not constitute observable behav-
iors. Each anatomically segregated neuronal population projects
to anatomically distinct neuronal populations in other regions of
the brain, forming a neural circuit. he linked local operations
performed in the circuit constitute the neural basis of an observ-
able aspect of behavior, such as striking the keys of a computer
keyboard.
Basal Ganglia Operations
Research that initially focused on Parkinsons disease, a neu-
rodegenerative disease that afects the operation of the basal
ganglia, largely sparing cortex, demonstrated their role in motor
control, syntax, and cognitive lexibility. In their review article, C.
D. Marsden and J. A. Obeso (1994) noted that the basal ganglia
constitute a sequencing engine for both motor and cognitive
acts. he basal ganglia regulate routine motor acts by activating
and linking motor pattern generators that each constitute an
instruction set for a submovement to the frontal regions of the
brain involved in motor control. As each submovement reaches
its goal, the pattern generator for the next appropriate submove-
ment is activated. herefore, motor control deicits characterize
neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinsons that degrade
basal ganglia operations.
he basal ganglia have other motor functions; in changing
circumstances, they can switch to a set of motor pattern gen-
erators that constitute a better it to the changed environment
constituting adaptive motor control. Basal ganglia operations
involving cognitive pattern generators (Graybiel 1997) account
for the subcortical dementia associated with Parkinsons disease.
Alicted individuals perseverate: hey are unable to switch to a
new train of thought when circumstances change. On cognitive
tests such as the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), they have
diiculty switching to a new cognitive criterion. For example, a
subject who has been successfully sorting cards by their color
will have diiculty switching to sorting them by the number of
symbols printed on each card. Neurophysiologic studies that
trace the linkages between the segregated neuronal populations
of the basal ganglia and cortex conirm circuits that project from
the basal ganglia to regions of the brain that are implicated in
120
cognitive as well as motor acts. Brain imaging studies reveal
increased basal ganglia activity in syntactically complex sen-
tences, as well as at the points where a person must switch from
one criterion to another, as is the case in studies using tests of
cognition such as the WCST (Monchi et al. 2001).
hus, basal ganglia dysfunction arising from neurodegen-
erative diseases, lesions, or the efects of oxygen deprivation
(Lieberman et al. 2005) also can result in an inability to com-
prehend distinctions in meaning conveyed by complex syntax.
Alicted individuals appear to have diiculty switching the cog-
nitive pattern generators that code syntactic operations at clause
boundaries or that in sentences depart from a simple canonical
form. hese subjects typically have diiculty sequencing motor
acts, including those involved in speech. heir motor acts are
slower, resulting in longer vowel durations, and those subjects
have diiculty rapidly sequencing the tongue, lip, and laryngeal
maneuvers necessary to diferentiate stop consonants, such as
[b] for [p], or [d] from [t].
Motor Control and Syntax
Linguists have long realized that the syntactic operations (i.e.,
the rules that they use to describe the structure of a sentence)
yield hierarchical structures. In describing the syntax of the sen-
tence John saw the cat, the words the cat are part of a constituent
that includes the verb saw. he rules that can be used to describe
seemingly simple motor acts such as walking also yield hierarchi-
cal structures. Both motor control and syntax involve selectional
constraints that result in hierarchical structures. For example, the
motor pattern generator for heel strike cannot be activated before
or much after your foot meets the ground. his yields a hierarchi-
cal tree diagram similar to those commonly used to convey the
grammatical structure of a sentence. he syntactic tree diagram
for a square dance in which swing your partner occurred again
and again would not difer in principle from that of a sentence
having embedded relative clauses. (For more on the similarities
between motor control rules and those of generative syntax, see
Lieberman 2006).
Genetic Findings
Studies of the regulatory gene FOXP2 provide a starting point for
understanding the evolution of the cortical-striatal-cortical cir-
cuits that confer human linguistic ability (see genes and lan-
guage). Other genes undoubtedly are involved and FOXP2 is not
a language gene. FOXP2 governs the embryonic development
of the basal ganglia, other subcortical structures, and lung tissue
and other structures. Its discovery resulted from a long-term study
of an extended family in which many individuals are marked by
a genetic anomaly. A syndrome, a suite of speech and orofacial
movement disorders, and cognitive and linguistic deicits mark
these individuals. hey are not able to protrude their tongues
while closing their lips, cannot repeat two word sequences, and
have diiculty comprehending distinctions in meaning conveyed
by syntax (Vargha-Khadem et al. 1998). On standardized intelli-
gence tests, they have signiicantly lower scores than their nonaf-
licted siblings. MRI imaging shows that the caudate nucleus (a
basal ganglia structure) is abnormal. fMRI imaging, which pro-
vides a measure of neural activity, shows underactivation in the
putamen (the principal basal ganglia input structure), Brocas
Basal Ganglia
area, and its right homolog (Watkins et al. 2002; Liegeois et al.
2003). hese structures are connected by neural circuits through
the striatum (Lehericy et al. 2004). he behavioral deicits of
alicted individuals are similar to those seen in Parkinsons dis-
ease and oxygen deprivation (cf. Lieberman 2006 for details).
he role of FOXP2 during early brain development in humans
and of the mouse version ( foxp2) in mice was established by C.
S. Lai and colleagues (2003). he gene governs the expression of
other genes during embryonic development. In both the human
and mouse brain, the gene is active in the interconnected neu-
ral structures that constitute the cortical-striatal-cortical circuits
regulating motor control and cognition in humans, including the
caudate nucleus and putamen of the basal ganglia, the thala-
mus, inferior olives, and cerebellum. Despite the high degree
of similarity, the mouse and human versions are separated by
three mutations. he chimpanzee and human versions are sepa-
rated by two mutations. W. Enard and colleagues (2002), using
the techniques of molecular genetics, estimate that the human
form appeared somewhere in the last 200,000 years, in the time
frame (Stringer 1998) associated with the emergence of anatomi-
cally modern Homo sapiens. he appearance of human speech
anatomy 50,000 years ago presupposes the prior appearance of
this neural substrate (see speech anatomy, evolution of).
In short, the basal ganglia are neural structures that were ini-
tially adapted for one function motor control. In the course of
evolution, the human basal ganglia were modiied, taking on
additional cognitive and linguistic tasks.
Philip Lieberman
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Dobzhansky, heodosius. 1973. Nothing in biology makes sense except
in the light of evolution. American Biology Teacher 35: 1259.
Enard, W., M. Przeworski, S. E. Fisher, C. S. Lai, V. Wiebe, T. Kitano, A. P.
Monaco, and S. Paabo. 2002. Molecular evolution of FOXP2, a gene
involved in speech and language. Nature 41: 86972.
Graybiel, Ann M. 1997. he basal ganglia and cognitive pattern genera-
tors. Schizoprenia Bulletin 23: 45969.
Grossman, Murray, S. Carvell, S. Gollomp, M. B. Stern, G. Vernon, and
H. I. Hurtig. 1992. Sentence comprehension and praxis deicits in
Parkinsons disease. Neurology 41: 16208.
Hauser, Marc D., N. Chomsky, and W. T. Fitch. 2002. he faculty of
language: What is it, who had it, and how did it evolve? Science
298: 156979.
Kotz, Sonia A., M. Meyer, K. Alter, M. Besson, D. Y. von Cramon, and A. D.
Frederica. 2003. On the lateralization of emotional prosody: An fMRI
investigation. Brain and Language 86: 36676.
Lai, C. S., D. Gerrelli, A. P. Monaco, S. E. Fisher, and A. J. Copp. 2003.
FOXP2 expression during brain development coincides with adult
sites of a pathology in a severe speech and language disorder. Brain
126: 245562.
Lehericy, S. M., M. Ducros, P. F. Van de Moortele, C. Francois, L. hivard,
C. Poupon, N. Swindale, K. Ugurbil, and D. S. Kim. 2004. Difusion
tensor tracking shows distinct corticostriatal circuits in humans.
Annals of Neurology 55: 5229.
Lieberman, Philip. 2006. Toward an Evolutionary Biology of Language.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lieberman, Philip, J. Friedman, and L. S. Feldman. 1990. Syntactic dei-
cits in Parkinsons Disease. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
178: 3605.
Basic Level Concepts
Lieberman, Philip, A. Morey, J. Hochstadt, M. Larson, and S. Mather S.
2005. Mount Everest: A space analogue for speech monitoring of cog-
nitive deicits and stress. Aviation, Space and Environmental Medicine
76: 198207.
Liegeois, F., T. Baldeweg, A. Connelly, D. G. Gadian, M. Mishkin, and F.
Varhgha-Khadem, 2003. Language fMRI abnormalities associated
with FOXP2 gene mutation. Nature Neuroscience 6: 12307.
Marsden, C. D., and J. A. Obeso.1994. he functions of the basal ganglia
and the paradox of stereotaxic surgery in Parkinsons disease. Brain
117: 87797.
Monchi, O., P. Petrides, V. Petre, K. Worsley, and A. Dagher. 2001.
Wisconsin card sorting revisited: Distinct neural circuits participat-
ing in diferent stages of the task identiied by event-related functional
magnetic resonance imaging. Journal of Neuroscience 21: 773341.
Stringer, Christopher B. 1998. Chronological and biogeographic per-
spectives on later human evolution. In Neanderthals and Modern
Humans in Western Asia, ed. T. Akazawa, K. Abel, and O. Bar-Yosef,
2938. New York: Plenum.
Stuss, Donald T., and D. F. Benson. 1986. he Frontal Lobes. New
York: Raven
Vargha-Khadem, Faraneh, K. E. Watkins, C. J. Price, J. Ashburner, K. J.
Alcock, A. Connelly, R. S. Frackowiak, K. J. Friston, M. E. Pembrey, M.
Mishkin, D. G. Gadian, and R. E. Passingham. 1998. Neural basis of an
inherited speech and language disorder. PNAS USA 95: 12695700.
Watkins, Kate, F. Vargha-Khadem, J. Ashburn, R. E. Passingham, A.
Connelly, K. J. Friston, R. S. Frackiwiak, M. Miskin, and D. G. Gadian.
2002. MRI analysis of an inherited speech and language disor-
der: Structural brain abnormalities. Brain 125: 46578.
BASIC LEVEL CONCEPTS
A concept is a mental representation that allows people to
pick out a group of equivalent things or a category (see catego-
rization). For example, people use their concept of dog to pick
out members of category of things that are called dogs.
Concepts are also organized into hierarchical taxonomies,
or sequences of progressively larger categories, in which each
category includes all the previous ones. For example, an object
driven on a highway with four wheels and a top that folds back
can be called a convertible, a car, or a vehicle. he category car is
more general than convertible because it includes other objects
(e.g., station wagons) as well as the members of convertible. he
category vehicle is more general than convertible and car because
it contains other objects (e.g., trucks) as well as the members of
these categories.
Strong evidence from cognitive psychology (Rosch et al.
1976) and anthropology (Berlin 1992) suggests that one level of
such hierarchies is cognitively privileged. Eleanor Rosch and
colleagues (1976) used a wide range of converging methods
that singled out the basic level as playing a central role in many
categorization processes. For example, the category level repre-
sented by chair and dog is typically considered the basic level, in
contrast to more general superordinate concepts, such as furni-
ture and animal, and more speciic subordinate concepts, such
as recliner and labrador retriever.
Basic level concepts have advantages over other concepts.
Pictures of objects are categorized faster at the basic level than
at other levels (Jolicoeur, Gluck, and Kosslyn 1984). As noted
by Rosch and her colleagues, people primarily use basic level
names in naming tasks, and the basic level is the highest level
121
Basic Level Concepts
for which category members have similar overall shape (cf. car
versus vehicle). Children learn basic level concepts sooner than
other concepts (Brown 1958; Horton and Markman 1980). Basic
level advantages are found in many other domains, including
environmental scenes (Tversky and Hemenway 1983), social
categories (Cantor and Mischel 1979), and actions (Morris and
Murphy 1990).
One explanation for the advantages of basic level categories
over other categories is that they are more diferentiated (Rosch
et al. 1976; Murphy and Brownell 1985). Members of basic level
categories have many features in common. hese features are
also distinct from those of other categories at this level. In con-
trast, although members of more speciic, subordinate catego-
ries (e.g., sports car) have slightly more features in common than
do those of basic level categories, many of these features are not
distinctive. hat is, members of a subordinate category share
their features with other subordinates (e.g., members of sports
car share a number of features with other subcategories of car).
In contrast, the members of more general, superordinate catego-
ries (e.g., vehicle) have few common features.
Diferentiation explains the basic level advantage because
it relects a compromise between two competing functions of
concepts. Categories should be informative so that one can draw
inferences about an entity on the basis of its category member-
ship. Emphasizing this function leads to the formation of large
numbers of categories with the inest possible discriminations
between categories (Rosch et al. 1976, 384). However, the for-
mation of categories should only preserve important diferences
between them that are practical: It is to the organisms advantage
not to diferentiate one stimulus from others when that diferen-
tiation is irrelevant to the purposes at hand (ibid.). his function
counteracts the tendency to create large numbers of categories
and relects the principle of cognitive economy (Rosch et al.
1976). Overall, basic level categories have an advantage because
they are relatively general and informative, whereas superordi-
nate categories, though general, are not informative and subor-
dinate categories, though informative, are not general.
he basic level may change with expertise in a way that is
consistent with the diferentiation explanation. For example,
James Tanaka and Marjorie Taylor (1991) investigated exper-
tise efects on the basic level in expert dog breeders and bird-
watchers. Using a number of tasks, they tested each expert in
both the dog and bird domains. For instance, in a speeded cate-
gorization task, experts in their novice domain were fastest at the
basic level and slowest at the subordinate level (as Rosch et al.
1976 found). However, in their area of expertise, categorization
was equally fast at the basic and subordinate levels. For more
detailed reviews of this literature, see Lassaline, Wisniewski,
and Medin 1992; Murphy and Lassaline 1997.)
Edward Wisniewski
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Berlin, Brent. 1992. Ethnobiological Classiication: Principles of
Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Brown, Roger. 1958. How shall a thing be called? Psychological Review
65: 1421.
122
Bilingual Education
Cantor, Nancy, and Walter Mischel. 1979. Prototypes in person percep-
tion. In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, ed. L. Berkowitz,
452. New York: Academic Press.
Horton, Marjorie, and Ellen Markman. 1980. Developmental difer-
ences in the acquisition of basic and superordinate categories. Child
Development 51: 70815.
Jolicoeur, Pierre, Mark Gluck, and Steven Kosslyn. 1984. Pictures and
names: Making the connection. Cognitive Psychology 16: 24375.
Lassaline, Mary, Edward Wisniewski, and Douglas Medin. 1992.
Basic levels in artiicial and natural categories: Are all basic cat-
egories created equal? In Percepts, Concepts, and Categories: he
Representation and Processing of Information, ed. B. Burns, 32880.
North Holland: Elsevier.
Morris, Michael, and Gregory Murphy. 1990. Converging operations on
a basic level in event taxonomies. Memory and Cognition 18: 40718.
Murphy, Gregory, and Hiram Brownell. 1985. Category diferentiation in
object recognition: Typicality constraints on the basic category advan-
tage. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and
Cognition 11: 7084.
Murphy, Gregory, and Mary Lassaline. 1997. Hierarchical structure
in concepts and the basic level of categorization. In Knowledge,
Concepts, and Categories, ed. K. Lamberts and D. Shanks, 93131.
London: Psychology Press
Rosch, Eleanor, Carolyn Mervis, Wayne Gray, David Johnson, and Penny
Boyes-Braem. 1976. Basic objects in natural categories. Cognitive
Psychology 8: 382439.
Tanaka, James, and Marjorie Taylor. 1991. Object categories and exper-
tise: Is the basic level in the eye of the beholder? Cognitive Psychology
23: 47282.
Tversky, Barbara, and Kathy Hemenway. 1983. Categories of environ-
mental scenes. Cognitive Psychology 15: 12149.
BILINGUAL EDUCATION
In principle, bilingual education is just the use of two languages
in instruction in a school setting. However, in practice, it covers
a wide array of programs. Bilingual education programs range
from high-status schools promoting international education
through prestige languages, such as English and French, to
highly marginalized schools devoted to the bare-bones school-
ing of immigrant children.
In its weak form, bilingual education may involve transi-
tional or subtractive bilingualism, leading to monolingualism
(e.g., teaching Spanish-speaking children English to ensure their
assimilation and integration into mainstream America). In its
strong form, bilingual education aims at maintaining the lan-
guage of a minority child in addition to the learning of a major-
ity language, thus leading to additive bilingualism. Heritage
bilingual schools often practice an ideal version of additive
bilingualism, which stresses bicultural education in addition to
bilingualism.
One of the central concerns of bilingual education is to
address the educational needs/performance of minority chil-
dren by maintaining their mother tongue. he proponents of
maintaining the mother tongue claim that such maintenance
is critical for linguistic and cognitive growth of the child, school
performance, psychological security, ethnic and cultural iden-
tity (see ethnolinguistic identity), self-esteem, and many
other positive personal and intellectual characteristics. he sup-
porters of transitional bilingualism claim that only transitional
Bilingualism, Neurobiology of
bilingualism is capable of saving children from poor academic
performance and allowing for assimilation.
Bilingual education has been steadily gaining strength around
the globe since the era of decolonization. It is further fueled by
the growth of ethnic awareness and the movement to prevent
the extinction of languages of the world. Many countries,
particularly in Europe, that earlier fostered monolithic ideology
have begun to recognize their diversity as a source of social and
economic capital, thus marking a new era of bilingual/multilin-
gual education (e.g., in the United Kingdom, France, and Spain,
among others; see language policy).
Multilingual countries of Asia and Africa continue to nurture
a long tradition of bilingual education. Since 1956, India, for
example, has had as oicial policy a three-language formula in
education. his formula calls for multilingual education. In addi-
tion to learning the two national languages Hindi and English
students are expected to learn a third or a fourth language.
Because of its deep-rooted association with immigrants, bilin-
gual education in the United States is particularly notable for its
turbulent history. On June 2, 1998, the people of California voted
to end a tradition of bilingual education by passing Proposition
227, which gives immigrant children just one year to learn English
before they enroll in regular classes. Many school systems in
other states are waiting either to put in place severe restrictions
on bilingual instruction or to eliminate it completely by passing
English only policies (for details, see Genesee 2006).
While bilingual education is often associated with the edu-
cation of minority students (e.g., in the United States), the
Canadian immersion programs in French devoted to the
majority Anglophones serve as a model of bilingual education
for majority students (for details, see Genesee 2006).
Tej K. Bhatia
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Crawford, James. 2004. Educating English Learners. Los Angeles: Bilingual
Educational Services.
Genesee, Fred. 2006. What do we know about bilingual education for
majority-language students? In Handbook of Bilingualism, ed. Tej K.
Bhatia and William C. Ritchie, 54776. Oxford: Blackwell.
BILINGUALISM, NEUROBIOLOGY OF
Neurobiology of bilingualism refers to the study of the cere-
bral organization of multiple languages in the human brain.
From early accounts of selective loss and recovery in bilingual
aphasia (i.e., loss of language due to a brain lesion) to recent
electrophysiological and functional neuroimaging studies, issues
inherent to the bilingual brain have inspired researchers for more
than a century. Investigations into the neural basis of bilingual-
ism focus not only on how two languages (L1 and L2) are repre-
sented in the brain (i.e., the anatomical location) but also on how
these languages are processed. Indeed, the main assumption is
that a weaker L2 may be processed through brain mechanisms
that may difer from those underlying L1 processing. After a brief
historical overview, I illustrate indings inherent to the represen-
tation of languages, followed by a section focusing on language
processing.
Historical Overview
From a historical standpoint, the irst approach to studying
brain organization for bilingualism was the study of bilingual
aphasics. Several clinical aphasia studies have shown that bilin-
gual aphasics do not necessarily manifest the same language
disorders with the same degree of severity in both languages. In
some cases, L1 is recovered better than a L2. In other cases, the
converse obtains. Since the landmark 1895 study of the French
neurologist Albert Pitres, who was the irst to draw attention to
the relative frequency of diferential language recovery follow-
ing aphasia in bilinguals, many diferent recovery patterns have
been described: from selective recovery of a given language
(i.e., one language remains impaired while the other recov-
ers); parallel recovery of both languages, successive recovery
(i.e., after the recovery process of one language, the other lan-
guage recovers); alternating recovery (i.e., the language that
was irst recovered will be lost again due to the recovery of the
language that was not irst recovered); and alternating antago-
nistic recovery (i.e., on one day the patient is able to speak in
one language while on the next day only in the other); to the
pathological mixing of two languages (i.e., the elements of the
two languages are involuntarily mixed during language pro-
duction). he study of bilingual aphasia is important because
it indicates the cortical regions necessary for performance of a
linguistic task (e.g., speaking in L1).
Clinical case reports indicate a set of relevant factors and
have led to theoretical conjectures. However, at present we lack a
causal account for the various recovery patterns and cannot pre-
dict clinical outcomes. Concerning the possible factors involved,
no correlation has been found between the pattern of recovery
and neurological, etiological, experiential, or linguistic param-
eters: not site, size or origin of lesion, type or severity of aphasia,
type of bilingualism, language structure type, or factors related to
acquisition or habitual use.
heoretical conjectures arising from the study of bilingual
aphasia developed along two distinct lines, a more traditional
approach and a more dynamic approach. he more traditional
localizationist view argued, for instance, that the speciic loss
of one language would occur because the bilinguals languages
are represented in diferent brain areas or even in diferent
hemispheres, and hence, a focal brain lesion within a language-
speciic area may alter only that speciic language, leaving the
other language intact. In contrast, according to the dynamic view
selective recovery arises because of compromise to the language
system, rather than to damage to diferential brain representa-
tions. A selective loss of a language arises because of increased
inhibition, that is, of a raised activation threshold for the afected
or lost language, or even because of an imbalance in the means
to activate the language due to the lesion. It is worth underlining
that Pitres himself proposed a dynamic explanation of language
recovery in bilingual aphasics: Language recovery could occur
only if the lesion had not entirely destroyed language areas but
temporarily inhibited them through a sort of pathological iner-
tia. In Pitress opinion, the patient generally irst recovered the
language to which she/he was premorbidly more exposed (not
necessarily the native language) because the neural elements
subserving the more exposed language were more strongly
associated.
123
Bilingualism, Neurobiology of
he dynamic view not only explains the so-called selec-
tive recovery of a language but can also explain many reported
recovery patterns in bilingual aphasia. As outlined by M. Paradis
(1998), a parallel recovery would then occur when both lan-
guages are inhibited to the same degree. When inhibition afects
only one language for a period of time and then shifts to the other
language (with disinhibition of the prior inhibited language) a
pattern of alternating antagonistic recovery occurs (see Green
1986). Selective recovery would occur if the lesion permanently
raised the activation threshold for one language, and pathologi-
cal mixing among languages would occur when languages could
no longer be selectively inhibited.
In general, the aphasia data have provided a rich source of evi-
dence on the range of language disorders and language recovery
patterns in bilinguals. However, there are limitations to the gen-
eralizability of such data to neurologically healthy individuals.
Concerns about the lesion-deicit approach include the inability
to determine whether speciic language deicits are the result of
damage to a specialized language component at the lesion site,
or if the damaged area is simply part of a larger neural network
that mediates a given component of language. Likewise, aphasia
data do not allow one to separate the efects of injury from those
of neural plasticity or a reallocation of healthy cortical tissue
for the mediation of language functions lost as a result of brain
injury. Nevertheless, studying the efects of brain damage on lin-
guistic function in bilinguals has led to a number of interesting
observations about the nature and course of language impair-
ment and recovery, which in turn has stimulated researchers to
apply functional neuroimaging techniques to the investigation of
bilingual language processing.
The Neural Representation of L2
Since its inception, neuroimaging work on bilinguals has been
motivated by the same localizationist questions that run through
the bilingual aphasia literature: whether multiple languages are
represented in overlapping or separate cerebral systems. In addi-
tion, neuroimaging and neurophysiological data on this issue
have often been inluenced by possible biases, such as lack of
information on the age of acquisition and degree of proiciency
in the experimental subjects. Both these variables indeed exert
profound inluences on the brain organization of L2.
According to psycholinguistic evidence grounded on the
concept of universal grammar, the age of L2 acquisition is
expected to be crucial for grammatical processing. In fact, gram-
matical processing may be particularly deicient when L2 is
learned later in life. On the other hand, lexical-semantic process-
ing seems to be less afected by age of acquisition than to depend
on the degree of L2 proiciency.
It is likely that other factors, such as usage and exposure to a
given language, can afect brain plasticity mechanisms, leading
to modiications of the neural substrate of language. I consider
separately how these variables may inluence L2 processing.
An ongoing issue in neurobiology concerns the fact that the
acquisition of language seems to depend on appropriate input
during a biologically based critical periods. It has also been
suggested that L2 learning may be subject to such crucial time-
locked constraints. However, L2 can be acquired at any time in
life, although L2 proiciency is rarely comparable to that of L1 if
124
L2 is acquired beyond the critical periods. he dependence of
grammatical processing upon these age efects was conirmed
by early event-related potentials (ERP) studies (Weber-Fox and
Neville 1996) and by recent functional brain imaging studies
(Wartenburger et al. 2003). In particular, I. Wartenburger and
colleagues reported no diferences in brain activations for gram-
mar in L1 and L2 in very early (from birth) highly proicient bilin-
guals. On the other hand, late highly proicient bilinguals were
in need of additional neural resources in order to achieve a com-
parable nativelike performance in grammatical tasks. he same
did not apply to lexical-semantic processing, for which the only
diference in the pattern of brain activity in bilinguals appeared
to depend upon the level of attained proiciency.
As mentioned, the degree of language proiciency seems to
exert a more pervasive inluence on the lexical-semantic level
of L2. According to psycholinguistics, during the early stages
of L2 acquisition there may be a dependency on L1 to mediate
access to meaning for L2 lexical items. As L2 proiciency grows,
this dependency disappears. Higher levels of proiciency in L2
produce lexical-semantic mental representations that more
closely resemble those constructed in L1. According to D. W.
Greens convergence hypothesis (2003), any qualitative difer-
ences between native and L2 speakers disappear as proiciency
increases. he convergence hypothesis claims that the acquisi-
tion of L2 arises in the context of an already speciied or partially
speciied system and that L2 will receive convergent neural rep-
resentation within the representations of the language learned
as L1.
Whether word or sentence production and word completion
were used as experimental tasks, neuroimaging studies reported
common activations in the left hemisphere when the degree
of L2 proiciency was comparable to that of L1. his happened
irrespective of the diferences in orthography, phonology and
syntax among languages. Conversely, bilinguals with low pro-
iciency in L2 engaged additional brain activity, mostly in the left
prefrontal cortex. Similar results were found in studies that did
not directly address lexical retrieval, but employed judgment
tasks in the lexical-semantic domain.
It is worth underlining that the activity found in the left pre-
frontal cortex is located anteriorily to the classical language areas
and, thus, not directly linked to language functions but rather
linked to other cognitive functions, such as cognitive control
and attention. Crucially, the engagement of the left prefrontal
cortex was reported for bilinguals with a low degree of L2 proi-
ciency and/or exposure. One may conclude that the diferences
found between high and low proicient bilinguals are not due to
anatomical diferences of L2 brain representations but instead
relect the cognitive dynamics of processing a weaker L2 as com-
pared to L1.
Neural Aspects of L2 Processing
One of the most salient aspects and one speciic to bilingual lan-
guage processing is language control. Language control refers to
the fact that there may be competition between languages and
that this competition is resolved by actively inhibiting the so-
called non-target language. Consider that individuals can perform
diferent actions on the same stimulus. For instance, a bilingual
can name a presented word in L1 or translate it into L2. he task
Bilingualism, Neurobiology of
goal must be maintained in the face of conlicting goals, and the
various actions required to perform the task must be coordinated
(e.g., retrieve or compute the words phonology from its spelling
or retrieve the meaning of the word and select its translation).
Once a given task is established, however (e.g., speaking in L2),
competition with alternative possible tasks (speaking in L1) may
be resolved more automatically. Where individuals wish to alter
their goal (for example, to switch from speaking in one language
to speaking in another), they must disengage from the current
goal and switch to the new goal. Lexical concepts matching the
intended language must be selected and produced, while those
not matching the intended language must be inhibited through
language control mechanisms. For instance, in word production
studies, language control would inhibit potential interferences
from the non-target language. Psycholinguistic evidence points
to the fact that such interference is more common during pro-
duction in a language that is mastered to a lower degree of pro-
iciency, for example, a weak L2. In that case, for example, when
asked to name a picture in L2, the bilingual speaker has to inhibit
L1 in order to prevent a prepotent interference from L1.
Functional neuroimaging studies using experimental tasks
like picture naming, switching, translating, and so on have ele-
gantly shown that these tasks are paralleled by the activation of
a set of brain areas that are not directly linked to language repre-
sentation, such as the brain activity within the left prefrontal cor-
tex, the left caudate nucleus, and the anterior cingulate cortex.
he engagement of these areas is even more relevant when sub-
jects have to process a weak L2. he functions generally ascribed
to the prefrontal cortex comprise working memory, response
inhibition, response selection, and decision making, while the
left caudate was reported to be imported for language selection
and set switching. he anterior cingulate cortex is related to such
functions as conlict monitoring, attention, and error detection.
It becomes clear that the engagement of these structures pro-
vides a cerebral testimony of the cognitive processes inherent to
bilingual language processing: competition and control between
languages.
Conclusions
Extensive reviews focusing on the bilingual brain as studied with
functional neuroimaging are available in the literature to which
the reader is referred (Abutalebi, Cappa, and Perani 2005; Perani
and Abutalebi 2005; but see also Paradis (2004) for a critical
viewpoint). In broad outlines, functional neuroimaging has shed
new light on the neural basis of L2 processing and on its relation-
ship to native language (L1). First of all, the long-held assump-
tion that L1 and L2 are necessarily represented in diferent brain
regions or even in diferent hemispheres in bilinguals has not
been conirmed. On the contrary, functional neuroimaging has
elegantly outlined that L1 and L2 are processed by the same
neural devices. Indeed, the patterns of brain activation associ-
ated with tasks that engage speciic aspects of linguistic process-
ing are remarkably consistent among diferent languages, which
share the same brain language system. hese relatively ixed
brain patterns, however, are modulated by a number of factors.
Proiciency, age of acquisition, and exposure can afect the cere-
bral representations of each language, interacting in a complex
way with the modalities of language performance.
Bilingualism and Multilingualism
Consider as an example the complex process of L2 acquisition.
his process may be considered as a dynamic process, requiring
additional neural resources in the early stages of L2 acquisition.
hese additional neural resources are mostly found within the
left prefrontal cortex (more anteriorily to the classical language
areas), the left basal ganglia, and the anterior cingulated cor-
tex and seem to be associated with the greater control demand
when processing a weaker L2. However, once the L2 learner
gains suicient L2 proiciency, the neural representation of L2
converges to that of L1, at least at the macroanatomical level.
At this stage, one may suppose that L2 is processed in the same
fashion as L1, as psycholinguistic evidence points out (Kroll and
Stewart 1994).
his latter point is an important one because many functional
neuroimaging studies did not take into consideration linguistic
and psycholinguistic evidence (Paradis 2004). Yet evidence from
neuroimaging should be integrated with the psycholinguistic
indings to the mutual advantage of both research traditions.
Integrating these indings with the psycholinguistic theory may
allow us to demonstrate the biological consistency of diferent
models, organize and consolidate existing indings, and gener-
ate novel insights into the nature of the cerebral organization of
bilingualism.
Jubin Abutalebi
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Abutalebi J., S. F. Cappa and D. Perani. 2005. Functional neuroimaging
of the bilingual brain. In Handbook of Bilingualism: Psycholinguistic
Approaches, ed. J. F. K Kroll and A. De Groot, 497515. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Green, D. W. 1986. Control, activation and resource. Brain and
Language 27: 21023.
. 2003. he neural basis of the lexicon and the grammar in L2
acquisition. In he Interface Between Syntax and the Lexicon in Second
Language Acquisition, ed. R. van Hout, A. Hulk, F. Kuiken, and R.
Towell, 197218. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kroll, J. F., and E. Stewart. 1994. Category interference in translation
and picture naming: Evidence for asymmetric connections between
bilingual memory representations. Journal of Language and Memory
33: 14974.
Paradis, M. 1998. Language and communication in multilinguals. In
Handbook of Neurolinguistics, ed. B. Stemmer and H. Whitaker. San
Diego, CA: Academic Press, 417430.
. 2004. A Neurolinguistic heory of Bilingualism. Amsterdam and
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Perani, D., and J. Abutalebi. 2005. Neural basis of irst and second lan-
guage processing. Current Opinion of Neurobiology 15: 2026.
Wartenburger, I., H. R. Heekeren, J. Abutalebi, S. F. Cappa, A. Villringer,
and D. Perani. 2003. Early setting of grammatical processing in the
bilingual brain. Neuron 37: 15970.
Weber-Fox, C. M., and H. J. Neville. 1996. Maturational constraints on
functional specialization for language processing: ERP and behavioral
evidence in bilingual speakers. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
8: 23156.
BILINGUALISM AND MULTILINGUALISM
Growing recognition that bilingualism/multilingualism is
not an exception or irregular phenomenon but is, in fact, a
125
Bilingualism and Multilingualism
growing global phenomenon marks a new challenge and a shift
for linguistic research. For instance, the traditional domain of
psycholinguistic research, which has been the monolingual
child, is now shifting to the bilingual child and multilingual lan-
guage processing (see, e.g., de Bot and Kroll 2002, 133). What is
bilingualism and who is a bilingual? he questions of identiica-
tion and measurement that are considered irrelevant in the con-
text of monolingualism become more pertinent and urgent in
the context of bilingual language acquisition, production, com-
prehension, and processing.
Bilingualism/Multilingualism: Two Conceptual Views
Is a bilingual a composite of two monolinguals? Does the bilin-
gual brain comprise two monolinguals crowded into a limited
space? For some researchers, the answer to these questions has
traditionally been airmative. Such a view of bilingualism is
termed the fractional view. According to this view, monolingual-
ism holds a key to the understanding of bilingualism. However,
a more balanced and accurate picture of bilingualism emerges
from the holistic view of bilingualism. According to this view, nei-
ther is a bilingual person the mere sum of two monolinguals nor
is the bilingual brain a composite of two monolingual brains. he
reason for this position is that the cooperation, competition, and
coexistence of the bilinguals two languages make a bilingual a
very complex and colorful individual (for details, see Grosjean
1989).
Deining and Measuring Bilingualism: Input Conditions and
Input Types
Deining and measuring bilingualism is a very complex and
uphill task due to the number and types of input conditions. For
instance, while a monolingual child receives input from his or
her parents only in one language in all settings, a bilingual child
is provided input at least in two separate languages (e.g., one-
parent one-language input; one-place one-language input) in
addition to a code-mixed input in a variety of environments. In
addition, biological (age of acquisition), sociopsychological, and
other nonlinguistic factors lead to a varying degree of bilingual
language competencies. herefore, it is natural that no widely
accepted deinition or measure of bilingualism exists. Instead, a
rich range of scales, dichotomies, and categories are employed
to describe bilinguals. A bilingual who can speak and under-
stand two languages is called a productive bilingual, whereas a
receptive bilingual is an individual who can understand but can-
not speak a second language. A child who has acquired two lan-
guages before the age of ive at home (natural setting) is called a
simultaneous or early bilingual, whereas those who learn a sec-
ond language after the age of ive, either at home or in school set-
ting, are described as late or sequential bilinguals. Other labels
and dichotomies, such as luent versus nonluent, balanced ver-
sus nonbalanced, primary versus secondary, and partial versus
complete, are based upon diferent types of language proiciency
(speaking, writing, listening) or on an asymmetrical relationship
between the two languages.
Compound versus coordinate bilingualism refers to the difer-
ential processing of language in the brain. Compound bilinguals
process two languages using a common conceptual system,
whereas coordinate bilinguals keep language separation at both
126
conceptual and linguistic levels (see bilingualism, neurobi-
ology of). hese labels and dichotomies demonstrate the com-
plex attributes of bilingualism that make the task of deining and
measuring bilinguals a daunting one. A working deinition of
bilingualism is ofered by Leonard Bloomied ([1933] 1984, 53),
who claimed that a bilingual is one who has native-like control
over two languages (i.e., balanced bilingual).
Bilinguals Language Organization
Bilinguals organization of a verbal repertoire in the brain is also
very diferent from that of monolinguals. When a monolingual
decides to speak, his/her brain does not have to make complex
decisions concerning language choice as does the bilingual. Such
a decision-making process for a monolingual is restricted at best
to the choice of a variety/style (informal vs. formal) selection.
It is inconceivable for monolinguals to imagine that a mul-
tilingual person, such as this author, has to make a choice from
among four languages and their varieties while communicating
within his family in India. he language choice is not a random
one but is unconsciously governed by a set of factors. he author
is a speaker of Multani, Punjabi, Hindi, and English. Normally,
he used Multani to talk with his brothers and parents while grow-
ing up. He speaks Punjabi with two of his sisters-in-law, Hindi
with his nephews and nieces, and English with his children. In
short, each language in his brain is associated with a well-de-
ined domain. A violation of such a domain allocation has seri-
ous implications not only for communication mishaps but also
for interpersonal relationships. In addition to the language-per-
son domain allocation, other factors such as topics and emotions
determine his language choice. While discussing an academic
topic, he switches from Multani to English with his brothers and
from English to Hindi with his children if the context is emotive.
In short, the determinants of language choice are quite com-
plex among bilinguals, and this, in turn, presents evidence that
bilinguals organization of their verbal repertoire is quite difer-
ent from monolinguals organization.It is interesting to note that
language choice (or language negotiation) is a salient feature of
bilingual linguistic competence and performance. he com-
plexity of language choice and its unconscious determinants
pose a serious challenge for the psycholinguistic theory of bilin-
gual language production.
Individual, Societal, and Political Bilingualism
Bilingualism can be viewed from individual, societal, and politi-
cal perspectives. In a bilingual family, not all members are always
bilinguals. Parents may be monolingual, while children may be
bilinguals or vice versa. Societal factors such as the overt prestige
of a language (or a presence of a majority language) often leads
to individual or family bilingualism. However, individual or fam-
ily bilingualism can persist even without societal support. Such
bilingualism can be termed covert prestige bilingualism, which is
often motivated by the consideration of group identity.
In those societies of Asia or Africa where bilingualism exists
as a natural phenomenon as the result of a centuries-long tradi-
tion of bilingualism, an ethnic or local language becomes a Low
variety, that is, it is acquired at home and/or in an informal set-
ting outside school (e.g., on a playground), whereas a language of
wider communication or a prestige language functions as a High
Bilingualism and Multilingualism
variety, which is learned formally in schools. In a diglossic
society, a single language develops two distinct varieties, the
L- and the H-variety.
People become bilingual for a wide variety of reasons: immi-
gration, jobs, marriage, or religion, among others. hese factors
create a language contact situation but do not always lead to
stable bilingualism. For instance, it is well known that immigrant
communities in the United States often give up their mother
tongue in favor of English and become monolingual after a brief
period of bilingualism.
he classiication of countries as monolingual, bilingual, or
multilingual often refers to the language policies of a country,
rather than to the actual incidence of bilingualism or multilin-
gualism. Canada is a bilingual country in the sense that its lan-
guage policies are receptive to bilingualism. It makes provision
for learning French in those provinces that are Anglophone.
Such a provision is called territorial bilingualism. However, it
does not mean that everybody in Canada is a bilingual, nor does
it mean that the country guarantees individual bilingualism (per-
sonality bilingualism) outside territorial bilingualism. In multi-
lingual countries such as India, where 20 languages are oicially
recognized, the government language policies are receptive to
multilingualism. Indias three-language formula is the oicial
language policy of the country. In addition to learning Hindi and
English, the conational languages, schoolchildren can learn a
third language, spoken outside their state.
Bilingual Verbal Behavior: Language Separation and
Language Integration
Language separation and language integration are the two most
salient characteristics of bilinguals and thus of the bilingual
brain. Whenever deemed appropriate, bilinguals can turn of one
language and turn on the other language. his enables them to
switch from one language to another with the ease of a driver of
a stick-shift car shifting into diferent gears whenever necessary.
he fractional view of bilingualism can account for such a verbal
behavior of bilinguals. In addition to keeping the two linguistic
systems separate, bilinguals can also integrate the two systems
by mixing two languages. Language mixing is a far more complex
cognitive ability than language separation. he holistic view of
bilingualism can account for these two types of competencies.
Language mixing comes naturally to bilinguals. herefore, it is
not surprising that such mixed languages as Spanglish, Hinglish,
Japlish, and Germlish are emerging around the globe.
Contrary to the claims of earlier research, the grammar of lan-
guage mixing is complex yet systematic. he search for explana-
tions of cross-linguistic generalizations about the phenomenon
of code mixing (particularly, code mixing within sentences) in
terms of independently justiied principles of language structure
and use has taken two distinct forms. One approach is formulated
in terms of the theory of linguistic competence, for example, Jef
MacSwan (2005). he other approach as best exempliied by
the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model (Myers-Scotton and
Jake 1995; see codeswitching) is grounded in the theory of
sentence production, particularly that of M. Garrett (1988) and
W. Levelt (1989) (see Bhatia and Richie 1996, 6557 for discus-
sion). For further development of these ideas and a critique, see
Bhatia and Ritchie (1996) and MacSwan (2005).
Effects of Bilingualism/Multilingualism
What is the efect of bilingualism/multilingualism on an indi-
vidual, particularly on a child? he research on this question
is fundamentally driven by two hypotheses: the linguistic def-
icit hypothesis and the linguistic augmentation hypothesis.
According to the former, bilingual children show serious linguis-
tic and cognitive adverse efects of bilingualism. Exposure to two
languages leads to semilingualism; that is, they become deicient
in both languages, which in turn leads to other disabilities (e.g.,
stuttering) and cognitive impairments (low intelligence, mental
retardation, and even schizophrenia).
Such a hypothesis has become obsolete in light of the ind-
ings of the research driven by the linguistic augmentation
hypothesis. Solid on theoretical and methodological grounds,
research by Elizabeth Peal and Wallace E. Lambert (1962) put
to rest such negative and frightening efects of bilingualism.
heir research and the indings of the succeeding research pro-
vide ample evidence that the negative conclusions of the earlier
research were premature and misguided due to the theoretical
and methodological laws. Contrary to the indings of the previ-
ous research, bilingual children exhibit more cognitive lexibility
than do monolinguals and perform better on verbal and nonver-
bal measures. Peal and Lamberts study, which was conducted in
Montreal, revolutionized research on bilingualism and multilin-
gualism by highlighting a positive conception of bilinguals. heir
research has been replicated in many countries, conirming
the augmenting rather than subtracting efect of bilingualism.
Beyond this research, the economic, communicative (intergen-
erational and cross-cultural), and relational (building relations)
advantages of bilingualism are inarguable.
Conclusion
In short, bilingualism/mulitilingualism is a global phenomenon
that continues to gain further momentum in the age of globaliza-
tion. It is a by-product of a number of biological, sociopsychologi-
cal, and linguistic factors. hese factors lead to individuals with
varying degree of language competencies. herefore, it is not sur-
prising that deining and measuring bilingualism/multilingual-
ism continues to be a challenging task. Bilinguals are complex
and colorful in the way they manage and optimize their linguistic
resources. For that reason, they are not a sum of two monolinguals.
Language mixing and shifting are two deining characteristics of
bilinguals. Current socio- and psycholinguistic research attempts
to account for these two salient properties of the bilingual brain.
Tej K. Bhatia
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bhatia, Tej K., and William C. Ritchie, eds. 2006. he Handbook of
Bilingualism. Oxford: Blackwell. his book presents a multidisciplinary
and comprehensive collection of state-of-the-art research on bilingual-
ism and multilingualism. Chapters 7 and 8 deal with bilingual produc-
tion models, including the discussion of Garrett 1988 and Levelt 1989.
Bhatia, Tej K., and William C. Ritchie. 1996. Bilingual language mixing,
Universal Grammar, and second language acquisition. In Handbook
of Second Language Acquisition, ed. W. C. Ritchie and T. K. Bhatia,
62782. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Bloomield, Leonard. [1933] 1984. Language. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
127
Binding
de Bot, Kees, and Judith F. Kroll. 2002. Psycholinguistics. In An
Introduction to Applied Linguistics, ed. Norbert Schmitt, 13349.
London: Arnold.
Edwards, John. 2006. Foundations of bilingualism. In Bhatia and Richie
2006, 731.
Garrett, M. E. 1988. Process in sentence production. In he
Cambridge Linguistic Survey. Vol. 3. Ed. F. Newmeyer, 6996.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Grosjean, Francois. 1989. Neurolinguists, beware! he bilingual is not
two monolinguals in one person. Brain and Language 36: 315.
Hakuta, Kanji. 1986. Mirror of Language. New York: Basic Books. his
work ofers an excellent multidisciplinary account of bilingualism in
general and bilingualism in the United States in particular. Among
other topics, it presents an excellent account of the linguistic dei-
ciency and linguistic augmentation hypotheses.
Levelt, W. 1989. Speaking: From Intention to Articulation. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
MacSwan, Jef. 2005. Remarks on Jake, Myers-Scotton and Grosss
response: here is no Matrix Language. Language and Cognition
8.3: 27784.
Myers-Scotton, Carol and J. Jake. 1995. Matching lemmas in a bilingual
language competence and production model: Evidence from intrasen-
tential code switching. Linguistics 33: 9811024.
Peal, Elizabeth, and Wallace E. Lambert. 1962. Relation of bilingualism
to intelligence. Psychological Monographs 76: 123.
Ritchie, William C., and Tej K. Bhatia. 2007. Psycholinguistics. In
Handbook of Educational Linguistics, ed. Bernard Spolsky and Francis
Hult, 3852. Oxford: Blackwell.
BINDING
In quantiied logic, binding names the relation between a
quantiier and one or more variables, for example, x and x
in x[P(x) Q(x)]. In linguistics, the term has been used in at
least three domains: irst, for the relation between quantiied
expressions and pronouns that referentially depend on them,
(1); second for coreference, the relation between two referring
expressions with the same referent, (2), including hypothesized
empty pronouns, (2c); and third, in theories that assume trans-
formations, for the relation between a dislocated phrase and its
trace, (3) (see government and binding theory):
(1) Every cat chased its tail.
(2) a. Sue hopes that she won.
b. Edgar spoke for himself.
c. Wesley called PRO to apologize.
(3) a. Which book did Kim read t?
b. Antonia was promoted t.
Semantically, only (1) and (3) are clear instances of binding
(the pronouns/traces are interpreted like variables, and their
antecedents are often nonreferring), yet coreference is almost
universally subsumed under the binding label in linguistics.
All three binding relations are frequently represented by
coindexing the binder (or antecedent) and the bound element
(e.g., Every cat6 chased its6 tail), though richer, asymmetrical
representations have been proposed and are arguably required
for semantic interpretation.
Semantic binding relations are subject to a structural con-
straint, to a irst approximation, the same as in quantiied
128
logic: he bindee must be contained in the sister constituent
to the binder, a relation usually called c(onstituent)-command
(see c-command). For movement relations, this amounts to the
ban on downward or sideways movement, the proper binding
condition, which is pervasive across languages. For quantiier-
pronoun relations, it blocks sideways binding as in (4a) (neither
noun phrase [NP] c-commands the other), and upward binding
as in (4b) (the putative binder is c-commanded by the pronoun);
note that in both examples the pronouns have to be interpreted
as referentially independent of no one/actress:
(4) a. If no one is here, hes elsewhere.
b. Her calendar showed that no actress had left early.
A systematic class of exceptions to the c-command require-
ment is found in so-called indirect binding, for example (5), where
the object can be bound from within the subject (sideways):
(5) Somebody from every city likes its beaches.
Unlike semantic binding, coreference among two NPs does not
require c-command:
(6) His/Jacquess teacher said that he/Jacques failed.
Yet certain prohibitions against coreference, for example, that
nonrelexive pronouns in English cannot corefer with expres-
sions in the same inite clause, only regard NPs that c-commands
the pronoun, (7) (similarly for nonpronominal NPs):
Your mother
(7) defended you.
*You
Likewise, relexive pronouns in English need an antecedent
that is not just within the same inite clause but also c-commands
them:
She
(8) defended herself.
*Her mother
hese conditions on the distribution of relexive and nonre-
lexive restrict binding by quantiied nominals as well and are
indiscriminately referred to as binding conditions.
While c-command seems relevant in binding conditions
cross-linguistically, other aspects, such as the number of mor-
phological classes (relexives, nonrelexives, etc.) or the size of
relevant structural domains, vary widely.
Daniel Bring
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bring, Daniel. 2005. Binding heory. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht,
the Netherlands: Foris Publications.
Dalrymple, Mary. 1993. he Syntax of Anaphoric Binding. Stanford,
CA: CSLI.
Kuno, Susumo. 1987. Functional Syntax Anaphora, Discourse and
Empathy. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Biolinguistics
BIOLINGUISTICS
Biolinguistics is the study of the biology of language. he mod-
ern biolinguistic program was initiated by Noam Chomsky in
the 1950s (Chomsky 2006), although it has much earlier histori-
cal antecedents (see cartesian linguistics). It investigates
the form and function of language, the development (ontogeny)
of language, and the evolution of language (phylogeny), among
other topics. Biolinguists study such questions as the following:
(1) What is knowledge of language?
(2) How does knowledge of language develop in the child?
(3) How does knowledge of language evolve in the species?
To answer the question of what knowledge of language is (1),
biolinguists have proposed various generative grammars,
that is, explicit models of the faculty of language.
he study of generative grammars draws from a variety
of areas, including syntax, semantics, the lexicon, mor-
phology, phonology, and articulatory and acoustic
phonetics.
In addition, the biolinguist investigates the neurologi-
cal mechanisms underlying the faculty of language (see
syntax, neurobiology of; semantics, neurobiology
of; morphology, neurobiology of; phonetics and
phonology, neurobiology of). Such studies of brain and
language include studies of expressive and receptive apha-
sia, split brain patients, neuroimaging, and the electrical
activity of the brain.
he biolinguist also studies performance models (language
processing), including parsing, right hemisphere lan-
guage processing, left hemisphere language pro-
cessing, and speech perception.
To answer the question of how knowledge of language devel-
ops in the child (2), one may visualize this as the study of the
language acquisition device:
experience ? language (English, Japanese, etc.)
where the box represents what the child brings to language learn-
ing. We ask how the child maps experience (primary linguistic data)
to a particular language. It is posited that the child moves through a
number of states from an initial state, corresponding to the childs
genetic endowment, to a inal state, corresponding to a particular
language. For each subarea discussed, biolinguistics studies the
development or growth of language, often referred to as language
acquisition (e.g., syntax, acquisition of; semantics, acqui-
sition of; and phonology, acquisition of).
he initial state may be characterized by a universal gram-
mar, which is a set of general principles with parameters that
are set by experience, thus accounting for the variation across
languages. For example, there are general principles of word
order that permit some variation; for example, the verb precedes
the object (English) or the verb follows the object (Japanese) (see
x-bar theory). Such a theory is referred to as a principles
and parameters theory. (For speciic subareas, see syntax,
universals of; semantics, universals of; morphology,
universals of; and phonology, universals of.) For some
diferent parametric proposals, see the microparametric approach
of Richard Kaynes (2004) and Charles Yangs (2004) work on com-
petitive theories of language acquisition. (From other perspectives,
see universals, nongenetic; absolute and statistical
universals, implicational universals, and typological
universals.)
In addition to comparative grammar (see also morpholog-
ical typology), universals of language change, syn-
tactic change, semantic change, pidgins, and creoles
provide additional evidence for the nature of universal grammar
and language acquisition.
Moreover, the study of genetic language disorders, as well as
familial and twin studies, has been very fruitful for the study of
language acquisition (see genes and language; specific
language impairment; see also the extensive literature on the
FOXP2 gene [Marcus and Fisher 2003]). Studies of language-iso-
lated children provide information about the critical period
for language learning. he study of sign languages has been
invaluable for investigating language outside the modality of
sound (see also sign language, acquisition of; sign lan-
guages, neurobiology of). Finally, the study of linguistic
savants has been quite useful for delineating the modularity
of the language faculty as distinct from other cognitive faculties.
To answer the question of how knowledge of language evolves
in the species, (3), biolinguists integrate data from a variety of
areas, including comparative ethology (see Hauser, Chomsky,
and Fitch 2002; see also animal communication and human
language; speech anatomy, evolution of), comparative
neuroanatomy, and comparative genomics. Since evolution of
language took place in the distant past, mathematical modeling
of populations of speaker-hearers has recently attracted much
interest in work on dynamical systems (see self-organizing
systems). Such studies have proven useful not only for the study
of evolution but also for the study of language acquisition and
change. (For some hypotheses on origins of language, see ori-
gins of language; grooming, gossip, and language.)
Questions (1) to (3) might be called the what and how ques-
tions of biolinguistics. One can also ask why the principles of
language are what they are, a deeper and more diicult question
to answer. he investigation into why questions is sometimes
referred to as the minimalist program or minimalism. In addi-
tion, there is the related question of how the study of language
can be integrated with the other natural sciences, a problem that
Chomsky calls the uniication problem (see Jenkins 2000). All
of these questions are certain to continue to fascinate investiga-
tors of the biology of language for decades to come.
(For more information on other explicit models of the lan-
guage faculty, see transformational grammar; standard
theory and extended standard theory; categorial
grammar; head-driven phrase structure grammar;
lexical-functional grammar; optimality theory; role
and reference grammar; cognitive grammar; connec-
tionism and grammar; construction grammars).
Lyle Jenkins
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Chomsky, Noam. 2006. Biolinguistics and the human capacity. In
Language and Mind, 17385. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
129
Birdsong and Human Language
Hauser, M. D., N. Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch. 2002. he faculty
of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science
298: 156979.
Kayne, Richard. 2004. Antisymmetry and Japanese. In
Variation and Universals in Biolinguistics, ed. Lyle Jenkins, 35.
Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Jenkins, Lyle. 2000. Biolinguistics: Exploring the Biology of Language.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marcus, G. F., and S. E. Fisher. 2003. FOXP2 in focus: What can genes
tell us about speech and language? Trends in Cognitive Sciences
7.6: 25762.
Yang, Charles. 2004. Toward a theory of language growth. In
Variation and Universals in Biolinguistics, ed. Lyle Jenkins, 3756.
Amsterdam: Elsevier.
BIRDSONG AND HUMAN LANGUAGE
Language is often claimed to be uniquely human (see ani-
mal communication and human language ). his belief
has discouraged eforts to identify potential animal models of
language, even though animal models have been essential in
ascertaining the neurobiology of other cognitive functions.
It is conceivable, however, that useful homologies or analo-
gies exist between human language and the communicative
systems of other species, even if language is unique in some
respects.
One particularly interesting homology might exist between
human language and birdsong. Songbirds rely on a special-
ized frontal lobebasal ganglia loop to learn, produce,
and perceive birdsong (Brenowitz and Beecher 2005) (see also
brocas area). Disruptions to this circuit disrupt the sensorim-
otor learning needed to acquire song, and also the sequencing
skills needed to produce and properly perceive it. Recent work
has revealed a remarkable homology in this circuit between
birds and mammals (Doupe et al. 2005). he homologous circuit
in human and nonhuman primates involves loops connecting
many regions in the frontal cortex to the basal ganglia. Aferents
from the frontal cortex densely innervate the striatum of the basal
ganglia, which also receives inputs from many other areas of the
cortex. he striatum seems to control behavioral sequencing in
many species (Aldridge and Berridge 1998). Spiny neurons, the
principal cells of the striatum, have properties that make them
ideal for recognizing patterned sequences across time (Beiser,
Hua, and Houk 1997). Damage to this loop in primates produces
problems with motor and cognitive skills that require plan-
ning and manipulating patterns of sequences over time (Fuster
1995).
hese observations lend plausibility to the notion that the
frontal cortexbasal ganglia circuit might play a role in the syn-
tax of human language. If so, then it is probably not coincidental
that the acquisition of human language and birdsong have com-
pelling parallels (Doupe and Kuhl 1999). Humans and songbirds
learn their complex, sequenced vocalizations in early life. hey
similarly internalize sensory experience and use it to shape vocal
outputs, by means of sensorimotor learning and integration.
hey show similar innate dispositions for learning the correct
sounds and sequences; as a result, humans and some species
of songbird have similar critical periods for vocal learning,
with a much greater ability to learn early in life. hese behavioral
130
parallels are what one would expect if both species rely on a simi-
lar neural substrate for learning and using their communicative
systems.
Relevant genetic evidence is also available. he much-dis-
cussed FOXP2 gene is similarly expressed in the basal ganglia of
humans and songbirds (Teramitsu et al. 2004; Vargha-Khadem
et al. 2005). A FOXP2 mutation in humans results in deicits in
language production and comprehension, especially aspects of
(morpho)syntax that involve combining and sequencing linguis-
tic units (Marcus and Hisher 2003; Vargha-Kadham et al. 2005).
One of the neurobiological efects of the mutation is a notable
reduction in the gray matter of the striatum (Vargha-Kadham
et al. 2005). Perhaps, then, the combinatorial aspects of human
language were enabled by the preadaptation of an anterior neu-
ral circuit that has been highly conserved over evolutionary time
and across species, and by a genetic mutation in this circuit that
increased its computational space.
Finally, some birdsong, like human language, is composi-
tional; songbirds learn units and rules of combination (Rose et
al. 2004), although the rules of combination are obviously far
less sophisticated than those that characterize human language.
A skeptic might argue that the syntax of human language is too
complex (too highly structured, too recursive, too creative; see
recursion, iteration, and metarepresentation ) to be
modeled as a simple patterned sequence processor that relies
on associative learning mechanisms. In fact, the explanatory
burden placed on rule-based, recursive syntax has diminished
over recent decades. Modern grammars tend to be lexicalist
in nature; that is, much of the knowledge relevant to sentence
structure is stored in the lexicon with individual words, rather
than being computed by abstract phrase structure rules (see
lexical-functional grammar ). Recursion, while clearly
a characteristic of human language, is much more limited in
actual language usage than would be predicted given the stan-
dard model. And, because conceptual knowledge (see seman-
tics) has its own structure (Jackendof 1990), it seems plausible
that some of the burden for structuring the input rests with the
conceptual stream (Jackendof 2002), rather than entirely with
the syntax.
Birds and humans are fundamentally diferent in many ways,
as are their systems of communication. Nonetheless, birds and
humans are two of only a handful of vocal learners, and recent
work points to communication-relevant homologies and similar-
ities. It is not unreasonable to think that a comparative approach
might provide important clues to how language evolved and,
perhaps, to the nature of language itself.
Lee Osterhout
WORK CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Aldridge, J. Wayne, and Kent C. Berridge. 1998. Coding serial order
by neostriatal neurons: A natural action approach to movement
sequence. Journal of Neuroscience 18: 277787.
Beiser, David G., Sherwin S. Hua, and James C. Houk. 1997. Network
models of the basal ganglia. Current Opinion in Neurobiology
7: 18590.
Brenowitz, Eliot, and Michael D. Beecher. 2005. Song learning in
birds: Diversity and plasticity, opportunities and challenges. Trends
in Neurosciences 28: 12732.
Blended Space
Doupe, Allison J., and Patricia Kuhl. 1999. Birdsong and human
speech: Common themes and mechanisms. Annual Review of
Neuroscience 22: 567631.
Doupe, Allison J., David J. Perkel, Anton Reiner, and Edward A. Stern.
2005. Birdbrains could teach basal ganglia research a new song.
Trends in Neurosciences 28: 35363.
Fuster, Joaquin M. 1995. Memory in the Cerebral Cortex: An Empirical
Approach to Neural Networks in the Human and Nonhuman Primate.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jackendof, Ray. 1990. Semantic Structures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
. 2002. Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar,
Evolution. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lieberman, Philip. 2000. Human Language and Our Reptilian Brain.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Marcus, Gary F., and Simon E. Fisher. 2003. FOXP2 in focus: What can
genes tell us about speech and language? Trends in Cognitive Sciences
7: 25762.
Rose, Gary, Franz Goller, Howard J. Gritton, Stephanie L. Plamondon,
Alexander T. Baugh, and Brendon G. Cooper. 2004. Species-typical
songs in white-crowned sparrows tutored with only phrase pairs.
Nature 432: 7538.
Teramitsu, Ikuku, Lili C. Kudo, Sarah E. London, Daniel H. Geschwind,
and Stephanie A. White. 2004. Parallel FOXP1 and FOXP2 expres-
sion in songbirds and human brain predicts functional interaction.
Journal of Neuroscience 24: 315263.
Vargha-Khadem, Faraneh., David G. Gadian, Andrew Copp, and
Mortimer Mishkin. 2005. FOXP2 and the neuroanatomy of speech
and language. Nature Reviews: Neuroscience 6: 1318.
BLENDED SPACE
A blended space is one element of the model of meaning con-
struction proposed by conceptual blending theory. In this
framework, mental representations are organized in small, self-
contained conceptual packets (Fauconnier and Turner 2002,
40) called mental spaces, which interconnect to form complex
conceptual networks. In a conceptual integration network, or
blend, some mental spaces serve as input spaces that contrib-
ute elements to a new, blended mental space (Fauconnier and
Turner 1994, 1998, 2002).
he minimal conceptual integration network connects four
mental spaces: two inputs, a generic space that contains all the
structures that the inputs seem to share, and a blended space. he
conventional illustration of this prototypical network, sometimes
called the Basic Diagram (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 467),
shows four circles marking the points of a diamond, with the
circle representing the generic space at the top and the blended
space at the bottom. However, this four-space model is only the
minimal version of the integration network; in conceptual blend-
ing theory, networks can contain any number of input spaces.
Blended spaces can also serve as inputs to new blends, making
elaborate megablends (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 1513).
What makes a blended space special is that it contains newly
emergent structure that does not come directly from any of the
inputs. For example, understanding his surgeon is a butcher
involves selective projection from inputs of butchery and sur-
gery, but the inference that the surgeon is incompetent arises
only in the blended space.
here is some potential for confusion regarding the terminol-
ogy used to distinguish blended spaces from other theoretical
Blindness and Language
constructs in the conceptual blending framework. Some research-
ers use blended space and blend interchangeably to refer to the
particular kind of mental space described here (e.g., Fauconnier
and Turner 1994). Elsewhere blend is used to describe the entire
integration network, as in double-scope blend (e.g., Nez 2005),
or the process of generating such a network, as in running the
blend (e.g., Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 48). Where the use may
be ambiguous, blended space provides maximal clarity.
Vera Tobin
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 1994. Conceptual projection and
middle spaces. UCSD Department of Cognitive Science Technical
Report 9401.
. 1998. Principles of conceptual integration. In Discourse
and Cognition, ed. Jean-Pierre Koenig, 26983. Stanford, CA: CSLI
Publications.
. 2002. he Way We hink: Conceptual Blending and the Minds
Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.
Grady, Joseph, Todd Oakley, and Seana Coulson. 1999. Conceptual
blending and metaphor. In Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics, ed.
Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., and Gerard J. Steen, 10124. Amsterdam and
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Nez, Rafael E. 2005. Creating mathematical ininities: Metaphor,
blending, and the beauty of transinite cardinals. Journal of Pragmatics
37: 171741.
BLINDNESS AND LANGUAGE
Reading by Touch
Blind people achieve literacy by reading braille, a tactile coding
system for reading and writing. Coding is based on raised dots
arranged in rectangular cells that consist of paired columns of
three dots each. Patterns of one or more dots represent letters,
numbers, punctuation marks, or partial and whole word con-
tractions (Figure 1). Initially, braille was coded for the Latin
alphabets of French or English. For languages with non-Latin
alphabets, braille patterns are assigned according to a translit-
eration of the Latin alphabet. For example, the third Greek letter
gamma has the dot pattern for the third Latin letter c. Chinese
and other Asian languages use phonetic adaptations of braille.
Chinese braille codes syllables into one, two, or three pat-
terns for, respectively, an initial consonant sound, a inal vowel
sound, and a word tone. here are no braille patterns for indi-
vidual Chinese ideograms. Japanese orthography is more com-
plex, as it includes a combination of Kanji (ideograms imported
from China), Kana (phonograms), Western alphabet, and Arabic
numerals. Kanji is converted to Kana irst before translation to
braille. While alphabet represents a single sound, Kana repre-
sents a syllable (a consonant and a vowel).
Standard braille in English and many European languages is
usually read in a contracted form (Grade II) in which selected
single patterns signify commonly used words, part-words, or syl-
lables. Hence, many words require only one, two, or three braille
cells and spaces, which reduce reading efort and space for text.
he same braille pattern can represent a letter or a contraction,
depending on context, thus expanding 63 to 256 interpretable
dot patterns in Grade II English braille. Although all alphabet-
131
Blindness and Language
based languages use the same braille patterns, associated con-
tractions vary. hus, multilingual reading requires the learning
of language-unique contractions.
During reading, scanning movement across text evokes
intermittent mechanical stimulation from contacting succes-
sive braille cells, which activates most low-threshold cutaneous
mechanoreceptors found in the ingertip (Johnson and Lamb
1981). A spatial-temporal transformation of the evoked periph-
eral activity indicates an isomorphic reproduction of braille
cell shapes across a population of mechanoreceptors (Phillips,
Johansson, and Johnson 1990). hrough connecting sensory
pathways, these physiological representations of braille cell
shape are conveyed to primary somatosensory cortex (Phillips,
Johnson, and Hsaio 1988) in the parietal lobe. Despite the
expected isomorphic representation of braille cell shapes in
somatosensory cortex, we do not know whether tactile reading in
fact relies on holistically discriminating shape.
Braille cell patterns also difer in the density of dot-gaps,
which is perceived as variations in texture (Millar 1985). hese
texture changes produce a dynamically shifting lateral mechani-
cal shearing across the ingertip as it moves over braille text in
luent reading. Good braille readers attend to these temporally
extended stimulation patterns, as opposed to global-holistic
spatial shapes (Millar 1997, 337). In addition, top-down linguis-
tic content drives perceptual processing in skillful readers, for
whom the physical attributes of the text are subservient to lexical
content. In other words, they do not puzzle out words, letter by
letter; instead, they recognize them due in part to their physical
properties but also to semantic context, the familiarity of words
stored in their mental lexicon, and so on. Less accomplished
readers trace shape by making more disjointed trapezoidal in-
ger movements over individual cells, a strategy that luent read-
ers utilize when asked to identify particular letters, which is a
shape-based task (Millar 1997, 337).
132
Figure 1. American standard braille cell patterns for
alphabet, punctuation marks, some contractions, and
whole words.
Braillists generally prefer bimanual reading (Davidson,
Appelle, and Haber 1992), with each hand conveying diferent
information. While one hand reads, the second marks spatial
position in the text (e.g., lines, locations within lines, spaces
between braille cells or words). Photographic records reveal skin
compression of only one ingertip even during tandem move-
ments across text; there is no coincident reading of diferent
braille cells by multiple ingers (Millar 1997, 337). Text and spa-
tial layout are tracked simultaneously in bimanual reading; there
is no best hand (Millar 1984). Some individuals read an initial
line segment with the left and a inal segment with the right hand
(Bertelson, Mousty, and DAlimonte 1985). Despite bimanual
reading, the left hemisphere is generally dominant for lan-
guage even in left-handed braillists (Burton et al. 2002a).
Visual Cortex Contribution to Language
Blindness requires numerous adjustments, especially for language.
hese adjustments appear to involve substantial reorganization of
the visual cortex (occipital lobe), which in sighted people is
dominated by visual stimulation. In blind people, the visual cor-
tex responds more readily to nonvisual stimulation and especially
contributes to language processing. A clinical case study of a con-
genitally blind, highly luent braille reader is particularly salient.
Following a bilateral posterior occipital ischemic stroke, she lost
the ability to read braille (Hamilton et al. 2000). However, auditory
and spoken language were unimpaired, and she retained normal
tactile sensations on her braille reading hand despite a destroyed
visual cortex. A similar but transient disruption in tactile reading
occurs in congenitally blind people following repetitive transcra-
nial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to occipital cortex (Hamilton
and Pascual-Leone 1998; Pascual-Leone et al. 2005).
he obvious explanation for these observations is that the
visual cortex reorganizes after blindness. But things are more
complex. First, occipital cortex normally processes some tactile
Blindness and Language
information in sighted people, especially following short peri-
ods of visual deprivation. hus, blindfolding sighted people for
ive days, during which they train to discriminate braille letters,
leads to visual cortex activity to tactile stimulation and sensitiv-
ity to disrupting braille letter discrimination by occipital rTMS
(Pascual-Leone and Hamilton 2001). Even without visual depri-
vation, occipital rTMS impairs macrogeometric judgments of
raised-dot spacing in sighted people (Merabet et al. 2004). hese
indings indicate that visual cortex normally contributes to some
tactile discrimination.
Brain-imaging studies have dramatically revealed the role of
visual cortex in language for blind people. For example, gener-
ating a verb to an ofered noun activates visual cortex in blind
people (see Color Plate 2), irrespective of whether the noun is
read through braille (Burton et al. 2002a) or heard (Burton et al.
2002b). In early blind individuals, verb generation engages both
lower-tier (e.g., V1, V2, VP) and higher-tier (e.g., V7, V8, MT)
visual areas (Color Plate 2). Similar adaptations occur in late
blind individuals, though fewer areas are afected. he semantic
task of discovering a common meaning for a list of heard words
also evokes extensive visual cortex activation in the early blind
and a smaller distribution in the late blind (Color Plate 2). Similar
distributions of visual cortex activity occur when the early blind
listen to sentences with increased semantic and syntactic com-
plexity (Rder et al. 2002) and during a semantic retrieval task
(Noppeney, Friston, and Price 2003). A phonological task of
identifying a common rhyme for heard words activates nearly all
visual areas bilaterally in early blind but few in late blind people
(Color Plate 2). he sublexical task of identifying block capital
letters translated passively across a ingertip activates only parts
of visual cortex in early and late blind people (Color Plate 2).
In general, semantic language tasks activate a greater extent
of visual cortex than lower-level language and most perceptual
tactile or auditory processing tasks. he functional relevance of
occipital cortex to semantic processing is demonstrated when
rTMS over left visual cortex transiently increases errors in verb
generation to heard nouns in the early blind without interrupting
the articulation of words (Amedi et al. 2004). Of course, perform-
ing any semantic task depends on retrieving word associations.
hus, two studies report a stronger relationship between reten-
tion performance and visual cortex activity, predominantly in
V1, than with verb generation. V1 response magnitudes corre-
late more positively with verbal retention (Amedi et al. 2003) and
the accuracy of long-term episodic memory (Raz, Amedi, and
Zohary 2005) in congenitally/early blind participants.
As in sighted people, blind individuals still utilize traditional
left-lateralized frontal, temporal and parietal language areas
(Burton et al. 2002a, 2002b; Burton, Diamond, and McDermott
2003; Noppeney, Friston, and Price 2003; Rder et al. 2002).
hus, the visual cortex activity represents an addition to the cor-
tical language-processing areas. Visual cortex activity distributes
bilaterally in all blind people for semantic tasks. However, left
visual cortex is more active in early blind individuals (Color Plate
2). In contrast, right hemisphere responses predominate in
late blind participants when they read braille with the right hand
but are more symmetrically bilateral when verbs are generated
to heard nouns (Color Plate 2). It is currently unknown whether
reorganized visual cortex contains speciic language domains.
Neuroplasticity has been observed in visual cortex of blind
individuals at all ages of blindness onset. Such observations
garner surprise only when primary sensory areas are viewed as
unimodal processors that funnel computations into a cascade of
cortical areas, including multisensory regions. Activation of reor-
ganized visual cortex by nonvisual stimulation most parsimoni-
ously relects innate intracortical connections between cortical
areas that normally exhibit nonvisual and multisensory respon-
siveness in sighted people. he demanding conditions of blind-
ness possibly alter and expand the activity in these connections
and thereby reallocate visual cortex to language processing.
Harold Burton
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Amedi, A., N. Raz, P. Pianka, R. Malach, and E. Zohary. 2003. Early
visual cortex activation correlates with superior verbal memory per-
formance in the blind. Nature Neuroscience 6: 75866.
Amedi, A., A. Floel, S. Knecht, E. Zohary, and L. G. Cohen. 2004.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation of the occipital pole interferes with
verbal processing in blind subjects. Nature Neuroscience 7: 126670.
Bertelson, P., P. Mousty, and G. DAlimonte. 1985. A study of braille
reading: 2. Patterns of hand activity in one-handed and two-handed
reading. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A: Human
Experimental Psychology 37: 23556.
Burton, H., J. B. Diamond, and K. B. McDermott. 2003. Dissociating cor-
tical regions activated by semantic and phonological tasks to heard
words: A fMRI study in blind and sighted individuals. Journal of
Neurophysiology 90: 196582.
Burton, H., D. G. McLaren, and R. J. Sinclair. 2006. Reading embossed
capital letters: A fMRI study in blind and sighted individuals. Human
Brain Mapping 27: 32539.
Burton, H., A. Z. Snyder, T. E. Conturo, E. Akbudak, J. M. Ollinger, and
M. E. Raichle. 2002a. Adaptive changes in early and late blind: A fMRI
study of braille reading. Journal of Neurophysiology 87: 589611.
Burton, H., A. Z. Snyder, J. Diamond, and M. E. Raichle. 2002b. Adaptive
changes in early and late blind: A fMRI study of verb generation to
heard nouns. Journal of Neurophysiology 88: 335971.
Davidson, P. W., S. Appelle, and R. N. Haber. 1992. Haptic scanning of
braille cells by low- and high-proiciency blind readers. Research in
Developmental Disabilities 13: 99111.
Hamilton, R., J. P. Keenan, M. Catala, and A. Pascual-Leone. 2000. Alexia
for braille following bilateral occipital stroke in an early blind woman.
Neuroreport 11: 23740.
Hamilton, R., and A. Pascual-Leone. 1998. Cortical plasticity associated
with braille learning. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2: 16874.
Johnson, K. O., and G. D. Lamb. 1981. Neural mechanisms of spatial tac-
tile discrimination: Neural patterns evoked by braille-like dot patterns
in the monkey. Journal of Physiology (London) 310: 11744.
Merabet, L., G. hut, B. Murray, J. Andrews, S. Hsiao, and A. Pascual-
Leone. 2004. Feeling by sight or seeing by touch? Neuron 42: 1739.
Millar, S. 1984. Is there a best hand for braille? Cortex 20: 7587.
. 1985. he perception of complex patterns by touch. Perception
14: 293303.
. 1997. Reading by Touch. London: Routledge.
Noppeney, U., K. J. Friston, and C. J. Price. 2003. Efects of visual depriva-
tion on the organization of the semantic system. Brain 126: 16207.
Pascual-Leone, A., A. Amedi, F. Fregni, and L. B. Merabet. 2005.
he plastic human brain cortex. Annual Review of Neuroscience
28: 377401.
Pascual-Leone, A., and R. Hamilton. 2001. he metamodal organization
of the brain. Progress in Brain Research 134: 42745.
133
Bounding
Phillips, J., R. Johansson, and K. Johnson. 1990. Representation of
braille characters in human nerve ibers. Experimental Brain Research
81: 58992.
Phillips, J. R., K. O. Johnson, and S. S. Hsiao. 1988. Spatial pattern rep-
resentation and transformation in monkey somatosensory cortex.
Proceedings of the National Academcy of Sciences (USA) 85: 131721.
Raz, N., A. Amedi, and E. Zohary, E. 2005. V1 activation in congenitally
blind humans is associated with episodic retrieval. Cerebral Cortex
15: 145968.
Rder, B., O. Stock, S. Bien, H. Neville, and F. Rosler. 2002. Speech pro-
cessing activates visual cortex in congenitally blind humans. European
Journal of Neuroscience 16: 9306.
Van Essen, D. C. 2004. Organization of visual areas in macaque and
human cerebral cortex. In he Visual Neurosciences, ed. L. Chalupa
and J. S. Werner, 50721. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
BOUNDING
For all its modernity and insights into the fundamental workings
of language,Noam Chomskys early writings (1955, 1957) con-
tain a curious gap: hey do not contain any explicit discussion of
locality. One does not even ind extensive discussion of the fact
that movement appears to be potentially unbounded. his gap is
all the more curious from our current perspective where locality
and long-distance dependencies are arguably the major area of
study in theoretical syntax.
We owe our modern interest in locality to John R. Rosss
([1967] 1986) seminal work in which the concept of island was
introduced. Rosss thesis is full of examples of long-distance
dependencies like (1a and b).
(1) a. Handsome though Dick is, Im still going to marry
Herman.
b. Handsome though everyone expects me to try to force Bill
to make Mom agree that Dick is, Im still going to marry
Herman.
Ross systematically investigated the fact that seemingly minute
manipulations dramatically afected the acceptability of sen-
tences. Witness (2a and b).
(2) a. Handsome though I believe that Dick is, Im still going to
marry Herman.
b. *Handsome though I believe the claim that Dick is, Im still
going to marry Herman.
Rosss thesis contains a list of contexts, technically known as
islands, which disallow certain types of dependencies.
Chomsky (1973) set out to investigate what the various
domains identiied by Ross as islands have in common. hus
began the modern study of locality and, in many ways, the nature
of current linguistic theorizing.
Chomskys central insight in 1973 is that movement is subject
to the subjacency condition, a condition that forbids move-
ment from being too long. Speciically, his notion of subjacency
prevented movement from crossing two bounding nodes. For
Chomsky, the bounding nodes were the top clausal node (S for
sentence; our modern inlectional phrase [IP]) and NP (noun
phrase; our modern DP [determiner phrase]). he condition cor-
rectly captured the unacceptability of (2b), but wrongly predicted
(2a) to be out (see [3] and [4]).
134
(3) *[Handsomei though [S I believe [NP the claim that [S Dick is ti]]],
Im still going to marry Herman.
(4) [Handsomei though [S I believe that [S Dick is ti]], Im still going
to marry Herman.
To correct this undesirable efect of subjacency, Chomsky
hypothesized that long-distance movement proceeds in short
steps, passing through successive cycles. In particular, he postu-
lated that movement can stop by at the edge of the clause (Sor
COMP; the modern complementizer phrase [CP] area). In other
words, instead of moving long distance in one fell swoop, move-
ment irst targets the closest clausal edge and from there pro-
ceeds from clausal edge to clausal edge, typically crossing only
one S(/IP)-node at a time:
(5) [Handsomei though [S I believe [S ti that [S Dick is ti]]], Im still
going to marry Herman.
Successive cyclicity may at irst seem like a patch, an exemption
granted to ix a bad problem (without it, the theory would wrongly
rule out acceptable constructions). But subsequent research has
uncovered a wealth of data, reviewed in Boeckx (2007), that con-
verge and lend credence to the successive cyclic movement
hypothesis, making it one of the great success stories of modern
generative grammar. It appears to be the case that long-dis-
tance, unbounded dependencies are the result of the conjunc-
tion of small, strictly bounded steps.
Currently, our most principled explanation for the phenome-
non of successive cyclicity is that it is the result of some economy
condition that requires movement steps to be kept as short as
possible (see Chomsky and Lasnik 1993; Takahashi 1994; Boeckx
2003; Bokovi 2002).
As eljko Bokovi (1994) originally observed, some addi-
tional condition is needed to prevent this economy condition
requiring movement steps to be kept as short as possible from
forcing an element that has taken its irst movement step to be
stuck in creating ininitesimally short steps. Put diferently, some
condition is needed to prevent chain links from being too short.
he idea that movement that is too short or superluous
ought to be banned has been appealed to in a variety of works
in recent years, under the rubric of anti-locality (see Grohmann
2003 for the most systematic investigation of anti-locality; see
also Boeckx 2007 and references therein.)
he anti-locality hypothesis is very desirable conceptually. It
places a lower bound on movement, as Chomskys subjacency
condition places an upper bound on movement. Since it blocks
vacuous movement, it is also an economy condition (dont do
anything that is not necessary), on a par with the underlying
force behind subjacency.
We thus arrive at a beautifully symmetric situation, of the kind
promoted by the recently formulated minimalist program for
linguistic theory (Chomsky 1995 and Boeckx 2006, among oth-
ers): Long-distance dependencies, which are pervasive in natural
languages, are not taken in one fell swoop. he patterns observed
in the data result from the conjunction of two economy condi-
tions: movement must be kept as short as possible, but not too
short.
Cedric Boeckx
Brain and Language
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Boeckx, Cedric. 2003. Islands and Chains. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
. 2006. Linguistic Minimalism: Origins, Methods, Concepts, and
Aims. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
. 2007. Understanding Minimalist Syntax: Lessons from Locality in
Long-Distance Dependencies. Oxford: Blackwell.
Bokovi, eljko. 1994. D-structure, -criterion, and movement into
-positions. Linguistic Analysis 24: 24786.
. 2002. A-movement and the EPP. Syntax 5: 167218.
Chomsky, Noam. 1955. he logical structure of linguistic theory.
Manuscript, Harvard/MIT. Published in part in 1975 by Plenum, New
York.
. 1957. Syntactic Structures. he Hague: Mouton.
. 1973. Conditions on transformations. In A Festschrift for Morris
Halle, ed. S. Anderson and P. Kiparsky, 23286. New York: Holt,
Rinehart, and Winston.
. 1995. he Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam, and Howard Lasnik. 1993. Principles and param-
eters theory. In Syntax: An International Handbook of Contemporary
Research, ed. J. Jacobs, A. von Stechow, W. Sternefeld, and T.
Vennemann, 50669. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Grohmann, Kleanthes K. 2003. Proliic Domains. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Ross, John R. [1967] 1986. Constraints on variables in syntax. Ph.D.
diss., MIT. Published as Ininite Syntax! Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Takahashi, Daiko. 1994. Minimality of movement. Ph.D. diss.,
University of Connecticut.
BRAIN AND LANGUAGE
he brains of humans have developed to control our articulators
and our sensory systems in ways that permit human language.
Our knowledge of how the brain subserves language was cur-
sory in the early millennia of recorded history; in the late 1800s,
developments in neurology in Europe gave us the tools to form
a more precise understanding of how brains support language.
Subsequent advances in neurolinguistic knowledge arose when
clinician-scientists abstracted patterns and other researchers
developed technical tools (of neuropathology, linguistics, psy-
chology, psycholinguistics, and brain localization via imaging)
that permitted both groups to understand the complexity of
brain-behavior relationships at ever-iner-grained levels.
Clinical Observation: The Behavioral Sequelae of Brain
Damage and the Brain Structures Underlying Them
As neurology developed in France, psychiatric patients were dis-
tinguished during their lives from aphasics (those with language
problems but not emotional ones), and post mortem dissection
and advances in staining techniques permitted localization of
the brain areas that could be linked to the language behaviors
recorded prior to the patients death. he developing under-
standing of French neurologist Paul Broca that not only the
frontal lobe (1861) but also the dominant, left, hemisphere
(1865) was linked to articulated language was extended by
German neurologist Carl Wernicke (1874). Wernicke suggested
an additional region, farther back in the brain, that was respon-
sible not for articulated speech but, rather, for comprehension of
it. In his paper, moreover, Wernicke proposed a model of centers
for language that predicted another type of aphasia that could
be, and was, found: conduction aphasia. In conduction apha-
sia, it was not centers but connections between them that were
impaired: Neither brocas area of the brain nor wernickes
area was itself damaged, but the link between them was; the pro-
duction of speech and comprehension of it were not impaired,
but, rather, repetition of auditory input became problematic.
he model postulated by Wernicke in his paper showed cen-
ters for speech, comprehension, and ideas overlaid on the image
of a right [sic] hemisphere, and his colleague Ludwig Lichtheim
abstracted this localizationist model away from a picture of under-
lying brain, expanding it to include reference to centers for reading
and writing. In England, John Hughlings Jackson took exception to
this localizationist/connectionist approach, taking the holist posi-
tion. He pointed out that even in patients with extensive damage to
the dominant hemisphere, some language remained (e.g., a sub-
set of emotional words, often curse words, as had been the case
with Brocas irst patient), suggesting, by way of the subtractionist
logic these researchers employed, that the nondominant hemi-
sphere also participated in language in the healthy individual.
In France, the debate between those who believed in multiple
types of aphasia, each associated with brain damage in a difer-
ent area, and those who believed in a unitary aphasia associated
with a single location continued in a series of debates (analyzed in
English by Lecours et al. 1992). Neuropathologist Auguste Djrine
and her neurologist husband Jules led proponents for the multi-
ple-connected-centers position, whereas Pierre Marie argued for
a unitarist one. He asserted that what we now call Maries quad-
rilateral, a region near the insula that has only recently been seri-
ously implicated in language again, was the seat of all language.
In addition to discussions of localization, bilingualism
earned a place in explanations of neuropsychological phenom-
ena among students of the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot in
the later nineteenth century, as Sigmund Freud, in his 1891 book
On Aphasia, and Albert Pitres, in his 1895 article on bilingual
aphasia, respectively championed the irst-learned versus the
best-known language in predicting patterns of diferential recov-
ery from aphasia.
Into the early twentieth century, European neurologists con-
tinued developing their careful clinical examination of patients,
which they then followed with an examination of their brains,
via advanced staining techniques, post mortem. In 1906, the
German neurologist Alois Alzheimer isolated a type of disease
among those theretofore housed in psychiatric institutions
when he discovered distinctive cellular changes in speciic
levels of cortex associated with what we now call Alzheimers
dementia. His extended descriptions of the communication
problems of his patients are models of the careful observation
of the semantic and conversational breakdown associated with
this disease.
Rehabilitation
he next major step forward in neurolinguistics lay in developing
rehabilitation techniques for those with language impairment.
One important group had been identiied by the ophthalmolo-
gist James Hinshelwood (1902), who described the case of a child
who had particular diiculty learning to read despite normal
135
Brain and Language
intelligence and vision. he American neurologist Samuel Orton,
who examined an increasing number of such children through
referrals, published his 1937 book Reading, Writing and Speech
Problems in Children and Selected Papers [sic], classifying their
problems. He worked with Anna Gillingham to develop a mul-
tisensory, systematic, structured system for training which, like
others that have been derived from it, enables children whose
brains do not naturally pick up reading today termed dyslex-
ics or developmental dyslexics (see dyslexia) to learn to do so.
he recognition that dyslexics might have normal (or better than
normal) intelligence but have substantial diiculty learning to
read conirmed a second point that Wernicke had included in his
1874 article, that language and intelligence were dissociable. It
may also be seen as the earliest vision of individual diferences in
brain organization that went beyond the donation of their brains
by the Paris Anthropology Society to determine whose was bigger
and phrenologys assertion that difering sizes of cortical regions,
as evidenced by diferences in skull coniguration, explained per-
sonality diferences.
his focus on rehabilitation resulted in the initiation of the
ield of speech therapy, today speech-language pathology in North
America and logopedics elsewhere. he seminal work of Hildred
Schuell, James Jenkins, and E. Jimenez-Pabon (1964) classiied
the language disorders resulting from injury to the brain in adult-
hood according to the primary impairment of either comprehen-
sion or production. A more holist approach developed alongside
this one, that of Bruce Porch, whose system of classiication
showed a set of language abilities clustering together.
Lateral Dominance
In the 1950s and 1960s, American psychology was also developing
more rigorous methods of studying behavior, and brain, though
not necessarily linking them yet. Brocas late-nineteenth-century
observation that aphasia tended to arise primarily from damage
to the left hemisphere of the brain, rather than the right, took on
a new life as the techniques of dichotic listening and tachisto-
scopic presentation evolved to study lateral dominance in non-
brain-damaged individuals. In dichotic listening, series of three
or so pairs of words are presented simultaneously, one to each
ear, and participants are asked to recall as many words as they
can. Because the primary connections between ear and brain are
136
to the brain hemisphere opposite a given ear (the contralateral
one), participants are better able to recall more words from the
ear contralateral to their language-dominant hemisphere, that
is, the right ear for language stimuli.
Tachistoscopic presentation permitted a visual analogue to
dichotic listening: When visual information is lashed so that it is
visible only to a single visual ield, that information is processed irst
by the brain hemisphere contralateral to the visual ield. he eyes
cannot turn quickly enough to see the stimulus in the central visual
ield, which projects to both hemispheres. hus written language,
but not non-language visual information such as pictures, is pro-
cessed faster and better by the language-dominant hemisphere.
From such laterality studies we came to understand the dom-
inant importance of the left hemisphere for processing auditory
and written language for most humans, and the link between this
lateralized brain dominance and handedness. For a period, such
techniques were used as well to determine if bilinguals brains
employed relatively more right hemisphere in language pro-
cessing than monolinguals did, following up the suggestions of
a number of researchers that bilingualism might be more bilat-
erally organized, or that early less-proicient language abilities
might rely relatively more on right hemisphere contributions.
hey hypothesized this possibility because they thought they
saw a disproportionately large number of instances of crossed
aphasia, that is, aphasia resulting from right hemisphere dam-
age rather than the more usual left hemisphere damage. Today
it appears, instead, that crossed aphasia is no more frequent
among bilinguals than among monolinguals.
During this same midcentury period, behavioral neurologist
Norman Geschwind and neuropathologist Marjorie LeMay under-
took post mortem studies of sizable numbers of brains, demonstrat-
ing that the apparent symmetry of the hemispheres is misleading.
Rather, they demonstrated precisely that the cortical region around
the Sylvian issure (the perisylvian region; see Figure 1) that was
understood to be crucial for language difered markedly, with a
steeper rise of the Sylvian issure in most right hemispheres cor-
responding to more temporal lobe cortex available for language on
the left. (In a small percentage of brains, presumably those from
left-handers for the most part, the two hemispheres were indeed
identical in this regard; in another small set the cortical asymme-
tries were reversed.)
Figure 1. Brain and language (cortical structures).
Brain and Language
Lenticular nucleus
(putamen and globus pallidus)
BASAL GANGLIA
OF FORK-BRAIN
The Return of Localization
Geschwind brought a localizationist approach back to aphasiology
in his work at the Boston Veterans Administration Hospital during
the mid-1960s. He anonymously translated Wernickes 1874 article
into English, and himself published a seminal work (1965) on dis-
connection syndromes, reminding readers of the particular pair of
brain-damaged sites required for alexia without agraphia, that is, a
diiculty in reading but not in rewriting resulting from brain dam-
age in adults who had previously been literate. With his colleagues
at the Aphasia Research Center of the Boston VA Hospital, Edith
Kaplan and Harold Goodglass, he developed this approach into
the aphasia classiication schema behind the Boston Diagnostic
Aphasia Exam (Goodglass and Kaplan, 1972), which includes cat-
egories for Wernickes and Brocas aphasias, as well as conduction
aphasia, anomia, and the transcortical aphasias. (his test and
classiication system is quite similar to that of their student Andrew
Kertesz, the Western Aphasia Battery). In the 1970s, aphasia grand
rounds at the Boston VA Hospital were structured as a localization-
ist quiz: Neurologists, neuropsychologists, and speech-language
pathologists who had tested a patient would irst present their ind-
ings; then Geschwind or Goodglass would test the patient in the
front of the room. After the patient had left, those gathered would
guess what the angiography and, later, CT scan results would dem-
onstrate; then Naeser would report the lesion location.
Perhaps precisely because CT scans permitted inspection of
brain damage beneath the cortex, an understanding of the sub-
cortical aphasias was developed from the linking of patients who
were neither luent (as Wernickes aphasics are) nor nonluent
(as Brocas aphasics are in that the speech they produce con-
sists largely of substantives, with functor grammatical words and
aixes omitted or substituted for). Early work distinguished the
cortical aphasias from the subcortical ones (e.g., Alexander and
Naeser 1988), while more recent work has distinguished apha-
sias in ever more discrete subcortical regions (e.g., thalamus
and globus pallidus; see basal ganglia and Figure 2).
With further advances in neuroimaging technology such as
magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study brain regions and,
more recently, difusion tensor imaging (DTI) to study pathways,
Figure 2. Schematic representation of the chief gangli-
onic categories. Adapted from Gray, Henry. Anatomy
of the Human Body. Edited by Warren H. Lewis.
Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger, 1918.
more precision has become available to distinguish areas of the
brain that are damaged when language is impaired. In addition,
as functional tools are developed (e.g., functional MRI, also called
fMRI), it is no longer necessary to rely on the traditional neuro-
linguistic premise (if area X is damaged and language problem Y
results, then X must be where Y is localized, or, at least, X is crucial
for normal performance of Y). It is interesting to note that these
advances in technology point to a number of regions outside the
traditional perisylvian language area of cortex that appear linked
to language areas such as prefrontal cortex, the supplementary
motor area, and the like. J. Sidtis (2007) points out the logical prob-
lem that arises as one would want to reconcile the aphasia data,
which suggest a relatively delimited area of the dominant hemi-
sphere that serves language, with the imaging data that indicate
areas beyond the perisylvian region in the dominant hemisphere,
as well as many subcortical and non-dominant-hemisphere
regions (usually, counterparts to those of the dominant hemi-
sphere) that appear to be involved in language processing.
Linguistic Phenomena Driving Neurolinguistic Study
Alongside developments in tools for measuring brain regions
involved in language during the last quarter of the twentieth
century and the beginning of the twenty-irst, developments in
linguistics both within and beyond Chomskys (itself protean)
school have permitted reinements of the questions asked in
neurolinguistics and, thus, the answers received.
Sheila Blumstein opened up the study of phonology within
aphasiology, researching, irst, the regression hypothesis of her
mentor Roman Jakobson and demonstrating, consistent with
the literature on speech errors in non-brain-damaged indi-
viduals, that errors tended to difer from their targets by fewer,
rather than more, distinctive features. She and her students have
studied suprasegmental phonology as well as segmental pho-
nology, demonstrating diferences in intonation patterns used
exclusively for languages from those that are not. Indeed, other
speech scientists have turned to tone languages, such as hai
and Chinese, to demonstrate the parallels there: Brain areas
of the dominant hemisphere process those features that ones
137
Brain and Language
language treats as linguistic, even if ones language is a signed
one (sign language), where phonemic elements are not,
strictly speaking, phonemic.
Phonology of lexical items is treated, in some classiicatory
schemata, as a part of semantics. Lexical-word-shape, how-
ever, can be divorced from word-meanings, as patients with the
syndrome of word-deafness the ability to recognize that they
know a lexical item without knowing what it means demon-
strate. Studies of aphasic errors have demonstrated the psycho-
logical reality of such concepts as phoneme, syllable, word
stress, and the like. Moreover, priming studies show that lexical
items are organizationally linked to others in their phonological
(or spelling or both) neighborhoods.
morphology has been studied via aphasiology with par-
ticular reference to agrammatism, that syndrome associated with
Brocas aphasia in which the language that patients produce is
telegraphic, consisting largely of substantive nouns and, to a lesser
extent, verbs, and relatively devoid of functor grammatical ele-
ments, including inlectional and derivational aixes. A number
of theories have been developed to account for this interesting
phenomenon, and it is clear that the salience of the omissible ele-
ments plays a role, as their production can be induced in a number
of ways, suggesting that they are not lost but, rather, costly to pro-
duce in Brocas aphasia. Evidence for salience varying across dif-
ferent languages can be found in the reports on agrammatism in
14 languages in Menn and Obler (1990) and in the work of E. Bates
and her colleagues (see Bates and Wulfeck 1989). Compounding,
too, has recently gained attention in neurolinguistics, and can be
seen to pose problems for agrammatic patients.
Agrammatic patients are particularly pertinent in studying
syntax as well, since not only does their production suggest
that they minimize syntactic load, but their comprehension is
arguably impaired syntactically as well. Whether this is because
traces are nonexistent in such individuals or because of more
general processing deicits associated with brain damage, per-
haps half of the patients with agrammatism have diiculty in
processing passive sentences, suggesting that the brain areas
impaired in Brocas aphasia are required for full syntactic func-
tion. In non-brain-damaged individuals, fMRI studies suggest
that substantial regions beyond the traditional perisylvian lan-
guage areas regions such as prefrontal cortex, linked to general
control functions of brain activity subserve comprehension
(e.g., Caplan et al. 2007).
Semantics is better studied in patients with dementing dis-
eases such as Alzheimers disease, in whom it breaks down,
than in patients with aphasia, in whom it appears better
spared, at least for nonluent (Brocas) and anomic aphasics.
Nevertheless, there have been indications that patients with
severe, global aphasia have diiculty with aspects of semantic
processing.
Psycholinguistic studies of lexical priming are also useful in
studying semantics in non-brain-damaged individuals. When
they have to judge if nurse is a word or not in English, they are
faster if they have seen doctor previously than the word horse,
suggesting semantic networks in our lexica. Event-related poten-
tial (ERP) measures, moreover, demonstrate that we process
top-down for semantic consistency. When we are presented with
a sentence that includes a word that is semantically anomalous,
138
a characteristic electrical response around 400 msec after that
word indexes our surprise.
Study of pragmatics in brain-damaged individuals rarely
focuses on aphasics, as their pragmatic abilities tend to be
remarkably spared. Rather, it is patients with damage to the
right hemisphere who evidence problems with pragmatic abili-
ties, such as verbal humor appreciation, inferencing, con-
versational coherence, and the like. Patients with the dementias
show an interesting combination of the sparing of some basic
pragmatic abilities (e.g., eye contact during communication, use
of formulaic language) and deicits in higher-level pragmatic
behaviors, including, among those who are bilingual, the appro-
priate choice of whether to address their interlocutors in one or
the other, or both, of their two languages.
Written language, of course, is not studied diferently from
auditory language by linguists, and rarely even by psycholin-
guists, but the literature on brain-damaged individuals ofers
numerous examples of selective impairment of one of these
modes of input and/or output. Historically, such studies focused
on alexia and agraphia, that is, disturbances of reading and/or
writing in previously literate individuals who had diiculties with
these skills as the result of adult-onset brain damage. Currently,
information about brainlanguage links for reading and writing
comes from the study of dyslexia, which, of course, is not linked
to frank brain damage but has been shown to co-occur with
unusual distribution of certain cellular types in language-related
brain areas (e.g., Galaburda and Kemper, 1979). Psycholinguistic
and brain-imaging studies of both groups of individuals have
shown diferences, as well as similarities, between the process-
ing of written and spoken language. he same can be said for
signed languages, as evident from those who are bilingual
speakers of a signed and a spoken language.
Conclusion: Language in Humans Brains
In many branches of science, pendulum swings are evident
between a focus on overarching patterns achieved by ignoring
details of individual diferences and a focus on those individ-
ual diferences. In neurolinguistics, the latter can show the full
range of human brains substrates for humans language abili-
ties. We assume that all individuals (except those with speciic
language impairment) learn their irst language in pretty much
similar fashion, though we are well aware that even in the irst
year of life, some of us start talking sooner and others later. In
adulthood, too, we acknowledge certain individual diferences
that are linked to language performance: Some of us are detail
oriented and others more big picture in cognitive style; some
of us are good second-language learners postpubertally and oth-
ers less so, some of us naturally good spellers and others not, and
some of us slow readers and others of us fast. Indeed, we can
assume that at many levels, from the cellular to brain regional,
from the electrophysiological to iber connectivity, diferences
subserve our human ability to communicate via language. From
the irst century of work primarily in Europe to the late-twenti-
eth-century addition of North American contributions, centers
worldwide now participate in moving the ield of neurolinguis-
tics forward.
Loraine K. Obler
Brain and Language
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Alexander, M. P., and M. A. Naeser. 1988. Cortical-subcortical dif-
ferences in aphasia. In Language, Communication and the Brain
Research Publications: Association for Research in Nervous and Mental
Disorders. Vol. 66. Ed F. Plum, 21528. New York: Raven Press.
Bates L. and B. Wulfeck. 1989. Comparative aphasiology: A cross-
linguistic approach to language breakdown. Aphasiology 3: 11142.
Caplan, D., G. Waters, D. Kennedy, N. Alpert, N. Makris, G. DeDe, J.
Michaud, and A. Reddy. 2007. A study of syntactic processing in apha-
sia II: Neurological aspects. Brain and Language 101: 15177.
Freud, S. [1891] 1953. Zur Aufassung der Aphasien. Trans. E. Stengel as
On Aphasia. New York: International University Press.
Galaburda, A., and T. Kemper. 1979. Cytoarchitectonic abnormalities in
developmental dyslexia: A case study. Annals of Neurology 6: 94100.
Geschwind, N. 1965. Disconnexion syndromes in animals and man.
Brain 88: 585644.
Goodglass, H., and E. Kaplan. 1972. he Assessment of Aphasia and
Related Disorders. Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger.
Goodglass, H., and Wingield, A. 1997. Anomia: Neuroanatomical and
Cognitive Correlates. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Lecours, A.R., F. Chain, M. Poncet, J.-L. Nespoulous, and Y. Joanette.
1992. Paris 1908: he hot summer of aphasiology or a season in the
life of a chair. Brain and Language 42: 10552.
Menn, L., and L. K. Obler, eds. 1990. Agrammatic Aphasia: A Cross-
Language Narrative Sourcebook. Vol. 3. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Obler, L.K., and K. Gjerlow. 1999. Language and the Brain.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Orton, S. [1937] 1989. Reading, Writing and Speech Problems in Children
and Selected Papers. Repr. Austin, TX: International Dyslexia
Association.
Pitres, A. 1895. Etude sur laphasie des polyglottes. Rev. Md. and language center, its precise role is still debated. Broca origi-
15: 87399.
Schuell, H., J. Jenkins, and E. Jimenez-Pabon. 1964. Aphasia in Adults,
New York: Harper & Row.
Sidtis, J. 2007. Some problems for representations of brain organiza-
tion based on activation in functional imaging. Brain and Language
102: 13040.
Journals worth checking: Behavior and Brain Science, Brain, Brain
and Language, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Journal of
Neurolinguistics, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, and NeuroReport.
Brocas Area
BROCAS AREA
In 1861, Pierre Paul Broca presented indings from two patients
who had diiculty speaking but relatively good comprehension
(Broca 1861a, 1861b, 1861c). At autopsy, he determined that both
of these patients, Leborgne and Lelong, sufered from injury to
the inferolateral frontal cortex. He concluded, he integrity
of the third frontal convolution (and perhaps of the second) seems
indispensable to the exercise of the faculty of articulate language
(1861a, 406). Four years later, Broca realized that these and sub-
sequent cases all had lesions to the left inferior frontal gyrus, thus
making the association between language and the LEFT hemi-
sphere (Broca 1865). his assertion proved to be a landmark
discovery that laid the groundwork not only for the study of lan-
guage but also for modern neuropsychology.
he region of left hemisphere cortex described by Broca sub-
sequently came to be known as Brocas area and the speech dis-
order, Brocas aphasia. Today, Brocas area is generally deined
as Brodmanns cytoarchitectonic areas (BA) 44 and 45, corre-
sponding to the pars opercularis and pars triangularis, respec-
tively. hese regions make up the posterior part of the inferior
frontal gyrus (see Figure 1). Recent investigations have suggested
important diferences between BA 44 and 45, both in anatomi-
cal asymmetries and in function. However, Broca himself never
designated the region so speciically, considering the posterior
half of the inferior frontal gyrus to be most crucial for the speech
disturbance he described (Dronkers et al. 2007).
Although Brocas area is widely described as a critical speech
nally thought of this region as important for the articulation of
speech (Broca 1864). More recently, a large body of research has
discussed its potential role in processing syntax. his premise
irst arose from behavioral studies of patients with Brocas apha-
sia in the early part of the twentieth century. It was noted that
patients with Brocas aphasia produced agrammatic speech,
often omitting functor words (e.g., a, the) and morphologi-
cal markers (e.g., -s, -ed). he following is an example of such
Figure 1. Three-dimensional MRI reconstruction of the
lateral left hemisphere of a noraml brain in vivo, showing
the pars operculars (Brodmann's area 44, anterior to the
precentral sulcus) and the pars triangularis (Brodmann's
area 45, between the ascending and horizontal limbs of
the sylvian issure; see perisylvian cortex).
Reprinted with permission from Brain (2007), 130, pg.
1433, Oxford University Press.
139
Brocas Area

Figure 2. Lesion reconstruction of a patient with

Brocas aphasia who does not have a Brocas area
lesion (left) and a patient with a Brocas area lesion
without Brocas aphasia (right).

Figure 3. Photographs of the brains of Leborgne

(A) and Lelong (C), Paul Brocas irst two aphasic
patients, with close-ups of the lesion in each brain
(B and D). Reprinted from N. F. Dronkers, O. Plaisant,
M. T. Iba-Zizen, E. A. Cabanis (2007), Paul Brocas
historic cases: High resolution MR imaging of the
brains of Leborgne and Lelong, Brain, 130.5: 1436,
by permission of Oxford University Press.

telegraphic speech in a patient with Brocas aphasia, describing a overlap with those of Brocas aphasics (Caplan, Hildebrandt, and
drawing of a picnic scene by a lake: Makris 1996). In addition, individual patients with Brocas apha-
sia do not always show the same pattern of grammatical deicit
O, yeah. Dets a boy an a girl an a car house but, rather, vary in the types of errors they make (Caramazza et al.
light po (pole). Dog an a boat. N dets a mm a cofee, 2001). Cross-linguistic studies also put a damper on the agram-
an reading. Dets a mm a dets a boy ishin. matic theory of Brocas aphasia. E. Bates and colleagues have
During the 1970s, a number of studies reported that compre- shown that in other languages such as German, where grammati-
hension of complex syntactic forms was also disrupted in this cal markers are critical for conveying meaning and semantic
patient group. A seminal study by A. Caramazza and E. B. Zurif content, patients with Brocas aphasia do not omit morphemes
(1976) reported that Brocas aphasics had particular diiculty as they do in English (Bates, Wulfeck, and MacWhinney 1991).
understanding semantically reversible versus irreversible sen- Finally, recent studies have shown that grammatical errors can be
tences (e.g., he cat that the dog is biting is black vs. he apple induced in normal participants through the use of degraded stim-
that the boy is eating is red). his study concluded that Brocas uli or stressors, such as an additional working memory load
area mediated syntactic processes critical to both production (Dick et al. 2001). hese indings would argue against a grammar
and comprehension. By extension, Brocas area came to be asso- center but, rather, suggest that competition for resources could
ciated with syntactic processing. also underlie deicits observed in Brocas aphasia.
Although many subsequent studies supported this general
notion, several others pointed out the need for caution. For exam- Lesion Studies of Brocas Area
ple, M. C. Linebarger, M. Schwartz, and E. Safran (1983) showed As with the previous claims, it is often assumed that all patients
that agrammatic patients could make accurate grammatical- with Brocas aphasia have lesions in Brocas area, and thus that
ity judgments, which would seem to challenge the notion the deicits in Brocas aphasia equate to dysfunction in Brocas
of Brocas area being broadly involved in syntactic processing. area. However, many studies making claims about Brocas area
Second, many patients with luent aphasia and lesions outside of and its functions did not actually verify lesion site. In fact, lesion
Brocas area have been found to exhibit grammatical deicits that studies have shown that Brocas aphasia typically results from

140
Brocas Area
a large left hemisphere lesion that extends beyond Brocas area
to include underlying white matter, adjacent frontal cortex, and
insular cortex (Alexander, Naeser, and Palumbo 1990; Mohr et
al. 1978). Color Plate 3 shows a lesion overlay map of 36 patients
with chronic Brocas aphasia persisting more than one year. As
can be seen, the region of common overlap (shown in dark red)
is not Brocas area but rather medial regions (i.e., more central),
namely, insular cortex and key white matter tracts. Indeed, only
5060 percent of patients with lesions extending into Brocas
area have a persistent Brocas aphasia. Lesions restricted to
Brocas area tend to cause a transient mutism followed by altered
speech output, but not a chronic Brocas aphasia (Mohr et al.
1978; Penield and Roberts 1959). hese indings would suggest
that Brocas area proper might be more involved in later stages of
speech production (e.g., articulation).
Even early studies reported contradictory cases, namely,
patients with Brocas area afected but no Brocas aphasia or
patients with Brocas aphasia but no lesion in Brocas area (e.g.,
Marie 1906; Moutier 1908). Figure 2 shows an example of an
individual with Brocas aphasia whose lesion spares Brocas area
(left) and one with word-inding problems but no Brocas apha-
sia after a lesion to Brocas area (right).
Although Broca deduced that the critical region for his
patients articulation disturbance was the inferior frontal gyrus,
he realized that his patients lesions most likely extended more
medially. However, he wanted to maintain the brains for poster-
ity and chose not to dissect them (see Figure 3). Recently, N. F.
Dronkers and colleagues (2007) had the opportunity to acquire
three-dimensional MRI images of the brains of Brocas two orig-
inal patients (Leborgne and Lelong), which are kept in a Paris
museum. hey found that the lesions in both patients extended
quite medially, involving underlying white matter, including the
superior longitudinal fasciculus. Moreover, one of the patients
brains (Leborgnes) had additional damage to the insula, basal
ganglia, and internal and external capsules. With respect to
the extent of frontal involvement, Leborgnes lesion afected the
middle third of the inferior frontal gyrus to the greatest extent,
with only some atrophy in the posterior third. In Brocas second
patient, Lelong, the lesion spared the pars triangularis, afect-
ing only the posterior portion of the pars opercularis. hus, even
what is commonly referred to as Brocas area (BA 44, 45) is not
exactly the region afected in Brocas original patients.
Functional Neuroimaging of Brocas Area
More recently, functional neuroimaging techniques, such
as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron
emission tomography (PET), have opened up new avenues for
the study of brain areas involved in language and cognition.
Consistent with the behavioral studies described previously, a
number of functional neuroimaging studies with normal par-
ticipants have suggested a link between Brocas area and syn-
tactic processing (e.g., Caplan et al. 2000; Friederici, Meyer, and
von Cramon 2000). However, Brocas area has also been linked
to a number of other nonsyntactic cognitive processes in the
left hemisphere, such as verbal working memory, semantics,
frequency discrimination, imitation/mirror neurons (see mir-
ror systems, imitation, and language ), tone percep-
tion (in tonal languages), and phonological processing. It is
possible that subregions of what is now interpreted as Brocas
area (i.e., BA 44, 45) may be functionally distinct, which could
explain the heterogeneity of functions associated with this
area. An alternative explanation is that functional activations of
Brocas area may be due to task demands involving articulation
and/or subvocal rehearsal. hese ideas remain to be explored.
A number of theories have arisen to try to reconcile the early
lesion studies of agrammatism and newer functional neuroimag-
ing indings. For example, it has been suggested that Brocas area
is crucial not for syntactic processing but for aspects of on-line
storage (i.e., verbal working memory) that in turn may under-
lie the ability to process complex grammatical forms (Stowe,
Haverkort, and Zwarts 2005). C. J. Fiebach and colleagues (2005)
showed that BA 44 was active when participants processed sen-
tences with a large working-memory load, and many neuroimag-
ing studies have suggested that Brocas area is involved in verbal
working memory, in particular (e.g., Awh, Smith, and Jonides
1995). Such indings would suggest that Brocas area may be cru-
cial for the understanding of complex syntactic forms due to a
basic role in subvocal rehearsal (but see Caplan et al. 2000).
In sum, though the term Brocas area has persisted for more
than a hundred years, the precise anatomical demarcation of
this brain region, along with its exact role in speech and language
processing, are still being debated. At a minimum, Brocas area
plays a role in end-stage speech production but is unquestion-
ingly a signiicant part of a larger network that supports speech
and language functions in the left hemisphere. Further work is
needed to determine whether it plays a direct or indirect role in
a number of other cognitive processes that have been suggested
and whether these relate to neighboring regions within the infe-
rior frontal gyrus or distinct functional subregions within the ter-
ritory known as Brocas area.
Nina F. Dronkers and Juliana V. Baldo
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Alexander, M., M. Naeser, and C. Palumbo. 1990. Brocas area apha-
sias: Aphasia after lesions including the frontal operculum. Neurology
40: 35362.
Awh, E., E. Smith, and J. Jonides. 1995. Human rehearsal processes and
the frontal lobes: PET evidence. Annals of the New York Academy of
Sciences 769: 97117.
Bates, E., B. Wulfeck, and B. MacWhinney. 1991. Crosslinguistic research
in aphasia: An overview. Brain and Language 41: 12348.
Broca, P. 1861a. Nouvelle observation daphmie produite par une
lsion de la troisime circonvolution frontale. Bulletins de la Socit
danatomie (Paris), 2e serie, 6: 398407.
Broca, P. 1861b. Perte de la parole: Ramollissement chronique
et destruction partielle du lobe anterieur gauche du cerveau. Bulletins
de la Socit danthropologie, 1re serie, 2: 2358.
. 1861c. Remarques sur le sige de la facult du langage articul,
suivies dune observation daphmie (perte de la parole). Bulletins de
la Socit danatomie (Paris), 2e serie, 6: 33057.
. 1864. Sur les mots aphmie, aphasie et aphrasie; Lettre M. le
Professeur Trousseau. Gazette des hopitaux 23.
. 1865. Sur le sige de la facult du langage articul. Bulletin de la
Socit dAnthropologie 6: 33793.
Caplan, D., N. Alpert, G. Waters, and A. Olivieri. 2000. Activation of
Brocas area by syntactic processing under conditions of concurrent
articulation. Human Brain Mapping 9: 6571.
141
Cartesian Linguistics
Caplan, D., N. Hildebrandt, and N. Makris. 1996. Location of lesions in
stroke patients with deicits in syntactic processing in sentence com-
prehension. Brain 119: 93349.
Caramazza, A., E. Capitani, A. Rey, and R. S. Berndt. 2001. Agrammatic
Brocas aphasia is not associated with a single pattern of comprehen-
sion performance. Brain and Language 76: 15884.
Caramazza, A., and E. B. Zurif. 1976. Dissociation of algorithmic and
heuristic processes in language comprehension: Evidence from apha-
sia. Brain and Language 3: 57282.
Dick, F., E. Bates, B. Wulfeck, M. Gernsbacher, J. A. Utman, and
N. Dronkers. 2001. Language deicits, localization, and gram-
mar: Evidence for a distributive model of language breakdown in
aphasics and normals. Psychological Review 108: 75988.
Dronkers, N. F., O. Plaisant, M. T. Iba-Zizen, and E. A. Cabanis. 2007.
Paul Brocas historic cases: High resolution MR imaging of the brains
of Leborgne and Lelong. Brain 130.5: 143241.
Fiebach, C. J., M. Schlesewsky, G. Lohmann, D. Y. von Cramon, and A.
D. Friederici. 2005. Revisiting the role of Brocas area in sentence
processing: Syntactic integration versus syntactic working memory.
Human Brain Mapping 24: 7991.
Friederici, A. D., M. Meyer, and D. Y. von Cramon. 2000. Auditory
language comprehension: An event-related fMRI study on the pro-
cessing of syntactic and lexical information. Brain and Language
74: 289300.
Linebarger, M. C., M. Schwartz, and E. Safran. 1983. Sensitivity to
grammatical structure in so-called agrammatic aphasics. Cognition
13: 36193.
Marie, P. 1906. Revision de la question de laphasia: La troiseme circon-
volution frontale gauche ne joue aucun role special dans la function du
langage. Semaine Medicale 26: 2417.
Mohr, J., Pessin, S. Finkelstein, H. H. Funkenstein, G. W. Duncan, and
K. R. Davis. 1978. Broca aphasia: Pathologic and clinical. Neurology
28: 31124.
Moutier, F. 1908. Laphasie de Broca. Paris: Steinhell.
Penield, W., and L. Roberts. 1959. Speech and Brain Mechanisms.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Stowe, L. A., M. Haverkort, and F. Zwarts. 2005. Rethinking the neuro-
logical basis of language. Lingua 115: 9971042.
C Generally speaking, the rationalist strategy treats languages
CARTESIAN LINGUISTICS
his term began as the title of a 1966 monograph by Noam
Chomsky. It has become the name of a research strategy for the
scientiic study of language and mind that Chomsky in other
works calls rationalist or biolinguistic, which he contrasts
to an empiricist strategy (see biolinguistics). Cartesian
Linguistics illuminates these strategies by focusing on contrasting
assumptions concerning mind and language and their study that
are found in the writings of a selection of philosophers and lin-
guists from the late sixteenth century through 1966. he rational-
ists include Descartes, the Port-Royal Grammarians, Humboldt,
Cudworth, and clearly Chomsky himself in 1966 and now.
he empiricists include Harris, Herder, the modern linguists
(L. Bloomield, M. Joos, etc.), and again clearly behaviorists,
connectionists, and others attracted to the idea that children
learn languages rather than growing them.
142
Case
Rationalists adopt a nativist (see innateness and innatism)
and internalist approach to the study of language. Support for
nativism is found in poverty-of-the-stimulus observations. To take
these observations seriously, rationalists believe, someone con-
structing a theory of language is advised to assume that much of
linguistic structure and content is somehow latent in the infants
mind: Experience serves to trigger or occasion structure and
content, not form and constitute them. Descartes himself was a
rationalist and appealed to poverty facts to support his views of
innate and adventitious (but not made up) concepts/ideas.
Until taken up by his Port-Royal followers, however, there was lit-
tle attention to the innateness of the structure of language itself.
Descartess greater contribution to the strategy with his name
lies in less discussed but equally important observations con-
cerning the creative aspect of language use (see creativity in
language use). Encapsulated in Descartess Discourse V, these
note that speakers can on occasion produce any of an unbounded
set of expressions (unboundedness), without regard to external
and internal stimulus conditions (stimulus freedom), sentences
that nevertheless are appropriate and coherent with respect to
discourse context (appropriateness and coherence). Taking
these seriously suggests a scientiic research strategy that focuses
not on linguistic action/behavior (language use) itself, for that
is in the domain of free human action, but on an internal system,
the language faculty. A science of linguistic action would not
only have to take into account the speakers understanding of rea-
sons for speaking and the job that an utterance is understood to
perform but would also have to say what a person will utter on a
speciic occasion. No extant science can do that, and likely none
ever will. Given stimulus freedom, independently speciiable
conditions for utterance are unavailable, and there is no upper
bound on sentences appropriate to a speakers understanding of
discourse circumstance. he scientist of language should focus
on language as an internal system, on competence, not on what
people do by using the tools their systems ofer. Science can
say what a language can yield; a theory of competence does that.
But it likely cannot say what will be said, when it will be said, or
whether it is appropriate and, if so, why.
as natural (native) systems in the head, not artifacts. he empiri-
cist strategy (not empirical science) treats languages as artifacts
in the head, as socially constituted sets of practices or behaviors,
mastery of which (learning) requires training and negative evi-
dence. Cartesian Linguistics emphasizes that there are few, if
any, linguistic practices and that children grow languages.
James McGilvray
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Chomsky, Noam. 1966. Cartesian Linguistics. New York: Harper and
Row.
. 2003. Cartesian Linguistics. 3rd ed. Ed. and introd. J. McGilvray.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
CASE
his term has been traditionally employed to designate the type of
morphological ending that indicates the syntactic function of the
Categorial Grammar
noun phrase that bears it. In Latin, for instance, the word meaning
girl may surface as puella (nominative case), puellam (accusative
case), or puellae (genitive case), depending on whether it is the sub-
ject of the sentence, is the object of a transitive verb, or stands in a
possessor relation with respect to another noun. Languages vary with
respect to the morphological case distinctions they make. Languages
such as Latin have six case distinctions (nominative, genitive, dative,
accusative, vocative, and ablative) whereas languages such as Chinese
have none. One may also ind languages like English in which only a
subset of nominal elements display case distinctions as in he (nomi-
native), him (accusative), and his (genitive).
On the basis of a suggestion by Jean-Roger Vergnaud (Rouveret
and Vergnaud 1980), Noam Chomsky (1981) developed a theory
of abstract case (annotated as Case). According to this theory, it is
a property of all languages that noun phrases can only be licensed
in a sentence if associated with Case. Whether or not the abstract
Cases get morphologically realized as speciic markings on (some)
noun phrases is a language-speciic property. Research in the last
two decades has been devoted to identifying i) which elements
are Case-licensers, ii) which structural conigurations allow Case
licensing, and iii) what the precise nature of such licensing is. he
contrast between John/he/*him/*his sang and *John/*he/*him/*his
to sing, for example, has led to the conclusion that in English, the
past tense may license nominative Case, but the ininitival to is not
a Case-licenser. In turn, the contrast between John/he/*him/*his
was greeted and was greeted *John/*he/*him/*his indicates that
nominative is licensed by the past tense if the relevant noun phrase
occupies the subject, but not the object, position.
When a given Case only encodes syntactic information, it is
referred to as structural Case. Nominative and accusative cases
in English are prototypical examples of structural Case. In John
greeted her and she was greeted by John, for example, the pronoun
bearing the thematic role of patient has accusative Case in
the irst sentence, but nominative in the second. On the other
hand, when a given Case also encodes thematic information,
it is referred to as inherent Case (Chomsky 1986; Belletti 1988).
he preposition of in English, for example, has been analyzed
as a marker of inherent Case, for it only licenses a noun phrase
that is the complement of the preceding noun: It may license that
country in the invasion of that country but not in *the belief of that
country to be progressive because that country is the complement
of invasion but not of belief.
Jairo Nunes
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Belletti, A. 1988. he Case of unaccusatives. Linguistic Inquiry 19: 134.
Chomsky, N. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding.
Dordrecht: Foris.
. 1986. Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use.
New York: Praeger.
Rouveret, A., and J. R. Vergnaud. 1980. Specifying reference to the sub-
ject: French causatives and conditions on representations. Linguistic
Inquiry 11: 97202.
CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR
Categorial grammar (CG) is a family of formalisms that model
syntax and semantics by assigning rich lexical categories that
project word order and build logical forms via general rules of
grammar. First proposed by Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1935), it is
arguably the oldest lexicalized formalism. CG is not itself a the-
ory of natural language grammar, but its use has many linguisti-
cally relevant ramiications: lexicalization, lexible constituency,
semantic transparency, control over generative capacity, and
computational tractability.
Basic Principles of Categorial Grammar
In Ajdukiewiczs system, words are assigned categories, which
are atomic types like np (noun phrase) and s (sentence) or com-
plex types like s\np, which indicate the arguments that a function
(such as the category for an intransitive verb) subcategorizes for.
Words and phrases combine with others by cancellation of sub-
categorized arguments through a general operation akin to mul-
tiplication. hat is, just as 4 (3 4) = 3, there is a grammatical
correlate: np . (s\np) = s. Given that the word Olivia has the type
np and that sleeps has the type s\np, their concatenation Olivia
sleeps has the type s via cancellation of the np argument of sleeps.
CG assumes compositionality: he global properties
associated with a linguistic expression are determined entirely by
the properties of its component parts. Linguistic expressions are
multidimensional structured signs containing phonological/
orthographic (), syntactic (), and semantic () speciications
for the expression. CG is distinguished in that it uses categories
as syntactic types, such as those mentioned. Complex catego-
ries encode both subcategorization and linear order constraints,
using the leftward slash \ and the rightward slash /.
Some (simpliied) lexical entries are given in the following
format := : .
he transitive verb category (s\np)/np seeks an object noun
phrase to its right and then a subject noun phrase to its left;
after these arguments are consumed, the result is a sentence.
Semantics are given as -calculus expressions that reduce to
predicate and argument structures after syntactic com-
bination. he -calculus is a standard system used in CG (and
many other frameworks) for representing semantics derived by
syntax, where variables in the -terms are bound to correspond-
ing syntactic arguments. For the category for likes, the x variable
is bound to the object (the /np argument), and the y is bound to
the subject (the \np argument) an example of how this works
in a derivation follows. hese semantics (and the categories
themselves) are obviously simpliied and are intended here only
to demonstrate how the correct dependencies are established.
Leftward and rightward slashes project directionality via two
order-sensitive, universal rules of function application:
143
Categorial Grammar
Figure 1.
In words, the forward rule states that a category of type X/Y
can combine with one of type Y found to its right to produce
a category of type X. he symbol > is an abbreviation used in
derivations (as in the next example). he function is applied
similarly for the backward rule. When these rules are used to
combine two syntactic categories, their semantic components
are also combined via function application in the -calculus
(indicated in the rules as f a). For example, the result of
applying the function x.y.like(y,x) to the argument chocolate
is y.like(y,chocolate). his lock-step syntactic-semantic com-
bination underlies the transparent syntax-semantics interface
ofered by CG.
With these rules and lexicon, the derivation can be given in
Figure 1.
he subcategorized arguments of the verb are consumed one
after the other, and the semantic relexes of the syntactic rules
are carried out in parallel. his derivation is isomorphic to a
standard phrase structure grammar (PSG) analysis of such
sentences. Derivational steps can be viewed as instantiations of
rules of a PSG written in the accepting, rather than producing,
direction (e.g., np s\np s instead of s np vp).
Type Dependency
CG with just function application is weakly equivalent to stan-
dard context-free phrase structure grammar. Nonetheless, the
approach is radically diferent: Syntactic well-formedness in CG
is type dependent rather than structure dependent, and deriva-
tion is an artifact rather than a representational level. Also, cat-
egories labeling the nodes of categorial derivations are much
more informative than the atomic symbols of constituent
structure produced by PSGs. Subcategorization is directly
encoded in categories like s\np, (s\np)/np, and ((s\np)/np)/
np, rather than with stipulated nonterminal symbols such as
V-intrans, V-trans, and V-ditrans that have no transparent con-
nection to their semantic types. Furthermore, there is a system-
atic correspondence between notions such as intransitive and
transitive: After the transitive category (s\np)/np consumes its
object argument, the resulting category s\np is that of an intran-
sitive verb.
More importantly, type dependency shifts the perspective
on grammar shared with tree-adjoining grammar and head-
driven phrase structure grammar away from a top-
down one in which phrase structure rules dictate constituent
structure into a bottom-up one in which lexical items project
structure through the non-language-speciic rules (i.e., CGs
universal grammar). Recent developments in the trans-
formational grammar tradition, such as minimalism, have
also incorporated such a lexically driven perspective.
144
Combinatory Categorial Grammar and Categorial
Type Logics
CG moves further from PSGs and other frameworks by incorpo-
rating other rules that provide new kinds of inference over cat-
egories. hese rules are responsible for the type-driven lexible
constituency for which CG is well known. he two main branches
of CG can be broadly construed as rule based, exempliied by
combinatory categorial grammar (CCG) (Steedman 2000), and
deductive, exempliied by categorial type logics (CTL) (Moortgat
1997; Oehrle in press). We discuss both of these briely.
CCG adds a small set of syntactic rules that are linear counter-
parts of the combinators from combinatory logic. Two combina-
tors, composition (B) and type-raising (T), lead to the following
rules, among others:
he rules are guaranteed to be semantically consistent.
Composition of categories leads to composition of the semantic
functions in the -calculus. Type-raising turns an argument into
a function over functions that seek that argument. See the follow-
ing for an example of both of these rules in a derivation.
CTL is a family of resource-sensitive linear logics, complete
with hypothetical reasoning. his approach began with Joachim
Lambek (1958) recasting basic CG as a logical calculus in which
slashes are directionally sensitive implications; for example, the
English transitive category (s\np)/np is (np s) np. As such,
categories are provided sound and complete model theoretic
interpretations. he application rules given earlier are then just
leftward and rightward variants of modus ponens. Additional
abstract rules may be deined that allow structured sequents of
proof terms to be reconigured to allow associativity and permu-
tativity. One result is that many rules can be derived as theorems
of a given CTL system. For example, any expression with the cat-
egory np can be shown to also have the category s/(s\np), among
others. his is an instance of type-raising; similarly, CCGs com-
position rules (as well as others) can be show to follow from CTL
systems that allow associativity. With CTL, such rules follow from
the logic, whereas rule-based systems like CCG tend to incorpo-
rate a subset of such abstract rules explicitly based on empirical
evidence.
As an example of how CCGs rules engender lexible con-
stituency, the sentence Olivia likes chocolate in Figure 2 has an
alternative derivation using composition and type-raising. his
derivation involves a nontraditional constituent with category
s/np for the string Olivia likes, which then combines with choc-
olate to produce the same result as the previous derivation. A
similar analysis can be given with CTL.
Whether through CCGs rules or through CTL proofs, semanti-
cally coherent interpretations for a wide variety of non-traditional
constituents can be created. his forms the core of accounts of
extraction and coordination, as well as intonation and infor-
mation structure and incremental processing in CG. For example,
subject relative pronouns like who have the category (n\n)/(s\np),
which seeks an intransitive verb type to produce a post-nominal
modiier, while object relativizers like whom have the category
Categorial Grammar

Figure 2.

(n\n)/(s/np), which seeks types which are missing objects such

as Olivia likes and Olivia gave Finn, which both have the type s/
np. Extraction is thus handled without appeal to movement or
traces. long-distance dependencies in object extraction are
captured because forward composition allows the unsaturated
argument to be successively passed up until it is revealed to the
relativizer, as in Figure 3. Under the standard assumption that
coordination combines constituents of like types, then right-node
raising is simply constituent coordination:
[Kestrel heard]s/np and [Finn thinks Olivia saw]s/np the plane
lying overhead.
he compositional semantic terms, omitted here for brevity,
are guaranteed to be consistent with the semantics projected
by the lexical entries because the composition and type-raising
rules themselves are semantically consistent.
hese processes conspire in other contexts to create constitu-
ents for argument clusters that allow similarly straightforward
analyses for sentences like Kestrel gave Finn comics and Olivia
books.
his phenomenon has been called nonconstituent coordina-
tion, relecting the diiculty in assigning a meaningful phrase
structure that groups indirect objects with direct objects. From
the CG perspective, it is simply treated as type-driven constitu-
ent coordination.
One of the key innovations CTL has brought to CG is the incor-
poration of a multimodal system of logical reasoning (including
unary modes) that allows selective access to rules that permit
associativity and permutation. It is thus possible for a grammar
to allow powerful operations (like permutative ones needed for
scrambling) without losing discrimination (e.g., engendering a
collapse of word order throughout the grammar), while enjoying
a (quite small) universal rule component.
Other rules be they CCG-style rules or CTLs structural
rules support analyses for phenomena such as nonperipheral
extraction, heavy-NP shift, parasitic gaps, scrambling, ellip-
sis, and others. he commitment to semantic transparency
and compositionality remains strong throughout; for example,
Pauline Jacobson (2008) tackles antecedent-contained deletion
in a directly compositional manner with CG and variable-free
semantics.
See Wood (1993) for a balanced overview of many CG
approaches and analyses. Steedman and Baldridge (in press)
gives a more recent introduction to and overview of work in CCG.
Vermaat (2005) provides a clear and concise introduction to CTL
(including pointers to connections between CTL and minimal-
ism), as well as an extensive cross-linguistic account of wh-ques-
tions using a very small set of universal structural rules.
Figure 3.
Current Applications and Developments
While CG is well known but not widely practiced in mainstream
linguistics, it has considerable uptake in both mathematical
logic and computational linguistics. Computational
implementations of CCG are used for parsing and generation
for dialog systems. Current probabilistic CCG parsers, trained
in the CCGbank corpus of CCG derivations for newspaper texts,
are among the fastest and most accurate available for identify-
ing deep syntactic dependencies. A useful aspect of CG for such
implementations that also has implications for its relevance for
psycholinguistics is that the competence grammar is used
directly in performance.
Despite a long divergence between the rule-based and
deductive approaches to CG, recent work has brought them into
greater alignment. CCG has adopted CTLs multimodal perspec-
tive. his connection allows eicient rule-based parsing systems
to be generated from CTL grammars the lexicon remains the
same regardless of the approach. CCG itself can be viewed as the
caching out of an underlying deinition given in CTL; as such,
CTL can be seen as providing metatheories for ruled-based CGs
like CCG. Work in CTL explores ine-grained control over gram-
matical processes within the space of sound and complete logics;
work in CCG focuses on cross-linguistic, wide-coverage parsing
and computational grammar acquisition. Researchers in both of
these traditions continue to expand the range of languages and
syntactic phenomena receiving categorial treatments.
Jason Baldridge
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Ajdukiewicz, Kazimierz. 1935. Die syntaktische Konnexitt. In Polish
Logic 19201939, ed. Storrs McCall, 20731. Oxford: Oxford University
Press. Translated from Studia Philosophica 1: 127.
Jacobson, Pauline. 2008. Direct compositionality and variable-free
semantics: he case of antecedent contained deletion. In Topics in
Ellipsis, ed. Kyle Johnson, 3368. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lambek, Joachim. 1958. he mathematics of sentence structure.
American Mathematical Monthly 65: 15470.
Moortgat, Michael. 1997. Categorial type logics. In Handbook of Logic
and Linguistics, ed. Johan van Benthem and Alice ter Meulen, 99177.
Amsterdam: Elsevier; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Oehrle, Richard. Multi-modal type-logical grammar. In Non-
Transformational Syntax: A Guide to Current Models, ed. Robert
Borsley and Kersti Brjars. Malden, MA: Blackwell. In press.
Steedman, Mark. 2000. he Syntactic Process. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.

145
Categorization
Steedman, Mark, and Jason Baldridge. Combinatory categorial gram-
mar. In Non-Transformational Syntax: A Guide to Current Models, ed.
Robert Borsley and Kersti Brjars. Malden, MA: Blackwell. In press.
Vermaat, Willemijn. 2005. he logic of variation. A cross-linguistic
account of wh-question formation. Ph.D. diss., Utrecht University.
Wood, Mary McGee. 1993. Categorial Grammar. London: Routledge.
CATEGORIZATION
William Labov (1973, 342) stated, If linguistics can be said to be
any one thing, it is the study of categories: that is, the study of how
language translates meaning into sound through the categoriza-
tion of reality into units and sets of units. Labov is here address-
ing the relation between linguistic expressions and the things
and situations to which the expressions are used to refer. he
circumstances of the world are limitless in their variety; linguis-
tic resources are inite. Since it is not possible to have a unique
name for every entity that we encounter or a special expression
for every event that happens, we need to categorize the world
in order to speak about it. We need to regard some entities, and
some events, as being the same as others.
he relation between a word and a referent is not direct but
is mediated by the words meaning. It is in virtue of its mean-
ing that a word can be used to refer. A words meaning can be
thought of as a concept, and a concept, in turn, can be thought of
as a principle of categorization. To know the word mug (to take
one of Labovs examples) is to have the concept of a mug, which
in turn means being able to use the word appropriately, namely,
for things that are called mugs. his goes not only for names of
concrete things like mugs but also for names of abstract entities
and for words of other syntactic categories. To state that X is on
Y is to categorize the relation between X and Y as an on-relation
rather than an in- or an at-relation. We can make similar claims
for other elements in a language, such as markers of tense and
aspect. To describe an event in the present perfect as opposed to
the past simple or to use progressive as opposed to non-progres-
sive aspect is to categorize the event in a manner consistent with
the concept designated by the morpho-syntactic elements.
On many counts, therefore, linguists need a theory of catego-
rization. he theory must provide answers to two related ques-
tions. On what basis are entities assigned to a category? And why
do we categorize the world in just the way that we do?
According to what has come to be known as the classical
or Aristotelian theory, a category is deined in terms of a set of
necessary and sufficient conditions; it follows that
things belong in a category because they exhibit each of the
deining features. here are many problems associated with
this view. First, it often is just not possible to list the deining
features. What, for example, are the deining features of mug as
opposed to cup? hen there is the question of the features them-
selves. Each feature will itself deine a category, which in turn
must be deined in terms of its necessary and suicient features.
Unless we are prepared to postulate a set of primitive features
out of which all possible categories are constructed, we are
faced with an ininite regress. Finally, the classical theory makes
no predications about why we should have the categories that
we do. Any conceivable combination of features could consti-
tute a valid category.
146
A major landmark in the development of a nonclassical the-
ory of categorization was the work of psychologist Eleanor Rosch
(1978). She argued that categories have a prototype struc-
ture, that is, are centered around good examples, and that things
belong to the category in virtue of their exhibiting some similar-
ities with the prototype. he members of a category, therefore,
do not need to share the same set of features. Moreover, some
members can be better or more representative examples of the
category than others.
Rosch addressed not only the internal structure of categories
but also the question of what makes a good category. Good cat-
egories the ones that people operate with, and which are likely
to be encoded in human languages are those that deliver maxi-
mum information to the user with minimal cognitive efort. We
can approach this matter in terms of the interplay of cue validity
and category validity. Cue validity means that having observed
that an entity exhibits a certain feature, you can assign the entity,
with a fair degree of conidence, to a certain category. Category
validity means that having learned that an entity belongs to a cer-
tain category, you have expectations about the likely properties
of the entity. In this way, we can infer quite a lot about the things
that we encounter, on the basis of minimal information about
them.
Categories also need to be studied against broader concep-
tual and cultural knowledge having to do with human inten-
tions and purposes, presumed causal relations between things
and events, and beliefs about how the world is structured. We
can imagine all kinds of hypothetical categories say, a cate-
gory comprising things that are yellow, weighing under ive kilo-
grams, and manufactured in 1980. Such a category is unlikely to
be lexicalized in any human language. It displays very low cue
and category validity and would, therefore, not be useful to its
users. It would also have no role to play in any broader knowl-
edge system.
As already recognized by Labov, the issue of categorization
applies not only to the categories we use in talking about the
world but also to the analysis of language itself. he very termi-
nology of linguistic description is replete with names of catego-
ries, such as phoneme, noun, direct object, word, dialect,
and so on, and practical linguistic description involves assigning
linguistic phenomena to these various categories. Although the
classical approach to categorization is still very strong among
linguistic theoreticians, it is increasingly recognized that the cat-
egories of linguistics may have a prototype structure and are to
be understood, in the irst instance, in terms of good examples.
As Labov remarked, linguistics is indeed the study of
categories!
John R. Taylor
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Labov, William. 1973. he boundaries of words and their meanings. In
New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English, ed. C. J. Bailey and R. W.
Shuy, 34072. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Lakof, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous hings: What
Categories Reveal About the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Murphy, Gregory. 2002. he Big Book of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Causative Constructions
Rosch, Eleanor. 1978. Principles of categorization. In Cognition
and Categorization, ed. E. Rosch and B. Lloyd, 2748. Hillsdale,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Taylor, John R. 2003. Linguistic Categorization. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
CAUSATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS
Causative construction (CC) is deined as form-meaning map-
ping that encodes a causative situation (CS) in which an entity
(typically human), or causer, acts upon another entity (typically
human), or causee, to induce some action. Cross-linguistically,
this mapping is known to operate using periphrastic syntactic
construction, valence-increasing morphology, or lexical verb.
hree structural types of CCs thus identiied are a) the syntactic
causative, which employs a periphrastic causative verb like make
in English (1); b) the morphological causative, which employs a
causative aix like -(s)ase- in Japanese (2); and the lexical caus-
ative, wherein a transitive verb with inherently causative mean-
ing is employed (3), e.g. kiseru to put (clothes) on (someone)
in Japanese.
(1) Mary made him read the book. (Syntactic)
(2) Mary-ga musuko-ni huku-o ki-sase-ta. (Morphological)
nom son-dat clothes-acc wear-caus-past
Mary made her son put on clothes.
(3) Mary-ga musuko-ni huku-o kise-ta. (Lexical)
nom son-dat clothes-acc put (clothes) on (someone)-past
Mary put clothes on her son.
Grammatical and Semantic Hierarchies of the Causee
Nominal Case Marking
CCs can involve the adjustment of case marking of a causee NP,
accompanied by the increased valence of a causer NP. As shown
in Japanese examples (2)(3), with the causer/subject NP Mary
assigned the nominative case marking -ga, the causee NP John
is demoted or deranked to lower case marking, in this case the
dative ni, since the accusative o is already assumed by another
NP/direct object hon (book). he deranking order of a cau-
see NP relects a hierarchy of grammatical relations established
cross-linguistically (4):
(4) Subject > Direct Object > Indirect Object > Oblique (Whaley
1997, 193)
Functional-typological studies (Shibatani 1976a; Givn 1980;
Cole 1983; see functional linguistics, typology) have
noted that diferential case marking indexes the difering degrees
of control that a causee can exercise over his or her action rela-
tive to the causer. Consider a Japanese example (5).
(5) Mary-ga John-{o/ni} Tokyo-e ik-ase-ta.
nom acc/dat to go-caus-past
Mary {made/let} John go to Tokyo.
he accusative case marker o indexes a lesser degree of con-
trol retained by the causee than the dative case marker -ni.
his semantic diference between accusative (patient-marking)
case and dative (experiencer-marking) case is captured by the
semantic hierarchy (6) proposed by Peter Cole (1983). It relects
the greater-to-lesser degree of control retained by a causee NP.
(6) Agent > Experiencer > Patient
Further Semantic/Pragmatic Dimensions of CCs
It is not unusual for a language to have more than one type of
CC, for example, Japanese morphological and lexical causatives
(3) and (2). In lexical causative (3), causative and causativized
verbs are completely fused, while in morphological causative (2)
they are separated by morpheme boundary. Crucially, as dem-
onstrated by John Haiman (1983), the diferential degrees of
fusion semantically correlate with the difering degrees of direct-
ness involved in causing an event. For instance, while a lexical
causative (3) encodes the causers nonmediated action of put-
ting clothes on the causee, a morphological causative (2) can
express the situation where the causee put on his clothes upon
the causers request (e.g., verbal command).
Languages can employ two causatives in a single sentence, as
in a Korean example ( 7), to encode a sequence of CSs.
(7) John-i Tom-eykey Mary-lul cwuk-i-key ha-ess-ta.
nom dat acc die- caus-caus-past-decl
John made Tom kill Mary.
(Ishihara, Horie, and Pardeshi 2006, 323)
Double CCs do not always encode a sequence of CSs and can
serve some pragmatic function instead. For instance, as observed
by J. Okada (2003), the Japanese double causative occurs most
frequently in highly conventionalized benefactive expressions
indexing a speakers expression of humbleness toward his/her
own action, as well as politeness toward the addressee, such
as -(s)ase-sase-te itadaku (to have someone allow one to do
something), as in (8).
(8) Otayori yom-as-ase-te itadaki-masu.
letter read- caus-caus-conj humbly receive-pol:nonpast
Allow me to read this letter.
(Okada 2003, 29)
In this instance, as contrasted with its single causative coun-
terpart yom-ase-ite itadaku (read-caus-humbly receive), the
double causative serves to reinforce the speakers expression of
humbleness and politeness.
CCs have also been productively investigated by more for-
mally oriented linguists (e.g., Kuroda 1993, Miyagawa 1998).
Kaoru Horie
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Cole, Peter. 1983. he grammatical role of the causee in universal gram-
mar. International Journal of American Linguistics 49: 11533.
Comrie, Bernard. 1976. he syntax of causative constructions: Cross-
language similarities and divergences. In Shibatani 1976b, 261312.
. 1985. Causative verb formation and other verb-deriving mor-
phology. In Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Vol.
3: Grammatical Categories and Lexicon. Ed. Timothy Shopen, 30948.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Givn, Talmy. 1980. he binding hierarchy and the typology of comple-
ments. Studies in Language 4: 33377.
Haiman, John. 1983. Iconic and economic motivation. Language
59: 789811.
147
C-Command
Haspelmath, Martin. 1993. More on the typology of inchoative/causative
verb alternation. In Causatives and Transitivity, ed. Bernard Comrie
and Maria Polinsky, 87120. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ishihara, Tsuneyoshi, Kaoru Horie, and Prashant Pardeshi. 2006. What
does the Korean double causative reveal about causation and Korean?
A corpus-based contrastive study with Japanese. In Japanese/Korean
Linguistics. Vol. 14. Ed. Vance, Timothy, 32130. Stanford, CA: CSLI.
Kemmer, Susanne, and Ariel Verhagen. 1994. he grammar of caus-
atives and the conceptual structure of events. Cognitive Linguistics
5: 11556.
Kuroda, Shige-Yuki. 1993. Lexical and productive causatives in
Japanese: An examination of the theory of paradigmatic structure.
Journal of Japanese Linguistics 15: 181.
Miyagawa, S. 1998. (S)ase as an elsewhere causative and the syntactic
nature of words. Journal of Japanese Linguistics 16: 67110.
Okada, J. 2003. Recent trends in Japanese causatives: he sa-insertion
phenomenon. In Japanese/Korean Linguistics. Vol. 12. Ed. McClure,
William. 2839. Stanford, CA: CSLI.
Shibatani, Masayoshi. 1976a. he grammar of causative constructions: A
conspectus. In Shibatani 1976b, 140.
Shibatani, Masayoshi, ed. 1976b. Syntax and Semantics. Vol. 6, he
Grammar of Causative Constructions. New York: Academic Press.
. 2002. he Grammar of Causation and Interpersonal Manipulation.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Shibatani, Masayoski, and Prashant Pardeshi. 2002. he causative con-
tinuum. In Shibatani 2002, 85126.
Song, Jae Jung. 1996. Causatives and Causation. London: Longman.
Whaley, Lindsay. 1997. Introduction to Typology. he Unity and Diversity
of Language. New York: Sage Publications.
C-COMMAND
An enduring and fundamental hypothesis within syntactic the-
ory is that the establishment of most, if not all, syntactic rela-
tions (agreement, binding, case, control structures,
movement, etc.) requires c-command.
Tanya Reinhart (1979) provides the following deinition of
c-command (see also Edward Klimas (1964) in construction
with):
(1) c-commands if and only if
a. he irst branching node dominating dominates ,
and b. does not dominate ,
and c. does not equal .
To illustrate, consider (2).
(2) Sentence
Noun Phrase Verb Phrase
Noun Phrase Noun Verb Noun Phrase
Marys mother criticizes herself
Does the noun phrase Marys mother c-command herself in (2)?
he irst branching node dominating Marys mother is sentence,
which dominates herself. Also, Marys mother does not dom-
inate or equal herself. Since c-command obtains, in this sen-
tence Marys mother corefers with herself (i.e., herself must mean
Marys mother). By contrast, since Marys fails to c-command
148
Cerebellum
herself, Marys and herself are unable to enter into such a relation
(see anaphora and binding).
Although Reinharts pioneering deinition is formally explicit
and strongly supported empirically, questions arise regard-
ing explanatory depth, as with any deinition. In this respect,
S. Epstein and colleagues (1998) ask:
(i) Why should this formal relation, and not any deinable
other, constrain syntactic relations?
(ii) Why is (irst) branching relevant?
(iii) Why must not dominate or equal ?
Epstein and colleagues argue that (iiii) receive natural answers
under a bottom-up derivational approach with recursive appli-
cation of the binary operation merge, as independently moti-
vated in minimalism (Chomsky 1995). C-command is then
arguably an emergent property of this structure-building process
and is expressible in terms of merge, as in (3):
(3) c-commands all and only the terms of the category with
which was merged in the course of the derivation.
Under (3), c-command is not deined on assembled trees, but
emerges as a consequence of the merger process by which trees
are built. It then follows that only the irst branching node is rel-
evant for computing what c-commands, since this branching
node is precisely the syntactic object resulting from merging with
another syntactic category. It also follows that must not domi-
nate , since dominance entails non-merger. Finally, because a
category cannot merge with itself, does not c-command itself.
Gerardo Fernndez-Salgueiro, and Samuel David Epstein
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Aoun, Joseph, and Dominique Sportiche. 1983. On the formal theory of
government. Linguistic Review 2: 21135.
Brody, Michael. 2000. Mirror theory: Syntactic representation in perfect
syntax. Linguistic Inquiry 31.1: 2956.
Chomsky, Noam. 1995. he Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Epstein, Samuel David, Erich M. Groat, Ruriko Kawashima, and Hisatsugu
Kitahara. 1998. A Derivational Approach to Syntactic Relations.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kayne, Richard. 1984. Connectedness and Binary Branching.
Dordrecht: Foris.
Klima, Edward. 1964. Negation in English. In he Structure of
Language, ed. Jerry Fodor and Jerrold Katz, 246323. Englewood Clifs,
NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Langacker, Ronald. 1969. On pronominalization and the chain of com-
mand. In Modern Studies in English, ed. D. Reibel and S. Schane,
16086. Englewood Clifs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Lasnik, Howard. 1976. Remarks on coreference. Linguistic Analysis
2: 122.
Reinhart, Tanya. 1979. Syntactic domains for semantic rules. In Formal
Semantics and Pragmatics for Natural Languages, ed. F. Guenthner
and S. Schmidt, 10730. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company.
CEREBELLUM
he cerebellum is a brain structure located underneath the pos-
terior part of the cerebral hemispheres. hree anatomical loops
Cerebellum
connect the cerebellum to various parts of the nervous system
(Ramnani 2006). he cerebro-cerebellar loop has been of partic-
ular interest to language researchers because this pathway sup-
ports anatomical connections between the cerebellum and the
cortex, potentially including language-related cortical regions in
the contralateral cerebral hemisphere. Recent advances in neu-
roimaging techniques, clinical testing, and anatomical methods
provide evidence that strongly implicates the cerebellum in a
broad range of language-related tasks, including those involv-
ing speech production and perception, single-word reading, and
higher-level language processing.
Historical Perspectives
Historically, the functions of the cerebellum were thought to be
limited to motor processes, such as motor control, performance,
and skill acquisition. Basic neuroscience research has led to difer-
ent proposals regarding its role in motor processes such as error-
driven learning (Marr 1969) and internal timing (Ivry 1996). In the
late 1980s, H. C. Leiner, A. L. Leiner, and R. S. Dow (1986) proposed
that the cerebellum is not exclusively involved in motor functions
but that it also contributes to cognitive processes. Speciically, they
argued for a putative role in language because the evolutionary
development of the cerebellum paralleled a similar evolution of
cortical areas associated with linguistic functions (e.g., brocas
area) (Leiner, Leiner, and Dow 1993). Based on the homogeneity
of cerebellar cellular organization, a similar role was attributed to
the cerebellum across both motor and non-motor domains.
Empirical work providing support for the claims proposed by
Leiner, Leiner, and Dow began to emerge in the late 1980s and
1990s (Desmond and Fiez 1998). A positron emission tomogra-
phy (PET) study conducted by S. E. Petersen and J. A. Fiez (1993)
showed increases in cerebellar activity during a verb generation
task. his neuroimaging inding was consistent with a follow-up
case study of a patient with a lateral cerebellum lesion (Fiez et
al. 1992). he patient showed particularly poor performance on
verb generation despite the fact that other neuropsychological
assessments were within the normal range.
Current Perspectives
he cerebellum has been implicated in a broad range of language-
related tasks. he majority of the work, however, can be related
to one of three domains: 1) speech production and perception,
2) reading, and 3) higher-level word processing. In order to
account for the cerebellums function in language, investigators
have made reference to the timing and error correction functions
that have been attributed to the cerebellum in the motor litera-
ture. For a review on how these may be general mechanisms that
contribute to both motor and non-motor processes, see Ivry and
Spencer (2004) and Doya (2000).
SPEECH PRODUCTION AND PERCEPTION. During speech produc-
tion, the control, coordination, and timing of movements are
essential. Not surprisingly, clinical indings demonstrate pro-
found speech and motor deicits associated with lesions to the
cerebellum. One common speech disorder resulting from dam-
age to the cerebellum is dysarthria, which is characterized by dis-
torted and slurred speech that is often monotonic and of a slower
rate (Dufy 1995). neuroimaging studies provide further
evidence for the involvement of the cerebellum in speech pro-
duction. In a recent study, participants performed a syllable rep-
etition task in which speech rate was varied. he results showed
increases in cerebellar activity that corresponded with increases
in speech rate (Riecker et al. 2006).
Cerebellar contributions to speech extend to the domain of
perception. Lesions to the cerebellum produce deicits in tem-
poral duration discrimination and impair categorical perception
for consonants that difer in the onset of voicing (Ackermann et
al. 1997). his clinical evidence is consistent with neuroimag-
ing data that show increases in right cerebellar activity during a
duration discrimination task for linguistic items (Mathiak et al.
2002). Other neuroimaging results suggest that the cerebellum
is also involved in learning new perceptual distinctions, such
as the non-native /r/-/l/ phonetic contrast for Japanese speak-
ers (Callan et al. 2003). As in the motor literature, many of these
studies provide evidence that the cerebellum may be important
for coordination and timing in the production as well as the per-
ception of speech (for a discussion, see Ivry and Spencer 2004).
Other research also draws upon knowledge from the motor
literature to emphasize a potential role of the cerebellum in error
correction. he luency of normal speech has led many models
of speech production to incorporate a mechanism for monitor-
ing and correcting speech errors (Postma 2000). More detailed
computational work has mapped certain processes in speech
production to speciic brain regions and deined the cerebellum
as an important component in monitoring (Guenther, Ghosh,
and Tourville 2006). Similar ideas have emerged in models of
verbal working memory. Speciically, J. E. Desmond and col-
leagues (1997) suggest that a rehearsal process that relies on
inner speech to maintain verbal items in working memory may
also implement an error correction process. In their model,
inputs from frontal and parietal cortex into superior and infe-
rior regions of the cerebellum are used to calculate and correct
discrepancies between phonological and articulatory codes in
order to improve memory performance.
READING. Data from neuroimaging studies consistently show
cerebellar activation during single-word reading tasks (Fiez and
Petersen 1998; Turkeltaub et al. 2002). In addition, individuals with
developmental reading disorders show some of the same symp-
toms that are often seen in patients with cerebellar damage, such
as poor duration discrimination and impaired gross motor func-
tions (Nicolson, Fawcett, and Dean 1995). hese observations led
R. Nicolson, A. Fawcett, and P. Dean (2001) to propose a relation-
ship between cerebellar deicits and developmental reading disor-
ders. Consistent with this idea, anatomical indings have reported
smaller right anterior lobes of the cerebellum in children diagnosed
with developmental dyslexia (Eckert et al. 2003). his work in
developmental reading disorders has focused on the importance of
cerebellar involvement in coordination and timing. Integrating the
neuroanatomical indings with behavioral work on dyslexia will be
key for establishing a speciic role for the cerebellum in reading.
Recent neuropsychological research provides mixed ind-
ings on the causal relationship between lesions to the cerebel-
lum in adult skilled readers and reading diiculties. One study
found that patients with lesions to the cerebellar vermis had
more errors in single-word reading when compared to controls
149
Cerebellum
(Moretti et al. 2002). On the other hand, a study of native English
speakers with lesions to the lateral cerebellar hemispheres did
not ind any reading diiculties at the level of single words or
text (Ben-Yehudah and Fiez 2008). hese seemingly inconsistent
indings may be due to diferences in the site of the cerebellar
lesions in the two patient groups.
HIGHER-LEVEL LANGUAGE. here is accumulating evidence that
higher-level language processes may also involve the cerebellum,
although this level has received less attention. A meta-analysis of
the neuroimaging literature conducted by P. Indefrey and W. J. M.
Levelt (2004) reveals increased activity in the cerebellum for tasks
that require higher-level word processing; such tasks include picture
naming and verb generation (Indefrey and Levelt 2004) or internal
generation of semantic word associations (Gebhart, Petersen, and
hach 2002). It is important to note that higher-level language pro-
cesses seem to recruit more lateral areas, often in the contralateral
right hemisphere of the cerebellum (Indefrey and Levelt 2004).
Neuropsychological studies have observed impairments in higher-
level language processing (Silveri, Leggio, and Molinari 1994; Riva
and Giorgi 2000), including poor performance on a grammaticality
judgment task relative to controls (Justus 2004).
Summary
In summary, these data collectively provide strong support for
cerebellar involvement in many aspects of language, including
speech processing, reading, and higher-level language process-
ing. hey also suggest that there may be diferent regions of the
cerebellum that are involved in diferent types of language tasks.
his observation is consistent with an emerging concept that
distinct cerebro-cerebellar loops support cerebellar interactions
with cortex, thus potentially enabling the cerebellum to apply
one or more of its suggested functions (e.g., error correction) to
separate input-output loops (Kelly and Strick 2003). According
to this view, language tasks that rely on diferent cortical regions
would engage distinct cerebro-cerebellar loops that recruit spe-
ciic cerebellar regions.
Sara Guediche, Gal Ben-Yehudah, and Julie A. Fiez
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Ackermann, H., S. Graber, I. Hertrich, and I. Daum. 1997. Categorical
speech perception in cerebellar disorders. Brain and Language
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Ben-Yehudah, G., and J. Fiez. 2005. Impact of cerebellar lesions on read-
ing and phonological processing. Annals of the New York Academy of
Sciences 1145: 26074.
Callan, D. E., K. Tajima, A. M. Callan, R. Kubo, S. Masaki, and R. Akahane-
Yamada. 2003. Learning-induced neural plasticity associated with
improved identiication performance after training of a diicult sec-
ond-language phonetic contrast. NeuroImage 19: 11324.
Desmond, J. E., J. Gabrieli, A. Wagner, B. Ginier, and G. Glover. 1997.
Lobular patterns of cerebellar activation in verbal working memory
and inger-tapping tasks as revealed by functional MRI. Journal of
Neuroscience 17.24: 967585.
Desmond, J. E., and J. A. Fiez. 1998. Neuroimaging studies of the cere-
bellum: Language, learning and memory. Trends in Cognitive Sciences
2.9: 355358. his article reviews neuroimaging evidence suggesting
that the cerebellum is involved in cognitive tasks, including those that
involve learning, memory, and language.
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Doya, K. 2000. Complementary roles of basal ganglia and cerebellum
in learning and motor control. Current Opinion in Neurobiology
10: 7329. his paper suggests that the cerebellum is part of a more
general supervised learning system that is guided by error signals.
Dufy, J. R. 1995. Motor Speech Disorders. St. Louis, MO: Mosby.
Eckert, M., C. Leonard, T. Richard, E. Aylward, J. homson, and V.
Berninger. 2003. Anatomical correlates of dyslexia: Frontal and cer-
ebellar indings. Brain 126 (Part 2): 48194.
Fiez, J. A., and S. E. Petersen. 1998. Neuroimaging studies of word read-
ing. Proc Nat Acad Sci USA 95: 91421.
Fiez, J. A., S. E. Petersen, M. K. Cheney, and M. E. Raichle. 1992. Impaired
non-motor learning and error detection associated with cerebellar
damage. Brain 115: 15578.
Gebhart, A. L., S. E. Petersen, and W. T. hach. 2002. Role of the poste-
rolateral cerebellum in language. Annals of the New York Academy of
Sciences 978: 31833.
Guenther, F. H., S. S. Ghosh, and J. A. Tourville. 2006. Neural modeling
and imaging of the cortical interactions underlying syllable produc-
tion. Brain and Language 96: 280301.
Indefrey, P., and W. J. M. Levelt. 2004. he spatial and temporal signa-
tures of word production components. Cognition 92: 10144.
Ivry, R. B. 1996. he representation of temporal information in percep-
tion and motor control. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 6: 8517.
Ivry, R. B., and R. M. Spencer. 2004. he neural representation of time.
Current Opinion in Neurobiology 14: 22532. his article discusses
timing processes and their potential neural correlates. A review of the
evidence from many diferent methods is provided, with an empha-
sis on the potential contributions made by the cerebellum and basal
ganglia.
Justus, T. 2004. he cerebellum and English grammatical morphonol-
ogy: Evidence from production, comprehension, and grammaticality
judgments. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 16.7: 111530.
Kelly, R. M., and P. L. Strick. 2003. Cerebellar loops with motor cortex
and prefrontal cortex of a nonhuman primate. Journal of Neuroscience
23.23: 843244. his article shows cerebellar regions that receive input
from the same cerebral cortical regions they project to. hey hypoth-
esize closed cerebro-cerebellar loops for the basis of the interactions
between cerebellum and cortex.
Leiner, H. C., A. L. Leiner, and R. S. Dow. 1986. Does the cerebellum con-
tribute to mental skills? Behavioral Neuroscience 100.4: 44354.
. 1993. Cognitive and language functions of the human cerebel-
lum. TINS 16.11: 4447.
Marr, D. 1969. A theory of cerebellar cortex. J Physiol 202.2: 43770.
Mathiak, K., I. Hertrich, W. Grodd, and H. Ackermann. 2002. Cerebellum
and speech perception: A functional magnetic resonance imaging
study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 14.6: 90212.
Moretti, R., A. Bava, P. Torre, R. M. Antonello, and G. Cazzato. 2002.
Reading errors in patients with cerebellar vermis lesions. Journal of
Neurology 49: 4618.
Nicolson, R., A. Fawcett, and P. Dean. 1995. Time estimation deicits
in developmental dyslexia: Evidence of cerebellar involvement. Proc
Biol Sci 259.1354: 437.
. 2001. Developmental dyslexia: he cerebellar deicit hypothesis.
Trends in Neurosciences 24.9: 50811.
Petersen, S. E. ,and J. A. Fiez. 1993. he processing of single words studied
with positron emission tomography. Annual Reviews of Neuroscience
16: 50930.
Postma, A. 2000. Detection of errors during speech production: A review
of speech monitoring models. Cognition 77: 97131.
Ramnani, N. 2006. he primate cortico-cerebellar system: Anatomy and
function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 7: 51122. his review provides
a brief description of cerebellar anatomy, and stresses integrating ana-
tomical, computational, and experimental knowledge.
Charity, Principle of
Riecker, A., J. Kassubek, K. Groschel, W. Grodd, and H. Ackermann. 2006.
he cerebral control of speech tempo: Opposite relationship between
speaking rate and BOLD signal changes at striatal and cerebellar struc-
tures. NeuroImage 29: 4653.
Riva, D., and C. Giorgi. 2000. he cerebellum contributes to higher func-
tions during development: Evidence from a series of children surgi-
cally treated for posterior fossa tumours. Brain 123: 105161.
Silveri, M., M. Leggio, and M. Molinari. 1994. he cerebellum contrib-
utes to linguistic production: A case of agrammatic speech following a
right cerebellar lesion. Neurology 44.11: 204750.
Turkeltaub, P., G. Eden, K. Jones, and T. Zeiro. 2002. Meta-analysis of
the functional neuroanatomy of single-word reading: Method and vali-
dation. NeuroImage 16.3 (Part 1): 76580.
CHARITY, PRINCIPLE OF
A charity principle is a principle governing the interpretation of
the speech and thought of others. It says that the correct inter-
pretation of certain kinds of expressions, areas of discourse,
or whole languages maximizes truth and rationality across the
(relevant) beliefs of its subject. According to Donald Davidson,
the main defender of a principle of charity, its validity derives
from the essentially rational and veridical nature of belief and
thought.
Principles of charity are of central importance in discussions
of radical interpretation or radical translation. In W. V.
O. Quines version, charity governs the translation of the logical
constants (cf. Quine 1960, 59). According to Donald Davidson,
charity governs the radical interpretation of all expressions of a
language. In an early formulation, it tells the radical interpreter
to optimize agreement by assigning truth conditions to alien
sentences that make native speakers right when plausibly pos-
sible (Davidson [1973] 1984, 137). To make native speakers
right is to interpret them as having beliefs that are largely true
and coherent with each other. Later, Davidson distinguished
explicitly between these two aspects of charity:
he Principle of Coherence prompts the interpreter to discover
a degree of logical consistency in the thought of the speaker; the
Principle of Correspondence prompts the interpreter to take
the speaker to be responding to the same features of the world
that he (the interpreter) would be responding to under similar
circumstances. Both principles can be (and have been) called
principles of charity: One principle endows the speaker with a
modicum of logical truth, the other endows him with a degree of
true belief about the world. Successful interpretation necessarily
invests the person interpreted with basic rationality. (Davidson
[1991] 2001, 211)
Coherence restricts belief ascription in terms of the logical rela-
tions among the beliefs of a speaker. Correspondence restricts
the ascription of empirical beliefs to a speaker in terms of
their truth. Since this can only be done according to the inter-
preters own view of what is true, following the principle of
correspondence amounts to agreement maximization
between speaker and interpreter. Here, Davidson more and
more emphasized a causal element; in the most basic percep-
tual cases, the principle of correspondence calls for the ascrip-
tion of beliefs shared by speaker and interpreter. he objects of
these beliefs are determined as the shared, external causes of
these beliefs: Communication begins where causes converge
(Davidson [1983] 2001, 151). In later years, Davidson liked to use
the metaphor of triangulation for this three-way interaction
among speaker, interpreter, and external object (cf. Davidson
[1991] 2001).
he principle of charity does not exclude the possibil-
ity of error; speakers are to be right when plausibly possible
(Davidson [1973] 1984, 137). Charity, thus, in certain situations
actually prevents the interpreter from ascribing beliefs of his or
her own to the speaker, for instance, perceptual beliefs about
objects the speaker cannot perceive from his or her position in
space, or beliefs it would be irrational for the speaker to hold on
the basis of other beliefs. If something false follows rather directly
from other beliefs the speaker holds, charity might even call for
ascribing outright mistakes. he rationality induced by the prin-
ciple is of a minimal, subject-internal character.
For Davidson, the principle of charity plays a double role: On
the one hand, it provides the method for the radical interpreter,
but it does so because it, on the other hand, is the principle meta-
physically determining meaning (and belief content): What
a fully informed interpreter could learn about what a speaker
means is all there is to learn; the same goes for what the speaker
believes (Davidson [1983] 2001, 148). his is a kind of superve-
nience: According to Davidson, meaning (and content) super-
vene on (dispositions to) observable behavior in observable
circumstances. hat is, there cannot be a diference in meaning
(or content) without a (potential) diference in behavior. his
can be called a weak semantic behaviorism, but according to
Davidson, meaning (and content) cannot be reduced to behav-
ior. hat meaning is determined by charity leaves room for a cer-
tain indeterminacy, according to Davidson, but does not lead
to antirealism or skepticism about meaning or thought content.
Because of the role that external objects, as shared causes, play
in the determination of content for basic perceptual beliefs, he
thought of his own position as a kind of externalism (cf. Davidson
2001; see meaning externalism and internalism).
he principle of charity has been widely discussed. Not only
have questions of its exact formulation and of its truth or valid-
ity been raised but also the question of what kind of a truth it
is, if any. What is its epistemic status a priori or a posteriori?
And what is its metaphysical status necessary or contingent?
Davidson mostly thought of charity as a principle constitutive of
thought and meaning, an a priori truth of conceptual necessity.
Many commentators have claimed that radical interpretation is
supposed to provide an (a priori) argument for charity: If radi-
cal interpretation is possible, charity is valid (see, for example,
Lepore and Ludwig 2005, 204 f). But according to others, the
direction of argument can only be the opposite: If charity holds,
radical interpretation is possible (Davidson 1994, 122; Gler
2006, 344). hen, Davidson would be seen as arguing for charity
from considerations regarding the nature of thought content, its
holism and externalist determination (cf. Davidson [1991] 2001;
1999, 343; 2001). Partly against Davidson, it has been argued that
charity can only be an a posteriori necessity (cf. Fllesdal 1982;
Gler 2006) and that it, like other nomological principles, can be
justiied by the principles of empirical science (cf. Pagin 2006).
Kathrin Gler
151
Childrens Grammatical Errors
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Davidson, Donald. [1973] 1984. Radical interpretation. In Inquiries into
Truth and Interpretation, 12539. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
. [1983] 2001. A coherence theory of truth and knowledge. In
Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective: 13753. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
. [1991] 2001. hree varieties of knowledge. In Subjective,
Intersubjective, Objective, 20520. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
. 1994. Radical interpretation interpreted. Philosophical
Perspectives 8: 1218.
. 1999. Reply to Andrew Cutrofello. In he Philosophy of Donald
Davidson, ed. L. Hahn, 3424. Chicago: Open Court.
. 2001. Externalisms. In Interpreting Davidson, ed. P. Kotatko,
P. Pagin, and G. Segal, 116. Stanford, CA: CSLI.
Fllesdal, Daginn. 1982. he status of rationality assumptions in inter-
pretation and action explanation. Dialectica 36: 30116.
Gler, Kathrin. 2006. he status of charity I: Conceptual truth or apos-
teriori necessity? International Journal of Philosophical Studies
14: 33760.
Lepore, Ernest, and K. Ludwig. 2005. Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth,
Language, and Reality. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Pagin, Peter. 2006. he status of charity II: Charity, probability, and sim-
plicity. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 14: 36184.
Quine, Willard V. O. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
CHILDRENS GRAMMATICAL ERRORS
Language learners make errors. his observation, easily veriied,
is not conined to children in thrall to their irst encounter with
language. It applies equally well to adults acquiring a further lan-
guage (see second language acquisition). And it applies
to cases of both typical and atypical language development (see
specific language impairment). here is, then, nothing
abnormal about speech errors. hey are an intrinsic feature of
language acquisition and do not mark out special cases of learn-
ing but, rather, constitute the norm. In this vein, one might argue
that the very notion of language development almost inevitably
implies the occurrence of errors. Perfect speech could not read-
ily be ascribed to a language learner, after all. It is not surprising,
therefore, to ind that linguistic errors have featured prominently
in research on language development. As a universal feature of
language acquisition, errors provide not only evidence that
learning is taking place but also, in some cases, evidence of how
that learning occurs.
Childrens speech errors range over every level of lan-
guage: phonological (see phonology, acquisition of);
lexical (see lexical acquisition); morphological (see mor-
phology, acquisition of); and grammatical (see syntax,
acquisition of). Grammatical errors are of special interest
because they are germane, in the ield of language acquisition,
to the nature-nurture controversy. Barbara C. Scholz and G. K.
Pullum (2006, 60) usefully encapsulate the nativist credo: [M]ost
of the acquisition of natural languages by human beings depends
on unacquired (or acquired but unlearned) linguistic knowl-
edge or language-specialized cognitive mechanisms. Child
grammatical errors present a problem, therefore. If the bulk of
what is acquired is unlearned, why is there a protracted period
in a young childs life (several years) during which language is
manifestly imperfect? At the very least, grammatical errors throw
into sharp relief the messiness of the data which nativists must
152
grapple with. Howsoever powerful the childs innate mecha-
nisms might be, they do not equate to an attribute (language)
that comes into the world fully formed at birth. Instead, there is a
bridge to be crossed from what Noam Chomsky (1980) has called
the childs initial state (the genetic endowment for language,
present at birth) to the steady state (the mature knowledge of
grammar inally attained). Several explanations are available to
deal with this problem (see innateness and innatism). Of
note here is the simple point that such explanations are required
by nativists and, inevitably, muddy the waters both theoretically
and empirically.
On the nurture side of the nature-nurture fence, speech errors
(grammatical and otherwise) again present a vexing issue that
needs to be addressed. In particular, the behaviorist approach to
language acquisition has been castigated for an excessive reliance
on operant conditioning as a mechanism of language learning.
B. F. Skinner (1957) argued that one of the key processes in lan-
guage development was the shaping of the childs verbal behav-
ior through reward. On this view, child utterances are rewarded
according to their proximity to the adult models provided. But
this is problematic. In a celebrated demolition of Skinners the-
sis, Chomsky (1959, 42) pointed out that operant conditioning
cannot tell the whole story since a child will be able to construct
and understand utterances which are quite new, and are, at the
same time, acceptable sentences in his language. hus, operant
conditioning cannot account for novelty.
Similarly, imitation cannot account for the childs speech,
particularly errors. Although not mentioned by Chomsky (1959),
grammatical errors do, in fact, present the most striking dem-
onstration that language acquisition is not largely based on
imitation. he reason is that children are exposed to very few
grammatical errors in the input they receive from parents.
Hence, there are very few faulty models for children to copy. For
example, Elissa Newport, H. Gleitman, and L. R. Gleitman (1977)
report just one instance of parental ungrammaticality in a cor-
pus of 1,500 utterances directed toward young children. In con-
sequence, one cannot easily blame the parents for child errors.
A further critical point is that the child cannot imitate grammar,
only the products of grammar (sentences). Perhaps not surpris-
ingly, since the demise of behaviorism, several other theories of
language acquisition have been promulgated that do not rely on
operant conditioning or imitation as their mainstay.
Beyond their relevance for the nature-nurture issue, child
errors have been studied because of the insights they furnish
about the processes of language acquisition. For example, an
error like i thought they were all womans reveals that the
child has extracted the regular suixation rule for forming plurals
of nouns in English. hat is, the child knows to add -s to singular
nouns in order to mark plurality. he childs error lies in mistak-
ing woman for a regular noun. his kind of error is commonly
described as an overregularization, since the plural rule for
regular forms (add S) has been applied beyond its conventional
conines to an irregular noun. hus, errors of this kind illuminate
the childs ability to extract and generalize a morphological rule.
We know that the child is indeed adding -s to make plu-
rals, even in the case of regular plurals like coconuts. his lat-
ter fact has been established even though it is conceivable that
the child has simply heard the form coconuts in the input and
Childrens Grammatical Errors
stored it whole, entirely unaware that the word can be parsed
into coconut and the plural marker -s. Jean Berko Gleason (1958)
invented nonsense words (including wug) to denote birdlike
creatures (also invented), in one of the irst experiments in the
ield of child language. Children were shown a picture of one of
these creatures and heard his is a wug. hey were then shown
a picture with two of these creatures and heard Now there are
two of them. here are two he pronunciation of two is left
hanging in the air, inviting the child to complete the sentence.
And, indeed, children four years of age will often declare here
are two wugs. Since the child has never before encountered the
word form wugs in the input, we can be sure that this word has
been assembled on-line using the new word form wug and prior
knowledge of the plural suix -s.
What is almost always overlooked, or possibly just taken for
granted, in research on childrens errors is the fact that error
is an intrinsically relative concept. In the case of language learn-
ers (young and old), utterances can be judged against the stan-
dard of an expert, typically a parent or other native speaker.
When my four-year-old son said, Whats the man who the for-
est doing? I registered an error, based on the dictates of how I
would have said the same sentence (possibly, Whats the man
who is in the forest doing?). But the intuitions of a parent are
not suicient proof that a given child sentence is ungrammatical.
Parental intuitions, as a form of evidence, are neither objective
nor decisive. Nevertheless, linguists continue to rely on intuitions
as a primary source of data on grammaticality (Smith 2004).
It is argued that the intuitions of an adult native speaker con-
stitute direct evidence for mental grammar, that is, the knowl-
edge of grammar residing in the head of an individual human
being. However, the judgment of what is and is not grammatical
is embedded in social convention. Whatever rule happens to be
mentally represented by a given individual, and whatever intu-
itions that rule gives rise to, its acceptance as part of the grammar
for a given language is judged in comparison with the intuitions
of other persons. hus, the grammaticality of a child utterance
will be judged against the intuitions of the parent or, in some
cases, a passing child language researcher. he social nature of
this process is rooted in the appointment (or self-appointment)
of one or more people as arbiters over the grammaticality of any
given utterance.
Evidently, decisions about when an error really is an error
are not entirely straightforward. And even when one has made
that judgment (on whatever basis), one is then faced with a fur-
ther diicult issue that has, hitherto, received scant attention. In
short, does a given error arise from an immature or incomplete
knowledge of grammar? Or is the underlying knowledge base
entirely adultlike, but somehow an error has slipped out, owing
to a technical hitch in production? In this vein, Chomsky (1965)
distinguished between competence and performance.
Competence refers to the speaker-hearers tacit knowledge of
his or her language. Performance, on the other hand, comprises
the use of this knowledge in producing speech. he utterances
we produce arise from both our linguistic competence and other
intervening performance factors, including the limitations of
short-term memory, motor control over the execution of speech
plans, and even the efects of anxiety or alcohol. Cognitive fac-
tors of this kind can cause errors to creep into our speech output
despite the fact that our linguistic knowledge (competence) may
be lawless.
Adult speech (in particular, speech directed toward other
adults) may be laden with false starts, hesitations, unnecessary
repetitions, and slips of the tongue. he default assumption about
adult errors is that they are the product of faulty performance.
Child speech errors, on the other hand, are more likely ascribed
to an immature competence. However, all the factors that apply
to adults as causes of performance errors apply equally well to
children. At the same time, the task of distinguishing errors of
competence from errors of performance is empirically fraught.
And tellingly, it is a task that researchers have not even begun
to tackle with any serious purpose (though, see Jaeger 2005 for
work on childrens slips of the tongue). With regard to adult
errors, there is also a scarcity of evidence to support the assump-
tion that they are, unfailingly, the product of performance fac-
tors. It may well turn out, on closer inspection, that adults vary in
terms of their grammatical competence.
As noted, theories of grammar acquisition tend to assume
that immature competence lies at the root of grammatical errors.
A notable exception is found in the study of childrens past tense
errors. he so-called words and rules theory suggests that when
children learn an irregular past tense form (e.g., broke), it auto-
matically blocks the application of the regular suixation process
(break + -ed breaked). In this way, errors are avoided (Marcus et
al. 1992). Of course, young children do produce errors from time
to time. To explain these errors, Gary F. Marcus and colleagues
(1992) suggest that young childrens memory retrieval system is
immature and sometimes lets them down. In consequence, the
child may occasionally fail in an attempt to retrieve an irregu-
lar form like broke. his failure then triggers the default regular
process to produce breaked. Hence, the explanation for child
errors is based on limitations in performance, not competence.
In support of this idea, it is argued that overregularization rates
are generally very low, something like 4 percent (Marcus et al.
1992). his rarity lends itself to a performance-based explana-
tion for what prompts the childs errors. In the event, error rates
may be considerably higher than initial estimates might indicate
(Maslen et al. 2004). Sampling limitations may mask brief peri-
ods of very high error rates, especially for high-frequency verbs.
A further problem is that there is no empirical support for the
speculation that errors are caused by failures in memory retrieval.
Very little is known about retrieval processes in young children,
especially in connection with language. Whatever the merits of
the words-and-rules account of past tense errors, it does at least
raise awareness that childrens grammatical errors may not nec-
essarily stem solely from an immature competence.
As noted, the fact that children produce errors in the course
of language acquisition is uncontroversial. Where controversy
does arise is in the attempt to explain how children expunge
errors and move toward a more adultlike system of grammar.
he obvious solution to the childs problem is for parents and
others to supply corrections. Corrections for grammatical errors
are often referred to as negative evidence, that is, evidence that
some structure is not permitted by the target grammar. However,
opinions difer sharply as to whether negative evidence is avail-
able to children. Roger Brown and C. Hanlon (1970) demon-
strated that parents do not overtly disapprove of their childrens
153
Childrens Grammatical Errors
grammatical errors. hus, they do not reliably mark grammat-
ical errors with injunctions like Dont say that or No, thats
wrong. his inding has exerted an enormous inluence in the
ield of child language, being hailed by Steven Pinker as one
of the most important discoveries in the history of psychology
(1988, 104). Undoubtedly, Pinker overstates the case. But his
enthusiasm stems from the perception that a crucial aspect of
linguistic knowledge could not have arisen in the childs mind
through the mediation of the environment. hat is, if children
receive no help or information in the input from parents con-
cerning what is or is not grammatical, then one must conclude
that the childs knowledge in this respect is innate. Observe that
the reach of this conclusion is extensive, since it could, conceiv-
ably, encompass each and every rule or principle of grammar
in a language.
Nativist enthusiasm for what is known as the no negative evi-
dence assumption is tempered by numerous empirical studies
that challenge this assumption. Beginning with Kathy Hirsh-
Pasek, R. Treiman, and M. Schneiderman (1984), researchers
have noted that the markers of disapproval examined by Brown
and Hanlon (1970) do not constitute the only possible form of
corrective input. More recent research has focused on the fre-
quent contrasts between erroneous child usage and correct
adult models that igure in childadult discourse (Chouinard
and Clark 2003; Saxton, Backley, and Gallaway 2005). he follow-
ing example is an exchange between my four-year-old son and
myself (emphases highlight the contrast in linguistic forms, not
pronunciation stress).
Child: I thinked about it with my brain.
Adult: You thought about it.
To function as a form of corrective input, contrasts of this kind
would have to be interpreted by the child as not simply model-
ing a correct form. he child would also have to regard them as
signals that their own previous usage was ungrammatical (for
evidence consistent with this view, see Saxton 1997 and Strapp
and Federico 2000). Curiously, Brown and Hanlon themselves
remarked on the corrective potential of contrastive discourse,
observing that repeats of ill-formed utterances usually con-
tained corrections and so could be instructive (1970, 43).
However, this observation was entirely overlooked for many
years, leading to a considerable distortion of the empirical facts.
At the same time, though, and as noted previously, the fact that
contrastive discourse is abundantly available to children does
not entirely resolve the matter. It still remains to be demon-
strated decisively that children actually perceive such contrasts
as a form of negative evidence and that they exploit that infor-
mation in shedding errors and arriving at a mature system of
grammar.
To conclude, childrens grammatical errors demand the
attention of language scientists for two reasons. First, and most
obvious, errors stand out. hey attract our attention like brightly
colored lags, lapping above the parapet. And, second, the
investigation of errors reveals much about the processes of lan-
guage acquisition. hey provide the paradigm demonstration
that language develops. he fact that errors occur at every level of
language, both in abundance and for extended periods of time,
154
Chirographic Culture
provides a strong stimulus for language scientists to seek expla-
nations for how and why language learners difer from fully com-
petent native speakers.
Matthew Saxton
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Berko Gleason, Jean. 1958. he childs learning of English morphology.
Word 14: 15077.
Brown, Roger, and C. Hanlon. 1970. Derivational complexity and order
of acquisition in child speech. In Cognition and the Development of
Language, ed. J. Hayes, 1153. New York: John Wiley.
Chomsky, Noam. 1959. Review of B. F. Skinners Verbal Behavior.
Language 35: 2658.
. 1965. Aspects of the heory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
. 1980. Rules and Representations. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Chouinard, Michelle M., and E. V. Clark. 2003. Adult reformulations
of child errors as negative evidence. Journal of Child Language
30: 63769.
Hirsh-Pasek, Kathy, R. Treiman, and M. Schneiderman. 1984. Brown
& Hanlon revisited: Mothers sensitivity to ungrammatical forms.
Journal of Child Language 11: 818.
Jaeger, Jeri J. 2005. Kids Slips: What Young Childrens Slips of the
Tongue Reveal about Language Development. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum.
Marcus, Gary F., S. Pinker, M. Ullman, M. Hollander, T. J. Rosen, and F.
Xu. 1992. Overregularization in Language Acquisition. Monographs of
the Society for Research in Child Development, serial no. 228.
Maslen, Robert J. C., A. L. heakston, E. M. V. Lieven, and M. Tomasello.
2004. A dense corpus study of past tense and plural overregulariza-
tion in English. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
47: 131933.
Newport, Elissa, H. Gleitman, and L. R. Gleitman. 1977. Mother, Id
rather do it myself: Some efects and non-efects of maternal speech
style. In Talking to Children: Language Input and Acquisition, ed. C.
Snow and C. Ferguson, 109149. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Pinker, Steven. 1988. Learnability theory and the acquisition of a
irst language. In he Development of Language and Language
Researchers: Essays in Honor of Roger Brown, ed. F. Kessel, 97119.
Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Saxton, Matthew. 1997. he contrast theory of negative input. Journal of
Child Language 24: 13961.
Saxton, Matthew, P. Backley, and C. Gallaway. 2005. Negative input for
grammatical errors: Efects after a lag of 12 weeks. Journal of Child
Language 32: 64372.
Scholz, Barbara C., and G. K. Pullum. 2006. Irrational nativist exuber-
ance. In Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science, ed. R. Stainton,
5980. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Skinner, Burrhus F. 1957. Verbal Behavior. New York: Appleton-Century-
Crofts.
Smith, Neil. 2004. Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals. 2d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Strapp, Chehalis M., and A. Federico. 2000. Imitations and rep-
etitions: What do children say following recasts? First Language
20.3: 27390.
CHIROGRAPHIC CULTURE
Writing and script are systems of graphic marks that repre-
sent words, syllables, or individual sounds (phonemes)
Chirographic Culture

of a language. Chirography shares the same deinition with

the added meaning of writing by hand. he term thus applies
to all the writing systems or scripts that followed the irst
invention of writing in Mesopotamia, circa 3200 b.c., and
before Gutenbergs invention of the printing press about
1437. Chirography is generally viewed as the gateway to com-
plex literate societies while leaving behind the archaic oral
cultures.
he nature and extent of the divide between oral and chiro-
graphic cultures has long been a matter of debate. In the ifth
century b.c., in Phaedrus and Letter VII, the Greek philosopher
Plato expressed his concerns with the impact of chirography on
human cognition. He warned that writing would weaken human
memory and threaten scholarship by allowing the ignorant to
fake omniscience. As discussed in Khosrow Jahandaries volume
Spoken and Written Discourse (1999), the present consensus is
less critical. Wherever chirography emerged, in Mesopotamia
about 3200 b.c., in China about 1250 b.c. and in Mesoamerica
circa 650 b.c., it is held as a productive supplement of speech.
his is based on the facts that, irst, the human voice can be
heard only by a small audience but written documents can be
sent to any destination, and, second, speech disappears instan-
taneously, leaving no trace, while texts can be preserved over Figure 1. Cuneiform tablet featuring a list of goods. Courtesy of the Texas
time. It is, therefore, generally agreed that chirography extends Memorial Museum, The University of Texas at Austin.
the network of human communication from culture to cul-
ture and makes it possible to trace the roots of cultures and their
evolution in history. Moreover, by reducing to order and clarity lineal conception of time, that they view events linearly, with a
a myriad of details, chirography is credited with revolutionizing beginning, a middle, and an end. And, in his view, the resulting
record keeping. Registers allow for administering communi- systematic sequential presentation of arguments translated into
ties and keeping track of entries and expenditures, proits, and a more rigorous logic.
losses of businesses. Finally, writing is recognized for creating Also in the 1960s, Eric A. Havelock analyzed how the adop-
data banks far beyond the power of human memory, resulting tion of the Semitic alphabet in Greece inluenced the organi-
in turn in the accumulation and articulation of an unlimited zation of ideas, abstraction, and consciousness. Havelock, as
quantity of complex data regarded as instrumental to the for- well as McLuhan, dealt primarily with alphabetic scripts. In
mulation of signiicant syntheses and the creation of new cogni- contrast, Walter J. Ong, S.J., university professor of humani-
tive skills. In other words, literacy is viewed as enhancing the ties at St. Louis University, and Jack Goody, anthropologist at
possibilities for socially distributed cognition, allowing Cambridge University, included in their analyses prealphabetic
civilization to grow more complex with the administration of chirographic systems, such as the Mesopotamian cuneiform
organizations of greater dimensions and larger political units, script and non-alphabetic oriental writing systems. Among its
the creation of more extensive economies, the development of many important contributions, Ongs book Orality and Literacy
complex sciences and technologies, and a more accurate knowl- ([1982] 1983) makes the case that the nonliterate relates to the
edge of the past. world in a concrete, situational way, downplaying generalization
he major priority of the twentieth century, however, has and abstraction. Relying on Aleksandr R. Lurias psychological
been to investigate the impact of chirography on the human ield work, Ong argued that the illiterate does not name geomet-
mind. With his famous adage the medium is the message, ric igures abstractly as circles or squares but as moons or
Marshall McLuhan emerged as a popular champion of literacy. plates, and doors or mirrors. Furthermore, the nonliterate
In his books he Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding avoids self-analysis, which requires abstracting the self from the
Media (1964), the Canadian media critic advocated that media surrounding world.
were not passive conduits of information but, rather, vortices of Goody, the author of he Domestication of the Savage Mind
power restructuring human perceptions. McLuhan argued that (1977) and he Interface Between the Written and the Oral (1987),
by translating sounds into a visual code, writing exchanged an investigated how the series of shifts involved in the develop-
eye for an ear and that [p]honetic culture endows men with the ment of writing restructured human thought. In particular,
means of repressing their feelings and emotions when engaged in he analyzed how the irst Mesopotamian texts that consisted
action (1964, 84, 88); he therefore claimed that literate humans exclusively of lists changed thought processes. He suggested
develop the power of acting with detachment from emotional that the lists of goods generated by the Mesopotamian admin-
involvement. He further emphasized the impact of the linear istration (Figure 1) or the sign lists compiled by scribes encour-
format of writing, pointing out that civilized societies acquire a aged scrutiny by selecting which items to include and which to

155
Chirographic Culture
Figure 2. Tokens from Uruk, Iraq, ca. 3300 B.C. Courtesy Vorderasiatisches
Museum Berlin, Germany.
exclude. Moreover, he argued that the lists segmented reality
by breaking down the perceptual world. For example, a list of
tree signs abstracted the trees from the forests to which they
belong. In other words, according to Goody, lists decontextu-
alize data but also regroup elements, ordering them by type,
shape, size, number, and so on. Consequently, lists reorganize
the world, transforming it into an ideal form and creating a new
reality upon which the literate is forced to relect at a new level
of generality.
Among other twentieth-century authors who considered
that writing afected the human mind, David R. Olson, pro-
fessor of applied cognitive science at the Ontario Institute
for Studies in Education, emphasized in he World on Paper
(1994) the importance of writing for relecting upon our-
selves. On the other hand, Bruno Latour, an anthropologist,
is among the scholars who disagree with the proposition that
writing created new cognitive skills. In an article in 1990, he
proposed that it is the combination of images and writing in
maps, charts, graphs, photos, and diagrams that create better
tools to allow scientists to foray into new ideas. Others credit
schooling, rather than writing, for increasing rationality and
abstract thought.
hese seminal studies of the 196080s must now be updated
by taking into account the archaeological discovery that
the cuneiform script, the earliest chirographic system, was
derived from an earlier visual code. As described by Denise
156
Schmandt-Besserat in Before Writing (1992) and How Writing
Came About (1996), a system of tokens was used to keep track
of goods in the Near East, starting about 7500 b.c. he tokens
were modeled in clay in multiple shapes, such as cones,
spheres, disks, and cylinders. Each token shape stood for a
unit of an agricultural product: A cone was a small measure
of grain, a sphere stood for a large measure of grain, and a cyl-
inder for an animal. Four thousand years later, in the urban
period circa 3300 b.c., the tokens had evolved into a complex
accounting device with a repertory of about 300 shapes, some
including additional incised or punched markings, to record
the various units of goods manufactured in workshops (Figure
2), such as wool, textiles and garments.
he fact that, in the Near East, the irst script was preceded
by a visual code a system of arbitrary symbols to represent
words sheds new light on chirographys contribution to soci-
ety. In particular, some of the merits formerly attributed to
writing have to be credited to the token system. For example,
tokens, not chirography, shifted an eye for an ear. Like texts,
the tokens were permanent and, therefore, could be transported
or stored. he clay artifacts symbolized units of real goods and
as such handled data in abstraction. Finally, like written lists,
tokens could organize information in successive lines in the
most concise way, allowing scanning, evaluating, scrutinizing,
and analyzing a budget. As a result, the token system stretched
human cognition by making it possible for the neolithic oral
cultures of the Near East to handle large amounts of complex
information.
Once appropriate recognition is given to the token system,
the revolutionary contributions of chirography become very
clear. First, chirography abstracted numbers (Figure 3). It
should be well understood that the tokens were used in one-to-
one correspondence, which means that one, two, or three small
measures of grain were shown by one, two, or three cones. But
numerals signs that represent numbers abstractly appeared
about 31003000 b.c., after the three-dimensional tokens were
replaced by their images pictographs traced onto clay tab-
lets. At this point, 10 jars of oil and 10 large units of grain were
no longer shown by 10 ovoid tokens and 10 spherical tokens
but by one sign standing for ten, followed by a sign for the
goods in question. Second, chirography abstracted the sounds
of speech. Whereas the tokens merely acted as logograms or
signs standing for a concept chirography created phonetic
syllabic signs to write personal names (see Figure 3). In sum,
compared to tokens that stood for concrete merchandise, the
chirographic numerals symbolized oneness, twoness, and
abstract constructs of the mind, and the chirographic phonetic
signs symbolized the immaterial and evanescent sounds of
the voice. By creating numerals and phonetic signs, chirogra-
phy, therefore, raised human cognition to far higher levels of
abstraction.
In the twentieth century, research on the impact of chi-
rography on cognition was conined to issues of interest to
the humanities. In the 21st century, however, the debate was
extended to the ield of art. In When Writing Met Art (2007),
Chirographic Culture
Figure 3. Pictographic tablet from Uruk, Iraq, ca. 3000 B.C. Courtesy
Deutsches Archaeologisches Institut, Berlin, Germany. The tablet features
a list of goods. In the upper cases, the units of merchandise are indi-
cated by pictographs or images of tokens traced in clay. Numerals are
shown with impressed signs. On the lower case, phonetic signs indicate
the name of the recipient or donor.
Schmandt-Besserat argued that ancient Near Eastern art com-
positions the way images are organized changed with the
advent of chirography in 31003000 b.c. She showed that pre-
literate painted or carved compositions consisted of the mere
repetitions of one motif as many times as necessary to cover a
surface. For instance, the same triangle or ibex was replicated
around the body of the vessel. In contrast, by borrowing the
strategies of writing, compositions of the chirographic cul-
tures were able to organize multiple igures into a narrative. To
illustrate this concept, large and small signs of writing denoted
greater or lesser units of goods and similarly, the size of images
indicated status. Gods were represented as larger than kings,
and the images of kings were shown larger than those of their
fellow citizens. Just as signs changed value by being placed to
the right or the left, above or below other signs, the heroes
actions and interactions were indicated by their orientation,
order, and direction. For instance, one igure standing in front
of another was understood as being more important than
one standing behind it. From writing, art also acquired ways
of loading images with information by using symbols akin to
determinatives signs denoting a general class. For instance,
the horned tiara indicated the divine status of a igure in the
same way the star-shaped sign dingir did in Sumerian cune-
iform texts. As a result, reading art became akin to reading
a text.
In sum, art, which is, in at least certain respects, a mirror
of culture, signals a conceptual change in design composi-
tions that coincides with the advent of chirography in the
ancient Near East. he preliterate lines of a repeated motif
were apprehended at a glance, but the narrative composi-
tions of chirographic cultures were read analytically, sequen-
tially. It is generally assumed that the Neolithic motifs, such
as triangles or ibexes, were symbols like the dove is a symbol
of peace in our culture. hus, the preliterate Near Eastern art
probably evoked ideas perhaps profound ideas but only the
art compositions of chirographic cultures could tell complex
stories.
On the basis of these recent indings, the immense legacy
of the irst handwritten texts can now be assessed with greater
clarity. Art demonstrates that chirography created a paradigm
that can be successfully implemented in other communication
systems. Archaeology shows that compared to its archaic token
precursor, chirography meant leaps in abstraction with the cre-
ation of numerals and phonetic signs. By inventing symbols
to express such numbers as 1, 10, and 60, chirography laid the
foundation for the development of mathematics. By represent-
ing the sounds of the voice by phonetic signs, chirography set
the stage for writing to become a universal system of communi-
cation emulating speech.
Denise Schmandt-Besserat
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Coulmas, F., ed. 1999. he Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
. 2003. Writing Systems: An Introduction to heir Linguistic Analysis.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goody, Jack. 1977. he Domestication of the Savage Mind.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 1987. he Interface between the Written and the Oral.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Havelock, Eric. A. 1963. Preface to Plato. Cambridge: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press.
Houston, Stephen D., ed. 2004. he First Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Jahandarie, Khosrow. 1999. Spoken and Written Discourse, A Multi-
disciplinary Perspective. Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing.
Latour, Bruno. 1990. Drawing things together. In Scientiic Practice,
ed.M. Lynch and S.Woolgar, 1968. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1962. he Gutenberg Galaxy: he Making of
Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
. 1964. Understanding Media: he Extensions of Man. New York: New
American Library.
Niditch, S. 1996. Oral World and Written Word. Louisville, KY:
Westminster John Knox Press.
Olson, David R. 1994. he World on Paper. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ong, Walter J., S. J. [1982] 1983. Orality and Literacy. London: Methuen.
Plato. 1973. Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII. Trans. Walter Hamilton.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Schmandt-Besserat, Denise. 1992. Before Writing. Austin: University of
Texas Press.
. 1996. How Writing Came About. Austin: University of Texas
Press.
. 2007. When Writing Met Art. Austin: University of Texas Press.
157
Clitics and Cliticization

CLITICS AND CLITICIZATION coincide (as with French object le, which is both unaccented and
distinctively positioned).
he unusual properties of little words have attracted the atten-
An association between them has been noted at least since
tion of generations of linguists. his is especially true of the items
the classic work of Jakob Wackernagel (1892), who pointed out
known to traditional grammar as enclitics and proclitics and to
that phonetically weak elements in the ancient Indo-European
modern linguistics simply as clitics. Diferent theoretical frame-
languages tended to cluster in second position within the sen-
works have highlighted diferent characteristics of what has often
tence, a position that was quite anomalous from the point of view
been seen as a unitary class of elements, with the result that two
of the rest of the syntax. Much later literature has treated the con-
quite distinct sorts of unusual behavior have not always been
nection between phonological weakness (and especially a lack
carefully distinguished.
of autonomous accent) and unusual positioning as essential,
although the two turn out to be quite separate characteristics,
Two Senses of Clitic not only logically but also empirically. he essential distinction
he etymology of the word clitic (from Greek kli:no lean) between them was pointed out by Arnold Zwicky (1977) and
brings out what seemed most distinctive to an earlier genera- further developed in much later literature, including Anderson
tion of scholars, their tendency to lean on or form part of a (2005).
prosodic unit with a preceding or following word, linked to
their typical lack of autonomous accent. Such attachment
Accounts of Clitic Behavior
may give rise to phonological words containing syntactically
Once we realize that it follows from the prosodically impov-
unrelated material as a result of linear adjacency. In addi-
erished nature of the elements concerned, the phonological
tion to standard cases in Greek, Latin, and Sanksrit, a well-
dimension of clitic behavior inds a natural account in more
known example of this is furnished by the Wakashan language
general theories of prosody and stress, as demonstrated in
Kwakwala, where determiner elements at the left edge of
work such as that of Elizabeth Selkirk (1995). he (morpho-)
nominal expressions (among other clitics) attach phono-
syntactic dimension is somewhat more controversial, how-
logically to the rightmost word of a preceding constituent. In
ever. Special clitics appear in a limited range of positions. Any
a sentence like mx id ida bgWanma-xa gnanma-sa
given clitic can be associated with some syntactic domain, and
kWixayu hit-Det man-Det child-Det club, he man hit the
within this domain it may appear initially, inally, postinitially
child with a club, the words bgWanma-xa man-Obj and
(in second position), preinally, or adjacent to the head of the
gnanma-sa child-Inst end in determiner elements that are
domain.
syntactically linked not to the phrase of which they are phono-
Syntacticians have tended to see special clitics as illing
logically a part but, rather, to the argument that follows in the
normal syntactic positions and then displaced to their sur-
sentence.
face position under the inluence of distinctive movement
In this case, the anomaly is a phonological grouping that does
principles within the syntax. One diiculty with this is the
not appear to relect syntactic organization, and this can plausi-
fact that in some languages (of which certain forms of Serbo-
bly be attributed to the prosodic weakness of the clitic (here the
Croatian are the most discussed), the element deining
determiners). In other instances, however, something else must
second position for the location of clitics is a unit in phono-
be at work. he pronominal object clitics in a French sentence
logical terms (a prosodic word) but not necessarily a unit that
like Je le lui donne I give it to him appear preceding the main
ought to be accessible to the syntax. An alternative that avoids
verb, a position in which objects cannot otherwise occur and
this diiculty is to note the close parallel between possible
which requires reference to ordering principles outside of the
positions for clitics and for aixes and to treat special clitics
languages normal syntax.
as a class of aixes introduced directly into the surface form
Elements appearing in unusual positions in this way are gen-
of phrases by principles closer to those of morphology than
erally also phonologically weak, and this has led to a tendency
to syntax.
to conlate the two sorts of exceptionality, taking prosodic weak-
ness (including lack of stress) as diagnostic of clitics and then
proposing distinctive ordering for the items so identiied. In fact,
Conclusion
he analysis of clitics and the principles by which they ind their
however, some prosodically weak elements appear only in posi-
place in sentence structure and prosody involve an intricate
tions that are quite normal syntactically (e.g., the reduced forms
interplay among all of the major components of grammatical
of is and has in Freds sleeping and Freds lost his dog), while some
structure, including syntax, phonology, morphology, and
elements that are positioned unusually along with other clitics
even semantics. hese elements have been invoked by schol-
are nonetheless prosodically full words, such as Tagalog tayo/
ars in all of these areas as evidence for fundamental claims about
natin we (incl.) and a number of other pronouns and particles
linguistic structure, and an assessment of those claims is only
in this language.
possible on the basis of a clearer understanding of the subdivi-
Such facts suggest that we should recognize two distinct
sions among clitics, and the appropriate mechanisms for accom-
dimensions of unusual behavior of clitics, one phonological
modating their speciic properties, than is often found in the
(associated with prosodic weakness) and the other syntactic
existing literature.
(associated with unusual positioning of a restricted sort, elements
commonly called special clitics). he two often, but not always, Stephen R. Anderson

158
Codeswitching
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Anderson, Stephen R. 2005. Aspects of the heory of Clitics. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Selkirk, Elizabeth. 1995. he prosodic structure of function words.
In Papers in Optimality heory, 43970. University of Massachusetts
Occasional Papers in Linguistics 18.
Wackernagel, Jakob. 1892. ber ein Gesetz der indogermanischen
Wortstellung. Indogermanische Forschungen 1: 333436.
Zwicky, Arnold. 1977. On Clitics. Bloomington: Indiana University
Linguistics Club.
CODESWITCHING
Introduction
Codeswitching (CS) is deined as the use of two or more language
varieties in the same conversation, not counting established bor-
rowed words or phrases. Two general types of structural conigu-
rations occur. 1) Intersentential CS, switches for one sentence
or many, is generally studied for its social implications (1). 2)
Intrasentential or intraclausal CS is more studied for its gram-
matical conigurations (24).
(1) (Policeman to heckler in Nairobi crowd, switching from
English to Swahilisentences)
How else can we restrain people from stealing except by
punishment?
Wewe si mtu ku-tu-ambia vile tu-ta-fanya kazi tu-na sheria
yetu.
Swahili translation: You arent a person to tell us how to do
our work we have our laws.
(Myers-Scotton 1993, 77)
(2) (A clause in French embedded in a Brussels Dutch clause)
[t is dat ][que jai dit madame].
hat is what that I told the lady.
(Trefers-Daller 1994, 30)
(3) (Single English content morpheme in a Hungarian-framed
clause)
jtsz-ok school-ot
play-s.pres school-acc
Im playing school.
(Bolonyai 1998, 34).
(4) (English verb stem with Swahili aixes in Swahili frame)
father a-li-m-buy-i-a vi-tabu a-ka-potez-a vy-ote
s-past-obj-buy-appl-fv cl-book s-consec-lose-
fv cl-all
father bought for him books and he lost all [of them]
(Myers-Scotton 1997, 87)
CS and Its Social Meanings
CS is a means of presenting a particular persona or negotiating
interpersonal relationships in a given interaction, making it a major
research topic for some sociolinguists and linguistic anthropol-
ogists. A starting point is John J. Gumperzs (1982) notion that CS is
one of the possible contextualization cues of the speakers prag-
matic intentions. Also, researchers often mention E. Gofmans
concept of footing, and M. Bakhtins concept of speakers mul-
tiple voices that are echoes of earlier utterances.
Many studies remain at the descriptive level, but at least two
models ofer explanations for why CS occurs within a discourse.
conversation analysis (CA) analysts emphasize a switchs
sequential positioning in conversation, claiming that it provides
vital information about its sociopragmatic message (Auer 1998
inter alia; Li 2005). In contrast, the markedness model empha-
sizes that speakers use CS as a tool to present a certain persona;
they exploit participants sense of the indexicality of each code
(see indexicals) and of the contrast between the social import
of codes in a given context (Myers-Scotton 1993 inter alia).
Some analysts, such as B. Rampton, C. Stroud, and J. Gafaranga,
emphasize CS as exemplifying the speakers creative agency.
CS researchers agree on two points: 1) To engage in CS is
largely an unconscious move, and 2) speakers seldom intend
a single, speciic meaning; potentially ambiguous or multiple
meanings are part of the pragmatic message.
Two overlapping generalizations capture diferences in vari-
ous approaches. First, the meaning of strategy, with its implica-
tion that CS carries messages of intentionality, divides analysts.
Second, analysts difer on the role of community values and
participants own sociolinguistic proiles, as well as a varietys
multiple associations, as they relate to a speakers motivation for
making a switch.
CS and Its Grammatical Structure
Most analysts agree that CS has a principled grammatical struc-
ture, but the principles they propose to constrain sentence/clause
structure vary. Many early studies employed a linear-based
framework; for example, Shana Poplack (1980) argues that pos-
sible switching depends on surface-level syntactic equivalences
across participating languages. Some place importance on distin-
guishing borrowing from CS through quantitative analyses (e.g.,
Budzakh-Jones 1998). In contrast, he matrix language frame
model links CS at abstract levels to psycholinguistic models
of language production (Myers-Scotton 1997, 2002). Asymmetries
between the structuring roles of the participating languages are
stressed. Also, languages do not supply morpheme types equally.
he 4-M model and a uniform structure principle explain diferent
morpheme distributions with more precision (cf. Myers-Scotton
and Jake 2009). Still other researchers argue that current syntactic
theory of mainstream generative grammar, though intended
for monolingual data, can explain CS parisomiously (MacSwan
2000). Although CS involves bilingual data (see bilingualism
and multilingualism), researchers claim that no dominant
or matrix language is needed. his conclusion is debated (cf.
MacSwan 2005a, 2005b and Jake, Myers-Scotton, and Gross 2002,
2005). CS as a vehicle in convergence in grammatical patterns is
also studied (e.g., Muysken 2000; Clyne 2003; Backus 2005).
Carol Myers-Scotton
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Auer, Peter, ed. 1998. Code-switching in Conversation: Language,
Interaction and Identity. London: Routledge.
Backus, Ad. 2005. Codeswitching and language change: One thing leads
to another? International Journal of Bilingualism 9: 33740.
Bolonyai, Agnes. 1998. In-between languages: Language shift/mainte-
nance in childhood bilingualism. International Journal of Bilingualism
2: 2143.
159
Cognitive Architecture
Budzhak-Jones, Svitlana. 1998. Against word-internal codeswitch-
ing: Evidence from Ukrainian-English bilingualism. International
Journal of Bilingualism 2: 16182.
Clyne, Michael. 2003. Dynamics of Language Contact.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gumperz, John J. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Jake, Janice, Carol Myers-Scotton, and Steven Gross. 2002. Making a
minimalist approach to codeswitching work: Adding the matrix lan-
guage. Bilingualism, Language & Cognition 5: 6991.
. 2005. A response to MacSwan (2005): Keeping the matrix lan-
guage. Bilingualism, Language, and Cognition 8: 2716.
Li, Wei. 2005. How can you tell?: Towards a common sense expla-
nation of conversational code-switching. Journal of Pragmatics
37: 37589.
MacSwan, Jef. 2000. he architecture of the bilingual language fac-
ulty: Evidence from intrasentential code switching. Bilingualism,
Language, and Cognition 3: 3754.
. 2005a. Making a minimalist approach to codeswitching
work: Adding the matrix language. Bilingualism, Language, and
Cognition 5: 6991.
. 2005b. Remarks on Jake, Myers-Scotton and Grosss
response: here is no matrix language. Bilingualism, Language and
Cognition 8: 27784.
Muysken, Pieter. 2000. Bilingual Speech, A Typology of Code-mixing.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Myers-Scotton, Carol. 1993. Social Motivations for Codeswitching: Evidence
from Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
. 1997. Duelling Languages, Grammatical Structure in
Codeswitching. 2d ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
. 2002. Contact Linguistics: Bilingual Encounters and Grammatical
Outcomes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
. 2006. Multiple Voices: An Introduction to Bilingualism.
Oxford: Blackwell. Chapters 6 and 9 deal with codeswitching for
advanced undergraduates.
Myers-Scotton, Carol, and Janice Jake. 2009. A universal model of code-
switching and bilingual language processing and production. In he
Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-Switching, ed. B. Bullock and
A. Toribio, 33657. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Poplack, Shana.1980. Sometimes Ill start a sentence in English Y
TERMINO EN ESPAOL: Toward a typology of code-switching.
Linguistics 18: 581618.
Trefers-Daller, Jeanine. 1994. Mixing Two Languages: French-Dutch
Contact in a Comparative Perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Winford, Donald. 2003. An Introduction to Contact Linguistics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winford provides a compre-
hensive overview of codeswitching designed for beginning graduate
students.
COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE
The Architecture of a Computer
he cognitive sciences have developed in large part from the
application of concepts that initially arose in computer science.
One such concept is that of architecture.
he term computer architecture was originated by Frederick P.
Brooks, Jr., a pioneering force in the creation of IBMs early com-
puters. For Brooks, computer architecture, like other architec-
ture, is the art of determining the needs of the user of a structure
and then designing to meet those needs as efectively as possible
within economic and technological constraints (1962, 5).
160
As digital computers evolved, so, too, did the notion of com-
puter architecture. Computer designers had to pay attention not
only to the needs of the user but also to additional constraints
that arose with the development of high-level programming
languages and with the invention of new hardware technolo-
gies. Brookss more modern deinition of architecture relects
these developments: he architecture of a computer system we
deine as the minimal set of properties that determine what pro-
grams will run and what results they will produce. he architec-
ture is thus the systems functional appearance to its immediate
user (Blaauw and Brooks 1997, 3). he key element here is that
a computers architecture describes the information-processing
capacities of a device without appealing to its speciic hardware
properties. In short, a computers architecture is a description
of its logical and abstract information-processing properties
(Dasgupta 1989).
The Cognitive Architecture
he concept cognitive architecture is the direct result of apply-
ing the notion of computer architecture to human cognition.
Cognitive scientists assume that cognition is information pro-
cessing (e.g., Dawson 1998). Cognition as information process-
ing must therefore be characterized by a fundamental set of
logical and abstract properties (e.g., a primitive set of symbols
and operations). By identifying this set of properties for human
cognition, one speciies the cognitive architecture.
For example, Z. W. Pylyshyn isolates the basic operations for
storing and retrieving symbols, comparing them, treating them
diferently as a function of how they are stored (hence, as a func-
tion of whether they represent beliefs or goals), and so on, as well
as such basic resources and constraints of the system, as a lim-
ited memory. It also includes what computer scientists refer to as
the control structure, which selects which rules to apply at vari-
ous times (1984, 30). It is no accident that this account empha-
sizes symbols and primitive operations for their manipulation.
his is because Pylyshyn wants to ensure that the architecture
is indeed cognitive, which for him means that it must be repre-
sentational: It [the cognitive architecture] is the level at which
the system is representational, and where the representations
correspond to the objects of thought (1991,191). here may be
other levels of system organization above and below the cogni-
tive architecture, but researchers like Pylyshyn would argue that
these levels are not cognitive.
Architecture and Explanation
Brookss (1962) original notion of computer architecture was
driven by the goals of computer design: he architecture served
as a functional account of capabilities to be used as a blueprint by
hardware engineers in order to bring a computer into being. In
the study of cognition and language, the information processor
already exists. Why, then, is there a need for the cognitive archi-
tecture? he answer is that an architectural account converts a
cognitive description into a cognitive explanation.
Architectural components convert descriptions into expla-
nations by providing a bridge between functional and physical
accounts. hey can do this because components of the cog-
nitive architecture must be both cognitive and physical (e.g.,
Haugeland 1985, 100).
Cognitive Architecture
hese two lives are important because the predominant
research methodology used by cognitive scientists is functional
analysis (Cummins 1983). In functional analysis, a researcher
attempts to account for some complex function by decompos-
ing it into an organized system of subfunctions. Each subfunc-
tion often becomes the subject of its own functional analysis;
this methodology is intrinsically iterative. However, if this were
all that there was to this methodology, functional analysis would
fall victim to an ininite regress and generate an ininite variety of
unexplained functions (Ryle 1949).
To avoid Ryles regress, functional analysis also attempts to
progressively simplify the proposed subfunctions: he highest
level design breaks the computer down into a committee or army
of intelligent homunculi with purposes, information and strate-
gies. Each homunculus in turn is analyzed into smaller homun-
culi, but, more important, into less clever homunculi (Dennett
1978, 80). At some point, the less clever homunculi become so
simple that they can be replaced by physical devices that carry
out the desired function. At this point, the functional descrip-
tion is physically subsumed (Cummins 1983) and becomes
explanatory.
From this perspective, the cognitive architecture can be
described as the set of primitive functions that have been sub-
sumed in a functional analysis. heir functional or cogni-
tive role deines how these components mediate complex
information processing. heir physical role deines how such
processing can be physically implemented and explained.
Architecture and Language
To the extent that language is mediated by information process-
ing, an explanation of language must be grounded in a cognitive
architecture. In many respects, linguistics provides prototypical
examples of architectural accounts of language. However, it can
also be argued that the cognitive architecture holds an uneasy
position within some linguistic theories.
On the one hand, dominant theories in linguistics appear
to provide architectural accounts of language. We have already
seen that a cognitive architecture requires a set of functions
to be established as primitives by subsuming them as neural
implementations. From its inception, the standard Chomskyan
approach to language appears to strive toward this kind of archi-
tectural account.
First, the speciication of a generative grammar provides
a detailed account of a set of complex tokens, and the rules for
their manipulation, that are required to assign structural descrip-
tions to sentences. Furthermore, this grammar is intended to
describe (at least in part) cognitive processing: Every speaker has
mastered an internalized a generative grammar that expresses
his knowledge of his language (Chomsky 1965, 8). In short, one
purpose of a generative grammar is to describe the functional
properties of an internalized set of symbols and rules.
Second, the Chomskyan tradition presumes a strong link
between generative grammar and the brain. his link is included
in the general view that the language faculty is a biological organ
(Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002). According to Chomsky,
he human brain provides an array of capacities that enter
into the use and understanding of language (the language fac-
ulty); these seem to be in good part specialized for that function
and a common human endowment (1995, 167). Complete
accounts of human language must appeal to these biological
underpinnings.
hus, in the Chomskyan tradition, an architectural account
would include the speciication of a generative grammar, as
well as additional processes that are necessary and suicient for
mediating language. Furthermore, this account would be bio-
logically grounded.
On the other hand, the Chomskyan tradition takes strong
positions that conlict with the general notion of cognitive archi-
tecture sketched earlier. Two of these positions require special
mention here. he irst is that a theory in linguistics should focus
on competence, and not performance. he second is that
the language faculty is modular in the sense of J. A. Fodor
(1983).
hese positions are important because both have been used
to exclude certain concepts from linguistic study that are critical
components of the cognitive architecture. For example, memory
has not been deemed to be properly part of the linguistic domain.
hat is, while memory might impact language production or
comprehension (e.g., by limiting the number of embedded
clauses that can be processed), some researchers would argue
that memory is not part of the language faculty proper. For some,
memory limitations are viewed as being important to a theory
of language performance, but not to a theory of language com-
petence (e.g., Chomsky 1965). Furthermore, memory limitations
are related to a general cognitive resource, which by deinition
therefore cannot be solely part of a language faculty (Hauser,
Chomsky, and Fitch 2002).
More recent variations of the Chomskyan approach provide
a more lexible view of the competence/performance distinc-
tion and, as a result, lead to theories that make strong proposals
about cognitive architecture as construed earlier: A theory that
allows us to readily relate competence to performance ought to
be favored over one that creates hard boundaries between the
two (Jackendof 2002, 197).
Jackendofs parallel architecture (2002) is one such theory.
He assumes that syntax is not the only system responsible for
the combinatorial nature of language. Instead, he proposes a par-
allel architecture in which three separate levels (phonology,
syntax, and semantics) are independent, each having their
own primitive operations and combinatorial principles. hough
independent, the three levels are linked by interface constraints.
hus, all three levels cooperate to produce the generative struc-
ture of language. Furthermore, this theory of linguistic structure
can be mapped to a parallel architectural theory in which each
level is a modular processor, but there are interfaces between the
three processors that share a common linguistic memory.
he preceding discussion of language and the cognitive archi-
tecture has emphasized theories that adopt a so-called classical
perspective that emphasizes the rule-governed manipulation of
symbols. It is important to realize that alternative architectures
for language have also been explored. For instance, classical
researchers have argued that artiicial neural networks are not
capable of modeling the generative properties of language (Fodor
and Pylyshyn 1988). However, empirical and theoretical analy-
ses would indicate that this criticism is not valid (Hadley and
Hayward 1997; Siegelmann 1999). As a result, many examples
161
Cognitive Grammar
exist in which neural networks have been used to model a variety
of language phenomena (Mammone 1993; Sharkey 1992).
Michael R. W. Dawson
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Blaauw, G. A., and F. P. Brooks. 1997. Computer Architecture: Concepts
and Evolution. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Brooks, F. P. 1962. Architectural philosophy. In Planning a Computer
System Project Stretch, ed W. Buchholz, 516. New York: McGraw-
Hill.
Chomsky, N. 1965. Aspects of the heory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
. 1995. he Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cummins, R. 1983. he Nature of Psychological Explanation. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press. Explores the role of the architecture in providing
explanatory power to functional analyses.
Dasgupta, S. 1989. Computer Architecture: A Modern Synthesis. New
York: Wiley.
Dawson, M. R. W. 1998. Understanding Cognitive Science.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Dennett, D. 1978. Brainstorms. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. A. 1983. he Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. A., and Z. W. Pylyshyn. 1988. Connectionism and cognitive
architecture. Cognition 28: 371.
Hadley, R. F., and M. B. Hayward. 1997. Strong semantic systematic-
ity from Hebbian connectionist learning. Minds and Machines
7: 137.
Haugeland, J. 1985. Artiicial Intelligence: he Very Idea. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Hauser, M. D., N. Chomsky, and W. T. Fitch. 2002. he faculty of
language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science
298: 156979.
Jackendof, R. 2002. Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning,
Grammar, Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Provides an
overview of the state of linguistics that pays special attention to archi-
tectural issues.
Mammone, R. J. 1993. Artiicial Neural Networks for Speech and Vision.
New York: Chapman and Hall. Contains many examples of artiicial
neural networks applied to speciic areas of speech and language.
Pylyshyn, Z. W. 1984. Computation and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press. A detailed examination of the role of cognitive architecture in
cognitive science.
. 1991. he role of cognitive architectures in theories of cognition.
In Architectures for Intelligence, ed. K. VanLehn, 189223. Hillsdale,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Ryle, G. 1949. he Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson and Company.
Sharkey, N. E. 1992. Connectionist Natural Language Processing.
Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Siegelmann, H. T. 1999. Neural Networks and Analog Computation: Beyond
the Turing Limit. Boston: Birkhauser.
COGNITIVE GRAMMAR
Cognitive Grammar (CG) refers to the theory of language artic-
ulated most comprehensively in Ronald W. Langacker (1987,
1991), two mutually dependent volumes that are best read
together. Langacker (1988) provides a succinct chapter-length
overview of his theory, while Taylor (2002) and Evans and Green
(2006, 553640) are highly recommended as student-oriented
introductions to the theory. CG is wide ranging in its scope and
provocative in its approach to an understanding of linguistic
162
structure. It has played a key role in the history of cognitive
linguistics.
Fundamental to CG is the idea that language is an integral
part of human cognition and cannot be properly understood
without reference to cognitive abilities. A pervasive feature of
CG is the determination to reconcile accounts of linguistic struc-
ture with what is known about cognitive processing in domains
other than language. CG contrasts in this respect with models
that insist upon a discrete, autonomous grammar module and
the autonomy of syntax. he cognitive orientation of CG
is apparent from a reliance on notions such as sensory imag-
ery, perspective, mental scanning, attention, and igure versus
ground asymmetry in accounting for linguistic phenomena. In
broad terms, grammatical structure is explained as conventional
imagery, with alternate structures relecting alternate construals
of the conceived situation.
Not surprisingly, the cognitive notions underlying CG assume
a relatively abstract interpretation when applied to some aspects
of linguistic structure. For example, cognitive processes such as
registration of contrast, scanning of a ield, and perception of a
boundary are all deemed relevant for explicating the notion of a
count noun, understood as a bounded region in some domain
in Langacker (1987, 189203). Such processes may be obvi-
ous factors in the conceptualization of nouns with clear spatial
boundaries (e.g., cup, pencil), but a more abstract interpretation
of these processes is clearly required in other domains. Body-part
nouns (e.g., waist, shoulder, side) must be explicated in terms of a
virtual boundary that does not correspond to any visible, objec-
tively identiiable demarcation. Likewise, the notions of igure
and ground familiar from the study of perception are seen as
underpinning various relational asymmetries in language. hese
notions have most obvious relevance in the case of words relat-
ing to the spatial domain, such as the contrasting pair above and
below, where there is a igure-ground reversal of the igure and
the conceptual reference point. he terms trajector (an adapta-
tion of the notion of igure) and landmark (an adaptation of the
notion of ground) are used to refer to the speciically linguistic
manifestation of the perceptual notions of igure and ground,
such that the book is the trajector and the table is the landmark
in the book under the table. Conversely, the table is the trajector
and the book is the landmark in the table over the book. More
abstractly still, the traditional syntactic contrast between subject
and object is construed in terms of relative salience, such that the
subject is a primary clausal igure, or trajector, and the object is a
secondary clausal igure, or landmark.
At the heart of CG is the concept of a symbolic unit, consist-
ing of semantic structure standing in correspondence to a
phonological structure. Consistent with the idea that language
is part of conceptual structure, semantic structure is understood
as conceptualization tailored to the speciications of linguistic
convention (Langacker 1987, 99; see Talmy 2000, 4 for a similar
view of semantic structure). CG takes the notion of symbolic unit
(similar to, but not to be equated simply with, the Saussurean
sign) as fundamental and applicable at all levels of representa-
tion, including lexical items, grammatical classes, and gram-
matical constructions. he lexical item tree, for example, consists
of a semantic unit [tree] and a corresponding phonological unit
[tri], which combine to form the symbol for tree, [[tree]/[tri]].
Cognitive Grammar
he same apparatus is applicable for deining a word class such
as a noun, abbreviated by Langacker as [[thing]/[]], indicat-
ing a schematic semantic speciication of a thing but without
any speciic content phonologically. A morphologically more
complex lexical item such as trees is represented as a composite
structure integrating two symbolic units representing the noun
tree and the plural [z]: [[[tree]/[tri]]-[[pl]/[z]]]. Grammatical
constructions are in principle no diferent from a lexical item like
trees in terms of the descriptive apparatus required to capture all
the relevant detail, with each of the component structures of a
construction represented by a symbolic unit. Grammatical mor-
phemes appearing in a construction, such as of, are treated as
symbolic units in their own right, with semantic structure (of, for
example, speciies a partwhole relation). he integration of any
two symbolic units goes hand in hand with distinguishing the
dependent and autonomous parts of the composite structure.
As far as semantic structure is concerned, [tree] is autonomous,
while [pl] is dependent, requiring an elaboration by a noun to
complete the structure. In terms of phonological structure, [tri] is
pronounceable as a whole syllable and can be considered auton-
omous, while the single consonant [z] is dependent.
A striking feature of CG is the detail provided for in the inte-
gration of structures into larger composite structures. he analy-
sis of the English passive construction in Langacker ([1991] 2001,
10147) illustrates the theoretical notions relevant to a detailed
grammatical description and is recommended as a prime exam-
ple of a full-blown CG account of a construction type. Briely, and
consistent with the foregoing remarks, each morpheme in the
passive (including by and the auxiliary verbs) has its own sym-
bolic representation, giving rise to the overall semantic structure,
just as the active counterpart has its own compositional struc-
ture and resulting semantic structure. Passive clauses do not
derive from active clauses in this view, nor do they derive from
some abstract structure underlying actives and passives. Rather,
passive clauses exist in their own right as instantiations of a con-
struction type with its own distinctive way of integrating sym-
bolic units, relecting a particular construal of the event.
While phonological structure can be fruitfully explored
within CG (see Langacker 1987, 32848, 388400; Taylor 2002,
7895), it is semantic structure that has received most attention
and for which most theoretical apparatus has been developed.
Fundamental to semantic structure is the idea of a network that
is employed to represent polysemy relationships and to provide
motivation for conventional and novel extensions. Each node of
the semantic network, together with the associated phonological
structure, represents a semantic variant of the lexical item.
Two types of relationships igure prominently in these net-
works: schematicity, whereby one node of the network expresses
a meaning fully contained in another node (see schema), and
extension, understood as a relationship between semantic nodes
of a lexical item involving a conlict in semantic speciications.
he word head, for example, can be assigned a sense [part of a
whole which controls the behavior of the whole] that is
schematic relative to iner-grained elaborations, such as [part
of the human body where thinking is located] and [person
who manages an administrative unit]. In some cases, a high-
est-level node or superschema can be proposed, encompassing
all lower-level senses in the network, though such superschemas
are not feasible for every network. he extensive polysemy of
head, for example, makes one single superschema covering such
diverse senses as head of a lettuce, head of a bed, head of
a university department, and so on unlikely. Semantic exten-
sion holds between the more basic sense of human head and
the sense of head of an administrative unit. he node that is
the source of the extension constitutes a local prototype (with
respect to the extended sense); where one node is experienced
as representative of the whole category, as is likely in the case of
the human head sense of head, we speak of a global prototype.
here is clearly variation among speakers in their judgments
about nodes and relationships within the network, including
their ability to identify relatedness of senses and to extract sche-
matic meanings. his variation poses challenges for description
but does not negate the need to acknowledge the reality of such
networks.
CG adopts a nonreductionist or maximalist stance in its anal-
ysis of linguistic structure, contrasting with prevailing reduction-
ist, minimalist approaches in contemporary linguistics. he
nonreductionist approach of CG explicitly provides for the list-
ing of highly speciic patterns alongside the statement of more
general patterns, rather than recognizing only the most general
rules and schemas. he existence of a general rule of plural for-
mation in English suixing /s/~/z/~/z/ to a noun, for example,
does not mean that certain instantiations of the rule, such as cats,
dogs, horses, and so on, have no place in a grammatical descrip-
tion. On the contrary, where such instantiations have gained unit
status and are activated directly by the speakers, it is appropri-
ate to recognize them alongside other symbolic units, grammar
and lexicon forming a continuum of types of symbolic elements.
Even when particular instantiations conform to a general rule,
they may acquire unit status in their own right, for example,
through high frequency of use. Acknowledging low-level, highly
speciic instantiations runs counter to deeply entrenched prac-
tices in contemporary linguistics, which has been preoccupied
with higher-level generalizations and the principle of economy
in description.
Langacker has repeatedly emphasized the desirability of both
general and particular statements in linguistic description, refer-
ring to the assumption that a phenomenon is to be accounted
for in a mutually exclusive way as either a rule or a list as the
rule/list fallacy (Langacker 1987, 402). Grammar, in CG terms,
amounts to a structured inventory of conventional linguistic
units (Langacker 1987, 73). he units, so conceived, may be
semantic or phonological; they range from the symbolic units
consisting of a single morpheme to larger composite symbolic
units at the clause level, and they include highly speciic, as well
as highly schematic, units. his conception of grammar makes
CG comparable to construction grammars, which are also
inventory-based (cf. Evans and Green 2006, 47583), particularly
radical construction grammar (Croft 2001).
By including quite speciic syntagmatic patterns within a
grammatical description, CG is able to comfortably accom-
modate phenomena that have been largely neglected in lin-
guistic theorizing, for example, the collocational patterning of
great idea, absolutely fabulous, and so on involving combina-
tions of particular words. he greater emphasis on speciic pat-
terning makes CG highly compatible with the methodology of
163
Cognitive Linguistics and Language Learning
corpus linguistics and other approaches that focus on lan-
guage in use whereby actual usage, including frequency of occur-
rence and patterns of co-occurrence, can be observed and used
as a basis for extracting patterns of varying generality (see also
the entries treating connectionism). Fully general, exception-
less rules are seen as atypical, and while it is valid to seek out
such rules, it would be misguided in this approach to attend only
to the most general patterns.
Finally, a word on notation employed in CG. here is an array
of notational devices used by Langacker, who employs a distinc-
tive and highly original geometric style of representation (in his
earlier publications, he used the term Space Grammar to refer
to his approach). To some extent, the notation is intuitive: A
circle is used to denote a [thing] entity; thicker, darker lines
represent the proile, that is, the designated thing or relation in
the semantic structure of a morpheme. A full appreciation of the
notation, however, requires careful study. Of course, not all the
detail needs to be represented all the time, and CG ideas can be
efectively incorporated into linguistic analyses simply in prose
or with a minimum of notation (as in Taylor 2002).
John Newman
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Croft, William. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic heory in
Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Evans, Vyvyan, and Melanie Green. 2006. Cognitive Linguistics: An
Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 1.
heoretical Prerequisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
. 1988. An overview of cognitive grammar. In Topics in Cognitive
Linguistics, ed. Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn, 348. Amsterdam and
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
. 1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 2. Descriptive
Application. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
. [1991] 2001. Concept, Image, and Symbol: he Cognitive Basis of
Grammar. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. he chapters in
this volume cover key areas of grammar (grammatical valence, case,
passive, etc.) and can be read more or less independently of one
another a good balance between CG theory and application to data.
Newman, John. 2004. he quiet revolution: Ron Langackers fall quar-
ter 1977 lectures. In Imagery in Language: Festschrift in Honour
of Professor Ronald W. Langacker, ed. Barbara Lewandowska-
Tomaszczyk and Alina Kwiatkowska, 4360. his chapter gives a irst-
hand account of an early presentation of the material that eventually
became Langacker (1987).
Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Vol. 1. Concept
Structuring Systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Taylor, John. 2002. Cognitive Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE LEARNING
A fundamental challenge for any theory of language is to provide
a convincing account of how the prelinguistic child becomes a
competent member of his or her linguistic community. To be
convincing, the developmental account should be consistent
with the general model of language posited for the adult sys-
tem. Michael Tomasello (2003, 45) calls this the how do we get
there (to the adult language system) from here (the pre-linguistic
infant) problem. A cognitive linguistic approach to the adult
164
language system holds that language is a relection of human
cognition and that language can be accounted for by the inter-
action of the complex set of cognitive capabilities with which
humans are endowed. Language is understood to emerge from
contextualized use; that is, it is usage based. he language
system to be learned is an inventory of linguistic constructions
(units with a phonological pole, i.e., the constructions form,
and a semantic pole, i.e., the constructions meaning) which
range in size from lexical items and morphemes to syntactic
and even discourse (see discourse analysis [linguistic])
patterns. he challenge for language acquisitionists working
within a cognitive linguistic framework is to account for the rapid
learning of this vast array of linguistic patterns, drawing solely on
general cognitive processes. Over the past 25 years, developmen-
tal psychologists have developed a large body of observational
and experimental evidence that begins to do just that.
Elizabeth Bates famously said, Language is a tool. We use it
to do things (1976, 1). Cognitive linguists hold that the primary
thing for which we use language is communication. Humans
are highly social by nature. We also have the unique ability to
think about entities and events that are not in the immediate envi-
ronment. Since we cannot communicate using mental telepathy,
we have to somehow externalize our internal conceptualizations
to make them available to others. Language is the major tool we
have developed to accomplish this task. Cognitive linguists hold
that when children learn a language, what they are learning is
constructions, of varying sizes and degrees of abstractness, as
they engage in using language in context. his learning process
takes place over a rather extended period of time, with most of
the pieces in place by the time the child is six or seven.
According to the developmental psychologist Jean Mandler
(2004), children begin forming rudimentary concepts, many
of which form the basic semantic frames from which language is
constructed, in early infancy. Very early on, the infant begins a
cognitive process of reformatting raw perceptional information
into simple, schematized spatial representations that express
fundamental experiences, such as self-motion, caused motion,
and containment (see schema ). Experimental evidence shows
that by three months, the infant can distinguish typical human
motion from mechanical motion. he infant learns that certain
entities start up under their own power while others do not. he
same entities that generate self-motion can also cause other
entities to move or change; the entities that do not generate
self-motion tend to be acted upon, and so on. he constellation
of these perceptually grounded generalizations form the basis
for fundamental concepts, such as animacy, inanimacy, and
caused motion. Such categories, in turn, represent the seman-
tic frames for basic syntactic patterns, such as intransitive and
transitive constructions, and participant roles, such as agent
and patient (see thematic roles ). A wide range of infant
studies provides rather clear evidence that infants are actively
observing and exploring their world, forming generalizations
across events and entities, and in the process developing con-
cepts and rudimentary syntactic-semantic frames that are the
foundation of language. hese concepts are largely in place by
nine months.
Other researchers provide evidence that prelinguistic chil-
dren generalize over units of spoken language and ind linguistic
Cognitive Linguistics and Language Learning
patterns. For instance, several studies show that children as
young as eight months are sensitive to repeated patterns of syl-
lables; this particular pattern inding forms the basis for rec-
ognizing words in the auditory stream (e.g., Safran, Aslan,
and Newport 1996, 19268; see word recognition, audi-
tory and speech perception in infants). In general, this
approach to language learning argues that language is extracted
from the patterns of usage events experienced by the child; the
system is derived from and grounded in contextualized utter-
ances. For instance, the evidence suggests that the childrens
early word forms are shaped by the salience of particular types of
words in the adults speech. English children irst produce rela-
tional words such as more, up, of, which seem to have particu-
lar salience in adult speech directed to children, and later fuller
verb forms, such as take of. In contrast, Korean childrens irst
verb forms are full forms that relect the salient forms in adult
speech. (Choi and Gopnik 1996). In line with the commitment
to cognitive generalization, pattern inding is not limited to
language; it is essential to all types of category formation (see
categorization).
Tomasello argues that intention-reading skills are also neces-
sary to account for language learning. At around 9 to 12 months,
the young child begins to engage in a number of activities in
which he or she actively attends to and participates in commu-
nicative interaction. Around this age, children engage in joint
attentional frames in which the child coordinates and shares
attention with another participant around a third entity, for
instance, when the infant and parent attend to the same object
or when the infant follows the eye gaze or gesture of an adult
in order to attend to a distal object or event. hese are activities
that create common shared ground for communication that
involves intentional communication about something outside
the dyad. he communicative events that take place within joint
attentional frames have the quality of focusing on a goal-directed
activity in which both the child and the adult are participating.
Within the context of the joint attentional frame, the infant can
begin to understand the adults use of pieces of language in coor-
dination with communicative intent. his is the grounding
for the young children to recognize that those around them are
intentional agents, like themselves, and further, that language is
used intentionally to manipulate the attention, mental state, or
even actions of the other person.
At this age, children also begin using verbal cues in order to
perform intentional actions; for instance, for varying purposes,
the child begins to use linguistic symbols to direct the adults
attention to something outside the immediately shared frame.
In order to do this successfully, the child must engage in what
Tomasello terms role-reversal imitation. It is not enough to sim-
ply repeat the adults language; the child must learn to use a sym-
bol toward the adult in the same intentional way the adult uses it
towards him or her. Tomasello argues that it is not a coincidence
that shortly after young children begin to engage in joint atten-
tion sharing, they also begin to produce their irst truly linguistic
symbols. Although these early utterances are one-word phrases
or unanalyzed chucks, such as whats-that (holophrases; see
holophrastic stage), they have a range of functions, includ-
ing imperative, declarative, and interrogative, that are typically
distinguished by distinct intonation contours. Intention-
reading skills are general cognitive skills that are fundamental to
a number of nonlinguistic human activities, such as tool use and
play.
Young children tend to be conservative in their language
use, apparently learning language item by item, as the items
are used in context. For instance, if they have heard a verb
used transitively, they are unlikely to use it in an intransitive
construction until they hear it used intransitively. Eventually,
children begin to form generalizations or more abstract repre-
sentations of the patterns. It is only when the childs syntactic
constructions become more abstract that creative language
begins to emerge, sometime between two and three years.
Tomasello argues that the creative use of language represents
the child putting together utterances out of already well-en-
trenched pieces of language.
Adele Goldberg (2006) speciically argues that syntactic pat-
terns are best understood as meaningful constructions (see con-
struction grammars) that relect recurrent, humanly salient
scenes, such as an agent engaging in an activity that results in
force being applied to another entity (transitive) or the agent
causing someone to receive something (cause to receive). To
the set of pattern inding and intention-reading skills, Goldberg
adds key frequency-based constraints to account for the way in
which the child learns to limit his or her use of abstract construc-
tions, using language creatively but in a way that is attuned to the
conventional restrictions of the ambient discourse community.
Two of the most important constraining elements identiied
by Goldberg are skewed input and preemption. Corpus studies
show that in the speech directed at children, a single verb, or
small set of verbs, tends to be disproportionally used with partic-
ular syntactic constructions. For instance, in the cause-to-receive
construction, for example, Ellie _____ Jerry the teddy bear, doz-
ens of diferent verbs occur, but the verb give accounts for over
40 percent of the instances. Goldberg points out that the seman-
tics of give closely match those of the cause-to-receive construc-
tion; thus, there is a reinforcing match between the semantics of
the syntactic pattern and the central verb that occurs with the
construction. She argues that such skewed input is a key aid in
helping children both learn the semantics of the syntactic con-
struction and the conventionally appropriate matching between
verbs and constructions.
A second important constraint provided by the input is
preemption. his is the notion that if two forms seem equally
appropriate for a particular context, but one consistently occurs
in the input while the other does not, the child learns that the
form that occurs in the input preempts the other, seemingly
appropriate, form. As a simple example, at some point the child
forms the generalization that -ed is used to represent an action
or event that took place in the past and creates the form goed.
However, in the input, where the child expects to hear goed, he
or she consistently hears went. After a short period of overgener-
alization (see overregularizations), the child will learn that
went preempts goed, and stop producing goed. Goldberg argues
that exactly the same process accounts for children learning
the match between speciic verbs and argument structure, for
instance, that told occurs in the cause-to-receive construction,
as Mommy told Isabela the story, but say does not. N. Ellis (2002)
reviews a plethora of psycholinguistic studies showing that
165
Cognitive Linguistics and Language Learning Cognitive Linguistics, Language Science, and Metatheory

humans are highly sensitive to frequency of linguistic input, thus COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS, LANGUAGE SCIENCE, AND
providing support for Goldbergs fundamental claims regarding METATHEORY
the importance of skewed input and preemption.
Cognitive linguistics is probably best understood not as a theory
Much of the research on child language learning focuses on
but as a theoretical orientation. A theoretical orientation is a
universal human capabilities and universal stages that all chil-
broader category that encompasses a number of particular theo-
dren go through. A theory that argues language is a relection of
ries that share presuppositions, attitudes, interests, methods,
general human cognitive processes would predict many univer-
and so on. generative grammar is a theoretical orientation
sals. As a usage-based theory, cognitive linguistics also focuses
in this sense, as is connectionism. In the past, behaviorism
attention on language-speciic learning and predicts a wide
and structuralism were important theoretical orientations.
range of variation. Melissa Bowerman and Sonja Choi (2001)
Diferent theories within an orientation need not be mutu-
studied the acquisition of spatial language by young English- and
ally compatible. Moreover, theories in diferent orientations
Korean-speaking children, an area in which one might expect to
need not be mutually exclusive, and are certainly not mutually
ind general human perception relected rather uniformly across
exclusive on all points. However, orientations often operate as
languages. Relatively speaking, however, English has a rather
identity categories, ways of deining ailiations, dividing in-
general system for expressing the notion of containment with
groups from out-groups. his has a number of intellectual and
the preposition in and that of support with the preposition on.
practical consequences, including our tendency to exaggerate
In contrast, Korean makes a number of iner distinctions in these
diferences between in-groups and out-groups, formulating the
categories with separate verbs of containment that express tight
views of both in extreme ways. For example, Noam Chomskys
it versus loose it and verbs of support expressing more informa-
view of the autonomy of syntax is complex. However, both
tion about the supporting surface, such as horizontal surface and
Chomskyans and anti-Chomskyans may absolutize the distinc-
juxtaposing surfaces. Bowerman and Choi found that despite the
tion between syntax and semantics, setting aside the nuances
seeming diferences in complexity, both systems were learned at
of Chomskys own formulations (see autonomy of syntax).
about the same age. Korean children were quite sensitive to the
he dichotomizing of in-group/out-group diferences is a
ine-grained spatial distinctions lexicalized in their language.
matter for social psychology. However, the tendency it repre-
Such indings raise issues about how language might inlu-
sents is not unique to group relations. here are analogues for
ence the speakers mental representation of phenomena in
this sharpening of diferences at virtually every level of human
the world. Dan Slobin (1985) describes language-directed atten-
cognition, extending down to the neuronal level in perception.
tion as thinking for speaking. He argues that the language makes
I mention this because the continuity of cognitive functions
salient, and focuses the speakers attention on, diferent aspects
is arguably the fundamental principle of cognitive linguistics.
of a scene in order to encode it in language. However, the claim
Moreover, that cognitive continuity is embodied (see embodi-
is not that language somehow causes people to experience spatial
ment), thus ultimately founded on bodily experience. Cognitive
scenes or activities diferently (strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis),
linguists are, of course, concerned with the ways in which this
but rather that speakers of diferent languages have the capacity
embodied continuity bears on language. Additionally, such a
to categorize objectively similar experiences in diferent ways.
continuity helps us to understand the development of theoretical
Andrea Tyler orientations. In this way, cognitive linguistic ideas are signiicant
for language science at two levels. First, they are important at the
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING level of guiding a set of research programs in language study.
Second, they have metatheoretical value in suggesting ways
Bates, Elizabeth. 1976. Language and Context: he Acquisition of
we might think about the relations among diferent theoretical
Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press.
orientations.
Bowerman, Melissa, and Sonja Choi. 2001. Shaping meanings for lan-
In this entry, I do not discuss speciic cognitive linguistic
guage: Universal and language-speciic in the acquisition of spa-
tial semantic categories. In Language Acquisition and Conceptual theories, which are treated in other entries theories such as
Development, ed. Melissa Bowerman and S. Levinson, 15891. cognitive grammar, frame semantics, conceptual met-
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. aphor, and conceptual blending (see also construction
Choi, Sonja, and A. Gopnik. 1996. Early acquisition of verbs in English: A grammars, exemplar theory, functional linguistics,
cross-linguistic study. Journal of Child Language 22: 497530. usage-based theory, and cognitive linguistics and
Ellis, N. 2002. Frequency efects in language processing: A review with language acquisition, as well as the more speciic entries
implications for theories of implicit and explicit language acquisition. on basic level concepts, blended space, conduit met-
Studies in Second Language Acquisition 24.2: 14388. aphor, framing effects, generic- and specific-level
Goldberg, Adele. 2006. Constructions at Work: he Nature of Generalization
metaphors, image schema, mental space, metonymy,
in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
parable, and projection [blending theory]; in addition to
Mandler, Jean. 2004. he Foundations of Mind: Origins of Conceptual
hought. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
overviews of key topics, these entries provide key bibliographical
Safran, E., R. Aslan, and E. Newport, E. 1996. Statistical learning by items for further reading in cognitive linguistics). Rather, I con-
8-month old infants. Science 274: 19268. sider three general characteristics of the cognitive linguistic ori-
Slobin, Dan. 1985. he Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition. entation, characteristics drawn from Croft and Cruse (2004). In
Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. discussing these ideas, I simultaneously consider what they reveal
Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based cognitively about the pretheoretical attitudes that ground cogni-
heory of Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. tive linguistics, and how these might difer from the pretheoretical
166
Cognitive Linguistics, Language Science, and Metatheory
attitudes that ground other approaches to language science, par-
ticularly generative grammar.
On the irst page of their important introduction to cognitive
linguistics, William Croft and D. Alan Cruse (2004) present the
following three major hypotheses: First, language is not an
autonomous cognitive faculty; second, grammar is conceptu-
alization; and third, knowledge of language emerges from lan-
guage use. Despite their phrasing, it does not seem quite right to
refer to these as hypotheses. Like the fundamental ideas in any
theoretical orientation, these are more like guiding principles,
assumptions for research programs that tie together the difer-
ent theorists with their diferent theories. Cognitive linguists do
not set out to falsify or even corroborate, say, the nonautonomy
of grammar. Rather, they put forth speciic hypotheses regard-
ing how grammatical patterns can be explained by reference to
general cognitive structures, processes, and contents. (I should
emphasize that this is in no way a criticism of cognitive linguists.
Everyone does this in all theoretical orientations. hat is part of
having a theoretical orientation and, therefore, is not something
that merits blame, or praise.) I would like to consider each of
these orienting principles in turn.
he irst principle is a reformulation of the fundamental idea
of cognitive linguistics that language (structure, production,
reception, acquisition, and so forth) is continuous with other
aspects of human cognition. However, Croft and Cruse put the
statement negatively. Along one axis, the opposite of continu-
ity would be discontinuity, a separation between language and
the rest of cognition. his is the position associated with genera-
tive grammar. So, in framing their statement negatively, Croft
and Cruse are making clear just where the identity division falls
here between those who see linguistic cognition as continu-
ous with other forms of cognition and those who make language
a separate faculty. I say that this is an opposition along one
axis because, along another axis, this is not an opposition. For
example, part of the identity deinition of generative grammar
involved demarcating its mentalistic view of language subse-
quently shared with cognitive linguistics from the nonmental-
istic view of behaviorism.
he second orienting principle of cognitive linguistics is that
grammar is conceptualization. his extends the continuity
assumption, but it begins to structure that continuity as well.
If cognition is continuous in its various operations, there are
several ways in which particular cognitive functions might be
organized to perform tasks in diferent domains. For example,
it seems possible that syntax and semantics would be separate,
even if neither is autonomous with respect to other cognitive
processes. Syntax might follow some sort of sequential ordering
process also found in bodily movement, while semantics might
follow some other set of principles found in inferential thought.
However, cognitive linguists have tended to see diferent compo-
nents of language itself as continuous with one another.
But this, too, leaves open several options. Just how are we to
understand the continuity of language? Are there neutral prin-
ciples that apply equally to syntax and semantics, for example?
Here, cognitive linguists have tended to opt for a stratiied
view of cognitive operation in language. Semantics is primary;
syntax is secondary. It is worth considering the form of Croft and
Cruses statement grammar is conceptualization. Given that
conceptual metaphor theory is a paradigmatic case of cognitive
linguistics, it is diicult not to read this statement as manifest-
ing the canonical form of a metaphor, with the structure Target is
source (e.g., Juliet is the sun; see source and target). hus
conceptualization more generally, semantics provides the
mental model for understanding syntax. his yields an orient-
ing principle for language study. Faced with a grammatical phe-
nomenon, this tells us, look for an explanation in the semantic
function of the grammatical phenomenon.
It is worth contrasting, and comparing, generative grammar
on this score. In both cognitive linguistics and in generative
grammar there is, in efect, a privileged level of language study.
While the privileged level in cognitive linguistics is semantics,
that in generative grammar is syntax. he privileging is some-
what diferent in the two cases. In generative grammar, syntax
does not provide an explanation for semantics. However, in each
case, language is seen as irst and most importantly deined by
one level (semantics or syntax). his has consequences for the
ways in which all theories in the orientation are formulated.
For example, literary theories inluenced by generative gram-
mar took syntax as a model (see generative poetics), while
literary theories inluenced by cognitive linguistics often take
semantics as a model (see cognitive poetics). Perhaps more
importantly, this privileging of a single level of language has con-
sequences for empirical study and the evaluation of theories and
evidence. Every theory of any value has things that it can explain
and things that it cannot explain. Part of a theoretical orientation
involves distinguishing central cases, the things that really need
explaining, from peripheral cases, the things that it is less crucial
to explain. he privileging of one level of language contributes
to that division. Cognitive linguists are likely to ind it scandal-
ous that generative grammarians do not have any cogent way
of explaining the complexities of metaphor. Generative gram-
marians are likely to ind objections on these grounds to be triv-
ial. However, they are likely to ind it scandalous that cognitive
linguists explain certain complex syntactic patterns in a some-
what loose, nonalgorithmic way. Cognitive linguists are likely to
respond to the generative arguments with the same indiference
that generativists show toward metaphor, seeing those intrica-
cies of grammar as contrived artifacts of the generative method.
In each case, some concerns deemed central by one orientation
are deemed marginal by the other.
he privileging of one level of language is related to something
else ones determination of what a paradigmatic case of lan-
guage is. As usual, the point is bound up with general cognition,
in fact general semantic cognition. When one thinks of a category
(see concepts and categorization), certain sorts of things
come to mind a prototype or standard case, perhaps salient
instances; depending on the category, some mode of actional
engagement may arise as well (e.g., a bodily orientation). Take a
category such as minority group. Each of us has an idea of what
a prototypical minority is, and each of us has some exemplars
or instances. While there are certainly similarities across our
prototypes and exemplars, there are diferences as well. hese
diferences will afect how we respond to such ideas as minority
rights. he same point holds for a category such as sports, though
in this case, particular sports may partially arouse action tenden-
cies as well (e.g., think of batting in baseball; when doing so, at
167
Cognitive Linguistics, Language Science, and Metatheory
least many people imaginatively orient toward a batting stance).
his is the sort of anticipatory actional engagement that is well
known in emotion theory (see, for example, Frijda 1986, 69 f.). It
is bound up with research linking meaning with action (see, for
example, Pulvermller 2002, 5662), research often stressed by
cognitive linguists treating embodiment.
Again, all these points apply directly to language study for
language, too, is a semantic category. Our prototypes and exem-
plars of language certainly have things in common, enough in
common that we identify roughly the same sorts of things as
language. But they difer also. Indeed, it seems that they difer
systematically. Speciically, our pretheoretical ideas about lan-
guage seem to cluster in ways that are roughly coordinated with
theoretical orientations. For some people, language is irst of all
a matter of words; for others, sentences; for others, larger dis-
courses. For some people, actional engagement with language
prototypically involves looking up words in a dictionary or learn-
ing vocabulary; for others, it may involve language instruction,
language therapy, or computer programming; for others, it may
be a matter of interior monologue or personal writing; for others,
animated conversation. If language brings to mind complexes
of related and opposed words, one will be inclined to view lan-
guage diferently than if it brings to mind sentences, or if it brings
to mind dialogues (see, for example, dialogism and hetero-
glossia) or chains of reasoning or poetry.
Prototypes, exemplars, and actional orientations are, of
course, somewhat diferent among ordinary folk, on the one
hand, and professional language scientists, on the other. But
the general pattern is the same. Indeed, one might argue that
the situation with language scientists is more extreme. On the
one hand, they have greater exposure to a wider range of under-
standings of language. his should, to some extent, loosen the
constraints imposed by their pretheoretical attitudes. On the
other hand, their specialized engagement with particular aspects
of language (not to mention their emotional and career invest-
ment in the success of certain theoretical orientations) tends
to entrench those attitudes more irmly. hus, structuralism
and related developments, such as deconstruction, tend to
begin with a pretheoretical view of language as primarily a mat-
ter of words, speciied professionally in terms of phonemes and
morphemes. In contrast, generative grammar began with a pre-
theoretical view of language as primarily a matter of sentences.
his was entrenched through research focusing on syntax.
Cognitive linguists actually seem to have somewhat diferent
prototypes for language in terms of language units, contributing
to their division into slightly diferent theoretical groups. (One
could undoubtedly make related points about structuralism and
generative grammar.) hey do focus on meaning. But meaning
occurs in diferent bundles words, sentences, larger discourses.
Some cognitive linguists seem to focus on words, others on sen-
tences, and others on larger discourses. However, in each case,
their prototype involves some person a person thinking the
words, writing the sentences, or arguing with someone else in
the larger discourse. Generative grammarians commonly wish
to abstract away from persons, seeing persons as introducing
performance errors into language. In contrast, cognitive linguists
stress the necessary involvement of persons in language. In some
versions of cognitive linguistics, this becomes embodiment. In
168
others, it is related to usage-based theory which leads us to the
third of Croft and Cruses criteria, that knowledge of language
emerges from language use.
he irst thing to note about this orienting principle is that,
as phrased, it refers, most basically, to language acquisition.
As such, it is opposed (once again) to generative grammar.
Generative grammarians often see language as growing out of
an innate language faculty (see innateness and innatism).
Alternatively, they see a language acquisition device as
taking in very fragmentary, inadequate data and using that data
to set parameters for principles that are already given geneti-
cally (see principles and parameters theory). One might
say that, in this view, knowledge of language is largely given
innately and, thus, language use arises from prior knowledge.
Cognitive linguists reverse this explanatory sequence as one
would expect, given the apparent diference in pretheoretical
prototypes.
Croft and Cruses statement also alludes to Chomskys divi-
sion between competence and performance. Competence is
the inner grammar that one has developed (or grown) in learn-
ing a language. Performance is any act of speaking, writing, or
signing. In generative grammar, competence explains perfor-
mance or partially does, since performance is also afected
by many nonlinguistic factors. (hat is why generative gram-
marians often wish to abstract away from persons in treating
language.) his leads us away from narrow concerns with acqui-
sition. Speciically, Croft and Cruses statement suggests that, in
Chomskys terms, performance does not arise from competence
(plus other things), but the reverse. Competence or knowledge
of language, they suggest, is a sort of artifact of the actional prac-
tice of language use once more, just what one would expect,
given diferent pretheoretical prototypes and associated theo-
retical orientations. his has consequences for acquisition as
well, for it suggests that the child is not a passive recipient of
language but is actively engaged in language practice while
learning.
Finally, it is worth remarking on the use of metaphors here.
Chomsky sees speech as performance. I do not at all believe
that we are determined by the metaphorical associations of our
speech. However, certain word choices may relect certain prior
attitudes, and they may serve to prime other, related ideas (see
priming, semantic), making it easier for us to choose those
primed options (other things being equal). In relation to drama,
ilm, or music, performance may suggest a secondary activity,
a more or less efective, successful, or accurate instantiation of
some prior, correct language the play text, the screenplay, or
the musical score. For example, an actor may lub his lines and
a director may cut scenes. If I want to study Shakespeares King
Lear, I do not conine myself to a particular ilm or stage produc-
tion, a performance. Rather, I look at the text. he analogue in
language leads me to study competence, what lies behind perfor-
mance, rather than performance itself. In contrast, use suggests
that language is a tool. he prior form is not the real thing (like
the play text). Rather, the crucial matter is the current action,
what is done with the tools. In relation to language, this suggests
the importance of focusing on speech practice.
he use of metaphor is related to a series of other gen-
eral semantic/cognitive processes that bear on our theoretical
Cognitive Linguistics, Language Science, and Metatheory
orientations. For example, it is related to our organization of
semantic space, thus what we consider most similar to human
language and what we consider most diferent from it. For exam-
ple, we will understand and investigate language in certain ways
if we view it as most similar to mathematics; we will understand
and investigate it in other ways if we view it as closest to gesture
or cooperative labor. he same point holds if we see human lan-
guage as most diferent from animal communication, from
human silence, or from machine code. As with other phenom-
ena we have been considering, none of this is something that we
examine empirically and seek to falsify or corroborate. Rather,
it is pretheoretical background that inclines us toward one or
another theoretical orientation.
Individual readers no doubt have diferent views as to which
pretheoretical ideas are right and which are wrong. I certainly
do. One thing I hope to have suggested, however, is that such
preferences are primarily a matter of ones own pretheoretical
attitudes. Does it seem obvious that language is really embod-
ied and that abstracting from that embodiment is wrong?
Certainly, speech is embodied and it would be misleading to
ignore that. But it also seems clear that there are many speech
glitches and that at least some degree of abstraction is neces-
sary. What about metaphors or the structure of semantic space?
Language is in some ways very much like mathematics, but in
other ways like shared work. It is in some ways very diferent
from animal communication or machine code, but in other
ways very similar to them. his is, of course, not to say that there
are no facts about language, about whether language is best
understood in one way or another. here are such facts in par-
ticular cases, and there are theories that are better at explaining
those facts. However, it is to say that the broad principles that
deine our theoretical orientations are almost always partially
correct and partially incorrect. It is probably productive to pur-
sue one set of orienting principles rigorously in a research pro-
gram. However, it is probably not productive to dismiss other
theoretical orientations that are pursuing research programs
based on diferent principles (themselves derived from difer-
ent pretheoretical attitudes).
Cognitive linguistics is a vibrant research program, or set of
research programs, in language science, as attested by a range
of entries in this volume. But it also has something to teach us
at a metatheoretical level. Speciically, it suggests that our theo-
rization should be pursued vigorously within theoretical orien-
tations, but that our subsequent evaluation of theories should
be less insular and, perhaps more importantly, less combative.
One of the early discoveries of conceptual metaphor theory was
that we commonly model intellectual dispute on war (see Lakof
and Johnson 1980, 45). his is not simply a matter of metaphors.
It is the result of the ways in which we form in-groups and out-
groups based, in this case, on theoretical orientations (as well as
personal ainities, attitudes toward the public political stances
of leading theorists in each orientation, and other factors). In any
event, it is unfortunate. Of course, cognitive linguists are people
with brains like anyone else. All of us tend to slide into the model
of warfare when engaging in intellectual dispute. But, as a theo-
retical orientation, cognitive linguistics helps us to see what we
are doing when we enter into combat mode and how intellec-
tually deleterious it is. hat metatheoretical point is potentially
Cognitive Poetics
one of the most important contributions of cognitive linguistics
to language science.
Patrick Colm Hogan
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Croft, William, and D. Alan Cruse. 2004. Cognitive Linguistics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Feyerabend, Paul. 1975. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic heory
of Knowledge. London: Verso.
Frijda, Nico. 1986. he Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Lakof, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pulvermller, Friedemann. 2002. he Neuroscience of Language: On Brain
Circuits of Words and Serial Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
COGNITIVE POETICS
Cognitive poetics is the study of literary reading that draws on the
principles of cognitive science. In its early phase, the discipline
drew mainly on cognitive linguistics in focusing on the
textual cues for literary reading; in its more recent phase, it has
drawn more readily from cognitive psychology in order to explore
issues of readerly efects and aesthetics. hroughout its short
history, however, practitioners in the ield have shown a willing-
ness and propensity for genuinely multidisciplinary study. Work
in cognitive poetics is often characterized by an awareness that
the task of understanding literary reading holistically involves
a serious engagement with several disciplines: Linguistics and
psychology are central, but they are also often enriched from lit-
erary scholarship and critical theory, discourse analysis and
social theory, anthropology and historical study, neuroscience
and medical research, aesthetics, ethics, and philosophy. Most
people working in cognitive poetics believe that the systematic
analysis of literary reading is also essential within both linguistics
and psychology.
he ield of cognitive poetics coalesced as an identiiable
movement in the mid-1990s, though it is possible to classify ret-
rospectively several areas of work that can be seen as precursors.
he term itself was coined by Reuven Tsur in the 1970s (see Tsur
1992) to refer speciically to his exploration of literary aesthetics
through neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Since then, the
term has been taken up and broadened in scope to include a wide
range of research questions, frameworks for analysis, and areas
for exploration. Various alternative names for the enterprise have
been used during its brief history, each indicating the slightly dif-
ferent emphases of its users. For example, cognitive rhetoric
has been used in North America to point to the connections with
classical rhetoric in uniting form and efect in language study;
cognitive stylistics indicates a focus on detailed and rigorous tex-
tual analysis in the European tradition of stylistics, or literary
linguistics; other, more neutral terms, such as cognition and liter-
ature, have also been preferred on occasion.
It is apparent, too, that there are cultural contexts underlying
this nomenclature, much of which has to do with the branding
of the new discipline in institutional settings and the intellectual
marketplace. In the United States, the generative paradigm in
169
Cognitive Poetics
linguistics, on the one hand, and poststructuralist critical theory
in literary study, on the other, have meant that cognitive poetics
has been ighting for recognition on two fronts. hough the dis-
tinction was important earlier, a West Coast psychological tradi-
tion of metaphor study and an East Coast tradition of linguistic
textual analysis have now largely been merged. Similarly else-
where, a continental European empiricist focus and a British and
East Asian stylistic emphasis have joined together more recently.
If there is any division remaining, it is a tendency for American
scholars to emphasize macrocognitive concerns and for Euro-
Asian researchers to emphasize the more micrological efects of
stylistic texture, though even this division is fast disappearing as
cognitive poetics develops globally. (See Lakof and Turner 1989;
Turner 1991; Stockwell 2002; Gavins and Steen 2002; Semino and
Culpeper 2002).
For the majority of writers in cognitive poetics, the basic
common principles of their work involve a rejection of the
distinctions between text and context, form and mean-
ing, abstraction and speciication, and literal and metaphori-
cal expression. Fundamental to this position is, most often, the
cognitive linguistic claim that language use is embodied and
that mind and body cannot be separated (see embodiment).
In other words, the linguistic expressions used in all languages
are elaborations of basic physical circumstances of the human
condition. To give an example from early cognitive linguistics,
there are fundamental conceptual metaphors (such as life
is a journey, ideas are objects, theories are buildings, and
so on) that tend to igure abstraction and complexity in familiar
and concrete terms. Such idealized igurative habits condition
our thinking and are manifest in linguistic expressions. hese
conceptual metaphors are maintained and exploited in literary
texts just as in any form of language, and a thorough cognitive
poetic analysis is interested in both the conceptual signiicance
of the underlying scheme and the textual pattern through which
it is expressed (see Johnson 1987).
he principle of linguistic embodiment resolves the key issue
for a theory of interpretation, which is how a single explana-
tion can account for the fact that individual readings are possible
but communal readings are in practice very common. Our basic
human condition creates igurative linguistic commonalities,
and our personal, social, and cultural tracks through these ide-
alizations create individual, group, and cultural distinctiveness.
he literary scholar coming to cognitive poetics thus has a sys-
tematic and principled means of exploring individual expression
and sociohistorical patterns in culture.
Cognitive poetics sees reading as a natural evolutionary
process, rather than as an artiice that is distinct from other
human capacities. So, it is particularly interested in the ways
everyday (that is, nonprofessional, nonacademic) readers read,
and it draws connections between the natural creativity of imag-
ination in everyday language (see creativity in language
use) and the particular ways in which linguistic creativity is
manipulated in the literary setting. Meaningfulness is regarded
as a readerly process, rather than a inal classiication, and so
cognitive poetics researchers have investigated how meanings
are constructed and resolved in the process of literary reading.
he personal experience and social circumstances of the reader
are at least as important as the textual organization of the literary
170
work. Cognitive poetic analyses thus have beneits for the study
of human language processing and the study of mind, as well as
for literary and artistic scholarship.
Within cognitive poetics, several diferent dimensions of
investigation have emerged. Some of the foremost and earliest
work centers on the human conceptual and linguistic capac-
ity for metaphor or conceptual integration (see conceptual
blending). When cognitive linguists explored the workings of
conceptual metaphors of the sort mentioned earlier, it became
apparent that some expressive, poetic, or innovative metaphors
used in literary settings were causing problems with the basic
theory. Some creative literary language was more concerned with
interesting deviance and unsettling defamiliarization than with
resolving unfamiliar concepts in familiar terms. Furthermore,
some artistic metaphors seemed to afect those very same famil-
iar domains in ways that persisted in the continuing life of the
reader, and most perplexingly of all, some literary metaphors
seemed to take on a life of their own that went beyond the basic
explanatory mappings of their source domains.
he cognitive poetic theory of conceptual integration or
blending has developed as a good account of these and other
features. Briely, the theory proposes that a set of inputs are gen-
eralized to produce a blended space, a mental representation
that the reader uses to develop the emergent logic, texture, and
consequences arising from an engagement with the metaphor.
For example, at a microstylistic level, in heodore Roethkes
phrase I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils, three
main input spaces (unstoppable motion, human emotion, and
the tool of the writer) are blended to produce a richly integrated
sense of emotional signiicance that is diicult to express in
any other way. At a more macrological level, the allegorical and
analogical signiications of, for example, Margaret Atwoods
novel he Handmaids Tale amount to more than the sum of a
political manifesto, on the one hand, or a dark fantastic narra-
tive, on the other (see Fauconnier and Turner 2002).
Another cognitive poetic dimension with a long history is
comprised of the various frameworks for the consideration of
worlds in literary works. Traditional possible worlds logic
from pragmatics and the philosophy of language has been
augmented as a means of understanding the richness of ictional
projection. (Indeed, the notion of mental spaces in concep-
tual integration theory owes something to the notion of worlds in
this sense). Such work has been especially fruitful in dealing with
extended prose iction in which the divergence from reality (the
actual possible world) is most striking or thematized: science
iction, fantasy, magical realism, dream visions, allegories, and
fairy tales (see Ryan 1991; Ronen 1994; Semino 1997).
Also aiming to integrate text and context in this way is schema
poetics, which draws on the notion of psychological schemas
from both Kantian philosophy and artiicial intelligence work.
Here, culturally shared knowledge frames provide a rich context
for linguistic input that always underdetermines the afective
outcome in the reader. In literary research, the notion has been
used to explain mismatches in reader and character knowledge
and as a means of exploring the notion of literariness itself
(see Cook 1994).
Most recently developing out of the worlds tradition is text
world theory, a cognitive poetic approach to discourse processing
Cognitive Poetics
that has been fruitfully applied to many texts, including literary
ones. Text world theory ofers a means of understanding how only
certain parts of readerly schematic knowledge are activated in a
reading of the literary text. It seems particularly useful for track-
ing readerly comprehension and understanding involvement
and empathy (see Emmott 1997; Werth 1999; Gavins 2007).
Other work in cognitive poetics has dealt with detailed mat-
ters of stylistic texture, drawing on cognitive grammar and
the psycholinguistics of igure and ground (Langacker
1987, 1991; and see van Peer 1986), on image schemas, and
on the psychology of deictic (see deixis) maintenance and shift
(Duchan, Bruder, and Hewitt 1995). If there is a major criticism
of cognitive poetics in addressing the nature of the connection
between cognition and stylistic realization, this work seems
to ofer a direct response. Certainly the linguistic realization
of conceptual patterns is the most urgent area for new work.
Currently, the interest of cognitive poetics in readerly empathy,
emotion, and aesthetics is being developed through the notion
of texture (see Stockwell 2009), and connections are being forged
with related ields in political ethics and critical discourse
analysis (see Lakof 2002; OHalloran 2003). As a young and
expanding ield that has not yet established its paradigms, cogni-
tive poetics looks set to continue this initial expansive phase for
the foreseeable future.
Peter Stockwell
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Cook, Guy. 1994. Discourse and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Duchan, J. F., G. A. Bruder, and L. E. Hewitt, eds. 1995. Deixis in
Narrative: A Cognitive Science Perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum.
Emmott, Catherine. 1997. Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse
Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2002. he Way We hink. New
York: Basic Books.
Gavins, Joanna. 2007. Text World heory: An Introduction. Edinburgh
and New York: Edinburgh University Press and Columbia University
Press.
Gavins, Joanna, and Gerard Steen, eds. 2002. Cognitive Poetics in
Practice. London and New York: Routledge. his book is the compan-
ion volume to Stockwell (2002) and contains good examples of cogni-
tive poetics.
Johnson, Mark. 1987. he Body in the Mind: he Bodily Basis of Meaning,
Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lakof, George. 2002. Moral Politics. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Lakof, George, and Mark Turner. 1989. More han Cool Reason: A Field
Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Langacker, Ronald. 1987, 1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vols.
1 and 2. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
OHalloran, Kieran. 2003 Critical Discourse Analysis and Language
Cognition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Ronen, Ruth. 1994. Possible Worlds in Literary heory.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ryan, Maire-Laure. 1991. Possible Worlds: Artiicial Intelligence and
Narrative heory. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press.
Semino, Elena. 1997. Language and World Creation in Poems and Other
Texts. London: Longman.
Coherence, Discourse
Semino, Elena, and Jonathan Culpeper, eds. 2002. Cognitive Stylistics.
Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins. A collection of articles in
cognitive poetics.
Stockwell, Peter. 2002. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. London and
New York: Routledge. he standard and comprehensive textbook of
the ield.
. 2009. Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading. Edinburgh and
New York: Edinburgh University Press and Columbia University Press.
Tsur, Reuven. 1992. Toward a heory of Cognitive Poetics.
Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Turner, Mark. 1991. Reading Minds: he Study of English in the Age of
Cognitive Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
. 1996. he Literary Mind: he Origins of hought and Language.
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. An excellent polemic
and exempliication of cognitive poetics.
van Peer, Willie. 1986. Stylistics and Psychology: Investigations of
Foregrounding. New York: Croom Helm.
Werth, Paul. 1999. Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in
Discourse. London: Longman.
COHERENCE, DISCOURSE
What is a discourse? What makes a discourse coherent or inco-
herent? Investigation into these diicult questions has yielded so
many sophisticated proposals that a short, comprehensive sur-
vey is well out of reach.
With regard to the irst question, it is fair to say that there is
widespread disagreement. Some researchers think of discourses
as texts, which raises questions about how texts are to be iden-
tiied and individuated. Is sameness of spelling necessary and/
or suicient to textual identity? Could there be signiicant varia-
tions, such as diferences of spelling, among the tokens of a sin-
gle text type or discourse? Under what conditions are sentence
tokens grouped as parts of a single text? Some investigators
question the very choice of texts as the basic unit of analysis: A
discourse is not a text (type), they say, but a string of spoken or
written sentences in a language. Yet disagreement again resur-
faces when we ask how these strings are to be picked out. Some
authors tend to think of a discourse as an utterance (construed
loosely along Gricean lines as anything that is a candidate for
non-natural meaning and produced with communicative
intention), whereas others think that speech-acts, or groups
thereof, are the relevant discursive units. Yet even this is not suf-
iciently holistic for some discourse analysts, who want to focus
on larger sociocultural patterns, such as the discourse of racism
(see discourse analysis [foucaultian] and discourse
analysis [linguistic]). Some researchers argue for the pri-
macy of face-to-face conversational interactions and contend
that the analysis of discourse coherence should ind its point of
departure in speciic sequences of immediate communicative
interaction (Scheglof 2001). Another area of divergence con-
cerns the nature and number of the participants or producers of
a single discourse. Is a conversation between two or more parties
one or several discourses?
Investigators who disagree over the very outlines of the
concept of discourse can often still agree that certain kinds of
examples ought to be counted as discourses, and so can mean-
ingfully debate logically independent questions about discourse
coherence. One such question is whether the coherence or
171
Coherence, Discourse
incoherence of a discourse is a matter of degree and, if so, what
sort of vagueness or lack of speciication explains this fact. Is
it just ignorance of the real coherence conditions that leads us
to judge that a given discourse is more or less coherent or that
another discourse is a borderline case? Is discourse coherence
by its very nature a genuinely scalar concept? To what extent are
judgments of coherence and incoherence relative to the contexts,
categories, and genres of discourse? One may be tempted to con-
clude that the coherence of a poem is something quite diferent
from that of an argumentative essay, but perhaps the subtending
semantic relations are similar or even identical.
he coherence of discourse is not just a matter of logic. he
absence of logical contradictions, or the presence of logical
coherence (see coherence, logical), is hardly suicient to
establish discursive coherence more generally, as the following
example is designed to show:
(1) he sap dripped. Mike pondered the cogito.
Battologymeans tiresome repetition.
It is logically possible that what the speaker of (1) has said is
entirely true, but as the speaker lits from topic to topic; the
utterance has a kind of incoherence but not the logical kind.
he example may be used to suggest that coreference or, more
broadly, sameness of subject or topic, is a necessary condition on
a discourses coherence.
Compare (1) to (2):
(2) I am fed up with the telephone always ringing. Dont
hesitate to call me!
he speaker has conjoined two sentences that both have some-
thing to do with the topic of telephoning, yet this two-part dis-
course seems incoherent unless the utterance was meant to
convey the idea that in spite of the irritation over phone calls in
general, an exception is being made with regard to the addressee.
And indeed, an intended, implicit contrast or counterpoint can
contribute to discursive coherence. What seems to be missing in
(2) is an explicit, metadiscursive marker, such as but, indicative
of the intended link. (An informative survey of work on discourse
markers, a growth market in linguistics, is ofered in Schifrin
2001.)
Investigators have described many other relations held to be
constitutive of discursive coherence or cohesion. For example,
consider the following coherent minidiscourse schemata, with
some of the proposed names for the illustrated coherence-
constitutive link:
(3) I am fed up with the telephone always ringing. A call woke
me up last night. (elaboration, illustration, speciication)
(4) I am fed up with the telephone always ringing. You are
tired of always hearing me complain. (parallelism)
(5) I am fed up with the telephone always ringing. People are
always bothering me and asking for something. (ampliica-
tion, generalization)
(6) I am fed up with the telephone always ringing. Im going
to disconnect my phone. (causation, explication)
(7) I was fed up with the telephone always ringing. hen I fell
ill. (temporal ordering, narration)
172
(8) I am fed up with the telephone always ringing. Yet I do
get some important calls every now and then. (concession,
contrast, qualiication)
he appearance of divergent and at times highly elaborate lists of
coherence-constitutive relations has occasioned the generation of
such lists, as well as theoretical relections over their status (Hovy
and Maier n.d.; Redeker 2000; Kehler 2002; Sanders 1997). Is the
list of coherence-constitutive relations open-ended or inite? Are
there deeper-level relations to which various other relations may
be reduced? What would count as a successful reduction? Should
the list of relations include recordation, or the loosest memorial
associations? How much of a real constraint is there?
At least some disagreements about the lists of relations stem
from divergent assumptions about the nature of the relata. Are
the actual intentions of the utterer a component of coherence, or
only those thoughts or moves expressed by the spoken or writ-
ten phrases? Some analysts (e.g., Grosz and Sidner 1986) bring
in the speakers plans, while others want to leave them out and
contend that coherence is determined by rhetorical structures
that are like the crystallized form of diverse speech-acts (Asher
and Lascarides 2003). According to these authors, a discourse
is coherent to the extent that anaphoric expressions can be
resolved and the propositions introduced can be rhetorically
connected to other propositions in the discourse. he recog-
nition of coherence requires the drawing of inferences about
rhetorical relations on the basis of semantic content; these rhe-
torical relations then serve as the basis for inferences about other
aspects of content. his approach is contrasted to one in which
conversational implicature and other implicit, coher-
ence-relevant content are recognized by inferring the speakers
intentions directly from conventional linguistic meaning and
contextual factors such as salient aspects of the conversational
situation. Another issue is whether the coherence of a conversa-
tional exchange depends inally on complex relations between
the participants cooperative activities and intentions. Can a
participants deliberate silence contribute to the coherence or
incoherence of the overall discourse? Could the logical incoher-
ence of one participants contribution contribute to the coher-
ence of the conversation of which it is a part?
Questions about the psychological status or reality of some
of the complex coherence relations iguring in the literature lead
to a more general issue pertaining to the explanatory merits of
discursivity as such. Although we may sometimes attend specii-
cally to coherence or incoherence as such, especially in scholarly
and argumentative contexts, in many other cases the production
and processing of words and related deeds proceed smoothly in
the absence of any such focus. Speciic relations such as paral-
lelism, contrast, causeefect, and so on play their part, but not
the disjunctive property called coherence that can be theoreti-
cally cobbled together. Consequently, the analysis of discourse
coherence runs the risk of reifying underconstrained theoretic
constructions.
Paisley Livingston
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Asher, Nicholas, and Alex Lascarides. 2003. Logics of Conversation.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Coherence, Logical
Clark, Herbert. 1996. Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Cohen, Philip, Jerry Morgan, and Martha Pollack, eds. 1990. Intentions in
Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gernsbacher, Morton Ann, and Talmy Givon. 1995. Coherence in
Spontaneous Text. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Grimes, J. 1975. he hread of Discourse. he Hague: Mouton.
Grosz, Barbara J., and Candace L. Sidner. 1986. Attention, intentions, and
the structure of discourse. Computational Linguistics 12: 175204.
Halliday, M. A. K., and Ruqaiya Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English.
London: Longman.
Hobbs, Jerry R. 1985. On the Coherence and Structure of Discourse.
Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information.
Hovy, Eduard H., and Elisabeth Maier. N.d. Parsimonious or proli-
gate: How many and which discourse structure relations? Available
online at: http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/people/hovy/papers/
93discproc.pdf (accessed February 7, 2009).
Kehler, Andrew. 2002. Coherence, Reference, and the heory of Grammar.
Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Mann, William C., and Sandra A. hompson. 1988. Rhetorical struc-
ture theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization. Text
8.3: 24381.
Redeker, Gisela. 2000. Coherence and structure in text and discourse.
In Abduction, Belief and Context in Dialogue: Studies in Computational
Pragmatics, ed. H. Bunt and W. Black, 23363. Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.
Sanders, Ted. 1997. Semantic and pragmatic sources of coherence: On
the categorization of coherence relations in context. Discourse
Processes 24: 11947.
Sanders, Ted, and Wilbert Spooren. 1999. Communicative intentions and
coherence relations. In Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse,
ed. W. Bublitz, U. Lenk, and E. Ventola, 23550. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Scheglof, Emanuel A. 2001. Discourse as an interactional achieve-
ment: III: he omnirelevance of action. In Handbook of Discourse
Analysis, ed. Deborah Schifrin, D. Tannen, and H. Hamilton, 22949.
Oxford: Blackwell,
Schifrin, Deborah. 2001. Discourse markers: Language, meaning, and
context. In Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. Deborah Schifrin, D.
Tannen, and H. Hamilton, 5475. Oxford: Blackwell.
COHERENCE, LOGICAL
Logicians generally employ coherence and consistency as
synonyms naming the absence of contradictions in a group of
sentences, propositions, or beliefs, where a contradiction is
the conjunction of a proposition and its negation. In metaphysi-
cal terms, logical incoherence or contradiction is the impossible
instantiation of a property and some other, incompatible prop-
erty, as in the circle was square. Epistemically, a contradiction
is an irrational belief in both a proposition and its denial.
Logical consistency is not a necessary feature of what people
say, write, or think. Nor is the absence of contradictions a suf-
icient condition on discourse coherence (see coherence,
discourse), as a collection of logically consistent yet unrelated
sentences does not constitute a coherent discourse. In many
contexts, however, logical consistency is a regulative norm for
speakers and interpreters. According to classical logic, a set of
propositions is either coherent or contradictory and trivial (in
the sense that it entails all propositions or explodes). In classical
logic, the ex falso quodlibet argument was held to establish that
Colonialism and Language
given a single contradiction, every arbitrarily chosen proposition
follows validly. Yet it is now often denied that this is a good prin-
ciple of reasoning, and some philosophers contend that there are
paraconsistent yet nonexplosive systems. hat some proposition
and its negation are part of the same belief set does not imply
that all other propositions belong to that set, and diferent levels
of logical coherence can be delineated in semantic representa-
tions of inconsistent sets (Jennings and Schotch 1984).
Some philosophers have gone so far as to contend that there
are true contradictions, such as the conclusions yielded by liar
and sorites paradoxes. he latter dialetheist stance is contested
by many logicians, however, who have sought to establish that
all paradoxical arguments are invalid or unsound. For example,
in an updating of the medieval cassatio account of logical para-
doxes, Laurence Goldstein (2000) argues that while liar sentences
are meaningful, they lack content in the sense of failing to specify
truth conditions and, therefore, are neither true nor false.
Logical coherence or consistency is not equivalent to logi-
cal validity, which is often deined as a basic constraint on the
relations between the premises and conclusions of an argu-
ment: Valid arguments are those in which truth is preserved, in
the sense that whenever all of the premises of the argument are
true, its conclusion is necessarily true. (In classical logic, valid-
ity requires the preservation of falsehood as well; necessarily,
if the conclusion is false, at least one of the premises is false.)
Attempts to provide a conceptual analysis of the notion of logical
consequence include syntactical, model-theoretic, and proof-
theoretic approaches.
Paisley Livingston
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Etchemendy, John. 1990. he Concept of Logical Consequence.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Goldstein, Laurence. 2000. A uniied solution to some paradoxes.
Proceedings of the Aristotlean Society 100: 5374.
Jennings, R. E., and P. K. Schotch. 1984. he preservation of coherence.
Studia Logica 53: 89106.
Priest, Graham. 2004. In Contradiction: A Study of the Transconsistent.
he Hague: Martinus Nijhof.
Priest, Graham, J. C. Beall, and Bradley Armour-Garb, eds. 2004. he Law
of Non-Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays. Oxford: Clarendon.
Sainsbury, R. M. 1995. Paradoxes. 2d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
COLONIALISM AND LANGUAGE
One of the complications of writing on the centrality of language
to imperialism and colonialism is that even if the account were
limited to the policies and practices of the European nation-
states in the last 500 years, it would still leave out major historical
events and processes. For example, it would not cover the efects
of Roman imperial linguistic strategy, one of which, at a deep
historical level, was the appearance of a number of the modern
European vernacular languages that were, in turn, to become
vehicles of imperial and colonial rule. Nor would it include the
linguistic impact of earlier empires, for example, the Aztecs
in Mexico or the Incas in Peru. And it would not address non-
European modern imperialism and colonialism, for example,
173
Colonialism and Language

the consequences of the imposition of Japanese language and kind and manner of living, than the diversity that is betwixt them
culture on its Asian neighbors in the late nineteenth and early to in tongue, language, order and habit, which by the eye deceives
middle twentieth centuries. the multitude, and persuades unto them, that they should be as it
Given the complexity of this larger history or set of histories, were of sundry sorts, or rather of sundry countries. (Statutes 1786,
it would be impossible to provide any sort of sensible rendition 28 H 8. c.xv.)
of it or them in a short entry. It is proposed, therefore, to trace
he corollary to this belief that cultural speciically linguistic
the development of one major form of linguistic colonialism in
diference created division and prevented political and religious
order to demonstrate the general ideology that lay behind the
unity was the idea that a common language would forge com-
practice, and to show how, even in this single example, it worked
mon political allegiance and identity. he logical consequence,
diferently in distinct locations and points in history. hough this
therefore, was that linguistic diference had to be extirpated and
sacriices historical speciicity in one sense, it is intended that
Ireland Anglicized. Edmund Spenser, poet and colonial servant,
the example chosen the uses of English in the British imperial
noted in 1596 that it hath ever been the use of the Conqueror,
and colonial project will demonstrate the particularity and var-
to despise the language of the conquered and to force him by all
iability of the process. Antonio De Nebrija made an important
means to learn his (Spenser [1596] 1633, 47). He argued for the
point when he asserted in his Gramtica Castellana, published
eradication of Gaelic on the supposition that the speech being
in the fateful year 1492, that siempre la lengua fue compaera
Irish, the heart must needs be Irish: for out of the abundance of
del imperio (language was always the companion of empire)
the heart the tongue speaks (ibid., 48).
(de Nebrija [1492] 2006, 13), but it is necessary to pay attention to
Yet if it was the aim of linguistic colonialism in Ireland to
the ways in which this relationship was constituted within difer-
Anglicize the country in order to bring it completely under politi-
ent forms of colonialism.
cal control, then it was a goal that was not achieved until the late
An account of English (later British) colonialism in Ireland
nineteenth century (by which point Irish linguistic nationalism,
might start by noting that when the English irst invaded Ireland
the binary opposite of the colonial policy, had already started to
in 1169, they took their language with them and imposed it on the
inspire the revolutionary movement that overthrew British rule).
native population. But such a narrative would involve an anach-
It has been calculated that in the 1830s, for example, half the
ronistic oversimpliication both in terms of the national identity of
native Irish population spoke Irish, and half of that group spoke
the invaders and the languages that they spoke. It is open to ques-
only Irish. Some 80 years later, just prior to Irish independence,
tion, for example, whether the leaders of the invasion thought of
less than 14 percent of the population spoke any Irish, and no
themselves as English at all (barely a century after the Norman
more than 2 percent were Irish monoglots. How was this linguis-
Conquest, they were more likely to have considered themselves
tic shift brought about? In this speciic case there were a number
Norman or Anglo-Norman), and the languages of their mercenary
of factors: the incorporation of the country by military force into
soldiery included Flemish, Welsh, Anglo-Norman, and, of course,
the imperial political and economic order and the consequent
what passed for English. Indeed, the irst colonial legislation on
introduction of the socially centralizing processes of industrial-
language in Ireland, he Statute of Kilkenny (1366), was notable
ism and urbanization; the massive emigration that followed upon
for two reasons. First, it was directed against the colonists, rather
the widespread poverty among the rural population; the imposi-
than the colonized, and had the aim of preventing the colonizers
tion of an educational system that rejected the native language in
from adopting the native Gaelic language and culture. he indig-
favor of English; the spread of the bureaucratic state into every-
enous Irish were not included in the scope of the law since they
day life; the choice of English as the language of religion by the
could speak their own language if they wanted; the point was to
Irish Catholic Church; and the death of large numbers of Irish
stop the colonizers from going native (a process of cultural assim-
speakers in the Great Famine.
ilation that had been occurring since the irst invasion). Second,
Although a number of these causes were particular to
despite proclaiming that English should be the language of the
Ireland, others repeated in a pattern that occurred across the
colonists, the statutes were in fact written in Norman-French
British Empire though with diferences. Indeed, if there is a
one of the languages of law in England at the time. he point here
key to understanding how and why linguistic colonialism of the
is that although the general outline of the history of linguistic
modern European type operated, it lies in this variable combi-
colonialism in any given case can be traced relatively easily, the
nation of economic, cultural, educational, and religious factors
debates and practices pertaining to speciic historical conjunc-
and their efects upon the lived experience of colonial subjects.
tures are often diicult and complex to understand.
he nature, practices, and functions of colonial language policy
In the sixteenth century, some 400 years after the irst inva-
changed throughout time, were altered to suit the difering pur-
sion of Ireland, the centralizing English state determined upon a
poses of the colonizers, and were adapted when the colonized
policy of linguistic colonialism as part of its attempt to bring the
responded in various ways. he sole aim was, to coin an oxymo-
whole island under crown rule. he legislation that marked the
ron, the ruthlessly pragmatic use of language to achieve, consol-
implementation of the strategy, Henry VIIIs Act for the English
idate, and prolong colonial rule.
Order, Habit and Language (1537), revealed the belief that under-
In this regard, it should also be remembered that the discourse
pinned it. he law ordered that all of the kings subjects conform
deployed around the languages of colonialism also formed part
to English culture, especially language, on the basis that
of the colonial project. For example, Edwin Guest noted in 1838
there is again nothing which doth more contain and keep many that English is rapidly becoming the great medium of civilisation,
of [the kings] subjects of [Ireland], in a certain savage and wild the language and law to the Hindoo, of commerce to the African,

174
Colonialism and Language
of religion to the scattered islands of the Paciic; its range, he
observed, is greater than ever was that of the Greek, the Latin, or
the Arabic; and the circle widens daily (1838, 703). And in 1850,
T. Watts argued in the Transactions of the Philological Society that
it will be a splendid and novel experiment in modern society, if
a language becomes so predominant over all others as to reduce
them in comparison to the proportion of provincial dialects. He
had one language in mind, of course: [A]t present the prospects
of the English language are the most splendid the world has ever
seen. It is spreading in each of the quarters of the globe by fash-
ion, by emigration, and by conquest (Watts 1850, 214).
he imperial vision that both Guest and Watts articulated in
the mid-nineteenth century was already one that held English
to be a global language transmitted by means of economic and
military conquest; by the emigration of English speakers as both
proponents and victims of British power; by cultural inluence
(not least through education and the fashionability that eco-
nomic success brings with it); and by the imposition of the civi-
lizing inluence of religion. But it is important to note that both
in the nineteenth century and today, the phrase global language
is signiicant in its reference to the use of English in contexts
across the world, but also highly misleading in its suggestion that
it is the same form of the language used throughout the world.
English, as the vehicle of imperialism and colonialism (primarily
British, more recently American), was and is used in enormously
wide-ranging situations, but it isnt a world language, either in
the sense of a single form reproduced globally or in the sense that
it is used by even a majority of human beings. Given the diver-
sity of human experience, the complexity of our history, and the
nature of human language, it is highly implausible that a par-
ticular language English, Chinese, Arabic, or any other will
become a true global language. Indeed, as has been seen in the
history of colonialism and postcolonialism, what in fact happens
when it is imposed in diferent places across the world is that the
language itself changes and develops. his process of the emer-
gence of variant forms, sometimes recognized as new languages
in their own right, is often described as the price that imperial
languages have to pay for their historical role.
If the functions of language in imperialism and colonial-
ism are historically, spatially, and contextually variable, then
the responses made by those who were subjected to these lan-
guages also difer accordingly in the colonial and postcolonial
periods. To take the example of English again, it is possible to
point to the distinct roles of the language in India both before
and after national independence. Although English was clearly
used under colonialism to produce domination and to exercise
power, it is nonetheless the case, as B. J. Kachru has shown,
that it was used as a language of Indian nationalism in the inde-
pendence struggle and now functions in complicated ways as a
vehicle of control, authority and administrative cohesion not
least in the way in which it can operate as a neutral medium in
particular contexts. his is not, however, to say that English is not
still perceived by some as a language of oppression in India, as it
is in other postcolonial locations. In the debate about the proper
medium for African literature, for example, the Kenyan writer
Ngg Wa hiongo identiied English as a signiicant cause of
colonial alienation and thus argued for his native Gky as
the language best suited to express his African experience. On
Color Classisiication
the other hand, Chinua Achebe, another major writer, rejected
this position and opted instead to use English, but a new form
of English, linked to its national home but altered to conform to
African realities.
he range of views on this and related issues and the vehe-
mence with which they are expressed testiies to the ongoing
complexity and signiicance of the debates surrounding the leg-
acy of linguistic colonialism, many of which are treated as ques-
tions of language policy (see language policy).
Tony Crowley
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Achebe, Chinua. 1975. Morning Yet on Creation Day. London:
Heinemann.
Calvet, Louis-Jean. 1998. Language Wars and Linguistic Politics. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Crowley, Tony. 2005. Wars of Words: he Politics of Language in Ireland
15372004. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
de Nebrija, Antonio. [1492] 2006. Gramtica Castellana. Barcelona:
Lingua.
Guest, Edwin. 1838. A History of English Rhythms. London: Bell.
Kachru, B. J. 1986. he Alchemy of English: he Spread, Function and
Models of Non-Native Englishes. Oxford: Pergamon.
Ngg Wa hiongo. 1986. Decolonising the Mind: he Politics of Language
in African Literature. London: James Currey.
Pennycook, Alastair. 1998. English and the Discourses of Colonialism.
London: Routledge.
Spenser, Edmund. [1596] 1633. View of the present state of Ireland. In
he Historie of Ireland Collected by hree Learned Authors, ed Sir James
Ware, 1119. Dublin.
Statutes at Large Passed in the Parliaments Held in Ireland, he. 1786
1801. 20 vols. Dublin.
Watts, T. 1850. On the probable future position of the English language.
Proceedings of the Philological Society 4: 20714.
COLOR CLASSISIFICATION
Color terms label categories of the hue, saturation, and bright-
ness of light relected from surfaces. Because colors vary from
one another continuously and independently on these three
dimensions, there is no apparent intrinsic structure to the color
space that would prevent speakers of diferent languages from
cutting up the continuum in diferent ways. In the absence of
empirical studies, psychologists and anthropologists expected
color classiication to be an example of extreme cultural relativ-
ism and that the spectrum would be segmented into categories
by diferent languages in arbitrarily diferent ways (e.g., Brown
1965, 31516).
B. Berlin and P. Kay (1969) refuted this relativist assumption.
hey asked native speakers of 20 diferent languages to identify
the best examples ( foci) and the boundaries of basic color terms
on a Munsell color chart (a grid of 320 color chips with 40 hues
and 8 levels of brightness, plus a 10-chip gray scale). Although
informants varied enormously in their placement of boundaries
of color categories, they agreed considerably more on the choices
of the foci of the categories. Berlin and Kay found that there were
only 11 basic color categories in their sample of languages, with
foci in black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, gray, pink,
orange, and purple. More surprisingly, they found that the color
175
Color Classisiication
W R Y W R Y
G/B/K G B/K
W/R/Y W R/Y W R/Y W R Y
G/B/K G/B/K G/B K G/B K
W R K W R K
Y/G/B Y/G B
categories came in a limited number of combinations. If there
were two categories, their foci were in black and white; if three,
they focused in black, white, and red; if four, black, white, red,
and yellow or black, white, red, and green; if ive, black, white,
red, yellow, and green; if six, blue was added; if seven, brown
was added; and if there were eight or more categories, gray, pink,
orange, and purple were added, in no particular order.
In the roughly 40 years since Berlin and Kays initial descrip-
tion of the universals and evolution of color classiication, this
picture has been enriched and complicated by further research,
but not radically changed. he most thorough revision was
prompted by the results of the World Color Survey (WCS) (Kay,
Berlin, and Merriield 1991; Kay et al. 1997; Kay and Mai 1999;
Cook, Kay, and Regier 2005). he WCS investigated color nam-
ing in 110 languages, with roughly 25 native speakers of each
language interviewed about their color names for each of 330
color chips, and their choices of the best examples of each basic
color term of their language. he WCS represented an enormous
improvement in both the methods and the quantity of data over
Berlin and Kay (1969): he WCS interviewers questioned many
more speakers of each language, surveyed nearly six times as
many languages, and focused on languages spoken by indig-
enous groups in Africa, Papua New Guinea, and Central and
South America, as opposed to predominantly Indo-European
languages.
he revised sequence (Kay et al. 1997; Kay and Mai 1999)
recognizes ive evolutionary pathways (shown in Figure 1). he
ive trajectories were interpreted as generated by four princi-
ples: partition (lexicons tend to partition items into exhaustive
and mutually exclusive categories); black and white (distinguish
black and white); warm and cool (distinguish warm primaries
from the cool primaries); and red (distinguish red from other
colors).
One open question is where the universals come from. Kay
and C. McDaniel (1978) argued that the six unique hue points of
white, red, yellow, green, blue, and black are given to us by the
neurophysiology of color vision. hey based their interpretation
on R. L. DeValois, I. Abramov, and G. H. Jacobss (1966) research
on the lateral geniculate nucleii (LGN) in the hypothalamus of
rhesus macaques, which had reported three families of neurons.
176
W R Y Figure 1. Five trajectories of color term evolution.
G B K
Two families were opponent processes: a red-green channel
(excited by red light and inhibited by green light, or vice versa)
and a yellow-blue channel (excited by yellow light and inhibited
by blue light, or vice versa). he third family was a white-black
channel that responds to brightness levels independently of the
other two channels. his physiological account helped explain
why there might be universals in the classiication of what
seemed a structureless domain: he universal structure is one
imposed by the neurophysiology of color vision.
Unfortunately, subsequent research has revealed that the
neurophysiological opponent process system would actually put
the unique hue points in the wrong places. he true axes of the
system are closer to cherry-teal and chartreuse-violet than they
are to red-green and yellow-blue (Jameson and DAndrade 1997).
Sadly, this leaves the universals in color classiication without a
clear neurophysiological explanation.
James Boster
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Berlin, B., and P. Kay. 1969. Basic Color Terms: heir Universality and
Evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Brown, R. 1965. Social Psychology. New York: Free Press.
Cook, R. S., P. Kay, and T. Regier. 2005. he world color survey data-
base: History and use. In Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive
Science, ed. H. Cohen and C. Lefebvre, 22342. New York: Elsevier.
DeValois, R. L., I. Abramov, and G. H. Jacobs. 1966. Analysis of the
response patterns of LGN cells. Journal of the Optical Society of
America 56: 96677.
Jameson, K., and R. G. DAndrade. 1997. Its not really red, green, yel-
low, blue: An inquiry into perceptual color space. In Color Categories
in hought and Language, ed. C. L. Hardin and L. Mai, 295319.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kay, P., B. Berlin, L. Mai, and W. Merriield. 1997. Color naming across
languages. In Color Categories in hought and Language, ed. C. L.
Hardin and L. Mai, 2156. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kay, P., B. Berlin, and W. Merriield. 1991. Biocultural implications of
systems of color naming. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 1: 1225.
Kay, P., and L. Mai. 1999. Color appearance and the emergence and evo-
lution of basic color lexicons. American Anthropologist 101: 74360.
Kay, P., and C. McDaniel. 1978. he linguistic signiicance of the mean-
ings of basic color terms. Language 54: 61046.
Communication

COMMUNICATION liberating. Human language was irst proposed by behaviorists

to be analyzable in terms of a inite state model, and this analy-
Explicit models of what communication is are not prominent in
sis of human language was then shown by Chomsky, from some
cognitive science. Research under the explicit banner of com-
elementary considerations about the structure of sentences, to
munication does lourish in sociology. here, the emphasis is
be evidently defective. he conclusion drawn was that the struc-
most often on phatic rather than ideational communication, a
ture of human language was not to be understood on this model,
distinction due to B. Malinowski (1923). he former creates,
but no objection was raised to it as a model of communication.
maintains, or dissolves communities of communicators. he
Language was saved but communication was fed to the behav-
latter communicates ideas. Generally, these two aspects of com-
iorists. he conclusion from Chomskys demolition might just as
munication are pursued independently, however unjustiiably.
well have been that the behaviorist model was a bad model of
he explicit and general models of language structure that dom-
human communication and that better was deserved.
inate linguistics are sometimes tacitly thought of as providing,
his skepticism about addressing communication is widely,
inter alia, models of ideational communication, though the gap
though not universally, shared by cognitive scientists it is not
between structure and function is underestimated.
just an isolated aberration of Chomskys. hose who have consid-
Of course, this avoidance of explicit study might be an ana-
ered communication worth discussion have generally pursued
logue of the lack of discussion of life in biology. Life is the subject
it within the framework of pragmatic theories, such as Paul
matter of biology and, therefore, the word is little heard therein.
Grices, which address communication as an add-on to a logical
Communication is at least a sizable part of what the social sci-
theory of sentence meaning (Sperber and Wilson 1986; Levinson
ences are about and, so the argument goes, it is not surprising
2000). hese authors appreciate the gap between structure and
that the word is little heard. Unfortunately, this analogy does not
function. We communicate more than the literal meanings of
it unproblematically or absolve us very far.
the sentences we utter (e.g., the implicatures we thereby make;
here is, of course, a huge amount of work on communica-
see conversational implicature), but this assumes, rather
tion phenomena. Linguistics is largely about the structure of
than explains, what it is to communicate a sentences meaning.
natural languages, and at least one of their functions is com-
Functional studies of information structure, many descended
munication. psycholinguistics studies the interpretation of
from Halliday (2004), are further oblique contributions to an
natural language discourses by people. Social psychology has
understanding of communication in terms of the tailoring of
much to say about both linguistic and nonlinguistic communi-
linguistic message to audience, but again they eschew a direct
cation, from tone of voice to body language. Sociology provides
account of what communication is.
extensive studies of communication in all sorts of guises, from
Perhaps it is itting that the nearest thing we have to a frontal
microdialogue to mass media. he humanities likewise. he
approach to communication is derived from philosophical and
issue here is not lack of study, or even lack of study in cognitive
logical approaches to language, and speciically to the seman-
science, but lack of theoretical frameworks for conceptualizing
tics of discourse (see discourse analysis [linguistic]). he
what human communication is. One might be happy to have lots
logical tradition can be seen as deining communication as the
of models, better still competing ones, but to have none smacks
achievement of mutual interpretation for discourses. Traditional
of carelessness.
logic had no explicit account of the process of interpreta-
One signiicant event in the recent cognitive history of the
tion, but logic was implicitly about the criteria that had to be
concept of communication was Noam Chomskys demolition
met to achieve mutually shared interpretation between two
of the pretense of behaviorist psychologists and linguists to
participants in an argument or proof. If the parties shared all
analyze language (and communication) in terms of inite state
assumptions, then they should also share the deductive closure
machine models. his computational model is closely related to
of the assumptions and conclusions. So if they difered on con-
C. Shannon and W. Weavers model of communication, one of
clusions (such as P vs. not P) then that must be because there
the few inluential abstract models of communication, in which
was some divergence of assumptions or interpretation of the lan-
a sender issues signals from a inite code book through a channel
guage fragment that appeared in the argument. For example, two
to a receiver who decodes the messages from an identical code
important cases were equivocation and enthymeme.
book. he amount of information transmitted is a function of
In equivocation, a party might draw a conclusion that relied
the probability of the occurrence of these signals. Information is
on slippage in their interpretation. Socrates might be interpreted
measured by the decrease of uncertainty. he less predictable a
as, say, referring to the Greek philosopher on one occurrence
signal, the more we learn from its occurrence. Of course, Shannon
and the Brazilian footballer on a second. Or democracy might, at
and Weaver were not behaviorists. hey assumed that the send-
one point in the argument, admit of a political system in which
ers and receivers minds have general capacities for assimilating
unlimited funds could be used to campaign, while excluding
messages, though any such assimilation lay outside their model.
such systems at another point. Logic from the earliest times dis-
But the behaviorists inite state machine can be construed as a
tinguished content from form, and avoidance of equivocation
particular application of Shannon and Weavers model, and the
was the main constraint on content in the process of interpre-
behaviorists claim was that it was a general theory not just of
tation. No constraint was placed on the content attached to X,
human communication but of human behavior in general. here
other than that it must be the same content that attached to every
was no mind to assimilate the inite code of messages.
occurrence of X in the argument.
Chomskys demolition of the inite state model as a model of
Enthymeme is an inexplicitness of assumption. Since natural
human language was deservedly famous, thoroughgoing, and
argument rarely spells out all its assumptions, enthymeme is a

177
Communication
prevalent cause of misalignment. Of course, there is a ine line
between equivocation and enthymeme. If by dog you mean all
members of Canis canis in the current domain, and I mean only
the ones who arent bitches, this could be described as equivoca-
tion in the interpretation of a term (here across parties) or enthy-
matic suppression of a premise by one party (i.e., all relevant dogs
are male). Modern developments of logic have provided formal
theories of this process of reasoning from general knowledge and
contextual speciicities to mutual interpretations. But in logics
twentieth-century detour into the foundations of mathematics
and the possibilities of knowledge engineering, this model of
communication has largely been lost.
Discourses come sentence by sentence, and each sentence
has complicated and generally nonmonotonic efects on the
structure of the context in which subsequent sentences will be
interpreted. Entities (people, objects, states, processes, events)
get added to, but also subtracted from, the current model of
the discourse. hese efects are functions of both linguistic and
nonlinguistic long-term knowledge, current perceptual circum-
stance, and much else besides. So the meaning contributed by
each sentence to the discourse is a complex function of more
than its own or any other sentences structure. he general con-
ception of discourse semantics has been developed with great
sophistication by H. Kamp and U. Reyle (1993) and their col-
leagues under the banner of discourse representation theory and
indeed by other approaches to discourse semantics, though still
with very little explicit connection to communication.
Whereas the classical logic of proof is monotonic in the sense
that adding more assumptions never removes valid conclusions,
defeasible logics of interpretation are nonmonotonic as new
assumptions are added, earlier conclusions may be subtracted.
hese defeasible logics for reasoning to interpretations model
the process of discourse interpretation. In a monologue, hear-
ers attempt to construct an interpretation of a speakers utter-
ances that makes the statements true, bringing with them all
available general knowledge and contextual information. When
things go smoothly, this returns a unique minimal model at
every stage (van Lambalgen and Hamm 2004; Stenning and van
Lambalgen 2007). he reason these defeasible logics can yield
unique intended models for discourses against a background of
large bodies of general knowledge is the extensive deployment of
closed-world reasoning. If there is no evidence for the relevance
of facts in the model, then we can conclude that they are not rel-
evant and at least not yet there. here are many subtleties about
how we close the world in constructing the intended model, but
they are variants on this same idea. Whereas in classical logic
we have to search for counterexamples in usually ininite sets of
logically possible models, closed-world reasoning gets us down
to single, small, intended models of the discourse at each point
in its development.
To adapt an example from an experiment designed to invoke
defeasible reasoning to an interpretation, when we are presented
with the following discourse,
She has an essay.
If she has an essay, she is in the library.
we duly conclude that she is in the library. But when we then
encounter, as the next sentence,
178
If the library is open, she is in the library.
we may use our general knowledge and may withdraw the infer-
ence we made before, constructing a model that can be summa-
rized as:
If she has an essay, and the library is open, she is in the library.
he speciication of the models that are the objects of communi-
cation on this theory is an achievement of a successful discourse.
Each speciication of a situation determines a set of situa-
tions difering from it by permutations of the speciication: She
does/doesnt have an essay and the library is/isnt open, and
Because of closed-world reasoning, there are no other students
or libraries or essays nor indeed much else in the current model
until we hear about them. It is these models that can be thought
of as Shannon and Weavers code books. Far from getting the
book down from the shelf at the outset of the discourse, it is only
at each stage of development of the discourse that we can see
what code book has been speciied. But note that this was never
Chomskys complaint about Shannon and Weavers model. he
complaint was always about the ininity of the code, not about its
on-line construction.
Such defeasible logics formalize the implicit model of com-
munication dominant in psycholinguistics the ield that has
most concerned itself with the empirical study of the process of
interpretation. he intended models correspond to what in psy-
cholinguistics is known as the gist of the discourse, or what W.
Kintsch (1988), for example, calls the situation model. It is this
gist that was shown to be rapidly extracted from discourses in
classical studies of text comprehension.
Notice that the most plausible kinds of Shannon and Weaver
signaling within the context of a fully speciied code book have to
do with temporal changes of state: She now has an essay to write
and is in the library. She now doesnt have an essay and she is in
the library (shes inished perhaps). She now has no essay and is
not in the library (having left?) what one might call the mono-
logue of the surveillance camera. here are kinds of human com-
munication that are like this (e.g., the stock ticker perhaps), but
one only has to consider such examples to realize what a minor
part they play. Creating local mutual interpretations is not sig-
naling within their possibilities.
Here is the beginnings of a general abstract model of human
communication based on logical theories of discourse process-
ing. In this model, communication is the construction of mutual
interpretations for discourses. It requires an attendant theory
of the structure of a language and of the organization of general
knowledge databases, which might be fully consonant with lin-
guistic theories. But it is not to be confused with such theories.
Its objects of communication are models of discourses (inter-
pretations that make them true), not sentences or meanings.
he contrast between this and other sentence-based theories of
communication can be well illustrated by considering the case of
soliloquy. We do indeed talk to ourselves, either audibly or not,
and intuitively we talk to ourselves for some of the same reasons
we talk to other people, including to help understand what we
believe or want, to formulate a course of action, to persuade our-
selves to follow resolutions, to understand what someone said to
us, or to weigh up pros and cons. Needless to say, this process is
Communication
extremely important in learning, as is well testiied in the empiri-
cal literature (e.g., Chi et al. 1989). To adapt an old saying, talking
to oneself is the irst sign of sanity, or at least the search for it.
here is little temptation to understand soliloquy in terms
of the reduction of uncertainty, but we can apply the same logi-
cal model of communication as we use for public discourse. We
would not need to talk to ourselves if our knowledge and belief
were a transparent, homogeneous, consistent database of facts
and principles driven by unconlicted motivations. We equiv-
ocate and suppress our assumptions in internal argument just
as well as in public, and successful argument with ourselves
can lead to the same kinds of revision in order to gain coherent
interpretations.
Certainly there are diferences between soliloquy and public
dialogue, but there are also enormous overlaps. In pursuing our
goals, it may often be a pragmatic matter of convenience whether
we choose to talk to ourselves or a conversational partner. hese
functions of soliloquy are functions shared with dialogical com-
munication, and they are functions that have been neglected in
our thinking about communication.
One could, of course, reject the notion that soliloquy is com-
munication and deine away these barriers to the consignment
of communication to Shannon and Weaver, but deeper consid-
erations indicate that to do so is to miss much of what is crucial
about public communication. One should observe that this
model is not so incompatible with Chomskys deeper views as at
might at irst appear. For example, his objections to functional
linguists who would see language shaped only by public com-
munication is that language evolution may have been driven as
much by the advantages of an internal medium for represen-
tation and reasoning as by one for public communication. But
with a more adequate theory of what communication is, and by
dropping the idea that communication is automatically public,
this view is entirely consistent with our claim that communica-
tion is about achievement of coherent interpretation, whether by
public utterance or internal soliloquy.
Lastly, the model may help to reconnect the cognitive and
the afective perspectives on phatic and ideational communica-
tion alluded to at the outset. One observation is that the funda-
mental basis of ideational communication is the achievement of
mutually aligned interpretations. he process of getting to these
is, by deinition, phatic communication it creates community
through shared interpretation of language. We perhaps for-
get how disturbing are our rare experiences of complete failure
to achieve this happy state and, in so doing, fail to see that our
cognitive theories of ideational communication contain within
them abstract speciications of just what has to be achieved and
maintained phatically, along with abstract accounts of some of
the processes by which this might be done.
Keith Stenning
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Chi, M., M. Bassok, M. Lewis, P. Reimann, and R. Glaser. 1989. Self-
explanations: How students study and use examples in learning to
solve problems. Cognitive Science 13: 14582.
Halliday, M. A. K. 2004. An Introduction to Functional Grammar.
London: Arnold.
Communication, Prelinguistic
Kamp, H., and U. Reyle. 1993. From Discourse to Logic: Introduction
to Model heoretic Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic
and Discourse Representation heory. Part II, Vol. 42, of Studies in
Linguistics and Philosophy. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer
Academic Publishers.
Kintsch, W. 1988. he role of knowledge in discourse comprehension: A
construction-integration model. Psychological Review 95: 16382.
Levinson, S. C. 2000. Presumptive Meanings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Malinowski, B. 1923. he problem of meaning in primitive languages.
Supplement to he Meanings of Meanings: A Study of the Inluence of
Language upon hought and the Science of Symbolism, ed. C. K. Ogden
and I. A. Richards, 451510. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Sperber, D., and D. Wilson. 1986. Relevance: Communication and
Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Stenning, K., and M. van Lambalgen. 2007. Human Reasoning and
Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
van Lambalgen, M., and F. Hamm. 2004. he Proper Treatment of Events.
Oxford and Boston: Blackwell.
COMMUNICATION, PRELINGUISTIC
Over the last 30 years, the ield of developmental psychology
has devoted considerable research to prelinguistic communi-
cation, deined, most generally, as the sharing of information
prior to the onset of language. Because language onset is usu-
ally identiied with the irst spoken words, the prelinguistic
period encompasses roughly the irst 12 to 18 months. Research
reviews have been framed both in terms of age-related changes
in infants interest in, and behavior during, social interactions
(e.g., Reddy 1999) and in terms of milestones for behaviors spe-
ciically related to communication, such as visual regard, turn-
taking, and gesture (Dromi 1993). hese two reviews point to a
general agreement about the infant behaviors that are relevant to
prelinguistic communication (e.g., gesturing and visual regard)
and about the ways in which those behaviors change during the
irst year of life. he major controversies in this area concern how
active a role infants play in structuring early episodes of com-
munication and how changes in cognitive functioning relate to
changes in prelinguistic communication.
Shortly after birth, infants recognize familiar people, and
they can recognize their mothers by voice, face, and even by
smell (e.g., DeCasper and Fifer 1980). hese perceptual capac-
ities set the stage for infants social interactions to play a spe-
cial role in prelinguistic communication; infants are interested
in and responsive to their caregivers, who interpret their early
social behaviors as communicative. Even if infants are not yet
aware that others have emotions or ideas to share or that they
themselves might have the same, the fact that the social world
treats them as communicative partners is viewed as a critical fea-
ture of social-pragmatic theories of language acquisition (e.g.,
Tomasello 2006).
Social smiling emerges at roughly six to eight weeks of age
and helps to mark the beginning of face-to-face, or en face,
interactions with caregivers, which are characterized by vocal
turn-taking and by the sharing of afect (see review by Adamson
2003). Although the role of the infant in holding up the structure
of these early en face interactions is controversial, it is clear that
infants take an even greater role in initiating social interactions
and maintaining their structure during the middle of the irst
179
Communication, Prelinguistic
year. his three-to-eight-month age range has been character-
ized as a time when infants become increasingly interested in
regularity and surprise. Conventional games such as peek-a-boo
become prominent, and infants begin to take the lead in initiat-
ing these games as well as their turns in them.
Infants interest in the attention of others during the last quar-
ter of the irst year has been viewed as an important milestone
in prelinguistic communication. For the irst time, there is joint
attention, which refers to episodes when infants and partners are
both engaged with the same object-in-the-world. Infants readily
follow the gaze of their partner and attempt to engage them in
attending to the object of interest. Infants use expanded means
to garner the attention of others, including giving objects, show-
ing, and pointing. Gestures, especially pointing, have been the
subjects of intense study in the prelinguistic period because ges-
tures may be used to share ones focus of attention with another
or to direct the attention of another (e.g., Bates 1979).
Also of great interest in late infancy is how new achieve-
ments in cognition might relate to changes in communication.
According to Jean Piagets theory of cognitive development (e.g.,
1983), infants begin, in the latter half of their irst year, to under-
stand that objects exist when out of sight and that objects exist
independent of our actions on them. his achievement, termed
object permanence, is theorized to be a critical part of the devel-
opment of symbolic functioning. he words of language are
symbols, that is, arbitrarily spoken or written units that stand for
other objects and events. hus, the achievement of object per-
manence and symbolic functioning are important milestones
setting the stage for the onset of formal language.
It is probably important, however, to view the transition
between prelinguistic communication and formal language as
neither abrupt nor all-or-none. Clearly, there continue to be
important relations between cognitive development and lan-
guage after infants speak their irst words; just as clearly, non-
symbolic forms of communication continue throughout the life
span (as, for example, in communication via physical actions or
emotional expressions).
Current research in developmental psychology is focusing on
processes that might be speciic to language learning, as well as
on more general cognitive processes (such as categorization)
that might be involved in early word learning (see review by
Hollich, Hirsh-Pasek, and Golinkof 2000). For example, infants
ability to ind patterns in auditory stimuli or to group objects
together if they share similar attributes are general cognitive pro-
cesses that relate to the problem of learning a language (Hollich,
Hirsch-Pasek, and Golinkof 2000; Tomasello 2006). Delays in
these milestones of prelinguistic communication, and in the others
noted here, have been the subject of early intervention programs,
and deicits in prelinguistic communication skills have even been
linked to speciic developmental disorders, such as autism.
James A. Green and Gwen E. Gustafson
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Adamson, Lauren B. 2003. he still face: A history of a shared experi-
mental paradigm. Infancy 4: 45173.
Bates, Elizabeth. 1979. he emergence of symbols: Cognition and commu-
nication in infancy. New York: Academic.
180
Communicative Action
DeCasper, Anthony, and W. Fifer. 1980. Of human bonding: Newborns
prefer their mothers voices. Science 12: 30517.
Dromi, Ester. 1993. he development of prelinguistic communica-
tion. In At-Risk Infants: Interventions, Families, and Research, ed. N.
Anastasiow, 1926. Baltimore: Brookes Publishing.
Hollich, George J., K. Hirsh-Pasek, and R. M. Golinkof. 2000. Breaking
the language barrier: An emergentist coalition model of the origins
of word learning. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child
Development 65.3: 1-137.
Piaget, Jean. 1983. Piagets theory. In Handbook of Child Psychology.
Vol. 1: History, heory, and Methods, ed. P. Mussen, 10326. New
York: Wiley.
Reddy, Vasudevi. 1999. Prelinguistic communication. In he
Development of Language, ed. M. Barrett, 2550. Hove, East Sussex,
UK: Psychology Press.
Tomasello, Michael. 2006. Acquiring linguistic constructions.
In Handbook of Child Psychology. Vol 2: Cognition, Perception,
and Language, 6th ed. Ed. D. Kuhn and R. Siegler, 25598. New
York: Wiley.
COMMUNICATIVE ACTION
Communicative action is a term introduced by Jrgen Habermas
as part of his attempt to develop a general theory of action for
the social sciences. Among social theorists, it is widely believed
that a purely instrumental (or economic) model of rational action
is unable to account for the orderliness and stability of human
social interaction (Parsons 1968). Classical sociological theorists,
from Max Weber (1978) to Talcott Parsons (1951), tried to remedy
this defect by positing some additional category of value-oriented
or norm-governed action that imposed constraints on the range
of strategically optimizing behavior. Absent from this analysis,
however, was any precise speciication of the role that language
played in mediating social interaction. Indeed, in many cases, it
was unclear how speech was supposed to it into the theory of
action at all (Cicourel 1973, 21).
Habermas took as his point of departure the observation
that not only was a purely instrumental model of rational action
unable to explain the orderliness of social interaction, but it was
also unable to supply an adequate pragmatics for a theory of
meaning. So instead of looking to values or norms for a speci-
ication of the structure of noninstrumental rational action, he
turned to speech-act theory. In particular, he looked to the
notion of illocutionary force, as developed by J. L. Austin
and John Searle (Habermas 1984, I: 293; Austin 1975; Searle 1969).
His central intuition was that the limitations of Gricean (Grice
1989), or intentionalist (see communicative intention)
semantics might both reveal the limitations of a strictly instru-
mental approach to understanding the illocutionary dimension
of speech-acts and provide some indication of the structural
features that a noninstrumental theory of rational action should
exhibit. Once an account of the rationality of speech acts was
developed, his thought was that this could be extended to pro-
vide a more general account of the rationality of linguistically
mediated interactions. It is the latter category of action that he
refers to as communicative action.
Although this theory is of primary relevance to social scien-
tists, it is also important to the study of language. Because of the
constraints imposed by the compositionality requirement,
Communicative Action
any plausible approach to the theory of meaning must incor-
porate some sort of division of labor between the semantics
and pragmatics (with the former taken to have a compositional
structure, the latter typically not). heorists of language have,
however, sometimes been naive when it comes to understanding
the constraints that the theory of action imposes upon the prag-
matics. For example, it is often simply assumed that individuals
are capable of rule-following at the level of social action; yet
rule-following is, at the level of general action theory, a deeply
contested if not entirely problematic concept (e.g., see Bicchieri
1993). Habermass concept of communicative action is impor-
tant for showing not only how action theorists might learn from
contemporary developments in the study of language but also
how theorists interested in language might proit from greater
attention to the structure of social action.
Speech Acts
Standard noncooperative game theory (or rational choice theory;
see games and language), which provides the canonical
modern formulation of the instrumental conception of rational
action, is the most widely adopted model of rational action in the
social sciences. It is, however, not a candidate for adoption as a
general theory of rational action because the model explicitly
excludes any communication between the parties to an interac-
tion (Nash 1951) and prohibits any action from having semantic
content (see Farrell 1993). Furthermore, when these restrictions
are lifted, the standard equilibrium solution concepts are no lon-
ger valid, and no theorist has yet succeeded in developing cor-
relates that exhibit the same stability properties (Farrell 1993;
Heath 1996). In other words, linguistic communication so far
does not it into the model of action favored by rational choice
theorists.
It is against this background that Habermass theory of
communicative action must be assessed. he central question
is: What properties do speech-acts possess that make them
unsuitable for purely instrumental use? he most obvious
answer, in the case of assertions, is that they are subject to a
norm of veridicality (and produced, in the standard run of cases,
with at least the pretense of satisfying that norm). Among phi-
losophers of language, this norm is commonly regarded not as a
convention that happens to govern the production of assertions
but as a norm that is internally connected to the meaningful-
ness of these expressions (see truth conditional seman-
tics). Absent such a norm, not only would no utterance be
credible, but it is not clear that the language itself would even
be learnable. If speakers simply claimed whatever happened to
be in their interest at the time to claim, the connection between
semantic conventions and patterns of use would essentially be
scrambled.
Habermas articulates this idea by claiming that in order to
produce a meaningful utterance, speakers must adopt what he
calls the performative stance, whereby they bracket the more
mundane instrumental objectives that they may be pursuing
and adopt the standard intracommunicative objective of reach-
ing mutual understanding. his is essentially a cooperative
undertaking, and so even though it may be pursued as a means
to securing other, extracommunicative objectives (indeed, this
is almost always the care), it is not itself a system of instrumental
action. On the contrary, in producing an utterance, Habermas
argues, speakers always associate a validity claim with its con-
tent, essentially extending a warrant to the efect that the rele-
vant norms governing its production have been satisied. In the
case of assertions, this takes the form of a truth claim (which is
why, Habermas claims, to assert something is to assert it as true).
He then generalizes this analysis to suggest that imperatives are
produced with an associated rightness claim, which warrants
that the action mandated is in fact the correct one to perform. He
argues also that expressives are produced with an associated sin-
cerity claim, which he analyzes in an analogous manner (Heath
1998). Appealing to Michael Dummetts (1993) assertability-
conditional semantics, he then argues that grasping the condi-
tions under which these validity claims are satisied constitutes
an understanding of the meaning of an utterance. hus speech-
acts, insofar as they are meaningful, are necessarily governed by
a noninstrumental pragmatics.
Communicative Action
Habermas concludes, on this basis, that instrumental action and
speech constitute two elementary forms of action (1998, 118).
he former is oriented toward success in the attainment of some
objective; the latter is oriented toward mutual understanding in a
process of communication. Naturally, the term elementary form
should not be taken to suggest that language is a presocial phe-
nomenon. he point is simply to identify two orientations that
the agent is able to assume toward his or her environment before
considering the implications of introducing a second rational
agent into the frame of reference. he introduction of a sec-
ond agent, in Habermass terms, generates social action. Social
action, in this view, is a complex phenomenon constructed out of
the interaction of the two elementary forms. he most immedi-
ate consequence of introducing a second agent is that it places
them both in the position that Parsons referred to as double
contingency what the irst agent wants to do will depend upon
what he or she expects the second to do and vice versa (Parsons
1951, 1011). hus, agents engaged in interaction are always in a
position where they must coordinate their action-plans, even if
this means simply developing a stable set of expectations against
which they can each proceed to pursue their private objectives
(Habermas 1998, 221).
In Habermass view, this problem of interdependent expecta-
tions can be resolved by drawing upon the resources of either
elementary action type. When instrumental action is assigned
priority, social action takes the form of strategic action, in the
standard game-theoretic sense. In this context, the resources of
language are used only to supply the content of the intentional
states beliefs and preferences that serve as parameters of the
strategic optimization problem. However, when the resources
of language are used to resolve the coordination problem, this
use generates the form of action that Habermas refers to as
communicative action. he diference is that communicative
action draws upon the commitments made, in the form of valid-
ity claims, in order to limit the range of action alternatives that
are available (thus, the consensus achieving force of linguistic
processes of reaching understanding the binding and bonding
energies of language itself becomes efective for the coordina-
tion of action [Habermas 1998, 221]).
181
Communicative Action
It is important to note that communicative action is not the
same as speech. It is a form of teleological action, in the sense
that agents continue to pursue extralinguistic objectives. he
distinguishing characteristic is that they use language in order
to solve the problem of double contingency by establishing a
set of shared goals and norms (rather than simply using lan-
guage to identify background beliefs and preferences). his use
of language as an explicit coordination mechanism imposes
constraints on the type of goals that agents can pursue and the
means they can employ. hus, communicative action, despite
being teleological in form, is not merely a species of instrumental
action. At most, it represents a type of constrained instrumental
action. hus, it is the use of language to coordinate social inter-
action, Habermas claims, that provides the explanation for the
orderliness and stability of human social interaction. he central
error of the classical sociological action theorists, according to
this view, rested with their focus upon a practical, rather than a
communicative, conception of rationality (Habermas 1996, 3).
Practical Discourse
Finally, it is worth mentioning a further distinction in Habermass
work, between communicative action and practical discourse.
he orderliness of linguistically mediated interactions (i.e., com-
municative action) is achieved by the binding-bonding efects
of the validity claims raised within speech-acts. It is the rational
acceptance of these claims by listeners that makes it rational, in
turn, for them to accept any constraints on their conduct that
may arise as a consequence. However, this process of acceptance
is usually only tacit and in many cases relies merely upon the
speakers warrant. his means that should the listener suddenly
experience doubts during the course of the subsequent interac-
tion, it is always legitimate for him or her to go back and demand
further justiication (i.e., request that the speaker redeem some
validity claim that was associated with the speech-acts). As a
result, the potential for critical scrutiny of social practices is
always present, in every society and culture, even if not explicitly
institutionalized. Such a demand for justiication interrupts the
sequence of communicative action and shifts the participants
into discourse, where contested validity claims are relexively
thematized and debated. Contested rightness claims are discur-
sively tested in a forum that Habermas refers to as practical dis-
course, which is governed by a set of distinctive inference rules,
in particular a universalization rule that serves as the foundation
for the theory of discourse ethics. he distinction between prac-
tical discourse and communicative action is important, in this
regard, because it is only the former that is directly governed by
the universalization constraint.
Joseph Heath
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Austin, J. L. 1975. How to Do hings with Words. 2d ed. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Bicchieri, Cristina. 1993. Rationality and Coordination. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Cicourel, Aaron. 1973. Cognitive Sociology. Harmondsworth, UK:
Penguin.
Dummett, Michael. 1993. What is a theory of meaning? (II) In he Seas
of Language, 3493. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
182
Communicative Intention
Farrell, Joseph. 1993. Meaning and credibility in cheap-talk games.
Games and Economic Behavior 5: 51431.
Grice, H. P. 1989. Studies in the Ways of Words. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Habermas, Jrgen. 1984. he heory of Communicative Action. 2 vols.
Trans. homas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press.
. 1996. Between Facts and Norms. Trans. William Rehg. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
. 1998. On the Pragmatics of Communication. Ed. Maeve Cooke.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
. 2001. On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction. Trans. Barbara
Fultner. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Heath, Joseph. 1996. Is language a game? Canadian Journal of
Philosophy 26: 128.
. 1998. What is a validity claim? Philosophy and Social Criticism
24: 2341.
. 2001. Communicative Action and Rational Choice. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Nash, John. 1951. Noncooperative games. Annals of Mathematics
54: 28995.
Parsons, Talcott. 1951. he Social System. New York: Free Press.
. 1968. he Structure of Social Action. 2 vols. New York: Free Press.
Parsons, Talcott, and Edward Shils, eds. 1951. Towards a General heory
of Action. New York: Harper and Row.
Searle, John. 1969. Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society. 2 vols. Ed. G. Roth and C.
Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press.
COMMUNICATIVE INTENTION
Late twentieth-century discussion of the nature of commu-
nicative intention was dominated by the theories of British
philosopher Herbert Paul Grice. Grice initially (1957) argued
that the primary intended efect of an indicative utterance
was to get the hearer to believe the proposition expressed; an
essential component of this communicative intention was the
intention to have this efect be achieved through the hearers
recognition of that intention. He eventually acknowledged that
there were counterexamples to this analysis and subsequently
(1968; 1969, 1712) proposed that the primary communica-
tive intention must be that the hearer should at least come to
believe that the utterer has some particular thought or belief.
Grice also allowed that speakers need not intend to change
the attitudes of some speciic, actual audience; instead, this
part of the communicative intention concerns what is meant
to happen should there be an audience having such-and-such
characteristics.
Setting aside some of the many reinements (1989, 86116),
Grices characterization of communicative intention runs as
follows:
An utterance, U, is made with a communicative intention if and
only if the utterer, S, utters U with an intention comprised of three
subintentions:
(1) Ss utterance U is to produce a certain response, R, should
there be an audience, A, having characteristics, C;
(2) A is to recognize Ss intention (1);
(3) As recognition of Ss intention (1) is to function as at
least part of As reason for having response R.
Communicative Intention
It is assumed here that S communicates a belief to some audi-
ence, A, just in case As recognition of Ss communicative inten-
tion yields R, where R is the formation of the relevant belief in
A. For example, Sally said Congratulations! with communi-
cative intent just in case she meant her saying to congratulate
the person to whom she was speaking and meant for this inten-
tion to be recognized by that person; she also had to intend for
that very recognition to be a reason for the recognition of the
congratulation.
Peter F. Strawson (1964) challenged the suiciency of the
loop or mechanism constituted by subintention (3). Suppose that
Karen thinks that if her tennis racket is lying on the kitchen table,
her friend Laura will think Karen plans to play tennis that day.
Karen knows that Laura is watching her, and she also knows that
Laura does not know that Karen knows Laura is watching. Karen
then puts the racket on the table with the intention of getting
Laura to believe Karen plans to play tennis. Karen also intends
that Lauras recognition of the latter intention will give Laura
reason to believe that Karen in fact means to play tennis. hus,
all three clauses in Grices deinition have been satisied. Yet in
such a situation, Strawson argues, Karen has not communicated,
at least in Grices sense, to Laura that she plans to play tennis. So
what is missing? Karen must intend not only that Laura recog-
nize her intention to get Laura to think she plans to play tennis
but also that Laura recognize her intention to get Laura to recog-
nize her intention to get Laura to think so.
Grice and other philosophers (e.g., Schifer 1972; Holdcroft
1978; Recanati 1986) have explored various responses to the
problem raised by Strawson. Grices own preferred response to
the problem was to allow that meaning requires an ininite set of
intentions. Yet this condition is to be understood as deining the
optimal state in relation to which actual communicative states
are measured. He contends, then, that strictly speaking, no
speaker actually means that p in the sense of actually having the
set of ininite intentions required for ideal, non-natural meaning,
but he adds that the speaker is in a situation which is such that
it is legitimate, or perhaps even mandatory, for us to deem him
to satisfy this unfulillable condition (1989, 302). Grices justi-
ication for this move inds its roots in his views concerning the
status of the normative rationality assumptions relied upon in
the entrenched and self-justifying system of both everyday and
philosophical psychology. He evokes the diference between the
titular and factual character of an utterance, where the former is
its idealized, rational character, never actually present in toto,
and where the latter could be a matter of a pre-rational coun-
terpart of meaning (1989, 856). Yet it seems unsatisfactory
to conclude that Karen could never, strictly speaking, actually
communicate to Laura that she wants to play tennis!
Wayne A. Davis (2003) develops an alternative approach to
the relation between communication and semantic intentions.
Not all instances of communication are intentional, and cases
of intentionally communicating something to someone are ana-
lyzed as doing something that expresses a mental state, where
this action is the basis of an audiences recognition that the
mental state is expressed. What is expressed depends on what
is intended, but that does not mean that the hearer has to rec-
ognize the speakers communicative intention for intentional
communication to take place. he intentional component of
Comparative Method
expression is the performance of an observable action as an
indication of some attitude, where some x indicates some y
whenever x provides some (possibly unreliable) evidence that
y is the case.
Paisley Livingston
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bennett, Jonathan. 1976. Linguistic Behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Davis, Wayne A. 2003. Meaning, Expression, and hought.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Grice, Herbert Paul. 1957. Meaning. Philosophical Review 66: 37788.
. 1968. Intentions and speech acts. Analysis 29: 10912.
. 1969. Utterers meaning and intentions. Philosophical Review
78: 14777.
. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Holdcroft, David. 1978. Words and Deeds: Problems in the heory of
Speech Acts. Oxford: Clarendon.
Recanati, Franois. 1986. On deining communicative intentions. Mind
and Language 1: 21342.
Schifer, Stephen. 1972. Meaning. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Strawson, Peter F. 1964. Intention and convention in speech acts.
Philosophical Review 73: 43960.
COMPARATIVE METHOD
Genetic Relatedness and Common History
Languages sharing a period of common history in a single ances-
tral language are genetically related. he comparative methods
(henceforth CM) goal is to demonstrate genetic relatedness by
identifying similarities attributable to retention from common
history. Demonstrations of genetic relatedness are presented as
reconstructions (or proto- forms) in the hypothetical ancestral
system. Genetically related languages comprise a language
family, relationships within which are identiied through
female kin terms. A form inherited in a daughter is a relex of the
mothers form. Relexes of the same form in diferent languages
are cognates.
Languages sharing a period of common history independent
of the rest of the family constitute a subgroup. Subgrouping is rep-
resented as a family tree. (Wave models are an alternative permit-
ting representation of overlapping shared innovations. Textbooks
like Hock [1986, Chap.15] compare the two.) In determining
genetic relatedness, one seeks evidence of shared retention from
a proto-language; in subgrouping, one seeks evidence of shared
innovation after the family began to diverge. In subgrouping, one
must identify unique events common to the history of the sub-
group. he features deining the subgroup must demonstrably
not be retentions from an earlier period of common history. (On
subgrouping arguments, see Harrison 2003, 3.2).
Because a language is not an organism passing on genetic
material but behaviors and underlying knowledge, common
history is a property not of languages but the constructions con-
stituting them (see construction grammars). A borrowing
and its source also share common history, and so genetic related-
ness privileges common history involving transmission between
individuals speaking the same language. For mixed languages
183
Comparative Method

Table 1.
plant paddle needleish thin forehead pandanus fold
Trukese ftuk-i ftun taak mlii-lif chaamw faach n-num
Mokilese poadok padil doak manip-nip soamw -par lim
Gilbertese arok-a arina raku m-manii ramwa ara- num
PMC *faSok- *faSla *[sS]aku *ma-nii(nii) *camwa *faca *lumi

Table 2.
Trukese f t k n ch m mw aa u u i
Mokilese p d k l r m mw oa a oa a i o i i
Gilbertese r k n r m mw a a a a a u u o i i
PMC *f *S *k *l *c *m *mw *a *u *o * *i

(homason 2001, 70 f), speaking the same language is diicult
to deine. Genetic relatedness may require redeinition to incor-
porate language mixing.
Deining the Comparative Method
he CM emerged from nineteenth-century research largely on
Indo-European. It demonstrates genetic relatedness by distin-
guishing cross-linguistic similarities due to retention from those
due to chance, borrowing, or the nature of language. Four (not
necessarily mutually exclusive) approaches to identifying shared
retentions are now considered.
NEGATIVE SIEVING. Similarities due to borrowing or the nature of
language must be identiied. One expects similarity in onomato-
poetic and schematic constructions, where the form is to a degree
iconic of the meaning. Such natural similarities are eliminable by
restricting comparison to symbols, whose form/meaning relation
is arbitrary. (On restrictions on the CM, see Harrison 2003.) here is
less consensus regarding what is (not) likely to be borrowed. Some
have argued for a core lexicon resistant to borrowing. For an assess-
ment, see homason (2001, 71 f). Although constructions with
grammatical meaning (like conjunctions or adpositions) are less
often borrowed than those with lexical meaning (like most nouns
or verbs), Sarah Grey homason and Terrance Kaufman (1988)
have demonstrated that, in principle, anything can be borrowed.
REGULAR SOUND CORRESPONDENCE AND THE STANDARD CM.
Most comparativists identify demonstrations of genetic related-
ness through regular sound correspondence as the standard CM.
To rule out chance and, to some extent, borrowing as accounts of
similarity, the standard CM exploits the neogrammarian move-
ments regularity assumption that every sound change, inas-
much as it occurs mechanically, takes place according to laws
that admit no exception (Osthof and Brugmann 1967, 204).
he Micronesian data and Proto-Micronesian (PMC) recon-
structions (largely from Bender et al. 2003) in Table 1 exemplify
regular sound correspondence (where - indicates a morpheme
boundary) from which emerge the correspondences in Table 2.
Multiple correspondences with a single reconstructed pho-
neme relect context-dependent sound changes. In Tables 1
and 2, they include the loss of short inal vowels in Trukese and
Mokilese, raisings conditioned by the vowel in the following
PMC syllable, and lengthenings, by PMC syllable structure. Each
correspondence set, or set of conditioned sets, is reconstructed
as a phoneme of the proto-language (see historical recon-
struction or textbooks like Campbell 2004, Chap. 5).
he regularity assumption is vacuous unless the sound
changes yielding conditioned correspondences are constrained,
since any correspondence is regular if its conditioning environ-
ment is suiciently narrow (for example, a single morpheme).
he neogrammarians restricted conditioning to purely phonetic
environments (see Hale 2003, 343).
Chance similarities like Mokilese padil paddle are iden-
tiiable because there is no regular correspondence between
Mokilese /p/ and English /p/, as there is between Mokilese /p/,
Trukese /f/, and Gilbertese . Of course, distinguishing regular
from chance correspondences is a function of token frequency.
Lexical replacement over suicient time or in some contact
situations may reduce the number of tokens exhibiting regular
correspondence so that regular correspondence is indistinguish-
able statistically from chance. (Statistical methods are seldom
used in the standard CM. Quantitative methods proposed in
subgrouping include lexicostatistics and, more recently, compu-
tational cladistics see McMahon and McMahon 2005.)
Borrowings may be identiiable similarly if their number is
small. Large-scale borrowing is often recognizable as a parallel
set of apparently regular correspondences, as in Rotuman. Bruce
Biggs (1965) was able to associate one set of Rotuman correspon-
dences with native vocabulary and another with Polynesian bor-
rowings. Latinate borrowings into English might be identiiable
similarly if we did not already know their history.
he identiiability of borrowings as irregular or parallel cor-
respondences is inhibited when:
(i) the source language cannot be identiied, or:
(ii) the source is a related language spoken by many target
language speakers, who apply their knowledge of source/tar-
get correspondences to nativize borrowings, or:
(iii) later phonological changes mask earlier borrowings.
In cases of massive borrowing across many languages, as
reported in Grace (1996) for New Caledonia, the number of

184
Comparative Method
regular correspondences proliferate to the point that one must
reconstruct a proto-language phonemic inventory far larger than
that of any of its daughters and possibly larger than one would
consider natural. In such cases, the standard CM fails.
It is vital in comparison that there be some measure of simi-
larity to show that we are comparing likes with likes. he CM
says little about similarity in meaning. Comparativist practice
favors meaning identity. Since semantic similarity remains ill-
deined, one is guided by experience and common sense. For
phonetic similarity, we can appeal to phonetic theories. What
is seldom appreciated is that the standard CM does not need a
theory of phonetic similarity because the regularity assumption
is a stand-in. We dont need to know that two sounds are similar,
only that there is a regular correspondence between them. Much
of the data for modern theories of phonetic similarity undoubt-
edly came from regular correspondences identiied by the CM.
he empirical validity of the regularity assumption has been
controversial from the outset. hose opposed to the neogram-
marian position asserted that each word has its [own] history.
A current manifestation of this opposition is lexical diffusion
(Chen and Wang 1975), the view that sound changes move
through the lexicon, afecting diferent words at diferent times.
Words yet unafected will appear to be exceptions to the change.
For example, the shortening of Early Modern English (ENE) /u:/,
as in good (ENE /gu:d/, English /gd/), has yet to afect food, and
has afected roof only in some dialects.
Examples of nonphonetic conditioning are less often cited. he
Micronesian [aa]-[oa]-[a] correspondence set in Table 2 might be
such a case. In Trukese and some other Micronesian languages,
lengthening afects only the V1 of PMC (C1)V1(C2)V2 nouns. If, as
other evidence suggests, these nouns are the residue of a process
afecting all prosodic phrases, phonetic conditioning is preserved.
Since the regularity assumption is crucial to the CM, it may
be problematic were it proven false. hough William Labov
(1981) argues that the regularity assumption holds for one class
of sound changes while others difuse through the lexicon, we
need not rely on his assessment to save regularity. Sound change
might begin variably, but given enough time, it moves toward
regularity. (See Durie and Ross 1996 for a range of perspectives
on the regularity assumption.)
SHARED ABERRANCIES. A shared aberrancy is a correspondence
between lexically or morphologically related forms so unusual as
to be unattributable to chance or borrowing. An oft-cited exam-
ple is the 3s/3p alternations in the present tense of to be in Indo-
European:
Sanskrit sti snti
Latin est sunt
Old High German ist sind
For many comparativists, like Lyle Campbell (2003, 268 f),
shared aberrancies are an alternative to regular correspondences
in demonstrating genetic relatedness. Others, like Johanna
Nichols (1996), insist that only shared aberrancies or other indi-
vidual identiiers demonstrate genetic relatedness. She con-
signs regular correspondence a subsidiary role in subgrouping.
Similarities in words suiciently long to be unattributable to
chance also qualify as individual identiiers. Nichols (1996, 50)
cites Proto-Indo-European *widhew-a widow. It is crucial that
her example is a reconstruction. he existence of that word may
be statistically unattributable to chance, but one must have coni-
dence that its relexes (including Sanskrit vidhav, Greek itheos,
Latin vidua, Old Irish febd Russian , OldEnglish widuwe)
are suiciently similar to be instances of the same word. Regular
sound correspondences are necessary to give that conidence.
MASS COMPARISON. he logic of mass comparison (as in
Greenberg 1987) is that by identifying a very large number of
similar constructions in many languages, one statistically rules
out similarity due to chance or to borrowing. Most comparativ-
ists do not regard mass comparison as an instance of the CM. he
volume of criticism leveled against it has been vast. (For a short
review, see McMahon and McMahon 2005, 1926.)
he fundamental objection is the same as that just raised to
the independence of shared aberrancies. Mass comparison pro-
vides no measure of similarity. here is no statistical reason to
consider signiicant the identiication of numerous vague simi-
larities in many languages unless attested in the same forms in
most of the languages compared. hat does not seem to be true
in those cases in which mass comparison has been used.
Summary
Any method for determining genetic relatedness must provide a
similarity measure and a means of distinguishing shared reten-
tions from other sources of similarity. None is without laws and
limitations. he standard CM is unique in deining similarity
through regularity. In some cases it will fail, but less often in prin-
ciple than the search for shared aberrancies, which depends on
the existence of data of a restricted sort.
he quantitative methods remain to be tested, but there is
reason to doubt that they can replace the standard CM, or even
supplement it where the latter fails. hese methods have been
applied to the subgrouping problem, not the genetic related-
ness problem, and the two difer crucially. he subgrouping
problem is the search for the best tree for a set of languages
already assumed to be genetically related. hese mathematical
techniques can determine genetic relatedness only if they fail to
incorporate unrelated languages into the trees they generate by
failing to identify cognates. And as long as a measure of similarity
is required to identify cognacy, something equivalent to the reg-
ularity assumption of the standard CM remains essential.
S. P. Harrison
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bender, Byron W., Ward H. Goodenough, Frederick H. Jackson, Jefrey C.
Marck, Kenneth L. Rehg, and Ho-min Sohn. 2003. Proto-micronesian
reconstructions 1. Oceanic Linguistics 42.1:1110.
Biggs, Bruce. 1965. Direct and indirect inheritance in Rotuman. Lingua
14: 383445.
Campbell, Lyle. 2003. How to show languages are related: Methods for
distant genetic relatedness. In Joseph and Janda 2003, 26282.
. 2004. Historical Linguistics: An Introduction. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Chen, M., and W. S-Y Wang. 1975. Sound change: Actuation and imple-
mentation. Language 51: 25581.
185
Competence
Durie, Mark, and Malcolm Ross, eds. 1996. he Comparative Method
Reviewed: Regularity and Irregularity in Language Change.
Oxford: Oxford University Press
Grace, G. W. 1996. Regularity of change in what? In Durie and Ross
1996, 15779.
Greenberg, Joseph H. 1987. Language in the Americas. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Hale, Mark. 2003. Neogrammarian sound change. In Joseph and Janda
2003, 34368.
Harrison, S. P. 2003. On the limits of the comparative method. In Joseph
and Janda 2003, 21343.
Hock, Hans Heinrich. 1986. Principles of Historical Linguistics.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Joseph, B., and R. Janda, eds. 2003. he Handbook of Historical Lingusitics.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Labov, William. 1981. Resolving the neogrammarian controversy.
Language 57: 267308.
McMahon, April, and Robert McMahon. 2005. Language Classiication by
Numbers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nichols, Johanna. 1996. he comparative method as heuristic. In Durie
and Ross 1996, 3971.
Osthof, Hermann, and Karl Brugmann. 1967. Preface to morphological
investigations in the sphere of the Indo-European languages I. In A
Reader in Nineteenth Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics, ed.
W. P. Lehmann, 197209. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
homason, Sarah Grey. 2001. An Introduction to Language Contact.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
homason, Sarah Grey, and Terrance Kaufman. 1988. Language Contact,
Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
COMPETENCE
he competence-performance dichotomy lies at the center of
transformational grammar, the linguistic theory introduced
by Noam Chomsky in the late 1950s (Chomsky 1957). Virtually all
current approaches to grammatical theory that descended from
Chomskys original work take the dichotomy as their starting point.
In brief, competence represents the system of abstract structural
relationships that characterize grammars, and performance the
faculties involved in putting that knowledge to use. It is generally
assumed that performance is determined in part by competence,
but is also a function of physiology, the communicative and social
aspects of language, and general cognitive architecture.
Competence and performance are modern reinterpretations
of the dichotomy between language and speech, which was
bequeathed to the ield about a century ago by the great Swiss
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure ([1916] 1966). he French words
that Saussure used for language and speech, langue and
parole respectively, are still encountered today: For Saussure,
langue represents the structural system at the heart of language
a system shared by all members of the speech community; parole
is the individual act of speaking. Saussure compared language
to a symphony. Langue represents the unvarying score, parole
the actual performance, no two of which are identical. Rather
than sticking with langue and parole, Chomsky coined the new
terms competence and performance since he wished to
underscore two important diferences between competence and
langue: Competence for Chomsky encompasses syntactic rela-
tionships, despite Saussures consignment of much of syntax
to parole; and competence is characterized by a set of generative
186
rules and principles, unlike Saussures langue, which was essen-
tially a taxonomic inventory of grammatical elements.
Chomsky has always considered competence a psychological
construct, deining it as the speaker-hearers knowledge of his
language (1965, 4). Hence, support for the notion tends to be
derived from the apparent disparity between our mental repre-
sentations of grammatical patterning and the actual use of lan-
guage in communication. So it is frequently pointed out that
the structural principles that characterize grammars are far from
being in a one-to-one relation with the principles and conven-
tions governing use (Newmeyer 1998). More direct psychological
evidence for competence has been adduced from observations
about child language learning. Experimentation has shown that
even very young children exhibit subtle grammatical knowledge
that points to their possessing a cognitive system encoding strictly
grammatical facts. For example, one-word speakers between 13
and 15 months know that words presented in strings are not iso-
lated units but are part of larger constituents; one-word speakers
between 16 and 19 months recognize the signiicance of word
order in the sentences that they hear; and 28-month-old chil-
dren who have productive vocabularies of approximately 315
words and who are speaking in four-word sentences can use a
verbs argument structure to predict verb meaning (Hirsh-Pasek
and Golinkof 1996). here also appears to be neurological evi-
dence for the competence-performance dichotomy. Numerous
pathological cases have been observed in which grammatical
abilities are lost while other cognitive faculties are preserved,
and vice versa (Pinker 1994).
Some linguists have applied the notion of competence to a far
broader range of abilities than the sort of grammatical knowledge
outlined here. For example, Dell Hymes coined the term com-
municative competence as the most general term for the speak-
ing and hearing capacities of a person (1971, 16). A broadened
notion of competence was soon applied to such capacities as the
ability of bilinguals to switch languages appropriately (Gumperz
1972), the proper control of stylistic registers (White 1974), the
ability of readers to fathom aspects of literature properly (Culler
1975), and even the use of language by doctors in emergency
wards (Candlin, Leather, and Bruton 1976). he all-too-easy met-
aphorical extension of the ordinary English word competence has
led Chomsky and others to avoid use of the term in recent years.
Rather, it has become standard to use the term i-language
(short for internalized language). In this usage, I-language con-
trasts not with performance but with E(xternalized)-language.
Finally, it should be mentioned that some linguists have
questioned the existence of the competence-performance
dichotomy on the basis of the belief that grammatical structure
is an emergent property of language use (see, for example,
Langacker 1987 and Bybee and Hopper 2001).
Frederick J. Newmeyer
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bybee, Joan L., and Paul Hopper, eds. 2001. Frequency and the Emergence
of Linguistic Structure. Vol. 45. of Typological Studies in Language.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Candlin, Christopher N., Jonathan H. Leather, and Clive J. Bruton. 1976.
Doctors in casualty: Applying communicative competence to compo-
nents of specialist course design. IRAL 14: 24572.
Competence and Performance, Literary
Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. Vol 4. of Janua Linguarum
Series Minor. he Hague: Mouton.
. 1965. Aspects of the heory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
. 1988. Language and Problems of Knowledge: he Managua
Lectures. Vol. 16 of Current Studies in Linguistics. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press. Chomskys most readable defense of the notion competence.
Culler, Jonathan. 1975. Structuralist Poetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press.
Gumperz, John. 1972. he communicative competence of bilin-
guals: Some hypotheses and suggestions for research. Language in
Society 1: 14354.
Hirsh-Pasek, Kathy, and Roberta Golinkof. 1996. he Origins of
Grammar: Evidence from Early Language Comprehension. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Hymes, Dell. 1971. Competence and performance in linguistic theory.
In Language Acquisition: Models and Methods, ed. Renira Huxley and
Elisabeth Ingram, 324. New York: Academic Press.
Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol.
1: heoretical Prerequisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1998. Language Form and Language Function.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pinker, Steven. 1994. he Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates
Language. New York: Morrow. An entertaining, but still serious, dis-
cussion of competence and performance, bringing in evidence from
many diferent areas of investigation.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. [1916] 1966. Course in General Linguistics. New
York: McGraw-Hill. Translation of Cours de linguistique gnrale.
Paris: Payot.
Smith, Neil, and Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli. 1995. he Mind of a
Savant: Language Learning and Modularity. Oxford: Blackwell.
Support for competence from Christopher, a savant who is severely
impaired cognitively but can learn a language virtually overnight.
White, Ronald. 1974. Communicative competence, registers, and sec-
ond language teaching. IRAL 12: 12741.
COMPETENCE AND PERFORMANCE, LITERARY
Literary competence, by analogy with Noam Chomskys concepts
of linguistic competence and performance, is the implicit
knowledge that enables readers to process literary works as they
do, connecting elements and deriving meaning; performance
would be their actual engagements with literary works. he con-
cept of literary competence works to highlight the importance in
literary studies of a poetics that describes the conventions and
interpretive operations that make possible the intelligibility of
literary works, as opposed to a hermeneutics (see philology
and hermeneutics) that seeks to develop new interpreta-
tions. It is also a claim about the relation between linguistics and
literary study: Rather than apply techniques of linguistic analy-
sis directly to the language of literary works, it is more fruitful to
attempt to take from linguistics the methodological model for
the construction of a poetics.
Chomsky makes a fundamental distinction between compe-
tence (the speaker-hearers knowledge of his language) and perfor-
mance (the actual use of language in concrete situations) (1965,
4). he notion of literary competence is introduced, on the anal-
ogy with linguistic competence, in Jonathan Cullers Structuralist
Poetics (1975). Rejecting corpus-based versions of descriptive
linguistics, Chomsky argues that the task of linguistics is not the
discovery of regularities in a corpus but a modeling or rendering
explicit of the speaker-hearers implicit knowledge. Culler argues
that just as the goal of the analysis of a language is not the descrip-
tion of a corpus of utterances but an explicit account of the lin-
guistic competence of speakers of the language, so ought the goal
of poetics and quite possibly of literary study generally not be the
analysis and interpretation of literary works but an account of the
rules, conventions, and procedures that enable readers to make
sense of literary works as they do (1975, viii, 215, 301, 11330).
His account stresses, for example, the shared knowledge and
processing techniques that enable readers to grasp the plot of a
narrative (a matter on which considerable agreement usually can
be reached) and to construct characters from the implicit and
explicit information scattered through a text, as well as to engage
in the thematic and symbolic interpretation that the institution
of literature encourages (ibid., 189238). He also stresses the dis-
tinctive assumptions and operations involved in making sense of
a lyric poem, such as a presumption of signiicance, the relevance
of sound patterning, and so on (ibid., 13188).
Culler presents literary competence as a revision of the
framework and goals of literary studies, an attempt to integrate
the accomplishments of structuralism and narratology
in literary studies with the program of a generative linguistics,
but others have suggested that taking the concept and the model
of generative grammar seriously would lead to a genera-
tive poetics. As a description of competence, a fully adequate
grammar must assign to each of an ininite range of sentences
a structural description indicating how the sentence is under-
stood by the ideal speaker-hearer (Chomksy 1965, 45). Ellen
Schauber and Ellen Spolsky maintain that [a] generative poet-
ics, therefore, will need to describe the derivation of competing
well-formed interpretations and to distinguish them from inade-
quately derived interpretations (1981, 397). Calling Cullers con-
ception of literary competence focused on literary conventions
and distinctive interpretive operations intolerably restrictive,
Schauber and Spolsky propose that a generative poetics should
integrate three competencies: linguistic competence, commu-
nicative competence, and literary competence, on the principle
that literary competence in Cullers sense could never lead to the
derivation of well-formed interpretations (ibid., 398; 1986).
Critiques of the concept of literary competence have sug-
gested that Chomskys speciication of the competence of an
ideal speaker-hearer makes the concept of competence inher-
ently elitist. Joseph Dane, while disputing the parallel between
linguistic and literary competence, contrasts a technical sense of
competence as knowledge that makes any literary performance
(including interpretation) possible with the everyday sense
where competence is a matter of qualiications and credentials
(1986, 53, 59). Despite Cullers argument that literary competence
does not involve a supposition that readers will agree upon an
interpretation but only that there are literary conventions that
guide interpretation and make possible some conclusions and
not others, Dane argues that a principle of stability must remain.
Some of us possess this competence; others of us must go to the
university to learn how to be perceptive and competent (ibid.,
60); [c]ompetence is simply that which is possessed by the most
powerful leaders of the literary community (ibid., 72).
he prestige of interpretation in literary studies, where the
task of the critic is to produce a more powerful interpretation,
has blocked the program of the study of literary competence as
187
Compositionality
something shared by readers, though it is implicit in any account
of narratology, for example, or of literary interpretation generally.
he cognitivist turn in literary studies (Turner 1996) provides an
opportunity for returning to aspects of literary competence and
the key question raised by the Chomskian model of the extent
to which such competence involves kinds of knowledge speciic
to literature. If our ability to make sense of the world is deined
in terms of perceiving stories, organizing perceptions according
to metaphorical ields, and so on, it may be possible to go on to
identify interpretive moves that are speciic to the reading and
appreciation of literary works.
Jonathan Culler
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the heory of Syntax. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press. he classic theorization of a grammar as a description
of linguistic competence.
Culler, Jonathan. 1975. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics,
and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge. Assesses structuralist
work and attempts to show that description of literary competence is a
fruitful program for literary studies.
Dane, Joseph. 1986. he defense of the incompetent reader.
Comparative Literature 38.1: 5372. A critique of the analogy with lin-
guistic competence and of an implicit elitism.
Schauber, Ellen, and Ellen Spolsky. 1981. Stalking a generative poetics.
New Literary History 12.3: 397413. Starting with literary competence,
lays out a broader program.
. 1986. he Bounds of Interpretation: Linguistic heory and Literary
Text. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Develops the conception
of a generative poetics at greater length.
Turner, Mark. 1996. he Literary Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.
An important instance of the cognitivist program in literary studies.
COMPOSITIONALITY
he principle of compositionality was irst formulated by the
German philosopher Gottlob Frege (1892) and is also referred
as the Frege principle. It states that the meaning of a complex
expression is a function of the meaning of its parts. A mapping
from expressions to meanings that satisies this principle is
called compositional. Frege identiied compositionality as a basic
requirement for an account of the meaning of natural language
(see language, natural and symbolic), and all serious
accounts of sentence meaning are compositional. herefore,
current research seeks to ind more restrictive notions of compo-
sitionality that can be used to assign a degree of compositionality
to a semantic analysis, as discussed in this entry. he question
of compositionality has also been asked for nonlinguistic com-
munication systems among humans and other species, which I
mention towards the end.
For a semantics of natural language, compositionality is
a basic requirement because humans can generate ininitely
many sentences (see discrete infinity) and associate them
with one from an ininite set of meanings. Since human memory
is a inite resource, there can only be a inite set of memorized
lexical meanings (see lexical semantics). It follows that
natural language must contain nonlexical expressions and that
the meaning of such nonlexical expressions is determined by a
188
compositional procedure. herefore, compositionality is a nec-
essary property of any semantics of natural language that claims
complete coverage. he result, however, leaves open what the
lexical expressions of natural language are and how many com-
position principles there are. Often, words can be assigned a
compositional meaning; for example, the meaning of slept is the
result of sleep combined with past tense. In other cases, how-
ever, syntactically complex phrases seem to have a noncomposi-
tional meaning. For example, that kick the bucket is synonymous
with die does not follow naturally from the meanings of kick
and the bucket (cf. idioms). In the history of language, complex
expressions often take on a noncompositional meaning over
time (cf. grammaticalization.)
he composition principles are closely tied to a particular
semantic theory. Compositionality plays a central role in formal
semantics and truth conditional semantics of natural
language, while other theories of language meaning have not
addressed compositionality (cf. construction grammars
and cognitive grammar). he textbook by Irene Heim and
Angelika Kratzer (1998) provides one inluential account. his
account assumes that humans construct a syntactic representa-
tion of a sentence, the logical form, which is then mapped
at the syntax-semantics interface to a meaning. his mapping
is a recursive procedure (see recursion, iteration, and
metarepresentation).
In addition to the meanings of a inite set of lexical items,
general composition rules determine the meaning of complex
phrases. Of the meanings of lexical items, only some aspects
are important for composition. In Heim and Kratzers analysis,
these aspects are captured by the semantic type. For example,
the meaning of proper names like Kai and Berlin have the type
of individuals, and the meanings of both to like and to hate are
of the type of two-place functions. he parts of a complex phrase
can be either lexical items or complex phrases themselves.
herefore, only one composition rule is required: a rule that
combines the meanings of two subphrases into one. Heim and
Kratzers analysis makes use of three composition rules: function
application, predicate modiication, and predicate abstraction.
Which composition rule is applied is determined by the types of
the meanings of the two parts of the complex phrase. he simple
example Kai likes Berlin illustrates only function application. We
assume that the sentence consists of only three lexical items: Kai,
likes, and Berlin, though a full analysis would contain at least
present tense as well. he lexical meanings of Kai and Berlin
are the individual concepts kai and berlin. he lexical entry for
likes is the function like which applied to one individual yields
another function that, when applied to another individual, yields
a sentence meaning. he logical form of the sentence shown
in (1) determines the order in which like is composed with its
arguments.
(1) like(berlin)(kai)
Kai like(berlin)
likes Berlin
Compositionality
While necessarily abstract, the analysis captures two important
aspects: 1) the commonality between the meaning of the sen-
tence and that of structurally similar sentences such, as Jan hates
the capital of Germany, and 2) the incompleteness of examples
like *Kai likes.
Recent work has pointed out a need to develop a stricter for-
mal notion of compositionality. One motivation is the following
theorem of Wlodek Zadrozny (1994): If there is a function that
assigns a meaning to each complete expression of a language,
a compositional meaning function can also be given. his result
relies on an extension of function beyond its natural domain.
For example, we might construct a compositional semantics for
the idiom kick the bucket in the following way: For one, stipu-
late that the bucket has in addition to its ordinary meaning also
the special symbol X as its meaning. Secondly, deine the mean-
ing of kick applied to X as the meaning of die, thereby composi-
tionally deining the meaning of kick the bucket. However, this
analysis strikes most researchers as less desirable than a formally
noncompositional one. For this reason, current research tries
to formulate notions of compositionality stricter than Freges
(Kazmi and Pelletier 1998; Szab 2000). In particular, Ali Kazmi
and Francis J. Pelletier suggest restricting the use of functions as
meanings, but it is still an open question how exactly to do this.
Looking beyond human language, compositionality has
emerged as an important property to classify communication
systems. Tim Horton (2001) investigates the compositionality
of music (see music, language and). Even more interesting
is the case of animal communication and human evolution
(Bickerton 1990). Elizabeth Spelke (2003) proposes that compo-
sitional semantics is crucial for human intelligence. She argues
that humans and higher animals possess a similar ability to form
basic concepts. Only humans, however, via the compositional
semantics of language have the ability to combine these basic
concepts into an ininite array of derived meanings.
Uli Sauerland
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bickerton, Derek. 1990. Language and Species. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Fodor, Jerry, and Ernest Lepore. 2002. he Compositionality Papers.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Frege, Gottlob. 1892. ber Sinn und Bedeutung. Zeitschrift fr
Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, NF 100: 2550.
Heim, Irene, and Angelika Kratzer. 1998. Semantics in Generative
Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.
Horton, Tim. 2001. he compositionality of tonal structures: A gen-
erative approach to the notion of musical meaning. Music Scienti
5.2: 13156.
Kazmi, Ali, and Francis J. Pelletier. 1998. Is compositionality formally
vacuous? Linguistics and Philosophy 23: 62933.
Partee, Barbara. 2006. Compositionality in Formal Semantics.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Spelke, Elizabeth. 2003. What makes us smart? Core knowledge and
natural language. In Language in Mind, ed. Dedre Gentner and Susan
Goldin-Meadow, 279311. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Szab, Zoltn Gendler. 2000. Compositionality as supervenience.
Linguistics and Philosophy 23: 475505.
Zadrozny, Wlodek. 1994. From compositional to systematic semantics.
Linguistics and Philosophy 17: 32942.
Computational Linguistics
COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS
Computational linguists develop working models of various
aspects of languages in the form of computer programs. hese
models fall under three main headings: analysis, generation, and
learning. Analysis models take in (usually typewritten) texts and
igure out the details of their linguistic structure, possibly pro-
ducing a meaning representation. Starting from an abstract rep-
resentation of a meaning, generation models compose text (e.g.,
a sentence) expressing that meaning in a particular language.
Some systems combine analysis and generation with other tasks.
For example, a database enquiry system analyzes queries in order
to igure out what information is sought, retrieves the requested
information from a database, and uses a generation system to
express that information in natural-language output. Machine
translation systems analyze input in one language and generate
corresponding expressions in a diferent language. Most systems
rely on grammar rules and resources such as text corpora and
dictionaries. Machine learning researchers build models that
learn the relevant information from training examples to avoid
hand-crafted rules.
Grammatical and Lexical Analysis
Computational analysis of linguistic input using a parsing
algorithm quickly reveals the ambiguity of syntax, due in
part to the fact that many words have several word classes.
Parsing is greatly assisted if the lexical category can be resolved
by looking at each words neighbors, a task performed by a
part-of-speech tagging (i.e., labeling) program. he two main
approaches are i) rule-based versus ii) probabilistic. he rule-
based approach exploits rules such as the can precede a noun or
adjective but never a verb to rule out contextually inappropriate
part-of-speech tags. hese rules must be written and tested by an
expert and need to be debugged by trial and error since no one
can discover all the correct rules immediately. he probabilistic
approach determines the most likely sequence of tags, calculated
using probability theory according to the frequency with which
one tag follows another in a training corpus. For example, Daniel
Jurafsky and James H. Martin (2000, 305) estimate the probabil-
ity that race is a noun as P = 0.000007 if the previous word is to; it
is more likely to be a verb (P = 0.00001) in that context.
Both approaches face diiculties with new words and new
uses of old words. Web pages, for example, contain so many
names, new technical terms (especially new compounds), and
misspellings that about 15 percent of words are not listed in
dictionaries. In such cases, morphological analysis of word
structure (perhaps using probabilistic methods) may help. In
agglutinative languages (such as Finnish) and in languages with
complex morphological patterns (such as Arabic), it is almost
essential. No dictionary contains the word Shamoization
(coined for this article), but we can infer the stem Shamo and
be fairly conident that it is a proper noun, because -ization com-
bines with nouns and it begins with a capital letter. With pro-
ductive morphemes like -ability in English, decomposition of
words into stems and aixes can reduce the dictionary size and
may also help us deal with new words (crushability, etc).
he commonest methods for morphological analysis use
inite-state automata, corresponding to the least powerful kind
189
Computational Linguistics
of grammar in the Chomsky hierarchy. Despite their limitations,
inite-state automata are eicient and adequate for lexical pre-
processing, including decomposition of words into morphemes
(e.g., geese goose + Nplu) and normalization of spelling (e.g.,
driver [drive/V + er]Nsing). For text-to-speech conversion,
interpretation of abbreviations and symbols may be necessary,
too, for example, Mr. Mister, 4.36 four pounds thirty-six
(not pound four point three six).
Semantic Analysis
In real-world applications of computational linguistics, syntac-
tic and morphological analysis are merely a means to an end.
In database enquiry systems or machine translation, we may
compute a representation of the meaning of the input. One of
the diiculties facing the computational treatment of meaning
is presented by groups of words with similar or related mean-
ings. For example, in Whats the irst class fare? and Whats
the price of a irst class ticket?, fare and price have almost the
same meaning (i.e., the answer would be found in the same entry
in the ticket-suppliers database). In order to recognize lexical
relations, many systems use computationally implemented
thesauruses, such as WordNet, Princeton Universitys lexical
database for English.
To represent sentence meanings, computational linguis-
tics often employs formal logic. A question, for example, can be
translated into a logical proposition with some information miss-
ing. Experts in formal semantics may express the meaning of
I would like the cheapest light from Washington to Atlanta as
the predicate calculus formula:
A.light(A) & from(A,washington) & to(A,atlanta) &
(1)
cheapest(A) & like(i,A)
that is, here exists a light A and A is from Washington and A is
to Atlanta and A is cheapest and I like A. In order to answer the
question, an information retrieval system (e.g., a ticketing sys-
tem) could search its light information database to ind one with
the desired origin, destination, and so on. Formulae like (1) can
be automatically converted to statements of a database query
language, or used in programming languages such as Prolog
(Clocksin and Mellish 2003).
Machine Translation
Conversion from natural languages to logical formulae and vice
versa suggests one method of machine translation:
(2) Language 1 input Logical representation of its meaning
(same for all languages) Output in language 2.
In this scheme, logic is used as an interlingua. Rather than going
directly from one language to the other, an interlingua is attrac-
tive because diferent languages can express similar ideas in
quite diferent ways. For example, the English verb like trans-
lates in Japanese as suki desu an adjective + to be, is likeable.
In Irish, I can X is expressed X is possible for me, using an
adjective. Using an intermediate meaning representation might
overcome such grammatical diferences between languages.
Also, to translate between a large number of diferent languages
(e.g., the 21 oicial languages of the European Union), it seems
simpler to translate them all into an interlingua (21 language
190
pairs) than to develop translation rules and bilingual dictionar-
ies for all 210 pairs. One technical problem with this approach
is that logical formulae are not unique representations of mean-
ing: for example, if A then B is equivalent to not (A and not
B). But an overseas booking clerk might be confused if your
statement If meals arent served in economy class, I want a irst
class ticket were translated as I dont want no meals served
in economy class and a irst class ticket, even though this is
logically correct. Consequently, real machine translation sys-
tems combine transfer methods, which map structures of one
language to the other, direct methods that use word and phrase
correspondences with as little linguistic manipulation as pos-
sible, and some statistics to help choose the most likely ways of
expressing the output.
Machine translation and information retrieval requires
the generation of linguistic output, a task with its own particu-
lar challenges. When there are many equivalent ways of saying
the same thing (e.g., John drove the car, the car was driven by
John), the most appropriate variant must be chosen, observing
pragmatic conventions, such as putting given information
before new, the conventional order of words (big, red bus,
not red, big bus), and the time sequence they suggest: he
accused broke his leg and fell out of the window does not mean
the same as the accused fell out of the window and broke his
leg. Sentence generation often uses a slot-illing technique: he
agent of an action is placed in subject position; the undergoer
is the object, and so on. focus might prompt a particular sen-
tence pattern, for example, it was the policeman who broke his
leg. Outputs are also generated in dialogue systems and in text
summarization. Dialogue systems collect information from the
user and provide information that the user requires according
to the accepted conventions of dialogue sequence. he dialogue
may be managed via a script that successively prompts the user
for gobbets of information. his is akin to form illing, as when
purchasing products on the Internet. he order in which the
user gives the information may not matter so long as all required
ields are eventually illed in. To navigate its script, the system
takes the lead in the conversation.
In text summarization, documents are analyzed in order to
extract the most important pieces of information according to
various criteria, such as discourse structure and word frequency.
his information is then used to generate a summary of the origi-
nal, to a required length. Often, the summary simply consists of
the most relevant extracts of the original.
Probabilistic Methods
Computational linguists employ a wide range of probabilistic
methods that are helpful in various problems, especially sentence
and word-sense disambiguation. For example, the girl saw the
dog with the telescope has at least two structures and meanings,
depending on whether the girl or the dog has the telescope. Both
these structures and meanings are legitimate, but in real-world
applications such as machine translation, we may need to deter-
mine which structure and meaning is intended. Parsers quickly
reveal that average-length sentences have many possible struc-
tures, some quite implausible and unwanted. It is impractical to
model a speakers world knowledge, such as the fact that dogs
cannot have telescopes. But it is feasible to use the statistics of
Concepts
word combinations, such as the fact that telescope occurs with see
more often than dog, to select more likely analyses.
Probabilities can also help with word-sense disambigua-
tion: For example, in she joined the club, it is not hard to work
out that club is more likely to be association of persons than
heavy staf of wood or suit of cards, simply on the basis of the tive aspect of categories as concepts. Philosophy, psychology,
frequency of the collocation join club. Consequently, lexical
semantic analysis often combines probabilistic methods and
symbolic resources such as thesauruses.
Learning
In order to determine probabilities of rules, word senses, and so
on, a system must be trained on a corpus of language data, in
efect learning them. We would like computers to do more of the
hard work of inding the best grammar for a language. Consider
the pairs of rules that, according to X-BAR THEORY, deine the
structure of noun phrases in all languages:
(3) a) NP Det N1 (as in English) or b) NP N1 Det (as in
Norwegian)
(4) a) N1 Adj N1 (as in English) or b) N1 N1 Adj (as in French)
(5) a) N1 PP N (as in German or Japanese) or b) N1 N PP (as
in English)
Given these predetermined possible rules, a language learner
(computer or human) only needs to count the number of times
each rule is applicable. In English, rule (4a) will be applicable
every time an adjective precedes a noun, whereas in French, rule
(4b) will be applicable where adjectives follow nouns. By count-
ing the frequencies with which these rules apply, a learner can
soon work out that (4a) is more suitable for English than (4b) and
vice versa for French. Probabilistic methods are now so common
in computational linguistics that a detailed review is impossible
here. One framework for computation and learning, however,
connectionism, is much used in some areas and has attracted
considerable interest from psycholinguists.
John Coleman
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Clocksin, William F., and Christopher S. Mellish. 2003. Programming in
Prolog: Using the ISO Standard. Berlin: Springer. An authoritative yet
readable textbook.
Coleman, John. 2005. Introducing Speech and Language Processing.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. An elementary introduction
to the ield, aimed at readers with a less technical background (espe-
cially linguists).
Jurafsky, Daniel, and James H. Martin. 2000. Speech and Language
Processing. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. A highly respected
and compendious textbook.
Manning, Christopher D., and Hinrich Schtze. 1999. Foundations of
Statistical Natural Language Processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Enormous and comprehensive.
CONCEPTS
Concepts are the central constructs in most modern theories of
the mind. Humans (and arguably other organisms) are seen as liv-
ing in a conceptually categorized world (see categorization).
Objects and events (from household items to emotions to gender
to democracy), although unique, are acted toward as members
of classes. Without this ability to categorize, it would be impos-
sible to learn from experience. Since at least the nineteenth
century, it has been common to refer to the mental or cogni-
computer science, and linguistics have all made contributions
to conceptual theory and research. At present, there are seven
major views of the nature of concepts that form the basis for
inquiry and debate: 1) the classical view, 2) the prototype and
graded structure account, 3) the theory theory, 4) neoclassi-
cal combination models, 5) connectionist computer models,
6) conceptual atomism, and 7) nonrepresentational ecological
approaches.
The Classical View
he classical view is the approach to concepts derived from the
history of Western philosophy. When humans begin to look at
their experience by means of reason, questions about the reli-
ability of the senses and the bases for knowledge arise, as do
more speciic questions about how categories can have gen-
erality (called the problem of universals), how words can have
meaning, and how concepts in the mind can relate to categories
in the world. he Greeks and most Western philosophers ever
since have agreed that experience of particulars, as it comes
moment by moment through the senses, is unreliable; therefore,
only stable, abstract, logical categories can function as objects
of knowledge and objects of reference for the meaning of words.
To fulill these functions: a) conceptual categories had to be
exact, not vague (i.e., have clearly deined boundaries), and b)
their members had to have attributes in common, which were
the necessary and sufficient conditions for member-
ship in the category. It follows that c) all members of the con-
ceptual category were equally good with regard to membership;
either they had the necessary common features or they didnt.
Categories were thus seen as logical sets. It is on this basis that
conceptual categories could be the basis for logical inferences
as in the familiar All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; Socrates
is mortal (see verbal reasoning). his is also the basis of the
way in which words are deined by genus and diferentia in our
dictionaries.
In psychology, the irst body of research on concept learning
mirrored the philosophers view of conceptual categories. Led by
the work of Jerome Bruner and his associates (Bruner, Goodnow,
and Austin 1956), subjects were asked to learn categories that
were logical sets deined by explicit attributes, such as red and
square, combined by logical rules, such as and. heoretical inter-
est was focused on how subjects learned the attributes that were
relevant and the rules that combined them. In developmental
psychology, the theories of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky were
combined with the concept-learning paradigm to study how
childrens ill-structured, often thematic, concepts developed
into the logical adult mode. Artiicial stimuli were typically used
in research at all levels, structured into microworlds in which
the prevailing beliefs about the nature of categories were already
built in.
In linguistics, most mainstream twentieth-century work
in phonology, semantics, and syntax rested on the
191
Concepts
assumptions of the classical view. phonemes were analyzed as
sets of universal, abstract, binary features (Chomsky and Halle
1968). word meaning, the province of semantics, was like-
wise represented by a componential analysis of features (see
feature analysis); for example, bachelor was rendered as the
features +human, +male, +adult, +never married (Katz and Postal
1964). A complex concept such as bald bachelor was considered
the unproblematic intersection of the features of bachelor with
those of bald. Synonymy, contradiction, and other relational
aspects of word meaning were accounted for in a similar fashion.
Syntax was analyzed by formal systems such as transforma-
tional grammar (Chomsky 1965) that also relied on decom-
position into features (see Taylor 2003). Such an understanding
of language was adopted with enthusiasm by computer science
because meaning could be divorced from world knowledge and
readily represented by the substitutable strings of symbols on
which computers work.
Prototypes and Graded Structure
Consider the color red: Is red hair as good an example of your
idea or image of red as a red ire engine? Is a dentists chair as
good an example of chair as a dining room chair? Are you imme-
diately sure how to classify and name every color and object you
see? From its inception as a discipline separate from philosophy,
psychology has investigated types of learning and behavior that
show graded efects. For example, Ivan Pavlovs dogs produced
decreasing amounts of saliva as tones grew farther from the tone
originally combined with meat powder. his is called stimulus
generalization. Note how diferent it is from the classical view of
conceptual categories.
he irst programmatic, empirically based challenge to the
classical view came from Eleanor Roschs work on prototypes
and graded structure (Rosch 1978, 1999; Rosch and Lloyd 1978).
A wide variety of conceptual categories were shown to have
gradients of membership; that is, subjects can easily, rapidly,
and meaningfully rate how well a particular item its their idea
or image of its category. his is true for perceptual, semantic,
social, biological, and formal concepts. In contrast, subjects can-
not list criterial attributes for most categories (Rosch and Mervis
1975). More importantly, the psychological import of gradients
of membership was demonstrated by their efect in a series of
experiments on virtually every major method of study and mea-
surement used in psychological research: learning, association,
speed of processing, expectation, inference, probability judg-
ments, and judgments of similarity. Rosch suggested a model
in which categories formed around perceptually, imaginally, or
conceptually salient stimuli, which she called prototypes, then,
by stimulus generalization, spread to other similar stimuli with-
out necessarily any analyzable criterial attributes, formalizable
deinitions, or deinite boundaries. It is the prototype that was
claimed to mentally represent the category for most purposes. A
profusion of factors have been found to create prototypes: phys-
iological saliency, statistical frequencies (including central ten-
dencies and family resemblances), social structure, formal
structure, extremes of attribute dimensions, cultural ideals,
causal beliefs, and particular stimuli (exemplar theories
are based on these) that are the irst learned, or most recently
encountered, or the most emotionally charged, vivid, concrete,
192
meaningful, or interesting. he classical view of concepts cannot
deal with any of this.
he prototype view has spread beyond psychology to many
ields, including linguistics and narratology. Gradients of
exemplariness are ubiquitous in linguistic phenomena, even
in phonology where actual speech is less clear-cut than would
appear in an abstract componential analysis. In semantic and
syntactic analyses (particularly in cognitive grammar and
the understanding of metaphor), prototype efects, in addition
to providing speciic case studies, are often used as evidence that
formal analysis is insuicient of itself and that world knowledge
must be part of ones theory (Lakof 1987a, 1987b; Langacker
1990; Taylor 2003).
Theories
he theories approach to concepts takes advantage of peoples
intuitions that life activities and the concepts that map them take
place in a context larger than is ofered by either formal descrip-
tion or laboratory experiments. he basic claim is that concepts
get their meaning through mental theories. here are actually
two groups of theory theorists: cognitivist-oriented cognitive
psychologists, who primarily address categorization issues, and
developmental psychologists of the theory theory school, who
address conceptual change. he irst group (Medin 1989; Medin
and Wattenmaker 1987; Murphy and Medin 1985) has used the
idea of theories primarily as criticism of previous categorization
research. hese theorists point out that previous accounts of
concepts cannot properly deine or explain either attributes or
similarity and that previous experiments on conceptual catego-
ries are all subject to context efects; for example, judgments of
the prototypicality of animals changes if a zoo context is speci-
ied. hey do not, however, themselves give an account of attri-
butes or similarity, nor do they specify what a theory is or give
any concrete examples of a theory deining a concept.
In contrast, the theory-theory school of developmental psy-
chology (see Gopnik and Meltzof 1997) explicitly deines theory
as analogous to scientiic theories, much like Kuhnian paradigms,
and argues that cognitive development should be viewed as the
successive replacement of one paradigm theory held by the child
by another. Interest in concepts tends to be from the point of
view of change in the childs (rather than the researchers) theory
of what a concept is. When speciic concepts are studied (such
as biological types Carey 1985; Keil 1979), the thrust is to show
them as parts of larger theoretical units.
In linguistics, the discussion tends to be formulated in terms
of the relation of word meaning to general knowledge in a vari-
ety of speciic contexts. Such contexts have been characterized as
schemas, frames, scripts, image schemas, domains, and
perspectivization. For example, Ronald Langacker (1990) talks
of the seven-day week as the semantic domain within which
Monday is understood, and George Lakof (1987a) points to ive
frames needed to explain our use of the word mother (genetic,
birth, nurturance, genealogical, and marital). Computer science
has worked on similar formulations in the design of the type of
program known as story understanders. Such work tends to be
classiied under theories despite its lack of general explanatory
hypotheses because, lacking speciication of what is to count
as a theory, virtually any demonstration of the embedding of
Concepts
individual concepts in larger semantic complexes or in world
knowledge has been argued as support for the theories view a
difuseness that has also been used as a critique of that view.
Neoclassical Combination Models
Such approaches are called neoclassical because they incorpo-
rate elements of the classical view, considering it a necessary
basis, but add elements from other approaches. Psychology
and linguistics treat the issue diferently. Psychology ofers dual
models. hese typically begin with criticisms of prototype theory,
some of which seem based on misinterpretation (e.g., taking
graded structure as a probability distribution [Smith and Medin
1981] or limiting prototypes to only one type of prototype), but
most seem to be based on the philosophical intuition that the
real meaning of a concept, that to which the concept refers, must
be the identiiable necessary attributes of a classical deinition.
Two main types of evidence are ofered for this account. One is
that prototype and graded structure efects can be found for con-
ceptual categories that have a formal classical deinition, such
as odd number (Armstrong, Gleitman, and Gleitman 1983), the
other that prototypes do not form componential combinations
as do the elements of classical deinitions (e.g., a good example
of pet ish is neither a prototypical pet nor a prototypical ish
[Osherson and Smith 1981]). Both indings are taken to indicate
that prototypes are something other than and irrelevant to a con-
cepts meaning. he solution is a dual model in which prototypes
are assigned the function of rapid recognition of conceptual
referents, whereas the true meaning is provided by a classically
deined core (Osherson and Smith 1981; Smith, Shoben, and
Rips 1974).
Linguistic models are more complex. All wish to include struc-
tured real-world knowledge in some form, along with at least a
minimum of necessary deining classical attributes. Some forgo
a complete characterization of the concept to concentrate on
grammatically relevant structure (Pinker 1989). Perhaps the most
complete attempt to cover all bases is Ray Jackendofs (1983)
account of the conditions needed to specify word meaning; these
include partial deinitions (red must at least include color), gra-
dients of relevant attributes (such as hue for colors), and sensory
speciications, such as a model of what the referent looks like.
Connectionist Computer Models
he previous accounts of concepts are all, to greater or lesser
extent, based on the idea of mental representations and are
formulated at the symbolic level of mental functioning, the the-
ories view being the most top-down. In sharp contrast, connec-
tionist semantics seeks to derive apparently symbolic functions
from subsymbolic mechanistic neuron-like processes, such
as weighted connections among units, the strengths of which
are gradually adjusted on the basis of feedback to the program
(Rogers and McClelland 2004). A question for this approach,
as for much present psychology, is the extent to which indings
about biological (or pseudobiological) substrates are to preclude
feedback and explanation at the higher symbolic levels.
Conceptual Atomism
All of the previous approaches are subject to philosophical criti-
cisms, even the classical views (for reviews, see Fodor 1998 and
Laurence and Margolis 1999). Jerry Fodors (1990, 1998) concep-
tual atomism attempts to sidestep such issues by arguing that
the concept BIRD (Fodors notation) simply expresses the single
atomic property bird. he concept derives that meaning from its
causal history (as in Kripke [1972] 1980 and Putnam 1975 see
also essentialism and meaning). Concepts have no struc-
ture and are not decomposable into any kind of properties, inter-
nal or external. his view has not been adopted by psychologists
who presume (despite Fodors denial) that atomic concepts
would need to be innate (how could they be learned?) and that
it seems highly unreasonable to propose biologically innate con-
cepts for everything in the universe, including televisions, peni-
cillin, and so on. More broadly, conceptual atomism has not so
far appeared generative of psychological empirical research.
Nonrepresentational Ecological Approaches
his is the approach that deals with the use of concepts. Ludwig
Wittgenstein (1953) is much cited in concept research for fam-
ily resemblances, but that observation was a small fragment of
his argument that concepts and words should be understood
not referentially but as embedded interactive parts of forms of
life. Since forms of life show up in a succession of situations,
one way to approach this issue is to study concepts in their natu-
ral situational environments (for example, Cantor, Mischel, and
Schwartz 1982). Another way is to analyze concepts as mental
simulators of situations (Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky 1982),
and another is to show the contextual sensitivity of concepts
(Barsalou 1987; see also ad hoc categories). Yet a diferent
point of entry into conceptual use may be to ask how the basic
level of abstraction, the default level at which conceptual cat-
egories appear to be named and understood (chair rather than
furniture or oice chair), maps onto the forms of human activities
(Rosch et al. 1976). General theoretical ecological accounts are
provided in Rosch (1999) and Gabora, Rosch, and Aarts (2007).
Conclusion
Concepts occur in use only in particular moments in particular
situations. From the perspective of their use, one can see the
aspects of mental and interpersonal activities in which each of the
seven accounts of concepts ofers insight. For example, one might
be actively seeking to ind the attributes for a classical deinition
by means of thoughts that use mental prototypes. his would be
done against a background of loosely organized frames, scripts,
and so on the sort of knowledge structures toward which the
theories view points. he concepts being used could be atomic
and inherent to that moment, given that recognition of items had
already been performed and was now inherited from previous
moments. In short, each of the views maps a particular intuition
that humans seem to hold about concepts: he classical view
ofers essences of a sort; the prototype view highlights concrete,
holistic mental representations; the theories view points toward
a background of conceptually structured world knowledge; con-
nectionism points to a subsymbolic neuronal substrate; atomism
brings in history (and simplicity); combination models attempt
to bring it all together; and the ecological approach attempts to
bring it all together in terms of the ways in which concepts par-
ticipate in real-world uses.
Eleanor Rosch
193
Concepts Conceptual Blending

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Chomsky, Noam, and Morris Halle.1968. he Sound Pattern of English.
Rosch, Eleanor, Carolyn Mervis, Wayne Gray, David Johnson, and
New York: Harper and Row.
Penelope Boyes-Braem. 1976. Basic objects in natural categories.
Fodor, Jerry. 1990. Information and representation. In
Cognitive Psychology 8: 382439.
Information, Language, and Cognition, ed. Philip Hanson, 17590.
Smith, Edward, and Douglas Medin. 1981. Categories and Concepts.
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Smith, Edward, Edward Shoben, and Lance Rips. 1974. Structure and
York: Oxford University Press.
process in semantic memory: A featural model for semantic deci-
Gabora, Liane, Eleanor Rosch, and Diederik Aerts. 2007. Toward an
sions. Psychological Review 81: 21441.
Ecological heory of Concepts. Ecological Psychology 20.1: 84116.
Taylor, John. 2003. Linguistic Categorization. Oxford: Oxford University
Gopnik, Allison, and Andrew Meltzof. 1997. Words, houghts, and
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Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. New
Jackendof, Ray. 1983. Semantics and Cognition. Cambridge MA: MIT
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Kahneman, Daniel, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, eds. 1982. Judgment
under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. New York: Cambridge
CONCEPTUAL BLENDING
University Press.
Katz, Jerrold, and Paul Postal. 1964. An Integrated heory of Linguistic Conceptual blending is a basic mental operation that has been
Descriptions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. explored as a central mechanism indispensable to grammar and
Keil, Frank. 1979. Semantic and Conceptual Development: An Ontological language. Conceptual blending leads to new meaning, global
Perspective. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
insight, and conceptual compressions useful for memory and
Kripke, Saul. [1972] 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge: Harvard
manipulation of otherwise difuse ranges of meaning. It plays a
University Press.
fundamental role in the construction of meaning in everyday life,
Lakof, George. 1987a. Cognitive models and prototype theory. In
Neisser 1987, 63100. in the arts and mathematics, in the natural sciences, and in the
. 1987b. Women, Fire, and Dangerous hings: What Categories social and behavioral sciences. he essence of the operation of
Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. conceptual blending is to construct a partial match between two
Langacker, Ronald. 1990. Concept, Image, and Symbol: he Cognitive inputs and to project (see projection [blending theory])
Basis of Grammar. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. selectively from those inputs into a blended mental space,
Laurence, Stephen, and Eric Margolis. 1999. Concepts and cognitive which dynamically develops emergent structure.
science. In Concepts: Core readings, ed. Eric Margolis and Stephen It has been suggested that the capacity for complex concep-
Laurence, 381. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. tual blending (double-scope integration) is the crucial capacity
Medin, Douglas. 1989. Concepts and conceptual structure. American
needed for language and for higher-order cognition of the sort
Psychologist 44: 146981.
that characterizes cognitively modern human beings.
Medin, Douglas, and William Wattenmaker. 1987. Cognitive cohesive-
ness, theories, and cognitive archeology. In Neisser 1987, 2562.
A systematic study of conceptual blending was initiated in
Murphy, George, and Douglas Medin. 1985. he role of theories in con- 1993 by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, who discovered the
ceptual coherence. Psychological Review 92: 289316. structural uniformity and wide applications. he central intro-
Neisser, Ulric, ed. 1987. Concepts and Conceptual Development: Ecological ductory statement of the ield is Fauconnier and Turner 2002.
and Intellectual Factors in Categorization. Cambridge: Cambridge (See also Turner 1996 and 2001; Fauconnier 1997; Fauconnier
University Press. and Turner 1996 and 1998; and Turner and Fauconnier 1999.)
Osherson, Daniel, and Edward Smith. 1981. On the adequacy of proto- he blending Web site at http://blending.stanford.edu presents
type theory as a theory of concepts. Cognition 9: 3558. an extensive body of work done since then by many research-
Pinker, Steven. 1989. Learnability and Cognition: he Acquisition of ers in various ields on the theory of conceptual blending and its
Argument Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
empirical manifestations in language and grammar, mathemat-
Putnam, Hillary. 1975. Mind, Language and Reality. New York: Cambridge
ics, art, natural and social science, literature, social pragmatics,
University Press.
Rogers, Timothy, and James McClelland. 2004. Semantic Cognition: A
and music. Additional research considers mathematical and
Parallel Distributed Processing Approach. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. computational modeling of conceptual blending and experi-
Rosch, Eleanor. 1973. Natural categories. Cognitive Psychology mental investigation in the cognitive neuroscience of neural and
4: 32850. cognitive processes.

194
Conceptual Blending
Some Simple Examples
RITUAL OF THE NEWBORN BABY. In a European ritual, the new-
born baby is carried up the stairs of the parents house as part of
a public event. he ritual is meant, symbolically, to promote the
childs chances of rising in life. One input is the ordinary action
of carrying a baby up the stairs. he other input is the schematic
space of life, already structured so that living a life is metaphori-
cally moving along a path, such that good fortune is up and mis-
fortune is down. In a partial match between these inputs, the
path up the stairs corresponds to the course of life, the baby is the
person who will live this life, the manner of motion up the stairs
corresponds to how the person goes through life, and so on. In
the symbolic ritual, the two inputs are blended, so that the ascent
of the stairs is the course of life, an easy ascent is an easy rise in
life for the person that the baby will become, and stumbling or
falling might take on extraordinary signiicance.
BOAT RACE. A famous example of blending is the boat race or
regatta. A modern catamaran is sailing from San Francisco to
Boston in 1993, trying to go faster than a clipper that sailed the
same course in 1853. A sailing magazine reports:
As we went to press, Rich Wilson and Bill Biewenga were barely
maintaining a 4.5 day lead over the ghost of the clipper Northern
Light, whose record run from San Francisco to Boston theyre try-
ing to beat. In 1853, the clipper made the passage in 76 days, 8
hours. (Great American II 1993, 100)
Informally, there are two distinct events in this story, the run
by the clipper in 1853 and the run by the catamaran in 1993 on
(approximately) the same course. In the magazine quotation, the
two runs are merged into a single event, a race between the cat-
amaran and the clippers ghost. he two distinct events corre-
spond to two input mental spaces, which relect salient aspects
of each event: the voyage, the departure and arrival points, the
period and time of travel, the boat, and its positions at various
times. he two events share a more schematic frame of sail-
ing from San Francisco to Boston; this is a generic space, which
connects them. Blending consists in partially matching the two
inputs and projecting selectively from these two input spaces into
a fourth mental space, the blended space, as shown in Figure 1.
In the blended space, we have two boats on the same course
that left the starting point, San Francisco, on the same day.
Pattern completion allows us to construe this situation as a race
(by importing the familiar background frame of racing and the
emotions that go with it). his construal is emergent in the blend.
he motion of the boats is structurally constrained by the map-
pings. Language signals the blend explicitly in this case by using
the expression ghost-ship. By running the blend imaginatively
and dynamically by unfolding the race through time we have
the relative positions of the boats and their dynamics.
Crucially, the blended space remains connected to the inputs
by the mappings, so that real inferences can be computed in the
inputs from the imaginary situation in the blended space. For
example, we can deduce that the catamaran is going faster overall
in 1993 than the clipper did in 1853, and, more precisely, we have
some idea (four and a half days) of their relative performances.
We can also interpret the emotions of the catamaran crew in
terms of the familiar emotions linked to the frame of racing.
Generic space
cross-space mapping
Input space 1 Input space 2
selective projection
Blended space
Figure 1.
he boat race example is a simple case of blending. Two
inputs share structure. hey get linked by a cross-space map-
ping and projected selectively to a blended space. he projection
allows emergent structure to develop on the basis of composi-
tion, pattern completion (based on background models), and
elaboration (running the blend).
CLINTON AND ROOSEVELT. he type of conceptual blend just dis-
cussed (technically called a mirror network because the same
frame organizes both inputs) is very general. For example, a
political comment on Bill Clintons presidency after he had been
in oice a few months might have been:
By this point, Roosevelt was far ahead of Clinton.
he two inputs are Roosevelts and Clintons presidencies.
hey are mapped onto each other in a natural way: Starting
points, midpoints, and so on are matched. In the blend, Roosevelt
and Clinton are brought together within the same time frame so
that they are competing against each other. Blends of this sort are
routinely elaborated for reasoning purposes in political analysis.
Computer Interfaces
A nice example of conceptual blending in action and design is
the desktop interface, in which the computer user moves icons
around on a simulated desktop, gives alphanumeric com-
mands, and makes selections by pointing at options on menus.
Users recruit from their knowledge of oice work, interpersonal
commands, pointing, and choosing from lists. All of these are
inputs to the imaginative invention of a blended scenario that
serves as the basis for integrated performance. Once this blend
is achieved, it delivers an amazing number of multiple bind-
ings across quite diferent elements, bindings that seem, in ret-
rospect, entirely obvious. A coniguration of continuous pixels
on the screen is bound to the concept folder, no matter where
that coniguration occurs on the screen. Folders have identities,
which are preserved. he label at the bottom of the folder in one
view of the desktop corresponds to a set of words in a menu in
another view. Pushing a button twice corresponds to opening.
195
Conceptual Blending
Pushing a button once when an arrow on the screen is superim-
posed on a folder corresponds to lifting into view. Of course, in
the technological device that makes the blend possible, namely,
the computer interface, there is no ordinary lifting, moving, or
opening happening at all, only variations in the illumination of a
inite and arranged number of pixels on the screen. he blend is
not the screen; the blend is an imaginative mental creation that
lets us use the computer hardware and software efectively. In
the blend, there is lifting, moving, opening, and so on happen-
ing, imported not from the technological device at hand, which
is only a medium, but from another input, namely, our mental
conception of work we do on a real desktop.
The Network Model
Conceptual blending is described and studied scientiically in
terms of integration networks. In its most basic form, a con-
ceptual integration network consists of four connected mental
spaces: two partially matched input spaces, a generic space
constituted by structure common to the inputs, and the blended
space. he blended space is constructed through selective
projection from the inputs, pattern completion, and dynamic
elaboration. he blend has emergent dynamics. It can be run
while its connections to the other spaces remain in place.
Neurobiologically, it has been suggested that elements in men-
tal spaces correspond to activated neural assemblies and that
linking between elements corresponds to neurobiological bind-
ing (e.g., coactivation). On this view, mental spaces are built up,
interconnected, and blended in working memory by activat-
ing structures available from long-term memory. Mental spaces
can be modiied dynamically as thought and discourse unfold.
Products of integration networks can become entrenched to
constitute grammatical constructions, basic metaphors, new
frames, and other elements of the conceptual repertoire.
Four main types of integration networks have been distin-
guished: simplex, mirror, single-scope, and double-scope. In
simplexes, one input consists of a frame and the other consists of
speciic elements. A frame is a conventional and schematic orga-
nization of knowledge, such as buying gasoline. In mirrors, a
common organizing frame is shared by all spaces in the network.
In single-scopes, the organizing frames of the inputs are diferent,
and the blend inherits only one of those frames. In double-scopes,
essential frame and identity properties are brought in from both
inputs. Double-scope blending can resolve clashes between
inputs that difer fundamentally in content and topology. his is
a powerful source of human creativity.
he main types of networks just mentioned are actually
prototypes along a continuum that anchors our intuitive every-
day notions about meaning to a uniied understanding of the
unconscious processes at work. Varieties of meaning traditionally
considered unequal or even incommensurable categoriza-
tions, analogies, counterfactuals, metaphors, rituals, logical
framing, grammatical constructions can all be situated on this
continuum. Conceptual blending has been shown to operate in
the same way at the highest levels of scientiic, artistic, and literary
thought and at the supposedly lower levels of elementary under-
standing and sentence meaning. Elaborate blending is at work in
supericially simple expressions like safe gun versus safe child,
guilty pleasures, cafeine headache, or money problem.
196
Emergent structure arises routinely, as in his surgeon is a lum-
berjack, which suggests that the surgeon is incompetent, though
incompetence is a feature of neither surgeon nor lumberjack.
here are opposing pressures within an integration network
to maximize topology matching, integration, unpacking of the
blend, Web connections, compression, and intentionality. More
complex integration networks (multiple blends) allow multiple
input spaces, and successive blending in which blends at one
level can be inputs at another.
Compression
Blending is a remarkable tool of compression over vital relations
like time, space, causeefect, identity, and change. In the new-
born ritual, time is compressed: An entire lifetime becomes, in
the blend, the short time it takes to climb the stairs; in the desktop
interface, the complex sequence of events that move the mouse
horizontally and cause an apparent vertical motion of the arrow
(and other objects) on the screen is compressed and integrated
into a single action moving the arrow. his is a compression of
space, causeefect, and change.
Language Science
he role of conceptual blending in language has been investi-
gated in many areas.
FICTIVE MOTION. Languages have means of describing static
scenes in terms of ictive motion:
he fence runs all the way down to the river.
his works by having an imaginary trajector move along the rele-
vant dimension of an object, in this case the fence or along some
imaginary path linking two objects. his is a remarkable mode
of expression: It conveys motion and immobility at the same time.
Objective immobility is expressed along with perceptual or con-
ceptual motion. his apparent contradiction is a consequence of
conceptual blending, which allows several connected, but hetero-
geneous, mental spaces to be maintained simultaneously within
a single mental construction. An input space containing a static
scene of a fence and a river is blended with an input space that
contributes a moving trajector on a path with a reference point.
COUNTERFACTUALS. Human thought depends heavily on the
capacity for counterfactual thought, and counterfactuals are
complex blends. Most of us can efortlessly understand state-
ments like In France, Watergate would not have hurt Nixon. his
counterfactual is intended to highlight some diferences between
the American and French cultural and political systems. It is a
blend that brings in aspects of the French system from one input
and the Watergate scandal and President Richard Nixon from the
other. In the blend, we have a Watergate-like situation in France.
Running this blend delivers attitudes quite diferent from those
in the American input, and so in the blend, the president is not
harmed. Counterfactuals can blend frames and identities in pow-
erful ways (If I were you ). Such blends have been shown to
play a major role for reasoning in the natural and social sciences.
THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. he central problem in the origins
of language is that conceptual structure is vast relative to
expressive structure. he central problem of expression is that we
Conceptual Blending
and perhaps other mammals have a vast, open-ended number of
frames and provisional conceptual assemblies that we manipu-
late. Even if we had only one word per frame, the result would be
too many words to manage. Double-scope integration permits
us to use vocabulary and grammar for one frame or domain or
conceptual assembly to say things about others. It brings a level
of eiciency and generality that suddenly makes the challenging
mental logistics of expression tractable. he forms of language
work not because we have managed to encode in them these
vast and open-ended ranges of meaning but because they make
it possible to prompt for high-level blends over conceptual arrays
we already command. Neither the conceptual operations nor the
conceptual arrays are encoded, carried, contained, or otherwise
captured by the forms of language. he forms need not and can-
not carry the full construal of the speciic situation but, instead,
consist of prompts for thinking about situations in the appro-
priate way to arrive at a construal. Blended spaces can have as
projections grammatical and lexical forms that come from the
input spaces. Accordingly, meaning that is special to the blend
can be expressed through forms that are already available from
the inputs. In virtue of double-scope blending, new or contextu-
ally dependent meaning does not require new expressive forms.
Double-scope blending is, accordingly, the indispensable opera-
tion that makes cognitively modern human language possible.
OTHER WORK. Other analyses of the role of conceptual blending in
language consider nominal compounds (Fauconnier and Turner
2002); relative clauses (Nikiforidou 2005); semantic extensions
(Coulson 2001); sign languages (Liddell 2003); discourse con-
structions (Tobin 2006); syntax and morphology (Mandelblit
2000b); polysemy (Fauconnier and Turner 2003); semantic
change and composition (Sweetser 1999); and many other areas.
Mark Turner
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Coulson, Seana. 2001. Semantic Leaps: Frame-shifting and
Conceptual Blending in Meaning Construction. New York and
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Coulson, Seana, and Oakley, Todd, eds. 2000. Cognitive Linguistics 11.3/4.
Special issue on conceptual blending.
Coulson, Seana, and Oakley, Todd. 2005. Journal of Pragmatics 37.10.
Special issue on conceptual blending.
Dancygier, Barbara, ed. 2006. Language and Literature 15.1. Special issue
on conceptual blending.
Fauconnier, Gilles. 1997. Mappings in hought and Language.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 1996. Blending as a central pro-
cess of grammar. In Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language,
ed. Adele Goldberg, 11330. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of
Language and Information (CSLI).
. 1998. Conceptual integration networks. Cognitive Science
22.2: 13387.
. 2002. he Way We hink: Conceptual Blending and the Minds
Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.
. 2003. Polysemy and conceptual blending. In Polysemy: Flexible
Patterns of Meaning in Mind and Language, ed. Brigitte Nerlich,
Vimala Herman, Zazie Todd, and David Clarke, 7994. Berlin and New
York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Great American II. 1993. Latitude 38 (April): 100.
Conceptual Development and Change
Liddell, Scott K. 2003. Grammar, Gesture, and Meaning in American Sign
Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mandelblit, Nili. 2000a. Conceptual blending and the interpreta-
tion of relatives: A case study from Greek. Cognitive Linguistics
11.3/4: 197252.
Mandelblit, Nili.. 2000b. he grammatical marking of conceptual inte-
gration: From syntax to morphology. In Coulson and Oakley 2000,
197252.
Nikiforidou, Kiki. 2005. Conceptual blending and the interpreta-
tion of relatives: A case study from Greek. Cognitive Linguistics
16.1: 169206.
Sweetser, Eve. 1999. Compositionality and blending: Semantic
composition in a cognitively realistic framework. In Cognitive
Linguistics: Foundations, Scope, and Methodology, ed. heo Janssen and
Gisela Redeker, 12962. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Tobin, Vera. 2006. Ways of reading Sherlock Holmes: he entrenchment
of discourse blends. In Dancygier 2006, 7390.
Turner, Mark. 1996. he Literary Mind: he Origins of hought and
Language. New York: Oxford University Press.
. 19992007. he Blending Web site. Available online at: http://
blending.stanford.edu
. 2001. Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science: he Way We hink
About Politics, Economics, Law, and Society. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Turner, Mark, and Gilles Fauconnier. 1999. A mechanism of creativity.
Poetics Today 20.3: 397418.
CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE
Most researchers allow for some kind of change in concepts
over the course of development and as adults go from lay knowl-
edge to expert knowledge. he main exception to this view would
be those who maintain that concepts have no discernible inter-
nal mental structure and, therefore, lack suicient substrate to
change (Fodor 1998). For present purposes, it is assumed that
concepts do have internal structure that then can be used to
characterize change. For those more minimalist accounts of
structure, conceptual change must be understood as a proxy for
changes in how stable concepts are accessed, used, and mentally
manipulated.
he study of conceptual change has often been hampered
by quite diferent senses of what is meant by the phrase, with
the consequences that scholars who seem to be disagreeing are
often talking past one another. It is therefore useful to consider
several distinct senses of conceptual change as well as patterns
of developmental change that do not relect alterations in the
concepts proper.
he most minimal forms of conceptual change involve elabo-
rations on concept structures in ways that do not cause changes
in any other concepts and that do not cause a restructuring of the
concept in which the elaboration occurs. For example, a child
might learn that chairs can be subdivided into kitchen chairs
and living room chairs. Such a subdivision might not appreciably
change the concept of the superordinate category of chair (see
categorization). One can also learn more details about mem-
bers of a category by simply adding more features to all mem-
bers. hus, a child might initially know that cars have wheels and
carry people and only later add the additional features of having
windshield wipers, brakes, and seatbelts. Concepts can therefore
go from relatively feature-sparse representations of members of
197
Conceptual Development and Change
a category to feature-rich representations. Some call this con-
ceptual enrichment, arguing that it shouldnt really count as true
conceptual change at all (Carey 1991).
Some changes are in the kinds of features that make up
concepts. Others are in the ways those features are mentally
represented and used. For example, young children might
favor perceptual features over functional ones (Nelson 1973;
Tomikawa and Dodd 1980), as well as concrete features over
abstract ones (Werner and Kaplan 1963). Instances of a concept
category would then initially be picked out on the basis of one
type of feature (e.g., perceptual features of chairs) and later on
the basis of another kind of feature (e.g., functional features of
chairs). A diferent approach would see changes not in the fea-
ture types but rather in how those features are used to make deci-
sions about members of a category. For example, children have
been described as moving from holistic representations to more
analytic ones (Vygotksy [1934] 1986; Kemler and Smith 1978).
hus, they might initially use a broad, roughly equal weighting
of all features that typically occur with members of the category
and then later switch to a focus on a few critical deining or cen-
tral features. A child might initially identify an uncle as a friendly
adult about the age of ones parents and who is present around
holidays and has close bonds with one or both parents. Later,
that same child might focus exclusively on the features having to
do with whether a person is a male blood relative of one parent
(Keil 1989). In this characteristic-to-deining shift, feature sam-
pling can change with development, even if feature types do not
(Keil and Batterman 1984).
Changes in feature types or distributions often seem to hap-
pen in ways that are related across concepts, leading to the idea
that concepts often change in clusters or domains. his pattern
suggests that concepts might get their meanings not just from
their constituent features but also from the ways in which they
relate to other concepts in the same domain. Experimentally,
such efects have been shown in cases where shifts in feature
usage, such as for uncle, are closely linked in time to shifts for
other kinship terms (Keil 1989). Similarly, once a child learns how
to extend one term in a domain to a new domain, such as the tex-
ture term rough to personality, the child is likely to extend at the
same time all other texture terms to personality, such as smooth
and slippery (Lehrer 1978; Keil 1986). hese semantic field
efects suggest that conceptual change occurs in a larger frame-
work that then inluences all concepts within that framework.
One view of concepts as parts of larger structures is known
as the theory theory, in which conceptual change is understood
as part of a process of theory change (Carey 1985; Gopnik and
Wellman 1994). hus, having a concept such as bird involves not
only knowing the features associated with birds but also having
a sense of why those features co-occur. Birds have wings, feath-
ers, and hollow bones because all those structures work together
causally to support light (Murphy and Medin 1985). Several
forms of restructuring have been proposed to model theory
change: conceptual diferentiation, conceptual coalescences,
addition of new deeper levels of explanation, and complete reor-
ganizations or revolutionary changes.
Conceptual diferentiation occurs when a single concept dif-
ferentiates into two new concepts that make the earlier concept
obsolete. hus, children might initially have a concept of felt
198
weight or heaviness that later splits into two concepts of weight
as physical quantity and of density (Smith, Carey, and Wiser
1985). Conceptual diferentiation is diferent from the case of
subdivision described earlier because it makes the original par-
ent concept nonviable and, therefore, creates incommensurabil-
ity between the diferentiated conceptual structures and their
parent (Kuhn 1970; Carey 1988).
Conceptual coalescences often occur in the same system
where diferentiations occur. hus, as children split apart one
concept, they merge two other concepts together in a manner
that makes the original two incoherent. Young children may see
solids and liquids as of one kind of stuf and air as something
entirely diferent. Later, however, they may see all three phases
of matter as just variants on the same stuf (Smith, Solomon, and
Carey 2005). Similarly, young children may see stars and the sun
as very diferent kinds of things, only to realize later that they are
all of the same kind (Nussbaum 1979).
Deeper levels of explanation occur when a whole new realm
of causal regularities get added to the theory. For example, a
child might initially understand the bodys functions in terms of
gross macroscopic events, such as the chewing of food and motor
movement, and then later sense causal patterns at work at the
microscopic level. Although such additions can occur without
changing the high level of explanation, new insights at a lower
level can often feed back and inluence the higher level.
Finally, conceptual revolutions can involve a dramatic reor-
ganization of all the elements in a domain. For example, young
children might only understand animals, plants, and people as
either psychological entities or mechanical physical ones (Carey
1985). hey would not understand plants and animals as living
things. At some point, however, in a manner analogous to con-
ceptual revolutions in the history of science (e.g., Kuhn 1970;
hagard 1992), a dramatic reorganization of an entire belief
system (see meaning and belief) occurs and a new category
of living things emerges (Chinn and Brewer 1993). It is unclear
how often such dramatic revolutions really occur (Inagaki and
Hatano 2002; Keil 2003).
Imposters
A major problem in the study of conceptual change concerns
cases where other patterns of cognitive developmental change
may give an appearance of conceptual change when none is
actually happening. Two common cases involve increasing
access and shifting relevance.
Increasing access refers to cases where cognitive limitations
having nothing to do with the concept per se limit its use (Rozin
1976). hus, younger children might difer from older ones in
terms of memorial or attentional capacities that make them
unable to access a concept in a certain set of tasks. For example,
children might fail to engage in transitive reasoning in a wide
range of tasks, not because the children lack the concept of tran-
sitivity but because of the memory burdens imposed by having to
keep several inequalities in mind at the same time. When those
memory burdens are reduced by intensive practice with the
inequalities, the concept of transitivity is easily accessed, even
as the learning of the inequalities might be quite diicult (Bryant
and Trabasso 1971). One way of thinking about increasing access
can be seen in the metaphor of a young child learning to use a
Conceptual Development and Change
heavy hammer. We might note at irst that the child cannot use
the hammer at all and think that he or she has a hammer dei-
cit, only to ind out that with a much lighter hammer, the child
reveals a full understanding of hammers. In other cases, there
may be a real deicit in the form of the missing concept.
Shifting relevance refers to changes in which several possi-
ble conceptual interpretations irst come to mind in a task. For
example, when young children are asked if worms eat, they
might initially say that worms do not because they interpret eat
in a psychological manner involving feelings of satiation, hunger,
and pleasant tastes. Older children who interpret eat in a biolog-
ical sense of providing nutrition might judge that worms do it.
Such changes have been interpreted as evidence for the emer-
gence of the new conceptual domain of biology (Carey 1985). Yet
younger children may also be able to access the biological sense
of eat when shown that such an interpretation is appropriate
(Gutheil, Vera, and Keil 1998).
In summary, there are several distinct varieties of conceptual
change as well as other patterns of cognitive change that can
masquerade as conceptual change. It is critical in discussions of
conceptual change and of the relations of conceptual change to
other topics, such as word meaning, to know which senses are
in play.
Frank Keil
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bryant, Peter E., and homas Trabasso. 1971. Transitive inferences and
memory in young children. Nature 232: 4568
Carey, Susan. 1985. Conceptual Change in Childhood. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
. 1988. Conceptual diferences between children and adults.
Mind and Language 3: 16781.
. 1991. Knowledge acquisition: Enrichment or conceptual
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CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR
According to proponents of conceptual metaphor theory, con-
ceptual metaphors are metaphors that we have in our minds
that allow us to produce and understand abstract concepts. he
theory was irst expounded by George Lakof and Mark Johnson
(1980), who argued that conceptual metaphors structure how
people perceive, how they think, and what they do. According
to Lakof (1993), conceptual metaphors represent habitual ways
of thinking, in which people metaphorically construe abstract
concepts such as time, emotions, and feelings, in terms of more
concrete entities.
Some Conceptual Metaphors and Mappings
Conceptual metaphors are usually expressed in an A IS B format,
using capital letters. For example, in the conceptual metaphor
THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS, theories (an abstract concept)
are viewed metaphorically as buildings (a concrete entity).
Conceptual metaphors consist of a source domain and a tar-
get domain (see source and target ). So in the conceptual
metaphor THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS, buildings constitute
the source domain, and theories constitute the target domain.
THEORIES are thus viewed as if they were BUILDINGS (exam-
ples follow). Lakof (1993) describes the relationship between
the two domains of a conceptual metaphor as a function,
where speciic properties of the source domain are mapped
onto the target domain (see mapping). So, in the conceptual
199
Conceptual Metaphor
Conceptual Metaphors Linguistic Metaphors
e.g., ARGUMENT IS WARFARE e.g., Mr. Marshall had the knives out
for Mr. Manning
They involve the drawing together of They involve the drawing together of
incongruous domains. incongruous words.
They are structures that are deeply They are surface-level linguistic features.
embedded in the collective
subconscious of a speech community.
They are thought to constitute a They are usually used to get a particular
structured system upon which much point across, or to perform a particular
abstract thought is based. function.
metaphor THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS, properties of the
source domain, BUILDINGS, such as needing a foundation or
being built from component parts, are mapped onto the target
domain of THEORIES, allowing us to talk about theories being
built on assumptions and axioms or put together by connect-
ing smaller ideas. he relationship is thus one way: heories are
treated as buildings, but buildings are not treated as theories.
Source domains are thus broad, often complex, cluster-like cat-
egories that can provide a rich source of mappings (Littlemore
and Low 2006). hey are sometimes described as image sche-
mas, as they can be represented in highly abstracted simple
diagrams.
Conceptual metaphors are thought to be acquired in infancy,
through our physical interaction with the world, by the way in
which we perceive the environment, move our bodies, and exert
and experience force. Other peoples habitual ways of selecting
and using image schemas will also be inluential.
he conceptual metaphor THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS mani-
fests itself in expressions such as:
You have to construct your argument carefully.
but they now have a solid weight of scientiic evidence.
he pecking order theory rests on sticky dividend policy.
his theory is totally without foundation.
in which case, the entire theory would have no support.
He has done his best to undermine the theory.
In an attempt to build a formal theory of underdevelopment
he value of a scholarly theory should stand or fall on the
character of the evidence.
One of the most productive conceptual metaphors is the
conduit metaphor in which communication is seen as trans-
fer from one person to another, allowing us to talk, for example,
about conveying information, and getting the message across.
Another conceptual metaphor, PROGRESS THROUGH TIME IS
FORWARD MOTION, results in expressions such as plan ahead,
200
Figure 1. The main differences between conceptual
and linguistic metaphors.
back in the 60s and to move on. In the same way, ARGUMENT
is often thought of in terms of WARFARE, UNDERSTANDING is
often expressed in terms of SEEING, LOVE is often thought of in
terms of a PHYSICAL FORCE, and IDEAS are often thought of in
terms of OBJECTS. Conceptual metaphors are thought to exist
for every abstract concept that we have, although there is no one-
to-one mapping: A single abstract concept can be understood
through several conceptual metaphors, and a single conceptual
metaphor can be used to explain several abstract concepts. Some
conceptual metaphors are universal, whereas others vary from
language to language (cf. metaphor, universals of).
Conceptual metaphors are often very complex, and one
conceptual metaphor will frequently give rise to a series of
mappings. For example, the conceptual metaphor THINKING
IS PERCEIVING gives rise to mappings such as IDEAS ARE
THINGS PERCEIVED (its quite clear to me); ATTEMPTING TO
GAIN KNOWLEDGE IS SEARCHING (Im still looking for a solu-
tion); and BEING IGNORANT IS BEING UNABLE TO SEE (you
have allowed yourself to be blinded to the truth) (Gibbs 2006).
Conceptual metaphors difer from conceptual metonymies in
that they involve mappings between diferent domains, whereas
in conceptual metonymies, one part of the single domain is used
to refer to another, related part of that domain.
Conceptual and Linguistic Metaphor
It is useful to distinguish between conceptual metaphor and
linguistic metaphor. Conceptual metaphors are cognitive struc-
tures that are deeply embedded in our subconscious minds,
whereas linguistic metaphors are surface-level linguistic phe-
nomena. It is important to note that the precise words used to
describe the two domains in a conceptual metaphor (like TIME
and MONEY) are not important or at least not crucial. his is very
diferent from the situation with linguistic metaphors, where it
is the exact words that constitute the metaphor (Littlemore and
Low 2006). Indeed, the whole point of a conceptual metaphor is
that it stands apart from actual exemplars. Figure 1 shows the
main diferences between conceptual metaphors and linguistic
metaphors.
Conceptual Metaphor
At times, the ability to understand linguistic metaphors
(when they are irst encountered) may rely on the success-
ful identiication of a relevant conceptual metaphor; at other
times, it may not. However, the ability to identify an appropri-
ate conceptual metaphor in itself is rarely suicient to allow a
complete understanding of a linguistic metaphor. Additional
metaphoric thinking is usually required, which takes into
account the context in which the metaphor appears and the
function that it is intended to perform. For example, in order
to understand the metaphor slavery was well on the road to
extinction, it may be helpful (but not necessary) to think in
terms of the conceptual metaphor PROGRESS IS FORWARD
MOTION. However, further metaphoric thinking is required to
understand that considerable progress has already been made
and that there is likely to be no turning back. hus, concep-
tual metaphors sometimes help us to understand linguistic
metaphors, but they are not always a necessary prerequisite
nor a suicient condition (see necessary and sufficient
conditions ).
Developments in Conceptual Metaphor Theory
Although conceptual metaphor theory has been hugely inluen-
tial, it has come in for a certain amount of criticism, which has led
to the theory itself being developed and reined. he main criti-
cisms of conceptual metaphor theory include the following: that
the number of conceptual metaphors has had a tendency to pro-
liferate; that they vary signiicantly in the extent to which they
are employed and elaborated; and that there is a huge amount of
overlap between them. Moreover, as Graham Low (1999; 2003)
points out, although it may be tempting, for example, to identify
a single conceptual metaphor of A THEORY IS A BUILDING in a
text containing phrases such as those listed previously, the ana-
lyst has no proof that buildings were ever present in the writers
mind when he or she was producing the text (cf. metaphor,
information transfer in). If the conceptual metaphor isnt
in the writers mind, then where is it? Could it be that it exists
only in the analysts mind?
In a partial response to criticisms such as these, Joseph Grady
(1997) suggests that conceptual metaphors do not in fact consti-
tute the most basic level of mapping. Instead, he proposes the
idea of primary metaphors, which constitute a more fundamen-
tal type of metaphor (Grady and Johnson 2002). Primary meta-
phors arise out of our embodied functioning in the world (Gibbs
2006) and, as such, are more basic than conceptual metaphors.
hey include very basic concepts, such as CHANGE IS MOTION,
HELP IS SUPPORT, and CAUSES ARE PHYSICAL SOURCES. One
primary metaphor can often underlie several conceptual meta-
phors. For example, the primary metaphor EXPERIENCE IS A
VALUED POSSESSION is held to underlie the conceptual meta-
phors DEATH IS A THIEF, A LOVED ONE IS A POSSESSION, and
OPPORTUNITIES ARE VALUABLE OBJECTS.
Primary metaphors are experiential, in that they result from
a projection of basic bodily experiences onto abstract domains.
As such, they are representative of a wider view of human cog-
nition that gives a central role to embodiment. Proponents
of embodiment argue that we understand abstract concepts
in terms of our physical experiences with the world and that
the two are impossible to separate. his is closely linked to the
concept of synaesthesia, where one sensory stimulus evokes a
stimulus in a diferent sensory organ (see Ramachandran and
Hubbard 2001). For example, the fact that the color red often
denotes heat is due to our ability to make synaesthesic map-
pings between the senses of sight and touch. he synaesthetic
relationship between sound and vision is relected in the fact
that dark or heavy music is likely to involve low notes and
minor keys, whereas light music is more likely to involve high
notes and major keys. Primary metaphors thus constitute a
more clearly delimited, cognitive, embodied phenomenon and
lend themselves much more readily to rigorous empirical test-
ing than do conceptual metaphors.
Another criticism of conceptual metaphors is that they often
give only a partial explanation of more creative linguistic meta-
phors, and the relationship between the two is unclear. In order
to address this criticism, Andrew Goatly (1997) has extended
conceptual metaphor theory to take account of the more cre-
ative extensions of conceptual metaphors. Instead of conceptual
metaphors, he refers to root analogies. He uses this term to
relect the fact that the original analogy often remains hidden
and its relationship to the creative expression is not always clear.
To illustrate his point, Goatly cites the expression the algebra
was the glue they were stuck in. his novel metaphorical expres-
sion is a creative extension of the root analogy DEVELOPMENT
IS FORWARD MOVEMENT, but the relationship is complex and
not immediately apparent. he root is there, but it cannot actu-
ally be seen.
A inal criticism of conceptual metaphor theory has been that
the examples used to illustrate conceptual metaphors are not
always taken from real language data. Signiicant eforts are now
being made to address this issue, most notably by Alice Deignan
(2005) and Anatol Stefanowitsch and Stefan Gries (2006), all of
whom have used language corpora not only to identify examples
of conceptual metaphors but also to reine and develop concep-
tual metaphor theory itself (see corpus linguistics). his
approach allows for a more systematic assessment of the types of
source domains that feature in diferent genres and of the com-
plex interplay between conceptual and linguistic metaphor. An
interesting insight to have come from their research is the fact
that the phraseological patterns surrounding the metaphorical
senses of a word often difer from those that surround its more
literal senses. Phraseological patterning is thus likely to make an
important contribution to the creation of meaning, and this must
be taken into account when studying conceptual metaphors.
Jeannette Littlemore
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Cameron, Lynne, and Graham Low, eds. 1999. Researching and Applying
Metaphor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Deignan, Alice. 2005. Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics. London: John
Benjamins.
Gibbs, Raymond. 2006. Embodiment and Cognitive Science.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goatly, Andrew. 1997. he Language of Metaphors. London: Routledge.
Grady, Joseph. 1997. heories are buildings revisited. Cognitive
Linguistics 8: 26790.
Grady, Joseph, and Christopher Johnson. 2002. Converging evidence for
the notions of subscene and primary scene. In Metaphor and Metonymy
201
Conduit Metaphor
in Comparison and Contrast, ed. Rene Dirven and Ralf Prings, 53354.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kovecses, Zoltan. 2002. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Lakof, George. 1987. Women, Fire and Dangerous hings: What
Categories Reveal About the Mind. Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press.
. 1993. he contemporary theory of metaphor. In Metaphor and
hought 2d ed. Ed. Andrew Ortony, 20251. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lakof, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Littlemore, Jeannette, and Graham Low. 2006. Figurative hinking and
Foreign Language Learning. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan.
Low, Graham. 1999. Validating metaphor research projects. In
Researching and Applying Metaphor, ed. Lynne Cameron and Graham
Low, 4865. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 2003. Validating models in applied linguistics. Metaphor and
Symbol 18.4: 23954.
Ramachandran, V. S., and E. M. Hubbard. 2001. Synaesthesia a win-
dow into perception, thought and language. Journal of Consciousness
Studies 8.12: 334.
Stefanowitsch, Anatol, and Stefan Gries, eds. 2006. Corpus-based
Approaches to Metaphor and Metonymy. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
CONDUIT METAPHOR
he conduit metaphor (Reddy [1979] 1993) models communi-
cation as a process in which the speaker puts information into
words and gets it across to a receiver, who tries to ind the mean-
ing in the words. Words are understood as containers, mean-
ings as objects that can be put into words. Reddy was concerned
with the biasing inluence this model has on our thinking about
communication.
Jrg Zinken
WORK CITED
Reddy, Michael J. [1979] 1993. he conduit metaphor: A case of frame
conlict in our language about language. In Metaphor and hought,
ed. A. Ortony, 164201. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
CONNECTIONISM AND GRAMMAR
Connectionist approaches to language employ artiicial neural
networks to model psycholinguistic phenomena (see connec-
tionist models, language structure, and represen-
tation). Although a few connectionist models have been used to
directly implement traditional types of grammar (e.g., Fanty 1986),
most aim to ofer new ways of capturing key properties of grammar,
such as constituent structure and recursion (see recur-
sion, iteration, and metarepresentation). In particular,
the latter models seek to demonstrate how important aspects of
grammar may emerge through learning, rather than being built
into the language system. his entry, therefore, focuses on the
radical connectionist models as they promise to provide new ways
of thinking about grammar and, as such, potentially could provide
the most substantial contribution to the language sciences.
Words in sentences are not merely strung together as beads
on a string but are combined in a hierarchical fashion. Grammars
202
Connectionism and Grammar
capture this by specifying a set of constraints on the way that
words are put together to form diferent types of constituents,
such as noun phrases and verb phrases, as well as the way these
phrases may be combined to produce well-formed sentences.
Connectionist models have begun to show how constituent struc-
ture may be learned from the input. J. L. Elman (1990) trained a
simple recurrent network (which has a copy-back loop providing
it with a memory for past inputs) on a small context-free gram-
mar and was able to show that the network could acquire aspects
of constituent structure. In related work, M. H. Christiansen and
N. Chater (1994) demonstrated that this kind of model is capable
of generalizing to novel syntactic constructions involving long-
distance dependencies across constituents, suggesting that it is
able to exploit linguistic regularities that are deined across con-
stituents. A subsequent model by D. L. T. Rohde (2002) has fur-
ther shown that constituent structure can be learned from more
natural language-like input than that used by previous models,
indicating that this approach may scale up well to deal with full-
blown language.
he notion of constituency that emerges in these models is
not the same as what is found in standard models of grammar.
Rather, connectionist models suggest a more context-sensitive
notion of constituency, dividing words and phrases into clus-
ters without categorical boundaries and treating them difer-
ently depending on the linguistic context in which they occur.
For example, Elmans (1990) model was able to learn context-
sensitive animacy constraints from word co-occurrence infor-
mation, thus allowing it to distinguish semantically meaningful
sentences (e.g., he boy broke the plate) from nonsensical ones
(e.g., he plate broke the boy).
he generative power of grammars derives from recursion, the
notion that constituents can be embedded within one another
and even within themselves. he model by Elman (1991) was
perhaps the irst to demonstrate the acquisition of a limited abil-
ity to process recursive structure in the form of right-branching
relative clauses (e.g., he cat chased the mouse that bit the dog),
as well as center-embedded constructions (e.g., he mouse that
the cat chased bit the dog). Christiansen and Chater (1994), as
well as Rohde (2002), extended this initial work by incorporating
several additional types of recursive structure, including sen-
tential complements (e.g., Mary thinks that John says that ),
possessive genitives (e.g., Johns brothers friend ), and prep-
ositional phrases (e.g., he house on the hill near the lake ).
Additionally, Christiansen and Chater (1999) demonstrated
that the performance of connectionist models closely match
human data from German and Dutch that relates to complex
sentences involving recursive center embeddings (with the fol-
lowing dependency relationship between nouns and verbs N1 N2
N3 V3 V2 V1) and cross-serial dependencies (N1 N2 N3 V1 V2 V3),
respectively. Speciically, people ind doubly center-embedded
constructions in German much harder to process than com-
parable levels of cross-serial dependency embedding in Dutch
(controlling for semantic factors across the two languages), and
this pattern of processing diiculty was mirrored closely by the
model. As with the connectionist notion of constituency, the
recursive abilities of connectionist models deviate from standard
conceptions of recursion. Speciically, connectionist models are
unable to accommodate unlimited recursion; it is important
Connectionism, Language Science, and Meaning
to note, however, that they are able to capture recursion at the
level of human abilities, as evidenced by psycholinguistic
experimentation.
Connectionist approaches to grammar are still very much
in their infancy and currently do not have the kind of coverage
and grammatical sophistication as seen in more traditional
computational models of syntax. Moreover, the question
remains as to whether the initial encouraging results described
here can be scaled up to deal with the full complexities of real
language in a psychologically realistic way. If successful, how-
ever, then the conception of grammar may need to be radically
rethought, including notions of constituency and recursion.
Already, connectionist models have suggested that the idea
of an ininite linguistic competence, as typically prescribed
by generative grammar, may not be required for captur-
ing human language performance. In this regard, the kind
of grammatical framework hinted at by connectionist models
more closely resemble those of construction grammars
and the usage-based theory of language than the tradi-
tional generative grammar approaches. Whatever the future
outcome of the connectionist approach to grammar may be, it
is likely to stimulate much debate over the nature of grammar
and language itself as it has done in the past and this, in
the long run, may be where connectionism will have the larg-
est impact on the way we think about grammar within the lan-
guage sciences.
Morten H. Christiansen
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Christiansen, M. H., and N. Chater. 1994. Generalization and connec-
tionist language learning. Mind and Language 9: 27387.
. 1999. Toward a connectionist model of recursion in human lin- human cognition, the models are constrained by properties of
guistic performance. Cognitive Science 23: 157205.
Elman, J. L. 1990. Finding structure in time. Cognitive Science 14:
179211.
. 1991. Distributed representation, simple recurrent networks, and
grammatical structure. Machine Learning 7: 195225.
Fanty, M. A. 1986. Context-free parsing with connectionist networks.
In Neural Networks for Computing, ed. J. S. Denker, 14045. New
York: American Institute of Physics.
Onnis, L., M. H. Christiansen, and N. Chater. 2005. Cognitive sci-
ence: Connectionist models of human language processing.
In Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, ed. K. Brown.
Oxford: Elsevier. his review article provides a more detailed treatment
of the issues discussed here.
Rohde, D. L. T. 2002. A connectionist model of sentence comprehension
and production. Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University, Department
of Computer Science, Pittsburgh, PA.
Rohde, D. L. T., and D. C. Plaut. 2003. Connectionist models of language
processing. Cognitive studies 10: 1028. Another review of connec-
tionist models of language.
CONNECTIONISM, LANGUAGE SCIENCE,
AND MEANING
Connectionism, or parallel distributed processing, is a general
term for a set of particular cognitive architectures. With some vari-
ations, these architectures model mental processes on a shared
set of constituents and operations, drawn from neurobiology.
he constituents are parallel to neurons, and the operations are
parallel to the iring of neurons. However, connectionist mod-
els are not strictly neurobiological and may be implemented in
various materials (e.g., computers). More exactly, a connection-
ist architecture has nodes as its basic constituents. hese nodes
are linked to one another, forming circuits. he nodes may have
diferent degrees of activation, and they receive activation from
other nodes in the circuit. When a node is activated in some
models, when it reaches a particular level of activation, a thresh-
old it ires, transmitting its activation to subsequent nodes in
the circuit.
he individual connections among nodes are commonly
understood to have diferent degrees of strength. Strength is typi-
cally a multiplicative relation, such that the activation of the ir-
ing or input node is multiplied by the connection strength to yield
the amount of activation transmitted to the recipient node (e.g.,
a node iring at level 1 delivers a level of activation to a second
node of .5 if the strength of the connection between the nodes
is .5). hese connection strengths may be altered by activation
sequences (e.g., in many models, when nodes activate together,
the strength of their connection increases). he connections may
be excitatory or inhibitory that is, a irst node my increase or
decrease the activation of a second node. Connectionist circuits
or neural networks commonly have a set of input nodes, a set
of output nodes, and layers of hidden nodes. Connectionist
models also incorporate some way that errors may be detected
and corrected. In a connectionist model, correction is a mat-
ter of readjusting connection strengths among the nodes in the
circuit.
Connectionist modeling has two broad purposes. One relates
to artiicial intelligence. he other relates to actual human cog-
nition. Insofar as connectionist models are designed to explain
human behavior. Take, for example, a connectionist model
of plural formation in English. If a connectionist is merely set-
ting out to create a program that generates plurals, he or she
does not need to worry about the precise sorts of errors actual
human beings make with plurals, the way plural usage develops
in childhood, and so on. However, a connectionist who is mod-
eling actual human language will wish to design a system that
produces the same curve of correct plurals and errors that we
ind among real people.
Connectionism and Neuroscience
he artiicial intelligence value of connectionism seems clear.
But with respect to human language, one might ask why bother
with connectionist modeling at all? Why dont we simply do
neuroscience? After all, connectionism takes up the basic prin-
ciples of neurobiology neuronal units, iring thresholds, cir-
cuits. However, it tends to eschew the ine-grained, empirically
based assignment of specialized neuronal or regional functions.
Moreover, it simply leaves out such important components of
neurobiology as neurochemistry.
Certainly, connectionist modeling of human cognitive archi-
tecture cannot replace neuroscience. Moreover, it does seem
clear that such modeling should follow the basic principles of
neuroscience (e.g., in modeling human language, it should not
posit processes that have no correlate in the brain). However,
203
Connectionism, Language Science, and Meaning
connectionist analyses serve two purposes beyond empirical
neuroscience. he irst is the general purpose of abstract mod-
eling. Empirical neuroscientists are rightly concerned with try-
ing to deine just what particular neurons, circuits, and regions
of the brain do. Connectionist modeling is concerned with just
what kinds of things an architecture of this general sort can do.
Clearly, the actual human brain does not do everything that a
similarly structured connectionist model can do. However, the
actual human brain does some subset of those things. hus,
abstract modeling tells us what we should not be investigating
in terms of neural operation (those things that no system of this
sort could ever do). It also tells us what sorts of things we should
not ignore in investigating neural operation (those things that we
may have thought were impossible for such a system, but which
connectionist models indicate are not impossible). For example,
it may be argued that connectionist networks have been used
successfully to model the emergence of semantic categories
in infancy, even when they have incorporated little in the way
of innate structure (see Rogers and McClelland 2004, 12173;
innateness and innatism). In this way, connectionist mod-
eling may serve as an important guide for the empirical investi-
gation of the neural substrate of language.
he second function of connectionism is related. Despite
genuine advances in neurolinguistics in recent years (see brain
and language), there is considerable divergence of opinion in
the ield and relatively little is well established. Apparently, irm
ideas (e.g., about the precise location and function of brocas
area and wernickes area) are continually being revised. It
seems highly unlikely that our fundamental understanding of
neurons, neuronal circuits, and other basic functional properties
will change very much. But particular neuroscientiic accounts
of language operation are far less stable. Neuroscientists rightly
tend to follow currently promising avenues of research, pursu-
ing particular empirical hypotheses in line with recent theories.
But, as a wise man (Hilary Putnam) once remarked, one of the
few things we know about our current theories is that they are
wrong. Given this, it is valuable to have a research program that
operates on the same basic, well-established principles as neu-
rolinguistics, but which is not closely tied to the vagaries of cur-
rent theorization.
Connectionism and Symbolic Architectures
Another diference between connectionism and neurobiology is
that connectionist models move, so to speak, in the direction of
symbolic architectures (what we commonly think of as mental
architectures, rather than neurobiological ones). It is common
for connectionists to deine their models in opposition to those
of symbolic architectures, such as generative grammar.
Symbolic architectures are commonly thought to operate seri-
ally, rather than in parallel, and to operate locally, rather than in
a distributed fashion. So a symbolic architecture would typically
be understood as involving some singular representation (e.g.,
a concept or a sentence) that is put through a series of pro-
cesses in a certain sequence following certain rules with rules
sometimes also (putatively) rejected in connectionist models.
Conceived of in absolute terms, the dichotomy is a false one.
First, there is a sequential element in all connectionist mod-
els. here would be no sense in speaking of input and output
204
otherwise. Second, there is a parallel element in symbolic archi-
tectures, at least when they are fully elaborated. For example,
in minimalism, the production of a sentence involves at least
some phonological, logical, and syntactic parallelism. Moreover,
connectionist networks clearly involve rules (even rules that
constitute operations over variables, the key set of rules stressed
by Gary Marcus [2001; see particularly 3583]). he rules are
embodied in the ways activation operates (e.g., through summa-
tion of inputs to thresholds).
Finally, it is not entirely clear that distributed versus uniied
is really an opposition. For example, lexical items have compo-
nents in symbolic accounts (e.g., semantic features). Writers in
the tradition of symbolic architecture do seem to envision those
components as occurring in one place, much like items in a dic-
tionary entry occur on a single page. However, in terms of the
theories themselves, that only means that the components are
conceptually related, accessed together, and so on. A symbolic
architecture need not be committed to localism in the neural
substrate. he meaning of a given symbol may be realized in a
pattern of activation across diferent areas of the brain.
his is not to say that there are no diferences between con-
nectionist and symbolic accounts. But many of these are just the
general sort of diferences that arise when one moves through
distinct levels of structure. For example, connectionist models
stress dispersal. Symbolic accounts stress unities. But this need
not constitute a contradiction anymore than diferences between
physical and social accounts or macroscopic and microscopic
accounts need constitute a contradiction. We dont stop speaking
of trees and discussing their biology or their gross physical prop-
erties just because we discover that they are composed of atoms.
Nor do we say that a railway system is not reasonably treated as a
single thing just because it is dispersed in space. A similar point
holds for rules. It is indeed the case that symbolic systems tend to
involve many more rules and much more speciic rules than con-
nectionist architectures. But these rules are reasonably thought
of as emerging from neural networks. he existence of a neural
substrate without, for example, speciic grammatical rules does
not invalidate a linguistic discussion of grammatical principles
anymore than the existence of a particle substrate invalidates an
engineers discussion of macroscopic causal laws.
Consider, for example, the head-directionality parameter
in principles and parameters theory. As Mark Baker
explains in his entry on parameters, Roughly put, when a
word-level category X [the head] merges with a phrase Y to create
a phrase of type X, there are two ways that the elements can be
ordered: he order can be X-Y within XP [X phrase], or it can be
Y-X. In languages throughout the world, heads tend to be added
in the same position, either irst or last (not half in each, as one
might expect from random distribution). Grossly oversimplify-
ing, we could imagine a connectionist model in which the net-
works for a range of processes develop some alternation between
initial position and inal position. For example, it is easy to set up
a model in which some set of items triggers a directionality node,
which in turn activates either a beginning or an end node. Suppose
it activates the beginning node. Once that node is activated in
the context of a task say, identifying a determiner it will lead
to a behavioral output of checking the beginning. he absence
of the determiner at the beginning will initiate the correction
Connectionism, Language Science, and Meaning
mechanism. Given a general relation between beginning and
end nodes within the network, that mechanism could by default
lead to the activation of the end node. Computer simulations of
connectionist models could be used to examine whether this
might lead to a coordination of diferent heads as irst or last. A
successful connectionist model would not imply that one should
not speak of a principle here (heads are added in one direction)
with a parameter to be set (irst/last). Rather, it would provide a
model for the substrate of an emergent principle.
his account is, as I said, grossly oversimpliied. For example,
it assumes that the system collects together all heads, rather than
treating diferent sorts of heads separately or rather than orga-
nizing grammar in ways that do not even include heads. his is
a very small instance of the sort of problem Steven Pinker has in
mind when he questions whether or not connectionist models can
scale up to the level of a full grammar (2002, 79). Pinker ofers
this criticism in the context of supporting a symbolic approach to
grammar. But here, too, the opposition is mistaken. If we assume
that the substrate of any grammatical operation is the human
brain, then something along the lines of a connectionist network
will have to scale up to the level of a full grammar. As Marcus puts
it, referring to a speciic case, he right question is not Can any
connectionist model capture the facts of inlection? but rather
What design features must a connectionist model that captures
the facts of inlection incorporate? (2001, 83).
Of course, Pinker has in mind something else here innatism.
It is true that symbolic approaches to language have often posited
a rich innate grammar, whereas connectionist approaches have
tended to minimize innatism. In general, it is valuable to have con-
licting views on this issue driving competing research programs.
However, it seems that the association of innatism with symbolism,
on the one hand, and the association of noninnatist learning with
connectionism, on the other hand, is contingent. here is no rea-
son that one could not have specializations and biases in a connec-
tionist network (cf. Martindale 1995, 250). hese would, of course,
not be rules in the symbolic sense but they would be equivalent
to rules at the level of the emergent structure. Conversely, there is
no reason that a symbolic account of grammar as such requires
rich innatism. It could begin from a view that grammar is learned
through experience, given general learning mechanisms (perhaps
of the sort currently associated with connectionism).
An Example from Truth Conditional Semantics
Consider a variation on a standard example exclusive or (i.e.,
one of two items, but not both) embedded, in this case, in a con-
ditional assertion. Conditionals and logical connectives, such
as or, are important not only in the semantics of formal
languages but also in the semantics of natural languages. For
example, they are critical for truth conditional semantics.
Take a sentence such as If x is a farm animal, then x is ovipa-
rous or viviparous. he semantics of this sentence are, in fact,
enormously complex. A full connectionist model would have
to account for many things. For the moment, lets assume that
most of this is taken care of, focusing only on the truth condition
issue. In a truth conditional account, we need to map the sen-
tence onto two values. hese are T (or true) and F (or false). here
are only two conditions in which the sentence is mapped onto
F that is, when x is a farm animal and x is neither oviparous nor
viviparous (e.g., it is an amoeba farm) and, more importantly,
when x is a farm animal and x is both oviparous and viviparous.
he former case is the obvious one, since it does not rely on the
peculiar nature of exclusive or (or the existence of simultane-
ously oviparous and viviparous creatures). However, real people
at some point come to understand the second possible falsity as
well. For example, they come to draw an inference very swiftly
when they learn that x is oviparous (i.e., they infer that x is not
viviparous) or when they learn that x is viviparous (i.e., they infer
that x is not oviparous). A connectionist model should produce
this result as well.
To model exclusive or, we begin with input nodes. In a full
model, we would need an array of nodes to represent farm,
another array for animal, and so on. But, for simplicity, lets
assume one node per word or object. Speciically, lets take the
case of Flufy. Little Bufy arrives on the farm and encounters
Flufy. She already has a node for farm animal. Farm is acti-
vated by her presence in the barn. Animal is activated by various
properties of Flufy. Together, these activate farm animal. Flufy
is assigned a new node. he activation of the (new) Flufy node
along with the farm animal node serves to link the two. Bufy
already knows that animals either have eggs or have babies.
hus, part of her stable knowledge involves the relation of exclu-
sive disjunction between oviparous and viviparous. (Obviously,
it doesnt matter if she knows these particular words.)
his may be modeled in the following way (see Figure 1). Both
oviparous and viviparous have their own nodes (marked o and
v). here are also nodes for nonoviparous (-o) and nonvivipa-
rous (-v). Oviparous has an excitatory connection (marked by a
pointed arrow) with nonviviparous, which, in turn, has an inhibi-
tory connection with viviparous (marked by an arrow with a cir-
cular head). Similarly, viviparous has an excitatory connection
with nonoviparous, which, in turn, has an inhibitory connection
with oviparous. hus, when Bufy sees Flufy sitting on a nestful
of eggs, she infers not only that Flufy is oviparous but also that
she is nonviviparous. (Moreover, due to inhibition, she does not
infer that Flufy is viviparous, even though viviparous might have
v
o
v
o
Figure 1. A simpliied model for exclusive or in the context oviparous or
viviparous. Arrows indicate excitatory connections. Lines with solid circles
indicate inhibitory connections. The symbol - stands for not; o stands
for oviparous; v for viviparous. Note that this model is not intended to
capture the truth conditions per se. Rather, it models the psychological
process idealized in the truth conditions. Thus, a disruption in a particular
connection could lead someone to hold logically contradictory beliefs.
205
Connectionism, Language Science, and Meaning
T yields principles. More importantly, this account also indicates
c psychological rule. For example, this model partially incorporates
o
v neutrality (see, for example, Nisbett and Ross 1980, 23842). he
o
ov
v F
Figure 2. A simpliied model of the psychologically operative truth condi-
tions for If x is a farm animal, then x is oviparous or viviparous. The letter
c stands for the entire conditional. T stands for true and F for false. The
letters o and v stand for oviparous and viviparous; - stands for not;
and -ov stands for neither oviparous nor viviparous. Arrows indicate
excitatory relations. Lines with solid circles indicate inhibitory connections.
Solid lines indicate a connection strength of 1. Broken lines indicate a con-
nection strength of .5. Activation of a node occurs at 1. Thus, for example,
both -o and -v would have to be activated for -ov to be activated. This is
because the .5 connection strengths reduce the activation they commu-
nicate to .5. Note that this is not a model of logical/empirical truth condi-
tions but of psychologically operative truth conditions. Thus, it seeks to
capture an initial presumption about the truth of the conditional based,
in this case, on authority. This is presumably more psychologically realistic
than a model that yields T only in cases of inductive validity.
received some degree of activation simply from the [unpictured]
activations of mother, etc., in connection with Flufy.)
Going further, we might model the entire sentence. here
are many ways in which this can be done. he following is an
attempt at a version that, while extremely simple, at least points
toward the way disjunctive or might operate psychologically
(see Figure 2). Suppose that when the node for our oviparous/
viviparous conditional (c) is activated, the truth node (T) is also
activated. For instance, if Uncle Bob tells Bufy that farm animals
either lay eggs or have babies, but not both, then Bufy assumes
that Uncle Bob is right. Bufy does not require positive evidence
to judge the conditional to be true. However, Bufy may discover
that Uncle Bob is secretly farming amoeba, which are nonovipa-
rous and nonviviparous, or that he is farming some mutant spe-
cies that lays some eggs and gives birth to some babies. In the
latter case, the simultaneous activation of oviparous and vivipa-
rous could be modeled as activating F (through connections of
strength .5). In a slightly more complex sequence, positive acti-
vation of both nonoviparous and nonviviparous might activate a
hidden node (say, -ov) through .5 connection strength links; this
node could, in turn, activate F (through a connection strength of
1). Finally, in this model, F would inhibit T.
his is, of course, an extremely simple model. In fact, con-
nectionist models of language phenomena are highly complex,
requiring computer simulations to plot their predictions and devel-
opments (see, for example, Rogers and McClelland (2004); see also
connectionist models, language structure, and repre-
sentation and connectionism and grammar). Nonetheless,
this model may partially illustrate some of the relations between
connectionist models, symbolic architectures, and neurobiology
outlined previously. For example, we do not seem to gain anything
206
Connectionist Models, Language Structure, and Representation
by denying that this complex of parallel and distributed processes
that the standard logical rule for exclusive or may not be our actual
our common bias toward conirmation, rather than falsiication or
sorts of statistical processes manifest in fully developed connec-
tionist models would be able to suggest other deviations from the
logical rule as well the place of exceptions, the degree to which
our memories often revert to the assumption of truth even after dis-
conirmation, and so on. Finally, such developments may suggest
avenues of inquiry for neurological investigations (e.g., in semantic
and episodic memory), which are not initially obvious in the study
of conditionals or logical connectives.
In sum, connectionism provides us with a way of modeling
language processing, storage, and acquisition indeed, history,
evolution, variation, and other areas of language science as well.
It is inspired by neurobiology, but departs from this source to
follow a more independent research program that may direct
us toward productive areas of neurobiological research, or away
from unproductive areas. At the same time, it mediates between
neurobiology and symbolic approaches, in some cases suggest-
ing problems with and possibilities for the latter as well as the
former. Although connectionist and symbolic architectures are
often viewed as diametrically opposed, it may be best to see the
former as modeling neurobiological substrates of language and
the latter as treating (rule-approximating) structures that emerge
from that substrate.
Patrick Colm Hogan
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Marcus, Gary. 2001. he Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and
Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Martindale, Colin. 1995. Creativity and connectionism. In he Creative
Cognition Approach, ed. Steven Smith, homas Ward, and Ronald
Finke, 24068. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
McLeod, Peter, Kim Plunkett, and Edmund Rolls. 1998. Introduction
to Connectionist Modelling of Cognitive Processes. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Nisbett, Richard, and Lee Ross. 1980. Human Inference: Strategies and
Shortcomings of Social Judgment. Englewood Clifs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Pinker, Steven. 2002. he Blank Slate: he Modern Denial of Human
Nature. New York: Viking.
Rogers, Timothy, and James McClelland. 2004. Semantic Cognition: A
Parallel Distributed Processing Approach. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
CONNECTIONIST MODELS, LANGUAGE STRUCTURE,
AND REPRESENTATION
Connectionist models have many desirable properties when
it comes to understanding several very basic things about
language:
Why language has the structure that it does;
How knowledge of language structure is represented so as to
lexibly encompass the sort of structure that it has;
How language can change over time in a direction that main-
tains and accentuates this sort of structure.
Connectionist Models, Language Structure, and Representation
Connectionist models also have desirable properties when it
comes to understanding language acquisition.
Quasi Regularity
A key, but underrecognized, aspect of all of natural languages is
the fact that they exhibit quasi regularity. hat is, linguistic expres-
sions generally have properties that are shared with many other
forms, while also having properties that are more idiosyncratic.
In general, they are neither completely regular nor completely
irregular, but instead are best understood as lying somewhere
along a continuum of regularity, with most forms somewhere
between the extremes. Languages do have a tendency to pull
novel and infrequent forms into conformity with other forms, but
they also have a tendency to maintain (even promote) forms with
item-speciic idiosyncrasies and clusters of similar items that
share such idiosyncrasies. hese idiosyncrasies coexist within
items that also exhibit sensitivity to more general regularities.
Lets consider a range of examples from several diferent sub-
domains of language:
Inlectional morphology
keep-kept
tell-told
say-said
have-had
All these cases exhibit the correct regular past tense inlec-
tion together with a vowel change or consonant deletion in the
stem. he pattern in keep is shared with a number of other verbs,
including sleep, creep, sweep, and somewhat more distantly
dream, kneel, and mean.
Derivational morphology
predict, prefer
dirty, rosy
idolize, replicate,
As many have noted, and Joan L. Bybee (1985) and Luigi Burzio
(2002) have considered extensively, there are many derived
inlectional forms that preserve semantic characteristics of
their constituents but bring in altered or additional elements of
meaning. Treating these items as either fully compositional or
as fully opaque misses out on capturing one or the other aspects
of their meaning.
Idioms, constructions, and collocations
I want to see a doctor.
She felt the baby kick.
Hour by hour I grow more and more lonely.
Such expressions nearly always participate in general patterns
characteristic of other expressions with overlapping constituents
(I saw a doctor, I saw a movie, I want to see a baseball game) but
carry idiosyncratic meaning.
Spelling sound correspondences
pint
clown
great
Consider PINT. his item is an exception, but three of the letters
(P, N, and T) take their regular correspondences, and there are
related cases, such as MIND, FIND, MILD, and so on, that over-
lap with PINT and share the atypical vowel correspondence seen
in this item. he other cases have similar properties.
he point, in all of these cases, is that an inherent feature
of language is its quasi regularity: irregular forms are nearly
always partially regular. Approaches to language that relegate
all quasi-regular forms to the status of exceptions are, in general,
eschewing an account of an important and productive aspect of
language.
Connectionist Models and Quasi Regularity
Connectionist models ofer ways of representing language
knowledge and language learning that explain why it has the
quasi-regular structure that it does and why it changes in some
of the ways that it does. No extant connectionist model is perfect
in its account of any speciic aspect of language, but such models
have the fundamental properties necessary for addressing this
very general property, its quasi-regular structure, justifying their
further development.
I present the principles of distributed connectionist models
within the context of a simple model of single word reading. I
use the model to underscore the point that the knowledge that
governs processing in connectionist models is fundamentally
diferent from the knowledge that linguists have traditionally
attributed to speakers and hearers, but it is ideally suited to
addressing the previous points, and thus is a candidate form of
knowledge for all aspects of language.
he essence of connectionist models is that they provide a
mechanism that is at once sensitive to both general and speciic
information in ways that mirror human sensitivity to such infor-
mation. A connectionist model can behave as though it knows
very general and completely idiosyncratic information; and it
can exploit both general and speciic information in processing
novel forms in ways that appear to mirror those seen in normal
human subjects. he model I describe is a model of single word
reading (Plaut et al. 1996). It has input units representing graph-
emes, output units representing phonemes, and one intermedi-
ate layer of hidden units that are initially uncommitted.
In networks such as this, the knowledge that governs process-
ing of an item is in the strengths of the connections among the
simple processing units. Knowledge enters the system gradu-
ally, through a connection adjustment process, based on experi-
ence with corresponding inputs and outputs. he experience is
assumed to mirror human experience in reading in that frequent
items (words like HAVE and TAKE) occur very frequently, while
less frequent items (words like LINT and COPE) occur far less
frequently.
Processing and learning take place as follows: he letters from
a word are presented over the input units; activation is allowed
to propagate forward to the output units; and adjustments are
then made to the connections within the network to reduce the
diference between the output produced by the network and the
pronunciation paired with the spelling. Note that this process is
not thought of as explicit correction of overt errors in the models
performance. he networks outputs can be translated into an
overt product, but learning is thought to occur from exposure
to spelling-sound pairs. (It is possible that once the process gets
started, many of the sounds are provided internally as a result of
207
Connectionist Models, Language Structure, and Representation
the readers ability to correctly predict the correct word based on
context. Of course, at irst this is unlikely, and learning depends
on there being a supportive context in which the child hears the
sound associated with each word as it is being read by a parent
or teacher).
Consider the learning that occurs as a result of processing an
ordinary pair such as MINT /mint/: It afects weights coming
from units for M, I, N, and T and going to units for /m/, /I/, /n/,
and /t/. Over the corpus, words with M in the input will over-
whelmingly have /m/ in the output and little else will be com-
mon across them, and so connections will gradually arise that
map M reliably to /m/, and similarly for most of the other let-
ters. he result is that the weights coding for the relation between
spellings that begin with M and sounds beginning with /m/ will
largely be restricted to the weights out of the M unit and into the
/m/ unit. But now consider the vowel. he situation here is far
more complex. Depending largely on aspects of the coda, it will
tend to be pronounced either as /ai/ or as /I/: he former occurs
when there is a single consonant followed by a inal E, as in MINE,
FINE, DINE, and so on, while the latter tends to occur when the I
is followed only by consonants as in MINT, LINK, SILT, and so on.
But there are several exceptions, including MIND, WIND; MILD,
CHILD; PINT. he network must learn to rely on the presence of
the inal E to signal the /ai/ correspondence; to generally produce
/I/ otherwise; and to overcome this tendency in the speciic con-
stellation of circumstances corresponding to the exceptions.
As a result of the gradual learning process, the weights coding
for the pronunciation of the vowel in PINT will depend not only
on the letter I but also on all of the other letters in PINT. While
one way in which this could occur would be for the network to
carve out a separate hidden unit for it, that is not what it tends
to do; the knowledge appears to be distributed over connections
into and out of many of the hidden units. he important points
here are the following:
In general, any and all aspects of an input can be relevant to
any aspect of the output, but complex cases are harder for the
network to master and must work against the grain of the gen-
eral tendencies embodied in the training corpus.
For the most part, even when some aspects of the output
such as the vowel in an exception like PINT depend on
all aspects of the input, many other aspects in this case,
the handling of the P, N, and T are largely componentially
determined.
Secondarily but still important, even the exceptional aspect of
PINT beneits to a degree from the learning that occurs with
related exceptions like MIND, FIND, WIND, and so on.
he model accounts for
main efects of regularity, frequency, and frequency by reg-
ularity interactions in human RTs and in pattern of errors
(under conditions where errors are likely);
graded efects of consistency of a word with pronunciations of
other known words;
the pattern of performance exhibited by human adults in read-
ing pronounceable nonwords that contain bodies that vary
in the consistency of their pronunciation. Speciically: he
model reads regular forms that are consistent with all of their
208
neighbors items like BOPE with a high degree of consis-
tency with conventional spelling-sound rules, but shows con-
siderable inconsistency in productions of forms such as:
GROOK, PREAD, MAVE
he pattern in the model, as in human readers, is to choose
one of the correspondences of the verb that occurs either in
forms traditionally treated as regular or irregular, but not neces-
sarily to choose the regular form.
he model exhibits sensitivity to the following:
First-order spelling-sound regularities:
M /m/
B /b/
Local context-sensitive patterns:
C /s/ when followed by {I | E} as in cell, cent
O oh when followed by L{L|D|K|T} as in told, colt
Partially consistent clusters, such as
OO{K, sometimes T,F} {vowel in put}
EA{often D,TH, sometimes F} {vowel in bread}
Exceptions that weakly cluster with others, such as PINT.
Idiosyncratic high-frequency exceptions like HAVE.
he model also accounts for the near (but not total) indepen-
dence of onsets and rhymes, and the much greater dependency
between vowels and codas. his independence is not complete,
as indicated by a few special forms like wash, warm, and so on.
he model captures this sensitivity in these cases.
he model produces gradient efects of the degree of con-
sistency with properties of words with similar rhyme-spellings
and of the items own frequency. he speciic pattern of these
gradient efects corresponds to key features of experimental
data: Performance on items that are highly consistent with their
neighbors is relatively insensitive to the frequency of the item
itself (leading some to assert that such items are dealt with by
algebraic rules, but fully consistent with the properties of connec-
tionist models). Performance on items that are inconsistent with
their neighbors is highly sensitive to the items own frequency.
Sensitivity to an items own frequency is a matter of degree itself
dependent on the degree of inconsistency.
he model does these things without having an explicit rep-
resentation of either any speciic lexical item or of any other
subword unit (other than the grapheme and the phoneme), and
without having an explicit representation of any of the rules or
correspondences.
It also has the very important property of using general knowl-
edge not only to process the fully regular cases but also, to the
fullest extent possible, to process those items that are partially
exceptional: It is only the idiosyncratic aspects of exceptions that
are processed diferently from fully regular forms. It thus cap-
tures the tendency for exceptions to be largely regular in nature,
the key, underappreciated feature of all languages with which I
began this entry.
he same general principles have been used to capture a wide
range of phenomena in reading, language processing, and many
other domains.
Here, I briely related mention several related models, in part
to indicate the generality of the approach and in part to address
concerns that some readers may have with some of the apparent
Connectionist Models, Language Structure, and Representation
commitments made by the reading model of D. C. Plaut and
colleagues.
Models of past tense formation, based on mapping
stem->past (e.g., Rumelhart and McClelland 1986; Plunkett
and Marchman 1991).
hese models illustrate the same principles as the reading
model already discussed. Both articles discuss how such models
can capture sensitivity to quasi-regular patterns, and K. Plunkett
and V. Marchman explain why there are so few suppletions
(stem-past pairs like go-went) and those that exist are only of
high frequency. Essentially, it is very hard work for a connec-
tionist network to learn a completely arbitrary mapping. A ten-
dency for weights to be shared across items forces these models
to exhibit sensitivity to regularities, while the fact that they are
trained gradually through small adjustments of connections
makes them inherently sensitive to frequency efects.
Models of past tense formation, mapping from meaning to
sound and sound to meaning (Joanisse and Seidenberg 1999;
Lupyan and McClelland 2003).
he same general principles are at work here as well, but the
approach brings out the quasi-systematic relationship between
semantic and syntactic properties of words, on the one hand,
and their phonology, on the other. his line of work has not been
pursued fully enough.
Models of derivational morphology (Plaut and Gonnerman
2000).
hese authors ofer a model that maps from form to mean-
ing, with such forms as government, predict, and so on. he
model captures graded priming relations, depending on degree
of compositionality. In ongoing work, Plaut and colleagues have
considered other languages (e.g., Hebrew) that show stronger
morphological efects. Here, one gets morphological priming
even in cases where there is no actual morphological relation-
ship. Extensions of the Plaut/Gonnerman model show that when
trained with a more highly systematic corpus (characteristic of
Hebrew), networks also exhibit this property. In other words, the
networks tendency to parse morphologically complex forms into
components (see the entries on parsing) relects both the spe-
ciic properties of individual items and the prevailing tendency
found among items in the language.
Models of sentence processing (Elman 1990; McClelland,
St. John, and Taraban 1989).
Both models are trained with word sequences generated
according to a simple grammar. J. L. Elmans model simply pre-
dicts the next word in the sequence after training with gram-
matical sequences. he model in J. L. McClelland, M. St. John,
and R. Taraban maps from the word stream to a representation
of the set of role-iller pairs characterizing the event described
in a given input sentence. Both of these models illustrate many
of the properties already considered, and operate strictly of of a
linear sequence of inputs. here are also word reading models
that read the sequence of sounds appropriate to a spelled word
sequentially. his eliminates the concern that arises with some
of the more parallel models that theyre really hiding a speciic
commitment to structure in the representations of inputs and
outputs.
Models that work from raw speech input (Keidel et al. 2003).
here are several models the irst was an unpublished
efort by Elman from the late 1980s in which the model works
directly with recorded spoken language. More recent eforts
(e.g., Keidel et al. 2003) along these lines are in their infancy,
but when they have matured they will eliminate a residual
drawback of all of the aforementioned models, namely, that
they stipulate speciic units on both their inputs and outputs.
Models that work directly with raw speech aford the possibil-
ity of seeing phones, phonemes, and syllables as approximate
descriptive conveniences similar to the other sorts of units we
have already been discussing. his overcomes a contradiction
inherent in the Plaut et al. reading models, and in most of the
other models discussed: hese models eschew units internally,
on the one hand, but appear to depend on such units in their
inputs and outputs, on the other. he computational demands
of working directly with raw speech are daunting, but some
progress is being made in ongoing work.
A radical connectionist hypothesis would be that approaches
to representing language structure and language knowledge that
eschew prior commitment to units of any type will ultimately be
the most informative and successful. It will, of course, always be
useful to summarize facts that characterize language more suc-
cinctly in the form of rules. Such rules, however, will ultimately
be seen only as summary descriptions that approximately cap-
ture important aspects of language, rather than as directly char-
acterizing the way in which language knowledge is represented,
acquired, and used.
Rules or Connections?
S. Pinker reacted strongly against the connectionist model of D.
E. Rumelhart and McClelland (Pinker and Prince 1988), taking
strong exception to the notion that language exhibits the graded,
similarity-based properties characteristic of connectionist mod-
els. He subsequently (Pinker 1991, 1999) accepted that language
does indeed have some gradient-like properties similar to those
of neural networks, but maintained that such properties are
restricted to operating within the lexicon. He made the case that
there is a separate, pure, rule-based system, operating accord-
ing to principles quite distinct from those characteristic of con-
nectionist networks. He made his case on the basis of a series
of empirical claims, arguing for the special status of categori-
cal, structure- but not content-sensitive rules in performance,
acquisition, and breakdown under brain damage, also claim-
ing support from cross-linguistic evidence. McClelland and K.
Patterson (2002) evaluated all of these claims and found instead
that properties of performance, acquisition, breakdown, and
cross-language variation do not support the view that language is
based on categorical rules; rather, the evidence supports the idea
that language knowledge is graded, semantic- and phonological-
content sensitive, and that there is no separate system for regular
as opposed to irregular aspects of language.
he fact that connectionist models can capture both system-
atic and idiosyncratic properties of linguistic forms leads to the
following suggestions:
209
Connectionist Models, Language Structure, and Representation
here are no lexical entries in the mechanisms of language
processing as such, only sensitivity to the idiosyncratic prop-
erties of particular items.
he rules that characterize regularities in the relations
between, for example, sound to meaning (past tenses tend
to end in a variant of the dental stop) have no special status
either; however, they do capture the tendency that connec-
tionist systems have to extend consistent relations among
constituent parts of expressions to new expressions contain-
ing the same constituents.
Similarly, other units besides the word, including subword
units such as phone, onset, rhyme, nucleus, coda, sylla-
ble, and morpheme, as well as supraword units, including
phrases, collocations, idioms, and constructions, may not
be stored as such; however, listing such units and noting the
regularities that describe their relations to other units may be
useful descriptively in characterizing aspects of the emergent
behavior of the system in which they need not be represented
as such.
A recent critique of connectionist approaches by Ray Jackendof
(2007) raises a number of concerns, centering around a perceived
failure of connectionist models to be as systematic as Jackendof
takes natural language to be. In a reply, McClelland and J. Bybee
(2007) address these concerns, emphasizing that connectionist
models do impose a tendency toward systematicity and regular-
ity, while they yet exploit quasi regularity in exceptions, some-
thing that the approaches of Pinker and Jackendof are not able
to do.
J. L. McClelland
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bird, H., M. A. Lambon Ralph, M. S. Seidenberg, J. L. McClelland, and
K. Patterson. 2003. Deicits in phonology and past-tense morphol-
ogy: Whats the connection? Journal of Memory and Language
48: 50226.
Burzio, Luigi. 2002. Missing players: Phonology and the past-tense
debate. Lingua 112: 15799.
Bybee, Joan L. 1985. Morphology: A Study of the Relation between Meaning
and Form. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Bybee, J., and J. L. McClelland. 2005. Alternatives to the combinatorial
paradigm of linguistic theory based on domain general principles of
human cognition. Linguistic Review 22: 381410.
Elman J. L. 1990. Finding structure in time. Cognitive Science
14: 179211.
Jackendof, Ray. 2007. Linguistics in cognitive science: he state of the
art. Linguistic Review 24: 347401.
Joanisse, M. F., and M. S. Seidenberg. 1999. Impairments in verb mor-
phology following brain injury: A connectionist model. Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences 96: 75927.
Keidel, J. L., J. D. Zevin, K. R. Kluender, and M. S. Seidenberg. 2003.
Modeling the role of native language knowledge in perceiving nonna-
tive speech contrasts. Proceedings of the 15th International Congress
of Phonetic Sciences: 22214.
Lupyan, G., and J. L. McClelland. 2003. Did, made, had, said: Capturing
quasi-regularity in exceptions. Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting
of the Cognitive Science Society. Available online at: http://csjarchive.
cogsci.rpi.edu/Proceedings/2003/mac/table.html.
McClelland, J. L., and J. Bybee. 2007. Gradience of gradience: A reply to
Jackendof. Linguistic Review 24: 43755.
210
Consciousness and Language
McClelland, J. L., and K. Patterson. 2002. Rules or connections in past-
tense inlections: What does the evidence rule out? Trends in Cognitive
Sciences 6.11: 46572.
McClelland, J. L., M. St. John, and R. Taraban. 1989. Sentence compre-
hension: A parallel distributed processing approach. Language and
Cognitive Processes 4: 287335.
Pinker, S. 1991. Rules of language. Science 253: 5305.
. 1999. Words and Rules. New York: Basic Books.
Pinker, S., and A. Prince. 1988. On language and connectionism: Analysis
of a parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition.
Cognition 28: 73193.
Plaut, D. C., and L. M. Gonnerman. 2000. Are non-semantic morpho-
logical efects incompatible with a distributed connectionist approach
to lexical processing? Language and Cognitive Processes 15: 44585.
Plaut, D. C., J. L. McClelland, M. S. Seidenberg, and K. Patterson. 1996.
Understanding normal and impaired word reading: Computational
principles in quasi-regular domains. Psychological Review
103: 56115.
Plunkett, K., and V. Marchman. 1991. U-shaped learning and frequency
efects in a multi-layered perceptron: Implications for child language
acquisition. Cognition 38: 43102.
Rumelhart D. E., and J. L. McClelland. 1986. On learning past tenses of
English verbs. In Parallel Distributed Processing. Vol 2: Psychological
and Biological Models. Ed. D. E. Rummelhart and J. L. McClelland.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND LANGUAGE
John Locke, one of the founders of the study of meaning, took it
for granted that consciousness has to play a role in our under-
standing of language. Ultimately, linguistic signs have their
meanings in virtue of their connections to perception. So, for
example, the meanings of the color words can only be grasped by
someone who has had experience of the colors. his is the gen-
eral case. Although the meanings of many words are grasped by
grasping their connections to other words, ultimately the whole
system has to bottom out in connections to perception. he gen-
eral picture was that our perceptual experiences are the contact
point between us and the world. When the world afects us caus-
ally in such a way that we can think and talk about it, it does so by
afecting our perceptual experiences. hese experiences, there-
fore, can serve as signs of the external phenomena that cause
them (somewhat as smoke can serve as a sign of ire), and their
status as signs is inherited by any further linguistic signs that we
use as a consequence of having those experiences (Locke [1690]
1975). Something like this general picture is still popular today,
partly as a result of Saul Kripkes (1980) reinvigoration of a causal
view of reference. he principal modiication is that the role of
experience in perception is given little weight; consciousness is
regarded as perhaps an inessential epiphenomenon in the pro-
cess and as having little to do with our grasp of language.
here are two lines of argument behind this elimination of
consciousness from the study of language. One is the direction
taken by the scientiic study of vision. On the cognitive science
approach exempliied by David Marr (1982), vision has to be
understood at three levels: the level of computation, at which we
specify the task being performed by a visual system; the level of
algorithm, at which we specify just how the task is performed;
and the level of implementation, at which we specify the neural
basis of the system. It is usually assumed that there is some sense
Consciousness and Language
in which we ind the mechanisms of causation only at the level of
implementation. Only at that level, the description of the biology
of the system, do we ind interactions among physical units in
virtue of which the whole process counts as causal, even if there
is some secondary sense in which the higher-level descriptions
of the system can be said to be of causal signiicance. Conscious
experience as such does not enter into the characterization of
any of these levels, and it is hard to see how its causal signii-
cance could be recognized. Consciousness seems like a kind of
miasma that might pervade the system, but of no signiicance for
its functioning.
he second line of argument for the elimination of conscious-
ness from the study of language is in the philosophical work of
Gottlob Frege. Freges point was that no one can really know
what experiences someone else is having, and so if conscious-
ness did play a key role in an understanding of language, com-
munication would be impossible (1952). You would be trying
to convey something whose signiicance ultimately had to do
with the nature of your experiences, and I would have no way of
knowing what you were talking about. So the shareable, public
phenomena of communication and meaning have to be sharply
diferentiated from the realm of conscious experience since the
nature of an experience can be known only to the person hav-
ing it. Freges point was pursued by the later Wittgenstein, who
argued that meaning cannot be grounded in the contents of the
stream of consciousness. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) argued
that the conception of meaning as grounded in the idiosyncratic
experiences that each of us has ultimately makes no sense; the
notion of experience that this conception uses is incoherent (see
private language argument). To characterize the meaning
of a sign, you have to look at its role in communication, and there
is no special role here for talk about conscious states.
hese two lines of thought, from cognitive science and from
the work of Frege and Wittgenstein, are evidently forceful. here
is, nonetheless, a line of argument that asks: Suppose we do
eliminate consciousness from the study of language. Will we
be left with enough that we can give a recognizable account of
meaning and understanding? he argument was given its clas-
sic formulation by John Searle (1980). Searles question was
put as a problem for computational approaches to meaning
and understanding. Suppose, as a premise for reductio, that we
have a computer that understands a language, say Chinese. he
operations of the computer can be described at Marrs levels of
computation, algorithm, and implementation. Fundamentally,
what we have is a machine capable of complex symbol manipu-
lation. Can this complex symbol manipulation add up to under-
standing? Suppose we have an ordinary speaker of English
who understands no Chinese. We put this speaker into a room
with a massive rule book written in English that tells him what
operations to perform with Chinese symbols when he encoun-
ters them. In efect, he mimics the operations of the computer.
We feed Chinese messages into the room, and he manipulates
the symbols and outputs fresh symbols in response. Could any
amount of this kind of thing add up to an understanding of
Chinese? Well, plainly our English speaker has no understand-
ing of Chinese after all this. So where is an understanding of
Chinese to be found? Despite an avalanche of literature written
in response, there has been no consensus about any particular
reply to the argument. It is hard to vanquish the sense that no
amount of this kind of thing is going to be enough on its own to
constitute an understanding of language.
Searle (1990) argued that intentional states must, in principle,
be accessible to consciousness, that insofar as we have what he
called original intentionality rather than merely some observ-
er-relative ascription of intentionality, the state must be one of
which the subject could become aware. You might think this
suggests one diagnosis of what is missing in the Chinese Room,
where there is no such thing as the possibility of anyone becom-
ing aware of the content held by the messages in Chinese. So
these meanings cannot be the contents of anyones intentional
states. hat is, in Searles scenario, there is no such thing as any-
one grasping the meanings of Chinese statements.
he problem with this diagnosis is that it is hard to see its con-
nection with what Searle himself highlighted as the moral of the
Chinese Room: that no amount of syntactic manipulation can
add up to a grasp of semantics, to a knowledge of what is being
talked about and what is being said about it. It is hard to see how
consciousness of the very intentional state itself does any work in
providing one with knowledge of what it is about. We have so far
no explanation of why consciousness should matter for the grasp
of semantics.
he traditional idea that consciousness plays a role in the
grasp of meaning had been developed in a somewhat diferent
direction by Bertrand Russell (1912) and G. E. Moore (1903).
Here, the emphasis is not on intentional states being conscious
but, rather, on consciousness of the things about which one is
talking or thinking. hese are diferent phenomena. You might
have a conscious belief about the numbers, without being con-
scious of the numbers. And you might have unconscious beliefs
about something of which you are conscious, for example, an
unconscious belief that the man before you is dangerous. Russell
argued that all grasp of meaning must be provided by what he
called acquaintance with the objects referred to: We must
attach some meaning to the words we use, if we are to speak sig-
niicantly and not utter mere noise; and the meaning we attach
to our words must be something with which we are acquainted
(Russell 1912, 25). Acquaintance here is a matter of consciousness
of the objects talked about: We shall say that we have acquain-
tance with anything of which we are directly aware, without the
intermediary of any process of inference or any knowledge of
truth (ibid., 25). Russells idea here is evidently intuitive. he
problem is that he thought one could only be acquainted with
ones own sense-data and, possibly, oneself. his greatly restricts
the possible topics of conversation and seems to run immediately
into problems in explaining how meaning is communicable. he
natural proposal is that the range of acquaintance should be
broader; it should include the physical objects around one. What
is missing in the Chinese Room is any awareness of the objects
around the room.
It is not immediately obvious how this way of inding a role for
consciousness is supposed to work. If consciousness is thought
of as a matter of having sensations produced by the physical
world, then how exactly could the having of those sensations be
what enabled one to think about the objects around one? If, on
the other hand, consciousness of the objects around one is taken
to be a matter of thinking about those objects, then it simply
211
Consciousness and Language
presupposes capacities for thought and talk about those objects
and cant play any role in explaining those capacities.
Still, there is something intuitive about the idea that what is
missing in the Chinese Room is some awareness of the things
under discussion, that if that were provided, we might have the
foundation for an understanding of the language being used. In
fact, Moore articulated the needed conception of awareness of
objects in a famous article, he refutation of idealism (1903).
Moore thought that in any analysis of sensation, we have to rec-
ognize that there are two elements. here is, irst, the generic rela-
tion, consciousness of, in respect of which all sensations are
alike. his is a relation between the subject and something else,
the object of the sensation. he experiences of a single subject
are always alike in that it is always the same relation, conscious-
ness, that is involved. he subjects experiences difer only in
that the objects of diferent experiences may be diferent. So, for
example, an experience of blueness and an experience of green-
ness difer in the things of which they are experiences (which
things they are encounters with); they are the same in that it is
the same generic relation of consciousness that is in question.
So the picture is
Subject consciousness object
he object varies, but the relation is always the same. Moores
point now is that there is no reason to think that the object must
always be some psychological state. He writes, I am as directly
aware of the existence of material things in space as of my own
sensations (1903, 453). If we can indeed appeal to this generic
relation of consciousness to external phenomena, doesnt this
give us our account of what is needed to provide a semantic
understanding of the terms we use?
For this approach to work, there has to be some response to
the lines of argument noted earlier. First, if consciousness does
do any work in our understanding of language, then it must do
some causal work. It must make some diference to what hap-
pens. But if we think of causality as a matter fundamentally of
the mechanistic interactions of physical particles, then how can
consciousness be causally signiicant? At best, it will seem that
an appeal to consciousness is an appeal to some ghostly quasi
mechanism. However, it is arguable that the trouble here is not
the appeal to consciousness but the mechanistic conception of
causation. he mechanistic conception is independently objec-
tionable (cf, e.g., Woodward 2003). Arguably, we should think of
X causing Y as a matter of what would have happened to Y had
things been diferent with X. And we can certainly make sense of
the idea that things would have gone diferently had one not been
conscious of this or that external phenomenon. So the idea that
the grasp of semantics is provided by experience of the things we
talk about does not seem to face any intractable diiculty over
the possibility of a causal role for consciousness. he idea that
consciousness as such must be a mere epiphenomenon has, in
any case, little intuitive appeal.
here were two classical objections to the idea that conscious-
ness plays a role in our understanding of language. he irst was
the point about causality. he second objection was that this
idea would make communication impossible; we would end up
each talking about only our own sensations. But this objection
disappears when we leave behind Russells view that we can be
212
acquainted only with our own sensations. Once we have Moores
picture, on which there is a generic relation of consciousness that
each of us can stand in to ordinary objects and properties, we can
see that consciousness of those objects and properties may be
what makes it possible for us all to be talking and thinking about
the same world. Suppose that, as Moore thought, all experiences
are alike in respect of the generic relation of consciousness and
difer only in their objects. hen, whether your experiences are
the same as mine can be a question only about the objects or
properties of which we are conscious. And we can know that we
are conscious of the very same ordinary physical things and their
properties.
here is, indeed, a traditional metaphysical issue in the back-
ground at this point. In the seventeenth century, advocates of
mathematical physics were at pains to stress that in the scien-
tiic image of the world, there were only atoms and the void; the
ordinary objects and properties about which we think and talk
had vanished. So the ordinary objects and properties could only
be projections of the mind onto the underlying scientiic reality.
Although this idea still enjoys some popularity today, its time has
passed. We are now familiar with the alternative, that the world
can be described at many levels, and there is no particular rea-
son to think that all but one of those levels must be projection of
the mind. In giving the natural history of a species, for example,
we are describing the world at a diferent level than the level of
basic physics. But we are not describing a projection of the mind.
Similarly, when we describe the world in terms of everyday tables
and chairs and people, we are not describing the world in terms
of basic physics. But we are not describing a projection of the
mind. We are describing objects that are there to be encountered
by us. And our awareness of them makes it possible for us to
think and talk about them.
Continued resistance to the idea that there is a role for con-
sciousness in the study of language seems likely to stem from
something like the following idea. he causal processes in virtue
of which the words of a language constitute signs of the phenom-
ena around us may be mediated by perception, but they do not
thereby have to be mediated by experience. Linguistic terms are
signs of the phenomena around us in something like the sense in
which smoke is a sign of ire. And there is nothing special about
causation of the use of a sign that is mediated by experience; any
kind of causation would do. he trouble with this line of thought
is that it has proven very diicult to try to explain what kind of
causation is needed for language to represent the phenomena
around us (Millikan 1984). It may be that a causal link to the
object is needed only because the prototypical causal links are
those in virtue of which we can be said to be aware of the object
we are talking about. It is, after all, diicult not to be struck by
a thought experiment even simpler than Searles. Suppose we
had a robot that, though not conscious of its surroundings, had
signiicant behavioral competencies in particular, it could pro-
duce language that sounded just like a humans production of
language and suppose it interacted freely with its environment.
It is impossible not to suspect that, just because this robot has no
awareness of anything, it does not have the irst idea what it is
talking about. It has no grasp of the semantics of its language.
John Campbell
Consistency, Truth, and Paradox
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Frege, Gottlob. 1952. On sense and reference. In Translations from the
Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, ed. P. T. Geach and Max Black,
5778. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kripke, Saul. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Locke, John. [1690] 1975. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
ed. P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marr, David. 1982. Vision. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.
Millikan, Ruth. 1984. Language, hought and Other Biological Categories.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Moore, G. E. 1903. he refutation of idealism. Mind 12: 43353.
Russell, Bertrand. 1912. he Problems of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Searle, John. 1980. Minds, Brains and Programs. Behavioral and Brain
Sciences 3: 41757
. 1990. Consciousness, explanatory inversion, and cognitive sci-
ence. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13: 585642.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. New
York: Macmillan.
Woodward, James. 2003. Making hings Happen: A heory of Causal
Explanation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
CONSISTENCY, TRUTH, AND PARADOX
he aim of this entry is to convey a lavor of (some) logical and
semantic issues that arise from so-called semantic paradoxes.
here is no aim, given space restrictions, to provide anything like
a history or survey of the relevant issues. he focus, for simplic-
ity, will be on truth-theoretic paradox, although the same issue
the consistency of language arises with other semantic notions
(denotation, satisfaction, etc.).
The Liar Paradox
he Liar paradox is one of the most familiar truth-theoretic para-
doxes. It arises from a sentence that says (or may be used to say)
of itself only that it is not true. English seems to have such sen-
tences. By way of illustration, consider the italicized sentence
immediately following this sentence, where CTP abbrevi-
ates consistency, truth, and paradox (this very encyclopedia
entry).
he italicized sentence in CTP is not true.
Consider the following argument.
(1) he italicized sentence in CTP is true or the italicized sen-
tence in CTP is not true.
(2) If the italicized sentence in CTP is true, then the italicized
sentence in CTP is not true.
(3) If the italicized sentence in CTP is not true, then the itali-
cized sentence in CTP is true.
(4) Hence, the italicized sentence in CTP is true and not
true.
Let us say that a language is inconsistent if theres some sentence
of the language such that both it and its negation are true. he
argument, then, seems to indicate that English is inconsistent.
hat English is inconsistent is surprising, at the very least. (Many
have said that the result is literally beyond belief the original
meaning of paradox.)
The Meaningless Response
One response to the paradox is that the italicized sentence is not
meaningful. Such a response, while natural, is implausible. Why
isnt the italicized sentence meaningful? One might point to the
conspicuous circularity (in particular, self-reference) in the sen-
tence. Self-reference, however, is hardly suicient for a meaning-
less sentence. (Witness the sentence immediately preceding the
italicized sentence! Witness others, e.g., All sentences are sen-
tences, or etc.) Moreover, if no meaningless sentence is true, then
a fortiori the italicized sentence is not true. But, then, we are led to
accept that the italicized sentence is not true led to accept, appar-
ently, the italicized sentence itself. If we should reject any untrue
sentence, then we are now stuck. For this and other reasons, the
meaningless thesis is not a plausible lesson to draw from the para-
dox. (See suggestions for further reading for a note on Tarski.)
Paracomplete Language?
he principle of excluded middle (PEM, sometimes LEM for
law) has it that, for any (declarative) sentence A, the disjunc-
tion of A and its negation is logically true (or valid). his is usu-
ally put by saying that, where V is disjunction and ~ negation, all
instances of AV~A are valid (in the given language). A paracom-
plete language is one in which PEM fails, that is, one in which
AV~A is not valid.
A popular response to the Liar paradox (and related semantic
paradoxes) is that it indicates the failure of PEM in English. After
all, premise (1) of the previous argument toward paradox relies
on PEM. Without PEM, the conclusion that some sentences are
true and not true fails to ind a sound argument.
Paracomplete responses to the paradox are the most com-
mon approaches today. One problem with them is similar to
the meaningless response: hey have trouble expressing their
position. After all, if (say) the Liar-instance of PEM fails, then,
presumably, neither the Liar nor its negation is true, in which
case, the Liar (e.g., the italicized sentence) is not true. But the
Liar says that its not true, and so, if it really is not true, it seems
to speak truly.
Paraconsistent Language?
Another response, being increasingly discussed, is a so-called
paraconsistent thesis. A paraconsistent language is one in which
arbitrary B does not follow from arbitrary A and ~A. (B does fol-
low from A and ~A in classical logic, and in many paracomplete
languages.) As a result, one can accept that some true sentences
have a true negation; it doesnt follow, in a paraconsistent lan-
guage, that all sentences are thereby true a genuine absurdity.
Accordingly, the paraconsistentist may truly say that (for exam-
ple) the italicized sentence is not true, since, according to the
proposal, it is true and so is its negation!
Closing Remarks and Curry
here are many other responses to paradox, and the sketches
above only crudely gesture in various directions. here are
also other, perhaps more diicult, paradoxes. Currys paradox
involves a conditional, and is largely independent of theories of
negation. Currys paradox involves sentences such as
* If the starred sentence in CTP is true, then everything is true.
213
Constituent Structure
A standard conditional proof (assume the antecedent, and derive
the consequent) seems to indicate that the starred sentence in
CTP is true, in which case, its antecedent is true. But, then, we
have a true conditional with a true antecedent, and so, by modus
ponens, detach the consequent: Everything is true!
Paracomplete and paraconsistent responses to the Liar ofer,
in the irst instance, nonclassical theories of negation proposals
about negations logical behavior. Currys paradox requires care-
ful theorizing about conditionals, and so calls for more work than
is provided by standard theories of negation.
J. C. Beall
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Beall, J. C., ed. 2008. Revenge of the Liar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
his is a collection of very recent papers on truth and paradox.
Martin, Robert., ed. 1984. Recent Essays on Truth and the Liar Paradox.
Oxford: Oxford University Press. his collects a variety of contempo-
rary approaches to truth, including so-called revision theory and con-
textual theories not mentioned here.
Tarski, A. 1983. Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics: Papers from 1923 to
1938. Ed. John Corcoran. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Tarskis
classic approach toward deining truth for a language remains inlu-
ential, but it is highly implausible as an account of truth for natural
languages (as Tarski himself thought).
CONSTITUENT STRUCTURE
words in sentences cluster into groups called constituents (or
phrases). For example, in (1), the dog, barked at a cat, at a cat,
and a cat are constituents:
(1) he dog barked at a cat.
Among criteria used for constituency are the following:
he words form a semantic unit; for example, the dog refers
to a particular animal.
he words form a phonological unit, with larger prosodic
breaks at constituent boundaries.
he same string of words (or categories) appears in various
contexts; for example, article-noun can appear as subject,
verbal object, prepositional object, and elsewhere.
A string can be replaced by a single word without radically
changing the meaning or structure of the sentence; for exam-
ple, in (1), the dog could be replaced by it.
A string of words occurs as a conjunct in a coordinate struc-
ture, such as the dog and two gerbils.
Unfortunately, such criteria sometimes diverge: In (2), large pro-
sodic breaks come before that, but the relative clauses introduced
by that are grouped semantically with the preceding nouns.
(2) his is the rat that ate the cheese that lay in the house that Jack
built.
In (3), a new person functions as a constituent syntactically
and prosodically but not semantically since it is contracting
AIDS, not the person, that is new.
(3) Every minute, a new person contracts AIDS.
214
Constraints in Language Acquisition
Constituents are often assumed to be contiguous strings,
but (4) undermines this assumption since a man whom nobody
knew is a semantic unit.
(4) A man walked in whom nobody knew.
his issue is even clearer in freer word order languages, such
as German or Warlpiri:
(5) Dem Jungen schenken wollte Peter das Buch.
the boy give wanted Peter the book
Peter wanted to give the boy the book.
(Uszkoreit 1987, 159)
(6) Maliki-rli ka kurtu kartirti-rli paji-rni wita-ngku
dog-ERG PRES child tooth-ERG bite-NPST small-ERG
he small dog is biting the child with its tooth.
(Simpson 1991, 261)
Responses to inconsistencies among constituency criteria
vary. transformational grammar assigns multiple con-
stituent structures to every sentence (Chomsky 1957). Other
responses include abandoning constituent structure altogether
(Hudson 1984) or giving priority to some criteria (Pollard and
Sag 1994).
Many constituents contain one word, called the head, that
determines its distributional properties, its internal struc-
ture, and its semantic content. Names like noun phrase, verb
phrase, and so on relect assumptions about headedness. Noam
Chomsky (1970) proposed a universal schema for the internal
structure of constituents (X-BAR THEORY), varying only in the
position of the head within this schema. Subsequent literature
has explored constituent structures across languages.
While both descriptive and theoretical syntacticians rely
heavily on the notion of constituency, the controversies raised
here remain unresolved.
homas Wasow
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bray, Norman W., Geofrey J. Huck, and Almerindo E. Ojeda. 1987.
Discontinuous Constituency. New York: Academic Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. he Hague: Mouton.
. 1970. Remarks on nominalization. In Readings in English
Transformational Grammar, ed. Roderick A. Jacobs and Peter S.
Rosenbaum, 184221. Waltham, MA: Ginn.
Hudson, Richard. 1984. Word Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.
Pollard, Carl, and Ivan A. Sag. 1994. Head-Driven Phrase Structure
Grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Simpson, Jane. 1991. Warlpiri Morpho-Syntax: A Lexicalist Approach.
Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Uszkoreit, Hans. 1987. Word Order and Constituent Structure in German.
Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
CONSTRAINTS IN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
One of the goals of developmental psycholinguists is to
understand how children acquire a system of linguistic knowl-
edge that is equivalent to that of adults in the same linguistic
community. What kind of learning mechanisms ensure that
childrens hypotheses about the sequences of sounds they hear
Constraints in Language Acquisition
map onto individuals, events, and concepts in the same way as
they do for adults? Observations of childrens language develop-
ment reveal that acquisition occurs rapidly and that linguistic
knowledge is often achieved without the support of much, if any,
relevant experience. On the basis of these observations, it has
been proposed that childrens linguistic hypotheses are circum-
scribed by constraints (sometimes termed biases, assumptions,
or principles).
The Role of Constraints
he role of constraints in language development is to prevent
children from forming misguided hypotheses about the forms
and meanings of linguistic expressions. One way a hypothesis
might be misguided is by being too broad, in the sense that it
allows forms that are not in the language or extends the mean-
ings of linguistic expressions to include individuals, events, and
concepts that are not part of the corresponding meanings gener-
ated by other speakers of the language. If children make hypoth-
eses that are too broad, in this sense, then they will make errors
that may prove to be diicult for them to recover from, thereby
making convergence on the system of adult linguistic knowledge
slow and onerous (see learnability). he observation that
children rapidly master many complex linguistic facts suggests
that mistaken hypotheses are somehow avoided. his is where
constraints come in, by placing limits on the kinds of linguistic
hypotheses that children can entertain, so that real-world expe-
rience will provide relevant data to conirm a hypothesis, or
redirect children to a new hypothesis. Although the existence of
constraints is widely acknowledged, two issues about the nature
of constraints are subject to controversy. One is whether con-
straints are learned or are innately speciied. A second issue is
whether constraints are speciic to a single cognitive domain
(e.g., language) or cut across several cognitive domains. his
issue is called domain speciicity.
The Innateness of Constraints
Constraints irst assumed prominence in the late 1960s in dis-
cussions of structure dependency (Chomsky 1971). Before con-
straints were introduced, grammars were systems of rules. Rules
are positive statements, indicating forms and meanings that are
possible. In contrast to rules, constraints are often couched in
negative statements, dictating the forms and meanings that are
not possible. Armed with constraints, then, learners are pre-
vented from producing illicit forms and from assigning illicit
meanings.
To take one example, there is a constraint that governs the
reference of pronouns in sentences (see binding ). he con-
straint applies in the sentence He said John hid the rabbit, where
the constraint dictates that the pronoun he and the name John
cannot refer to the same individual; they must have disjoint
reference (Chomsky 1981). he disjoint reference of the pro-
noun he and the name John follows from the fact that the pro-
noun is positioned higher in the constituent structure
than the name (more precisely, the pronoun must c-command
the name). Suppose the pronoun is lower in the constituent
structure than the name (and, hence, does not c-command
it). In such cases, the pronoun and the name should be able to
corefer. Attesting to this is the acceptability of coreference in a
variety of examples: John said he hid the rabbit, When he was
in the woods, John hid the rabbit. In such cases the constraint
that blocks coreference fails to apply, and so the pronoun he is
free to refer to John. his illustrates how a single negative con-
straint can describe the same set of facts that would require a
host of positive rules, making for a more compact (parsimoni-
ous) grammar.
Because constraints are negative statements, they are likely
candidates for being innately speciied. Suppose a child lacked
the constraint on coreference. hen, the child would allow the
sentence He said John hid the rabbit to mean that John said that
he, John, hid the rabbit. How could the child learn that the sen-
tence cannot mean this? One way to unlearn something is to
be exposed to so-called negative evidence, such as corrective
feedback. As a matter of fact, however, parents do not provide
consistent corrective feedback (negative evidence) even when
children do make errors (Brown and Hanlon 1970; Morgan and
Travis 1989). Without negative evidence, it is diicult to see how
constraints could be learned. he alternative is to suppose that
constraints are innately speciied, as part of human biology.
here are interesting empirical consequences of the innateness
hypothesis: Innate constraints are expected to emerge early
(despite their apparent complexity), and to be universal (see
Crain and hornton 1998; innateness and innatism). he
issue of innate speciicity versus learning crops up in discussions
of all kinds of constraints, including constraints on how children
learn the syntactic frames in which verbs can appear, and how
they learn word meanings. We discuss these topics in turn.
Constraints on Argument Structure
In some linguistic frameworks, human languages are character-
ized by constructions (see construction grammars). For
example, one set of verbs can appear in the dative construc-
tion (e.g., gave, as in John gave a book to the museum). Many of
the same verbs can appear in another construction, called the
double-object construction (John gave the museum a book). In
fact, changing the sentence from the dative to the double object
does not change its basic meaning, or communicative function.
However, suppose a child formed the following generaliza-
tion that all verbs that can appear in the dative construction
can appear in the double-object construction, without a change
in basic meaning. his generalization is lawed because there
are verbs that can appear in the dative but not in the double-
object construction. One exceptional verb is donate. Notice that
John donated a book to the museum is ine, but John donated
the museum a book is not acceptable. To prevent learners from
forming illicit double-object constructions for verbs like donate,
a constraint can be introduced. he constraint allows a struc-
tural option for a verb (say, the double-object word order) to
be entered into childrens grammars only if there is evidence
for that word order in the input to children. A proposal of this
kind is the unique argument-structure preference proposed by
Martin Braine and Patricia Brooks (1995). As Pinker points out,
[T]he need for negative evidence in language acquisition can be
eliminated if the child knows that when he or she is faced with a
set of alternative structures fulilling the same function, only one
of the structures is correct unless there is direct evidence that
more than one is necessary (1984, 113).
215
Constraints in Language Acquisition
A similar uniqueness constraint has been advanced to explain
how children avoid errors in learning the past tense form of a verb.
he simple past tense rule add -ed (with its phonological vari-
ants) provides the right answer for many verbs, but this rule, too,
is plagued with exceptions; it outputs the incorrect forms comed
and bringed, for example, rather than came and brought. Gary
Marcus and colleagues (1992) proposed that the past tense forms
of regular verbs (lifted, walked, showed) are formed by the sim-
ple past tense rule, but irregular past tense forms (e.g., came and
brought) must be learned from the input and entered as excep-
tions into the childs mental dictionary (cf. Pinker 1999). his is
where a constraint comes into the story. Once an irregular past
tense form is entered in the lexical entry for a verb, a constraint
prevents the child from accessing the past tense rule to produce
regular forms like comed and bringed. Essentially, the constraint
ensures that a lexical entry contains only a single past tense form
unless there is direct evidence for more than one form.
Constraints on the Meanings of Words
Constraints also igure prominently in the literature on word
learning (see lexical acquisition). One family of constraints
assists children in associating labels with objects in the world.
he complexity of associating labels to objects was driven home
by W. V. O. Quine (1960), who invites us to consider how we
would interpret an expression used by a speaker of another lan-
guage in the presence of a passing rabbit. Suppose the speaker
utters gavagai as the rabbit passes by. Quine asks how we can
be sure that gavagai is being used to refer to the rabbit and not
some property of the rabbit, such as food, or furry, white,
or even undetached rabbit parts. Until we become native
speakers of the language with gavagai, there is what Quine calls
an indeterminacy of translation between that language
and our own.
Constraints on word learning are part of the solution to the
indeterminacy of translation. One constraint, called mutual exclu-
sivity, ensures that children assign only one label per category
(e.g., Markman and Wachtel 1988). Mutual exclusivity guides
childrens initial hypotheses, but in many cases it is overridden as
it becomes clear that it has exceptions. For example, a child who
has mastered dog as the label for the pet at home will soon hear
that the dog is also labeled animal, so both labels will be incorpo-
rated into the childs mental dictionary. Some researchers sup-
pose that mutual exclusivity is domain speciic, applying just to
word learning. An alternative claim is advanced by Paul Bloom
(2000), who proposes that inferences about the communica-
tive intentions of others, and not mutual exclusivity, are used
to derive childrens associations of labels to unfamiliar objects.
Such inferences are likely to cross the boundaries of cognitive
domains, including logical reasoning in addition to language.
Labeling objects is just one aspect of word learning. Children
also have to achieve the mapping for abstract words and for func-
tion words (called closed class vocabulary items) and not just for
nouns and verbs (called open class vocabulary items). In these
cases, the environmental input clearly has less impact. Consider,
for example, how a child learns the meaning of the logical word
or (see semantics, acquisition of). In classical logic, a state-
ment of the form a or b is true if (i) only A is true, (ii) only B is
true, and (iii) both A and B are true. So, the or of classical logic
216
Construction Grammars
is inclusive-or (including iii). For most sentences that children
experience, however, one or the other of the expressions sur-
rounding or (its disjuncts) is false (excluding iii): Eat your veg-
gies, or youll have to go to bed, Is his name Ted, or Fred? his
leads to the expectation that children should initially attribute
the exclusive-or meaning to the word or. In fact, there is evidence
that despite the input, children initially interpret or as inclusive-
or as in classical logic. One possibility is that classical logic (or a
universal grammar) imposes constraints on childrens ini-
tial interpretations of logical words. On this scenario, children
initially assign or the truth conditions associated with inclusive-
or, and later learn to limit these truth conditions to those associ-
ated with exclusive-or, based on principles of conversation. his
could be an example of an innate constraint but one that may or
may not be domain speciic.
To summarize, constraints typically direct children to begin with
narrow hypotheses (i.e., to start small) and only broaden these
hypotheses if the input demands it. Constraints function quite dif-
ferently in diferent parts of the linguistic system. Some constraints
are viable candidates for being domain speciic and innately speci-
ied, but others may be domain general and learned.
Stephen Crain, Rosalind hornton
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bloom, Paul. 2000. How Children Learn the Meaning of Words.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Braine, Martin, and Patricia Brooks. 1995. Verb argument structure and
the problem of avoiding an overgeneral grammar. In Beyond Names
for hings: Young Childrens Acquisition of Verbs, ed. M. Tomasello and
W. E. Merriman, 35376. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Brown, Roger, and Camille Hanlon. 1970. Derivational complexity and
order of acquisition in child speech. In Cognition and the Development
of Language, ed. J. Hayes, 153. New York: Wiley.
Chomsky, Noam. 1971. Problems of Knowledge and Freedom. New
York: Pantheon.
. 1981. Lectures in Government and Binding. Dordrecht, the
Netherlands: Foris.
Crain, Stephen, and Rosalind hornton. 1998. Investigations in Universal
Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Marcus, Gary, Steven Pinker, Michael Ullman, Michelle Hollander, T. John
Rosen, and Fei Xu. 1992. Overregularization in Language Acquisition.
Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, no. 57.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Markman, Ellen, and G. Wachtel. 1988. Childrens use of mutual exclu-
sivity to constrain the meanings of words. Cognitive Psychology
20: 12157.
Morgan, James, and Lisa Travis. 1989. Limits on negative information in
language input. Journal of Child Language 16: 53152.
Pinker, Steven. 1984. Language Learnability and Language Development.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
. 1999. Words and Rules. New York: Basic Books.
Quine, W. V. O. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
CONSTRUCTION GRAMMARS
here has been a broad convergence in many quarters in recent
years toward a view of grammar in which constructions play a cen-
tral role; approaches that share this view are here referred to as
construction grammars. Construction grammars view linguistic
Construction Grammars
Table 1. Examples of constructions, varying in size and complexity
Simple words (illed or partially e.g., the, theory, blue, re-V
illed)
Complex word e.g., sh taco, rehouse
Idiom (illed) e.g., cock and bull story
Idiom (partially illed) e.g., the apple of
<someones> eye
Ditransitive (double object) Subj V Obj1 Obj2 (e.g., She
construction gave him a kiss; He baked
her an apple pie.)
Passive Subj aux VPpast participle
(PPby)
(e.g., The man was hit by a
meteor.)
patterns of varying complexity as instances of conventional pair-
ings of form and meaning. hese pairings include words (with
or without open slots), idioms (with or without open slots), and
fully general abstract phrasal patterns (with or without any ixed
words). Examples of constructions at varying degrees of com-
plexity are given in Table l. (See Goldberg 2006 for arguments
that the shared formal properties and closely related semantics
of dative and benefactive ditransitives warrant treating them as
instances of the same construction.)
Any linguistic pattern is recognized as a construction so long
as some aspect of its form or some aspect of its function is not
strictly predictable from its component parts or from other con-
structions recognized to exist. In addition, most constructionists
argue that patterns are stored even if they are fully predictable as
long as they occur with suicient frequency.
he emphasis on the pairing of function with form is what
sets construction grammars apart from both other generative
approaches (which tend to downplay function) and other func-
tional approaches (which tend to downplay form). At the same
time, constructionists bring these two approaches together in
some ways. hey recognize the importance of two major ques-
tions that have been brought to the fore by generative grammar-
ians (see generative grammar):
(1) How can all of the complexities of language be learned such
that we are able to produce an open-ended set of utterances?
(2) How are cross-linguistic generalizations (and language
internal generalizations) accounted for?
Moreover, constructionists recognize that the answers to these
questions rely heavily on traditional functionalist methodology
and indings that emphasize the usage-based nature of lan-
guage and the importance of general cognitive processes.
Construction grammars, broadly conceived, each share at
least most of the basic tenets listed that follow:
(1) All levels of description are understood to involve form
function pairings, including morphemes or words, idioms, par-
tially lexically illed patterns, and fully abstract phrasal patterns.
(2) A what you see is what you get (WSWYG) approach to
syntactic form is adopted.
(3) An emphasis is placed on psychological validity. A lin-
guistic theory must interface naturally with what we know
about acquisition, processing, and historical change.
(4) An emphasis is placed on subtle aspects of the way we
construe of events and states of afairs.
(5) Constructions are understood to be learned on the basis
of the input and general cognitive mechanisms and are
expected to vary to some degree cross-linguistically.
(6) Cross-linguistic generalizations are explained by appeal
to general cognitive constraints, together with the functions
of the constructions involved.
(7) Language-speciic generalizations across construc-
tions are captured via inheritance networks much like those
that have long been posited to capture our nonlinguistic
knowledge.
(8) he totality of our knowledge of language is captured by a
network of constructions: a construct-i-con.
Constructionists have traditionally emphasized unusual
phrasal patterns such as those in Table 2. As an example of an
unusual pattern, consider the Covariational Conditional construc-
tion in Table 2. he construction is interpreted as involving an inde-
pendent variable (identiied by the irst phrase) and a dependent
variable (identiied by the second phrase). he normally occurs
with a head noun, but in this construction it requires a compara-
tive phrase. he two major phrases resist classiication as either
noun phrases or clauses. he requirement that two phrases of this
type be juxtaposed is another nonpredictable aspect of the pat-
tern. Because the pattern is not strictly predictable, a construction
is posited that speciies the particular form and function involved.
Research has revealed subtle syntactic and semantic prop-
erties of this and other construction types in Table 2 (e.g.,
Culicover 1999; Jackendof 2002; Lambrecht 1990; Michaelis and
Lambrecht 1996; Williams 1994). he existence of these clearly
learned, partially productive, syntactically constrained patterns
leads to the implication that much more of grammar may be
learned on the basis of the input than had been generally rec-
ognized by the generative approach. hat is, if these unusual
patterns could be learned, why should we assume that the more
frequent, regular patterns could not possibly be?
In fact, constructionists have ofered construction-based
accounts of many of the more core aspects of grammar,
including argument structure (e.g., Goldberg 1995), control
phenomena (Culicover and Jackendof 2005), aspectual (see
aspect) interpretation (Michaelis 2004), raising (Langacker
1992), existential constructions (Lakof 1987), and island con-
straints (Deane 1991; Goldberg 2006).
Constructionists aim to provide accounts of such phenom-
ena without appealing to underlying levels of representation,
traces, or phonetically null functional projections. hat is, a
WSWYG approach to form is adopted. Beyond methodological
parsimony, this is due to the fact that there generally exist subtle
functional diferences between surface forms (Goldberg 2002).
herefore, surface forms are generated directly. Note that surface
form need not specify a particular word order, nor even par-
ticular grammatical categories, although there are constructions
that do specify these features.
217
Construction Grammars
Table 2. Examples of partially idiosyncratic constructions
Mad Magazine construction Him, a doctor?!
N P N construction time after time; day after
day
Time away construction Dancin the night away
Whats X doingY?! Whats that y doing in my
soup?!
Nominal extraposition construction Its amazing the
difference!
Enough already construction Enough with the
examples!
Stranded preposition construction Who did he give that to?
Covariational conditional The more you have, the
construction more you want
Constructions are combined freely to form actual expressions
as long as they can be construed as not being in conlict. hat
is, an actual expression typically involves the combination of at
least a half dozen diferent constructions. he observation that
language has an ininite creative potential is accounted for, then,
by the free combination of constructions.
Most constructionist approaches aim to provide motivation for
each construction posited. Motivation aims to explain why it is at
least possible and at best natural that this particular formmean-
ing correspondence should exist in a given language. Motivation
is distinct from prediction: Recognizing the motivation for a con-
struction does not entail that the construction must exist in that
language or in any language. It simply explains why the construc-
tion makes sense or is natural (cf. Haiman 1985; Lakof 1987;
Goldberg 1995). Functional and historical generalizations count
as explanations, but they are not predictive in the strict sense, just
as parallel generalizations in biology are not predictive. hat is,
language, like biological evolution, is contingent, not determin-
istic. Just as is the case with species, particular constructions are
the way they are not because they have to be that way but because
their phylogenetic and ontogenetic evolution was motivated by
general forces.
Varieties of Construction Grammars
here are several variations of construction grammars, including
the following:
(1) SCxG: sign-based construction grammar (Fillmore 1999;
Fillmore, Kay, and OConnor 1988; Kay 2002; Kay and Fillmore
1999; Sag, Wasow, and Bender 2003)
(2) CG: cognitive grammar (e.g., Langacker 1987a,
1987b, 1988, 1991, 2003)
(3) RCxG: radical construction grammar (e.g., Croft 2001)
(4) ECxG: embodied construction grammar (e.g., Bergen
and Chang 2005)
(5) CCxG: cognitive construction grammar (e.g., Bencini and
Goldberg 2000; Goldberg 1995, 2006; Lakof, 1987)
(6) Fluid constructon grammar (e.g., Steels and DeBeule 2006)
(7) Simpler syntax (Culicover and Jackendof 2005)
218
C. J. Fillmore and P. Kay irst coined the term construction
grammar. heir early work on idioms and idiomatic phrasal pat-
terns such as let alone, even, and Whats X doing Y? laid the foun-
dation for many of the variations of construction grammar that
have since developed. Yet their version, sign-based construction
grammar (SCxG), has developed quite distinctly from the other
construction grammars. Key diferences include the fact that
SCxG is not uniformly usage-based nor does it generally seek
motivation for the relationship between form and function.
A Comparison with Mainstream Generative Grammar
Proposals
Certain mainstream generative grammar frameworks share the
basic idea that some type of meaning is directly associated with
some type of form, independently of particular lexical items (cf.
also Borer 1994, 2003; Hale and Keyser 1997; Marantz 1997). To
the extent that syntax plays a role in contentful meaning, these
other approaches are constructionist, and they are occasionally
referred to that way in the literature. However, the approaches
are fundamentally diferent from the type of constructionist
approaches just outlined. For example, these mainstream gen-
erative accounts do not adopt a nonderivational (monostratal)
approach to syntax, but appeal instead to underlying levels of
representation in which constituents (or entities that are never
realized) move around abstract trees. Moreover, these accounts
emphasize rough paraphrases instead of speakers detailed con-
struals of situations. Empirical challenges faced by the accounts
are discussed in some detail in Goldberg (2006).
Adele E. Goldberg
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Fillmore, C. J., P. Kay, and M. C. OConnor. 1988. Regularity and idioma-
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Haiman, John. 1985. Iconicity in Syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge
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Hale, K., and J. Keyser. 1997. On the complex nature of simple predi-
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Michaelis, L. 2004. Implicit and explicit type-shifting in construction
grammar. Cognitive Linguistics 15: 167.
Michaelis, L. A., and K. Lambrecht. 1996. he exclamative sentence type
in English. In Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language, ed A. E.
Goldberg, 37598. Stanford, CA: CSLI.
Sag, I. A., T. Wasow, and E. M. Bender. 2003. Syntactic heory: A Formal
Introduction. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and
Information.
Saussure, F. de. [1916] 1959. Course in General Linguistics. Trans W.
Baskin. New York: Philosophical Library.
Steels, L., and J. DeBeule. 2006. A (very) brief introduction to luid
construction grammar. Paper presented at the hird International
Workshop on Scalable Natural Language Understanding, New York
City.
Williams, E. 1994. Remarks on lexical knowledge. Lingua 92: 734.
CONTACT, LANGUAGE
Language contact occurs when individuals who regularly use
diferent language varieties communicate with each other.
Language variety should be understood in a very broad sense,
including varieties that are traditionally considered to be diferent
languages, as well as varieties of the same language, since the lin-
guistic efects of either sort of contact are similar.
he social contexts in which language contact occurs are var-
ied and have been common throughout human history. Most of
us, even if we are ourselves monolingual, interact with people
who are bilingual or bidialectal and, thus, are participants in
language contact situations whether we are aware of it or not.
Language contact can result in a wide variety of possible
outcomes for the language varieties involved, ranging from no
discernible efects to the borrowing of a few vocabulary items to
profound structural change. It may even result in the creation of
entirely new language varieties.
Outcomes of Language Contact
Language contact occurs when speakers of diferent language
varieties communicate. In general, for any two varieties of
speech, we can say that the relationship between the variet-
ies is either one of autonomy or heteronomy. To say that they
are autonomous means that the two varieties are independent
socially and politically: English and Mandarin are autonomous
with respect to each other. However, to say that a variety is het-
eronomous with respect to another means that it is in some way
dependent or connected to it socially, politically, or both. So,
regional dialects of English are heteronomous with respect to
standard English and one another.
Heteronomy is not the same as mutual intelligibility: Standard
Czech and standard Slovak are more or less mutually intelligible
varieties, but they are deinitely autonomous. Local Italian dia-
lects may not be mutually intelligible but are heteronomous with
respect to standard Italian.
Heteronomous varieties frequently come into contact: in
national institutional settings, as a result of migration or trade,
and in colonial tabula rasa situations (i.e., where there
were no varieties of the language spoken in the region before).
One result of such contact may be the creation of a koin. he
original koin (the Koin) was a variety of Ancient Greek that
had come to supplant other, local Greek dialects during the
Hellenistic and Roman periods. his dialect was based mostly
on the Athenian dialect but included many elements from other
dialects and involved a certain amount of simpliication: the
disappearance of irregularities in favor of structurally regular
forms.
he term koin has come to be used for any variety that sup-
plants heteronomous varieties and that serves as a means of
intercommunication between speakers of these varieties. his
comes about as a result of dialect leveling: the loss of distinctive
features in favor of features with a high degree of mutual intel-
ligibility and/or high prestige. Sometimes this involves a fair
amount of dialect mixture, though this neednt be the case. Where
dialect mixture is involved, the process of creating the koin can
be referred to as koinization. Koinization has probably been a
fairly common feature of the history of languages.
Standard dialects these days typically ill the role of a koin.
Standard dialects sometimes arise spontaneously through a pro-
cess of koinization; sometimes they are created by a deliberate
mixture of varieties through the actions of a language academy or
a government commission (language policy), and sometimes
they are a regional or social variety selected for the purpose.
219
Contact, Language
Whether varieties are autonomous or heteronomous, linguis-
tic elements of various sorts may be exchanged between them.
his exchange is referred to as borrowing. Virtually any linguistic
feature can be borrowed: vocabulary, grammatical morphemes,
grammatical constructions, semantic relations, sounds, and so
on. Vocabulary borrowing is the most common, but its easy to
ind instances of borrowing of virtually any grammatical element.
Borrowing, particularly of vocabulary, can occur even when con-
tact between speakers of the source and target languages is fairly
casual; when languages coexist in bilingual situations, however,
really intensive borrowing can take place.
bilingualism implies communicative skill in two auton-
omous varieties. (he term bidialectalism refers to commu-
nicative skill in two heteronomous varieties.) When bilingual
situations persist over a long period, convergence may take
place: he two varieties may converge toward each other, but
more usually one variety converges toward another, relecting
local political or social dominance. If the varieties are suiciently
diferent to begin with, and the convergence is extensive, the
result may be metatypy, a complete change in language type.
Cases of metatypy have not been commonly attested, but they
certainly exist: Amharic, a Semitic language spoken in Ethiopia,
has a grammar that is rather diferent from its Semitic kin due
to metatypic convergence with the Cushitic languages spoken in
the region prior to the arrival of Semitic languages.
At the beginning, bilingual situations are usually character-
ized by varying degrees of imperfect learning: situations where
in learning variety B, speakers of variety A learn B imperfectly,
making various sorts of grammatical errors in B, speaking B with
an accent, and so on. hese linguistic features may become per-
manent components of the bilingual communitys command of
language B and may ultimately afect the speech of others speak-
ing language B. If the bilingual community undergoes language
shift if speakers of A cease to speak A and adopt B instead the
results of imperfect learning are referred to as substratic inlu-
ences on the B variety they speak. he particular sort of English
spoken in Ireland, for example, is often said to be the result, at
least in part, of this sort of substratic inluence, in this case from
the Irish language to the English now spoken in the country.
Superstratic inluence is also possible. A superstratic language
is one with high prestige, either in all formal contexts or in some
speciied domains. Classical languages (Latin, classical Greek,
Sanskrit, Koranic Arabic, classical Tamil, etc.) can serve as super-
strata, but so can living languages when these languages have
suicient prestige. French has served as a superstratic language
for Europe, a role now illed largely by English. Chinese served
as a superstratum for Japanese, Arabic for much of the Moslem
world, Russian for other languages within the old Soviet Union,
and so on. Superstratic languages do not require many speakers
within communities for their inluence to be strong: In the last
few centuries, only a minority of people in Europe learned Latin
to any signiicant degree, yet Latin inluence on the languages
of Europe remains profound and extends beyond the extensive
borrowing of vocabulary to the borrowing of syntactic construc-
tions, rhetorical strategies, and so on.
he discipline of second language acquisition refers
to linguistic systems that arise in the course of learning another
language as an adult as an interlanguage. In the ideal case, the
220
grammar of the interlanguage will eventually become identical
to (or nearly identical to) that of the target language. In most
cases, however, the interlanguage difers from the target lan-
guage in signiicant ways, relecting imperfect learning. In many
cases, the interlanguage may be a very simple, rudimentary sys-
tem, consisting of a few vocabulary items and simple phrases if
the need for interlanguage-based communication is restricted
to a narrow range of activities, such as simple commercial or
workplace transactions. When such interlanguages are used by
a number of people and stabilize to a degree, they are usually
referred to as pidgins.
Pidgins typically take their vocabulary primarily from a single
language, referred to as the lexiier language. English is the lexi-
ier language for the various pidgin Englishes that developed in
many parts of the world during the colonial period. Pidgins are
characterized by a very large degree of simpliication vis--vis the
lexiier language: Even when most of the vocabulary derives from
a given language, the grammatical complexities of the language
are seldom found in the pidgin, which instead has a very simple
grammatical structure.
Of the set of stable interlanguages that can arise in contact
situations, only those with a considerable degree of grammati-
cal simpliication vis--vis the lexiier language are referred to as
pidgins. When the language varieties spoken by the people cre-
ating the interlanguage are similar particularly when they are
close enough to be heteronomous one would never describe
the interlanguage as a pidgin, even when there is some simpli-
ication involved: he task of learning the lexiier variety would
be suiciently easy so that the radical simpliication associated
with pidgins would not occur. (A koin may be the product of
simpliication, but it is not a pidgin.) Similarly, with autonomous
varieties that are similar, one would not describe stable interlan-
guages as pidgins: An interlanguage developed between speakers
of Romance languages or Slavic languages would not be consid-
ered a pidgin. For a variety to be described as a pidgin, the native
varieties spoken by the people involved in its creation must be
suiciently diferent to make learning the other variety relatively
diicult, though the degree of imperfect learning associated with
pidgins relects restricted opportunities for learning as well.
Further, it seems that the conditions for the creation of stable
pidgins as opposed to the creation of bilingual situations
seem to be the product of economic systems associated with
states, suggesting that they may have been rare or nonexistent in
ancient times. he colonial period was an especially fertile time
for the creation of pidgins.
Stable pidgins typically originate in social situations where
they are used only in a very restricted set of social situations, for
example in commercial transactions. But if they persist over a
long period, they may come to be used in a wide range of social
contexts, in which case the pidgin may acquire a relatively large
vocabulary and a relatively large, stable set of grammatical con-
structions. he pidgin language Tok Pisin, the national language
of Papua New Guinea, is such a language. Such pidgins may
come to be acquired natively by children as their irst language.
In many situations, this is a gradual process since pidgins arise
in multilingual situations, and therefore there are other lan-
guages that could serve as the native languages for some or even
all of the children in the community. For some communities,
Contact, Language Context and Co-Text

however, the process may be fairly abrupt: most adult members CONTEXT AND CO-TEXT
of the community speak the pidgin to one another and children
he term context is used to refer very generally to the extralin-
grow up learning only the pidgin. Creolization refers to a social
guistic circumstances in which language is produced as a text
process by which a stable pidgin acquires native speakers; the
and to which the text is related the setting in which the lan-
result of creolization is a creole.
guage is used, for example, and the participants involved. But
Speakers of pidgins and creoles may remain in contact with
such circumstances are many and indeterminate, and only when
native speakers of the lexiier language, or they may not. If they
they relate to the text in the realization of meaning do they count
remain (or come to be) in contact with such speakers, and if the
as context. Many circumstantial features may have no bearing
lexiier language is a prestige language for instance, a language
whatsoever on the meaning that is intended by a text or how it
of administration and/or of the social elite the pidgin or creole
is interpreted. he question is: How does one establish which
may become heteronomous with the lexiier language. In such
attendant circumstances are contextually signiicant and which
cases, the pidgin or creole may borrow vocabulary and/or gram-
are not?
matical constructions from the lexiier language, becoming more
he importance of taking context into account as a matter
like it in the process. his, to some degree, is the reverse of the
of principle in the deinition of meaning has been long estab-
pidginization process. If, in particular, the lexiier language is the
lished. Early in the last century, the anthropologist Bronislaw
oicial language, serving as the standard dialect in the region
Malinowski argued that an understanding of the way in which
where the pidgin or creole is spoken, the pidgin or creole may be
language functions as a mode of action depends on establishing
perceived by its speakers and by the local authorities as a dialect
a relationship with its context of situation (Malinowski 1923).
of the lexiier language, and a process of dialect leveling may take
Subsequently, the linguist J. R Firth reformulated the notion as a
place similar to what was described under the label of koiniza-
suitable schematic construct to apply to language events (1957,
tion. When this happens, we may ind that there is a continuum
182) his construct makes mention of the relevant features of
of speech varieties in the community, ranging from relatively
participants and the relevant objects, but leaves unanswered
pure versions of the pidgin or creole to forms of the language
the key question of how relevance is to be determined.
that resemble (or are identical with) the standard dialect. Such
Context is a selection of circumstantial features that are rec-
situations, when they afect creoles, are referred to as post-creole
ognized by the language user as relevant in that they key into
continua. he pidgin or creole may eventually lose its distinc-
text to achieve communication. One set of criteria for deter-
tive status as speakers come to speak versions of the language
mining relevance can be found in the conditions for realizing
that are no longer distinguished by the results of a pidginization
pragmatic meaning as proposed in the theory of speech-acts
process. his leveling process, when it afects creoles, is referred
(Searle 1969). A piece of text, the uttering of a particular linguistic
to as decreolization. A variety that descends from a creole but
expression, for example, can be said to realize a particular illo-
has undergone extensive decreolization is referred to as a post-
creole.
cutionary force to the extent that circumstantial features are
taken to satisfy the conditions that deine the illocution. hus, the
he processes that we have been discussing pidginization
illocutions of threat and promise have the conditions in common
and dialect leveling can take place in tandem. hat is, its pos-
of reference to a future event and one controlled by the irst per-
sible, for example, that a language could acquire new native
son, but they difer as to whether the event has a negative efect
speakers via pidginization and subsequent creolization, while at
(threat) or positive efect (promise) on the second person. Hence,
the same time undergoing dialect leveling (koinization) in favor
the utterance I will call again tomorrow could be interpreted as
of the creole-based dialects. his has happened, more often than
either a threat or a promise, depending on the contextual factors
is usually acknowledged, in the historical development of lan-
of who said it to whom and in what circumstances.
guages. Languages that have undergone this sort of development
he recognition of relevance comes about because language
can be referred to as creoloids. Since the social dynamics of lan-
users are familiar with such conditions as part of their extralin-
guage shift situations can vary considerably, we have to examine
guistic sociocultural knowledge. But familiarity with illocution-
each instance of language shift to determine whether or not its
ary conditions is only one kind of sociocultural knowledge that is
result is a creoloid. Afrikaans, the Germanic language spoken in
brought to bear in the recognition of contextual signiicance. he
South Africa, is often described as a creoloid.
world we live in is made familiar by projecting two kinds of order
Michael Noonan onto it: linguistic encoding, on the one hand, and sociocultural
convention, on the other. Communication involves an interac-
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING tion between them: We make texts with the irst with a view to
homason, Sarah Grey. 2001. Language Contact: An Introduction. keying them into the second. Sociocultural conventions take the
Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. form of schemata (see schema): customary representations of
homason, Sarah Grey, and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language Contact, reality, in various degrees culture-speciic, modes of behavior
Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of California and thought that are socially established as normal. Contexts are
Press. features of a particular situation that are identiied as instantia-
Trudgill, Peter. 2000. Sociolinguistics. London: Penguin Books. tions of these abstract conigurations of experience that are real-
Weinreich, Uriel. [1953] 1968. Languages in Contact. he ized and recognized in text. hese schematic constructs are not,
Hague: Mouton.
however, static and ixed since once they are engaged they can
Winford, Donald. 2003. An Introduction to Contact Linguistics.
be extended and changed. Although communication depends
Oxford: Blackwell.

221
Context and Co-Text
on some schematic convergence to get of the ground at all, it can
then develop its own creative momentum.
Although context is generally understood as an extratextual
phenomenon, apart from text but a crucial concomitant to it, the
term is also often used, misleadingly, to refer to the intratextual
relations that linguistic elements contract with each other within
text. An alternative, and preferable, term for this is co-text.
Co-textual relations occur between linguistic elements at dif-
ferent levels. William Labov shows the tendency for segments of
spoken utterance at the morpho-phonemic level, for example, to
vary according to the phonetic and morphological environ-
ment in which they co-textually occur, and he is able to specify
variable rules for their occurrence. hese are distinct from other
variable rules that Labov postulates, rules that have to do with
contextually motivated variation where speakers adjust their
pronunciation in relatively formal situations in approximation
to prestige social norms (Labov 1972). Co-textual variation is
a property of text and in itself has no social signiicance as dis-
course. Contextual variation, on the other hand, decidedly does.
Co-textual relations at the lexico-grammatical level have
attracted particular interest over recent years in the ield of
corpus linguistics. Computers now provide the means for
collecting and analyzing vast quantities of text and for identify-
ing in detail the regularities of co-textual patterning that occur
(Sinclair 1991). One such pattern is that of collocation, the regu-
lar occurrence of one word in the environment of another. But
co-textual patterning extends beyond the appearance of pairs of
words in juxtaposition and is also manifested in word sequences
of relative degrees of ixity. he identiication of such co-textual
relations has led to the recognition that text is essentially formu-
laic in structure (Wray 2002).
Whereas contextual relations bring about pragmatic
efects, co-textual relations of this lexico-grammatical kind have
semantic consequences to the extent that the mutual condi-
tioning of meaning across co-occurring words becomes estab-
lished as a conventional encoding. Another kind of semantic
linking is brought about by the co-textual function of cohesion
(Halliday and Hasan 1976). Here, there is a copying of one or
more semantic features from an antecedent expression on to
an expression that follows. hus, a pronoun like she would link
cohesively with a noun phrase like the lady in red occurring ear-
lier in a text in that it copies the features of singular and female.
It should be noted, however, that the co-textual link of cohesion,
being semantic, does not guarantee that the appropriate prag-
matic reference will be achieved. here may be more than one
antecedent to which the copying expression may semantically
relate. Co-textual cohesive links, therefore, do not themselves
result in referential coherence; the latter depends on contex-
tual factors (Blakemore 2001).
H. G.Widdowson
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Blakemore, D. 2001. Discourse and relevance theory. In he Handbook
of Discourse Analysis, ed. D. Schifrin, D. Tannen, and H. E. Hamilton,
10018. Oxford: Blackwell.
Firth, J. R. 1957. Papers in Linguistics 193451. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
222
Control Structures
Halliday, M. A. K, and R. Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English.
London: Longman.
Labov, W. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Pittsburgh: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Malinowski B. 1923. he problem of meaning in primitive languages. In
he Meaning of Meaning, ed. C. K. Ogden and I. A.Richards, 296336.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Schrifrin, D. 1994. Approaches to Discourse. Oxford: Blackwell.
Searle, J. R. 1969. Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sinclair, J. M. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Widdowson, H. G. 2004. Text, Context, Pretext: Critical Issues in Discourse
Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell.
Widdowson, H. G.. 2007. Discourse Analysis. Oxford Introductions to
Language Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wray, A. 2002. Formulaic Language and the Lexicon. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
CONTROL STRUCTURES
In many languages, when the subject of an embedded clause is
identical in reference (coreferential) with some noun phrase in
the main clause, the former may (or must) be left syntactically
unexpressed. hus, sentence (1a) can be paraphrased as (1b),
where the understood subject of the embedded clause corre-
sponds to the pronoun he in (1a). his unexpressed subject is
standardly notated by PRO, as represented in (1c). he referen-
tial dependence of PRO on George is expressed by the sharing of
an index (here, subscript i). his dependence is called control
(originally equi-NP deletion, see Rosenbaum 1967).
(1) a. George hoped that he would meet the Pope.
b. George hoped to meet the Pope.
c. Georgei hoped [PROi to meet the Pope].
Universally, PRO can only occur in a subject position.
Furthermore, in most languages, PRO can only occur in non-
inite clauses. However, the latter is not a universal condition,
as controlled clauses in the Balkan languages, for example, are
systematically inite. Deriving the distribution of PRO is a fun-
damental issue in the theory of control ever since Chomsky
(1981).
Although occasionally challenged, the existence of PRO
receives strong empirical support in languages with case con-
cord (Sigursson 1991), where PRO can be shown to bear the
same morphological case that an overt subject does. Further
evidence for PRO is provided by pairs like (2). Secondary predi-
cates (like angry) cannot be predicated on arguments absent
from the syntax, like the implicit agent of serve. he fact that
they can be predicated on the understood subject of an inini-
tive implies that the latter is syntactically present, even if pho-
netically null.
(2) a. Michael served dinner angry / *Dinner was served angry.
b. Michaeli hated [PROi to serve dinner angry].
Examples (1c) and (2b) illustrate obligatory control. In contrast,
when the noninite clause occurs as a subject, the reference of
PRO is free and can pick a remote linguistic antecedent or no
antecedent at all (arbitrary PRO). his situation is called non-
obligatory control.
Conversational Implicature
(3) a. Janei admitted that it was likely that [PROi perjuring herself]
was a mistake.
b. [PROarb to blame everything on fate] is all too common.
hus, theories of control must explain, at a minimum: i) where
PRO must/can/cannot occur, ii) what syntactic conigurations
require obligatory versus nonobligatory control, and iii) the lexi-
cal/semantic/pragmatic factors that afect the choice of control-
ler in particular environments. his unique combination makes
control an area where separate modules of grammar lexicon,
syntax, semantics, and pragmatics converge.
Idan Landau
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht,
the Netherlands: Kluwer.
Landau, Idan. 2000. Elements of Control: Structure and Meaning in
Ininitival Constructions. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer.
Manzini, M. Rita. 1983. On control and control theory. Linguistic
Inquiry 14: 42146.
Rosenbaum, Peter. 1967. he Grammar of English Predicate Complement
Constructions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sigursson, Halldr A.. 1991. Icelandic case-marked PRO and the licens-
ing of lexical arguments. Natural Language and Linguistic heory
9: 32763.
CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE
he British philosopher Herbert Paul Grice observed that the total
signiicance of an utterance embraces not only what is said but
what is implied. His term of art for the latter was implicature,
and he identiied conversational implicature as an important
type of implicit meaning or signiication.
Grice used the following example to introduce this type of
implicit meaning in his 1967 William James lectures at Harvard: A
and B discuss a mutual friend, C, who has recently started work-
ing at a bank. When A asks B how C is getting on, B replies, Oh
quite well, I think; he likes his colleagues, and he hasnt been to
prison yet. Given knowledge of English and of contextual fac-
tors, A can readily grasp that B has said that C is getting on well,
likes his colleagues, and hasnt been to prison yet. A may also
understand that B has implied something else with the remark
about prison, and, according to Grice, a rational reconstruction
of the bases of this understanding reveals a complex inferential
process a process based on principles that the persons involved
probably would not be able to articulate unless they had studied
the Gricean literature.
At the top of Grices list is the cooperative principle,
roughly, the idea that it is rational for participants in conversa-
tions to advance the accepted purpose or direction of the talk
exchange to which they contribute. As it is routinely recapitu-
lated, Grices theory speciies that in addition to this basic pre-
sumption about rational cooperation, hearers should act and
think in terms of conversational maxims or imperatives, which
include the following:
Maxim of Quality. Make your contribution true; so do not
convey what you believe false or unjustiied.
Maxim of Quantity. Be as informative as required.
Maxim of Relation. Be relevant.
Maxim of Manner. Be perspicuous; so avoid obscurity and
ambiguity, and strive for brevity and order.
Grice consistently allowed that this list is not exhaustive, and
at the end of his career, he raised some additional issues. Quality,
he suggests in his Retrospective Epilogue (1989, 3702), dif-
fers from the other maxims in being essential to the making of
a genuine contribution. Nor are the maxims independent of one
another.
Grice contends that an implicatum can be conveyed by obey-
ing the maxims, as well as by the louting of a maxim (1989,
301). When what is said is patently irrelevant, false, uninforma-
tive, or obscure, the hearer is incited to search for some speakers
intention that does contribute to the purpose of the conversation.
In one of his descriptions of the inferential pattern whereby the
hearer works out a conversational implicature, Grice has the
hearer reason as follows: S has said that p; I presume he is observ-
ing the cooperative principle, and p does not on its own suit the
purposes of the conversation, so he must have been implicating
some other proposition, q; the speaker knows and (knows that I
know that he knows) that I can see that the supposition that he
thinks that q is required; he intends me to think, or is willing to
allow me to think, that q; and so he has implicated that q.
To apply this pattern to our example, A assumes that B was
being cooperatively rational (informative, sincere, relevant, per-
spicuous) in making the obscure remark about C not having been
to prison and so must draw upon background beliefs to come up
with the point of the remark. his background could pertain to
what A and B mutually believe about C, such as the idea that C
has venal inclinations. he remark about prison may be inter-
preted, then, as a hyperbolic comment meant to evoke this trait.
Grice states that a conversational implicature can be can-
celed without contradiction. For example, B could coherently
add: but of course there is no real danger of C going to prison.
Implicatures can also be reinforced, which would be the case
should B add: so lets hope C does not get caught. To implicate
something insincerely can be dangerously misleading but does
not amount to lying: he hearer cannot reasonably complain
that B has performed the illocutionary action of stating or assert-
ing that their friend has venal inclinations.
Grice distinguishes between conversational and conventional
implicature. Sentences, as opposed to utterances, implicate
what speakers or writers who follow the linguistic conventions
would normally use the sentence to implicate. He also contends
that there are generalized conversational implicatures that
are not conventional. One of his examples is that if someone
says X went into a house, it is normally but not convention-
ally implied that the house is not Xs own (1989, 378). A detailed
neo-Gricean account of generalized conversational implicature
for utterance-type meaning has been developed by Stephen C.
Levinson (2000), who argues that an implicature is generalized
just in case it is implicated by default or, in other words, unless
there are unusual contextual assumptions that prevent the impli-
cature from being appropriate.
Grice describes implicature as a pervasive feature of dis-
course and extends his account to cover metaphor, irony,
and indirect speech-acts. His exploration of implicature was
223
Conversational Implicature
linked to larger philosophical themes, including his defense of a
causal theory of perception and contentions about ambiguity
and presupposition in ordinary language use. Grice argues,
for example, that the word or is not ambiguous in English since
the exclusive interpretation (according to which or means that
either but not both disjuncts is true) can be understood as a con-
versational implicature and not as a second meaning of or.
According to the thesis known as Grices Razor, it is better to
posit conversational implicatures than ambiguity (and in some
cases, presupposition) because implicatures can be derived
more economically from the independently motivated principles
of cooperative rationality.
Although it is widely acknowledged that implicature is an
important phenomenon, questions are raised about the explan-
atory and descriptive value of Grices theory. Wayne A. Davis
(1998) argues that Grices maxims and cooperative principle
predict a range of implicatures that do not actually occur, while
other implicatures that do occur cannot be derived from them.
He also argues that the theory has no genuine explanatory pay-
ofs. he proximal causes of a speakers conversational moves
are that persons attitudes, not general tendencies to cooper-
ate or an audiences presumptions about the latter. According
to Davis, Grice wrongly assumes that the production and rec-
ognition of implicature are processes explicable in terms of the
same principles and maxims. his premise is misleading if what
a speaker implicates or means is not caused by what others pre-
sume or know about that speaker. To implicate a meaning that
extends beyond what one says is to say something with certain
intentions, and the speakers intentions do not directly depend
on what others know or presume. Having and expressing inten-
tions is one thing, whereas communicating them to others is
something else. Grice appears to assume that audience uptake of
a certain kind is necessary or even suicient to the realization of
communicative intentions.
Grices explicit analysis of conversational implicature can
be read as indicating that the very existence of implicature (as
opposed to its successful uptake or understanding by some audi-
ence) requires the presumption, on the part of a hearer, that the
speaker has observed or acted in accordance with the coop-
erative principle. hus, Grice writes that S implicates q only if he
is presumed to be observing the conversational maxims (1989,
30). On an alternative reading, the actual hearers presumptions
and other beliefs are not necessary, since some implicatures
are made by a speaker but remain unrecognized by the target
audience. What Grice has proposed is an account of success-
fully communicated implicatures, but not implicature tout court.
Jennifer Saul (2002, 241) suggests that what matters for Grice
is not what particular hearers actually think, but what they are
required to think. Grice indeed stressed that his focus was on
the rationality or irrationality of conversational conduct (1989,
369). he thesis that implicature must be calculable or capable
of being worked out can, then, be taken as belonging to a nor-
mative theory of the conditions under which speakers can suc-
cessfully realize the rational intention to implicate rather than
to state some thought. Yet it is unclear why the norms of com-
municative rationality should apply to both noncommunicative
and communicative linguistic behavior. Is it persuasive to argue
that it is simply impossible for a speaker to have implicated some
224
proposition because that would have been irrational? In other
words, why could there be no irrational implicatures?
Other challenges to Gricean theory target the interest and
adequacy of the normative account of the hearers recognition of
implicature. Kim Sterelny (1982, 1913) observes that it is knowl-
edge of the speaker that is crucial to the success of this kind of
interpretive project, not knowledge of conversational principles,
maxims, rules, or general tendencies. Interpreters do sometimes
discern the intentions of uncooperative, strategic, and even idio-
syncratic interlocuters who violate the norms of rational, coop-
erative speech. Implicatures that are generated and understood
may be a prevalent feature of non-Gricean discursive exchanges,
that is, exchanges that diverge very signiicantly from the norm
of cooperative communicative activity. he comprehension of
implicature is assisted by the existence of various conventional-
ized forms, many of which vary from culture to culture, as Anna
Wierzbicka (1991) has documented.
Davis argues that the interpretation of implicit meaning does
not depend on any one specialized or characteristic pattern of rea-
soning, concluding that any principle general enough to hold in
all cases of implicature will be too general to yield speciic predic-
tions (1998, 99). his criticism also applies to the versions of the
principle of relevance advanced by Sperber and Wilson (1986) as
the successor to Grices bundle of maxims. It seems highly dubi-
ous to suppose that what people imply, and what others efec-
tively take them to be implying, in all discourse is determined by a
quest for communicative eiciency deined as the maximization
of information conveyed per unit of processing cost.
An alternative to the Gricean recourse to broad psychosocial
principles is to focus on the role of conventions in both the gen-
eration and understanding of the speakers implicature. Often
when we intend to imply one thing by saying another we rely
upon some conventional, established idiom. For example, it is
idiomatic that S could have done y normally implies that S did
not do y, whereas the nearly synonymous S was able to do y
implies that S did do y (Davis 1998, 378). hus, Bernard was
able to make the inal putt can be used to implicate convention-
ally that Bernard made the putt, and the speakers intention and
corresponding implicature can be grasped through knowledge
of the convention without recourse to the complex inferences
Grice postulated. As an alternative to the thesis that interpreters
reason from cognitive states to implicatures, Nicholas Asher and
Alex Lascarides (2003) argue that reasoning about implicature is
based on rhetorical structures understood as speech-act types.
Paisley Livingston
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Asher, Nicholas, and Alex Lascarides. 2003. Logics of Conversation.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some
Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Davis, Wayne A. 1998. Implicature: Intention, Convention, and Principle
in the Failure of Gricean heory. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Grice, Herbert Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Syntax and
Semantics. Vol. 3. Ed. Cole and Morgan, 4158. New York: Academic
Press.
Conversational Repair
. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Kasher, Asa, ed. 1998. Pragmatics: Critical Concepts. London: Routledge.
Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive Meanings. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Saul, Jennifer. 2002. Speaker meaning, what is said, and what is impli-
cated. Nos 36: 22848.
Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. 1986. Relevance: Communication and
Cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Sterelny, Kim. 1982. Against conversational implicature. Journal of
Semantics 1: 18794.
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1991. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: he Semantics of
Human Interaction. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
CONVERSATIONAL REPAIR
Conversational repair (hereafter, repair) refers to a common
practice in the interactive social organization of conversations
in which speakers suspend the smooth progressivity of the talk
to deal with some ostensible problem in speaking, hearing, or
understanding the talk. Repair does not always involve hearable
errors or mistakes that require correction. herefore, the term
repair, rather than correction, is used to capture the more general
domain of such occurrence in conversation analysis.
he organization of conversation is a turn-taking system in
which speakers take turns to converse. A repair may be done
by the speaker of the trouble source in the same turn (same-
turn self-repair). Or it may be done by anyone but the speaker.
Furthermore, a repair may be initiated by the speaker of the
trouble source or by others. Repair is often carried out with rep-
etition/recycling, replacement, or restructuring of the utterance,
although not all repair attempts may be successful. Studies ind
that self-repair prevails even when a repair is initiated by others.
Next is a brief discussion of same-turn self-repair, for which
an emerging utterance may be stopped, aborted, recast, con-
tinued, or redone. Such repair often involves self-initiation with
some nonlexical initiators, such as cutofs, sound stretches, uhs,
and so on, followed by repair. Following is an example contain-
ing two instances of repair with cutofs, replacements, insertion,
and repetition/recycling (the asterisk indicates where repair
initiates).
(1) And tshe-* this girls ixed up onna da- * a blind da:te.
In the irst instance of repair, the speaker cuts of the pronoun
tshe- (i.e., the repairable; the - indicates glottalized cutof) and
replaces it with a full noun phrase, this girl. he second instance
is where date is cut of to introduce a modiier by recycling the
entire noun phrase: a blind date.
Repair is highly patterned, with some basic mechanisms
occurring cross-linguistically. But speciics of the mechanisms
difer. For instance, recycling often occurs at a turn beginning
when the utterance overlaps with the ending of the previous
speakers turn. However, the syntactic unit that is recycled difers
from one language to another: Some allow repetition of single
words, whereas some require larger syntactic units to be recy-
cled (e.g., in the example, the entire noun phrase is recycled).
Furthermore, speakers of a tone language such as Mandarin
make tone-related recycles. herefore, repair mechanisms are
constrained by the grammar of individual languages.
Conversation Analysis
Conversation analysis inds that the grammar of repair is
vital for syntax-for-conversation. Repair is closely related to
syntax because it afects the shape and/or components of
a sentence. Syntax organizes elements through which talk
is constructed. Syntax-for-conversation cannot exist without
repair because speakers constantly search for the next item
due for the interactive needs of the conversation. he study of
repair, therefore, demonstrates how interaction and grammar
shape each other.
Liang Tao
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Fox, Barbara, Markoto Hayashi, and Robert Jasperson. 1996. Resources
and repair: A cross-linguistic study of the syntactic organization
of repair. In Interaction and Grammar, ed. Elino Ochs, Emanuel
Scheglof, and Sandra hompson, 185237. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Scheglof, Emanuel, Gail Jeferson, and Harvey Sacks. 1977. he prefer-
ence for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation.
Language 53: 36182.
CONVERSATION ANALYSIS
Conversation analysis (CA) is the study of talk (and other con-
duct) in human interaction that began with the pioneering work
of Harvey Sacks (1995) and his collaborators Emanuel Scheglof
and Gail Jeferson (e.g., Sacks, Scheglof, and Jeferson 1974;
Scheglof, Jeferson and Sacks 1977). CA seeks to establish tech-
nical speciications of the practices people use to co-construct
orderly and mutually understandable courses of action. hese
speciications constitute a cumulative, empirically derived body
of knowledge that is foundational to CA as a discipline. Since its
beginnings within sociology in the late 1960s and early 1970s,
CA has become hugely inluential, both as an emerging disci-
pline in its own right and across the ields of sociology, psychol-
ogy, anthropology, linguistics, and education. It is increasingly
applied in studies of institutional and organizational interaction
(including news interviews, court proceedings, emergency and
help-line calls, and doctorpatient interaction; see Drew and
Heritage 1992; Heritage and Maynard 2006) and in sociologi-
cal studies of the operation of social norms and the reproduc-
tion of culture (especially related to gender [see gender and
language] and sexualities; Kitzinger 2000, 2005). Although
it originated in the analysis of talk from American-English speak-
ers, CAs basic indings have now been replicated across many
other languages.
he intellectual roots of CA lie in a synthesis of the sociological
traditions established by Erving Gofman and Harold Garinkel
traditions that, like other broadly social constructionist theo-
retical frameworks, ofer models of people as agents and of a
social order grounded in contingent, ongoing, interpretive work
(see Heritage 1984). CA aims to build a science of social action,
rather than to contribute to the study of language per se. It relies
on analysis of recordings of naturally occurring human interac-
tion (i.e., not invented or hypothetical data and not data gener-
ated by researchers via interviews or in laboratories). Recordings
are transcribed according to a distinctive transcription nota-
tion system (Jeferson 2004), but it is the recordings themselves
225
Conversation Analysis
(and not transcripts of them) that are the primary data. Sound
iles are increasingly being made available on the World Wide
Web (see http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/scheglof/
sound-clips.html for sound clips from Scheglofs publications),
enabling readers of published work to access the original data.
Much early CA was based only on audio recordings (since the
technology for video recording was not yet available, but see
Goodwin 1981), which precluded analysis of such interactional
features as gesture, body deployment, and gaze. Video record-
ings of face-to-face interactions are now the norm. Although new
data are continually being collected, several core data sets have
been shared within the CA community since the 1970s (e.g., the
telephone conversation known as Two Girls [TG], which can
be accessed at http://www.cambridge.org/9780521532792,
Appendix 2). hese shared data are widely used in teaching,
frequently reanalyzed for new phenomena, and appear in pub-
lications by a range of diferent authors. Analysis of these kinds
of ordinary conversations is the point of departure for studying
more specialized communicative contexts (the legal process, the
medical encounter) in which social institutions are talked into
being (Heritage 1984).
Conversation analysis has produced few theoretical mani-
festos but has, rather, concentrated on ine-grained empirical
studies of interaction. hese studies rest upon three fundamen-
tal theoretical assumptions (Heritage 1984): i) Talk is a form of
action; that is, people use it to do things like complaining, com-
plimenting, disagreeing, inviting, telling, and so on; ii) action
is structurally organized; that is, turns at talk are systematically
related to one another, such as (for example) when an accep-
tance follows an invitation or a self-deprecation follows a compli-
ment (see adjacency pair); and iii) talk creates and maintains
intersubjectivity; that is, a irst speaker understands, by what a
second speaker does, how that second speaker heard his or her
irst turn as when a second speaker produces a turn hearable as
an answer, thereby showing herself /himself to have heard the
prior turn as a question.
he focus in CA research is on identifying generic orders of
organization in talk-in-interaction that are demonstrably salient
to the participants analyses of one anothers turns at talk in
the progressively unfolding interaction. Data are rarely coded
or quantiied since manifest similarities in talk may turn out to
have very diferent interactional meanings. Key discoveries of CA
include turn-taking, action formation, sequence organization,
repair, word selection, and overall structural organization, each
of which is now sketched out.
Turn Taking
he classic paper by Sacks, Scheglof, and Jeferson (1974) pres-
ents a model to describe the practices whereby people (mostly)
speak one at a time. Summarized very simply, the model pro-
poses that the building blocks out of which turns are composed
(turn constructional units or TCUs) can be whole sentences,
phrases, sometimes just single words, or even nonlexical
items which, in context, are recognizable to a co-participant
as possibly constituting a complete turn. Each speaker is ini-
tially entitled to just one TCU, after which another speaker has
the right (and sometimes the obligation) to speak next. As a
speaker approaches the possible completion of a irst TCU in a
226
turn, transition to a next speaker can become relevant: his is a
transition relevance place. Turn-taking organization is designed
to minimize turn size, such that a turn with one (and only one)
TCU is the default, and extended turns with lengthy and/or
multiple TCUs are accomplishments. his has important impli-
cations for the analysis of overlapping talk and of longer turns
at talk (including, but not limited to, storytelling), both of which
have been extensively researched. he model also encompasses
speaker-selection techniques in multiparty interaction.
Action Formation
Researchers have focused on how speakers deploy talk (and other
conduct) in order to fashion a turn designed to be recognizable to
their recipients as doing a particular action, that is, how people
do complaining, or inviting, or declining, and so on (Atkinson
and Heritage 1984). Since CA (unlike speech-act theory) starts
from the analysis of singular episodes of human interaction and
undertakes to understand action as the co-participants under-
stand it, one outcome of this kind of analysis is a very detailed
understanding of how (for example) complaining or inviting
are done that often departs from vernacular understandings.
Another outcome is the discovery of actions that have no vernac-
ular name (e.g., conirming an allusion; Scheglof 1996a).
Sequence Organization
he most basic type of sequence involves two turns at talk by dif-
ferent speakers, the irst constituting an initiating action (irst
pair part) and the second an action responsive to it (second pair
part): for example, an invitation and an acceptance or declina-
tion of it; a news announcement and a news receipt (see adja-
cency pair). Most initiating actions can be followed by a range
of sequentially relevant (i.e., appropriately itted) next actions,
some of which further the action of the prior turn (e.g., accepting
an invitation) and are termed preferred responses, and others of
which do not (e.g., rejecting an invitation) and are termed dispre-
ferred. he basic two-turn adjacency pair sequence can be and
frequently is expanded. Pre-expansions are turns that come
before and are recognizably preliminary to some other action;
for example, a turn such as What are you doing tonight? can be
recognizable in context as preliminary to an invitation (hence, a
pre-invitation); a turn such as Guess what is virtually dedicated
to preannouncement. Insert expansions come between the irst
and second pair parts, for example, between an invitation and
the acceptance or declination of it (Do you wanna come round
tonight? / What time? / About six. / Okay where the invita-
tion and its acceptance are separated by an insert sequence).
Postexpansions come after the second pair part and may accept
or assess it. For example, You want me to bring you anything?
(ofer: irst pair part) / No, no nothing (declination: second
pair part) / Okay (acceptance of the declination, expanding the
sequence to a third turn). he authoritative work on adjacency
pairs and expansions of them, the organization of preference
and dispreference, and other types of sequence organization is
Scheglofs (2007) primer.
Repair
Interactional co-participants must manage troubles in speak-
ing, hearing, and/or understanding talk if the interaction is not
Conversation Analysis
to founder when trouble arises (see conversational repair).
Repair is a method for ine-tuning a turn in the course of its pro-
duction and for maintaining intersubjectivity. Researchers have
shown some of the practices that speakers use across a range of
diferent positions in talk, both in repairing their own talk (e.g.,
by deleting, inserting, or replacing a word; Scheglof, Jeferson,
and Sacks 1977) and in initiating repair on the talk of others (e.g.,
with open-class repair initiations like huh?; Drew 1997). Most
repairs are completed by the speaker of the trouble source in the
same turn (more accurately, the same TCU) as the trouble source
but can be delayed to third turn or third position, or even later
(Scheglof 1992).
Word Selection
Turns at talk are composed of lexical items selected from among
alternatives. For example, when English-language speakers refer
to themselves, they can often select between I or we (the latter
choice sometimes being used, for example, to index that they are
speaking on behalf of an organization or a couple). Alternatively,
they can self-reference in distinctive (marked) ways (e.g., self-
naming or self-description) that perform analyzable actions.
Likewise, explicit self-reference in (so-called zero-anaphora)
languages in which this is not required has been shown to be
interactionally meaningful (see the Lerner and Kitzinger 2007
collection on selection issues in self-reference). Category-based
reference to nonpresent persons also involves choices between
alternatives (Scheglof 1996b); for example, law enforcement
oicers can be referred to as police or cops, and speakers selec-
tion of one or the other may be responsive to whether the speaker
is appearing in court (Jeferson 1974) or talking with adolescent
peers (Sacks 1995). CA explores how word selection is done as
part of turn design and how it informs and shapes the under-
standing achieved by the turns recipient.
Overall Structural Organization
Talk-in-interaction is organized into phases, for example, most
obviously, openings and closings (Scheglof and Sacks 1973).
Within ordinary conversation, however, matters are compara-
tively luid. Within organizational talk, by contrast, there are
component phases or activities that characteristically emerge in a
particular order. Acute doctorpatient interactions, for example,
have a highly structured overall organization (opening, present-
ing complaint, examination, diagnosis, treatment, and closing;
Heritage and Maynard 2006), and doctors and patients conduct
can be analyzed for the way in which they orient to and negoti-
ate the boundaries of each phase of the interaction. Many recent
studies draw on analyses of overall structural organization as
part of research designed to be of practical use by organizations
in improving the quality of their services.
Conclusion
Although much research remains to be done, there is, for each of
these orders of organization, an established set of core indings,
foundational to the discipline of CA. An outstanding bibliograph-
ical source of information about CA is available on the Ethno/CA
Web site maintained by Paul ten Have at http://www2.fmg.uva.
nl/emca/resource.htm.
Celia Kitzinger
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Atkinson, J. Maxwell, and John Heritage, eds. 1984. Structures of Social
Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clayman, Steven, and John Heritage. 2002. he News Interview.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Drew, Paul. 1997. Open class repair initiators in response to sequential
sources of trouble in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 28: 69101.
Drew, Paul, and John Heritage, eds. 1992. Talk at Work: Interaction in
Institutional Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A clas-
sic collection of studies exploring the application of conversation
analysis to the study of language and interaction in applied settings,
including doctorpatient consultation, legal hearings, news interviews,
and emergency calls. For more recent work in talk in organizational
settings, see Heritage and Maynard (2006) and Clayman and Heritage
(2002).
Goodwin, Charles. 1981. Conversational Organization. New
York: Academic Press.
Heritage, John. 1984. Garinkel and Ethnomethodology.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heritage, John, and Douglas Maynard, eds. 2006. Communication in
Medical Care. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jeferson, Gail. 1974. Error correction as an interactional resource.
Language in Society 2: 18199.
. 2004. Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. In
Conversation Analysis, ed. Gene Lerner, 1331. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Kitzinger, Celia. 2000. Doing feminist conversation analysis. Feminism
and Psychology 10: 16393.
. 2005. Heteronormativity in action. Social Problems
52.4: 47798.
Lerner, Gene. 2004. Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First
Generation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. A collection of early but
previously unpublished research by many of the central igures in the
development and advancement of CA.
Lerner, Gene, and Celia Kitzinger, eds. 2007. Referring to self and others
in conversation. Discourse Studies 9.4 (Special Issue).
Sacks, Harvey. 1995. Lectures on Conversation.Vols. 1 and 2.
Oxford: Blackwell. Useful for understanding the early beginnings of
CA, these two volumes present lectures, transcribed and edited by Gail
Jeferson, from one of the founders of conversation analysis, as deliv-
ered to classes at the University of California between 1965 and 1972.
Each volume has an introduction by Emanuel Scheglof.
Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Scheglof, and Gail Jeferson. 1974. A sim-
plest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation.
Language 50: 696735.
Scheglof, Emanuel A. 1992. Repair after next turn. American Journal of
Sociology 95: 12951345.
Scheglof, Emanuel A.. 1996a. Conirming allusions: Toward an empiri-
cal account of action. American Journal of Sociology 104.1: 161216.
. 1996b. Some practices for referring to persons in talk-in-
interaction. In Studies in Anaphora, ed. Barbara Fox, 43785.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
. 2007. Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in
Conversation Analysis. Vol 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
A landmark text providing the deinitive introduction to sequence
organization and capsule reviews of other key concepts such as turns,
actions, and repair, each of which will constitute the subject matter of
forthcoming primers by this leading authority on CA.
Scheglof, Emanuel A., Gail Jeferson, and Harvey Sacks. 1977. he pref-
erence for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversa-
tion. Language 53: 36182.
Scheglof, Emanuel A., and Harvey Sacks. 1973. Opening up closings.
Semiotica 7.4: 289327.
227
Cooperative Principle
COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE
Introduced by the British philosopher Herbert Paul Grice
(191388), the cooperative principle and related maxims are part
of his theory of conversational implicature.
Grice formulates the principle as an imperative: Make your
contribution such as required, at the stage at which it occurs, by
the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which
you are engaged (1975, 45). He observes that it is a well-rec-
ognized empirical fact that this ceteris paribus principle applies
to all talk exchanges that do not consist of wholly disconnected
remarks, and he adds that he would like to be able to argue
that the principle is grounded in rationality. To that end, he sug-
gests that persons participating in conversational exchanges
do so with certain shared purposes, such as exchanging infor-
mation and inluencing and being inluenced by others. hese
shared purposes, Grice suggests, are in general only realized if
the exchanges are conducted in accordance with the coopera-
tive principle. For those who know this, it is rational to behave in
accordance with the cooperative principle and to expect others
to do so as well. hus, this principle and presumption are ratio-
nal, given assumptions about shared conversational ends, efec-
tive means to those ends, and rationality.
Many researchers (e.g., Brown and Levinson 1987; Clark
1996) describe the cooperative principles applications and take
up thorny questions about its relation to the associated maxims
of quantity, quality, relation, manner, and politeness. here is
disagreement as to whether norms of conversational etiquette
derive from, are complementary to, or are in tension with the
cooperative principle. Asa Kasher (1976, 1982) argues against
the assumption of shared conversational purposes and contends
that the cooperative principle is superluous since the needed
maxims can be derived from a more fundamental principle of
rational behavior: Given a goal, adopt the most efective and
least costly means to its realization. Wayne A. Davis (1998) con-
tends that the cooperative principle lacks explanatory value and
is hopelessly ambiguous among normative, motivational, behav-
ioral, and cognitive readings. As it is only the speakers motives
and beliefs that are causally involved in the intentional produc-
tion of implicit meanings, what the speaker implicated or implic-
itly expressed does not depend on the thoughts or presumptions
of the audience. In other words, Grice erred when he made the
hearers presumption that the speaker observes the cooperative
principle a condition on the speakers expressing one thing by
saying something else.
Paisley Livingston
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some
Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Clark, Herbert H. 1996. Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Davis, Wayne A. 1998. Implicature: Intention, Convention, and Principle
in the Failure of Gricean heory. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Grice, Herbert Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Syntax and Semantics.
Vol. 3. Ed. Cole and Morgan, 4158. New York: Academic Press.
228
Core and Periphery
Grice, Herbert Paul.. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Kasher, Asa. 1976. Conversational maxims and rationality. In Language
in Focus: Foundations, Methods, and Systems, ed. A. Kasher, 197211.
Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Reidel.
Kasher, Asa. 1982. Gricean inference revisited. Philosophica
29: 2544.
CORE AND PERIPHERY
Mainstream generative grammar makes two basic divisions
among linguistic phenomena. he irst is the traditional division
between grammar and the lexicon, taken to be the locus of all
irregularity. he second (Chomsky 1981) distinguishes between
two parts of the grammar itself, the core and the periphery.
he core rules represent the deep regularities of language. he
periphery represents marked exceptions, such as irregular verbs,
for which there are no deep regularities.
he coreperiphery distinction (henceforth C/P) is related
to markedness. For Noam Chomsky (1965), markedness is a
graded phenomenon that relects relative centrality, naturalness,
simplicity, ease of learning, and related notions. he introduction
of C/P can be seen as a distillation of the notion markedness hier-
archy into a binary distinction. he consequence is a dramatic
conceptual simpliication, which ties naturally to the character-
ization of universal grammar in terms of parameters and
a related perspective on the language acquisition device
and learnability (see also syntax, universals of). On this
view, the core is part of the human biological endowment for lan-
guage, and the value of a parameter is set by the learner on the
basis of minimal linguistic input. One important consequence of
C/P, particularly in syntactic theory, is that it has focused con-
siderable attention on understanding how languages do and do
not realize phenomena such as argument structure and wh-in-
terrogatives. Another is that it has led to the uncovering of a wide
range of empirical phenomena in the attempt to integrate appar-
ent exceptionality, idiosyncrasy, and counterexamples into a
general framework of universals and parametric restrictions.
Despite the value of such a simpliication, Chomsky him-
self notes that we do not expect to ind chaos in the theory of
markedness, but rather an organized and structured system,
building on the theory of core grammar (1981, 216), and that
marked structures have to be learned on the basis of slender
evidence too, so there should be further structure to the system
outside of core grammar (1981, 8). It is in fact not clear that C/P
is a principled distinction and that it relects anything beyond
generality of function and frequency of use. Apparent syntactic
idiosyncrasies beyond the level of individual words are learned,
they display various degrees of speciicity, and native speakers
have sharp and reliable intuitions about them. Furthermore,
Occams razor demands that it be shown that a learning mecha-
nism that can acquire the peripheral cases cannot also acquire
the core. Hence, C/P may be nothing more than a rough and
tentative distinction, one drawn for working purposes (and
nothing more than that) (Chomsky 1993, 1718).
Here are some illustrations of peripheral phenomena
(Culicover and Jackendof 2005). First, there are words that go in
the wrong place.
Core and Periphery
Enough modiies adjectives and adverbs, alternating with
so, too, and as. However, unlike these, it follows its head: so/
too/as/*enough big; big enough. As a nominal modiier, it can
go either before or after its head: much/more/suicient/enough
pudding; pudding *much/*more/*suicient/enough.
he quantiiers galore and aplenty also go after the head
rather than before it, obligatorily: money galore, *galore money.
Responsible, unlike other adjectives, can occur either before or
after its head. Notwithstanding parallels other prepositions, such
as despite, in spite of, and regardless of in its semantics, but it
can go on either side of its complement noun phrase (NP). he
related word aside goes on the right of its complement; aside
from goes on the left.
Each of these cases constitutes an idiosyncratic departure
from strict x-bar theory.
here is sluice-stranding too. (1a) means the same as (1b).
(1) a. John went to NY with someone, but I couldnt ind out who
with.
b. John went to NY with someone, but I couldnt ind out who
John went to NY with.
(1a) is a case of sluice-stranding, where an isolated wh-
phrase stands in place of an understood indirect question.
It contains not only the wh-phrase but also a preposition
from whose complement the wh-phrase has apparently been
moved. It is technically possible to derive this construction
through some combination of wh-movement and deletion.
he diiculty is that sluice-stranding is both more productive
and more restricted than a derivational account would suggest.
Sluicing in general is possible where the purported extraction
site normally forbids extraction (Ross 1969). (2a) illustrates for
ordinary sluicing of a prepositional phrase; (2b) illustrates for
sluice-stranding.
(2) I saw a fabulous ad for a Civil War book, but I cant remember
a. by whom.
b. who by.
c. * by whom I saw a fabulous ad for a Civil War book.
d. *who I saw a fabulous ad for a Civil War book by.
On the other hand, sluice-stranding severely constrains what
combinations of wh-word and preposition are acceptable, while
sluicing is productive.
(3) Normal pied-piped preposition in sluicing:
but I couldnt igure out
a. with/to/from/for/next to/about/beside whom.
b. with/for/from/of/on/in/about/at/before/into/near beside
what.
c. for/by/with how much.
d. to/from/near where.
e. with/to/from/next to/about/beside which (book).
(4) Sluice-stranding:
but I couldnt igure out
a. who with/to/from/for/*next to/*about/*beside.
b. what with/for/from/of/on/in/about/
at/*before/*into/*near/*beside.
c. how much for/*by/*with.
d. where to/from/*near.
e. * which (book) with/to/from/next to/about/beside. here are
other cases as well (Culicover 1999):
(5) a. no matter (how heavy the load/what the cost/the diiculty)
b. -ever [as in whatever the cost]
c. the comparative correlative (the more he eats the hungrier
he gets)
d. would rather
e. had better
f. ininitival relatives [as in someone with whom to speak;
*someone who to speak with]
g. parasitic gaps
h. Not-topics (not in my car (you wont))
i. Italian loro
j. dative NP in English
k. the possibility of clitic climbing
l. English tags
For any apparently peripheral phenomenon, further research
may show that its properties follow from general principles with-
out construction-speciic stipulations, or that there may be some
irreducible idiosyncrasy.
Conclusions
Syntactic constructions appear to be ranged on a continuum
from words through idioms through truly idiosyncratic con-
structions through more general but still specialized construc-
tions to the most general corelike structures and principles of
universal grammar. It is likely that certain peripheral construc-
tions may be related to the core in systematic ways, say, by
relaxing certain conditions of core grammar (Chomsky 1986,
147). But C/P per se, however valuable heuristically, may not
merit genuinely theoretical status. (Cf. head-driven phrase
structure grammar and construction grammar.)
he implication for learning is that the learner stores current
analyses of novel utterances in the lexicon, with idiosyncratic
and general properties (see lexical acquisition). he learn-
ing procedure attempts to construct more general lexical entries
on the basis of positive experience, where common parts of exist-
ing lexical entries are retained and difering parts are replaced by
a variable. he resulting lexical entry functions as a schema or
rule that encompasses existing entries and permits construction
of new utterances. In turn, this schema, along with others, may
be further abstracted into a still more general schema by replac-
ing further dimensions of variation with variables (Tomasello
2003), producing in the limit grammatical rules of full generality
where warranted (see also syntax, acquisition of).
Peter W. Culicover
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the heory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht, the
Netherlands: Foris.
. 1986. Knowledge of Language. New York: Praeger.
. 1993. A minimalist program for linguistic theory. In he View
from Building Twenty, ed. Kenneth Hale and Samuel J. Keyser, 152.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
229
Corpus Callosum
Culicover, Peter W. 1999. Syntactic Nuts. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Culicover, Peter W., and Ray Jackendof. 2005. Simpler Syntax.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ross, John R. 1969. Guess who. In Proceedings of the Fifth Annual
Meeting of CLS, ed. Robert I. Binnick et al., 25286. Chicago: Chicago
Linguistics Society,
Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a Language. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
CORPUS CALLOSUM
Although language processing relies predominantly on left
hemisphere networks, certain functional units are also local-
ized in the right hemisphere. As a result, there is a strong
need for an interaction between the two hemispheres during
most language-related processes. he neuronal basis for this
interaction is provided by a brain structure located between the
two hemispheres, the so-called corpus callosum (CC), which is
the major interhemispheric iber tract. he more than 200 million
axons forming the CC originate from nearly all cortical regions,
including the language areas, and they primarily link homologue
regions of the hemispheres. he ibers cross the interhemispheric
gap ordered by their cortical origin. Due to functional special-
ization of the cerebral cortex, this anatomical organization also
establishes a functional topography within the CC. hus, dif-
ferent subregions of the tract are related to speciic functional
networks.
Viewed in a midsagittal section of the brain (see Figure 1),
two subregions of the CC seem to be particularly relevant for lan-
guage processing: Fibers passing through portions of the anterior
CC connect the language production network situated in the left
inferior frontal cortex (see frontal lobe and brocas area)
with its contralateral homologue, while axons in the posterior
CC interconnect the cortical areas in the temporal lobes (see
also wernickes area) which are responsible for language
perception.
230
he functional relevance of the CC in general, and in language
processing in particular, was impressively demonstrated by Roger
W. Sperry and Michael S. Gazzaniga in their research on patients
with a complete surgical transsection of the CC (Gazzaniga
2000). In an everyday situation, these patients are able to pro-
cess language in a seemingly appropriate way. However, when
tested with special experimental paradigms, the lack of inter-
hemispheric communication becomes obvious, indicating that
an intact CC is not obligatory but seems necessary for achieving
optimal and eicient language processing.
he exact role of the callosal axons in interhemispheric inter-
action is still a matter of debate, however. At least two diferent
classes of possible callosal functioning can be distinguished. he
CC might be seen either as 1) a channel to exchange information
between the two hemispheres (information transfer function) or
as 2) a mechanism through which one hemisphere exerts inhibi-
tory or excitatory inluence on the ongoing processing in the
opposite hemisphere (modulatory function).
Information transfer becomes important whenever one
hemisphere needs to access information that is available only in
the other hemisphere. his might be the sensory input initially
transferred to only one hemisphere (e.g., visual input from the
lateral periphery of the visual ield) or the outcome of preced-
ing unilateral processing steps. An instructive example related
to language is the interplay of (right-hemispheric) prosodic
and (left-hemispheric) syntactic information processing dur-
ing speech comprehension (see speech perception). In an
electroencephalographic (EEG) study, Angela D. Friederici,
D. Yves von Cramon, and Sonja A. Kotz 2007, 135) examined
how patients with lesions in the CC respond to a mismatch
between the syntactic and prosodic structure of a sentence.
While the healthy control subjects and patients with anterior CC
lesions showed a clear diference between their EEG responses
to prosodically correct and incorrect sentences, no such efect
was found in patients with lesions in the posterior CC. hus,
the destruction of the direct connections between left and right
Figure 1. A midsagittal view of the brain
acquired with magnetic resonance imaging. The
characteristic cross-sectional shape of the cor-
pus callosum (CC) is indicated. CC subregions
connecting frontal (1) and temporal (2) language
networks are marked by hatched areas.
Corpus Linguistics
temporal lobes seems to prevent the interhemispheric exchange
required to integrate prosodic and syntactic information.
One often-quoted modulatory role of the CC is the functional
inhibition of the contralateral hemisphere while the ipsilateral
hemisphere is engaged in a task for which it is specialized. he
advantage of such an inhibitory mechanism might be the reduc-
tion of interfering inluence coming from the opposite hemi-
sphere. A inding recently published by Alexander hiel and
coworkers (2006) could be interpreted in this vein. he authors
measured the activation of the left and right inferior frontal gyrus
(IFG) in a verb generation task using positron emission tomog-
raphy (see neuroimaging). In some of the administered trials,
repetitive transcranial-magnetic stimulation, a method to induce
a temporary disruption of ongoing neuronal activity, was simul-
taneously applied over the left IFG. Besides a reduction of the
activation in the stimulated left IFG, this virtual brain lesion also
induced a relative increase in the response measured in the right,
nonstimulated IFG. hus, the suppression of the left IFG area
seems to result in a disinhibition of its contralateral homologue.
he studies cited here illustrate that not only the exchange of
information but also the coordination of bihemispheric processing
is supported by transcallosal connections. Furthermore, a recent
functional imaging study has shown that interindividual difer-
ences, which can be found in size and micro-architecture of the
CC, have consequences for language processing (Westerhausen
et al. 2006, 80). Here, the degree of activation diferences between
left and right inferior frontal language areas (in a word produc-
tion task) appeared to be directly related to diferences in the iber
architecture of the callosal connection. Whether structural CC
diferences between individuals also trigger diferences in per-
formance or are even associated with language disorders (as was
hypothesized for dyslexia) has still to be conirmed.
Ren Westerhausen
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Friederici, Angela D., D. Yves von Cramon, and Sonja A. Kotz. 2007. Role
of the corpus callosum in speech comprehension: Interfacing syntax
and prosody. Neuron 53: 13545.
Gazzaniga, Michael S. 2000. Cerebral specialization and interhemi-
spheric communication Does the corpus callosum enable the human
condition? Brain 123.7: 12931326.
hiel, Alexander, Birgit Schumacher, Klaus Wienhard, Stefanie Gairing,
Lutz W. Kracht, Rainer Wagner, Walter F. Haupt, and Wolf-Dieter
Heiss. 2006. Direct demonstration of transcallosal disinhibition in
language networks. Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism
26.9: 11227.
Westerhausen, Ren, Frank Kreuder, Sarah Dos Santos Sequeira, Christof
Walter, Wolfgang Woerner, Ralf A. Wittling, Elisabeth Schweiger, and
Werner Wittling. 2006. he association of macro- and microstruc-
ture of the corpus callosum and language lateralisation. Brain and
Language 97: 8090.
CORPUS LINGUISTICS
his term refers to linguistic research that uses corpus data as
the primary object of study. he term, therefore, describes a
methodology rather than a ield of linguistics; corpus research
has been carried out in most areas of formal and applied
linguistics, including phonetics, phonology, morphol-
ogy, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse analy-
sis (linguistic), sociolinguistics, language acquisition,
PSYCHOLINGUISTICS, HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS, dialectol-
ogy, and lexicography.
Corpus Data as an Object of Study
It is appropriate to begin a discussion of corpus linguistics with the
question of whether the language found in corpora is a legitimate
object of study. Corpora, after all, contain performance data.
Noam Chomsky (1957 and elsewhere) and others have argued
that linguists should model competence rather than perfor-
mance; this has been widely interpreted to mean that the source
of linguistic data should be introspective judgments, rather than
naturally occurring spoken or written text. Additional arguments
commonly put forward against the use of corpus data are 1) that
performance may be afected by factors that are not linguistic in
nature, such as memory limitations and the speakers state of
mind, degree of tiredness, and so on, and 2) that performance
data include utterances that are judged ungrammatical by native
speakers of the language. In response to the irst argument, intro-
spective judgments can also be afected by nonlinguistic factors.
Grammaticality judgments often depend on context: Utterances
may seem unacceptable in isolation but perfectly natural in the
proper context, for example, embedded in discourse within a
corpus. he inability to imagine an appropriate context is clearly
irrelevant to grammaticality, but may also be afected by nonlin-
guistic factors, such as tiredness. hus, introspective judgments
may lead to the wrong results (Bresnan 2007). In response to the
second, the number of ungrammatical utterances in a corpus is
usually small (Labov 1969).
In their favor, corpora provide at least two types of informa-
tion that is not easily available via speaker judgments: frequency
data, which have applications ranging from lexical studies to
research into language impairment; and historical and longitu-
dinal data, which can be used to model language acquisition and
language change.
Deining Characteristics of Corpora
Corpora themselves vary widely in size, form, and content, and
in fact, almost any collection of data (a single text, a collection
of the works of a single author, speech recorded from a single
individual at a speciic time) could be considered a corpus.
But modern corpora are usually assumed to have the following
characteristics:
1. hey are representative samples of the language under
investigation and have a inite size. Complete corpora for mod-
ern spoken languages are of course impossible to construct,
because the number of utterances is constantly increasing as
the language is used by its speakers. he goal of corpus build-
ers is to collect a sample that provides a good picture of the
possible utterances of the language, including both rare and
common constructions with representative frequencies. Most
corpora contain a broad range of texts from diferent authors/
speakers and genres. here are, of course, corpora that by their
very nature cannot be representative in this way. hese include
corpora of dead languages, where the texts are inite and
231
Corpus Linguistics
restricted to those that have survived over time, and corpora
of child language during the period of acquisition, which are
intentionally restricted to a speciic type of speech and a spe-
ciic class of speakers.
2. Modern corpora are machine-readable; that is, they exist
as computer iles and can be transmitted and manipulated
electronically. his characteristic has two consequences: First,
corpora can be searched quickly and easily; second, they can
be annotated with linguistic and extralinguistic information to
make them more useful.
3. Modern corpora are publicly available and are considered
standard tools for research in particular languages. his char-
acteristic has major implications for language study: Empirical
results can be replicated and veriied; studies can more easily
build on one another, since they are working from the same
empirical base; and difering results must be attributed to dif-
ferent methodology or diferent interpretation, rather than to
diferent databases. hus, corpora may have the overall efect
of raising the quality of linguistic research.
Corpora and Their Annotation
One beneit of large corpora can also be a disadvantage: Having
a million words or more of text available is of very little use if
the corpus cannot be easily searched. Even for lexical studies,
the researcher must use concordances and other software to
determine and then collect all of the variant forms and spell-
ings of individual words in the corpus. For syntactic research,
both part of speech and structural annotation is necessary.
Consider the standard problem of retrieving relative clauses in
a corpus of modern standard English. Relative clauses may be
introduced by that, which or who/whom, or even by nothing
at all:
(1) a. the book that I read
b. the book which I read
c. the book I read
Searching lexically for that and which/who/whom will not only
miss clauses like (1c) but will also ind the examples in (2), which
are not relative clauses at all:
(2) a. I like that book.
b. Which one do you want?
hese problems are termed low recall (missing wanted data
like [1c]) and low precision (getting unwanted data like [2ab])
by Ann Taylor 2007. hey can be solved by annotating corpora
for part of speech and (abstract) syntactic structure, and by
using a search engine designed for corpus annotations.
he construction and use of publicly available corpora have
revolutionized the way that empirical linguistic research is
conducted. Rather than spending most of their time collect-
ing data, linguists can now concentrate on asking questions,
retrieving the relevant data quickly and easily from corpora,
and constructing analyses. Large searchable corpora are now
publicly available for many diferent languages, both written
and spoken, historical and contemporary, in many diferent
styles and registers.
Susan Pintzuk
232
Creativity in Language Use
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bresnan, Joan. 2007. A few lessons from typology. Linguistic Typology
11.1. Available online at: http://www.stanford.edu/bresnan.
Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. he Hague, Paris: Mouton.
Labov, William. 1969. he logic of non-standard English. Georgetown
Monographs on Language and Linguistics 22.
McEnery, Tony, and Andrew Wilson. 1997. Corpus Linguistics.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Contains a full discussion of
many of the topics introduced in this entry.
Sampson, Geofrey, and Diana McCarthy. 2004. Corpus
Linguistics: Readings in a Widening Discipline. London and New
York: Continuum. A variety of corpus studies.
Taylor, Ann. 2007. he York-Toronto-Helsinki parsed corpus of Old
English prose. In Using Unconventional Digital Language Corpora. Vol.
2. Ed. J. C. Beal, K. Corrigan, and H. Moisl. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave-
Macmillan. A detailed description of a historical English corpus, its
morphosyntactic annotation scheme, and its search engine.
CREATIVITY IN LANGUAGE USE
Linguists speak of creativity in two senses. One is what Noam
Chomsky called the generativity of language. he other is the
imaginative use of language in novel ways.
Chomsky described language as a system wherein a inite
set of formal rules (plus vocabulary) can generate an indeinite
number of hierarchical structures or sentences. Many of
these will be irst-time new. his, said Chomsky, implies that a
(behaviorist) theory based on surface probabilities cannot pre-
dict language use, nor explain the nested dependencies within
sentences.
he imaginative use of language wasnt stressed by Chomsky.
In calling himself a cartesian linguist, he noted that prede-
cessors such as Wilhelm von Humboldt had also stressed the cre-
ativity of language. However, Humboldt was referring not to the
formal generativity of syntax but to the linguistic expression of
novel thoughts (Boden 2006, 9.iv.fg). his includes straightfor-
ward sentences/phrases conveying new facts or ideas and also
imaginative uses such as metaphor, analogy, and poetic
metaphor, or imagery.
Cognitive science has deined various creative information-
processing mechanisms underlying those imaginative uses.
he basic principles of mental association are implemented
by connectionism. his models the luidity of concepts
(Hofstadter and Mitchell 1993), and (in parallel distributed
processing [PDP] networks) their deinition by Wittgensteinian
family-resemblances, rather than necessary and sufficient
rules. hey illuminate, for instance, how Coleridge could pro-
duce the imagery in he Ancient Mariner (Boden 2004, 12546).
conceptual blending theory (Fauconnier and Turner
2002) outlines how various metaphors and analogies could arise.
Classical artiical intelligence (AI) has identiied some hierarchi-
cal conceptual structures in longterm memory, including gen-
eral and culture-speciic assumptions about human motivation
(Boden 2004, 17092). And it has modeled the generation of jokes
(see verbal humor) of the form What do you get if you cross
an x with a y? (Binsted and Ritchie 1997). Compare: Q. What
do you get if you cross a sheep with a kangaroo? A. A woolly
jumper. (his joke doesnt work in American English, wherein
jumpers are called sweaters.)
Creoles
As that example illustrates, the tacit knowledge of language
(syntax, semantics, phonetics, morphology, catego-
rization, dialect, orthography) and also of the world
that is needed to use language imaginatively is richly detailed
and widely various. Both hearer and speaker must possess this
knowledge if the creative usage is to be understood.
Margaret A. Boden
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Binsted, Kim, and G. D. Ritchie. 1997. Computational rules for punning
riddles. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 10: 2576.
Boden, M. A. 2004. he Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms. 2d ed.
London: Routledge.
Boden, M. A.. 2006. Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fauconnier, G. R., and Mark Turner. 2002. he Way We hink: Conceptual
Blending and the Minds Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.
Hofstadter, D. R., and Melanie Mitchell. 1993. he copycat pro-
ject: A model of mental luidity and analogy-making. In Advances
in Connectionist and Neural Computation heory. Vol. 2: Analogical
Connections. Ed. Keith Holyoak and John Barnden, 31112. Norwood,
NJ: Ablex.
Humboldt, Wilhelm von. [1836] 1988. On Language: he Diversity
of Human Language-Structure and Its Inluence on the Mental
Development of Mankind. Trans. Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
CREOLES
SocioHistorical, Terminological, and Epistemological
Background
he concept Creole has not been operationalized with rigorous
and reliable criteria in linguistic theory. At best, it is a sociohis-
torically and politically motivated concept, often misidentiied
as linguistic (DeGraf 2005b, 2009; Mufwene 2008).
Etymologically, the word Creole derives from the Portuguese
crioulo and/or Spanish criollo raised in the home (from criar
to raise, to breed). In Caribbean history, the labeling of bio-
logical species, including humans, as Creole seems to have
preceded the labeling as Creole of certain speech varieties.
Both uses referred to nonindigenous varieties that developed
locally, in contrast to their counterparts from Europe and Africa.
he original uses of the word were thus devoid of any speciic
structural correlates (Mufwene 2001, 311; Chaudenson and
Mufwene 2001, Chap. 1).
In keeping with this original usage and to avoid circular-
ity and the sort of controversial linguistic assumptions that
are noted in Mufwene 2008, I here ostensively use Creole as a
label for certain speech varieties that became emblematic of the
newly created communities the Creole communities on and
around colonial Caribbean plantations. hese are the classic
Creole languages.
Caribbean Creole languages developed mostly among
Europeans and Africans via language acquisition by adults and
children in a complex mix of language-contact settings. he
complex sociohistorical factors therein included a continuum
of social divides and power asymmetries (Chaudenson and
Mufwene 2001). One end of this continuum was marked by
drastic opposition and inequality between the dominant and
dominated groups speakers of the European superstrate and
the African substrate languages, respectively. At the opposite
end, the superstrate and substrate speakers had relatively inti-
mate interactions, especially during the settlement period when
substrate speakers were outnumbered by, and in relatively close
contact and interdependence with, superstrate speakers and
then, throughout the colonial period, among and around the
groups that played an intermediate bufer role race- and class-
wise. hese continua would entail, throughout colonial history,
corresponding continua of second-language (L2) learner vari-
eties of the superstrate language. hese non-native varieties,
alongside native varieties, of the superstrate language would
in turn become the target for increasingly numerous cohorts of
native Creole speakers (DeGraf 2002, 37494; 2005b, 2009).
My working assumption is uniformitarian: Normal processes
of irst- and second-language acquisition (L2A) and use
have underlaid the formation of Creoles as they have the forma-
tion of non-Creoles. he sociohistorical evidence, as documented
by (e.g.) Salikoko Mufwene (2008), suggests that Caribbean
Creoles were not seeded by any sort of structureless pidgins
(i.e., these Creoles were not created with input from early Pidgins
allegedly spoken by the parents of the irst generation of Creole
speakers). Such early Pidgins as the immediate predecessors of
Caribbean Creoles have never been documented, and neither
does the contemporary structural evidence support the pos-
tulation of such Pidgins as the primary ancestors of Caribbean
Creoles (see the following).
Creole Exceptionalism
he term Creole exceptionalism (DeGraf 2003) covers a sub-
set of long-standing hypotheses whereby Creole languages
constitute a sui generis class on phylogenetic and/or structural
grounds. Here is a sample:
(i) Creoles are degenerate ofshoots of their European
ancestors;
(ii) Creoles are special hybrids with exceptional
genealogy;
(iii) Creoles are the only contemporary languages with a his-
tory of abnormal transmission that deprives them of any
structurally full-ledged ancestors.
(iv) he Pidgin-to-Creole transition recapitulates the transi-
tion from pre-human protolanguage to human language.
(For a fuller development of these arguments, see DeGraf 2005a,
2009.)
Creoles as Degenerate Offshoots? Its only in the latter part of
the twentieth century that linguists started refuting the received
wisdom that Creoles are structurally impoverished variants of
their European norms. In Julien Vinsons scientiic dictionary
(1889, 3456), Creole languages result from the adaptation of
a language, especially some Indo-European language, to the
(so to speak) phonetic and grammatical genius of a race that
is linguistically inferior. he resulting language is composite,
truly mixed in its vocabulary, but its grammar remains essen-
tially Indo-European, albeit extremely simpliied. For Leonard
233
Creoles
Bloomield (1933, 472), he creolized language has the status of
an inferior dialect of the masters speech.
Even in the latter half of the twentieth century, certain lin-
guists claimed that structural linguistic factors, related to (e.g.)
morphological simplicity and a vocabulary [that] is extremely
poor, are among the greatest obstacles to the blossoming of
Creoles (Valdman 1978, 345; cf. Whinnom 1971, 110; Samarin
1980, 221; Seuren and Wekker 1986; and Quint 1997, 58). Pieter
Seuren (1998, 292) has elevated the alleged extraordinary sim-
plicity of Creole languages to historical universal.
here is no reliable empirical or theoretical basis for the claim
that Creole languages are uniformly less complex than their
European ancestors. For example, certain aspects of my native
Haitian Creole (HC) signal an increase in complexity to the extent
that these properties of HC have no counterpart in French, HCs
European ancestor (DeGraf 2001b, 284). Furthermore, HC, like
any other language, expands its vocabulary as needed, via pro-
ductive aixation, neologisms, borrowings, and so on (DeGraf
2001a; Fattier 1998).
CREOLES AS SPECIAL HYBRIDS? Lucien Adams (1883) hybri-
dologie linguistique hypothesis posited diferent linguistic
templates for diferent races. he latter belong to distinct evolu-
tionary rungs, with their respective linguistic templates ranked
in a corresponding hierarchy of complexity. Upon language
contact, these templates will cross-fertilize (i.e., hybridize),
and the most primitive grammar (in this scenario, the gram-
mar of the lower race of speakers, i.e., the non-European
speakers) imposes an upper bound of complexity on the hybrid
grammar. In such scenario, the European contribution to the
hybridization of European and non-European languages is lim-
ited to supericial traits, such as the phonetic shapes of words
only these shapes, and not the complex grammars of European
languages, can be acquired by the allegedly inferior minds of
the non-Europeans.
Claire Lefebvres (1998) relexiication hypothesis is far
removed from Adams race-theoretical postulates. For Lefebvre,
it is because the Africans in Haiti had very limited access to
French that they were virtually unable to learn any aspect of
French grammar. hus, they could only overlay French-derived
phonetic strings on their native substrate grammars, with the lat-
ter being kept nearly intact in the original Creole languages.
Consider again HC. Current results from L2A research pre-
dicts that HC structure would have indeed evolved under some
inluence from the substrate languages. L2A research also docu-
ments that adult learners at every stage acquire more than pho-
netic strings from their target. Unsurprisingly, HC instantiates,
alongside substrate-inluenced patterns, a wide range of super-
strate-derived properties that apparently have no analogues in
the substrate languages (DeGraf 2002).
Adams and Lefebvres proposals share one non-uniformitar-
ian assumption, namely, that Creole creators, unlike L2 learn-
ers elsewhere, were unable to learn anything abstract about
their target language. Yet the lexicon and morphology of HC
demonstrate that Creole creators were able to segment and
parse target speech (here, French), including aixes. Such seg-
mentation and parsing contradict the claim that the creators of
HC could not access any abstract property of French grammar.
234
Segmentation and parsing of target speech necessarily tap into
substantial aspects of target grammar.
CREOLIZATION AS ABNORMAL/BROKEN TRANSMISSION AND
CREOLES AS LIVING FOSSILS? In keeping with the postulated
congruence in nineteenth-century philology between the evo-
lution of races and that of languages, Alfred de Saint-Quentin
([1872] 1989, 40) considered it a property of emerging languages
to be naive and claimed Guyanais Creole as a spontaneous
product of the human mind, freed from any kind of intellectual
culture. Similarly, Isle de France Creole was considered an
infantile language for an infantile race (Reinecke 1980, 11).
In twentieth-century linguistics, the abnormal/broken trans-
mission doctrine excludes Creoles from the scope of the com-
parative method and turns them into new linguistic phyla
without ancestry (homason and Kaufman 1988).
his doctrine seems related to another myth of origins, as
writers in cultural studies (see deconstruction and crit-
ical discourse analysis) might put it that of Creoles as
contemporary (quasi-)replicas of human language at its evo-
lutionary incipience (Bickerton 1990, 171, Chap. 5; 1998, 354;
Bickerton and Calvin 2000, 149). In Derek Bickertons scenario,
the hypothetical Pidgin-to-Creole cycle recapitulates the evolu-
tion of Homo erectuss protolanguage into the most primitive
instantiations of Homo sapienss language: What happened [in
the formation of Hawaiian Creole] was a jump from protolan-
guage to language in a single generation (Bickerton 1990, 171).
In this scenario, one sui generis process that allegedly dis-
rupts normal language transmission and leads to catastrophic
language genesis is some form of radical pidginization. he lat-
ter is claimed to obliterate virtually all stable structural patterns,
including morphology (Bickerton 1999, 69, n. 16), and to lead to a
structureless early pidgin. Such a Pidgin is putatively unlike any
full-ledged human language and more like the hypothetical pro-
tolanguage of Homo erectus, our prehistoric hominid ancestors
(Bickerton 1990, 169, 181; 1998, 354; Bickerton and Calvin 2000,
149). his early Pidgin, by deinition, is non-native, unstable, and
used as an emergency lingua franca across languages. his early
Pidgin is argued to abruptly seed the Creole when the former
becomes the acquisition target for the irst generation of locally
born children (see Bickerton 1999, 49) in a way similar to how
Homo erectus protolanguage seeded the early forms of human
language as spoken by the irst cohorts of Homo sapiens.
How could the documented pidgins of modern humans and
the hypothetical protolanguage of Homo erectus evince any
enlightening similarity? How could the hypothetical Pidgin-to-
Creole transition in modern history resemble the evolution in
prehistory from Homo erectuss structureless protolanguage to
Homo sapienss full-ledged human language? If the transition
from Homo-erectus protolanguage to Homo-sapiens human
language is a relex of brain reorganization via natural selection
in the course of human evolution, then Bickertons hypothetical
Pidgin-to-Creole cycle has nothing to say about such brain reor-
ganization and its linguistic structural consequences. Indeed
Pidgins, under any deinition, relect mental properties of Homo
sapiens. Acquisition data suggest that learners at every age and
stage, including Pidgin speakers, have access to the same faculty
of language as any other human being (Mufwene 2008, ch. 5).
Creoles
he broken transmission and linguistic fossils doctrines
are further undermined by a vast range of comparative data and
empirical and theoretical observations. As mentioned earlier,
there is ample evidence for systematic lexical and morpho-syntac-
tic correspondences between radical Creoles and their European
lexiiers from the onset of Creole formation onward (Fattier 1998;
DeGraf 2001a, 2005b, 2009; Mufwene 2008). here is also ample
evidence for transfer from the African substrate languages into
Creole grammars. his is as expected given the aforementioned
facts of Caribbean history and the results from L2A research. he
sort of structureless pidgin that is an essential ingredient in the
traditional Pidgin-to-Creole scenario renders mysterious any sys-
tematic set of structural correspondences between Creoles and
their ancestor languages. Besides, the magnitude of structural
gaps in the history of non-Creole languages seems comparable
to, and sometimes even greater than, that of their counterparts
in Creole diachrony (DeGraf 2005b, 2009), pace homason and
Kaufman (1988, 812, 206) and homason (2002, 105).
If the rigorous criteria of the Comparative Method [CM]
include the establishment of recurring phonological correspon-
dences in morphemes of identical or similar meanings, including
much basic vocabulary the establishment of systematic mor-
phosyntactic correspondences (homason 2002, 103), then the
available evidence puts Caribbean Creoles squarely in the scope
of the CM (DeGraf 2005b, 2009; Mufwene 2008, pace homason).
Such evidence militates against the postulation, in Creole for-
mation, of an exceptional and abnormal break in transmission
with subsequent creation of all new linguistic structure from the
hypothetical scraps of a Pidgin.
The End of Creole Exceptionalism?
Creolization difers from language change on sociohistori-
cal and political, not linguistic, grounds. For example, conquered
peoples involved in forming Caribbean Creoles may have spo-
ken more languages than their counterparts in the formation
of, say, the Romance languages. Furthermore, oppression in
the Caribbean was correlated with race. Caribbean Creoles and
Romance languages thus evolved in distinct ecologies, with
Caribbean vernaculars ending up disfranchised for sociohis-
torical reasons. Creolization is a social, not a structural, pro-
cess (Mufwene 2001, 138). he individual speakers engaged in
language contact, whether in the genesis of Creole or Romance
languages, would have made use of the same [mental] process
adopted [for the] formation of [their respective new] language
(Greenield 1830, 51 f). If so, Creole grammars do not, and could
not, form a typological class that is aprioristically and fundamen-
tally distinguishable from non-Creole grammars (DeGraf 2005b,
2009; Mufwene 2008).
Michel DeGraf
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Adam, Lucien. 1883. Les idiomes ngro-aryen et malo-aryen: Essai
dhybridologie linguistique. Paris: Maisonneuve et cie.
Bickerton, Derek. 1990. Language and Species. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Bickerton, Derek.. 1998. Catastrophic evolution: he case for a single
step from protolanguage to full human language. In Approaches to the
Evolution of Language, ed. J. Hurford, M. Studdert-Kennedy, and C.
Knight, 34158. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 1999. How to acquire language without positive evidence. In
Language Creation and Language Change, ed. Michel DeGraf, 4974.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bickerton, Derek, and William Calvin. 2000. Lingua Ex
Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky with the Human Brain.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bloomield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: H. Holt and Co.
Chaudenson, Robert, and Salikoko Mufwene. 2001. Creolization of
Language and Culture. London: Routledge.
DeGraf, Michel. 2001a. Morphology in Creole genesis: Linguistics and
ideology. In Ken Hale: A Life in Language, ed. M. Kenstowicz, 53121.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
. 2001b. On the origin of Creoles: A Cartesian critique of Neo-
Darwinian linguistics. Linguistic Typology 5.2/3, 213310.
. 2002. Relexiication: A reevaluation. Anthropological Linguistics
44.4: 321414.
. 2003. Against Creole exceptionalism. Language 79: 391410.
. 2004. Against Creole exceptionalism (redux). Language
80: 8349.
. 2005a. Linguists most dangerous myth: he fallacy of Creole
exceptionalism. Language in Society 34: 53391.
. 2005b. Morphology and word order in creolization and beyond.
In Handbook of Comparative Syntax, ed. G. Cinque and R. Kayne, 249
312. New York: Oxford University Press.
. 2009. Language acquisition in creolization and, thus, language
change. Language and Linguistic Compass 3:888971.
Fattier, Dominique. 1998. Contribution ltude de la gense dun
crole: LAtlas linguistique dHati, cartes et commentaires. Ph.D. diss.,
Universit de Provence. Distributed by Presses Universitaires du
Septentrion, Villeneuve dAscq, France.
Greenield, William. 1830. A Defence of the Surinam Negro-English
Version of the New Testament. London: Samuel Bagster.
Lefebvre, Claire. 1998. Creole Genesis and the Acquisition of
Grammar: he Case of Haitian Creole. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Mufwene, Salikoko. 2001. he Ecology of Language Evolution.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 2008. Language Evolution. London: Continuum.
Quint, Nicolas. 1997. Les les du Cap-Vert aujourdhui: Perdues dans
limmensit. Paris: LHarmattan.
Reinecke, John. 1980. William Greenield, a neglected pioneer creolist.
In Studies in Caribbean Language, ed. L. Carrington, 112. Saint-
Augustine, Trinidad: Society for Caribbean Linguistics.
Saint-Quentin, Alfred de. [1872] 1989. Introduction lhistoire de
Cayenne , with tude sur la grammaire crole by Auguste de Saint-
Quentin. Antibes: J. Marchand. 1980 edition: Cayenne: Comit de la
culture, de lducation et de lenvironnement, Rgion Guyane.
Samarin, William. 1980. Standardization and instrumentalization of
Creole languages. In heoretical Orientations in Creole Studies, ed.
A. Valdman and A. Highield, 21336. New York: Academic Press.
Seuren, Pieter. 1998. Western Linguistics: An Historical Introduction.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Seuren, P., and Herman W. 1986. Semantic transparency as a factor in
Creole genesis. In Substrata Versus Universals in Creole Genesis, ed.
P. Muysken and N. Smith, 5770. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
homason, Sarah. 2002. Creoles and genetic relationship. Journal of
Pidgin and Creole Languages 17: 1019.
homason, Sarah, and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language
Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press.
235
Critical Discourse Analysis
Valdman, Albert. 1978. Le crole: Structure, statut et origine. Paris: ditions
Klincksieck.
Vinson, Julien. 1889. Croles. In Dictionnaire des sciences anthro-
pologiques, ed. A. Bertillon, 3457. Paris: Doin.
Whinnom, Keith. 1971. Linguistic hybridization and the special case of
pidgins and creoles. In Pidginization and Creolization of Languages,
ed. D. Hymes, 91115. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
his term has been used since the 1990s by a group of academics
initially in the United Kingdom, but also increasingly in the rest
of Europe, Australia, South America and more recently in Asia.
he various practitioners of critical discourse analysis (CDA)
who would associate themselves with this label have in common
some concept of what it means to be critical, various notions of
discourse inluenced strongly by sociology and social theory, and
a range of descriptive methods borrowed from various linguistic
theories. Broadly speaking, what all CDA practitioners are con-
cerned with is the way language is integrated with society, but
unlike most sociolinguists, they espouse an overtly ethical or
political stance in engaging with this question. While its goal is to
increase understanding of the relationship between society and
language, CDA does not in general contribute to the description
or theorization of human language systems.
he term critical was irst used to characterize an approach
to language study that was dubbed critical linguistics by Roger
Fowler and his colleagues (1979) and by Gunther Kress and
Robert Hodge ([1979] 1993). hese scholars took some inspiration
from George Orwells informal critique of the use of language in
political life and his dystopian fantasy of newspeak in the novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four. But they also acknowledged intellectual
debts to Valentin Voloshinov (see dialogism and hetero-
glossia) and to Frankfurt School critical theory, especially the
work of Jrgen Habermas (ideal speech situation). he ini-
tial impetus of critical linguistics was, to some extent, grounded
in the Enlightnement philosophical notion of critique. However,
in many respects, the work produced by critical linguistics and
its successor CDA has been colored by, even tainted by, the
everyday sense in which one speaks negatively of criticizing a
person or group of persons. Among other ideas, critical linguists
held that the use of language could lead to mystiication, which
analysis could elucidate. For example, a missing by-phrase in
English passive constructions might be seen as an ideological
means for concealing or mystifying reference to an agent. he
same is claimed for nominalizations such as destruction or arrest,
which have neither tense nor aspect and can also appear without
a by-phrase specifying an agent. Conspicuous clustering of syn-
onymous or near-synonymous lexical items around a particu-
lar topic, or overlexicalization, is felt to indicate some critical
problematic social process or institution. Analysis of the refer-
ents associated with diferent kinds of participant roles in clauses
(e.g., actor, goal, beneiciary) is regarded as a way of detecting
patterns in the way social relations, especially power relations,
are represented. he most signiicant principle of critical linguis-
tics, carried over into CDA, is the important observation that use
of language is a social practice, that is, a form of action consti-
tutive of and constituted by social processes and structures.
236
he label critical linguistics has given way to critical dis-
course analysis, as the ield developed to include wider areas
of social concern and more social theory. In particular, in addi-
tion to the writings of Marx and Marxian writers (see marxism
and language ), CDA practitioners have often made appeal
to Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and the British sociolo-
gist Anthony Giddens. he label CDA became associated with
the work of, in particular, Norman Fairclough (e.g. 1989, 1992),
Teun van Dijk (e.g. 1993, 1998, 2005) and Ruth Wodak (1996;
Wodak et al. 1999). Faircloughs work, mainly cast within a neo-
Marxian mold, has developed detailed concepts and models of
discourse, intertextuality, and genre, while leaving the
linguistic dimension of discourse comparatively undeveloped.
His work can be characterized as social theory that gives full
recognition to the constitutive role of language in society, in the
form of interlinked discursive practices. Van Dijks work is
rooted in formal discourse analysis of the 1970s with a cognitive
tendency, and has sought to provide deeper discourse-based
understanding of major pragmatic notions such as context,
as well as of the social-theoretic notion of ideology. Wodaks
work has developed the discourse historical method (Wodak
and Meyer 2001), a methodology for empirical investigation
that advocates the study of intersecting texts and samples of
talk collected from various milieus and representing various
genres, for which analysis of the historical context is regarded
as crucial. Numerous other scholars of the same period, whose
accomplishments it is not possible to describe here, produced
work that was overtly or implicitly critical, particularly in
France, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium, the Hispanic
world, and Australia.
he CDA literature has introduced a number of key con-
cepts and claims. he principle that discourse is constitutive of
social processes and structures has been extended to include
other semiotic systems, notably pictorial ones (Kress and van
Leeuwen 2001). Discourses, in the plural, are understood as rel-
atively stable uses of language serving the structuring of social
life, organizations, and political systems. Such discourses con-
sist of interlinked discursive practices or genres. Discourses
may be of various kinds and operate in diferent ways. hus,
political ideologies, scientiic worldviews, ethical systems, and
the like are said to represent the world in particular ways. Genres
regulate interaction and thus control social behavior, examples
being interviews, news broadcasts, medical consultations, edu-
cational examinations, and so forth. When these discursive
practices are viewed as interlinked, they involve intertextual-
ity and interdiscursivity, leading to the colonization of one
discourse by another and to hybrid genres a process regarded
as integral to and an index of social change. Discursive prac-
tices viewed as a complex network are referred to as an order of
discourse (Fairclough 1992). A crucial claim of CDA is that the
details of particular instances of text and talk are related in com-
plex ways to these structures, structures regarded as embodying
power.
CDA has not produced a theory of language that explains how
meanings produced by utterances have the tight connection to
social structures, which is often claimed. here are nonetheless
numerous examples of the description, analysis, and interpreta-
tion of utterances in the CDA literature, and these are dependent
Critical Discourse Analysis
on existing linguistic frameworks. In critical linguistics, early
transformational and generative grammar was used as
a framework for explaining the supposedly ideological efects of
the language forms found in texts. One questionable claim was
that a linguistic system that is, the syntax, lexicon, and if not
the phonology then the writing system of a language could be
inherently ideological (Kress and Hodge [1979] 1993), an idea
revived in equally questionable fashion by Robert Hodge and
Kam Louie (1998) in their discussion of Chinese. A more lasting
inluence has been M. Hallidays systemic-functional grammar,
which CDA has drawn on for its classiication of clause types, its
model of modality and theory of register. his framework
has the advantage of being formulated within a social-semiotic
perspective. However, it has the disadvantage that it is inad-
equate for the analysis of certain textual phenomena that CDA
writers have wanted to talk about, particularly such theoretically
diicult areas as implied meanings and metaphor. he reason for
this is that systemic-functional grammar has an encoding model
of linguistic meaning and fails, as do certain kinds of CDA work,
to take account of the fact that language understanding depends
on nonlinguistic knowledge. By contrast, alongside these theo-
retical frameworks, cognitive approaches have increasingly
provided theoretical resources, as is shown by the work of van
Dijk (e.g., 1998, 2005), who has drawn on models from cogni-
tive psychology, and Paul Chilton (1996, 2005), who has drawn
on conceptual metaphor theory and blending theory (see
conceptual blending).
CDA has itself been the focus of principled criticism for at
least three reasons. One is its claim to be socially committed and
objective (Widdowson 2005). Another criticism has come from
within CDA itself on the basis of the view that CDA has been
too negative and should examine, even advocate, positive
analysis of discourse that it approves of (Martin 2004). Kieran
OHalloran (2003) has criticized CDAs inadequate notion of
cognition, in particular its symbolicism that is, the assump-
tion that mental processes correspond to and can be inluenced
by the manipulation of symbols. Chilton (2005) criticizes CDAs
failure to engage with developments in cognitive linguistics
and evolutionary psychology, arguing also that a critical faculty
may be universal and that CDA may exaggerate the power of
discourse. he fact remains, however, that the notion of critical
analysis of discourse remains increasingly inluential through-
out the world.
In general, it can be argued that, taken as a whole, CDA writ-
ing provides something more like a social theory than a linguistic
theory, although this is not to overlook many examples of perspi-
cacious analysis of individual utterances in their sociopolitical
contexts, for example, analyses of leadership speeches, various
media genres, teacher pupil exchanges, and the like. his case-
by-case approach may in itself be a disadvantage, since CDA is
premised on claims about entire discourse networks, a prob-
lem addressed by Wodaks proposals for an empirical method
based on the analysis of linked instances of diferent genres
within organizational structures (Wodak et al. 1999; Wodak and
Meyer 2001). he most general characteristic of CDA has been
not its linguistics but its ethically or politically committed stance.
Indeed, a number of CDA practitioners make an emancipatory
mission the core element of their work, and this is evident in the
special focus in many CDA works on issues such as racism, mili-
tarism, media bias, marketization, and gender.
his survey necessarily neglects much work that has a critical
stance without subscribing to the CDA label. Such work would
include the writing on language and gender that has arguably had
an impact on modern social behavior (for an overview see Eckert
and McConnell-Ginet 2003). It would also include work on soci-
ety and on controversial political matters in North America (G.
Lakof 1996); R. Lakof 1990; Lemke 1995). Further, it should also
include the emerging scholarship on discourse in its sociopoliti-
cal context in China (cf. Gu 2001) and on a smaller scale in the
Middle East and Africa. It may be the case that something like the
CDA approach emerges in periods of signiicant socioeconomic
or political change: In some respects, CDA may be considered to
have the character of a social movement.
Paul Chilton
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1982. Ce que parler veut dire: Lconomie des changes
linguistiques. Paris: Fayard.
Chilton, Paul. 1996. Security Metaphors: Cold War Discourse from
Containment to Common House. New York: Peter Lang.
. 2004. Analysing Political Discourse: heory and Practice.
London: Routledge.
. 2005. Missing links in mainstream CDA: Modules, blends
and the critical instinct. In A New Agenda in (Critical)l Discourse
Analysis: heory and Interdisciplinarity, ed. Ruth Wodak and Paul
Chilton 1950. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Eckert, Penelope, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 2003. Language and
Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and Power. London: Longman.
. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Fowler, Roger, Gunther Kress, Robert Hodge, and Tony Trew, eds. 1979.
Language and Control. London: Routledge.
Goatly, A. 2007. Washing the Brain: Metaphor and Hidden Ideology.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Gu, Yueguo. 2001. he changing orders of discourse in a changing
China. In Studies in Chinese Linguistics. Vol 2. Ed. Haihua Pan, 3158.
Hong Kong: Linguistic Society of Hong Kong.
Hodge, Robert, and Kam Louie. 1998. he Politics of Chinese Language
and Culture. London and New York: Routledge.
Kress, Gunther, and Robert Hodge. [1979] 1993. Language as Ideology.
London: Routledge.
Kress, Gunther, and heo van Leeuwen. 2001. Multimodal Discourse: he
Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold.
Lakof, George. 1996. Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know hat
Liberals Dont. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lakof, Robin. 1990. Talking Power: he Politics of Language in Our Lives.
New York: Basic Books.
Lemke, Jay. 1995. Textual Politics: Discourse and Social Dynamics.
London: Taylor & Francis.
Martin, Jim R. 2004. Positive discourse analysis: Power, solidarity and
change, Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses. 49: 179200.
OHalloran, Kieran. 2003. Critical Discourse Analysis and Language
Cognition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Saussure, Louis de, and Peter Schulz, eds. 2005. Manipulation and
Ideologies in the Twentieth Century: Discourse, Language, Mind.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Van Dijk, Teun. 1993. Elite Discourse and Racism. Newbury Park,
CA: Sage.
. 1998. Ideology. London: Sage.
237
Critical Periods
. 2005. Contextual knowledge management in discourse produc-
tion: A CDA perspective. In A New Agenda in (Critical) Discourse
Analysis: heory and Interdisciplinarity, ed. Ruth Wodak and Paul
Chilton, 71100. Amsterdam: Benjamins
Widdowson H. G. 2005. Text, Context, Pretext: Critical Issues in Discourse
Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wodak, Ruth. 1996. Disorders of Discourse. London: Longman.
Wodak, Ruth, and Michael Meyer. 2001. Methods of Discourse Analysis.
London: Sage.
Wodak, Ruth, Rudolf de Cillia, Martin Reisigl, and Karen Liebhart. 1999.
he Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
CRITICAL PERIODS
he idea of a critical period for language acquisition is one of the
most debated issues in language acquisition theory. One reason
for controversy in the empirically based discussion of the critical
period hypothesis (CPH) has been the diferent understandings
of what a critical period actually means and what efects it might
have on language. Another more basic philosophical cause for
lack of unanimity is the notions central symbolic role in the
naturenurture divide and the concomitant ideological prefer-
ences among researchers to stress biological or environmental
aspects of language development. It is probably fair to say that
the rhetorical tone that is sometimes noticeable in debates on
the CPH originates to a considerable extent from the various
epistemological commitments of the protagonists, nativist or
constructivist, cognitive or social constructivist, general cogni-
tive or modular, and so on.
he CPH is relevant for all kinds of language learning. When
much more of the discussion is about second language learn-
ing (see second language acquisition) than about irst
language learning, it is a relection of the fact that irst language
learning, except in cases of isolation from language input, starts
from age zero. his means that data from delayed irst language
acquisition are rare. On the contrary, for second language acqui-
sition (SLA), massive data from language learning at diferent
phases of the life span are available. Most of this entry, therefore,
addresses second language acquisition rather than irst language
acquisition.
he notion of critical period has been used by ethologists to
explain the fact that the development of several aspects of spe-
cies-speciic behavior are dependent on early stimulus exposure
or experiences. A critical period can generally be deined, there-
fore, as a time span in early life during which the organism is
responsive to those stimuli in the external environment that are
crucial or relevant for a behavior (or capacity) to develop eventu-
ally in keeping with a species-speciic standard. If the organism
does not encounter or experience the particular stimuli during
the time span for sensitivity, that behavior will either not develop
at all or eventually reach an end state that difers from the spe-
cies-speciic ultimate standard. In addition to maturationally
constrained learning in humans and other species, there are two
other kinds of learning, namely, learning that occurs with equal
success at any time over the lifespan and learning that becomes
efective only at later phases of cognitive development.
Examples of maturationally constrained behaviors range
from imprinting in geese and song learning in songbirds (see
238
birdsong and human language) to bonding in sheep and
vision in cats and primates. he efects of maturation on minute
details of behavior are continuously being mapped out, not least
in neurobiological research. Adding to the classic results on sen-
sitive periods for human vision obtained by the 1981 Nobel med-
icine laureates David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, one example
is the more recent understanding obtained from experimental
studies on rhesus monkeys that certain irreversible visual dis-
orders, such as impaired vision of speciic movements or gaze
holding, result from failed visual experience during a three-week
neonatal sensitive period (Boothe 1997). As the visual systems
of rhesus monkeys and humans are in principle identical, these
results are claimed to be interpretable for humans where the
three-week neonatal sensitive period for monkeys corresponds
to a three-month period for humans.
Human language as a system of communication is an
extremely complex type of behavior. As in other kinds of complex
behavior, such as vision, it is highly likely that maturation afects
some but not all aspects of language acquisition. Diferent details
of language may be constrained by diferent phases of matura-
tion, something that is covered by the notion of multiple critical
periods as suggested, for example, by H. W. Seliger (1978). Much
language learning occurs with reasonable ease over the whole life
span, for example, the learning of new vocabulary. What seems
to be the key distinguishing parameter between child learners
and adult learners is the fact that young learners in the majority
of cases seem to be able to reach an overall proiciency level in
the second language, phonetics and phonology included,
that allows them to be taken for native speakers of that language,
while this is extremely rare in adult learners. herefore, an obvi-
ous candidate for what may be maturationally constrained in
language learning is the ability to reach ultimate nativelikeness.
A central role for nativelikeness was outlined already in Eric
Lennebergs original formulation of the CPH in his volume
Biological Foundations of Language:
[A]utomatic acquisition from mere exposure to a given lan-
guage seems to disappear [after puberty], and foreign languages
have to be taught and learned through a conscious and labored
efort. Foreign accents cannot be overcome easily after puberty.
However, a person can learn to communicate at the age of forty.
his does not trouble our basic hypothesis on age limitations
because we may assume that the cerebral organization for lan-
guage learning as such has taken place during childhood, and
since natural languages tend to resemble one another in many
fundamental aspects the matrix for language skills is present.
(1967, 176)
Lennebergs formulation, in actual fact, addressed many of the
issues that have been researched and debated over the years: 1)
the diference between the automatic, or implicit, acquisition
assumed to be possible within the critical period and conscious,
or explicit, learning postulated to be the only remaining option
for late learners; 2) puberty as the end point for a critical period;
3) the ability to reach nativelike ultimate proiciency for L2 learn-
ers who start at ages below that point; and 4) the efect that any
early language learning can have on subsequent languages.
In addition, albeit not mentioned in this particular quotation,
Lenneberg proposed 5) lateralization as the neural mechanism
Critical Periods
that could explain an end point for the critical period at puberty.
However, such a role for lateralization was soon demonstrated
not to be correct: he widely accepted theory in the 1960s that
lateral specialization is progressive, increasing with age from
infancy to adolescence has long been abandoned in the face of
accumulated evidence that indicates that cerebral lateral spe-
cialization is established from early infancy or even during
fetal development (Paradis 2004, 107).
Lennebergs proposals were based mainly on general informal
observations, but subsequent research has provided theoretical
frameworks and substantial empirical data that, taken together,
can be given an interpretation that is compatible with the predic-
tions of the hypothesis. he irst point, on the distinction between
(implicit) acquisition and (explicit) learning, has been addressed
in a series of theoretical discussions about language learning dif-
ferences between children and adults (see DeKeyser 2003), with
some of its most well known exponents in S. Krashens (1988)
acquisition-learning hypothesis, R. Bley-Vromans (1989) fun-
damental diference hypothesis, and S. Felixs (1985) competition
hypothesis. Also, the various perspectives on access to univer-
sal grammar (UG) (full/direct, partial/indirect, or no access)
in UG-framed SLA theories (see White 2003) can be translated
into a CPH framework (cf. Pinkers 1994 use-it-then-loose-it general cognitive changes, or L1 use, that would explain these
hypothesis).
As for the second point, a multitude of studies have singled
out puberty or early adolescence as an end point for high or
nativelike proiciency levels in a second language. Several other
studies have pointed to a discontinuity at earlier ages, in particu-
lar around age six, especially for phonology and grammar (Long
2005; see, especially, Johnson and Newport 1989).
In relation to point three on obtained nativelikeness in
younger and older starters, empirical observations are by and
large compatible with the CPH; that is, child learners frequently
have results in the range of native controls, whereas this is rare,
or even claimed never to have been demonstrated, in adult
learners (Hyltenstam and Abrahamsson 2003; Long 2005). In
many studies, however, nativelikeness is not focused upon. It is,
rather, the level of ultimate attainment, nativelike or not, among
younger and older learners that is correlated with age of onset
(AO). One of the most robust results in CPH-related research is a
strong negative correlation between AO and ultimate attainment
in a second language.
In addition, in relation to Lennebergs fourth point, the
hypothesis correctly seems to predict the fact that delayed expo-
sure to an L1 more severely afects the level of ultimate attain-
ment than delayed exposure to an L2. Case studies of abused
children who have not been exposed to any language before
puberty (Curtiss 1977) show severe limitations in the develop-
ment of grammar and pronunciation, whereas learning a second
language from the same age allows high levels of proiciency in
that language. It has frequently been pointed out that depriva-
tion data are diicult to interpret in terms of a critical period for
language, but similar results have been obtained from studies
of delayed irst language exposure to American Sign Language
(ASL) (e.g., Mayberry 1993).
A number of counterarguments to the CPH have also been
put forward over the decades. here is a current consensus
that some of these are, in fact, not valid arguments, as they deal
either with phenomena that are not covered by the hypothesis
or issues that are not decisive components of it. An example
of the former are early objections to the CPH based on results
showing that younger learners are, in fact, not better than older
learners in initial rate of learning a second language (Snow and
Hoefnagel-Hhle 1977). he CPH is not about what happens in
initial stages of second language learning but indeed about long-
term impacts, that is, what is ultimately attainable in language
learning. An example of objections to nondecisive components
is the type of criticism that says that if lateralization is not the
cerebral mechanism behind the diferential behavior of children
and adults (Krashen 1973), there can be no critical period. he
CPH is not dependent on lateralization as such; other cerebral
mechanisms may be at work.
More substantial criticisms to the CPH have frequently
focused on the correlation between AO and ultimate attainment.
For various reasons, most prominently because correlation does
not equal cause, results showing a strong negative correlation
between AO and ultimate proiciency are not accepted by every-
one as evidence of maturational constraints. It has been sug-
gested that there may be other factors of a social or psychological
nature, such as length of residence, input frequency, motivation,
correlations (cf. Flege, Frieda, and Nozawa 1997). However, in
studies that have used statistical measures that are able to assess
the relative weight of diferent dependent variables, it has consis-
tently been shown that AO is the strongest and often only factor
in predicting ultimate attainment. Results are often in the range
of 50 percent of the variance explained by AO, while other factors
add only 26 percent in explaining the variance (see DeKeyser
and Larson-Hall 2005). As these other factors do not correlate
highly with achieved ultimate attainment, and as none of them
has a convincing link to age, this leaves us with maturation as the
strongest candidate for explaining the correlation.
In addition, it has been claimed that AO and ultimate attain-
ment correlations exhibit patterns of a linear decrease, rather
than one of discontinuity, which would be expected for the
CPH: At the end of the period, there should be an obvious of-
set, after which we would expect a lattening of the interaction.
Studies such as E. Bialystok and B. Miller (1999) obtained results
indicating a linear decline through all AOs, and D. Birdsong
and M. Molis (2001) saw age efects among postpuberty and
adult learners generally. hese authors interpret their results as
evidence against the CPH and suggest general age-dependent
cognitive factors as causes. However, another possible back-
ground for a linear decrease might be a combined efect where
maturation plays the dominating role up through puberty and
adolescence and where social/psychological factors become
more important for explaining the variation after maturation is
complete (Birdsong 1999; Hyltenstam and Abrahamsson 2003).
It is probably fair to say that the issue of discontinuity is far from
solved.
Finally, counterarguments have addressed the issue of
nativelikeness evidence for the CPH. Some authors claim that
nativelike ultimate attainment among late learners is not as rare
as has been previously thought, something that would indeed
falsify the hypothesis. Birdsong (2005) reviewed frequencies of
L2 participants who performed in the range of native speakers
239
Critical Periods
and claimed that studies show up to 15 percent of postpuber-
ty-investigated samples that reach this level. At the other end,
many studies have shown that nativelike ultimate attainment is
far from always obtained among learners with prepuberty AOs
(Abrahamsson and Hyltenstam 2009).
Research related to the idea of a critical period for language
is central to language acquisition theory, in particular for the
understanding of deining diferences between irst and second
language acquisition. Intensive eforts at understanding the fac-
tors behind age diferences in language acquisition outcomes
have been made over the last 15 years, but the ield is far from
approaching a consensus about the role of maturational con-
straints or critical periods. However, current claims for recon-
sidering deinitions of concepts, analytical instruments, and
research methodologies (see, e.g., Birdsong 2005; Hyltenstam
and Abrahamsson 2003; Long 2005) are promising for decisive
steps forward in the near future.
Kenneth Hyltenstam
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Abrahamsson, N., and K. Hyltenstam. 2009. Age of onset and nativelike-
ness in a second language: Listener perception versus linguistic scru-
tiny. Language 59: 249306.
Bialystok, E., and B. Miller. 1999. he problem of age in second-lan-
guage acquisition: Inluences from language, structure, and task.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 2: 12745.
Birdsong, D. 2005. Interpreting age efects in second language acquisi-
tion. In Handbook of Bilingualism: Psycholinguistic Perspectives, ed. J.
Kroll and A. M. B. De Groot, 10927. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Birdsong, D., ed. 1999. Second Language Acquisition and the Critical
Period Hypothesis. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Birdsong, D., and M. Molis. 2001. On the evidence for maturational
constraints in second-language acquisition. Journal of Memory and
Language 44: 23549.
Bley-Vroman, R. 1989. What is the logical problem of foreign language
learning? In Linguistic Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition,
ed. S. Gass and J. Schachter, 4168. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Boothe, R. G. 1997. A neonatal visual deprivation syndrome. Perception
26: 766.
Curtiss, S. 1977. Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-day Wild
Child. New York: Academic Press.
DeKeyser, R. M. 2003. Implicit and explicit learning. In Doughty and
Long 2003, 31348.
DeKeyser, R. M., and J. Larson- Hall. 2005. What does the critical
period really mean? In Handbook of Bilingualism: Psycholinguistic
Approaches, ed. J. F. Kroll and A. M. B. De Groot, 88108. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Doughty, C., and M. Long, ed. 2003. Handbook of Second Language
Acquisition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Felix, S. 1985. More evidence on competing cognitive systems. Second
Language Research 1: 4772.
Flege, J. E., E. M. Frieda, and T. Nozawa. 1997. Amount of native-lan-
guage (L1) use afects the pronunciation of an L2. Journal of Phonetics
25: 16986.
Hyltenstam, K., and N. Abrahamsson. 2003. Maturational constraints in
SLA. In Doughty and Long 2003, 53988.
Johnson, J. S., and E. L. Newport. 1989. Critical period efects in sec-
ond language learning: he inluence of maturational state on the
240
Culture and Language
acquisition of English as a second language. Cognitive Psychology
21: 6099.
Krashen, S. 1973. Lateralization, language learning, and the critical
period: Some new evidence. Language Learning 23: 6374.
. 1988. Second Language Acquisition and Second Language
Learning. Boston: Prentice-Hall.
Lenneberg, E. 1967. Biological Foundations of Language. New York: Wiley
and Sons.
Long, M. H. 2005. Problems with supposed counter-evidence to the
critical period hypothesis. International Review of Applied Linguistics
43: 287317.
Mayberry, R. I. 1993. First-language acquisition after childhood dif-
fers from second-language acquisition: he case of American Sign
Language. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 36: 125870.
Paradis, M. 2004. A Neurolinguistic heory of Bilingualism.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Pinker, S. 1994. he language instinct: How the mind creates language.
New York: Morrow.
Seliger, H. W. 1978. Implications of a multiple critical periods hypoth-
esis for second language learning. In Second Language Acquisition
Research, ed. W. Ritchie, 1119. New York: Academic Press.
Snow, C., and M. Hoefnagel-Hhle. 1977. Age diferences in the pronun-
ciation of foreign sounds. Language and Speech 20: 35765.
White, L. 2003. On the nature of interlanguage representation: Universal
grammar in the second language. In Doughty and Long 2003, 1942.
CULTURE AND LANGUAGE
Culture and language are connected in a myriad ways. prov-
erbs, politeness, linguistic relativism, cooperative
principle, metaphor, metonymy, context and co-text,
semantic change, discourse (see discourse analysis
[foucaultian] and discourse analysis [linguistic]),
ideology and language, print culture, oral culture,
literacy, sociolinguistics, and speech-acts are just some
of the entries in this encyclopedia that deal with some obvious
connections between culture and language. Several disciplines
within the language sciences attempt to analyze, describe, and
explain the complex interrelations between the two broad areas.
(For a brief and clear survey, see Kramsch 1998.)
Culture and Language as Meaning Making
Can we approach this vast variety of topics from a more uniied
perspective than is traditionally done and currently available?
he relationship between culture and language can be dealt with
if we assume that both culture and language are about making
meaning. his view of culture comes closest to that proposed by
Cliford Geertz, who wrote: Man is an animal suspended in webs
of signiicance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those
webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental
science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of
meaning (1973, 5). In this spirit, I suggest that we approach both
culture and language as webs of signiicance that people both
create and understand. he challenge is to see how they are cre-
ated and understood often in multiple and alternative ways.
We have a culture when a group of people living in a social,
historical, and physical environment make sense of their experi-
ences in a more or less uniied manner. his means, for example,
that they understand what other people say, they identify objects
and events in similar ways, they ind or do not ind behavior
Culture and Language
appropriate in certain situations, they create objects, texts, and
discourses that other members of the group ind meaningful,
and so forth. In all of these and innumerable other cases, we have
meaning making in some form: not only in the sense of produc-
ing and understanding language but also in the sense of correctly
identifying things, inding behavior acceptable or unacceptable,
being able to follow a conversation, being able to generate mean-
ingful objects and behavior for others in the group, and so forth.
Meaning making is a cooperative enterprise (linguistic or other-
wise) that always takes place in a large set of contexts (ranging
from immediate to background) and that occurs with varying
degrees of success. People who can successfully participate in
this kind of meaning making can be said to belong to the same
culture. Spectacular cases of unsuccessful participation in joint
meaning making are called culture shock.
his kind of meaning-based approach to culture can be
found in George Lakofs (1996) work on American politics, Mark
Turners (2001) investigations into the cognitive dimensions
of social science, and Zoltn Kvecsess (2005) study of meta-
phorical aspects of everyday culture. Gary Palmer makes such a
meaning-based approach the cornerstone of what he calls cul-
tural linguistics and applies it to three central areas of anthropo-
logical linguistics: Boasian linguistics, ethnosemantics, and the
ethnography of speaking (1996, 45).
What is required for meaning making? he main meaning-
making organ is the brain/mind. he brain is the organ that
performs the many cognitive operations that are needed for
making sense of experience and that include categorization,
igure-ground alignment, framing knowledge, metaphorical
understanding, and several others. Cognitive linguists and cog-
nitive scientists in general are in the business of describing these
operations. Cognitive linguists believe that the same cognitive
operations that human beings use for making sense of experi-
ence in general are used for making sense of language. On this
view, language is structured by the same principles of operation
as other modalities of the mind. However, these cognitive opera-
tions are not put to use in a universally similar manner; that is,
there can be diferences in which cognitive operations are used
to make sense of some experience in preference to another, and
there can be diferences in the degree to which particular opera-
tions are utilized in cultures. his leads to what is called alter-
native construal in cognitive linguistics (see Langacker
1987). Moreover, the minds that evolve on brains in particular
cultures are shaped by the various contexts (historical, physical,
discourse, etc.) that in part constitute cultures (Kvecses 2005).
his leads to alternative conceptual systems.
Many of our most elementary experiences are universal.
Being in a container, walking along a path, resisting some physi-
cal force, being in the dark, and so forth, are universal experi-
ences that lead to image schemas of various kinds (Johnson
1987; Lakof 1987). he resulting image schemas (container,
source-path-goal, force, etc.) provide meaning for much of
our experience either directly or indirectly in the form of con-
ceptual metaphors. Conceptual metaphors may also receive
their motivation from certain correlations in experience, when,
for instance, people see correlations between two events (such
as adding to the content of a container and the level of the sub-
stance rising), leading to the metaphor MORE IS UP (see Lakof
and Johnson 1980). When meaning making is based on such ele-
mentary human experiences, the result may be (near-)universal
meaning (content) though under a particular interpretation
(construal), that is, conceived of in a certain manner, to use
Hoyt Alversons phrase (1991, 97).
Language, on this view, consists of a set of linguistic signs, that
is, pairings of form and meaning (which can range from simple
morphemes to complex syntactic constructions). Learning
a language means the learning of such linguistic signs. hus,
language can be regarded as a repository of meanings stored in
the form of linguistic signs shared by members of a culture. his
lends language a historical role in stabilizing and preserving a
culture. his function becomes especially important in the case
of endangered languages (see extinction of languages),
and it often explains why minorities insist on their language
rights (see language policy).
Members of a culture interact with one another for particu-
lar purposes. To achieve their goals, they produce particular dis-
courses. Such discourses are assemblies of meanings that relate
to particular subject matters. When such discourses provide a
conceptual framework within which signiicant subject mat-
ters are discussed in a culture, and when they function as latent
norms of conduct, the discourses can be regarded as ideolo-
gies (see, e.g., Charteris-Black 2004; Musolf 2004; Goatly 2007).
Discourse in this sense is another source of making meaning in
cultures. A large part of socialization involves the learning of how
to make meaning in a culture.
Three Examples of Meaning Making
As the irst example, consider how people make sense of the spa-
tial orientation of objects around them. What we ind in language
after language is that speakers conceptualize the spatial orienta-
tion of objects relative to their own bodies (Levinson 1996). his
means that they operate with such orientations as right and left
or in front of and behind. Both pairs of concepts make use of the
human body in order to locate things in space. hus, we can say
that the window is on my left and that the church is in front of
us. If we did not conceptualize the human body as having right
and left sides and if we did not have a forward (and backward)
orientation aligned with the direction of vision, such sentences
would not make too much sense. But in our efort to understand
the world we do rely on such conceptualization. his is called an
ego-centered, or relativistic, spatial orientation system.
Since so many of the worlds languages have this system and
because the system is so well motivated in our conception of
the human body, we would think that the ego-centered system
is an absolute universal and that no culture can do without it.
However, as Stephen Levinson (1996) points out, this is just a
myth. he native Australian language of Guugu Yimithirr has a
radically diferent system:
Take, for example, the case of the Guugu Yimithirr speakers
of N. Queensland, who utilize a system of spatial conception
and description which is fundamentally diferent from that
of English-speakers. Instead of concepts of relativistic space,
wherein one object is located by reference to demarcated regions
projected out from another reference object (ego, or some land-
mark) according to its orientation, Guugu Yimithirr speakers use
241
Culture and Language

a system of absolute orientation (similar to cardinal directions) the one that it is some kind of physical object) can be explicitly
which ixes absolute angles regardless of the orientation of the negated and efectively canceled. his is how new art movements
reference object. Instead of notions like in front of, behind, were born out of a successful new deinition. More importantly,
to the left of, opposite, etc., which concepts are uncoded in there are always some people who do not accept the deinition
the language, Guugu Yimithirr speakers must specify locations that most people take to be deinitional. his small but signii-
as (in rough English gloss) to the North of, to the South of, cant minority can constantly challenge, undermine, or plainly
to the East of, etc. he system is used at every level of scale, negate every one of the features that the majority take to be def-
from millimeters to miles, for there is (efectively) no other sys- initional and essential. If they were essential, they could not be
tem available in the language; there is simply no analogue of the so easily challenged and canceled. We can suggest that the con-
Indo-European prepositional concepts. (Levinson 1996, 180) cept of art has a central member the traditional conception
and many noncentral ones. he noncentral ones may become
hus, according to Levinson, the Guugu Yimithirr speakers
the prototypes of art for some people, and then these new pro-
must carry a mental map in their head of everything surround-
totypes can be further challenged. Concepts like art assume a
ing them, with the map aligned for the four quadrants. With the
prototype-based organization, and it is their very structure that
help of such a mental map, they can identify the location of any
invites contestation. We can only understand the nature of the
object with a high degree of precision, far exceeding the ability
widespread phenomenon of cultural and social debates if we
of speakers of languages that have a relativist system of spatial
study and understand the nature of our categories that give rise
reckoning.
to and invite debates by virtue of their very structure.
he second example deals with the cognitive process of cat-
Our third example has to do with how we represent knowl-
egorization. We can suggest that there is a close connection
edge in the mind. Categories are mentally represented as frames,
between the nature of our categories and many important cul-
schemas, or mental models (see, e.g., Schank and Abelson
tural and social issues. he classical view of categories is based
1977; Fillmore 1982; Langacker 1987; Lakof 1987). We can use
on the idea of essential features. In that view, the members of
the following working deinition of frames: A frame is a struc-
the category must share certain essential features. In the new
tured mental representation of a coherent organization of
rival view, categories are deined not in terms of necessary
human experience.
and sufficient conditions (i.e., essential features) but with
Frames are important in the study of almost any facet of life
respect to prototypes and various family resemblance
and culture and not just language. he world as we experience
relations to these prototypes.
it is always the product of some prior categorization and framing
How do we make sense of social debates? he emergence,
by ourselves and others. A crucial aspect of framing is that difer-
existence, and often the resolution of cultural and social issues
ent individuals can interpret the same reality in diferent ways.
may hinge on how we think about the nature of our categories.
his is the idea of alternative construal mentioned earlier.
To see how this is possible, let us consider the concept of art. he
How do we categorize the various objects and events we
discussion of the structure of the concept of art can shed light
encounter in the world? Clearly, many of our categories are
on why art has been a debated category probably ever since its
based on similarity (especially of the family resemblance kind)
inception and particularly in the past two centuries. Kvecses
among members of a category. hat is, many categories are held
(2006) examines some of the history of the category of art in
together by family resemblances among the items that belong
the past 200 years on the basis of the Encyclopedia Britannica
to a particular category. In this sense, most of our conventional
(2003). What he inds in this history is that the category under-
categories for objects and events are similarity-based ones. For
goes constant redeinition in the nineteenth and twentieth
example, the things that one can buy in a store are commonly
centuries. Diferent and rival conceptions of art challenge the
categorized on the basis of their similarity to one another; thus,
traditional view that is, the most prevalent conservative
we ind diferent kinds of nails (short and long ones, thick and
view. Impressionism, cubism, surrealism, pop art, and the like
thin ones, etc.) in the same section of a hardware store. hey
are reactions to the traditional view and to each other. But what
form a similarity-based category. However, we can also ind nails
is the traditional view of art?
in other sections of the store. Some nails can occur in sections
he traditional conception of art can be arrived at by exam-
where, for example, things for hanging pictures are displayed.
ining those features of art that are challenged, negated, or suc-
Clearly, a nail is not similar to any of the possible things (such as
cessfully canceled by the various movements of art. For example,
picture frames, rings, short strings, adhesive tapes, maybe even a
most people believe that a work of art represents objective reality.
special hammer) displayed in this section. How is it possible that
his feature of art is canceled by the art movements of impres-
certain nails appear in this section? Or, to put it in our terms, how
sionism, expressionism, and surrealism. Another feature of art
is it possible that nails are put in the same category with these
that most people take to be deinitional is that a work of art is
other things? he answer is that in addition to similarity-based
representational, that is, it consists of natural igures and forms.
categories, we also have frame-based ones. hat is to say, catego-
his feature is efectively canceled by symbolism, cubism, and
ries can be formed on the basis of the things that go commonly
abstract art. Finally, most believe that a work of art is a physical
and repeatedly together in our experience. If we put up pictures
object. his feature is canceled by conceptual art.
on the wall by irst driving a nail into the wall and then hanging
As can be seen, even those features of art that many would take
the picture frame on the nail by means of attaching a metal ring
to be deinitional for all forms of art (such as the one that art rep-
or a string on the frame, then all of the things that we use for this
resents objective reality, the one that it is representational, and

242
Culture and Language
purpose may be placed in a single category. But this category will
be frame-based not similarity-based.
Now there can be diferences across and even within cul-
tures in the use of this meaning-making device. An interesting
example is provided by a study by J. Glick (1975) conducted
among the Kpelle of Liberia. Kpelle farmers consistently sorted
objects into functional groups (such as knife and orange and
potato and hoe), rather than into conceptual categories (such
as orange and potato and knife and hoe). he former is what we
would call a frame-based categorization, whereas the latter is a
similarity-based one. On the whole, Westerners prefer to cat-
egorize objects on the basis of similarity. When Glick asked the
Kpelle how a fool would categorize the objects, they came up
with such neat similarity-based piles. Clearly, cultures can dif-
fer in the use of meaning-making devices, and these diferences
may produce diferences in the use of categories and language
in general.
Conclusion
Culture and language are connected in many ways, and the
interconnections can be studied from a variety of diferent
perspectives. Following Geertz, I tried to develop a view of the
relationship that is based on how we make sense of our experi-
ences linguistic or otherwise. Recent cognitive science and cog-
nitive linguistics provide us with new ideas and methodological
tools with which we can approach the issue of meaning making
in cultures, both in its universal aspects and in its ininite cross-
cultural variety.
Zoltn Kvecses
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
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University Press.
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2004. Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor
Analysis. Houndsmill, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Encyclopedia Britannica Ready Reference. 2003. Chicago: Encyclopedia
Britannica. Electronic version.
Fillmore, Charles. 1982. Frame semantics. In Linguistics in the Morning
Calm, 111137. Hanshin: he Linguistic Society of Korea.
Foley, William A. 1997. Anthropological Linguistics: An Introduction.
Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Geertz, Cliford. 1973. he Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic
Books.
Gibbs, Raymond W. 2006. Embodiment and Cognitive Science. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Glick, J. 1975. Cognitive development in cross-cultural perspective. In
Review of Child Development Research. Vol. 4. Ed. F. Horowitz, 595
654. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Goatly, Andrew. 2007. Washing the Brain: Metaphor and Hidden Ideology.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Johnson, Mark. 1987. he Body in the Mind. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Kimmel, Michael. 2001. Metaphor, Imagery, and Culture: Spatialized
Ontologies, Mental Tools, and Multimedia in the Making. Ph.D. diss.,
University of Vienna.
Kvecses, Zoltn. 2005. Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation.
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Cycle, the
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Kramsch, Claire. 1998. Language and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Lakof, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous hings.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lakof, George.. 1996. Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives
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Lakof, George, and Mark Johnson 1980. Metaphors We Live By.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lakof, George, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: he
Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western hought. New York: Basic
Books.
Langacker, Ronald. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: heoretical
Prerequisites. Vol. 1. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Levinson, Stephen C. 1996. Relativity in spatial conception and descrip-
tion. In Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, ed. J. Gumperz and S. C.
Levinson, 177202. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Musolf, Andreas. 2004. Metaphor and Political Discourse: Analogical
Reasoning in Debates about Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Palmer, Gary. 1996. Toward a heory of Cultural Linguistics. Austin: Texas
University Press.
Schank, Robert, and Robert Abelson. 1977. Scripts, Plans, Goals, and
Understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Shore, Bradd. 1996. Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem
of Meaning. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Strauss, Claudia, and Naomi Quinn. 1987. A Cognitive heory of Cultural
Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Turner, Mark. 2001. Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science. Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press.
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1956. Language, hought, and Reality: Selected
Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Ed. John B. Carroll. Cambridge,
MA: he MIT Press.
Wolf, Hans-Georg. 2001. he African cultural model of community in
English language instruction in Cameroon: he need for more syste-
maticity. In Applied Cognitive Linguistics. Vol 2: Language Pedagogy.
Ed. M. Putz, S. Niemeier, and R. Dirven, 22558. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
CYCLE, THE
he syntactic cycle was originally formulated in Chomsky (1965)
as a general principle of grammar that constrains the way trans-
formational rules can apply in the derivation of sentences
containing embedded clauses. he term cycle refers to the prop-
erty of syntactic derivations whereby transformations apply
within syntactic subdomains before they apply to larger syntac-
tic domains that contain them. hus, in (1), where A, B, and C
denote syntactic domains to which transformational rules can
apply, the set of transformations must apply to C before B, and
then to B before A (see Figure 1). If a rule X applies to domains
AC in a single derivation, it applies successive cyclically to C,
then B, and inally A that is, starting with the smallest cyclic
domain and proceeding stepwise to the largest (see Boeckx 2007
for discussion).
Noam Chomsky sharpens his original formulation as the
strict cycle condition (SCC):
No rule can apply to a domain dominated by a cyclic node A in
such a way as to afect solely a proper subdomain of A dominated
by a node B which is also a cyclic node. (1973, 243)
243
Cycle, the
(1) A extension condition (1993), the phase impenetrability condition
B
C turns out to be correct, it is clear that the theory of grammar need
Figure 1.
he SCC includes the further restriction that transformations
may not revisit a subdomain after they have applied to the larger
domain that contains it. For example, once a transformation
applies to domain B in Figure 1, no transformation can apply
solely within the subdomain C. Since the earliest formulations,
clauses (complementizer phrase (CP)/inlection phrase (IP)
in current analysis) have been designated as cyclic domains.
Nominal phrases (i.e., noun phrase [NP] and determiner phrase
[DP]) and more recently light verb phrase (vP) have also been
proposed as additional cyclic domains.
Empirical motivation for the SCC involves deviant sentences
whose derivation violates the SCC, for example (2) under the
partial derivation given in (3).
(2)*Who did you wonder what bought?
(3) a. [CP1 C [IP1 you wonder [CP2 C [IP2 who bought what ] ] ] ]
b. [CP1 C [IP1 you wonder [CP2 who C [IP2 bought what ] ] ] ]
c. [CP1 who C [IP1 you wonder [CP2 C [IP2 bought what ] ] ] ]
d. [CP1 who C [IP1 you wonder [CP2 what C [IP2 bought ] ] ] ]
Speciically, the SCC blocks the countercyclic derivational step
that moves what in (3c) to the speciier position of CP2, as illus-
trated in (3d).
Whether a cyclic principle of rule application like the SCC
constitutes an axiom of syntactic theory depends on two
things: one concerning the formulation of transformations and
the other involving the empirical overlap with independently
motivated conditions. If the countercyclic movement of what
in (3) is prohibited by the basic formulation of transformations
(e.g., merge), then stipulating an independent cyclic principle
is redundant. he cyclic application of rules simply follows from
the formulation of rules (see Freidin 1999).
Suppose, however, that the formulation of transformations
does not prohibit the countercyclic movement in (3). hen, a
cyclic principle is required only if (2) under derivation (3) cannot
be excluded by other independently motivated constraints. For
example, under trace theory, the derivation (3) yields a represen-
tation (4).
(4)[CP1 whoi C [IP1 you wonder [CP2 whatj C [IP2 ti bought tj ] ] ] ]
he connection between who and its trace ti violates the
subjacency principle. Taking this condition to be a constraint
on trace binding (i.e., on representations), one empirical efect of
the SCC is subsumed under subjacency. (See Freidin 1978 for an
account that generalizes this kind of analysis.) Other proposals to
derive the empirical efects of a cyclic principle include Chomskys
244
Deconstruction
(Chomsky 2000), and cyclic linearization (Fox and Pesetsky 2005).
It appears that syntactic derivations do not allow countercy-
clic operations, either because the formulation of grammatical
operations will not allow them or because such operations violate
general constraints (aside from the SCC) on either derivations
or the representations that are produced. Whichever approach
not include a speciic cyclic principle along the lines of the SCC,
given that virtually all of its empirical efects follow from inde-
pendent factors. Either way, the cycle is deeply embedded in
syntactic theory.
Robert Freidin
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Boeckx, C. 2007. Understanding Minimalist Syntax: Lessons from Locality
in Long-Distance Dependencies. Oxford: Blackwell.
Chomsky, N. 1965. Aspects of the heory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Chomsky, N. 1973. Conditions on transformations. In A Festschrift for
Morris Halle, ed. S. Anderson and P. Kiparsky, 23286. New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston.
. 1993. A minimalist program for linguistic theory. In he View
from Building 20: Essays in Linguistics in Honor of Sylvain Bromberger,
ed. K. Hale and S. Keyser, 152. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
. 2000. Minimalist inquiries: he framework. In Step by Step: Essays
on Minimalist Syntax in Honor of Howard Lasnik, ed. R. Martin,
D. Michaels, and J. Uriagereka, 89155. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fox, D., and D. Pesetsky. 2005. Cyclic linearization of syntactic struc-
ture. heoretical Linguistics 31: 145.
Freidin, R. 1978. Cyclicity and the theory of grammar. Linguistic Inquiry
9: 51949.
. 1999. Cyclicity and minimalism. In Working Minimalism, ed.
S. Epstein and N. Hornstein, 95126. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lasnik, H. 2006. Conceptions of the cycle. In Wh-Movement: Moving
On, ed. L. Cheng and N. Corver, 197216. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
D
DECONSTRUCTION
Deconstruction is a practice of exceptionally close and vigilant
critical reading that aims to reveal the various contradictions
or moments of aporia (of paradox or strictly irresolvable doubt)
endemic to the texts of Western philosophy, literature, and other
kinds of writing. It is best approached through the work of Jacques
Derrida (19302004), the most vigorous exponent of deconstruc-
tion and a thinker centrally concerned with issues in semantics,
hermeneutics (see philology and hermeneutics),
speech-act theory, and philosophy of language and logic (see
especially Derrida 1973, 1978, 1982, 1989).
Perhaps the most striking example is Derridas lengthy
treatment of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Of Grammatology
(Derrida 1976). Here, he shows how Rousseaus ideas about a
vast range of topics nature, culture, language, society, ethics,
politics, history, sexual relations, personal identity, literature,
Deconstruction
and music are afected by a curious logic of supplementarity
that constantly twists his argument back against itself and thereby
subverts its manifest intent. Rousseau wants to say and does
quite explicitly state that in each case, there is (or once was)
an original, authentic, natural, uncorrupted state that then gives
way to a decadent, artiicial, and degraded state where human
beings are condemned to live at a distance from their true nature
and enter into all kinds of intrinsically bad (since by very dei-
nition unnatural) relationship with themselves, each other, and
the world around them. Yet in each case, his argument comes up
against a stubbornly insistent counterlogic that throws its claims
into doubt by reversing the conceptual order of priorities upon
which that argument relies.
hus, Rousseau sees language and music as having their
common point of origin in a mode of passionate speech-song
that expresses human feelings directly and without, as yet, any
need for those various bad supplements of syntactic and
lexical structure in language or harmony and counterpoint in
music that had since come to work their insidious, corrupting
efects. Indeed, as Derrida notes, the key word supplement
occurs with remarkable frequency and weight of semantic
implication throughout Rousseaus writing on these topics. Yet
when he treats them in a more sustained and relective way,
Rousseau has perforce to concede that the melodious aspect of
music is always dependent on a background sense of its har-
monic implications, just as the expressive aspect of language
depends on the existence of grammatical and lexical struc-
tures in the absence of which it could communicate nothing
whatsoever.
he same applies to his thinking about matters of history, pol-
itics, and civil society. Here, Rousseau purports to trace a process
of epochal decline from the close-knit, organic, natural commu-
nities that once existed before the advent of all the corrupting
forces of power, class, education, authority, political inluence,
acquired expertise, and so forth which are falsely considered
progress or civilization by those same decadent standards.
And again, what passes for culture among the denizens of
modern society is, in truth, just another melancholy sign of the
falling away from nature or the ever more false and artiicially
cultivated manners, practices, and modes of expression that ig-
ure as mere supplements to an otherwise perfectly self-suicient
natural state. Yet here also Derrida shows that the term supple-
ment is subject to a kind of dislocating force, or logico-semantic
torsion, that twists the operative sense of Rousseaus argument
against his avowed intent. In each case, the supplementary item
turns out to be not so much a mere supplement ( = add-on,
accessory, optional extra) but a supplement in the opposite,
palliative sense: that which is required in order to complete or
make good an otherwise defective, non-self-suicient, or inad-
equate mode of being. hus, it is strictly impossible a downright
contradiction in terms to posit the existence of a social state
of nature that would somehow precede and contrast with those
subsequent states whose hallmark, according to Rousseau, was
their basis in various, increasingly complex forms of societal and
cultural distinction. his attempt to describe what can never in
truth have existed a society unmarked by any of those struc-
tures (however primitive) that constitute the very conditions
of possibility for social life can in fact be seen to deine the
condition of impossibility for the sorts of claim put forward by
Rousseau and like-minded thinkers.
Such is the logic of supplementarity whereby the text
bears involuntary witness to this strain on its powers of articu-
late expression through various, often extreme, complexities of
logical and syntactic structure. Chief among them are complexi-
ties of a modal and temporal type, the former brought about by
Rousseaus constant switching back and forth between talk of
what must, might, or should properly have been the case with
regard to the aforementioned orders of priority, the latter by his
likewise ambivalent, grammatically and logically elusive turns of
phrase when it comes to establishing a time-indexed (i.e., histor-
ical, rather than mythic) sequence for the process of decline that
his text narrates. Hence Derridas claim that the writer writes in
a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his
discourse by deinition cannot dominate absolutely, since [h]e
uses them only by letting himself, after a fashion and up to a
point, be governed by the system (1976, 158). More speciically,
what Rousseau wishes to say about the proper, authentic order
of priority between passion and reason, speech and writing, mel-
ody and harmony, primitive and civilized stages of society, or
(subsuming all these) nature and culture is everywhere implic-
itly subject to challenge or thrown into doubt by that same
supplementary logic.
So critics of Derrida like John Searle and Jrgen Habermas
along with some of his admirers such as Richard Rorty are wide
of the mark when they take deconstruction to consist in noth-
ing more than a routine technique for inverting or subverting the
various distinctions between reason and rhetoric, philosophy
and literature, or conceptual and linguistic issues (see Habermas
1987; Rorty 1982; Searle 1977). On their account, his work exem-
pliies the textualist ne plus ultra of that widespread linguis-
tic turn that has been such a prominent feature of philosophy in
both the analytic and the continental traditions during the past
seven decades or so (Rorty 1967). Of course, one can see how this
idea took hold, given Derridas sharp focus on matters of tex-
tual detail and his extreme attentiveness to elements of igural
or metaphoric language that must complicate any straightfor-
ward appeal to literal, express, or intended meaning. However,
he is equally insistent that those who claim to turn the page on
philosophy always end up by just philosophizing badly, since it
is a pointless (and in any case self-refuting) gesture that afects to
have done with all those old philosophical concepts and catego-
ries while, in fact, surreptitiously or involuntarily deploying them
at every turn (Derrida 1982; Norris 1989; Rorty 1982, 1989).
hese issues receive their most explicit treatment in his essay
he Supplement of Copula, where Derrida ofers a full-dress
transcendental argument from the conditions of possibility for
thinking or reasoning in general against the idea put forward
by the linguist Emile Benveniste that our entire stock of philo-
sophical concepts and categories can be seen to derive from a
certain language (the ancient Greek) and its distinctive range of
lexico-grammatical structures (Benveniste 1971; Derrida 1982,
175205). On the contrary, Derrida maintains, Benveniste cannot
advance a single proposition in support of his linguistic-relativist
case without falling back upon those same conceptual resources,
such as the distinction between language and thought. So there
is no making sense of Benvenistes claim to invert the received
245
Deconstruction
(philosophical) order of priorities by treating language as the
condition of possibility for thought, or in narrowly professional
terms linguistics as the discipline now poised to occupy the high
academic ground. Rather, what emerges from a critical reading
of Benvenistes texts is the absolute necessity that any such argu-
ment should turn out to controvert its own leading premise by
taking for granted a whole range of indispensable distinctions
that derive from a prior philosophic discourse, in this case one
that inds its irst clear statement in Aristotles doctrine of the
categories.
here is a similar twist of argument, and again one that
is ignored by most commentators, in Derridas essay White
Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy (1982, 20771).
On the usual account, what he here purports to show taking a
lead from Nietzsche is the saturation of philosophic discourse
by various (predominantly visual or tactile) types of metaphor
that cannot be expunged, as some philosophers would wish, or
even brought within the bounds of rational acceptability through
a systematic treatment or method of classiication. hat is, they
are so pervasive and go so far toward deining the very nature,
self-image, and operative scope of that discourse that it is strictly
impossible for philosophy either to manage without them or
come up with some rigorously theorized account that would
inally reduce them to order on its own methodological terms. To
suppose that philosophy has managed to resolve this problem
to achieve a clear demarcation between concept and metaphor
or literal and igural language is to take it for granted that the
sense aimed at through these igures is an essence rigorously
independent of that which transports it, which is an already phil-
osophical thesis, one might even say philosophys unique thesis,
the thesis which constitutes the concept of metaphor (Derrida
1982, 229). However, this conidence may appear ill-placed if
one considers the extent to which philosophy depends upon a
range of metaphorical terms and distinctions like that between
metaphor (etymologically a means of transport or carrying
away) and concept (grasping, comprehending, holding together
in thought) which make up its very element.
What I have said so far about White Mythology its in well
enough with the received view among mainstream analytic phi-
losophers: that Derridas approach has more in common with
literary criticism than with philosophy properly so called, that
is, the practice of rigorous conceptual analysis. However, this is
a partial and highly prejudicial reading, as soon becomes clear
if one looks beyond the opening section where his approach
might plausibly be construed along these echt-Nietzschean
lines to later passages where Derrida goes out of his way to fore-
stall or disqualify that interpretation. His counterargument (as
with the response to Benveniste) is that philosophy has provided
all the terms and categorical distinctions that must be seen as
absolutely prerequisite to any discussion of these issues, among
them most crucially the distinctions between concept and met-
aphor, reason and rhetoric, or philosophy and literature.
Hence, Derridas cardinal point: that this will require not only
the highest degree of conceptual precision but also a detailed
knowledge of their history and various stages of elaboration and
reinement to date.
White Mythology makes good this claim by examining a
great range of texts by philosophers, linguists, rhetoricians, and
246
historians of science and showing how they take for granted not
only the existence of certain prior philosophical concepts and
categories but also the necessity of bringing them to bear in the
process of deconstructing the kinds of uncritical or prejudicial
thinking that often go along with them. For if the concept of
metaphor is itself what Coleridge dubbed a philosopheme a
distinctively philosophic notion then we can have no means
of questioning the supposed priority of concept over metaphor
except by way of the discourse wherein that topic has received
its most decisive statements and elaborations. hus, it makes no
sense to proclaim, with postphilosophical adepts like Rorty,
that we should give up the old deluded quest for truth, clear and
distinct ideas, conceptual precision, and so on and henceforth
embrace the Derridean ideal of philosophy as just another kind
of writing that at best ofers new and adventurous modes of cre-
ative self-description (Rorty 1982). his involves not only a snip-
pety reading of Derrida but also a failure to grasp his point that
such gestures can amount to no more than a kind of rhetorical
hand waving or a claim to have come out on the far side of phi-
losophy, while in fact regressing to a prephilosophical stage of
unrelective immersion in language.
Such is indeed the charge that Habermas brings against
Derrida, namely, his having leveled or annulled the crucial genre
distinction between philosophy and literature or language in its
constative (i.e., truth-based or logical) and its performative (sua-
sive and rhetorical) modes (Habermas 1987; see also perfor-
mative and constative). It seems to me, on the contrary,
that Derridas most signiicant achievement will be seen to lie in
his contributions to philosophy of language and logic and, above
all, his remarkably inventive and original yet none the less rigor-
ous rethinking of the relationship between these disciplines. (For
some early indications, see Norris and Roden 2002.)
Christopher Norris
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Aristotle. 1990. Categories and De Interpretatione. Trans. J. L. Ackrill.
Oxford: Clarendon.
Benveniste, Emile. 1971. Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. Mary
Meek. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press.
Dasenbrock, Reed Way, ed. 1989. Re-Drawing the Lines: Analytic
Philosophy, Deconstruction, and Literary heory. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays
on Husserls heory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press.
. 1976. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
. 1978. Writing and Diference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
. 1982. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
. 1982. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
. 1989. Afterword: Toward an ethic of conversation. In Limited Inc,
ed. Gerald Graf, 11154. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Habermas, Jrgen. 1987. On levelling the genre-distinction between
philosophy and literature. In he Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence, 185210.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Deinite Descriptions
Norris, Christopher. 1989. Philosophy as not just a kind of writ-
ing: Derrida and the claim of reason. In Dasenbrock 1989, 189203.
. 1990. Deconstruction, postmodernism and philosophy: Habermas
on Derrida. In Whats Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical heory and
the Ends of Philosophy, 4976. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester.
. 2000. Deconstruction and the Uninished Project of Modernity.
London: Athlone.
. 2002. Derrida on Rousseau: Deconstruction as philosophy of
logic. In Norris and Roden 2002, II: 70124.
Norris, Christopher, and David Roden, eds. 2002. Jacques Derrida. 4 vols.
London: Sage.
Rorty, Richard. 1982. Philosophy as a kind of writing. In Consequences
of Pragmatism, 89109. Brighton: Harvester.
. 1989. Two versions of logocentrism: A reply to Norris. In plete deictic reference as, for example, the verb ro seaward in
Dasenbrock 1989, 20416.
Rorty, Richard, ed. 1967. he Linguistic Turn. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Searle, John R. 1977. Reiterating the diferences: A reply to Derrida.
Glyph 1: 198208. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
DEFINITE DESCRIPTIONS
A phrase of the form the is a deinite description. In his 1905
On Denoting, Bertrand Russell sought an account of deinite
descriptions that would speak to why it is worthwhile to produce
an identity statement with such a phrase (a = a is trivial, but
Jupiter = the largest planet is informative), why one cannot
substitute Jupiter for the largest planet in George Bush often
wonders whether Jupiter is the largest planet, and why sen-
tences that contain deinite descriptions that appear to denote
nonexistent objects (the present king of France) can be mean-
ingful if they denote nothing. (For details, see Ludlow 2009.)
James McGilvray
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Ludlow, Peter. 2009. Descriptions. In he Stanford Encyclopedia Of
Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. Available online at: http://plato.
stanford.edu/entries/descriptions/.
Russell, B. 1905. On denoting, Mind 14: 47993.
DEIXIS
By deixis (from the Greek to point) we mean here all the literature, occurs in Native American, Papuan, and Australian
cues provided by a language that localize a speech event and its
participants in space and time. By contrast, reference is based on
the privative distinction related to the deictic center (origo) /
not related to the deictic center. here are two reference sys-
tems to localize a referent. In a positional system, the speaker is,
or both speaker and hearer are, the deictic center whose position
is used to localize an entity. A dimensional system relies on the
speech participants orientation and understanding of the envi-
ronment, in which case the deictic center may be something else
instead of the speech participants. he choice for one or both of
these systems evokes major diferences among languages.
here are six categories of deixis: person, space, time, dis-
course, emphathy, and social status (Levinson 1983). Person
deixis usually distinguishes the speaker (irst person) from
the hearer (second person) and the non-speech or narrated
participant (third person). his can be encoded by inlection
Deixis
on the verb, pronouns, or a combination of both. Many deixes
add information in the pronoun on the referents number (sin-
gular, paucal, plural, dualis, or trialis) and its classiication
(masculine, feminine, neuter, animate, inanimate, edible). In
Asian and Native American languages, irst person plural pro-
nouns often distinguish whether or not the hearer is included
in the narrated event (labeled inclusive or exclusive), as shown
in Table 1. Languages may use a two-term or three-term system
to localize the referent in space. his tripartite distinction also
applies to languages with elaborate deictic systems like Malagasy
(Madagascar) and Venda (South Africa) (see Table 2).
In one-term systems, nouns and verbs may be used for a com-
the following Ewaw (Indonesia) sentence.
1. Om-liik=ken nung afa en-ho ded=i en-ro?
2sg-see=hit my thing 3sg-pass road=DEM 3sg-seaward
Did you see something of mine on that road?
Time deixis can be encoded by tense inlections on the verb or
adverbs in which the speech moment is the deictic center. Maori
(New Zealand) seems atypical in that it signals past, present, or
future tense by means of special locative markers (respectively, i,
kei, and hei in the following examples).
2a. I tepoti rua inanahi.
LOC.past Dunedin 3d yesterday
hey were in Dunedin yesterday.
2b. Kei raro te ngeru.
LOC inside ART cat
he cat is inside.
2c. Hei te ata tua haere ai.
LOC.fut ART morning 1d go PART
We will go in the morning.
Often, space deictics are used originally to locate a referent in
the discourse (as, for example, in Leti (Indonesia): ptal=d
(bottle=here) this bottle here; ptal=di (bottle=now) the bot-
tle we are discussing now; and ptal=d=di (bottle=here=now)
this bottle here that we are discussing now).
A special type of discourse deixis, labeled switch-reference in
languages where special verb inlections or pronouns signal
whether or not the subject in a clause has the same referent as
the subject in the following clause (same subject [SS] or diferent
subject [DS]).
3. U-hu ma or hari-k limu teyen ya-ha lafaura.
Do-SS man he died-DS they bench make-SS placed
hen the man died, people (in the village) made a bench and
placed him there.
(Mende, Papua Niugini, after Nozawa 2000).
In Algonquian languages (North America), third person pro-
nouns signal whether their referent is more or less topical
in the narration (for example, proximal bi versus obviative
yi in Navajo). Similarly, a languages deictic system may sig-
nal the speakers empathy toward the referent and its status
within society. In Javanese (Indonesia), for example, social
247
Deixis

Table 1. Pronoun systems in four languages

English Quechua (Peru) Tamil (India) Biak (Indonesia)

1st person singular I nuqa nn ai
2d person singular you qan n au
3d person singular he pay avan (masculine) I
she ava (feminine)
it atu (neuter)
1st person plural we nuqanchis nm u (dualis)
inclusive o (trialis)
1st person plural we nuqayku nka nu (dualis)
exclusive mo (plural)
2d person plural you qankuna nka mu (dualis)
mo (plural)
su (dualis)
3d person plural they paykuna avar so (trialis)
si (animate plural)
na (inanimate plural)

Table 2. Demonstratives in Malagasy (Madagascar)

Referents

Distance to speaker Proximal Distance-neutral

Boundedness Bounded Unbounded Medial Distal Bounded Unbounded

Visibility Number
Visible Singular Ito ~ ity Itsy Iry Io Iny
Plural Ireto Iretsy Irery Ireo ireny
Invisible Singular Izato Izaty - Izary Izao izany
Plural Izatero - - - - -

Source: After Imai 2003, 201.

deixis created separate low and high lexicons that permeate Duchan, J. F., G. A. Bruder, and L. E. Hewitt. 1995. Deixis in Narrative: A
the entire language. he low style is represented in 4a, the high Cognitive Science Perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
style in 4b. Felson, Nancy, ed. 2004. he poetics of deixis in Alcman, Pindar and
other lyric. Arethusa 37.3 (Special Issue).
4a. Dewek-e sing kok tuko-ni iwak. Garry, Jane, and Carl Rubino, eds. 2001. Facts About the Worlds
self-POS REL you buy-APPL ish Language: An Encycplopedia of the Worlds Major Languages, Past and
Present. New York and Dublin: H. W. Wilson.
4b. Piyambak-ipun ingkang sampeyan tumbas-aken ulam.
Green, Keith, ed. 1995. New Essays in Deixis: Discourse, Narrative,
self-POS REL you buy-APPL ish
Literature. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
It is him whom you bought ish for. Imai, Shingo. 2003. Spatial deixis. Ph.D. thesis, State University of New
Deixis is a major research topic in typology, pragmatics, York at Bufalo.
Levinson, Stehen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University
anthropological linguistics and, recently, in poetics.
Press.
Aone van Engelenhoven Levinson, Stephen C., and David P. Wilkins. 2006. Grammars of Space:
Towards a Semantic Typology. Explorations in Cognitive Diversity,
Language, Culture & Cognition 6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Nozawa, Michiyo. 2000. Participant Identiication in Mende. Available
Bhler, K. 1982 (1934). he deictic ield of language and deictic worlds. online at: http://www.sil.org/ paciic/png/abstract.asp?id=506
Speech, Place and Action: Studies in Deixis and Related Topics. Ed. Te Aka Mori-English, English-Mori Dictionary and Index. Available
R. J. Jarvella and W. Klain (eds). Chichester: John Wiley, 930. online at: http://www.maoridictionary.co.nz/index.cfm.

248
Descriptive, Observational, and Explanatory Adequacy
DESCRIPTIVE, OBSERVATIONAL, AND EXPLANATORY
ADEQUACY
In empirical science, the adequacy of a theory is determined by the
degree to which it gives insight into the real nature of certain aspects
of the world. he evaluation of a theory can concentrate on the cor-
respondence between the predictions of the theory and observed
phenomena, on the plausibility of the system described by the the-
ory as underlying these phenomena, or on the compatibility of the
theory with theories for adjacent ields. Ideally, a theory scores well
on all three of these accounts. In linguistics, a special set of terms for-
malizing these criteria was introduced by Noam Chomsky (1964).
Origin of the Terms
he terms of observational adequacy, descriptive adequacy, and
explanatory adequacy were introduced by Chomsky in his ple-
nary address to the Ninth International Congress of Linguists in
1962. hese terms are not widely used outside linguistics. hey
are collectively referred to as the levels of adequacy. Chomsky
(1964, 289) describes them as follows:
A grammar that aims for observational adequacy is concerned
to account for observed linguistic utterances.
A grammar that aims for descriptive adequacy is concerned
to account for the speakers underlying system of intuitions.
A linguistic theory that aims for explanatory adequacy is con-
cerned to provide a principled basis for selecting a descrip-
tively adequate grammar.
Position in Chomskyan Linguistics
he interpretation of the three levels of adequacy cannot be sepa-
rated from Chomskys view of the nature of language and the way it
should be studied. Schematically, this view can be represented as
in Figure 1, which is based on ten Hacken (2007), where a detailed
discussion of and motivation for the elements of the diagram may
be found. On the left-hand side, real-world entities are repre-
sented. Observable facts are phenomena and events that can be
observed by the linguist, for example, grammaticality judg-
ments. competence is the knowledge of language in the mind/
brain of the speakers that enables them to produce these facts. he
language faculty is a set of genetically determined predispositions
of human beings that enable them to acquire this competence.
he gray arrows between them can be read as underlies.
he rounded rectangles in the middle of Figure 1 represent
theoretical entities. An observation is a theoretical entity in the
sense that it imposes a certain structure on the world and selects
relevant aspects. A grammar in Chomskyan linguistics is a the-
ory of the speakers competence. universal grammar (UG)
is a theory of the language faculty. he grammar can be tested
by observations and can explain these observations because
they correspond to consequences of the competence. UG can be
tested by individual grammars because for each competence, a
grammar must be available that is allowed by the language fac-
ulty. UG explains the individual grammars in the sense that it
describes the mechanism that makes the emergence of compe-
tence in the individual (i.e., language acquisition) possible.
As indicated in Figure 1, the levels of adequacy correspond
closely to the levels of theoretical depth. For observational
Figure 1. Chomskyan linguistics and levels of adequacy.
adequacy, it is suicient that the observable facts are covered.
For descriptive adequacy, it is required that they be covered by
a grammar that describes the speakers competence. Although
both observational and descriptive adequacy are described
as properties of grammars, only for descriptive adequacy does
the grammar correspond to grammar in Figure 1. A grammar
that ignores the need to describe the speakers competence is a
grammar of a kind not represented in this igure. he opposition
between descriptive and explanatory adequacy is characterized
by the fact that the latter is a property of a linguistic theory of a
higher level of abstraction than a grammar.
Discussion until the Emergence of Principles and
Parameters
he main purpose of the introduction of the concept of observa-
tional adequacy seems to have been to set of Chomskyan linguis-
tics from post-Bloomieldian linguistics. In post-Bloomieldian
linguistics, a grammar was not supposed to describe the speakers
competence because the speakers competence is a mental entity.
Zellig S. Harris ([1951] 1960) and Charles F. Hockett (1954), for
instance, reject any appeal to mental states because it is impossi-
ble to observe them directly. Any recourse to mental entities was
deemed unscientiic. In the framework of Figure 1, this is tanta-
mount to a rejection of descriptive adequacy as a legitimate goal
of linguistic theory. Of course, post-Bloomieldian linguists could
not accept the allegation that they were aiming only for observa-
tional adequacy, as shown by Fred W. Householder (1965). As
analyzed by Pius ten Hacken (2007), post-Bloomieldian linguis-
tics assumed a diferent set of criteria for the selection of gram-
mars, which was not compatible with the framework of Figure 1.
he criteria of descriptive and explanatory adequacy create a
certain tension because descriptive adequacy is served by a weak
UG and explanatory adequacy by a strong UG. he weaker the con-
straints imposed by UG, the more diferent grammars it allows and
the easier it is to ind one for a particular language. he stronger
the constraints imposed by UG, the smaller the range of grammars
a child has to choose from in language acquisition and the more
aspects of the grammar that are determined by genetic factors.
he tension between descriptive and explanatory adequacy is
mentioned by Chomsky (1981, 3) as beneicial because it directs
249
Descriptive, Observational, and Explanatory Adequacy
linguistic theory to an optimal balance between the power of UG
and the power of individual grammars. It provides the basis for a
solution to the problem of selecting the grammar that corresponds
to the way competence is actually organized in the speaker. If we try
to devise a grammar for a language on the basis of a inite set of data,
there are indeinitely many candidates. No (inite) amount of addi-
tional data can constrain the range of candidate grammars to a inite
set. A very similar problem was known to the Post-Bloomieldians
as the problem of non-uniqueness (cf. Chao [1934] 1957).
By exploiting the tension between descriptive and explanatory
adequacy, Chomsky hoped to solve the indeterminacy and, at the
same time, reach a deeper level of explanation. In Chomskyan
linguistics, it is assumed that there is a single correct grammar,
that is, the one describing the actual system in the speakers
mind. If this system can come into existence, it has to be learn-
able on the basis of the language faculty and a limited amount
of input data from the environment. Whatever is contributed to
language acquisition by the language faculty must be common
to all human languages. his reasoning implies that descriptive
and explanatory adequacy can only be achieved simultaneously.
Without a proper theory of the genetically determined language
faculty, it is not possible to ind a grammar describing the actual
knowledge of language that a speaker has.
An alternative tradition in the approach to the problem of
non-uniqueness is to deny the relevance of the problem. Harris
([1951] 1960) and W. V. Quine (1972), for instance, assume that
any grammar that covers the data is a correct grammar and that
there is no principled way to choose between alternative correct
grammars (cf. indeterminacy of translation). A common
assumption in this tradition is that explanatory adequacy can
only be achieved after descriptive adequacy has been achieved.
Gerald Gazdar and colleagues observe that a description of the
relevant phenomena is a necessary precondition to explaining
some aspect of the organization of natural languages (1985, 2).
Taken literally, their observation does not have a direct bearing
on the order in which descriptive and explanatory adequacy can
be achieved. hey only mention description and explanation, not
descriptive adequacy and explanatory adequacy. For the applica-
tion of the latter pair of terms, it is necessary to conceive a gram-
mar as a theory of a speakers competence. As this conception is
generally foreign to theories in this tradition, they are all classiied
as aiming only for observational adequacy in the original sense of
the levels of adequacy introduced by Chomsky (1964).
Recent Developments
Chomsky (1981) introduced the principles and parameters
(P&P) model. In this model, the language faculty is considered as
a set of genetically determined principles that are operative in all
languages. In order to account for the diferences between lan-
guages, principles are assumed to have parameters. A parameter
is a variable in the principle with a predetermined set of values.
Language acquisition is then analyzed as inding the right values
for the parameters. he P&P model solves the tension between
the demands of descriptive and explanatory adequacy because it
provides a basis for explaining language acquisition while describ-
ing the range of attested languages. It does not provide an obvious
constraint on the proliferation of parameters, however. his means
that the indeterminacy problem arises again, but at a higher level.
250
he higher-level indeterminacy problem raised by the prolif-
eration of parameters cannot be solved within the framework of
Figure 1. Chomskys (1995) minimalist program (MP) (see
minimalism) addresses this problem by considering the ques-
tions of the uniication of linguistics with biology and the emer-
gence of the language faculty in evolution (see biolinguistics).
he latter aspect is elaborated by Marc D. Hauser, Chomsky,
and W. Tecumseh Fitch (2002). In the analysis proposed by ten
Hacken (2007), the MP adds a new pair of a real-world entity and
a theoretical entity on top of the three represented in Figure 1.
hese entities determine and explain evolution, respectively.
hey are not part of linguistics proper but operate more gener-
ally. It is not necessary to specify their exact nature in order to
use them as constraints on the way the language faculty can have
emerged and should be shaped.
If the levels of adequacy are considered only in the way they
are deined by Chomsky (1964), they have lost their relevance in
the MP, as stated by Chomsky (2002, 12933). If they are consid-
ered as relecting a wider-ranging concern in empirical science,
they have to be reformulated in a more general way. Ten Hacken
(2006) considers two alternative ways of adapting the levels of
adequacy to the expanded framework arising from the MP. One
is to add a new level of adequacy, directly connected with the
new pair of entities added on top of Figure 1. he other approach
is to relativize descriptive and explanatory adequacy with respect
to the level of the entities to which they are applied.
Pius ten Hacken
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Chao, Yuen-Ren. [1934] 1957. he Non-uniqueness of phonemic solu-
tions of phonetic systems. Bulletin of the Institute of History and
Philology 4: 36397. Repr. in Readings in Linguistics: he Development
of Descriptive Linguistics in America 19251956, ed. Martin Joos, 3854.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 1964. Current Issues in Linguistic heory. Den
Haag: Mouton. his book is the original source for the terms descrip-
tive, observational, and explanatory adequacy.
. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris.
. 1995. he Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
. 2002. On Nature and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Gazdar, Gerald, Ewan Klein, Geofrey Pullum, and Ivan Sag. 1985.
Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Harris, Zellig S. [1951] 1960. Methods in Structural Linguistics.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Repr. as Structural Linguistics, 1960.
Hauser, Marc D., Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch. 2002. he
faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?
Science 298: 156979.
Hockett, Charles F. 1954. Two models of grammatical description.
Word 10: 21031.
Householder, Fred W. 1965. On some recent claims in phonological
theory. Journal of Linguistics 1: 1334.
Quine, W. V. 1972. Methodological relections on current linguistic
theory. In Semantics of Natural Language, ed. Donald Davidson and
Gilbert Harman, 44254. Dordrecht: Reidel. his article ofers an alter-
native conception of adequacy for grammars.
ten Hacken, Pius. 2006. he nature, use and origin of explanatory ade-
quacy. In Optimality heory and Minimalism: A Possible Convergence?
ed. Hans Broekhuis and Ralf Vogel, 932. Linguistics in Potsdam 25.
Dhvani and Rasa
his article ofers a version of descriptive and explanatory adequacy
that adapts them to the latest developments in Chomskyan linguistics.
. 2007. Chomskyan Linguistics and Its Competitors. London: theorists also had literary materials available to them. hese
Equinox.
DHVANI AND RASA
he central concept of ancient Indian aesthetics is rasadhvani. A
combination of two interrelated terms, rasa and dhvani, the term
refers to a complex theory of emotion-genres based on sugges-
tiveness of language, allusion, and imagery. he theory developed
during the classical period of Sanskrit literature. More recently,
rasadhvani has drawn the attention of scholars in cognitive sci-
ence, especially those who study representational emotion (Oatley
2004, 152). he term rasa refers to a readers or viewers aesthetic
experience in relation to a work of art, music, or literature, his/her
enjoyment (or relish) of it. Dhvani refers to the verbal processes
of suggestiveness, or vyajakatva (Ingalls 1990, 9). Vyajakatva
of language and other representational signs is essential for trig-
gering memory traces in the mind of the recipient. When this
happens, an intersubjective mirroring (see mirror systems,
imitation, and language) aligns remembered emotion with
the represented rasa (Hogan 1996, 17071).
Given the emphasis on an essentially transactive relation-
ship between the actual and the imaginary, rasadhvani can be
conceived of as a theory of reader response. However, it is not
merely a reader-response theory but also a systematic theory
of representation. Among the prominent rasa theorists whose
treatises have been translated and reprinted are Bharat-Muni
(second century b.c.e.), nandavardhana (ninth century c.e.)
and Abhinavagupta (tenth century c.e.). A major contribution
of these three, among many others, is the linking of emotion to
genre in a systematic way (Oatley 2004, 153). Although each has
his own pet project and theoretical (or practical) obsession, the
common assumption is that a basic emotion insofar as one can
conceive of an emotion as basic, such as anger, fear, or love in
its rasa format can be and often is the unifying principle for an
artwork, while ancillary emotional states elaborate the unifying
rasa through antithesis and collaborative synthesis.
In their account of aesthetic experience, the rasa theorists refer
to physical processes, such as senses and sense perceptions, and
body, hand, and facial gestures, with the same ease with which
they refer to subtler processes, such as the pra (breath), mental
entities like manas (the mind), citta (cognition), budhi (cognizing
intelligence) and ahakra (ego consciousness). In his widely
known work Yogastra, Patajali (third century c.e.) searched for
points of alignment between bodily processes that afect the mind
and higher cognition (Patajali 1971, 6694). His ideas on the the-
ory and practice of yoga aim for personal development, as well
as social practice based on compassion and non-violence. Later,
nandavardhana and Abhinavagupta considered aesthetic expe-
rience, too, as a form of yoga, approximating samdhi (contem-
plative realization), though it remains grounded in the materiality
of experience. To this purpose, they reined the folk science of
emotions while trying to give an account of why and how literary
works induce emotional states and thought trends that produce
aesthetic pleasure, why representations of fear, anger, horror, and
so forth are enjoyable and deeply satisfying.
Just as the substantive body of Greek literature provided
materials for Aristotles therapeutic idea of katharsis, the rasa
included all of the epic material and most of the early classical
material that we now possess, and they were acquainted with a
substantial literature in Prkrit [vernacular], most of which is now
lost (Ingalls 1990, 5). Although earlier Sanskrit poetics tended
to be somewhat prescriptive, rasa and dhvani aesthetics is pri-
marily descriptive. No doubt, this is in part due to widely shared
knowledge of canonical and local literatures, a fully developed
literary culture, and the associated reception aesthetics. From
the engagement of centuries, thus, emerged the nine emotion-
genres, or rasas: the erotic (gra), the comic (hsya), the
tragic (karua), the furious or cruel (raudra), the heroic (vra),
the fearsome or timorous (bhaynaka), the gruesome or loath-
some (bbhats), and the wondrous (adbhuta). To these a ninth
was added later, the rasa of peace (nta) (Ingalls, 1990, 16).
Elaborate identiication of determinants (vibhvas) of emo-
tion, its consequents (anubhvas), permanent mood-congruent
states of mind (sthybhvas), and the transient states of mind
(vyabhicri, or sacr bhvas) involved the rasa theorists into
making a distinction between two sorts of emotion, rasa and
bhva. It is not uncommon for early theorists, as well as their
modern commentators, to give difering accounts of the distinc-
tion between rasa and bhva, because this is the most controver-
sial area in rasadhvani studies (Pandit 2003, 16572). he general
consensus, however, is that bhva, as indicated, is everyday emo-
tion grounded in self-interest and ego attachment, and rasa is what
we feel empathically in relation to the objective determinants of
rasa, most often via characters in iction. English renditions of
the Nyastra translate bhvas as emotional tracts and states,
providing long lists under each subtype of what would today be
called emotion categories, ranging from physical emotion to
mental states and thought trends (Bharata-Muni n.d., 87113).
Insofar as bhvas are already part of representation, the difer-
entiation of rasa as a separate emotive entity assumes that within
the deictic ields of a narrative, characters emotions will func-
tion, deictically, as raw emotions, rooted in egotism and various
forms of misrecognition, but for the reader the emotional experi-
ence will be of rasa. Some of this applies to characters as well.
In contrast to real people, characters as deictic subjects come to
have ictionally complete lives (i.e., their stories resolve either
in death or with lovers uniting in the happily ever after); hence,
some of their emotive experience, especially toward the end, will
be that of rasa. In desiring, they will go beyond desire to achieve
an emotional state based on recognition and understanding.
he rasa versus bhava distinction becomes more deinitively
clear in nandavardhanas focus on the importance of nta
rasa, which he considers the greatest happiness (Ingalls 1990,
16). Citing a verse from the epic Mahabhrata as supporting evi-
dence, nandavardhana says that nta (the peaceful) is char-
acterized by the full development of happiness that comes from
the dying of desire (nandavardhana 1990, 520). Not invested
in the dying of desire but its aesthetic transformation, his suc-
cessor Abhinavagupta too considers nta an essential part of
the rasa emotionality and, hence, a part of all rasas. Countering
objections that nta cannot be regarded as an emotion, he
asks: What shall we call the heroism of compassion? Is it the
251
Dhvani and Rasa
heroism of religion, or the heroism of generosity? It is neither; it
is simply another name for the peaceful [nta] (Abhinavagupta
1990, 525).
Upon careful examination of the primary texts on rasadhvani,
nandavardhanas Dhvanyloka and Abhinavaguptas com-
mentary, one is led to believe that while bhva covers a range
of emotions, representational and nonrepresentational, rasa is
emotion aligned with the mind-steadying potentialities of nta.
he critics of this idea, who are rebufed by Abhinavagupta, mis-
take steadiness of the mind for stillness and wonder if nta can
be a rasa.
In addition to considering nta an emotion-genre as well as
an overarching aesthetic for all rasas, Abhinava combines the
concept of rasa with the concept of dhvani. It is through pat-
terned verbal suggestion (dhvani) that the violent, the hateful,
the horriic, the furious will give rise to aesthetic enjoyment: the
rasa experience. here are various forms of dhvani, but Abhinava
considered rasadhvani the most important. he most basic form
of dhvani is vastudhvani, which refers to suggestion of a thing,
or a fact. It is not necessarily emotive, but emotive dhvani can
build on it. he dhvani movement began with a paradigm shift
away from the igures of speech (alakra) emphasis in earlier
Sanskrit poetics. However, it did not abandon that idea. he con-
cept of alamkdhvani combined connotation through igures of
speech with suggestion, though rasadhvani was still being con-
sidered more important.
In this connection, Daniel H. H. Ingalls notes that in Greek
rhetoric, signiicatio may seem like a close parallel to dhvani, but it
is the igure that draws attention to itself. He continues: [O]nly
under allegory and irony does Greco-Latin rhetoric come to what
would qualify with nanda as dhvani, and at that only vastudh-
vani (Ingalls 1990, 38). Unlike signiicatio, dhvani is not a trope;
it does not draw attention to itself. It is a suggestive process, an
aesthetic strategy that erases the primary meaning, mukhyrtha,
of a word, or phrase, to incline it toward suggestiveness within
the textual context of a representational schema.
It is important to keep in mind that the term dhvani was origi-
nally borrowed from the grammarians for whom it had a techni-
cal meaning. In Vkyapadya, Bharthari deines dhvani in the
following manner: he true form [that is the semantic content]
in the word that is manifested by the dhvani is determined by a
series of cognitions [viz., the cognitions of successive phonemes],
which are unnameable [that is to say, each phoneme-cognition
in itself is unassignable to this word or that], but favorable to the
inal [word-identifying] cognition (quoted in Ingalls 1990, 170;
bracketed insertions from Ingalls).
In poetic theory, the technical, linguistic meaning of dhvani
is used only metaphorically. Graduated phoneme-cognition
stands for the temporality of the reading process, where one is
engaged but is not sure what the dhvani meaning might be until
the narrative, musical, or other equivalent of the inal word-
identifying phoneme-cognition is registered on the mind.
A brief example of the operations of dhvani used in the
Sanskrit tradition is a Prkrit verse, where a wife gives sleeping
directives to the stranger who is a guest for the night (while the
husband is away). She says Mother-in-law sleeps here, I there;
/ look, traveler, while it is light. / For at night when you cannot
see, / You must not fall into my bed (Ingalls 1990, 14). Clearly,
252
by erasing the primary sense, mukhrtha, of her words, the lonely
wife makes an erotic suggestion through a literal negation of it.
his is a very simple example. Others from the epics Rmyaa
and the Mahbhrata are much more complicated.
In explicating some of these epic and classical examples from
the rasadhvani perspective, Abhinavagupta developed a theory
of memory equipped with the notion of memory banks, storage
and retrieval processes. he connection to memory semantic,
emotional, and episodic allowed the subsequent integration of
rasadhvani into contemporary cognitive science (Hogan 1996,
17076).
Following traditional theories of consciousness,
Abhinavagupta believes that all experiences perceptual,
cognitive, emotional, etc. leave traces in the mind (Gnoli
1968, 79). Relecting on why representational grief is relished,
Abhinavagupta explains that the basic emotion for grief is
compassion. And, compassion consists of relishing (or aes-
thetically enjoying) grief. hat is to say, where we have the basic
emotion of grief, a thought trend that its with the vibhvas and
anubhvas of this grief, if it is relished (literally, if it is chewed
over and over), becomes a rasa and so from its aptitude [towards
this end] one speaks of any basic emotion as becoming rasa
(Abhinavagupta 1990, 117; insertions by Ingalls). Drawing a gen-
eral conclusion, he adds: he basic emotion is put to use in the
process of experiencing the rasa of literary and art works, as
thought-trends are transferred from what one has already expe-
rienced in ones own life to one which one infers in anothers life
(ibid.). his process involves distancing of ones own emotion
from self-interested concerns to something larger.
Abhinavaguptas notions of memory-trace (saskra)
and desire-trace (vsan) are not unrelated to his theologi-
cal preoccupation with how to free the mind from egocentric
attachments (and ephemeral satisfactions) to incline it toward
transcendental joy: nanda. he importance given to nta rasa
has the same origin. he materiality of aesthetic experience, for
Abhinavagupta, is a means of moving toward the nonmateriality
of transcendental experience. Socially, the rasa theory focuses
on education of emotions that would produce sahdaya citizens.
Abhinavagupta deines sahdayatva (literary sensitivity) as the
faculty of entering into the identity of the poet (Ingalls 1990,
72). In a more modern context, sahdaya is a person trained in
rasadhvani-generated understanding of emotion and social obli-
gation (Hogan 2003, 1217).
An instance from John Websters Duchess of Mali ([1623]
1961), a work clearly not known to the rasadhvani theorists, will
demonstrate to what extent applications of the rasadhvani aes-
thetics are contingent neither on a shared origin nor on areal
connectedness of traditions. Briely, Websters play revolves
around a duchesss secret marriage, upon her early widow-
hood, to her steward, against the wishes of her socially powerful
brothers. he marriage remains a secret for some time, but in the
middle of the play the duchess is separated from her husband,
Antonio, and is imprisoned along with her children and servant
woman, Cariola. Toward the end of the play, a loyal friend, Delio,
and Antonio approach the cardinals house in hopes of reconcil-
ing Antonio to his wifes brothers. While the reader knows that
the duchess, her children, and Cariola have been murdered,
Delio and Antonio do not, at least not with certainty.
Dhvani and Rasa
he deserted point of entry they choose is a walkway around
a fortiication near the ancient ruin of an abbey. A piece of the
old cloister around there Gives the best echo, says Delio to
Antonio. he words repeated by the echo are so clear in their
enunciation, Delio remarks, that it is regarded by some as a
spirit (5.3.18). As one would expect, the echo repeats the last
words and phrases of what Antonio and Delio say to each other,
and these repeated sentence fragments (italicized in many edi-
tions of the play) compose a text of their own with a dhvani mes-
sage to Antonio: a message that holds a mirror to his suspicions
and dread.
As the conversation continues, Delio remarks that like
human beings, ancient monuments also become deceased
and so Must have like death that we have (5.3.19). he echo
repeats: Like death that we have (5.3.20), changing the referent
for we from humans in general to the duchess and her chil-
dren. For the reader, the echo-utterance is her utterance, not
because she has become a ghost but because we know that the
duchess would like to inform and warn her husband. On his part,
Antonio imagines that the echo spoke in A very deadly accent
(23), as instantly it echoes back: Deadly accent (21). Delio, less
illed with dread and more with anxious anticipation, thinks this
utterance signiies some thing of sorrow (25). Expectedly, the
phrase, A thing of sorrow is reverberated and collated with the
repetition of hat suits it best (256). Drawn thus far into the
echo-utterance, Antonio says: Tis very like my wifes voice; the
echo promptly repeats: Ay, wifes voice (27). he next few syn-
tactic and semantic fragments, similarly taken out of the stated
context when repeated by the echo are Do not (30) suggesting
that they should not go in. his pattern continues for some time,
till the text develops through echoes of Fly your fate (38); For
thou art a dead thing (41).
At the narrative level, clearly, the echo phenomenon fore-
shadows the end; yet there is no need for foreshadowing. he
reader knows that nothing good can come out of Antonios going
into the house. It is equally clear that Webster is not using the
supernatural trope. he echo-text is like a code; it uses vastud-
hvani in the way the primary sense in the sentences spoken by
each speaker, their mukhyrtha, is erased. A suggested mean-
ing, or the dhvani meaning, is inserted systematically. Up to this
point in the play, the plot line involving the duchess and her fam-
ily, though it has had moments of tragic grandeur, was mostly
marked by abjection and horror. Into this general scenario, the
well-placed junctural scene inserts a relective moment of tran-
quility (of nta), with a muted lavor of retrospective and pro-
spective experience of grief.
hrough the dhvani resonance of the echo scene, the tragic
fate of this holy family (Antonio last parted from his wife near
the Loretto convent, where she was captured by her brother, the
cardinal [3.5.1140]) is, thus, represented through karua rasa,
the aesthetic feeling of compassionate sorrow. In contrast, what
happens to the brothers is represented through the emotion-
genre of absurd horror. From the start, Webster walls of the
inner story of the duchesss secret marriage, her motherhood,
and marital happiness from the overall clamminess of a sordid
world, where the most heinous sinner is the one who punishes
others for violation of social rules. Despite Websters many iro-
nies (embodied in the character of Bosola), the emotional logic
of this inner story is like a clear stream, resonant with muted
gra (the rasa of romantic love), and is constituted by vari-
ous determinants, consequents, and permanent and transient
emotional states. For instance, one permanent mood-congru-
ent state of mind (sthy bhva) is the duchesss love for her
husband and her enjoyment of her secret marriage, despite the
dread. Another is her vtsalya, mother-love. At the moment of
her brutal murder in prison, when Cariola cries out that she will
die with her, the duchess pleads: I pray thee, look thou givst
my little boy / Some syrup for his cold, and let the girl / Say her
prayers ere she sleep (4.2.18890). Some of the transient emo-
tional states (sacri bhvas) are her hopes, fears, worries, and
anxieties as she conceals her pregnancies and plans for her fam-
ilys safety.
he precision and economy of Websters semantic technique
presents the reverberated sentence fragments not as random
repetitions. Rather, they are put together like semantic paral-
lels to the sequence of phoneme-cognitions, where the inal
phoneme, retrospectively, forms a meaningful unit the gram-
marians concept of dhvani, as mentioned earlier. Here, the inal
semantic unit, like the inal phoneme, brings forth the full eicacy
of rasadhvani when the two auditors (Antonio and Delio) stand
awed by the inal words: Never to see her more (5.3.45), echoed
in answer to Antonios My duchess is asleep now, / And her lit-
tle ones, I hope sweetly, O heaven, / Shall I never see her more
(424). After his conditional statement is changed to an assertion
by the echo, never see her more, Antonio says: I marked not
one repetition of the echo / But that; and on the sudden, a clear
light presented me a face folded in sorrow (469). What Antonio
has known subconsciously for some time, but has not dared to
believe, is communicated to him with concern, consolation, and
ininite sorrow minutes before he will have no time for relec-
tion (on his fate), or for emotion of any kind.
Lalita Pandit Hogan
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Abhinavagupta. 1990. he Dhvanyaloka of nandavardhana with Locana
of Abhinavagupta. Trans. Daniel H. H. Ingalls, Jefrey Moussaief
Masson, and M. V. Patwardhan. London: Harvard University Press.
nandavardhana. 1990. he Dhvanyaloka of Anandavardhana with
Locana of Abhinavagupta. Trans. Daniel H. H. Ingalls, Jefrey Moussaief
Masson, and M. V. Patwardhan. London: Harvard University Press.
Bharata-Muni. n.d. he Natya Sastra. Delhi: Satguru Publications
Gnoli, Raniero. 1968. he Aesthetic Experience According to Abhinavagupta.
Varanasi, India: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series.
Hogan, Patrick. 1996. Towards a cognitive science of poet-
ics: Anandadhana, Abhinavagupta, and the theory of literature.
College Literature. 23.1: 16478.
. 2003. Introduction: Tagore and the ambivalence of commit-
ment. In Rabindranath Tagore: Universality and Tradition, ed. Patrick
Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit, 923. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press.
Ingalls, Daniel H. H., ed. 1990. he Dhvanyaloka of nandavardhana
with Locana of Abhinavagupta. London: Harvard University Press.
Oately, Keath. 2004. Emotions: A Brief History. Oxford: Blackwell
Pandit, Lalita. 2003. he psychology and aesthetics of love: ringra,
Bhvan, and Rasadhvani in Gora. In Rabindranath
Tagore: Universality and Tradition, ed. Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita
Pandit, 14174. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
253
Dialect
Patajali. 1971. Yogasutra. Ed. and trans. J. R. Ballantyne and Govind
Shastri Deva. Varanasi, India: Indological Book House.
Webster, John. Duchess of Mali. [1623] 1961. In Elizabethan Drama, ed.
Leonard Dean, 271360. 2d ed. Englewood Clifs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
DIALECT
In pursuit of a useful deinition of dialect, one may begin by
distinguishing language from dialect. hink of a language as a
set. A dialect is a set member of that set. Just as a set does not
exist in the absence of its set members, so a language does not
exist in the absence of its dialects. A dialect is often identiied
as a variety of a language spoken by a group of people. hus, a
dialect involves the shared linguistic behavior and knowledge
of a group, not of the idiosyncratic individual. his variety may
be understood, to varying degrees, by people who speak other
contemporary varieties of the same language. his criterion of
mutual intelligibility is problematic as diferent languages can
also show degrees of mutual intelligibility. (Consider Swedish
versus Norwegian.) Consequently, to speak of a dialect presup-
poses a prior identiication of the language to which the variety
belongs. Within this language, each variety will difer from others
in terms of pronunciation, vocabulary, and/or grammar. More
precisely, each variety may difer in its phonetic implementation
rules, phonology, lexical items or semantics, morphology,
syntax, and the pragmatic functions of discourse markers or
syntactic structures. Although diferences of speech-act real-
izations, narrative types and topics, or conversational routines
can also exist, less research has explored these issues.
Generally, diferences between varieties of the same language
may be quantitative or qualitative in nature. What is a quantita-
tive diference? Consider words like the or that. Most speakers of
English will sometimes pronounce the initial consonant as a fric-
ative [] and sometimes as a stop [d]. his alternation between
[] and [d] can be quantiied. In turn, the frequencies with which
individuals say [] versus [d] may correlate to categories of iden-
tity, such as age, gender, class, or ethnicity. Alternating forms,
like [] ~ [d], are called variants of a sociolinguistic variable. his
variable is represented as (dh) in the literature. Sociolinguistic
variables like (dh) show quantitative diferences across social
classes (upper favors [] more than lower), genders (women
favor [] more than men), and age (working adults favor [] more
than young children). Such frequency diferences have also been
termed group-preferential diferences.
What is a qualitative diference? Consider the Spanish la casa
(house) and la caza (hunt). In Puerto Rico, they are both pro-
nounced [kasa]. In Spain, casa is [kasa] but caza is [kaa]. hus,
in one dialect we ind a feature that is absent from another. his
is a qualitative diference. Some researchers identify this as a
group-exclusive diference.
Qualitative and quantitative dialect diferences may map onto
groups deined by geographical regions or by social characteris-
tics. hus, researchers speak of regional or social dialects. his
difers from the common belief that dialects are only regional.
Because diferences among the genders or age groups occur, we
may ask if varieties associated with gender or age are dialects as
well. In practice, researchers reserve social dialects for class and
ethnic varieties, even though gender and age diferences in a
254
Dialogism and Heteroglossia
community may lead to new dialects. Because dialect boundaries
are fuzzy, contiguous regional dialects may form dialect chains.
Within the chain, two adjacent dialects will display greater simi-
larity than two dialects that exist at a distance from one another.
Richard Cameron
SUGGESTION FOR FURTHER READING
Labov, William, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg. 2006. he Atlas of
North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change.
Berlin: Mouton/de Gruyter.
DIALOGISM AND HETEROGLOSSIA
Dialogism and heteroglossia, as well as polyphony, chronotope,
and an array of related terms used in literary criticism, cultural
studies, and postcolonial studies, are most commonly asso-
ciated with the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin (18951975). he
concepts connected with these terms serve to question vari-
ous forms of epistemologism or ixing of putative knowledge in
a timeless, generalized, absolute form, a tendency common to
many European philosophical systems of the nineteenth cen-
tury and before (Holquist 1990, 18). Detailed elaborations of
dialogic terminology by the original authors and commen-
tators suggest a general distrust of any transformation of tem-
poral experience into objectivist abstraction through a reifying
vocabulary. Even though dialogical theory has accumulated its
own privileged vocabulary, its deeper project is to challenge the
monologic discourses of authority in favor of internally per-
suasive discourses, which are anchored in the polyglossia of
social life (Bakhtin 1981, 3345). From this perspective, dialogue
is essential to the generation, accumulation, and dispersion of
knowledge.
Given this emphasis on dialogue, it is somewhat ironic that the
disputed authorship of various writings of the Bakhtin Circle has
given rise to a great deal of debate over the years (Holquist 1990,
21011). In their deinitive biography, Katerina Clark and Michael
Holquist take pains to establish that the volumes attributed to
Valentin Voloshinov and P. N. Medvedev were really authored
by Bakhtin. His involvement in reverse plagiarism, the biog-
raphers attest, is a consequence of Bakhtins love of conversa-
tion, the give and take of good talk, which is the keystone of his
dialogism (Clark and Holquist 1984, 14670). Looking toward
applications of dialogical theory to digital media, classroom
pedagogy, cognitive theory, and empirical studies, others main-
tain that for searching beyond early dialogism, it is important
to keep in mind that there were important diferences in ide-
ology among the members of the Bakhtin Circle (Bostad et al.
2004, 7). Nevertheless, they all shared a conviction that socio-
historical embeddedness of symbolic tools implies that signs
carry their previous use with them without having entirely ixed
meanings (ibid., 11). his provides suicient internal coherence
to dialogical theory.
Some Basic Concepts
In the course of discussing the novel as a polyphonic genre,
Bakhtin deines heteroglossia as the diversity of speech genres
that are rooted in social life. he novel, he says, orchestrates all
Dialogism and Heteroglossia
its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas expressed
in it by means of the diversity of speech genres (razonreie) and
by difering individual voices that lourish under such condi-
tions (1981, 263). His preference for the novel over the epic is
based on the notion that high genres distance literary form from
the diversity of speech genres by choosing an elevated style, a
unitary language, at the expense of the common language
and its polyphonic utterances. his joining of diversity must
be simultaneous, not segmented into diferent times. In other
words, it must be heteroglossic simultaneity. hat simultaneity is
neither unitary nor directed at a telos. Its only goal is interactive
self-understanding.
Interaction is produced by dialogue, which brings us to dia-
logism. Foregrounding utterance as the most salient unit of
language and dialogue as the social and biological condition in
which language lourishes, Bakhtin states: We are taking lan-
guage not as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but
rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language
as world view, even as concrete opinion, insuring a maximum
of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life (1981,
271). Just as language is not merely a system of abstract gram-
matical categories, but concrete opinion and world view,
truth (pravda) is ongoing dialogue, never-ceasing talk. Since
talk brings into play both the cognitive structure of the brain and
ones immersion in the social life of a language, consciousness is
necessarily participative consciousness, and the primary unit
of polyphony in the novel is the author-hero dialogue that pro-
duces an open-ended uninalizable hero (Reed 1999, 117).
Although the speciic subject for these formulations is
Dostoevsky, the implications apply to literature, philosophy,
linguistics, ethics, and social life in general. Similarly, the car-
nivalesque, as explored by Bakhtin in Rabelais, includes dia-
logically signiicant speech genres, such as curses, oaths, slang,
humour, popular tricks and jokes, scatological forms, in fact all
the low and dirty sorts of folk humor (Peter Stallybrass and
Allon White, quoted in Emerson 1999, 247). For Bakthin, how-
ever, the structures of addressivity and answerability the ways
in which all speech is oriented toward an addressee and calls
for a dialogic answer have a larger constitutive function than
one might at irst infer from the phrase speech genres. Within the
frames of heteroglossic creativity and constraint, Baktin suggests,
Heroes are genres, and trends and schools are second and third
rank protagonists (1990, 78).
To say that some discourse is or is not dialogical itself risks
reifying that discourse in a monological way, however. hus,
Bakhtin stresses, we may dialogize a discourse. Indeed, this per-
spective can be used to enter into dialogue with Bakhtins rele-
gation of the epic to the discourse of authority. A Bakhtinian
approach entails that epics are utterances grounded in temporal
social realities that, at some point in time, attain a degree of eval-
uative inalization and absorb a degree of valorized perception.
he Indian epic Rmyaa, for instance, with its regional ver-
sions still available, along with their link to lively speech genres,
can be understood as an ongoing societal conversation about
ideas of order in family and state, about right rule, duties of wife
to her husband, brother to brother, ruler to subject, and so forth.
However, it should not be forgotten that the Rmnyaas long
life in cultural memory comes from its lasting value determined
by continual mainstreaming of its message, but also by contin-
ual and only partially successful marginalization of its residual
polyphony and heteroglossia.
What Dialogism Is Not
One might reasonably ask here if dialogism is just another way of
referring to Hegelian (or Marxist) dialectic or Saussurean bina-
rism. In fact, there are striking diferences, even contradictions,
among these concepts. Dialogism may, in fact, be seen as quar-
reling with the tropes of dialectic and binary opposition. On the
other hand, these quarrels never resort to confronting systems
with their elaborated antitheses because of the complicities this
entails (Pechey 1999, 326). In other words, Bakhtinian dialo-
gism refuses an agonistic identiication with the aggressor, as it
resists any kind of maximal codiication of its own discourse and
terminology.
Consider dialectical thinking. Although it allows for a thesis
and an antithesis, dialectical thinking resolves diferences in a
synthesis. Dialogue, on the contrary, advocates a copresence of
diferences. More importantly, in dialogue, diferences are never
only two that can be conveniently resolved into one. Diferences
are many and dispersed because the voices in a society are plural
and dispersed.
Similarly, even though dialogism deines itself against mono-
logism and, thus, sets up an initial binary opposition, dialogical
theory does not sponsor binaryism, nor can it be confused with
antibinaryism. In its most productive forms, dialogism is asym-
metric dualism (Holquist 1990, 52). Relecting on the shift
from bipolar thinking to triadic thinking in dialogism, Sigmund
Ongstad draws attention to the super-addressee as the invisible
third party in dialogue. In Bakhtin words, any dialogue takes
place against the background of the invisible thirds responsive
understanding (quoted in Ongstad 2004, 78). he role of the
super-addressee is, it must be noted, participatory, not telic or
ontological.
Dialogism, Heteroglossia, and Answerability: An Example
from King Lear
A brief example from King Lear will clarify this point. In the
opening scene of the play, Lear asks his daughters how much
they love him. After the irst two have spoken, Lear asks what
Cordelia can say to draw a third more opulent share of royal
largesse. Cordelias cryptic answer, Nothing, clashes violently
with the extravagant professions of her sisters. he addressee for
all their speeches is Lear, also the others who are present. he
super-addressee is the invisible viewer/auditor of Shakespeares
time and ours. When Lear asks Cordelia to mend her speech,
lest she mar her fortunes (1.1.945), it is clear that the king
has already decided to punish by withholding patrimony (and
love), but the father worries. His caution expects ilial answer-
ability (of speech and action). Lears later characterization of his
loved daughter as Dowered with our curse and strangered with
our oath (1.1.205) does not merely show that he is hiding his
shame in anger; it attests to the fact that, though the relationship
has fallen apart, the frames of addressivity and answerability
are intact. Consequently, the dramaturgy of the scene is marked
by a violent clash between the discourse of authority shown
in Lears dividing of the kingdom and the mutually struggling
255
Dialogism and Heteroglossia
internally persuasive discourses of the ambitious, unloving
daughters and the not-ambitious, loving daughter.
he heteroglossic vitality of this moment in the play is
enhanced by Lears own utterances as they move back and forth
from the discourse of authority to an internally persuasive dis-
course. When Cordelia does not mend her speech enough and
chooses, instead, to mar her fortunes, risking her hurtful answer
Lear asks: But goes thy heart with this? he poignant question
betrays an involuntary admission that the heart does not need
to go with the words one speaks, as much as it is indicative of his
growing sense that the logic of the discourse (of love) he initiated
has been undermined. Having used up his kinglike and fatherlike
powers, Lear resorts to accusation: So young and so untender?
uttered, once again, to the answerability of Cordelias self-de-
fense: So young, my lord, and true (1.1.1058) Clark, Katerina, and Michael Holquist. 1984. Mikhail Bakhtin.
his kind of responsiveness to the other is the deining feature
of heteroglossic simultaneity, perhaps its central ethical norm.
At the beginning of the scene, Lear is not responsive to Cordelia
as his other. he super-addressee, embodied later in Lears
Fool, senses that Lear is like a monologic author, and his daugh-
ters are his heroines and villains. As an unsurprising parallel,
Bakhtin, too, thinks of the hero as a model for a person in society
and insists that a hero is not a voiceless object but a legal per-
son with rights. Deictically imagined as someone who acts, talks,
and exists in a world of heteroglossic simultaneity, heroes are
formally equal subjects of law that is immanent to the relations
between persons themselves (Brandist 2004, 30; see deixis). In
this case, Cordelia, though not the hero of this play, is intent on
establishing herself as a person with a voice and a legal person
with rights, just as her sisters are invested in gaining access to
social power.
In stylistic terms, Lears utterances conlate formal lan-
guage of the court with speech genres of familial conversation.
He changes nouns to unusual verbs, as in strangered and
dowered; repeats the plural irst person pronoun, our, twice
in the same line, calling attention to himself as speaker; substi-
tutes curse and oath for authoritative command; and echoes
Cordelias Nothing at the moment of irst shock that a daughter,
who is also his subject, would be so insubordinate (1.1.8790).
In the course of the play, Lears unitary consciousness has
to become a participative consciousness. Most importantly, Lear
has to acquaint himself with the consciousness(es) of his daugh-
ters as others. In this way, the play seems to point directly
toward Bakhtinian conclusions. he raison detre for heteroglos-
sic simultaneity as an aesthetic-ethical norm is to sustain the
chaos of human experience and the noise of language within a
polyphonic system, not to underwrite it through monological
glossing.
Lalita Pandit Hogan
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bakhtin M. M. 1981. he Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed.
Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
. 1984. Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl
Emerson. Introduction by Wayne C Booth. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
256
Diffusion
. 1990. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Ed. and
trans. Michael Holquist, Vadim Liapunov, and Kenneth Brostorm.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
. 1993. Towards Philosophy of the Act. Ed. Michael Holquist and
Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas
Press.
Bostad, Finn, Craig Brandist, Lars Sigfried Evenson, and Hege
Charlotte Faber, eds. 2004. Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language
and Culture: Meaning in Language, Art and New Media. New
York: Macmillan, Palgrave.
Brandist, Craig. 2002. he Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture and Politics.
London: Pluto Press.
. 2004. Law and genres of discourse: he Bakhtin Circle theory
of language and the phenomenology of right. In Bostad et al. 2004,
2345.
London: Harvard University Press.
Emerson, Caryl, ed. 1999. Critical Essays on Mikhail Bakhtin. New
York: G. K. Hall.
Holquist, Michael. 1990. Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World. 2d ed. New
York: Routledge.
Ongstad, Sigmund. 2004. Bakhtins triadic epistemology and ideologies
of dialigism. In Bostad et al. 2004, 6588.
Pechey, Graham. 1999. Boundaries versus binaries: Bakhtin in/against
history of ideas. In Emerson 1999, 32137.
Reed, Natalia. 1999. he philosophical roots of polyphony: A
Dostoevskian reading. In Emerson 1999, 11752.
Shakespeare, William. 2001. King Lear. Ed. R. A. Foakes. London: homas
Learning.
DIFFUSION
he study of linguistic difusion is concerned with describing and
explaining how languages or language features spread over time
and space. On a macrolevel, difusion refers to the dispersion of
languages from a common point of origin. hrough migration
and subsequent isolation, thousands of languages have devel-
oped from a highly limited set of protolanguages. he physical,
demographic, and social constraints on language dispersion can-
not be reduced to a simple algorithm, and the reconstruction of
protolanguages, language family relationships, and patterns
of spatial dispersion remain a primary challenge in historical
linguistics.
On a language-speciic level, difusion is concerned with the
spread of particular linguistic innovations across the varieties of
a language or, in some cases, across languages. Linguists, partic-
ularly sociolinguists, dialectologists, and historical linguists,
seek to identify the mechanisms of transmission and the factors
that promote or inhibit the spread of language traits. A linguistic
change is initiated in a particular locale at a given point in time
and spreads outward from that point in progressive stages so that
earlier changes reach the outlying areas later. he wave model
assumes that a change spreads in concentric layers, as waves
radiate outward from a central point of contact when a pebble is
dropped into a pool of water. Forms that follow this straightfor-
ward time and distance relation follow the pattern of contagious
difusion (Bailey et al. 1993).
Because of physical, social, and psychological factors, a model
that considers only time and distance is too simplistic to account
for the spread of linguistic forms. Difusion researchers cite at
Diffusion
least ive factors that inluence the dispersion of customs, ideas,
and practices: 1) the phenomenon itself, 2) communication net-
works, 3) distance, 4) time, and 5) social structure. Although lin-
guistic structures are inherently quite diferent from phenomena
such as technological innovations, they are subject to many of
the same social and physical factors that inluence the nature of
difusion in general.
A gravity model or hierarchical model of language (Trudgill
1974) often provides a better proile of the difusion of linguistic
forms than a simple wave model. In the gravity model, which is
borrowed from the physical sciences, difusion is a function not
only of the distance from one point to another, as with the wave
model, but of the population density of areas that stand to be
afected by a nearby change. he interplay between the popu-
lation density of two areas and the distance that separates them
parallels the efects of density and distance on gravitational pull.
Changes are most likely to begin in heavily populated cities that
serve as cultural hearths. From there they radiate outward, but
not in a simple wavelike pattern; rather, innovations irst reach
moderate-size cities that fall under the area of inluence of some
large, focal city, leaving nearby, sparsely populated areas unaf-
fected. Gradually, innovations ilter down from more populous,
denser areas to less densely populated areas, afecting rural
areas last, even if such areas are quite close to the original focal
area of the change. he spread of change is thus like skipping a
stone across a pond, rather than dropping a stone into a pond, as
in the wave model. he model of change following this pattern is
referred to as cascade difusion.
One of the noteworthy examples of cascade difusion is a
vowel shift currently taking place in the northern cities of the
United States. Part of this elaborate rotation involves the shift
of the vowel of thought so that it sounds more like the vowel of
lot. he lot vowel, in turn, sounds more like the vowel of trap,
which moves closer to the pronunciation of the vowel of dress.
his vowel shift proceeds from larger cities in the North to suc-
cessively smaller ones, leaving in-between rural areas relatively
unafected until the later stages of the change.
Gravity models of change include factors of distance and
communication networks as a function of population density,
but they do not recognize the role of other social and psycho-
logical factors. For example, changes do not spread evenly across
all segments of the population. Members of upwardly mobile
social classes usually adopt linguistic innovations more quickly
than do members of other classes, and women and younger
people are often leaders in certain kinds of language change. It
is therefore essential to track changes not only across geographi-
cal space and population density but also across diferent age,
ethnic, gender, and social status groups (cf. age groups and
gender and language).
In terms of social networks, the irst people to adopt changes
are those with loose ties to many social groups but strong ties to
none due to the face that strong ties inhibit the spread of change.
In order for the changes to make their way into more close-knit
groups, they need to be picked up by people who are central ig-
ures in these groups but who are willing to adopt change none-
theless, perhaps for reasons of prestige. Because these early
adopters are well regarded in their social groups, the changes
they adopt are likely to be picked up by other members of these
Digital Media
groups, thereby difusing throughout the group and to other
groups or communities within a population (Labov 2001).
One important study of language difusion in the southern
United States (Bailey et al. 1993) shows that although many
linguistic innovations follow the more common hierarchical
pattern of cascade difusion, some features may display the
opposite difusion pattern. For example, the use of the special
intentional modal ixin to, as in heyre ixin to go now, once
heavily concentrated in rural areas of the American South, has
now been adopted in some larger, urban population centers.
he explanation for this contrahierarchical difusion pattern is
tied to its symbolic marking of traditional southern American
speech. In the face of a large inlux of outsiders into the region,
native urban residents may seek to assert their southern iden-
tity by adopting selected structures strongly associated with the
regional South, showing that the social meaning attached to
linguistic forms has to be considered along with geographical,
demographic, and interactional factors in explaining linguistic
difusion.
Walt Wolfram
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bailey, Guy, Tom Wikle, Jan Tillery, and Lori Sand. 1993. Some patterns
of linguistic difusion. Language Variation and Change 5: 35990.
Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change. Vol. 2. Social
Factors. Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell.
Rogers, Everett M. 1995. Difusion of Innovations. 5th ed. New York: Free
Press.
Trudgill, Peter. 1974. Linguistic change and difusion: Description and
explanation in sociolinguistic dialect geography. Language in Society
3: 21546.
DIGITAL MEDIA
Digital media are those media whose means of production and
distribution are digitized via computers; the term is commonly
used in contrast to older forms of media, such as print (for text)
or analog devices (for sound and images). In language studies,
digital media most commonly refer to the Internet, the World
Wide Web, mobile telephony, and other networked and wireless
technologies that support human communication known as
computer-mediated communication (CMC) and the transmis-
sion of information. Digital media can also refer to digital storage
devices for data, sound, video, and graphics. Here, we are con-
cerned primarily with the former sense, especially the impact of
digital communication technologies on peoples individual and
collective use of and relation to language.
History
Communication via digital media can be traced to the inven-
tion of packet switching technology in the 1960s, which enabled
messages to be exchanged among networked computers. he
ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet, was implemented as
a United States defense department project in 1969; by the mid-
1970s, it had become popular for human communication via
e-mail and mailing lists. In 1979, the USENET was created as an
alternative, grassroots network; USENET newsgroups, along with
various BBS (bulletin board systems) and networks hosted on
257
Digital Media
private servers during the 1980s, were eventually integrated into
the Internet, the term used after 1983 for the collection of net-
works that had grown around the ARPANET. By the late 1980s,
the Internet ofered public real-time chat via Internet Relay Chat
and MUDs (Multi-User Dimensions), along with email, mailing
lists, and newsgroups. Around the same time, Internet service
providers (ISPs) were starting to make the Internet accessible
to people in their homes, rather than just from businesses and
universities.
he introduction of the World Wide Web in 1991 and the irst
graphical browser in 1993 transformed the Internet by enabling
networked multimedia. By the mid-1990s, Internet telephony
and videoconferencing were available, along with graphical vir-
tual worlds. Despite the increasing availability of bandwidth to
support multimedia, however, text retained its popularity. he
late 1990s saw the emergence of several text-based applica-
tions: instant messaging, weblogs (blogs), and text messaging on
mobile phones (especially in Europe and Asia).
A more recent trend has been toward mobile media and lex-
ible access. Starting with external hard drives for external data
storage and continuing with laptops, personal digital assistants
(PDAs), iPods, and smartphones, digital media have moved
away from desktop computing toward more distributed, light-
weight, faster devices.
Language-Related Issues
he rapid rise in popularity of digitally mediated communication
over the past two decades has attracted considerable interest
from language scholars. he central debates have focused on
how to classify such communication relative to speech and writ-
ing, the efects of technology on language and language use, the
purported anonymity of text-based CMC and its social and lin-
guistic consequences, and the long-term efects of digital media
on individual languages and the global language ecology.
Computer-mediated communication is sometimes claimed
to constitute a third modality of language, alongside speech and
writing. Text-based CMC, by far the most common manifestation
of digital communication, blends the production and reception
features of writing (typing on a keyboard or otherwise entering
characters into an alphanumeric interface; reading messages on
a screen) with the structural and interactional features of spoken
conversation (e.g., informality, phatic content, relatively rapid
exchange of messages), making it a hybrid modality with distinc-
tive characteristics (Crystal [2001] 2006). Moreover, the personal
accessibility and wide public reach of the Internet have led some
to characterize it as fundamentally transformative of human
communication, a revolution as profound as that triggered by
the printing press.
At the same time, the novelty of digital language should not
be overstated. It is often possible to trace the roots of so-called
emergent or digitally native CMC genres (Crowston and Williams
2001) to older written and oral genres. An example is the blog,
which, while arguably a historically unprecedented hybrid of
personal, interpersonal, and mass communication, manifests
continuities with handwritten diaries, phone calls to friends and
family, project logs, and letters to the editor. Ultimately, what may
be most unique about digital media is their tendency to support
a convergence of language features, genres of communication,
258
and communication technologies that were previously consid-
ered distinct. he incorporation of text chat into multiplayer
online games and the ability to send text messages from mobile
phones to interactive television (iTV) programs illustrate the lat-
ter trend.
heoretical debate has also centered around the efects of
digital technology on human communication. A strong techno-
logical determinism position holds that production and recep-
tion constraints on CMC inevitably shape digitally mediated
language and language use. Such a position inds support in
research indings that technical constraints on message exchange
disrupt and reshape turn-taking patterns across a range of digital
genres (Herring 1999). A weaker version of technological deter-
minism holds that features of speciic technologies predispose
users to communicate in certain ways, but that users may over-
ride those predispositions. For example, the synchronicity of
CMC systems tends to afect message length, complexity, and
formality (with messages in asynchronous modes being gener-
ally longer, more syntactically complex, and more formal than
in synchronous modes), although both formal and informal lan-
guage can be found, for example, in email (asynchronous) and
chat (synchronous), depending on the topic and purpose of the
communication.
he social construction of technology theory goes further to
assert that users shape technologies through their use as much or
more than their use is shaped by those technologies (Bijker and
Law 1992). his view receives support from computer-mediated
cooperative work and online education, where the nature of
the tasks structures communication in often predictable ways.
Further, many face-to-face social and interactional dynamics,
including gendered patterns of communication, are reproduced
in digital discourse, albeit diferently in academic discussion
forums than in chat. In an efort to account for such variation,
a fourth position holds that there is no single way in which tech-
nology inluences mediated language; rather, it depends on the
particular constellation of technical and social variables that
characterizes a given sample of mediated discourse (Herring
2007). A desideratum for future research is a coherent theory
that can predict when speciic types of media will have particular
communicative efects.
Another nexus of debate concerns the purported anonym-
ity of digitally mediated communication. Because social cues
conveyed through prosody, facial expression, and physical
appearance of message senders are iltered out in text-based
CMC, many early scholars believed that digitally mediated com-
munication was depersonalized and that users identities were
masked or irrelevant. his was thought to give rise to laming or
hostile language (and antisocial behavior, in general); play with
identity and liberatory (or inauthentic, depending on ones per-
spective) online self-presentations; and compensatory linguistic
strategies, such as creative spellings and emoticons (faces made
out of ascii characters), in order to enhance ones social pres-
ence and signal ones intentions. hese linguistic strategies have
been referred to as textspeak by David Crystal ([2001] 2006; for
examples, see Figure 1).
Alternative perspectives have also been advanced on these
phenomena, however. True anonymity is infrequent, since most
people who communicate digitally use consistent identiiers, and
Digital Media
HK English: Hee hee . . . dunno why I always like to send u mails ar! Part is
becoz I wanna keep contact with u la!
French: Ca sera donc tjs 1 plaisir 2te revoir! :-) [So it will always be a pleasure to
meet you again :-)]
Arabic: w 3laikom essalaaam asoomah ^_^ [Hi there, Asoomah ^_^]
Japanese: (*^ ^*) [Congratulations on your comeback
(as if singing) That was good (*^ ^*)]
in the case of private communication (e.g., via e-mail, instant
messaging, or short message service [SMS]), the communica-
tors usually already know one another. Flaming may be better
explained by the lack of accountability characteristic of public
Internet forums than by anonymity per se, given that many hos-
tile messages are sent by people with known identities. Play with
identity, while fashionable in some chat environments, occurs
less often in practice than was implied by early theorists, in part
due to the diiculty of maintaining a false identity over time.
Recent years have also seen an increasing tendency for people to
post photographs of themselves, for example, on social network-
ing sites although false and digitally modiied photos can, of
course, be posted. Finally, textspeak is also shaped by the impe-
tus to type quickly, especially in real-time message exchanges,
resulting in creative, often abbreviated, spellings. Nonetheless,
it remains the case that digital media aford new and increased
opportunities for selectively crafting ones self-presentation,
both linguistically and visually, and for deceptive communica-
tion to take place.
he scope and spread of digitally mediated communication,
both globally and over time, give rise to other language-related
issues. Digital media enable unprecedented large-scale con-
versations (e.g., in public discussion forums) and provide vast,
potentially interactive audiences (e.g., for websites and blogs) in
which many participants are unknown to one another and par-
ticipation is open to a wide spectrum of society. Conversations
involving hundreds (or thousands) of people raise new chal-
lenges for maintaining interactional coherence, and unknown
audiences constitute new kinds of addressees when the broad-
cast content is personal, as is the case for many blogs. As ordi-
nary language users come to grips with these challenges, new
media-speciic norms are emerging, much as people a century
ago evolved new interactional and pragmatic norms for speaking
over the telephone.
he Internet enables new kinds of social formations to arise
known as virtual communities which often develop character-
istic communicative practices; these, in turn, may spread. New
lexical items, as well as textspeak features, have difused rap-
idly across the Internet and have become integrated to varying
degrees into everyday speech and writing, especially those of
young people, giving rise to the claim that digital media are accel-
erating processes of language change. his includes introducing
Figure 1. Examples of textspeak (bolded) in
Hong Kong English, French, Romanized Arabic,
and Japanese (from Danet and Herring 2007).
new morphological formatives such as e- and cyber- into the
English language; however, there is less evidence that digital
media are associated with syntactic changes, which typically take
place more slowly. he fears of some educators and journalists
that digital communication is accelerating language decline and
interfering with childrens learning of standard written language
appear to have no basis in empirical fact (hurlow 2006).
Digital media also have global implications for cross-cultural
communication, multilingualism and language choice, and the
status of individual languages. Although still a small percentage
of the worlds languages, those used on the Internet are grow-
ing in number. Figure 1 gives examples of textspeak in four
languages.
here is debate, however, as to whether linguistic diversity
equal to that in the oline world will eventually be achieved,
or whether digital media are promoting and accelerating the
dominance of English and other large languages. Evidence from
multilingual contact situations, such as cross-national Internet
discussion forums, suggests that English or the regional language
(e.g., Spanish, German, Russian) tends to be used as a lingua
franca in order to ensure the widest comprehension; this trend
bodes ill for the use of minority languages in such forums. At
the same time, many Internet forums have national rather than
international audiences, and localization eforts are produc-
ing hardware and software in local languages. Some speculate
that these trends are leading toward a global diglossia, with
English as the High (international) variety and local languages
as the low, or colloquial, variety. he Internet has also been used
with some success as a tool to support revitalization eforts for
endangered languages (Danet and Herring 2007).
Current State of Research
From the outset, scholarship on digital media was broadly inter-
disciplinary. In the irst two decades of CMC research, scholars
trained in communication, rhetoric, social psychology, manage-
ment, linguistics, humancomputer interaction, anthropology,
and education came together in interdisciplinary fora to try to
meet the challenge of characterizing online communication,
and in recent years, new interdisciplinary ields have arisen in
which digital media play a central role, such as new media studies
and social informatics. At the same time, there is a trend toward
increasing disciplinary specialization, as new media become
259
Diglossia
accepted into mainstream disciplinary approaches. In language
studies, new media currently provide application domains (e.g.,
for language learning) and sources of data for empirical analysis
and, increasingly, for theorizing about language from cognitive,
social, and evolutionary perspectives.
Susan C. Herring
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bijker, Wiebe, and John Law, eds. 1992. Shaping Technology/Building
Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Crowston, Kevin, and Marie Williams. 2001. Reproduced and emergent
genres of communication on the World-Wide Web. he Information
Society 16.3: 20116.
Crystal, David. [2001] 2006. Language and the Internet.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Danet, Brenda, and Susan C. Herring, eds. 2007. he Multilingual
Internet: Language, Culture, and Communication Online. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Herring, Susan C. 1999. Interactional coherence in CMC. Journal of
Computer-Mediated Communication 4.4. Available online at: http:
//jcmc.indiana.edu/vol4/issue4/herring.html.
. 2004. Slouching toward the ordinary: Current trends in computer-
mediated communication. New Media & Society 6.1: 2636.
. 2007. A faceted classiication scheme for computer-mediated is not used as the medium of everyday interaction. On the other
discourse. Language@Internet. Available online at: http://www.
languageatinternet.de/articles/761.
hurlow, Crispin. 2006. From statistical panic to moral panic: he
metadiscursive construction and popular exaggeration of new
media language in the print media. Journal of Computer-Mediated
Communication 11.3: article 1. Available online at: http://jcmc.indi-
ana.edu/vol11/issue3/thurlow.html.
DIGLOSSIA
In his seminal article, Charles Ferguson (1959, 435) deined
diglossia as
a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition to the
primary dialects of the language (which may include a standard
or regional standards), there is a very divergent, highly codiied
(often grammatically more complex) superposed variety, the
vehicle of a large and respected body of written literature, either
of an earlier period or in another speech community, which is
learned largely by formal education and is used for most written
and formal spoken purposes but is not used by any section of the
community for ordinary conversation.
Using the examples of Greek, Arabic, Haitian Creole, and Swiss
German, Ferguson discussed several characteristics common
across diglossic situations. First of all, there is a strict division
of labor between the two varieties: he superposed variety or
the H(igh) variety is used mostly in prestigious domains (e.g.,
education; see prestige ), and the vernacular or the L(ow)
variety is restricted to informal domains (e.g., neighborhood).
Second, although the two varieties are genetically related, the
H variety is structurally more complex than the L variety (e.g.,
the H variety has more overt case markers than the L vari-
ety). hird, the H variety is more highly valued than the L vari-
ety: While there is a sizable body of literature written in the H
variety, the L variety is rarely used in the written form except
in dialect poetry and advertising. Fourth, the H variety tends
260
to be more standardized than the L variety: Grammars and
dictionaries are written for the H variety, but not usually for the
L variety. Fifth, while the L variety is the language of the home,
the H variety is not spoken natively by anyone in the commu-
nity and has to be learned through schooling. Finally, although
the L variety may gradually replace the H variety due to such
factors as more widespread literacy and broader communica-
tion among diferent social groups, a diglossic situation usually
persists for centuries or even millennia.
Diglossic situations are diferent from other commonly
found language situations in several respects. In contrast to
diglossic situations, many bilingual situations do not main-
tain a clear functional compartmentalization of the two varieties
(see bilingualism ). In Arabic-speaking countries, colloquial
Arabic serves as the basic medium of interaction, but modern
standard Arabic is the preferred variety for formal purposes.
However, in a bilingual community such as Flemish- and
French-speaking Belgium, both varieties are used to perform
similar functions in formal and informal domains. Diglossic
situations are also diferent from standard-with-dialects situ-
ations. In the German-speaking regions of Switzerland, the H
variety (Hochdeutsch) is learned through formal schooling and
hand, in Italy (a standard-with-dialects situation), many people
speak standard Italian natively and use it in formal as well as
informal settings.
Over the years, numerous scholars have reworked Fergusons
deinition of diglossia. While maintaining the criterion of strict
functional compartmentalization, Joshua Fishman (1967)
broadened the deinition of diglossia to include genetically unre-
lated varieties. According to this broad deinition, Spanish- and
Guaran-speaking Paraguay would be classiied as a diglossic
community, in that the two genetically unrelated varieties func-
tion like H and L varieties in diglossic situations. However, some
have criticized this deinition as diluting the original meanings of
diglossia. Although the Spanish-Guaran situation resembles the
diglossic situation in the Arabic-speaking world, the two difer in
their social origin and course of development. While the former
came into being through the conluence of two sociolinguistic
traditions as a result of colonial contact, the latter was derived
from the internal functional diferentiation within a single
sociolinguistic tradition (see colonialism and language).
Furthermore, when language shift occurs in a bilingual com-
munity, it is usually the H variety that replaces the L variety.
In contrast, in the terminal stages of Fergusonian diglossia,
the L variety often displaces the H variety. More recently, Alan
Hudson (2002) argued that the absence of native H speakers
distinguishes diglossia from bilingual situations like the one in
Paraguay. his characteristic, Hudson maintains, enhances the
stability of diglossia. Without a prestigious community of native
H speakers, L speakers lack the motivation to adopt H for every-
day communication.
Another point of contention is the discreteness of H and L. In
many diglossic communities, there exists a continuum of forms
between the H and L varieties. In addition, speakers sometimes
mix H and L in the same functional domain and even in the same
utterance. In the Arabic-speaking world, speakers sometimes
engage in diglossic switching (Walters 2003). In this case, one
Discourse Analysis (Foucaultian)
variety (i.e., the matrix) provides the frame for an utterance,
while the other supplies lexical items that are inserted into the
frame. In formal interviews, speakers may use modern standard
Arabic as the matrix but draw on lexical items from the L vari-
ety. In other cases, the L variety serves as the matrix. his may
occur when Arabs who speak diferent Arabic varieties interact
with one another. hey use mostly their own varieties but with
lexical items from Modern Standard Arabic and other spoken
Arabic varieties. A closer look at diglossic switching is warranted
because it may yield important insights into the nature of code
mixture in diglossic communities.
In his inal major statement on the subject, Ferguson (1991)
lamented the fact that studies in the last few decades have focused
mostly on individual cases and examined whether or not they
are instances of diglossia. He called for more cross-community
studies that investigate the origins and developments of diferent
diglossic situations, as well as research that examines diglossic
situations during rapid social change.
Andrew Wong
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Ferguson, Charles. 1959. Diglossia. Word 15: 32540.
. 1991. Diglossia revisited. Southwest Journal of Linguistics
10.1: 21434.
Fishman, Joshua. 1967. Bilingualism with and without diglossia; diglossia
with and without bilingualism. Journal of Social Issues 23.2: 2938.
Hudson, Alan 2002. Outline of a theory of diglossia. International
Journal of the Sociology of Language 157: 148.
Walters, Keith 2003. Fergis prescience: he changing nature of diglos-
sia in Tunisia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language
163: 77109.
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS (FOUCAULTIAN)
he type of analysis of discourse developed by Michel Foucault
has a complex history, and the term discourse itself is used in a
range of ways by diferent theorists. Even Foucault himself draws
attention to the diiculty of ixing on a particular type of analy-
sis that follows from his deinition of the term. As he comments,
Instead of gradually reducing the rather luctuating meaning of
the word discourse, I believe I have in fact added to its mean-
ings: treating it sometimes as the general domain of all state-
ments, sometimes as an individualizable group of statements,
and sometimes as a regulated practice that accounts for a num-
ber of statements ([1969] 1972, 80).
his quotation is crucial for understanding the range of mean-
ings that the term has accrued to itself within Foucaults work
and within that of other discourse theorists and, consequently,
crucial to the type of analysis of discourse that they under-
take. he irst deinition that Foucault gives is the most general
one: the general domain of all statements; that is, all utterances
or texts that have meaning and which have some efects in the
real world count as discourse. his is a broad deinition and is
generally used by Foucault in this way, particularly in his earlier
more structuralist work, such as Archaeology of Knowledge
([1969] 1972), when he is discussing the concept of discourse
at a theoretical level. It may be useful to consider this usage
to be more about discourse in general than about a discourse
or discourses, with which the second and third deinitions are
concerned. he second deinition that he gives an individu-
alizable group of statements is one that is used by Foucault
when he is discussing particular structures within discourse;
thus, he is concerned to be able to identify discourses, that is,
groups of utterances that seem to be regulated in some way and
to have a coherence and a force to them in common. Within
this deinition, therefore, it would be possible to talk about a dis-
course of femininity, a discourse of imperialism, and so on. His
third deinition of discourse is perhaps the one that has most res-
onance for many theorists: a regulated practice which accounts
for a number of statements. I take this to mean that he is inter-
ested less in the actual utterances/texts that are produced than
in the rules and structures that produce particular utterances
and texts. It is this rule-governed nature of discourse that is of
primary importance.
Within most discourse theorists work, these deinitions are
used sometimes almost interchangeably. One of the most pro-
ductive ways of thinking about discourse is not as a group of
signs or a stretch of text but as practices that systematically form
the objects of which they speak (Foucault [1969] 1972, 49). In
this sense, a discourse is something that produces something
else (an utterance, a concept, an efect), rather than something
that exists in and of itself and can be analyzed in isolation. A dis-
course is generally something that is airmed by an institution
and, therefore, constitutes an intervention in power relations. A
discursive structure can be detected because of the systematicity
of the ideas, opinions, concepts, ways of thinking, and behaving
that are formed within a particular context, and because of the
efects of those ways of thinking and behaving.
he theorists who have drawn on Foucaults work on dis-
course most extensively to develop a form of discourse analysis
have been critical discourse analysts. hey have tried to
develop a form of linguistic analysis of texts that is openly politi-
cal and, therefore, draws on a more social model of discourse
than conventional linguistics generally does (Fairclough 1992;
hornborrow 2002; Wodak 1998; see Mills 2004 for a fuller dis-
cussion). Very often, critical discourse analysts examine texts
and utterances that seem to display extreme power diferentia-
tion (see inequality, linguistic and communicative),
and they draw attention to some of the more troubling aspects
of these texts in order to bring about change at a discoursal level
but also, more importantly, at a material level. For them, as for
Foucault, discourse is crucial for constructing a social identity
and for resisting or airming the social roles that others construct
for us. By becoming aware of the systemic nature of some of the
ways in which institutions position individuals through discourse,
it is possible to challenge them and construct alternative modes
of representation. hese theorists often fuse linguistic analysis,
such as systemic linguistics or conversation analysis, with
a more Foucaultian analysis of discourse. (Other theorists, such
as D. Smith 1990, use Foucaults work on discourse in a more
thoroughly social or cultural analysis, without focusing on lan-
guage as such they would be considered discourse theorists,
rather than discourse analysts). However, some theorists, such
as J. Blommaert (2004), are critical of the use of Foucaults work
within a broadly linguistic analysis, as for him, this constitutes a
distortion of Foucaults overall project.
261
Discourse Analysis (Foucaultian)
N. Fairclough (1992) draws on Foucaults conception of dis-
course in order to develop a very systematic type of analysis of
text. He provides working models and forms of practice from
Foucaults theoretical interventions, together with a description
of the efects of discursive structures on individuals. For him,
critical discourse analysis is not only concerned to describe dis-
cursive structures but also shows how discourse is shaped by
relations of power and ideologies, and the constructive efects
discourse has upon social identities, social relations and systems
of knowledge and belief, neither of which is normally apparent
to discourse participants (Fairclough 1992, 12). Furthermore,
Fairclough uses Foucaults conception of discourse because of
the stress that Foucault lays on the constitutive nature of dis-
course the fact that discourse structures the way that we per-
ceive objects and reality. For Fairclough, critical discourse
analysts can unpick commonsense knowledge and views of the
world that present themselves as self-evident and natural, as all
of these types of knowledge will inevitably be profoundly ideo-
logical. By foregrounding the constructed and ideological nature
of this knowledge, it will be possible to suggest ways of seeing
that are more productive and egalitarian.
he inluence of Foucault can be seen in the emphasis that
these theorists accord to the workings of power. Generally,
within critical discourse analysis, there is an emphasis on what
Foucault would term repressive power, that is, a view of power
relations that stresses the way that individuals are prevented
from doing what they wish because of other individuals or insti-
tutions. However, Foucault stresses that power is not simply
the imposition of someones will upon another but, rather, that
power should be seen as a network of power relations among
all members of a social group. Discourse is a key element in the
working out of power relations since discourse not only marks
perceptions of power diference (one displays ones self or posi-
tion within a hierarchy through ones discursive choices) but also
airms and contests those perceptions or power diferences.
In that sense, individuals engage in power relations even in the
most mundane interactions. For example, within everyday conver-
sation, critical discourse analysts would draw attention to the way
that only certain people consider it their role to sum up an inter-
action or to comment on the point of an interaction, which is a
very powerful position to construct for oneself through discourse.
J. hornborrows (2002) work draws on Foucaults notions of dis-
course and productive power, together with an analytical frame-
work from conversation analysis, to develop a form of discourse
analysis that focuses on the way power relations are efected within
institutions (see also Goodwin 1994). Analysis of discourse, here,
focuses on the language resources available and the way that
they are used by those who have institutional power. Rather than
assuming that certain elements of language are powerful in them-
selves, hornborrow considers that there are certain language
styles and procedures likely to be used by those who are in posi-
tions of power. Some of these styles, such as the use of indirectness
or politeness, which appear to be relatively neutral styles, will
be understood by others within a framework of power relations.
For example, if a manager makes an indirect request to an oice
worker, that request will be understood as a command rather than
as a simple request. However, in addition to analyzing the strate-
gies of those in positions of power, hornborrow also focuses on
262
Discourse Analysis (Linguistic)
the strategies used by those who are less powerful but who use lan-
guage strategically to achieve what she terms local status, that is,
a form of interactional power achieved at a local level.
hornborrow challenges a great deal of the work by critical dis-
course analysts who focus solely on the way that language is used
to oppress others, the standard example being the way that doc-
tors speak to patients (asking more questions, providing informa-
tion, deciding the topic of the interaction, interrupting, and so on).
Instead, she examines interactions such as that of a woman who
is being interviewed by police oicers in relation to a rape alle-
gation that she had made. She focuses on the way that the police
oicers try to take control of the interaction by drawing on pow-
erful language resources, such as interruption. he woman inter-
viewee, however, does not simply submit to their interruptions but
instead tries to structure the interaction from her own perspective
and to meet her own needs. hrough the womans interventions in
the interview, it is possible to see that she is not simply a victim of
oppressive linguistic strategies but that she employs a range of dis-
cursive tools, such as persistently asking questions, to assert her
right to have her point of view considered.
Other discourse analysts, such as C. Walsh (2001), have
focused on the discursive structures that act upon women who
enter the public sphere and that categorize the interventions
of women as feminine or as trivial. She examines the way that
newspapers report on women in positions of power and the fact
that they often focus on their appearance, their sexuality, and the
way they dress, rather than on the work that they do. She also
examines the way that women are often represented as if they
were in the private sphere instead of in the public sphere. She
focuses on the systematic nature of this type of representation so
that it can be seen to be a general trait, rather than a tendency in
certain newspapers (see also gender and language).
he critical and analytical perspective of theorists and ana-
lysts such as Fairclough, Blommaert, C. Goodwin, hornborrow,
and Walsh is a signiicant reinterpretation of Foucaults work
through the matrix of linguistics concern for veriiable, repli-
cable analyses.
Sara Mills
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Blommaert, J. 2004. Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fairclough, N. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. London: Polity.
Foucault, M. [1969] 1972. Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M.
Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon.
Goodwin, C. 1994. Professional vision. American Anthropologist
96: 60633.
Mills, S. 2004. Discourse. 2d ed. London: Routledge.
Smith, D. 1990 Texts, Facts, and Femininity. London: Routledge.
hornborrow, J. 2002. Power Talk: Language and Institutional Discourse.
Harlow, UK: Longman.
Walsh, C. 2001. Gender and Discourse: Language and Power in Politics,
the Church and Organisations. Harlow, UK: Longman.
Wodak, R. 1998. Disorders of Discourse. Harlow, UK: Longman.
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS (LINGUISTIC)
Although discourse analysis is variously deined (see examples
in the Introductions to Jaworski and Coupland [1999]; Schifrin,
Discourse Analysis (Linguistic)
Tannen and Hamilton [2001]; Johnstone [2006]), a generally
accepted linguistic deinition of discourse itself is language above
and beyond the sentence. An advantage of this deinition is that
it allows several diferent entry points into linguistic analyses of
discourse. Some discourse analysts, for example, focus on the
ways in which smaller language units (e.g. noun phrases, clauses,
sentences) combine to create a coherent text that makes sense
to others. Other discourse analysts focus on features that help
to co-constitute the text. In other words, just as the structures,
meanings, and functions of a text are continuously projected by
the combinatory patterns of smaller units, so too are they a result
of those combinatory patterns of smaller units. Such features
might include the topic structure of the text or the various rela-
tionships across sentences (such as repetition, lexical colloca-
tions, or conjunctions) that help create cohesion among smaller
parts. Still other discourse analysts focus on how sequences of
language units (be they clauses or turns at talk) contribute to
social meanings and functions. Interest in the functions of lan-
guage in social contexts leads to a range of other issues, for exam-
ple, how repeated use of a particular noun, or distribution of
speech, can reproduce power or initiate resistance in social and
political spheres (see, e.g., entries on inequality, linguistic
and communicative; politics of lanugage; gender
and language). Discourse analyses thus address features of
language within text, context, qualities of texts, and how lan-
guage in texts is related to contexts.
After a brief history of key works in early discourse analysis,
I show how current approaches address phenomena and pro-
cesses of discourse and close with some general principles.
Early Approaches to Discourse
Although many linguists in the mid-1900s stopped their analyses
at the level of sounds, words, and then sentences, some moved
toward the next level of discourse by examining morphological
patterns across sentences in written texts, the structure of rela-
tionships across clauses within spoken narrative, and aspects of
language that display connections across sentences.
Zellig Harris (1952) derived procedures for analyzing
arrangements of morphemes across sentences by building on
the tools of descriptive linguistics. Consistent with models of the
time (predating Chomskys turn to the sentence), Harris took a
bottom-up approach that viewed discourse as the next level in a
hierarchy of morphemes. His procedure examined morphemes
in terms of their co-occurrence with (or distribution in relation
to) other morphemes (or sets of morphemes). Included were not
only actual sequences of equivalent morphemes but also chains
of morphological equivalencies that were seen as representa-
tive of diferent genres or registers. Yet nothing but linguistic
structure within a given text was included: [T]he analysis of the
occurrence of elements in the text is applied only in respect to
that text alone and not in respect to anything else in the lan-
guage (Harris 1952, 1).
William Labov and J. Waletzky (1967) developed a formal
model of oral narrative (see narratives of personal experi-
ence) that was based on temporal relationships among clauses
that had diferent functions in the verbalization of experience.
Later work (Labov 1972) focused not just on formal relation-
ships among clauses but also on the distribution and function
of information within the text. In addition to function, parts of
narratives (e.g., abstract, orientation, complicating action, coda)
were identiiable by linguistic (syntactic, semantic) properties.
Likewise, syntactic modiications of a basic X did Y event struc-
ture on a clause-by-clause basis convey the subjective meanings
of the narrative the point of the story.
In contrast to the more formal approaches of Harris and Labov,
Michael Halliday and R. Hasan (1976) focused on how language
reveals cohesive connections within a text (see text linguis-
tics) so that the reader (or listener) can understand not just the
meaning of each sentence but the meanings being conveyed
throughout the entire text. he following text, part of a recipe, is
annotated with subscripts for cohesive devices: Reference1, rep-
etition2, substitution3, ellipsis4, conjunctions5, and lexical rela-
tions6 provide cohesive ties.
Apple1a pudding1b. First5 you1c peel6 and chop6 the fruit6 (with 1a).
hen5 __ 4 sprinkle it3 =1a with sugar and toss with the raisins6. __4
Bake the mixture3 (for 1a / 1b) for one hour. You1c + 2 may serve the
pudding3 (for 1a and 1b) with vanilla ice cream1.
Whereas the recipe is relatively dense in cohesion (roughly half
of the words in the excerpt are linked in cohesive ties), other
types of texts may be less dense.
In sum, key works in early discourse analysis focused, rela-
tively separately, on patterns of sentence-internal forms, clause
sequences, and cross-sentence meanings those that arise
across sentences. Recent approaches continue the search for
various types of patterns, but add an interest in how those pat-
terns emerge in texts, often as a dialogic process (see dialogism
and heteroglossia), in relation to context.
Contemporary Approaches to Discourse
his section illustrates diferent approaches by means of a brief
analysis of two examples: Both are the opening phase of a lon-
ger discourse, the irst, a classroom, the second, an oral history
interview.
OPENING A CLASSROOM LESSON. he discourse analyzed in (1)
is from a ifth grade class during parent visitation day. he class-
room was overlowing with parents squeezed into the crowded
room. After greeting the parents and students, Mr. Clark (the
teacher) proceeded to what we see in the following:
(1) Mr. Clark: (a) Okay, lets get started.
(b) First well review the problems from last night.
In applying the approaches to the language of this short dis-
course, we focus on some aspects of text (the information in,
structure of, and relationships between successive clauses) and
context (social identities, relationships, and institutions). We
progress from a focus on knowledge (how to communicate infor-
mation and take social action) to the use of the linguistic code
to convey a variety of situated meanings by people in particu-
lar roles that are embedded within (and sustain) larger cultural
practices and social structures.
pragmatics analyzes how we communicate more than
the semantic content of language by depending upon our abil-
ity to draw inferences based on such general principles as the
cooperative principle (appropriate quantity, quality,
263
Discourse Analysis (Linguistic)
manner, and relevance of information), as well as semantic and
logical meaning, adjacent features of text, and the social con-
text. For example, we can infer to whom Mr. Clark is speak-
ing and therefore who will get started and review even related actions: hey sequentially implicate another action, the
though he does not explicitly designate their identity. First per-
son plural pronouns include the speaker and someone else, but
the other can be inclusive or exclusive of the hearer. Once we
know about the context and shared schematic knowledge of who
typically does what, when, and where, we can infer that the irst
we includes the students and their parents, but the second we
includes only the students.
Another aspect of communication that goes beyond what is
literally meant and said actions performed through speech is
the focus of speech-act analysis and theory. Actions can be
accomplished through language (e.g. requests, promises, warn-
ings, assertions, thanks) only when speciic conditions (involv-
ing linguistic knowledge, assumptions about speakers/hearers
needs and wants, and background situations) are appropriate to
the realization of that speciic action. Okay, lets get started, for
example, is a directive, a general class of actions (including com-
mands, e.g., Begin! and hints, e.g., Its getting late) through which
a speaker directs hearer(s) to take a future (not a past) action that
is something the speaker wants, is not likely to be done by the
hearer otherwise, but is within the hearers ability.
Linguistic alternatives also appear in how we pronounce,
select, or arrange our words. Alternatives that maintain semantic
meaning are studied by variation analysis. Instead of saying lets
(a) and well, for example, Mr. Clark could use the full forms let us
and we will. Although these two variants have the same semantic
meaning, they have diferent possible social meanings. Because
full forms provide more explicit information, and allow stress on
us and will, they can emphasize the need for particular (possibly
reluctant) people to take an undesired action. Lexical variants
would have diferent efects. Repetition of go in Lets get going
and Well go over the problems would create a cohesive tie high-
lighting the continuity of the actions and grouping them together.
Another alternative concerns how to organize information
and arrange sentences: What should be irst? What are the con-
sequences of diferent orders? Narrative analysis focuses on the
organization of information across sentences by analyzing dif-
ferent ways of verbalizing past experiences in textual units that
are also attuned to their contexts. One common feature of narra-
tives is to present events in temporal order. Although Mr. Clark
is not telling a story, he is anticipating the future actions, and
the way he does so relects some of the underlying features of
narrative: He presents upcoming actions roughly in the order in
which they will occur (rather than saying well review after we get
started) and highlights the transition from one event to another
with language that focuses on the beginnings of activities (get
started).
Sentences appear not just within one persons turn at talk but
also across diferent peoples turns at talk. How social order is
constructed through sequences of both grammatical units (sen-
tences) and other units of speech production (e.g., clauses, into-
nation units) on a turn-by-turn basis in talk-in-interaction is a
major focus of conversation analysis. Mr. Clarks Okay, lets
get started has three features (syntactic closure, inal intonation,
semantic wholeness) common to turn transitions. Instead of a
264
continuation, then, Mr. Clarks statement could have been fol-
lowed by others actions. Indeed, Lets get started and the utter-
ance that follows are parts of a particular pair of sequentially
students response to the summons (see adjacency pair).
Mr. Clarks ability to maintain his turn and develop the
sequence of classroom activities is one way that his role in the
situation is established and reinforced. Interactional sociolin-
guistics reveals how numerous features of language provide
clues to (or indices of) the social situation, activities, participant
identities, and relationships that may actually have a role in cre-
ating the context of interaction. he use of lets, for example, sug-
gests that the speaker has authority over the hearer, thus evoking
a situation in which participants have an asymmetrical power
relationship (e.g., doctor/patient, parent/child). We can narrow
down the nature of the authority and the situation by noting that
the activity being started by Mr. Clark (review), and the object of
the review (problems), indicates a learning environment or one
in which an expert is instructing a novice. hat the problems
were from last night reveals a cyclical pattern, a structured rou-
tine often found in formal institutions.
Language choices inferences about meaning, actions, roles,
relationships, and participation are all embedded in broader
cultural matrices of recurrent practices, knowledge, and mean-
ings, which include beliefs about who should do what and how
they should do so, as well as the evaluations based on larger
values and ideologies (see ideology and language) of
particular outcomes of what is said and done. Ethnography of
communication elucidates these connections. For example,
the collaborative review of the problems portrays a cultural
belief system in which learning and attaining information arises
when novices work on their own (problems from last night)
and then, at a given point in time, present and review their solu-
tions with an expert.
Just as language, inferences, actions, roles, relationships,
and participation are all embedded in culture, so too are they
intertwined with social processes and structures that sustain (or
restrict) power and privilege. critical discourse analysis
(see also discourse analysis [foucaultian]) explores how
ways of speaking can put those processes into place and reinforce
(or challenge) received means of authority. Mr. Clarks ability to
manage the use of time, select the activity in which to engage,
and organize the way in which information becomes distributed
as knowledge is consistent with a school setting in which his role
is not challenged. he power created by the institutional setting
links his discourse to broader social, cultural, and civic agendas.
What Mr. Clark says and more fundamentally, his ability to do
so thus positions him as one who can reinforce social structural
norms (who teaches whom? how? when?) and as an arbiter of the
oicial set of values, beliefs, and ideologies that are sanctioned
means of maintaining a stock of received knowledge. And the
fact that he is speaking on a special day that happens only once
a year when parents are permitted to visit en masse to observe
irsthand their childrens education highlights the public and
civic function of his role.
OPENING AN ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW. he discourse analyzed
in (2) is from the beginning of an oral history interview. After
Discourse Analysis (Linguistic)
greeting and introducing the Interviewee (IVee), the Interviewer
(IVer) asks a question. Rather than illustrate diferent approaches
to discourse, we use (2) to show how forms, structures, and
meanings are co-constructed. Key features are annotated with
subscripts: question/answer (Q/A) pairs1, turn-taking devices2,
and the use of and3 to build and indicate topic structure (see
Figure 1). In (2), Q and A indicate question and answer, respec-
tively; lowercase letters (e.g., (Qa) indicate the successive Q/A
pairs. Dual numbers (e.g., 2/3 in line 2) indicates multiple fea-
tures of organization.
(2) 1. IVer: 1Q (a)Id like you to tell me a li- something about
yourself now.
2. Your family and2/3
3. IVee: Mmhmm2.
4. 1AaUh Ive been living in Cleveland for the last 36 years.
5. IVer: mmhmm2
6. I uh at the present time uh I am a housewife,
7. and3 uh uh occupy myself uh uh sometimes helping my
husband with his oice, when needed.
8. IVer: 1Q (b)What does he do?
9. IVee: 1A(b) Hes a podiatrist.
10. IVer: uhhuh2
11. IVee: 1A (a) And3 uh other times, I pursue, uh really uh
umthings that I enjoy um going to the museum, and3
swimming, and3 uh visiting ill people, and3 uh um spend-
ing time uh decorating my home,
12. IVer: Mmhmm2
13. IVee: and3 thats about2/ 1A(a)
14. IVer: 1Q(c) May I ask how old you are?
15. IVee: 1A(c)Yes2, Im sixty years old.
16. IVer: Mmhmm.2 Sixty2 1A(c).
17. IVee: Mmhmm.2
Space prohibits discussion of each feature, but note the
following:
A multifaceted question (line 1) receives answers that occupy
several turns, during which short question/answer pairs
(lines 8 and 9, 14 and 15) are embedded.
Question forms (compare lines 1, 14, 18, and 19 to line 8) are
more complex when they shift topic or level of information.
Figure 1. List structure.
Interviewers mmhmm (lines 3, 5, 12) and uh huh (line 10)
allow Interviewee to continue to the end of her intonation
and information units (line 13).
Interviewees mmhmm (line 3) or yes (line 15) opens a turn
that will answer a question.
Reciprocal uses of mmhmm (lines 16, 17) open an opportu-
nity for turn exchange;
and in initial or medial position in a turn (lines 7, 11) con-
nects lateral items in the list (as in Figure 1).
Interviewer and Interviewee co-construct a hierarchical topic
structure in which information is organized on the basis of
lexical relationships (e.g., family, husband) and ad hoc cat-
egories (e.g., things I enjoy).
In sum, key works in early discourse analysis focused, rela-
tively separately, on patterns of sentence-internal forms, clause
sequences, cross-sentence meanings that arise across sen-
tences. Recent approaches continue the search for various types
of patterns, but add an interest in how those patterns emerge in
texts produced by more than one person in relation to context.
Conclusion
Discourse analysis provides a range of methodologies that are
applicable to diferent facets of language in text and context.
Although we have been able to consider only some components
of discourse analysis, our discussion and sample analyses help
us extract several general principles (Schifrin 1994):
(1) Analysis of discourse is empirical: Data are based on peo-
ple using language, not linguists thinking about how people
use language.
(2) Analyses are accountable to the data: hey have to explain
the data in both sequential and distributional terms.
(3) Analyses are predictive: hey produce hypotheses that
can be falsiied or modiied by other data.
(4) Discourse is not just a sequence of linguistic units: Its coher-
ence (see coherence, discourse) cannot be understood if
attention is limited just to linguistic form and meaning.
(5) Resources for coherence jointly contribute to participant
achievement and understanding of what is said, meant, and
265
Discrete Ininity
done. In other words, linguistic forms and meanings work
together with social and cultural meanings, and interpretive
frameworks, to create discourse.
(6) he structures, meanings, and actions of everyday spo-
ken discourse are interactively achieved.
(7) What is said, meant, and done is sequentially situated;
that is, utterances are produced and interpreted in the local
contexts of other utterances.
(8) How something is said, meant, and done speakers
selection among diferent linguistic devices as alternative
ways of speaking is guided by relationships among the
following:
(a) speaker intentions;
(b) conventionalized strategies for making intentions
recognizable;
(c) the meanings and functions of linguistic forms in rela-
tion to the text and context in which they appear;
(d) the sequential context of other utterances;
(e) properties of the textual mode, for example, narrative,
description, exposition;
(f) the social context, for example, participant identities
and relationships, structure of the situation, the setting;
(g) a cultural framework of beliefs and actions.
When brought together, this set of heuristic tools leads to the
following principle: Our uses of language, and the functions
that it accomplishes, are interactively constructed by people
using language together (e.g., taking turns at talk, drawing infer-
ences about communicative intentionality) and drawing
upon properties of language and its ability to join smaller units
(clauses, sentences) into larger units (texts) that both relect and
create the social contexts in which they emerge.
Deborah Schifrin
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Halliday, Michael, and R. Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English.
London: Longman.
Harris, Zellig. 1952. Discourse analysis. Language 28: 130.
Jaworski, Adam, and N. Coupland, eds. 1999. he Discourse Reader.
London: Routledge.
Johnstone, Barbara. 2006. Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell.
Labov, William. 1972. he transformation of experience in narrative
syntax. In Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 35496.
Labov, William, and J. Waletzky. 1967. Narrative analysis. In Essays
on the Verbal and Visual Arts, ed. June Helm. Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1244.
Schifrin, Deborah. 1994. Approaches to Discourse. Oxford; Blackwell.
Schifrin, Deborah, D. Tannen, and H. Hamilton, eds. 2001. Handbook of
Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell.
DISCRETE INFINITY
his locution was brought into linguistics by Noam Chomsky
(for instance, Chomsky 1988, 170) to characterize the fact that
human languages are built up from discrete units (morphemes
266
or words) that can be combined into ininitely many possible
sentences. Marc D. Hauser, Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch
(2002) argue that humans are the only species whose language
is characterized by discrete ininity, and there are debates con-
cerning the evolution of the property.
he opposition discrete versus continuous applies to sys-
tems, models, domains, and variables. A digital clock represents
time as discrete; an (idealized) analog clock represents time as
continuous.
A set is inite if its size (cardinality) is some natural number
(0,1,2, ), otherwise ininite. he set of all natural numbers and
the set of all points on a line are ininite. It is standardly argued
that the set of all possible sentences in English is ininite, even
though only initely many sentences have ever been uttered. If
the set were inite, there would be a longest sentence. But from
any sentence we can construct a longer one, for instance, by add-
ing an and-clause; so the set is ininite.
Some nonhuman communication systems (see animal com-
munication and human language) are arguably ininite, but
because of continuous variation on one or a few parameters, thus
not discrete. he honeybees waggle dance language involves
continuous variations in tempo, body orientation, and intensity,
indicating distance, direction from the hive, and quality of food
source. If these continuous variables can take any real-number
value within some range, then the resulting language is nondenu-
merably ininite, a cardinality greater than standardly attributed
to human languages, even though each message has only three
words. In Chomskys terminology it is a nondiscrete ininity.
he enterprise of generative grammar aims to account
for the discrete ininity (and other properties) of language; all
versions of generative grammar employ recursion in some
form to provide a inite description of a denumerably ininite set
built from discrete building blocks.
D. T. Langendoen and Paul M. Postal (1984) argue that sen-
tences need not be inite in length and that the class of sentences
of a language is nondenumerably ininite. Would this also be a dis-
crete ininity? here is no known deinition of discrete in this context
that would settle the issue (the phrase is rare outside Chomskyan
contexts). he conventional answer is no, apparently because
typical examples of nondenumerably ininite sets, such as the set
of points on a line, involve continuous domains. But if discrete
in discrete ininity is meant to characterize the building blocks
of the system, the answer would be yes. Some mathematicians
think the phrase is unclear and best avoided altogether.
Barbara H. Partee
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Chomsky, Noam. 1988. Language and Problems of Knowledge: he
Managua Lectures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hauser, Marc D., Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch. 2002. he
faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?
Science 298: 156979.
Langendoen, D. T., and Paul M. Postal. 1984. he Vastness of Natural
Languages. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Studdert-Kennedy, M., and L. Goldstein. 2003. Launching language: he
gestural origin of discrete ininity. In Language Evolution, ed. M.
Christiansen and S. Kirby, 23554. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Disorders of Reading and Writing
DISORDERS OF READING AND WRITING
literacy is one of our most important cultural tools. It allows us
to communicate our thoughts and ideas across space and across
time in a manner that seems as natural and efortless as speak-
ing and listening. It is easy to forget that like cars and musical
instruments, writing systems are inventions that need to be
learned, much as one learns to drive a car or play an instrument.
Much has been learned about the reading and writing process by
studying people who have impairments in reading or writing.
Disorders of written language can be split into two broad
camps: developmental disorders and acquired disorders. Recent
years have seen a tendency to use the term neurodevelopmen-
tal disorder, rather than developmental disorder, relecting
the growing consensus that atypical development is often the
product of genetic and/or environmental inluences on early
brain development. In contrast, acquired disorders are a con-
sequence of brain damage, typically caused by disease or head
injury. he diference between developmental and acquired
disorders is not analogous to disorders that afect children ver-
sus adults: Developmental dyslexia is a lifelong condition
that continues to manifest itself throughout adulthood, and an
acquired disorder of written language can arise following brain
damage inlicted during childhood. However, there are impor-
tant diferences between acquired and developmental disorders.
As developmental disorders afect developing systems, they
are very rarely sharply deined, and one tends to see associated
deicits across a range of behaviors; in contrast, acquired disor-
ders relect selective damage to what (one assumes) was a fully
working system. Consequently, diferent patients with damage
to diferent subsystems can show remarkably diferent and
remarkably speciic types of reading impairment (Bishop
1997).
Deining Reading and Writing
Consider what you are doing as you read a text. Letters and
words are processed visually (see word recognition,
visual) at a rate of many items per minute, their forms recog-
nized and meanings decoded or inferred. Words are only part of
the story: Phrases and sentences need to be interpreted, rel-
evant background knowledge activated, and inferences gener-
ated as information is integrated during the course of reading.
Control processes are needed to monitor both ongoing compre-
hension and the internal consistency of text, allowing the reader
to initiate repair strategies (for example, rereading) if compre-
hension breakdown is detected. In short, readers need to form a
mental model of the text they are reading. To some extent, one
can think of writing being the reverse of reading, with the writer
beginning with a conceptual message that he or she wishes to
communicate and ending with inkmarks on a page.
Although written language clearly involves visual and motor
processes (identifying letters, scanning text, handwriting), the
cognitive psychology of reading and writing has been most con-
cerned with an understanding of the language bases of reading
and writing. hus, visuo-motor aspects of reading and writing will
not be considered here. Instead, we focus on reading and writing
as linguistic skills, skills that have their routes in our biological
endowment for spoken language (see genes and language).
Even when we restrict our focus to the linguistic bases of written
language impairments, it is clear that in both developmental and
acquired cases, reading and writing can go wrong for a variety of
reasons.
Developmental Disorders of Written Language
As developmental disorders of written language are disorders of
development, it is important to consider them within the con-
text ofered by models of typical development (see spelling
and writing and reading, acquisition of). It is useful to
make a distinction between impairments that afect word-level
processes (recognizing words, spelling) and impairments that
afect the higher level processes involved in comprehend-
ing text and producing written narrative. As children learn
to read, there is generally a strong association between decod-
ing (deined as the ability to read a word aloud) and compre-
hension: Children who are good at decoding tend to have good
comprehension, and children who are poor at decoding tend
to have weak comprehension. For some children, however, the
two sets of skills develop out of step. In dyslexia, a developmen-
tal disorder experienced by 310 percent of children, decoding is
slow, efortful, and error prone, yet their actual comprehension
of what they have read can be impressive (Snowling 2000). In
contrast, approximately 10 percent of children can be described
as poor comprehenders: Despite having well-developed decod-
ing skills, they are poor at understanding what they have read
(Nation 2005).
DEVELOPMENTAL DYSLEXIA. Developmental dyslexia is typically
diagnosed when a child experiences profound diiculty read-
ing and spelling words, despite normal educational opportunity
and normal-range general intelligence. Dyslexia runs in families
and there is good evidence from behavioral genetics demon-
strating genetic heritability of the disorder. Although genes are
yet to be identiied, regions of interest have been implicated on
chromosomes 1, 2, 3, 6, 15, and 18, suggesting that patterns of
inheritance are complex and polymorphic (Nation and Coltheart
2006; Pennington and Olson 2005). It seems likely that genetic
factors (in interaction with environmental factors) inluence
the development of brain areas implicated in the neural cir-
cuitry that underpins reading and spelling (Price and McCrory
2005; see also writing and reading, neurobiology of).
However, our understanding of how genetic factors inluence
brain development and lead to developmental dyslexia is rela-
tively unspeciied.
Cognitive explanations of developmental dyslexia are more
speciied. It is widely accepted that many people with dyslexia
have underlying impairments in processing phonological
aspects of oral language. According to the phonological dei-
cit hypothesis (Snowling 2000), children with dyslexia have
diiculty representing and processing phonological informa-
tion. his leads to diiculties on tasks that tap phonological
processing, including aspects of speech perception and
speech production and, most notably, diiculties with
phonological awareness. In an alphabetic language, at
least, learning to read and spell places heavy demands on pho-
nological skills inasmuch as children need to learn to make
ine-grained mappings between phonology and orthography.
267
Disorders of Reading and Writing
Children with poor phonological skills ind this process more
diicult, as evidenced by the well-replicated inding that people
with dyslexia are poor at reading novel words: Young children
with dyslexia ind nonword reading extraordinarily diicult, and
even well-compensated adults whose more obvious diiculties
with reading have resolved are slower and often less accurate at
reading nonwords a lasting legacy of their dyslexia.
here is some debate as to whether there are subtypes of
developmental dyslexia. According to the dual-route model
(Coltheart 2005), words can be read via one of two independent
routes: a sublexical route, mediated by phonological rules dictat-
ing mappings between graphemes and phonemes, and a lexical
route, mediated by visual-orthographic mappings. he sublexi-
cal route is needed to read nonwords, whereas the lexical route is
needed to read words that do not obey grapheme-phoneme cor-
respondence rules (i.e., exception words, such as yacht, chaos,
and enough). he majority of children with dyslexia have pho-
nological impairments, and therefore in dual-route terms they
have phonological dyslexia, caused by an impaired sublexical
route. In contrast, a small proportion of children with dyslexia
have less severe phonological deicits. For these children, typi-
cally referred to as having developmental surface dyslexia, their
greatest diiculty is with reading and spelling exception words,
caused by an impaired lexical route.
heorists disagree about the validity and stability of the sur-
face subtype. More generally, they debate the need to evoke
two separate routes to word reading. An alternative account is
provided by the triangle model, a connectionist model in
which reading aloud is accomplished via sets of interactive con-
nections between three sets of units: phonological, orthographic,
and semantic. Unlike the dual-route model, individual difer-
ences in reading are not a consequence of an impaired lexical
or sublexical route. Instead, diferences in the quality of repre-
sentations (phonological, orthographic, or semantic) or in the
strength of mappings between diferent representations, bring
about diferent patterns (or subtypes) of reading behavior (see
Plaut, 2005 for discussion of the triangle model and how it difers
from the dual-route model; see Snowling 2000 for a discussion of
how developmental dyslexia can be accommodated by the tri-
angle model).
POOR COMPREHENDERS. Unlike children with dyslexia, poor
comprehenders do not have diiculty with decoding and pro-
ducing words; however, they are poor at understanding what
they read. In particular, they are poor at making inferences
when reading text, and they are less able to integrate informa-
tion across sentences in order to resolve anomalies (Oakhill and
Yuill 1996). It is also clear that poor comprehenders diiculties
are not restricted to reading comprehension. hey are also poor
at listening comprehension and they have relative weaknesses in
oral vocabulary and word knowledge, understanding igurative
language, and with aspects of grammar (Nation et al. 2004). hus,
poor comprehenders diiculties with reading comprehension
should be seen against a backdrop of more general diiculties
in processing and comprehending language, leading to diicul-
ties in building a mental model of text or discourse. In contrast
to these deicits, poor comprehenders show strengths in phono-
logical processing and phonological awareness, facilitating the
268
development of good decoding and word recognition. Clearly,
however, adequate decoding and strengths in the phonological
skills that underpin decoding are not suicient to guarantee ade-
quate comprehension.
A similar dissociation exists between word-level versus
higher-level aspects of writing. L. Cragg and K. Nation (2006)
found that poor comprehenders spell at age-appropriate levels.
However, when asked to write a story from a series of picture
prompts, the same children produced narratives that captured
less of the story content and contained a less sophisticated story
structure. hese indings are consistent with what we know about
poor comprehenders oral language skills, with strengths in pho-
nological skills promoting adequate spelling but weaknesses in
language comprehension constraining the more compositional
aspects of narrative production.
Acquired Disorders of Written Language
Acquired disorders of reading and spelling are observed in
patients with aphasia following stroke, head injury, or pro-
gressive brain disease (see brain and language ). Some
patients show deicits that are a consequence of impairments
in visual processing and letter recognition (e.g., pure alexia;
Behrmann, Plaut, and Nelson 1998). In line with our discus-
sion of developmental disorders, however, we focus here on
acquired disorders of written language that have their bases in
spoken language. he majority of work on acquired disorders
of reading and writing has focused on patients ability to read
single words aloud or spell single words to dictation. Some of
this work is reviewed very briely here; rather surprisingly, few
studies have investigated aspects of reading comprehension
and narrative production, although diiculties in discourse-
level processing have been noted in patients with right hemi-
sphere brain damage.
SURFACE AND PHONOLOGICAL DYSLEXIA: TRADITIONAL COGNITIVE
NEUROPSYCHOLOGY AND THE DUAL-ROUTE MODEL OF READING
ALOUD. he study of patients with acquired dyslexia has played
a central role in the ield of cognitive neuropsychology. In
particular, the dissociation between patterns of intact and
impaired behaviors in two types of acquired dyslexia, namely,
surface dyslexia and phonological dyslexia, provided important
support for the dual-route model of reading aloud (Coltheart
2005).
Patients with surface dyslexia are poor at reading exception
words (words that have irregular mappings between orthog-
raphy and phonology), which they tend to regularize (e.g.,
reading pint to rhyme with mint). According to the dual-route
framework, this is a consequence of damage to the lexical route,
meaning that patients overrely on the sublexical route; hence,
they produce overregularization to irregular forms. he
term phonological dyslexia is used to describe the condition of
patients who show particular impairments in decoding novel
words. Traditionally, this has been interpreted within a dual-
route framework as a consequence of damage to the sublexical
route, responsible for translating graphemes to phonemes via
phonological rules. hus, nonwords tend to be lexicalized, with
patients reading a nonword as if it were a visually similar familiar
word (e.g., reading bem as ben).
Disorders of Reading and Writing
SURFACE AND PHONOLOGICAL DYSLEXIA: THE PRIMARY SYSTEMS
HYPOTHESIS. he dual-route model is a model of the reading sys-
tem, relatively divorced from the underlying cognitive and lin-
guistic skills that subserve reading. An alternative approach is to
consider the extent to which acquired disorders are a consequence
of impairment to one or more of those underlying primary skills
upon which reading is parasitic (for example, phonology, seman-
tics, and visual processing). his perspective, termed the primary
systems hypothesis, is reviewed in detail by M. A. Lambon Ralph
and K. E. Patterson (2005). It draws heavily on connectionist mod-
els of reading, especially the triangle model described previously.
Space precludes a full description of the model (see Plaut 2005 for
detailed review), but it difers fundamentally from the dual-route
model in a number of key ways. As a model of the language sys-
tem rather than the reading system, it predicts that patients with
reading problems should also show concomitant weaknesses in
aspects of language processing more generally.
How does the triangle model account for surface and phono-
logical dyslexia? Surface dyslexia (i.e., poor exception word read-
ing) is proposed to be a consequence of reduced activation from
semantic representations impacting on the connections between
phonology and orthography. Lambon Ralph and Patterson
(2005) provide technical details underpinning this proposal, and
explain the balance of evidence supporting it. According to the
primary systems hypothesis, if surface dyslexia is a consequence
of impaired semantics, then patients should exhibit semantic
impairments that is, impairments on nonreading tasks that
require knowledge of, or access to, word meanings. In support of
this, patients with semantic dementia show a variety of seman-
tic impairments and show a surface dyslexia reading proile
(Graham, Hodges, and Patterson 1994).
In contrast to the semantic weaknesses considered to under-
pin surface dyslexia, the triangle model proposes that impair-
ments in phonology underpin phonological dyslexia. Inasmuch
as reading nonwords places heavy demands on the connections
between phonology and orthography (as nonwords have no
meaning, contributions from semantic knowledge is minimal),
if patients have weaknesses in the phonological domain, these
should be exhibited as relatively stronger nonword than word
reading deicits exactly the pattern seen in patients with pho-
nological dyslexia. And, consistent with the primary systems
hypothesis, patients with acquired phonological dyslexia also
show weaknesses on nonreading tasks that tap phonological
skills, including word and nonword repetition and phonological
awareness (Bird et al. 2003).
ACQUIRED DYSGRAPHIA. Often, patients with acquired dyslexia
show associated impairments in spelling words to dictation
(dysgraphia); however, some patients show selective impair-
ments in spelling. As with reading impairment, damage to difer-
ent aspects of the language system produces diferent patterns
of spelling impairment. Some patients are very poor at using
spelling-sound conversion rules to spell novel words, similar
to the pattern of reading behavior seen in patients with phono-
logical dyslexia; others tend to make regularization errors when
spelling exception words, akin to surface dyslexia (see Romani,
Olson, and Di Betta 2005 for discussion of these and other types
of acquired [and developmental] dysgraphias).
Summary and Conclusions
Reading and writing are complex processes, and it is clear that
they may be impaired for a variety of reasons. Written language
is parasitic upon spoken language, and, therefore, it is no sur-
prise to ind that oral language weaknesses are associated with
impairments of reading and writing in both developmental and
acquired disorders. More speciically, diferent aspects of the oral
language system (e.g., phonology and semantics) appear to be
more or less associated with diferent aspects of reading or writ-
ing failure. A challenge for future work is to understand how oral
language skills interact with each other and with orthographic
factors to produce diferent patterns of written language impair-
ment. In addition, many challenges remain for understanding
how genetic and environmental risk factors interact to inluence
brain development so as to cause a developmental disorder of
reading or writing.
Kate Nation
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Behrmann, M., D. C. Plaut, and J. Nelson. 1998. A literature review and
new data supporting an interactive account of letter-by-letter reading.
Cognitive Neuropsychology 15: 751.
Bird, H., M. A. Lambon Ralph, M. S. Seidenberg, J. L. McClelland, and
K. Patterson. 2003. Deicits in phonology and past tense morphology.
Journal of Memory and Language 48: 50226.
Bishop, D. V. M. 1997. Cognitive neuropsychology and develop-
mental disorders: Uncomfortable bedfellows. Quarterly Journal of
Experimental Psychology 50A: 899923.
Coltheart, M. 2005. Modeling reading: he dual-route approach. In
Snowling and Hulme 2005, 623.
Cragg, L., and K. Nation. 2006. Exploring written narrative in chil-
dren with poor reading comprehension. Educational Psychology
21.1: 5572.
Graham, K., J. R. Hodges, and K. E. Patterson. 1994. he relationship
between comprehension and oral reading in progressive luent apha-
sia. Neuropsychologia 32: 299316.
Lambon Ralph, M. A., and K. E. Patterson. 2005. Acquired disorders of
reading. In Snowling and Hulme 2005, 41330.
Nation, K. 2005. Childrens reading comprehension diiculties. In
Snowling and Hulme 2005, 24866.
Nation, K., P. Clarke, C. M. Marshall, and M. Durand. 2004. Hidden
language impairments in children: Parallels between poor reading
comprehension and speciic language impairment. Journal of Speech,
Hearing and Language Research 47: 199211.
Nation, K ., and M. Coltheart, eds. 2006. he genetics of reading.
Journal of Research in Reading 29. Special issue containing a number
of articles exploring the heritability of reading and related issues.
Oakhill, J. V., and N. Yuill. 1996. Higher order factors in comprehension
disability: Processes and remediation. In Reading Comprehension
Diiculties, ed C. Cornoldi and J. V. Oakhill, 6992. Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum.
Pennington, B. F., and R. K. Olson. 2005. Genetics of dyslexia. In
Snowling and Hulme 2005, 45372.
Plaut, D. C. 2005. Connectionist approaches to reading. In Snowling
and Hulme 2005, 2438.
Price, C. J., and E. McCrory. 2005. Functional brain imagining studies of
skilled reading and developmental dyslexia. In Snowling and Hulme
2005, 47396.
Romani, C., A. Olson, and A. M. Di Betta. 2005. Spelling disorders. In
Snowling and Hulme 2005, 43148.
269
Division of Linguistic Labor
Snowling, M. J. 2000. Dyslexia. Oxford: Blackwell.
Snowling, M. J., and C. Hulme, eds. 2005. he Science of Reading.
Oxford: Blackwell.
DIVISION OF LINGUISTIC LABOR
According to Hilary Putnams (1975) division of linguistic labor,
speakers routinely use terms whose extension (see intension
and extension, reference and extension) they would not
be able to ix. For example, most of us cannot tell the diference
between gold and fools gold. Nevertheless, we know that the two
are diferent, and when we use the word gold, we mean to refer to
the real thing to the material that experts who can distinguish
between gold and fools gold call gold. If there is ever a dispute
about whether our use of the word is appropriate, we can consult
one of these experts. Using examples like this one, Putnam pro-
posed that knowledge of word meaning is not a private mental
property. Instead, it is the responsibility and achievement of the
collective linguistic community: Metallurgists can ix the extension
of the word gold, botanists can ix the extension of the word elm,
and so on. he average speakers use of such terms depends upon
an implicit structured cooperation between that person and the
experts in the relevant domains (see socially distributed
cognition).
Putnam (1975) proposed the division of linguistic labor as
part of a seminal argument against traditional accounts of word
meaning. Many of these accounts hold that knowing the mean-
ing of a word is a function of being in a particular psychologi-
cal state. In fact, he argued, two speakers can share the same
psychological state (neuron for neuron) but mean diferent
things. For example, imagine two speakers who know exactly
the same things about beech and elm trees: hey know that
both are large deciduous trees, but they cannot tell them apart
(for that, they defer to experts). If one speaker uses the word
beech to refer to an elm and the other uses the word to refer to
a beech, the two speakers share the same psychological state,
but they mean diferent things. As Putnam (1975, 144) famously
put it, Cut the pie any way you like, meanings just aint in the
head!
he notion that speakers do not know much about many of the
words they use is not controversial. However, there has been vigor-
ous debate about which words are subject to a division of linguistic
labor and whether a division of linguistic labor necessarily implies
that meanings aint in the head (see Pessin and Goldberg 1996).
For example, J. Searle (1983) argued that knowing that there are
experts who can be called upon to ix a words extension should be
considered part of knowing the meaning of a word.
Vikram K. Jaswal
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Pessin, A., and S. Goldberg, eds. 1996. he Twin Earth Chronicles: Twenty
Years of Relection on Hilary Putnams he Meaning of Meaning.
New York: M. E. Sharp.
Putnam, Hilary. 1975. he Meaning of Meaning. In Minnesota Studies
in the Philosophy of Science. Vol. 7: Language, Mind, and Knowledge.
Ed. Keith Gunderson, 13193. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Searle, J. 1983. Intentionality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
270
Dyslexia
DYSLEXIA
Introduction: What Is Dyslexia?
Dyslexia is a speciic learning diiculty afecting literacy
development. Children and adults with developmental dyslexia
show diiculties in reading and spelling that are not explica-
ble in terms of their age, intelligence, or educational experience.
Children with dyslexia typically have marked diiculties in learn-
ing to read and spell words, though their understanding of what
they read may be good. hese diiculties are often accompanied
by diiculties in short-term memory and organization. In adult-
hood, the word-reading diiculties may resolve, but spelling and
other underlying diiculties remain.
Behavioral Manifestations of Dyslexia
Reading development depends on two foundation skills, let-
ter-sound knowledge and phonological awareness, the
ability to identify the small sounds in speech (Byrne 1998). A
childs ability to establish mappings between the letter strings
of printed words and these speech sounds (phonemes) allows
printed words to be decoded and is the basis for the acquisition
of later and more automatic reading skills. hus, individual dif-
ferences in phonological awareness predict diferences in the
ability of children to learn to read. he most common pattern
of reading deicit in dyslexia in English is poor nonword read-
ing, a task that requires the decoding of unfamiliar words. To
some extent, spelling draws on the same processes as decoding;
however, English words cannot be spelled solely on the basis of
sound-letter mapping rules but also require knowledge of gra-
pho-tactic or morphological rules and sometimes rote learn-
ing. hus, for children with dyslexia, spelling poses even more of
a signiicant challenge than reading.
An important issue is whether dyslexia has the same symp-
toms in more consistent or transparent languages than English.
Findings from a variety of transparent languages show that
orthographic consistency of grapheme-phoneme correspon-
dences afects the rate at which children acquire reading skills.
Speciically, when correspondences between letters and pho-
nemes are regular, children quickly learn the phonological skills
required for reading and spelling. hus, children with dyslexia
learning to read in transparent orthographies have less serious
diiculties than their English-speaking counterparts; for them,
the main behavioral feature of dyslexia is a problem in read-
ing luency (Caravolas 2005). Conversely, in languages such as
Mandarin Chinese, in which the orthography does not consis-
tently signal the corresponding phonology, one might expect
that the relationship between dyslexia and phonological aware-
ness difers again. To date, there has been little research on this
issue (Hanley 2005), but the extant literature suggests that both
phonological and morphological processing skills are associated
with reading diiculties in Chinese.
Theories of Dyslexia
Current theories of dyslexia are cast at either the biological or cog-
nitive levels of explanation. he predominant cognitive account
of dyslexia views the primary cause as a phonological process-
ing impairment (Vellutino et al. 2004). According to this hypoth-
esis, children with dyslexia have phonological deicits that cause
Dyslexia
a wide range of symptoms, not all of which are directly related
causally to the reading deicits (e.g., verbal short-term memory
problems and word-inding diiculties). As far as is known, such
symptoms are equally common among children learning to read
in all languages.
Many other theories of dyslexia accept phonological diicul-
ties as a proximal cause of reading problems but cite more low-
level deicits as their distal cause. For example, the automization
deicit hypothesis (Nicolson and Fawcett 1990) proposes that
diiculties in the cerebellum in dyslexic children place sim-
ilar constraints on learning of all skills, including phonology,
naming abilities and basic motor skills. he proposal of William
Lovegrove, Frances H. Martin, and Walter L. Slaghuis (1986) that
people with dyslexia have impairments of the magnocellular
system (the division of the visual system that responds to rapid
changes) has also generated much research. Findings are mixed,
with some studies reporting no evidence of abnormal sensitiv-
ity and others suggesting that group diferences between people
with dyslexia and normal readers may be related to uncontrolled
diferences in IQ. Research investigating visual attention prob-
lems in dyslexia is also inconclusive.
An inluential hypothesis is that dyslexia stems from a dei-
cit in basic auditory processing. Speciically, a rapid audi-
tory processing deicit found with both speech and nonspeech
sounds would afect the perception of consonants distinguished
by rapid changes in the speech signal, and further, poor speech
perception would afect the development of phonological
processing skills (Tallal 2004). Investigation of auditory deicits
in dyslexia has extended to such tasks as frequency discrimina-
tion, frequency modulation, binaural processing, and backward
masking. However, as with indings on visual impairments, the
literature is replete with conlicting results, and an alternative
suggestion is that the deicit is not a general auditory impairment
but is speciic to the processing of speech sounds. Investigations
of speech perception in dyslexia have highlighted subtle impair-
ments, although again there are conlicting results. he lack of
consensus in the ield regarding sensory impairments has led to
the proposal that they frequently occur in dyslexia but are not
causally linked to it (Ramus 2004). Further investigation of this
complex issue is needed.
Etiology of Dyslexia
GENETIC FACTORS. It has long been known that dyslexia runs in
families; however, because families share genes as well as envi-
ronments, it is important to attempt to disentangle genetic and
environmental inluences. Twin studies have been helpful in this
regard (Pennington and Olson 2005). Most twin studies of read-
ing and reading disability report that both reading and phono-
logical awareness are heritable skills, and thus it can be inferred
that dyslexia has a genetic basis. Furthermore, molecular genetic
studies have found gene markers of dyslexia as well as some can-
didate genes, though it is far from clear what the genetic mecha-
nisms are (Fisher and Francks 2006).
It is important to note that the genes implicated in dyslexia
indicate a susceptibility to reading diiculties but not that read-
ing problems are fully genetically determined. he interaction
of diferent skills in determining reading outcomes can be seen
in studies of children at family risk of dyslexia followed from
the preschool years (e.g., Snowling, Gallagher, and Frith 2003).
hese studies highlight a wide range of diferent literacy out-
comes. Although many are slow in the early stages of reading,
some recover from this slow start to go on to be normal readers,
whereas others have persistent problems.
NEUROBIOLOGICAL BASES. Most children with speciic reading
diiculties do not have any detectable neurological abnormality.
However, evidence suggests that atypical brain development is
implicated (Leonard et al. 2001). Other symptoms that co-occur
with dyslexia may also be important in deining subtypes of dys-
lexia, and the neuroanatomical markers of diferent forms may
difer.
In addition to studies of brain structure, much recent work
has focused on functional abnormalities in the brains of people
with dyslexia. Typically, people with dyslexia have been reported
to show less activation than controls in the left temporal and
parietal lobes (Price and McCrory 2005). However, it remains
unclear whether diferences in brain activation are a sign of
some constitutional limitation of brain processing or whether
they simply relect activation of a persons inability to read words
using a phonological approach (a task that uses these language
regions).
ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS. School, home, and broader environ-
mental factors contribute to a childs risk of developing reading
problems. At the broadest level, reading disorders show social
class diferences, and direct literacy-related activities in the
home are also important, though evidence suggests that these
activities primarily afect reading comprehension via vocabulary
growth (Phillips and Lonigan 2005).
It is important to note that genes and the environment inter-
act, and there is evidence that children with dyslexia tend to
avoid reading activities, such that their reading problems may
become magniied over time. Where parents themselves have lit-
eracy problems, home literacy experiences may also be less than
optimal. In addition, comparisons of children from the same
area attending diferent schools have emphasized that school-
ing can make a substantial diference to reading achievement
(Rutter and Maughan 2002). Over time, the cumulative impact
of environmental processes can have a very signiicant efect on
reading progress.
In keeping with the relevance of both genetic and environ-
mental factors, there is currently a move away from single-deicit
models toward multifactorial models that explain the nature and
causes of dyslexia (Pennington 2006).
Comorbidity
Dyslexia shows some similarities with specific language
impairment, and there is some debate as to whether they
should be characterized as the same disorder (Bishop and
Snowling 2004). here is also evidence of comorbidity between
dyslexia and various emotional and behavioral problems. Most
strikingly, dyslexia is highly comorbid with attention-deicit
hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and, in particular, attention dif-
iculties (Willcutt and Pennington 2000). Recent research sug-
gests shared genetic risk factors as a possible cause. Children
with dyslexia also show an increased risk of developing clinically
271
Dyslexia
signiicant emotional diiculties, possibly as a result of their
reading diiculties (Carroll et al. 2005).
Reading Intervention
heoretical knowledge of the relationship between phonological
skills and learning to read has led to the development of efective
reading intervention programs that promote phonological skills
in the context of reading (National Reading Panel, 2000) (see
teaching reading). Such interventions are efective both for
diagnosed dyslexics and for children who are at risk of reading
problems. An underresearched issue is the problem of children
who, despite high quality intervention, do not respond to teach-
ing and continue to have reading impairments. hese children
are often socially disadvantaged and may show additional emo-
tional and behavioral diiculties.
Conclusions
Dyslexia is a highly researched developmental disorder. here
is now clear evidence that diiculties in phonological skills are
a major proximal cause of reading diiculties across languages.
here is also evidence that reading is a complex skill inluenced
both by genetics and by the environment. However, outstand-
ing issues remain. Notably, models of the disorder are moving
toward a multiple deicit model, and it is unknown which is the
most appropriate support for children who do not respond to
standard phonics-based reading intervention.
Margaret J. Snowling and Julia M. Carroll
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bishop, Dorothy V. M., and Margaret J. Snowling. 2004. Developmental
dyslexia and speciic language impairment: Same or diferent?
Psychological Bulletin 130: 85888.
Byrne, Brian. 1998. he Foundation of Literacy: he Childs Acquisition of
the Alphabetic Principle. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.
Caravolas, Marketa. 2005. he nature and causes of dyslexia in diferent
languages. In Snowling and Hulme 2005, 33657.
Carroll, Julia M., Barbara Maughan, Robert Goodman, and Howard
Meltzer, 2005. Literacy diiculties and psychiatric disorders: he
case for comorbidity. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry
46: 52432.
Cunningham, Anne, and Keith Stanovich. 1990. Assessing print
exposure and orthographic processing skill in children: A quick
measure of reading experience. Journal of Educational Psychology
82: 73340.
Fisher, Simon E., and Clyde Francks. 2006. Genes, cognition and dys-
lexia: Learning to read the genome. Trends in Cognitive Sciences
10: 2507.
Hanley, J. Richard. 2005. Learning to read in Chinese. In Snowling and
Hulme 2005, 31635.
Leonard, Christine M., Mark A. Eckert, Linda J. Lombardino, homas
Oakland, John Kranzler, Cecile M. Mohr, Wayne M. King, and Alan
Freeman. 2001. Anatomical risk factors for phonological dyslexia.
Cerebral Cortex 11: 14857.
Lovegrove, William, Frances H. Martin, and Walter L. Slaghuis. 1986.
he theoretical and experimental case for a visual deicit in speciic
reading disability. Cognitive Neuropsychology 3: 22567.
National Reading Panel. 2000. Report of the National Reading
Panel: Reports of the Subgroups. Washington, DC: National Institute of
Child Health and Human Development Clearing House.
272
Ellipsis
Nicolson, Rod I., and Angela J. Fawcett. 1990. Automaticity a new
framework for dyslexia research. Cognition 35: 15982.
Pennington, Bruce F. 2006. From single to multiple deicit models of
developmental disorders. Cognition 101: 385413.
Pennington, Bruce F., and Richard K.Olson. 2005. Genetics of dyslexia.
In Snowling and Hulme 2005, 45372.
Phillips, Beth M., and Christopher J. Lonigan. 2005. Social correlates of
emergent literacy. In Snowling and Hulme 2005, 17387.
Price, Cathy J., and Eamon McCrory. 2005. Functional brain imaging
studies of skilled reading and developmental dyslexia. In Snowling
and Hulme 2005, 47396.
Ramus, Franck. 2004. Neurobiology of dyslexia: A reinterpretation of the
data. Trends in Neurosciences 27: 7206.
Rutter, Michael, and Barbara Maughan. 2002. School efectiveness ind-
ings 19792002. Journal of School Psychology 40: 45175.
Snowling, Margaret J. 2000. Dyslexia. 2d ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
Snowling, Maragaret J., Alison Gallagher, and Uta Frith. 2003. Family
risk of dyslexia is continuous: Individual diferences in the precursors
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Snowling, Margaret J., and Charles Hulme, eds. 2005. he Science of
Reading: A Handbook. Oxford: Blackwell.
Tallal, Paula. 2004. Improving language and literacy is a matter of time.
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Vellutino, Frank R., Jack M. Fletcher, Margaret J. Snowling, and Donna
M. Scanlon. 2004. Speciic reading disability (dyslexia): What have
we learned in the past four decades? Journal of Child Psychology and
Psychiatry 45: 240.
Willcutt, Erik, and Bruce Pennington. 2000. Psychiatric co-morbidity
in children and adolescents with reading disability. Journal of Child
Psychology and Psychiatry 41: 103948.
E
ELLIPSIS
Ellipsis is the nonexpression of some lexical material specii-
cally, a word or words forming a syntactic constituent that
is needed for the full interpretation of a sentence but is not
expressed because it can be recovered from the linguistic or real-
world context. Under a traditional syntactic deinition of ellip-
sis, elliptical gaps must be able to be illed with overt material,
thus distinguishing them from other types of gaps, like traces
of moved constituents. All natural languages permit ellipsis,
but they difer with respect to which constituents can be elided
in which conigurations. Ellipsis falls within the larger ield of
reference resolution.
Most studies of ellipsis concentrate on formalizing the licens-
ing and recoverability conditions for elided constituents. he
former must account for what makes ellipsis grammatical in
given conigurations whereas the latter concerns the ways in
which the meaning of the elided material can be understood
from the context. When the meaning of an elided constituent is
understood by coreference with a previously introduced linguis-
tic constituent, that constituent is called the antecedent.
A cross-linguistic sampling of the many types of constituents
that are subject to ellipsis includes arguments of a verb (1); head
nouns in noun phrases with an overt quantiier, modiier, and so
on (in [2], laps); main verbs in so-called gapping constructions
Embodiment
(in [2], swam); verb phrases selected by an overt auxiliary (3);
and main verbs in sentences containing two or more overt argu-
ments or adjuncts (4). he elided categories in the examples are
indicated by []. Textual antecedents, when present, are shown
in boldface.
1. [] Pomoe mne? [Russian; the subject is elided]
[] Help 2.SG.FUTURE meDATIVE
Will you help me?
2. Jack swami 20 lapsj and Beth [i] 25 [j].
3. Greg is almost inished swimming but Bruce has just started
[].
4. Kuda ty []? [Russian; the main verb is elided]
whereDIRECTIONAL youNOM
Where are you going?
Although ellipsis is generally deined syntactically, syntactic
approaches to the study of ellipsis (e.g., Lobeck 1995) are, by
necessity, partial because ellipsis decisions can be afected by
nonsyntactic factors like the semantics of the utterance, the
potential for ambiguity, the physical context of the speech situ-
ation, and so on (McShane 2005).
Certain types of ellipsis, like gapping, either require or are
promoted by syntactic and/or semantic parallelism.
Ellipsis is particularly challenging for natural language pro-
cessing (NLP) systems since parsers (see parsing, machine)
must be able to detect the virtual presence of elided constituents,
and language generators must be supplied with rules of ellipsis
usage that go beyond the relatively broad generalizations found
in theoretical treatments.
Marjorie J. McShane
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Lobeck, Anne. 1995. Ellipsis: Functional Heads, Licensing and
Identiication. New York: Oxford University Press.
McShane, Marjorie J. 2005. A heory of Ellipsis. New York: Oxford
University Press.
EMBODIMENT
Embodiment refers to the ways in which persons bodies and
bodily interactions with the world shape their minds, actions,
and personal, cultural identities. Embodied accounts of mind
and language embrace the idea that human symbols are
grounded in recurring patterns of bodily experience, and there-
fore reject traditional dualistic, disembodied views of human
cognition and linguistic meaning. he study of embodiment
demands recognition that thought and language arise from the
continuous dynamic interactions among brains, bodies, and
the world. here are, in fact, three levels of embodiment that
together shape the embodied mind (Lakof and Johnson 1999).
Neural embodiment concerns the structures that characterize
concepts and cognitive operations at the neurophysiological
level. he cognitive unconscious consists of the rapid, evolu-
tionarily given mental operations that structure and make pos-
sible conscious experience, including the understanding and
use of language. he phenomenological level is conscious and
accessible to consciousness and consists of our awareness of
our own mental states, our bodies, our environment, and our
physical and social interactions.
Scholars opinions about the proper locus of embodiment in
cognition and language tend to privilege their own methodolog-
ical preferences. For instance, neuroscientists tend to privilege
the brain and some peripheral aspects of the nervous system in
their studies of thought, language, and emotion; anthropologists
focus on cultural-speciic behaviors and generally explore how
culture both is written onto bodies and gives cultural meanings
to bodily experiences and behaviors; cognitive linguists, and
some literary theorists, concentrate on the embodied nature
of linguistic structure and behavior, as well as on the embod-
ied nature of speaking/listening and writing/reading; and psy-
chologists tend to study the role of diferent bodily actions on
various cognitive activities. Despite these difering approaches,
many agree that an embodied understanding of mind and lan-
guage requires attention to all three levels of embodiment and
their interaction.
here is now a large body of linguistic research demonstrat-
ing that the existence and speciic meanings of many words and
phrases emerged from recurring patterns of bodily experience.
For instance, peoples frequent experiences of taking physical
journeys (i.e., beginning at some source, moving along a path,
and reaching some destination) appears to inluence the devel-
opment of metaphorical ways of talking about abstract ideas
and events, such as achieving a personal goal (e.g., I inally
am getting close to my Ph.D.) or having diiculties in personal
relationships (e.g., Our marriage has hit a dead-end street). In
this way, peoples bodily experiences of taking journeys is meta-
phorically extended to conceive of many ideas related to LIFE IS
A JOURNEY (Lakof and Johnson 1999).
Embodied experience may also directly inluence contem-
porary speakers understandings of many words and phrases.
Neuroscience research demonstrates that perceptual and motor
systems are speciically activated during immediate language
processing. hus, areas of motor and premotor cortex associated
with speciic body parts are activated when people hear language
referring to those body parts. Listening to diferent verbs asso-
ciated with diferent efectors (i.e., mouth/chew, leg/kick,
hand/grab) leads to diferent iring rates in diferent regions of
motor cortex (i.e., areas responsible for appropriate mouth/leg/
hand motions exhibit greater activation) (Hauk, Johnsrude and
Pulvermuller 2004).
Psycholinguistic studies also demonstrate the automatic
recruitment of perceptual and motor systems in immediate
language understanding. For instance, people are slower to
understand a phrase like aim a dart when they irst form a ist
than when they shape their hand into a dart-throwing position,
which suggests that semantic comprehension may engage rel-
evant motoric processes (Klatzky et al. 1989). People also more
quickly understand a statement like grasp the concept when
they irst make, or imagine making, a grasping motion than
when no grasping motion is made (Wilson and Gibbs 2007).
hus, people need not necessarily inhibit the physical meanings
of certain metaphorically used words, like grasp, because these
meanings are recruited during the on-line construction of met-
aphorical meanings, such as when concepts are metaphorically
273
Emergentism
understood as things that can be grasped. Studies also show
that people understand metaphorical ictive motion sentences,
such as he road runs along the coast, in terms of implicit,
imaginary sensations of movement implicit in these sentences
(Matlock 2004). People are not aware of these simulations, and
so language processing is not dependent on deliberate thought
about motion. In general, psycholinguistic studies provide addi-
tional support for the broad claim, also now made in compu-
tational modeling research, known as simulation semantics
(Feldman and Narayanan 2004) that language use is closely tied
to embodied imagination.
he empirical work in cognitive science on embodiment in
language and thought (see Gibbs 2006) mirrors other debates in
philosophy and literary studies on the role of embodied imagi-
nation in literary and aesthetic experience. Readers emotional
involvement with iction, for instance, may arise from their simu-
lations of themselves as the characters they read about and their
ictional actions (Nichols 2006). In this manner, reading may not
be an abstract, purely mental process with little engagement of
the bodily imagination but is fundamentally tied to our powers
to recreate what it must be like to be and move like the people
we are reading about. Debate about this, and about other issues
related to embodiment in thinking and language, is central in
much contemporary scholarship in the humanities and cogni-
tive sciences.
Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Feldman, J., and S. Narayanan. 2004. Embodied meaning in a neural
theory of language. Brain and Language 89: 38592.
Gibbs, R. 2006. Embodiment and Cognitive Science. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Hauk, O., I. Johnsrude, and F. Pulvermuller. 2004. Somatotopic rep-
resentation of action words in human motor and premotor cortex.
Neuron 41: 3017.
Klatzky, R. L., J. W. Pellegrino, B. P. McCloskey, and S. Doherty. 1989. Can
you squeeze a tomato? he role of motor representations in semantic
sensibility judgments. Journal of Memory and Language, 28: 5677.
Lakof, G., and M. Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: he Embodied
Mind and Its Challenge to Western hought. New York: Basic Books.
Matlock, T. 2004. Fictive motion as simulation. Memory & Cognition
32: 13891400.
Nichols, S., ed. 2006. he Architecture of he Imagination: New Essays on
Pretense, Possibility, And Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wilson, N., and R. Gibbs. 2007. Real and imagined body movement
primes metaphor comprehension. Cognitive Science, 31: 72131.
EMERGENTISM
A signiicant body of linguistic research can be situated in the
philosophical and scientiic tradition known as emergentism.
his entry ofers a brief overview of this work, with a focus on its
guiding principles and on the proposals it makes concerning the
nature of human language.
The Emergentist Tradition
he roots of emergentism can be traced to the work of John
Stuart Mill ([1843] 1930), who proposed that a system can have
274
properties that amount to more than the sum of its parts. he
physical world ofers many examples of this, as Mill observes
(p. 243):
he chemical combination of two substances produces, as is well
known, a third substance with properties diferent from those of
either of the two substances separately, or both of them taken
together. Not a trace of the properties of hydrogen or oxygen is
observable in those of their compound, water.
Mills insight is relevant to the study of so-called complex sys-
tems ranging from atoms to the weather whose dynamic
nonlinear behavior involves many interacting and intercon-
nected parts. (A system is dynamic if it is constantly in lux; it
is nonlinear if efects are out of proportion to causes, as when
a neglected candle causes a ire that destroys an entire city.
See self-organizing systems.) However, the question of
whether and to what extent language is an emergent phenom-
enon remains controversial.
Linguistic Emergentism
Although it is widely agreed that emergentist approaches to lan-
guage necessarily stand in opposition to theories of the language
faculty that posit an innate universal grammar, other tenets
of linguistic emergentism are less well deined, and there is no
consensus within the ield as to how precisely the standard prob-
lems of linguistic analysis should be confronted. Nonetheless,
the starting point for a substantial portion of emergentist work
seems to involve a commitment to the emergentist thesis for
language:
he phenomena of language are best explained by reference to
more basic nonlinguistic (i.e., nongrammatical) factors and
their interaction.
An appealing tag line for linguistic emergentism comes from
Elizabeth Bates and Brian MacWhinney (1988, 147): language,
they say, is a new machine built out of old parts. While there
is no general agreement concerning just what those parts might
be, the list is relatively short, ranging from features of physiology
and perception, to processing and working memory, to prag-
matics and social interaction, to properties of the input and of
the learning mechanisms.
A signiicant amount of emergentist work within linguis-
tics adopts the techniques of connectionism, an approach to
the study of the mind that seeks to model learning and cogni-
tion in terms of networks of (assumedly) neuron-like units. In its
more extreme forms, connectionism rejects the existence of the
sorts of symbolic representations (including syntactic structure)
that have played a central role in explanatory work on human
language. Gary Marcus (1998, 2001) and Kevin R. Gregg (2003)
ofer a critique of this sort of eliminativist program while Paul
Smolensky (1999) and Mark Steedman (1999) discuss ways to
reconcile it with traditional symbolic approaches to language,
including the possibility that representations might be
abstract, higher-level descriptions that approximate the patterns
of neuronal activation that connectionist approaches seek to
model.
Although connectionist modeling provides a useful way to
test various predictions about language acquisition, processing,
Emergentism
change, and evolution, the eliminativist position is far from uni-
versally accepted within emergentism. Symbolic representations
of one form or another are evident in the work of many emergen-
tists (e.g., Goldberg 1999; Tomasello 2003; OGrady 2001, 2005),
who nonetheless reject the view that the properties of those rep-
resentations should be attributed to innate grammatical prin-
ciples (see innateness and innatism).
Language Acquisition
To date, emergentist work within linguistics has focused most
strongly on the question of how language is acquired (see, e.g.,
the many papers in MacWhinney 1999). he impetus for this
focus stems from opposition to the central claim of grammati-
cal nativism, which is that the principles underlying a good deal
of linguistic knowledge are underdetermined by experience and
must therefore be innate.
Emergentism is not opposed to nativism per se the fact that
the brain is innately structured in various ways is not a matter of
dispute. However, there is opposition to representational nativ-
ism, the view that there is direct innate structuring of particular
grammatical principles and constraints (Elman et al. 1996, 369 f;
Bates et al. 1998), as implied by many of the proposals associated
with universal grammar.
Contemporary emergentism often includes a commitment
to explaining linguistic development by reference to the opera-
tion of simple learning mechanisms (essentially, inductive gen-
eralization) that extract statistical regularities from experience.
It is interesting that there is as yet no consensus as to what form
the resulting knowledge might take local associations and
memorized chunks (Ellis 2002), constructions (Goldberg 1999;
Tomasello 2003), or computational routines (OGrady 2001,
2005). In addition, there is variation with respect to the exact
relationship that is assumed to hold between learning and rel-
ative frequency in the input. Some work implies a quite direct
relationship (e.g., Ellis 2002), but other work suggests something
less direct (e.g., Elman 2002).
Emergentist work on language acquisition often makes use
of computer modeling to test hypotheses about development.
Jefrey Elman and his colleagues (e.g., Elman 2002) have been
able to show that a simple recurrent network (SRN) can achieve
at least some of the milestones associated with language acqui-
sition in children, including the identiication of category-like
classes of words, the formation of patterns not observed in the
input, retreat from overgeneralizations, and the mastery of sub-
jectverb agreement. (An SRN learns to produce output of its own
by processing sentences in its input; it is speciically designed to
take note of local co-occurrence relationships or transitional
probabilities given the word X, whats the likelihood that the
next word will be Y?)
Emergentist modeling has yielded impressive results, but it
raises the question of why the particular statistical regularities
exploited by the SRN are in the input in the irst place. In other
words, why does language have the particular properties that it
does? Why, for example, are there languages (such as English) in
which verbs agree only with subjects, but no language in which
verbs agree only with direct objects?
Networks provide no answer to this sort of question. In fact,
if presented with data in which verbs agree with direct objects
rather than subjects, an SRN would no doubt learn just this
sort of pattern, even though it is not found in any known human
language.
here is clearly something missing here. Humans dont just
learn language; they shape it. Moreover, these two facts are surely
related in some fundamental way, which is why hypotheses about
how linguistic systems are acquired need to be embedded within
a more comprehensive theory of why those systems (and there-
fore the input) have the particular properties that they do. here
is, simply put, a need for an emergentist theory of grammar.
Emergentist Approaches to Grammatical Theory
A substantial amount of analytic work has addressed the tradi-
tional concerns of linguistic analysis, including core phenom-
ena in the major areas of traditional grammatical theory.
SYNTAX. It is possible to identify several strands of emergentist
work on syntax, each devoted to explaining the structural prop-
erties of sentences without reference to inborn grammatical prin-
ciples. Difering views have been put forward by MacWhinney
(2005) and William OGrady (2001, 2005), both of whom address
a series of issues that lie at the heart of contemporary syntactic
analysis the design of phrase structure, coreference, agree-
ment, the syntax-phonology interface, and constraints
on long-distance dependencies. MacWhinney seeks to explain
these phenomena in terms of pragmatics, arguing that grammar
emerges from conversation as a way to facilitate accurate track-
ing and switching of perspective. In contrast, OGrady holds that
syntactic phenomena are best understood in terms of the opera-
tion of a linear, eiciency-driven processor that seeks to reduce
the burden on working memory in the course of sentence forma-
tion and interpretation.
Still other work, such as that done within construction
grammar, seeks to reduce syntax to stored pairings of form and
function (constructions). Some of this work has a strong emer-
gentist orientation (e.g., Goldberg 1999; Tomasello 2003), but
some retains a commitment to universal grammar (Goldberg
and Jackendof 2004, 563).
MORPHOLOGY. Very early connectionist work on morphol-
ogy called into question the existence of morphological rules
and representations, even for phenomena such as regular past
tense inlection. Instead, it was suggested, a pattern-associator
network learns the relationship between the phonological form
of stems and that of past tense forms (run~ran, walk~walked,
etc.), gradually establishing associations (connections) of dif-
ferent strengths and levels of generality between the two sets of
elements the most general and strongest involving the -ed past
tense form. James McClelland and Karalyn Patterson (2002) ofer
a succinct overview of this perspective.
More recent work has raised important questions about the
nature of morphemes in general. A key claim of this research
is that morphological structure emerges from statistical regulari-
ties in the formmeaning relationships between words. (Hay and
Baayen 2005 ofers an excellent review of this research.)
Intriguing experimental work by Jennifer Hay (2003) suggests
that the internal structure of an aixed word is gradient rather
than categorical, relecting its relative frequency compared to
275
Emergentism
that of its base. he words inadequate and inaudible are a case in
point. Because adequate is more frequent than the aixed form
inadequate, its presence in the derived word is relatively salient,
leading to a high native-speaker rating for structural complex-
ity. In contrast, inaudible, which is more frequent (and therefore
more salient) than audible, receives a low rating for structural
complexity.
If this is right, then morphological structure exists but not
in the categorical form commonly assumed. Rather, what we
think of as morpheme boundaries emerge to varying degrees
of strength from the interaction of more basic factors, such as
frequency, semantic transparency, and even phonotactics.
(he low-probability sequence in inhumane creates a sharper
morpheme boundary than the high-probability sequence in
insincere.)
THE LEXICON. here have been various attempts to develop an
emergentist approach to the lexicon, which is traditionally seen
as the repository of information about morphemes and words.
One possibility, suggested by Joan Bybee (1998), among others,
is that the lexicon emerges from the way in which (by hypothesis)
the brain responds to and stores linguistic experience by creat-
ing units whose strength and productivity is determined largely
by frequency of occurrence. Some of these units correspond to
words, as in a traditional lexicon, but many are phrases and other
larger units of organization, including possibly abstract construc-
tions (see usage-based theory).
Elman (2005) also argues against a pre-structured lexicon,
proposing instead that lexical knowledge is implicit in the efects
that words have on the minds internal states, as represented
in the activation patterns created by an SRN. Because an SRN
focuses on co-occurrence relationships (see above), these efects
are modulated by context a words meaning, like its syntactic
category, emerges from the contexts in which it is used rather
than from an a priori vocabulary of linguistic primitives.
PHONOLOGY. Pioneering work on emergentist phonology was
carried out by Patricia Donegan (1985), who noted the unhelp-
fulness to language learners of classic distributional analysis. As
she observed, it is implausible to suppose that children record
sets of phonetic representations in memory and then compare
them in the hope of determining which phonetic contrasts are
distinctive and which are predictable from context (see speech
perception in infants and speech production). Instead,
Donegan suggests, children begin with a set of processes (nasal-
ization, devoicing, and so forth) that emerge as responses to the
physical limitations of the human vocal tract and the auditory
apparatus. (hese limitations are inborn, of course, but are not
inherently linguistic in character, despite their linguistic con-
sequences.) A languages phonemic inventory and allophonic
patterns then emerge as speciic processes are suppressed in
response to experience.
A simple example involves the process that palatalizes /s/ in
front of a high front vowel, giving the pronunciation [i] for /si/
in many languages (e.g., Japanese). A child learning English is
forced to suppress this process upon exposure to words such
as see, which is pronounced [si], without palatalization. his, in
turn, results in the admission of // to the phonemic inventory
276
of English: Because the palatalization process has been sup-
pressed, the [] in words such as [i] she must be interpreted
as a sound in its own right, rather than as a process-induced
variant of /s/.
Crucially, this conclusion is drawn without the need for com-
parison of minimal pairs or similar distributional analysis; the
phonemic inventory emerges in response to a much simpler
and more basic phenomenon the suppression of processes
based on exposure to particular individual words. Boersma
(1998) and Hayes, Kirchner, and Steriade (2004) discuss a broad
range of other phonological phenomena from an emergentist
perspective.
Concluding Remarks
here is currently no comprehensive emergentist theory of lan-
guage or its acquisition, but there are various emergentist-inspired
research programs devoted to the construction of such a theory.
For the most part, this work is based on the simple thesis that the
core properties of language are best understood by reference to
the properties of quite general cognitive mechanisms and their
interaction with one another and with experience. he viability
of this idea can and must be measured against its success in con-
fronting the classic empirical challenges of linguistic analysis
iguring out how language works and how it is acquired.
William OGrady
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bates, Elizabeth, Jefrey Elman, Mark Johnson, Annette Karmilof-Smith,
Domenico Parisi, Kim Plunkett. 1998. Innateness and emergentism.
In A Companion to Cognitive Science, ed. W. Bechtel and G. Graham,
590601. Oxford: Blackwell.
Bates, Elizabeth, Judith Goodman. 1999. On the emergence of grammar
from the lexicon. In he Emergence of Language, ed. B. MacWhinney,
2979. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Bates, Elizabeth, Brian MacWhinney. 1988. What is functionalism?
Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 27: 13752.
Boersma, Paul. 1998. Functional Phonology: Formalizing the Interactions
between Articulatory and Perceptual Drives. he Hague: Holland
Academic Graphics.
Bybee, Joan. 1998. he emergent lexicon. In Proceedings of the 34th
Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society: he Panels, 42135.
Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. An excellent example of emergen-
tist thinking about the lexicon.
Donegan, Patricia. 1985. How learnable is phonology? In Papers on
Natural Phonology from Eisenstadt, ed. W. Dressler and L. Tonelli,
1931. Padua: Cooperativa Libraria Editoriale Studentesca Patavina.
Ellis, Nick. 2002. Frequency efects in language processing. Studies in
Second Language Acquisition 24: 14388.
Elman, Jefrey. 1993. Learning and development in neural networks: he
importance of starting small. Cognition 48: 7199. A much-cited and
widely admired illustration of the value of computational modeling in
the study of language acquisition.
. 2002. Generalization from sparse input. In Proceedings of the
38th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 175200.
Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. A highly readable summary of
several important SRN-based studies of language acquisition.
. 2004. An alternative view of the mental lexicon. Trends in
Cognitive Science 8: 3016.
Elman, Jefrey, Elizabeth Bates, Mark Johnson, Annette Karmilof-Smith,
Domenico Parisi, Kim Plunkett. 1996. In Rethinking Innateness: A
Emergent Structure
Connectionist Perspective on Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Goldberg, Adele. 1999. he emergence of the semantics of argu-
ment structure constructions. In he Emergence of Language, ed. B.
MacWhinney, 197212. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Goldberg, Adele, and Ray Jackendof. 2004. he English resultative as a
family of constructions. Language 80: 53268.
Gregg, Kevin R. 2003. he state of emergentism in second language
acquisition. Second Language Research 19: 4275.
Hay, Jennifer.and 2003. Causes and Consequences of Word Structure. New
York: Routledge.
Hay, Jennifer, and R. Harald Baayen. 2005. Shifting paradigms: Gradient
structure in morphology. Trends in Cognitive Science 9: 3428. An
excellent survey of work on emergentist morphology.
Hayes, Bruce, Robert Kirchner, and Donca Steriade, eds. 2004. Phone-
tically Based Phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
MacWhinney, Brian. 1998. Models of the emergence of language.
Annual Review of Psychology 49: 199227.
. 2002. Language emergence. In An Integrated View of Language
Development: Papers in Honor of Henning Wode, ed. P. Burmeister,
T. Piske, and A. Rohde, 1742. Trier, Germany: Wissenshaftliche Verlag.
. 2004. A multiple process solution to the logical problem of lan-
guage acquisition. Journal of Child Language 31: 883914.
. 2005. he emergence of grammar from perspective. In Grounding
Cognition: he Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language and
hinking, ed D. Pecher and R. Zwaan, 198223. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
MacWhinney, Brian, ed. 1999. he Emergence of Language. Mahwah,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Marcus, Gary. 1998. Rethinking eliminative connectionism. Cognitive
Psychology 37: 24382.
. 2001. he Algebraic Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
McClelland, James, and Karalyn Patterson. 2002. Rules or connections
in past-tense inlection: What does the evidence rule out? Trends in
Cognitive Science 6: 46572. An update and survey of connectionist
work on inlection.
Mill, John Stuart. [1843] 1930. A System of Logic Ratiocinative and
Inductive. London: Longmans, Green, and Co.
OGrady, William. 2001. An emergentist approach to syntax. Available
online at: http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/faculty/ogrady/. A summary of
the detailed arguments for an emergentist theory of syntax found in
OGrady (2005).
. 2005. Syntactic Carpentry: An Emergentist Approach to Syntax.
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. An emergentist approach to syntax that seeks
an understanding of many of the classic problems of syntactic theory
in terms of processing.
Palmer-Brown, Dominic, and Jonathan Tepper, Heather Powell. 2002.
Connectionist natural language parsing. Trends in Cognitive Science
6: 43742.
Smolensky, Paul. 1999. Grammarbased connectionist approaches to
language. Cognitive Science 23: 589613.
Steedman, Mark. 1999. Connectionist sentence processing in perspec-
tive. Cognitive Science 23: 61534.
Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based
heory of Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press. A widely cited example of a usage-based approach to language
acquisition.
EMERGENT STRUCTURE
his term is used in many ields, including scientiic and social
disciplines, where it has been applied to a variety of adaptive
self-organizing systems from termite mounds to grocery
checkout lines. he term emergent refers especially to an open-
ended process in which systematicity is partial and incomplete
and in which a system is in a constant course of (re)formation.
In the study of language, the expression emergent grammar
was coined by Paul Hopper (1987) as a methodological pro-
posal for approaching the relationship between grammar and
the local structure of natural discourse. Logically prior, ixed
grammar was, Hopper argued, inconsistent with the kinds of ad
hoc linguistic decisions made by speakers. he notion of emer-
gent grammar inverts the standard picture of grammar, as well
as the generally accepted logical priority of structure over text.
Linguistic structure is thus to be seen as a product of, rather than
a prerequisite to, discourse. Since discourse is ongoing, structure
is emergent, that is, continually in a process of formation accord-
ing to the current needs of the interaction. (See Weber 1997 for
further discussion.)
he database for the study of language from this perspec-
tive is a corpus of transcribed texts, usually oral, and, recently,
conversational (Ochs, Scheglof, and hompson 1996). In this
respect, too, emergent grammar difers from structural and cog-
nitive grammar, in which conclusions are normally based on
isolated constructed sentences. he explanation for grammar,
according to this theory, lies in frequency (Bybee and Hopper
2001) and the associated routinization of forms (Haiman 1994).
High-frequency forms tend to become phonetically reduced
and to be restructured (Bybee 2001). Typical examples are the
English pronoun+modal sequences like Ill, youre, weve, and so
on. Emergent grammar is thus relevant to the more general study
of grammaticalization.
Incipient structure that is, looking backward at the histor-
ical origins of a structured system or forward to the predicted
course of events leading to a structured system, as in the study
of irst language acquisition and of most varieties of cogni-
tive linguistics is more properly described as emerging
than as emergent. he noun emergence is ambiguous in this
respect.
Paul J. Hopper
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bybee, Joan. 1998. he emergent lexicon. Papers of the Annual Meeting
of the Chicago Linguistic Society 34: 42135.
. 2001. Phonology and Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Bybee, Joan, and Paul Hopper, eds. 2001. Frequency and the Emergence of
Linguistic Structure. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Haiman, John. 1994. Ritualization and the development of language.
In Perspectives on Grammaticalization, ed. William Pagliuca, 328.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hopper, Paul. 1987. Emergent grammar. Papers of the Annual Meeting
of the Berkeley Linguistic Society 13: 13957.
Lewin, Roger. 1992. Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos. New
York: Macmillan. A readable account of chaos theory and the emer-
gence of structured systems.
Ochs, Elinor, Emanuel Schegloff, and Sandra Thompson, eds.1996.
Interaction and Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Weber, hilo. 1997. he emergence of linguistic structure: Paul
Hoppers emergent grammar hypothesis revisited. Language Sciences
19.2: 17796.
277
Emotion and Language
EMOTION AND LANGUAGE
A vast domain of research on emotion and language cuts across
many disciplines, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks.
To render this topic coherent and manageable, we focus on the
current resurgence of research on emotional words. Emotional
words (e.g., lower, shit) contrast with connotatively neutral
words (e.g., toaster, being) and include subcategories such as
taboo words (insults, scatological references, and swearing or
curse words), threatening words (e.g., negative valence words
referring to menacing situations such as murder and abuse),
and some emotion words (e.g., terror, disgust). In a con-
tinuum of vocal emotional expression ranging from nonverbal
(e.g., screams) to abstract verbal (e.g., igurative language; see
idioms, irony, metaphor, verbal humor), T. B. Jay (2003)
argues, taboo words constitute the strongest form of emotional
language: Taboo words are more arousing than igurative lan-
guage and yield reliable and robust emotional efects more often
than do threatening words.
We review research on emotional words from historical,
methodological, and theoretical perspectives.
Historical Perspectives
Historical perspectives illustrate the multiple domains and meth-
odologies of research on emotional words. In the mid-1800s,
neuropsychological case studies of Hughlings Jackson (1958)
and others helped shape current ideas concerning automatic
or uncontrollable production of emotional words (see, e.g., Van
Lancker 1987). Carl Jungs (1910) work with emotional words
in free association tasks also shaped procedures for diagnos-
ing clinical disorders such as schizophrenia (see also psycho-
analysis and language). From 1950 to 1975, experimental
psychologists used classical conditioning concepts to analyze
the learning of emotional words (e.g., Staats 1968) and adopted
perceptual defense paradigms to determine whether ego-pro-
tective processes shield threatening stimuli (taboo words) from
awareness (e.g., Dixon 1971). However, both lines of research
were largely abandoned: perceptual defense because of method-
ological laws and the learning of emotional words because com-
puter metaphors dominated the study of language and cognition
and downplayed emotion during the period of 1975 to 1990
(Jay 2003).
Methodological Perspectives
RATING STUDIES. Rating studies provide a method for deter-
mining the emotional qualities of words. A classic example is
the semantic diferential (Osgood, Suci, and Tanenbaum 1957),
where ratings of words on bipolar connotative scales relect three
underlying dimensions: evaluation (the valence component,
e.g., negativepositive); activity (e.g., fastslow); and potency
(e.g., strongweak). L. H. Wurm and D. A. Vakoch (1996) argued
that evolutionary considerations and relations between process-
ing time data and the evaluation, activity, and potency ratings for
words indicate an afective lexicon (for avoiding threats) that dif-
fers from the general lexicon (for obtaining valuable resources).
Other rating studies involving the afective lexicon include
Bellezza, Greenwald, and Banaji (1986), Bradley and Lang
(1999), and Jay (1992). Unrepresented in current rating studies
278
are gender, age, psychological history, personality factors, social
context, political and religious ailiation, and cultural factors
(see culture and language), all of which powerfully inlu-
ence peoples perception of emotion-linked words (Jay 2000).
SELF-REPORT AND FIELD STUDIES. Field studies of taboo word use
indicate that emotional language is learned early and persists
well into old age (Jay 2000). Self-report studies suggest that pun-
ishment for cursing fails to alter the actual likelihood of swear-
ing but nevertheless serves a function because the same people
admit that they would punish their own children for cursing (Jay,
King, and Duncan 2006).
NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL STUDIES. Neuropsychological studies
have focused on two primary dimensions of emotions: arousal
(excitement) and valence (positivenegative). A primary neu-
ropsychological measure of arousal and unconscious auto-
nomic activity is the skin conductance response (SCR; see,
e.g., LaBar and Phelps 1998). For emotional words presented
to bilinguals, the SCR decreases as a function of the order in
which a language is learned (Harris, Aycicegi, and Gleason
2003). he SCR also varies with the estimated emotional force
of aversive words (Dewaele 2004) and occurs even when
presentation times are too brief for word identiication (Silvert
et al. 2004).
amygdala activity also indexes arousal: hreatening words
trigger increased amygdalar activation (Isenberg et al. 1999),
and amygdalar damage impairs recognition of arousal but not
valence characteristics of emotional words (Adolphs, Russell,
and Tranel 1999; see also Lewis et al. 2007 for the role of other
subcortical structures in arousal). Some cortical and subcorti-
cal areas respond only to valence, some respond only to arousal,
and some respond to an interaction of valence and arousal,
particularly when valence is negative (Lewis et al. in press).
Finally, some cortical areas respond to valence per se, while
others respond selectively to either positive or negative valence
(Maddock, Garrett, and Buonocore 2003).
Relative activity in the left hemisphere (LH) versus right
hemisphere (RH) also indexes emotional processing, albeit
less consistently across studies, and the nature and scope of
emotion-linked processing in the RH is an ongoing issue (see
Borod, Bloom, and Haywood 1998). RH brain damage is associ-
ated with emotional blunting (Gainotti 1972) and diiculties in
identifying emotional words or the emotion they represent, in
matching words and emotions, in interpreting emotional con-
tent, in describing emotional autobiographical information,
in self-expression with emotional words (Borod, Bloom, and
Haywood 1998), and in comprehending and expressing humor
(Blake 2003). he corpus callosum that links the RH and LH
also plays a role in comprehending emotion-linked prosody,
humor, and igurative usages (Brown et al. 2005; Paul et al. 2003).
he frontal lobe seems to regulate or inhibit socially inap-
propriate uses of emotional words, with links between frontal
lobe damage and verbal aggression, such as excessive cursing
(e.g., Grafman et al. 1996).
CLINICAL AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCE STUDIES. Clientpatient
interactions focus on emotions, and an inability to express ones
Emotion and Language
emotions in words may relect a serious psychiatric problem
known as alexithymia. Alexithymic individuals have few words
for describing their feelings and communicating emotional
distress, are unable to identify and describe subjective states,
and have diiculty interacting with others, including therapists
(Taylor, Bagby, and Parker 1997).
Clinical studies have developed strategies for facilitating ther-
apeutic communication and emotional interactions in general,
for example, use of metaphor (see Stine 2005). Clinical studies
have also developed new ways of using emotion-linked words to
diagnose psychopathology. An example is the emotional Stroop
task where clients name the font color of words while attempting
to ignore their meaning: Longer color naming times for speciic
word classes (e.g., web, spider) are associated with clinical prob-
lems such as phobias (e.g., arachnophobia), anxiety and depres-
sive disorders, alexithymia, eating disorders, drug abuse, and a
range of other psychopathologies (see Williams, Mathews, and
MacLeod 1996 for a review).
EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES. Recent experimental studies have made
extensive explorations of the efects of emotional words on cog-
nitive processes such as memory and attention. For example,
in a variant of the emotional Stroop task known as the taboo
Stroop (MacKay et al. 2004), people name the font color of taboo
and neutral words (equated for length, familiarity, and category
coherence) while ignoring the meaning of the words and their
screen location. hey then receive a surprise memory test for the
words, the font color of particular words, or the screen location
of particular words, and the results indicate better memory for
taboo than neutral words and better memory for the font colors
and screen locations of taboo than of neutral words (see, e.g.,
MacKay et al. 2004; MacKay and Ahmetzanov 2005). hese and
other results suggest that taboo words facilitate recall of con-
textual details in the same way as do lashbulb memories for
traumatic events such as the September 11, 2001 tragedies,
after which people vividly recall contextual details associated
with the emotion-linked event, for example, how and when
they irst learned of the event, where they were, what they were
doing, and who else was present (see MacKay and Ahmetzanov
2005).
Other results indicate that taboo words impair immediate
recall of prior and subsequent neutral words in rapidly presented
mixed lists containing taboo and neutral words (e.g., MacKay,
Hadley, and Schwartz 2005), without impairing recall of neigh-
boring words in pure, all-taboo lists (Hadley and MacKay 2006).
However, lexical decision times (the time to identify a stimulus
as a word) do not difer for taboo versus neutral words (MacKay
et al. 2004). We discuss theoretical perspectives on this pattern
of results next.
Theoretical Perspectives
Current research on emotional words illustrates a gamut of the-
oretical perspectives that difer in their scope and goals and in
the nature and speciicity of the predictions they make. Jays
(2000) neuro-psychosocial theory of cursing summarizes likeli-
hood estimates of various forms of cursing, based on neurolog-
ical (e.g., conscious state, brain damage), psychological (e.g.,
personality, age, history), and social context (e.g., culture, class)
factors. American males are more likely to curse than females
both as children and as adults, although women also learn a
range of taboo words, whether they use them or not. Similarly,
Americans with high sexual anxiety but no religious training are
less likely to use sex-linked curse words than profanity or blas-
phemy, especially in conversations with same-sex others (see Jay
1992, 2000, 2003).
W. Buccis (1997) multiple code theory (MCT) of emo-
tional information processing links Freudian and connec-
tionist concepts via the concept of referential activity (RA).
RA is an index of the ability to link primary (e.g., emotional,
unconscious) and secondary (e.g., verbal, conscious) levels
of processing within a connectionist network. Applied in the
domain of clinical psychology, MCT has provided explana-
tions for negative psychological states, such as repression, in
terms of the nature or quality of connections between these
fundamentally linguistic versus emotional levels of process-
ing. Under MCT, people with high versus low RA differ in their
ability to express and describe their emotions, in the structure
and organization of their narratives, and in their therapeutic
success rates.
Resource theories of emotion and attention (e.g., Wells
and Matthews 1994) perhaps provide the broadest conceptu-
alization of emotion and cognitive processes. Under resource
theories, threatening stimuli attract limited-capacity cognitive
resources, thereby reducing resources available for processing
and responding to other stimuli, for example, font color in clini-
cal, emotional, and taboo Stroop tasks. his hypothesis readily
describes phenomena such as the taboo Stroop efect (longer
times for naming the font color of taboo than of neutral words)
but cannot describe other phenomena, for example, superior
memory for the font color and screen location of taboo than of
neutral words (see MacKay et al. 2004).
Two exceptions to the descriptive or post hoc approach that
characterizes resource theories are noteworthy. One is arousal
theory (e.g., LeDoux 1996) as applied to emotional words (e.g.,
Kensinger and Corkin 2003). Under arousal theory, low-level
sensory aspects of emotional stimuli, such as taboo words,
directly engage an emotional reaction system (in the amygdala)
independently of other stimulus factors, such as context and
presentation rate. he emotional reaction system then triggers
enhanced skin conductance and facilitates memory consolida-
tion for the emotional stimuli and their context of occurrence (in
the hippocampus).
What makes arousal theory attractive is its generality and test-
ability. For example, arousal theory explains lashbulb memories
under the hypothesis that arousal tends to induce storage of per-
ceptual images that include both the emotional stimulus and
its context of occurrence. However, arousal theory as applied to
emotional words has not fared well in recent tests: Contrary to
arousal theory, if presented in mixed taboo-neutral lists at rela-
tively slow rates (e.g., 2,000 ms/word) or if presented in pure (all-
taboo or all-neutral) lists at rapid rates (e.g., 200 ms/word), taboo
words are no better recalled than neutral words equated for
familiarity, length, and category coherence (Hadley and MacKay
2006). Also contrary to arousal theory, recent data indicate that
taboo words do not trigger imagelike memories (MacKay and
Ahmetzanov 2005).
279
Emotion and Language
he second notable exception to the summary-description
approach is node structure binding theory, or binding theory
for short (e.g., Hadley, and MacKay 2006). Under binding the-
ory, emotion-linked stimuli, such as taboo words, engage the
emotional reaction system, which delays activation of binding
mechanisms (located in the hippocampus) for linking concur-
rent neutral stimuli to their context of occurrence. As a result,
(less important) neutral stimuli only form links to their context of
occurrence after links to context for (more important) emotion-
linked stimuli have been formed.
hese binding theory assumptions have generated counter-
intuitive predictions that subsequent experimental tests have
veriied. For example, unlike other theories, binding theory
correctly predicted impaired recall of neutral neighbors before
and after a taboo word if and only if mixed (taboo-neutral) word
lists are presented rapidly (Hadley and MacKay 2006). Binding
theory also correctly predicted no diference in recall of taboo
versus neutral words in pure (all-taboo or all-neutral) lists pre-
sented rapidly or slowly (Hadley and MacKay 2006). Unlike
other theories, binding theory also correctly predicted no dif-
ference in lexical decision times (the time to identify a stimulus
as a word) for taboo versus neutral words (MacKay et al. 2004).
Conclusion
Both historical and contemporary research on emotional
words relects a wide variety of theoretical and methodological
approaches in ields ranging from neuroscience to psycholin-
guistics to cognitive and clinical psychology. Further research is
required to piece together these multiple domains and to develop
a general understanding of emotional words and their relation to
other cognitive processes. However, emotional words currently
seem poised to resume their central position in the language sci-
ences and related disciplines.
Kristin L. Janschewitz and Donald G. MacKay
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EMOTION, SPEECH, AND WRITING
In our everyday life, we are frequently exposed to expressions such
as a thousand words cannot express a single emotion, what I
feel is something that is beyond words, and so on. his kind of
utterance, relecting the diiculty of expressing emotions, evokes
special interest: Can speech and writing really express emotions?
In todays world, with the increasing awareness of emotion
as part of the self and the importance of expressing emotion as
part of human communication, language becomes vital to the
understanding and analysis of emotions. Lexical choices relect
how people experience the world around them and, thus, con-
stitute mediators between individuals emotions, which are
internal and subjective, and external entities, such as society and
environment.
heorists of emotion stress that language is the most con-
venient channel for approaching research into emotions and
that emotion words are the best way to relect the emotional
experience. Psychologists and psychoanalysts (Freud and his
followers) recognize that in spite of the importance of nonver-
bal behavior, words are the natural way of exteriorizing the inner
emotional world (see psychoanalysis and language).
heorists of emotion (e.g., Ortony, Clore, and Foss 1987) also
stress that language ofers the most convenient access for research-
ing emotions, and that emotion words are the best way of relect-
ing emotional experiences. Linguists such as N. J. Enield and A.
Wierzbicka (2002) went further, stating that it would be impossi-
ble to examine peoples emotions without putting language at the
center, both as the object of the research and as the research tool.
One reason for the complexity of such studies, according to sev-
eral researchers, is linguistic usage that confuses emotion terms.
Criticism of psychological research into emotions focuses mainly
on the fact that most research in this ield relies largely on linguis-
tic labels and not on direct measurement of the emotion itself. If
this is, in fact, the case, it is particularly important to investigate
the language of emotions as a discrete issue, with tools exterior to
the emotion itself such as those of linguistics.
In her critical essay, J. T. Irvine (1990) wrote that many lin-
guists tend to get cold feet when it comes to considering how
emotions are expressed verbally. Accordingly, if we use the ter-
minology of Ferdinand de Saussure, we can say that emotion
is accepted as integral to the parole, which is linguistically less
meaningful than langue language in its broadest sense. hus,
examination of emotion is pushed to the periphery of linguis-
tics. Irvine also remarks that though there are languages with
phonological and morphological units that indicate
emotional states in speech, linguists frequently tend to combine
such elements with general descriptions of grammar, rather than
emphasizing such verbal expressions of emotion. However, she
notes two important linguistic texts that also deal with emotion
in language, namely, Edward Sapirs lexicon of emotions as mir-
roring culture and Roman Jakobsons work relating to the emo-
tive function of language.
C. Cai and R. W. Janney (1994) examined the rhetorical
strategies for expressing emotion by comparing psychological
categories of emotions with linguistic categories. hey deine
emotional communication as directed strategies for imparting
emotional information in speech or writing, insisting that such
expressions must be analyzed linguistically, because language
spoken or written is the means for conveying emotion. heir
model comprises linguistic markers, including speciic emotion
words, obligatory words, syntax markers, and spoken language
mechanisms (i.e., tones and intonation, prosody, length of
syllables, etc.).
Cai and Janneys writings infer that there are signiicant
connections between textual linguistic usage and emotions,
as evidenced also in diaries, letters, and other autobiographi-
cal writings. For instance, language was used to measure emo-
tion in a study by G. Collier, D. Kuiken, and M.E. Enzle (1982).
he researchers noted that when describing negative emotions,
people use more complex constructions than in describing posi-
tive emotions, and this also applies to expressions of negative
as opposed to positive personal qualities. he positive is always
more clearly expressed. Assessing descriptions of levels of posi-
tivity or negativity of emotions or traits indicated that the feel-
ings or traits described in more complex detail tended to be more
negative, that is, the more complex the descriptions, the more
likely they were to be negative.
An earlier study by C. E. Osgood (1958) dealt with the connec-
tion between emotion and language, establishing the link
between the lingual characteristics of a text and the motivation
level of the author when writing it. he research studied suicide
notes, written under the inluence of very strong emotion the
last letter as compared with ordinary correspondence with
family or close friends.
In her chapter How and why is emotion communicated?
S. Planalp (1999) writes that verbal expression of feelings is
endemic to the process of communication, even though peo-
ple do not always use words. hey do not, as a rule, announce
that Im angry or Im feeling depressed at the moment, but
there are other verbal indications, like swearing or extravagant
outbursts such as I could kill him!
J. W. Pennebaker and M. E. Francis (1996) analyzed per-
sonal texts describing thoughts about commencing higher stud-
ies by irst-year students at college. Linguistic and cognitive
281
Emotion, Speech, and Writing
parameters were classiied according to speciic verbal catego-
ries. his included classifying emotion words used by the sub-
jects (in particular, positive and/or negative expressions), while
the cognitive parameters included clarity, accessibility to the
reader, and schematic organization of the text. he connection
between these linguistic and cognitive variables and mental
health was then examined, as were the academic achievements
of the subjects in their ongoing studies.
A. Boals and K. Klein (2005) examined how the words used
in a narrative can convey stress or distress in regard to levels of
pain after a negative emotional event. heir subjects were more
than 200 students who had undergone a romantic crisis or the
breaking up of a relationship. he students were asked to write
about both the relationship and the efects of the separation.
he researchers found that there was conspicuously more use
of negative emotion expressions, both of physical words and
of irst person utterances, as compared with descriptions of the
relationship before breaking up. It was possible to pinpoint lin-
guistic diferences between rejection/repression and intensive
internalization of an experience. he rejecters tended to use
more casual language, negative emotion words, and the irst
person singular, as well as pronouns when referring to others,
but also used fewer cognitive words. Cognitive expressions imply
actively searching for meaning and comprehension of a stressful
event and of depression, so that using them is characteristic of
people who thoroughly work through such an event.
Psychotherapy also ofers sources for researching emotions
via language. he therapists diagnoses and therapeutic meth-
ods are frequently based on patients language choice of words,
slips of the tongue, narratives in their stories, repetitions when
describing a trauma, and other markers (see, for example, Bucci,
2001).
D. D. Danner, D. A. Snowdon, and W. V. Friesen (2001) exam-
ined autobiographies of nuns as part of research known as the
Nun Study. hey examined the link between writings about
positive emotional incidents, expressed in positive terms, and
the life span of the writers. Emotional stability, measured accord-
ing to the use of emotion words, was found to have a signiicant
positive efect.
Use of nonautobiographical texts not produced under labora-
tory conditions are derived from Internet chat, blogs, and e-mails
in various frameworks. For example, M. A. Cohn, M. R. Mehl, and
J. W. Pennebaker (2004) examined changes in the language use
of American citizens after September 11, 2001. he researchers
studied randomly selected blogs over a period of four months
two months prior to and two months after the traumatic event.
Linguistic markers to psychological diferences were studied.
Two weeks after the attack, the writers had returned to baseline
in regard to use of lexical expressions of emotion. Pennebaker,
who collaborated both with Francis in researching academic
achievement according to linguistic parameters and in Cohns
work on linguistic markers in blogs written after 9/11, devel-
oped a tool for categorizing various types of text according to
style, called the LIWC (linguistic inquiry and word count), which
is available online (Pennebaker 2007). Pennebaker maintains
that his computer program collates words from various cate-
gories and translates them, according to their relative number
in the text, to psychological meanings. Main categories include,
282
for example, words relating to the self, social words directed
to others, words expressing positive or negative emotion, cog-
nitive words, long words (more than six letters), and others.
He believes that constant use of positive expressions indicates
optimism, whereas negative expressions indicate depression.
Cognitive terms (In my opinion, It seems to me, I think,
etc.) indicate that the writer does a lot of considering and prepa-
ration when writing and is thus more thoughtful and self-aware.
Constant use of long words suggests that the writer is alienated,
keeping his/her distance.
Another group of researchers (Pennebaker, Slatcher, and
Chung 2005) attempted to learn from the speeches of U.S. presi-
dential candidates about their personalities and emotions. It was
shown that in spite of advice received by political candidates from
their advisors about using words correctly (e.g., using the irst
person plural instead of singular), they sometimes speak more
freely, revealing more about their personalities. Pennebaker
and his colleagues emphasized the use of functional words that
indicate the ability to absorb and organize thoughts and ideas.
Using the program developed for this study, they also examined
positive and negative expressions of emotion, cognitive words,
exclusives, singular and plural expressions, etc.
From all these diverse studies, we learn that language, the
dominant aspect of intercommunication between individuals,
is the simplest method of revealing a diferent system, one that
has its own attributes and inluences all aspects of our lives, that
is, the emotional system. One can, as a rule, consciously control
the content of the story one tells, but it is more diicult to control
the exact choice of each word. When it comes to what to write
or say, we are aware of what we are doing, but this is not always
the case with how we do it. Even the most practiced speaker inds
it diicult to monitor all the words he or she selects in order to
communicate. hus, linguistic markers are, in fact, the building
blocks that must be used as the foundation for researching emo-
tion in language.
Osnat Argaman
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Boals, A., and K. Klein. 2005. Word use in emotional narratives about
failed romantic relationships and subsequent mental health. Journal
of Language and Social Psychology 24: 25268.
Bucci, W. 2001. Pathways of emotional communication. Psychoanalytic
Inquiry 21.1: 4070.
Cai, C., and R. W. Janney. 1994. Toward a pragmatics of emotive com-
munication. Journal of Pragmatics 22: 32573.
Cohn, M. A., M. R. Mehl, and J. W. Pennebaker. 2004. Linguistic mark-
ers of psychological change surrounding September 11, 2001.
Psychological Science 15: 68793.
Collier, G., D. Kuiken, and M. E. Enzle. 1982. he role of grammatical
qualiication in the expression and perception of emotion. Journal of
Psycholinguistic Research 11: 63150.
Danner, D. D., D. A. Snowdon, W. V. Friesen. 2001. Positive emotions
in early life and longevity: Findings from the Nun Study. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology 80: 80413.
Enield, N. J., and A. Wierzbicka. 2002. Introduction: he body in descrip-
tion of emotion. Pragmatics and Cognition 10.1/2: 125.
Irvine, J. T. 1990. Registering afect: Heteroglossia in the linguistic expres-
sion of emotion. In Language and the Politics of Emotion, ed. C. A. Lutz
and L. Abu-Lughod, 12661. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Emotion Words
Ortony, A., G. L. Clore, and M. A. Foss. 1987.he referential structure of
the afective lexicon. Cognitive Science 11: 34164.
Osgood, C. E. 1958. Some efects of motivation on style of encoding.
In Style in Language, ed. T. A. Sebeok, 293306. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Pennebaker J. W. 2007, he world of words. Available online at: http://
www.liwc.net/.
Pennebaker, J. W., and M. E. Francis. 1996. Cognitive, emotional and
language processes in disclosure. Cognition and Emotion 10: 60126.
Pennebaker, J. W., R. B. Slatcher, and C. K. Chung. 2005. Linguistic
markers of psychological state through media Interviews: John Kerry
and John Edwards in 2004, Al Gore in 2000. Analyses of Social Issues
and Public Policy 5: 197204.
Planalp, S. 1999. Communicating Emotion: Social, Moral and Cultural
Processes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
EMOTION WORDS
What Counts as an Emotion Word?
Languages difer in the size and range of their emotion vocabu-
laries. here are, for example, more than 500 words in English,
750 in Taiwanese Chinese (Russell 1991), and 256 in Filipino
(Church, Katigbak, and Reyes 1996). In addition, translation
equivalents often cover overlapping but not identical semantic
space (Wierzbicka 1999). Clearly, the investigation of the emo-
tion lexicon requires the careful delimitation of what counts as
an emotion word.
Empirical approaches to this question are driven by
prototype theory (Fehr and Russell 1984; Rosch 1978), accord-
ing to which semantic categories are recognized not by lists of
necessary and sufficient features but in terms of a gestalt
or conigurational whole. his approach suggests that emotion
is a fuzzy category, and emotion words it the category in a
graded manner.
A number of taxonomies have been proposed. G. L. Clore,
A. Ortony, and M. A. Foss (1987) distinguished eight categories
in English: 1) pure afective states (e.g., happy), 2) afective-be-
havioral states (e.g., cheerful), 3) afective-cognitive states (e.g.,
encouraged), 4) cognitive states (e.g., certain), 5) cognitive-
behavioral states (e.g., cautious), 6) bodily states (e.g. sleepy),
7) subjective evaluations of character (e.g., attractive), and 8)
objective conditions (e.g., abandoned). Analyses of prototypi-
cality ratings of 585 candidate emotion words conirmed the
empirical discriminability of the eight categories, and words in
the irst three (afective) categories had the highest typicality
ratings.
Phillip Shaver and colleagues (1987) used cluster analysis of
prototypicality ratings of English emotion words to display a pro-
totype hierarchy, with two superordinate categories encompass-
ing positive versus negative terms and ive basic-level terms: love,
joy, anger, sadness, and fear. he rest of the terms are subor-
dinates under these basic terms (Shaver et al. 1987; Storm and
Storm 1987). It is interesting to note that negative emotion words
generally outnumber positive emotion words, perhaps explained
by the greater cognitive processing required by negative events
in comparison with positive events (Schrauf and Sanchez 2004).
he Indonesian emotion lexicon has the same overall structure
(Shaver, Murdaya, and Fraley 2001), but in the Chinese lexicon,
a love category does not emerge separate from happiness-
related words (Shaver, Wu, and Schwartz 1992). Recent studies
on the Italian (Zammuner 1998) and the French (Niedenthal et
al. 2004) emotion lexicons suggest that prototypicality ratings are
driven by valence, intensity, duration, familiarity, age of acquisi-
tion, and frequency in the corpus.
How Are Emotion Words Represented in the Mind?
psycholinguistics distinguishes abstract and concrete words
as separate classes of words, and recent work suggests that emo-
tion words may form yet a third class of words. In general, con-
crete versus abstract words are easier to imagine, more quickly
recalled, and more easily recognized. In addition, concrete words
are more easily associated with a context, perhaps because of
prior association with those contexts (Schwanenlugel, Akin, and
Luh 1992). When approached as a third class of words, emotions
words are rated as less concrete and lower in context availability
than abstract and concrete words. Nevertheless, they are rated
higher in imageability than abstract words, perhaps because
of some connection to scripts or typical situations in which
they are experienced. Further, when participants give the irst
word that comes to mind in response to concrete, emotion, and
abstract words, emotion words garner the highest number of
diferent associates (Altarriba and Bauer 2004). If associates are
stored together (as an associative model of memory suggests),
then emotion words would seem to be linked to a richer concep-
tual base than either of the other two word types. It is interest-
ing that when Spanish-English bilinguals perform these tasks in
Spanish, ratings of context availability in Spanish are higher than
in English. his raises the possibility that emotion words might
be encoded in language-speciic ways (Altarriba 2006).
Robert W. Schrauf
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Altarriba, J. 2006. Cognitive approaches to the study of emotion-laden
and emotion words in monolingual and bilingual memory. In Bilingual
Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression, and Representation, ed. A.
Pavlenko, 23256. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Altarriba, J., and L. M. Bauer. 2004. he distinctiveness of emotion con-
cepts: A comparison between emotion, abstract, and concrete words.
American Journal of Psychology 117: 389410.
Church, A. T., M. S. Katigbak, J. A. S. Reyes. 1996. Toward a taxonomy of
trait adjectives in Filipino: Comparing personality lexicons across cul-
tures. European Journal of Personality 10: 324.
Clore, G. L., A. Ortony, M. A. Foss. 1987. he psychological foundations
of the afective lexicon. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
53: 75166.
Fehr, B., and J. A. Russell. 1984. Concept of emotion viewed from a
prototype perspective. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
113: 46486.
Niedenthal, P. M., C. Auxiette, A. Nugier, N. Dalle, P. Bonin, M. Fayol.
2004. A prototype analysis of the French category emotion.
Cognition and Emotion 18.3: 289312.
Rosch, E. 1978. Principles of categorization. In Cognition and
Categorization, ed. E. Rosch and B. B. Lloyd, 2748. Hillsdale,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Russell, James A. 1991. Culture and the categorization of emotions.
Psychological Bulletin 110.3: 42650.
Schrauf, R. W., J. Sanchez. 2004. he preponderance of negative
emotion words in the emotion lexicon: A cross-generational and
283
Emplotment
cross-linguistic study. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural
Development 25.2/3: 26684.
Schwanenlugel, P. J., C. Akin, W. Luh. 1992. Context availability and
the recall of abstract and concrete words. Memory and Cognition
20: 96104.
Shaver, P., U. Murdaya, R. C. Fraley. 2001. Structure of the Indonesian
emotion lexicon. Asian Journal of Social Psychology 4: 20124.
Shaver, P. R., S. Wu, J. C. Schwartz. 1992. Cross-cultural similarities and
diferences in emotion and its representation: A prototype approach.
In Review of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol. 13: Emotion. Ed.
M. S. Clark, 175212. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Shaver, Phillip, Judith Schwartz, Donald Kirson, Cary OConnor. 1987.
Emotion knowledge: Further exploration of a protoytpe approach.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52: 106186.
Storm, C., T. Storm. 1987. A taxonomic study of the vocabulary of emo-
tions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53: 80516.
Wierzbicka, A. 1999. Emotions Across Languages and Across
Cultures: Diversity and Universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Zammuner, V. L. 1998. Concepts of emotion: Emotionness and dimen-
sional ratings of Italian emotion words. Cognition and Emotion
12: 24372.
EMPLOTMENT
Emplotment is the organization of events into a narrative. he
concept was developed most inluentially by Hayden White in
his treatment of historiography. White distinguishes ive levels
of conceptualization in the writing of history (1973, 5). he irst
is the chronicle, a simple listing of events in the order of their
occurrence. he second is the formation of these events into a
basic causal sequence or story. he third, emplotment proper,
is their further elaboration into a narrative with a point. (he
fourth and ifth levels, mode of argument and mode of ideo-
logical implication, go beyond emplotment and thus the main
concerns of this entry.) According to White, diferent historians
commonly organize even the same sequence of events into diver-
gent histories, relecting diferent strategies of emplotment. he
same point applies beyond writers on history. Everyone emplots
events, from political igures shaping public policy to ordinary
people in conversational storytelling.
We might consider the events of September 11, 2001, by way
of illustration. A chronicle would simply list the events of the
day. A basic story would set out the causal relations the orga-
nization of the conspirators, their practice, their inal execution
of their plans, and so on. It should be clear that, even here, there
are diferent ways in which events may be selected and grouped
together and diferent ways in which causal links may be pos-
ited. For example, in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, some
commentators suggested that various actions of the Iraqi gov-
ernment were part of the September 11 causal sequence; others
denied the connection, arguing that this was not even a plausi-
ble part of the basic story. he third level, emplotment, embeds
the causal sequence in a more elaborated structure. In the case
of the Bush administration, that structure was a war narrative in
which the events of September 11 constituted an act of war. For
many others, that structure was a crime narrative in which the
events were a (massive) criminal violation. As these cases sug-
gest, diferences at the level of causal interpretation and difer-
ences at the level of emplotment not only manifest intellectual
284
disagreements but also entail highly signiicant practical diver-
gences as well.
For White, the formation of the story level is roughly
Aristotelian, the shaping of a beginning, middle, and end.
Emplotment proper follows Northrop Fryes modes (see Frye
1957). Drawing on more recent work in cognition, we might
preserve Whites (and Fryes) insights, while understanding the
precise structures and operations of those structures slightly
diferently.
Emplotment and Cognition
he sort of emplotment discussed by White is part of our ordi-
nary causal thought. Indeed, our everyday thought about every-
thing, from our personal lives to larger social patterns, is bound
up with emplotment in roughly Whites sense. hus, we might
consider the more professional forms of emplotment alongside
more ordinary forms in order to better understand both.
Historiography and everyday causal thought share several
salient tendencies and constraints. First, they tend to be con-
cerned with particularity. Although we try to isolate general
principles for any sort of explanation, history and daily life are
unlike paradigmatic natural sciences, for in history and daily life,
generalities are most often a means of understanding particu-
lars rather than the reverse. In addition, our concerns in history
and everyday life are not subject to repetition in controlled cir-
cumstances where we can manipulate variables. As a result, our
causal accounts in these cases must range over a vast number
of possible causal factors. We tend to chose the factors that are
important by a more or less loose comparison across sequences
that we have grouped together as parallel not experimentally
but conceptually. For example, in ordinary life, I may categorize
several failed friendships together and infer their common prop-
erties, thus why the most recent friendship failed. his may occur
self-consciously or implicitly. Similarly, a presidential advisor
might categorize several failed foreign policy initiatives together
in order to infer what led to the failure of the most recent policy
or to avoid such failure in a current policy.
It is worth pausing over this point for a moment. In ordinary
cognition, our grouping together of (putatively parallel) event
sequences is almost invariably bound up with prototype for-
mation. A prototype results from a weighted averaging across
instances of a category. Weighting is determined by several fac-
tors, prominent among them salience and distinctiveness for the
category (cf. Tversky 1977; Barsalou 1983, 212; and Kahneman
and Miller 1986, 143, on contrast). For example, our prototype
for a man will result from averaging across individual men, but
this is not a pure statistical average. Men to whom we pay more
attention (e.g., heroes and villains in movies) will be weighted
more heavily than men of whom we are only peripherally aware.
Moreover, for individual men, distinctive characteristics (e.g.,
facial hair, as a distinctive diference from both boys and women)
will weigh more heavily than nondistinctive characteristics.
hus, our prototypical man is more manly than the statisti-
cal average. Finally, once established, even in a minimal form,
our prototypes guide categorization. hey do so by directing our
attentional focus to distinctive (thus putatively identifying) char-
acteristics of individual men. Given that this is part of the general
operation of the human mind, it presumably occurs with other
Emplotment
sorts of prototype as well, including prototypes for categories of
event sequences thus, narrative prototypes.
We may broadly distinguish, then, between two types of causal
understanding. he irst sort, found in what might be called the
general sciences, is experimental, based on the isolation of causal
features by the controlled manipulation of variables. he sec-
ond sort, found in ordinary life and in what might be called the
particularistic sciences, is prototypical, based on the formation
of distinctive, (loosely) statistical structures. Of course, there
are intermediate cases. Moreover, there are diferent degrees to
which statistical derivations may be made explicit and rigorous.
For example, there are areas of economic history where we might
achieve relatively high levels of explicitness and rigor. In other
cases, however, it is very diicult to make the statistical pro-
cess at all scientiic, for the selection of a comparison set (which
guides causal inferences) is already so thoroughly imbued with
the implicit prototypes of the researcher.
his division in types of causal understanding is, of course,
connected with the orientation of the particularistic sciences to
the explanation of particulars. But there are many particulars.
Just how does our interest in certain particulars arise? In both
particularistic and general sciences, we attend to the explana-
tion of individual objects or events when we care about them.
We care about something when it has an emotional impact,
which is to say, when it engages some emotion system. hus, an
understanding of emotion systems is crucial for understanding
our explanatory aims in particularistic study. As it turns out, an
understanding of emotion systems also gives us a way of under-
standing Whites irst and second levels of conceptualization.
Speciically, both a chronicle and a basic story involve three
fundamental cognitive operations selection, segmentation,
and structuration. (On these processes, see Hogan 2003, 3840.)
here are countless aspects of any given sequence of events and
countless construals of those events and their components.
Even a chronicle selects certain aspects while ignoring others,
clusters those aspects together into the events that compose
the chronology, and gives those aspects at least some degree of
internal structure. For example, in a chronology of the events of
September 11, we might include a statement that the hijackers
took over one airplane at such and such a time. hat statement
selects various aspects of the situation and organizes them into
a brief causal moment. Moreover, in going beyond a chronicle
and telling the basic story, we might begin with the irst plane
crash, or we might begin with the conspiracy of the hijackers, or
we might begin with various aspects of U.S. policy in the Muslim
world (seen by the hijackers as justiication for the September 11
attacks). he questions that arise here concern just why we select
certain aspects and construals over others and how we come to
decide that events begin and end at certain points.
he simple answer to these questions is that our initial selec-
tion and construal (as manifest in a chronicle) are the product of
our emotion systems. (For a more technical discussion of these
issues, and for research supporting this analysis, see Hogan
2008 and Chapter 4 of Hogan 2009.) We are emotionally sensi-
tive to certain sorts of properties, conditions, alterations, and so
on. hese draw our attentional focus. Our sense of a beginning
and an ending (thus, our fashioning of a basic story) are equally
guided by our emotional responses. he beginning of the story
is the point at which our emotion systems are engaged. he end
of the story is the point at which our emotion systems return to
their normal state. his is why Americans tend to view the con-
spiracy of the hijackers as the beginning of the story. With limited
exceptions, they lack emotional interest in what preceded and
motivated the attacks.
Of course, things do not end with this level of selection, and so
on. Whenever we isolate aspects of a particular event sequence
due to their emotional force, we simultaneously activate cognitive
structures for understanding and responding to that sequence.
hese structures crucially involve prototypes, which supplement
our emotional responses in elaborating interpretations, explana-
tions, expectations, directing attentional focus, and so on. In the
case of event sequences, these are crucially narrative prototypes,
including subprototypes bearing on actions and on agents. his,
then, leads us to the level of emplotment proper.
he narrative prototypes that guide emplotments undoubt-
edly include the broad structures of narrative universals.
For example, the hijackers may have emplotted their actions in
terms of a sacriicial narrative in which the sufering of the home
society will be relieved by God due to the voluntary death of a
member of that society. In contrast, the U.S. government emplot-
ted these same actions as the foreign aggression component of a
heroic plot. Beyond these cross-cultural patterns, emplotments
also derive from more culturally speciic narrative structures,
including structures related to culturally deined practices, such
as those of legal systems (as in the emplotment of the September
11 attacks as criminal acts).
Both universal and culturally speciic narratives are bound up
not only with emotions but also with values related to those emo-
tions. hus, it is unsurprising that diferent emplotments tend to
import diferent social agendas and diferent political attitudes
into the interpretation of the event sequence. (In Whites sys-
tem, this appears in the ifth level of conceptualization, mode
of ideological implication [1973, 5].) It is also unsurprising that
they tend to be points of consequential political contestation.
A Note on Emplotment and Grammar
he study of narrative is a consequential part of linguistic
discourse analysis and sociolinguistics. In this way,
emplotment necessarily has an important place in the language
sciences. However, it is worth mentioning that emplotment may
be related to more narrowly grammatical issues as well. One
might argue that thematic roles are, irst of all, narrative posi-
tions that have grammatical consequences. Of course, one might
also see thematic roles as orienting our emplotments by way of an
initial operation in grammar. Similarly, one might argue that the
diferent causal relations encoded in causative construc-
tions are a function of our tendency to emplot experience or
at least that the linguistic propensity realized in some languages
gives us a clue as to the diversity of causal sequences that broadly
constrain our emplotments. Finally, the grammatical encoding of
event individuation in some languages (see Kroeger 2004, 2335)
may indicate the dependency of certain grammatical features on
a prior (implicit) emplotment, or it may point us toward a further
area of research that will help us understand event individuation
and its relation to emplotment. In any case, there are reasons to
believe that emplotment is closely related not only to broad issues
285
Encoding
in discourse but to more narrowly grammatical concerns as well.
he most radical view of this relation would be that emplotment
is cognitively fundamental to certain aspects of grammar (a point
suggested by authors such as Mark Turner [1996]). Alternatively,
it may simply be that certain features recur in grammar and nar-
rative, due to shared cognitive sources (an account that may be
suggested by certain aspects of frame semantics) or due to the
efects of grammar on emplotment.
Patrick Colm Hogan
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Barsalou, Lawrence. 1983. Ad hoc categories. Memory and Cognition
11.3: 21127.
Frye, Northrop. 1957. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2003. Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A
Guide for Humanists. New York: Routledge.
. 2008. Stories, wars, and emotions: he absoluteness of narrative
beginnings. In Narrative Beginnings, ed. Brian Richardson, 4462.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
. 2009. Understanding Nationalism: Narrative, Identity, and
Cognitive Science. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Kahneman, Daniel, and Dale Miller. 1986. Norm theory: Comparing
reality to its alternatives. Psychological Review. 93.2: 13653.
Kroeger, Paul R. 2004. Analyzing Syntax: A Lexical-Functional Approach.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Turner, Mark. 1996. he Literary Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tversky, Amos. 1977. Features of similarity. Psychological Review
84: 32752.
White, Hayden. 1973. Metahistory: he Historical Imagination in
Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
ENCODING
Encoding refers both to the process of laying down informa-
tion in memory as the result of exposure to certain stimuli and
to the organization of that information once it has been laid
down. From the viewpoint of language, this encompasses both
the encoding of linguistic knowledge and the encoding of verbal
experience (Francis 1999). he former refers to what we think of
as knowing a language and the latter refers to knowing things
in language (e.g., recalling a conversation). In either case, most
of what we know about encoding comes from studying its inter-
action with retrieval.
Encoding of Linguistic Knowledge
Linguistic knowledge includes the phonological forms, mor-
phosyntactic patterns, lexico-semantic items, pragmatics, and
so on, that are held in long-term memory. It is information that
we usually produce automatically without attention to process-
ing and for which we have no memory of the speciic contexts in
which we acquired the individual items or skills. Studies in irst
language acquisition focus on how individuals come to learn
(encode) all of the linguistic knowledge necessary to be compe-
tent speakers of a particular language (Gass and Selinker 2001;
Ritchie and Bhatia 1998). Such encoding involves complex inter-
actions between environmental input and physiological matura-
tion. For instance, infants 46 months old can encode phonetic
286
distinctions in sounds from any language, but those 1012 months
old can only distinguish sounds that are meaningful in their own
language (Stager and Werker 1997). Reacquisition of the ability
to encode sounds from other languages can be diicult later in
life. On the other hand, the stagelike encoding of complex lexi-
cal and grammatical information over the course of childhood
probably has as much to do with the nature of language learn-
ing as with developing cognitive maturity (Snedeker, Geren, and
Shafto 2007). In the same vein, proponents of the controversial
critical period hypothesis suggest that ultimate proiciency
in a second language is a function of earlier age at acquisition,
due in part to maturational abilities and exposure to the language
(DeKeyser and Larson-Hall 2005; see also second language
acquisition).
Investigations of the encoding of linguistic knowledge have
relied primarily (though not exclusively) on priming paradigms
in which some language knowledge (phonological, lexical,
semantic) stored in long-term memory is activated, and then
its efect is measured on some task that relies on that implicit
activation (e.g., associative priming with lexical decision as the
task; see also spreading activation).
Encoding of Verbal Experience
A great deal of our world knowledge is initially learned verbally,
and language scholars have been particularly interested in the
extent to which linguistically encoded information retains its
linguistic form at retrieval. Experimental work in the labora-
tory often focuses on new information learned as lists of words,
sentences, or paragraphs. Participants are then tested for their
memory of both the information (the conceptual information)
and any accompanying linguistic detail in which it was pre-
sented (words, phrases, sentences, etc). bilingualism pro-
vides an ideal test case in this regard because the language of
both encoding and retrieval can be experimentally manipu-
lated. An inluential theory in this ield is encoding speciicity,
which suggests that successful retrieval is premised on a match
between information in the retrieval cue and information stored
in the encoded memory trace (Tulving 1983). In this case, the
language used at the time of encoding the information is puta-
tively a feature of the mnemonic trace and may be reactivated at
the time of retrieval. For instance, in their research on bilingual
recall for word lists, J. Altarriba and E. G. Soltano (1996) sug-
gest that as bilinguals store concepts across languages, they
also associate language-tags with the concepts that corre-
spond to the language in which the concepts were presented in
the lists. Important recent work suggests that language-speciic
information is deeply embedded at the level of semantic repre-
sentations, and new methods of investigation may be needed to
explore how such encoding takes place and how the informa-
tion is reactivated at retrieval (Pavlenko 2008).
At higher levels of complexity (beyond memory for information
in words or phrases), memory for narratively organized personal
events, or autobiographical memories, also seems to be linguis-
tically tagged. hus, research in this area shows that bilinguals
recall events from their personal past in the language in which
these events were encoded (Marian and Neisser 2000; Schrauf
2000, Schrauf and Durazo-Arvizu 2006). hese results may also
be explained by the principle of encoding speciicity because the
nonc/Statement (Foucault)
language in which an event took place (spoken, heard, written,
read) constitutes a feature of the mnemonic trace and predis-
poses the individual to recall the event in that same language.
Robert W. Schrauf
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Altarriba, J., and E. G. Soltano 1996. Repetition blindness and bilingual
memory: Token individuation for translation equivalents. Memory
and Cognition 24: 70011.
DeKeyser, R., and J. Larson-Hall. 2005. What does the critical period
really mean? In Handbook Of Bilingualism: Psycholinguistic
Approaches, ed. J. F. Kroll and A. M. B. de Groot, 88108. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Francis, W. S. 1999. Cognitive integration of language and memory
in bilinguals: Semantic representations. Psychological Bulletin
125: 193222.
Gass, S. M., and L. Selinker. 2001. Second Language Acquisition: An
Introductory Course. Mahwah, NJ: LEA.
Marian, V., and U. Neisser. 2000. Language-dependent recall of auto-
biographical memories. Journal of Experimental Psychology (General)
129: 3618.
Pavlenko, A. 2008. Emotion mental lexicon. Bilingualism: Language
and Cognition 11.2: 14764.
Ritchie, W. C., and T. K. Bhatia, eds. 1998. Handbook of Child Language
Acquisition. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Schrauf, R. W. 2000. Bilingual autobiographical memory: Experimental
studies and clinical cases. Culture and Psychology 6: 387417.
Schrauf, R. W., and R. Durazo-Arvizu. 2006. Bilingual autobiographi-
cal memory and emotion: heory and methods. In Bilingual
Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression, and Representation, ed.
Aneta Pavlenko, 284311. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Snedeker, J., J. Geren, and C. L. Shafto. 2007. Starting over: International
adoption as a natural experiment in language development.
Psychological Science 18.1: 7987.
Stager, C. L., and J. F. Werker. 1997. Infants listen for more phonetic detail
in speech perception than in word learning tasks. Nature 388: 3812.
Tulving, E. 1983. Elements of episodic memory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
NONC/STATEMENT (FOUCAULT)
he term nonc or statement was modiied and developed by
Michel Foucault to describe what for him constituted the small-
est element within a discursive structure (Foucault [1969] 1972).
Foucault had some heated debates with others about the mean-
ing of the word statement. In some of these discussions, some
critics asserted that the statement was the same as the speech-
act, as developed by John Austin and John Searle (see Dreyfus
and Rabinow 1982, 449) for a fuller discussion). However, state-
ments the most fundamental building blocks of discourse do
seem to difer from speech-acts in important ways. Statements
are those utterances or parts of text that have an efect. Statements
are not the same as sentences but are those utterances that can
be seen to be grouped around one particular efect. hus, when a
judge says, I sentence you to three years imprisonment, there
are a number of these efects. he judge is institutionally sanc-
tioned and, therefore, the force of her/his pronouncement is to
transform the accused into a criminal and to enforce a particular
sentence on that person. hus, I sentence you can be regarded
both as a statement and as part of a discourse, since such a state-
ment can only have efect if it is uttered within the context of
Essentialism and Meaning
other utterances (i.e., if certain procedures have been adhered
to) and if it takes place within an institutional setting (i.e., within
a courtroom, by an appointed judge). Whereas Searles and
Austins deinition of speech-acts stressed the performative
nature of such utterances the fact that they achieved something
in the real world Foucaults emphasis is much more on the fact
that statements bring about something because of their position
within an institution and because of their interrelationship with
other discursive structures.
For Foucault, the main reason for conducting an analysis of
statements is to discover the material and conceptual supports
that allow it to be said and that keep it in place. hese support
mechanisms are both intrinsic to discourse itself and extra-
discursive, in the sense that they are sociocultural and institu-
tional. Foucault is concerned to set statements in their discursive
frameworks; thus, statements do not exist in isolation since there
is a set of structures that makes those statements make sense and
gives them their force. hus, entry into discourse is seen to be
inextricably linked to questions of authority and legitimacy. Each
discursive act maps out the possible uses that can be made of the
statement (although, of course, that is not necessarily what hap-
pens to it). Each statement leads to others, and in a sense, it has
to have embedded within it the parameters of the possible ways
in which future statements can be made.
Sara Mills
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Austin, J. 1962. How to Do hings with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Dreyfus, H., and P. Rabinow. 1982. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism
and Hermeneutics. Brighton: Harvester.
Foucault, M. [1969] 1972 in text. Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans.
A. M. Sheridan-Smith. London: Tavistock.
Searle, J. 1979. Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
ESSENTIALISM AND MEANING
What Is Essentialism?
he idea of essences has been important in Western philosophy
since at least the time of Plato. Discussion of essences lourished
in classical and medieval philosophy and has been revived in
recent decades by philosophers such as Saul Kripke, due primar-
ily to work in modal logic, which is to say, the formalization of
necessity and possibility. In the humanities, essentialism is often
used to refer to any view that is not historicist. In philosophy
including the semantics of formal logic the term is used
more narrowly for the belief that objects have deinitive features
and incidental features. he incidental features may change with-
out the identity of the object changing. However, if a deinitive
feature changes, then the objects identity changes. For example,
in suicient quantities and with the right light, water appears to
be blue, but if we take a glass of water from a larger (blue) body,
it appears colorless. In scooping the glass out of the water, we
have altered the color of the water, yet we would not say that it
is a diferent thing than it was before. An incidental property of
appearance has changed, but the stuf itself remains the same.
In contrast, suppose we take that glass of water and induce a
chemical change so that it continues to appear clear but is no
287
Essentialism and Meaning
longer H2O. Its appearance would not have changed. However,
we would be inclined to say that the stuf is not the same. In other
words, its essence would have altered.
Essentialism is connected with semantics through natural
kind terms. hese are terms that (putatively) refer to some nat-
urally delimited set of objects (including substances). Natural
kinds are distinguished from sets of objects that are merely
selected by human choice. In this view, a word such as water
would be a natural kind term.
Semantic essentialism is a form of meaning externalism
in which our natural kind terms are deined (in part) by essences,
thus entities external to the minds of speakers. Crucially, this
holds even in cases where we do not know the essence in ques-
tion. In perhaps the most famous example of such a case, Hilary
Putnam (1975) imagined a Twin Earth that is identical with
our earth, right down to our brain states when we use the word
water. However, there is one key diference. he actual chemical
composition of the stuf referred to as water on Twin Earth is
not H2O, but something else call it XYZ. According to Putnam,
water (as we use it) does not refer to the waterlike substance on
Twin Earth and it never did even hundreds of years ago, when
we did not realize that our water is H2O. In other words, the nat-
ural kind term, water, always referred to H2O and nothing else
because, as a natural kind term, it was always deined (in part)
by the essence of its referents. (I say in part because essential-
ist theories of meaning commonly allow for various semantic
components. For example, in setting out the meaning of water,
Putnam [1975, 269] includes syntactic markers, such as noun,
semantic markers, such as liquid, and stereotypical properties,
such as being colorless. But none of these determines the exten-
sion of the term, thus what the term refers to [see reference
and extension].)
At least two sets of issues arise in connection with the relation
between essentialism and meaning. he irst set concerns the
essences. he second set concerns the words for which essences
determine the referents. We consider each in turn.
Essences, Causes, and Possible Worlds
Saying that essences are deinitive properties works well enough
as a way of introducing the general notion. But it can hardly
stand as an ontology. Yes, we think that the stuf in the glass has
changed its identity after the chemical reaction, but not previ-
ously when it was scooped out of the pool. But what does that
tell us?
Here we might subdivide the problem into whether or not
essences exist, just what essences there are, and how we might
access these essences. Modal logic, with its associated possible
worlds theory, serves as a preliminary way of approaching all
three issues. Again, modal logic treats relations of necessity and
possibility. For example, suppose it is necessary that p entails q.
Suppose also that it is necessary that p. It follows that it is nec-
essary that q. hus, suppose it is necessary that if substance w is
water, then substance w is H2O. Suppose also that substance w is
necessarily water (i.e., w could not possibly be just this substance
and not be water). It follows that substance w is necessarily H2O.
Here, the question arises as to what diferentiates this necessity
from ordinary truth. Suppose everyone in a particular town in
Minnesota call it New Oslo speaks Norwegian. It is then true latter (whether or not they bear on the former). Indeed, from
288
that If someone lives in New Oslo, he or she speaks Norwegian.
But this is merely a contingent truth. After all, it could happen
that a monoglot Swedish speaker moves to New Oslo. he sit-
uation is diferent with water. Some bit of non-H2O could not
simply be added to the set of things that constitute water. he
idea of possible worlds is a way of capturing this notion. Put sim-
ply, there are possible worlds in which not all residents of New
Oslo speak Norwegian. However, there are no possible worlds in
which water is not H2O. hus, it is necessary that water is H2O.
hus, H2O is the essence of water. hus, water is a natural kind
term and its meaning is (partially) determined by the essence,
H2O. (Alternatively, it refers directly to H2O because that is the
essence of water.)
Insofar as we accept that there is a diference between nec-
essary and contingent implications, and insofar as we accept
that in at least some of these cases the necessary implications
have normative bearing on semantic relations (such as the rela-
tion between the word water, the things we call water, and the
essence, H2O), we seem to have committed ourselves to the exis-
tence of essences and to some form of semantic essentialism.
Moreover, insofar as we accept the relation of all this to modal
logic and possible worlds theory, we seem to have found a way
of determining what the essences are and how we might know
them. Of course, possible worlds theory does not tell us that the
chemical composition of water is H2O. hat is learned empiri-
cally. What it (purportedly) tells us is that once we know the
chemical composition, we thereby know the essence, because
that is what is unchanging across possible worlds.
Nevertheless, on relection, it may be that things are not that
clear. Perhaps we have simply noticed that identity is preserved
under a construal (as G. E. M. Anscombe [1963] might have put
it). If I scoop out a glass of water and it stops being blue, then it is
still the same under the construal water. However, it is not the
same under the construal blue. In other words, we would not
say that the set of blue things now includes something clear. Note
that the point holds even if we dont quite know what water is (in
terms of chemical composition) or what being blue is (in terms
of light relection). Moreover, the point is not conined to terms
such as water and blue. It appears to extend across the board.
Somewhat reminiscent of the problems faced by Platonic essen-
tialism in the Parmenides, these points may seem to suggest a
promiscuous multiplication of essences. his would efectively
undermine any reason for isolating essences in the irst place.
(Conversely, these are just the sorts of phenomena that a nones-
sentialist approach to semantics might lead us to expect; see, for
example, meaning and stipulation.)
On the other hand, none of this really counts for much, either
way. In all these cases, we are relying on intuition. (Kripke is
explicit about the role of intuition in essentialism; see, for exam-
ple, [1972] 1980, 1012, 39, and 42; see also Putnam 1975, 271).
he rules for modal entailment are ixed formally. However,
the truth or falsity of our premises is not ixed either formally or
through empirical study. It is ixed only by our intuitions. But
just what do our intuitions tell us? Do they tell us about meta-
physical possibility and necessity? Or do they tell us something
about the way our minds operate in construing possibility and
necessity. It seems much clearer that our intuitions bear on the
Essentialism and Meaning
the perspective of cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary
psychology, our intuitions in these matters are unsurpris-
ing. At an early age, we begin to attribute essences (or hidden
structures, as Putnam would say) to certain objects (see, for
example, Boyer 2001, 10620, and citations). hat attribution is
simply a form of semantic organization that operates in the usual
adaptive way (see adaptation). Speciically, it is a simpli-
ied mechanism that has adaptive value because it approximates
a function (for more on this distinction, see Hogan 2007). he
function, in this case, is causal inference. Causal inference can
be a slow, complex process. Attributing essences to kinds (e.g., to
water and to tigers) allows us to draw causal inferences quickly
and with a great deal of accuracy. Speciically, it facilitates the
exploitation of opportunities (e.g., for quenching thirst) and the
avoidance of threats (e.g., of being eaten).
Perhaps, then, we should incorporate causality into our under-
standing of essences; perhaps we should say that the essence of
an object is whatever property explains its other properties. Of
course, not every object or substance has such a causal nexus.
Natural kinds, however, do. hus, water has a range of proper-
ties that may be explained by it being H2O. Its being colorless
and its function in quenching thirst, for example, are explained
by its chemical composition. Conversely, its being colorless
and its function in quenching thirst do not explain its chemical
composition.
his causal criterion turns us away from speculation on pos-
sible worlds toward actual empirical science. Our conclusions
might still be framed in terms of modal logic and possible worlds.
However, it is not clear that this will add anything to our under-
standing. Speciically, in order to make the connection between
empirical science and possible worlds, we have to rely once
more on intuitions or we have to hold real-world causality con-
stant across all possible worlds, which merely makes the modal
logic a translation of our empirical causal analysis. For example,
consider again Putnams case of Twin Earth XYZ. If H2O and XYZ
have no causally distinct consequences, even in chemical tests,
then how do we decide if water on our Earth means/refers to
something diferent from what water means/refers to on Twin
Earth? We have only intuitions based on what is in efect a form
of Cartesian doubt. Ex hypothesi, we couldnt know or even come
to suspect that there is a diference based on evidence. On the
other hand, if there are causally diferentiating consequences,
then distinguishing between the two is merely making a causal
and empirical division for which modal logic and possible worlds
seem superluous.
his raises a further question. If we are simply seeking caus-
ally crucial properties, just what is added to this by the term
essence? What reason do we have to assert that a causally cru-
cial property even a uniquely causally crucial property deter-
mines the identity of a substance? Isnt this something we have
merely stipulated reasonably, perhaps, but without any neces-
sity beyond facilitating the achievement of certain practical tasks
(such as doing certain sorts of things with water)? Again, a wide
range of properties of a given substance derive from the puta-
tively deinitive property. But shouldnt we still be free to pick
out one of those other properties as deinitive, depending on our
interests or speciic tasks? he point has semantic consequences
as well as ontological ones. For example, cant we call anything
water that looks, tastes, and quenches thirst like H2O, even if it
has a diferent chemical composition? his brings us to our sec-
ond topic.
Words and Meanings
What, then, prevents us from grouping together all the things
that we can drink, or all the things that we can see through, rather
than all the things that have the same chemical composition
(say, H2O)? Well, in fact, nothing prevents us from doing that.
We refer to things that we can drink as beverages and things that
we can see through as clear. An essentialist can respond to this
by saying that it is irrelevant. Only natural kind terms are linked
with essences; beverage, clear, treat, and so on, simply do
not refer to natural kinds.
Given the preceding causal account of essences, it would
seem that a natural kind term is any term used to refer to an
object or substance that has some central causally consequential
property (or perhaps a small number of such properties). hus,
water is a natural kind term because its molecular composition
has unique causal importance, explaining a wide range of other
properties. But objects are clear due to speciiable properties as
well. Although the molecular composition of water and glass are
diferent, they share properties that allow the passage of light. So,
by this criterion, it would seem that clear should count as a natu-
ral kind term. he same point could be made even about such
extreme cases as treat (roughly, something that someone likes a
lot but experiences only rarely), so long as being a treat is open to
causal explanation.
As the importance of causal relations may suggest, these
issues bear on particulars as well as classes. (After all, real causal
sequences are themselves particular.) Indeed, from the start, we
have implied that in essentialist theory, particulars have essences,
as when we said that a bit of water is the same before and after
we scoop it out. But this returns us to our earlier question about
considering objects under a certain construal. Is there any issue
of this bit of stuf really being or not being the same individual?
Or is the only issue whether or not it is the same under the con-
strual water?
hese questions are related to the problem of just how we
ix the relation between a word and a referent. In the context of
standard essentialist semantics, this is to say that it is related to
Kripkes idea of rigid designation. In this view, certain sorts of
terms names and natural kind terms rigidly designate their
referents. A term rigidly designates its referent if it designates that
referent in all possible worlds (Kripke [1972] 1980, 48). hus water
designates H2O in all possible worlds. he same point holds for
names. Al Gore refers to the same person in all possible worlds.
In contrast, deinite descriptions are not rigid designators. he
actual winner of the 2000 presidential election refers to George
W. Bush in some possible worlds. In Kripkes view, almost any
property of an individual can be altered. Al Gore might really
have lost the 2000 presidential election is a perfectly plausible
counterfactual, unlike Al Gore might not have been Al Gore.
But what does it mean to say that Al Gore is the same individual
in all possible worlds?
Kripke explains this by explaining the ixing of reference.
For Kripke, reference is ixed by a causal sequence that is, a
sequence of transmission leading back to an initial linking of
289
Essentialism and Meaning
a term with an object. Water names H2O because its use leads
back to a link with a certain substance having a certain essence.
Al Gore names Al Gore because its use leads back to a cer-
tain individual, tracing a chain of transmission in reverse. (he
chain of transmission, presumably went from Gores parents to
their friends [Bob, Trudy this is baby Al], and so on.) his is
called the causal theory of reference. (his intentional or seman-
tic causality is, of course, diferent from the physical causality
of putatively essential properties, such as chemical composition.
In order to keep the two distinct, I refer to the latter as physical
causality in the remainder of this entry.)
As with natural kinds, however, there has to be some limit on
just what we can vary about Al Gore in order to guarantee that
he is the same person across possible worlds. It is not clear that
there is any property that has the sort of physical causal force
that chemical composition has for water. Relying on intuitions
about possible worlds, Kripke concludes that the earliest physi-
cal causal factors are the crucial ones here. It seems to me, he
writes, that anything coming from a diferent origin would not
be this object ([1972] 1980, 113). But here again we run into the
issue of just what intuition tells us. Put diferently, do we learn
anything about identity here, or do we only learn something
about the general importance of physical causality for the way
in which we think about the world, and thus the way we draw
intuitive inferences about identity? In other words, does this tell
us something epistemological and ontological, or simply some-
thing psychological and evolutionary?
Conclusion
If they are valid, the preceding arguments may suggest that,
ultimately, there is no real issue of essences (or essential iden-
tity) in semantics. (For further discussion of these issues, see
Hogan [1996] 2008, Preface, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3, partic-
ularly ixxi and 6370.) However, there are important issues of
physical causal analysis (issues to which the active develop-
ment of essentialist theories has helped to draw our attention).
More exactly, there is no issue of metaphysics and the founda-
tions of epistemology (requiring guidance by possible worlds
theorization). Rather, there is only 1) an issue of empirical
science regarding the physical causal properties of objects (or
substances) and 2) the related, also empirical, issue of how our
brains organize the world in terms of physical causality, iden-
tity relations, and so on. hese forms of empirical study, then,
may impact our descriptive account of the way in which mean-
ing operates. hey should also have consequences, of a more
limited sort, for our normative deinitions of terms, particularly
in scientiic contexts where precise physical causal analysis is
paramount.
On the other hand, not everyone agrees with these argu-
ments far from it, in fact. Essentialism is an important and
highly inluential position, and advocates of essentialist seman-
tics have responses to the preceding claims. For example, some
writers would insist that we should not take causality as a primi-
tive notion. Rather, we need to explain causality in terms of possi-
ble worlds (see Lewis 1986, 157269), leading us back to modality
and, presumably, essences.
Patrick Colm Hogan
290
Ethics and Language
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Anscombe, G. E. M. 1963. Intention. 2d ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press.
Boyer, Pascal. 2001. Religion Explained: he Evolutionary Origins of
Religious hought. New York: Basic Books.
Hogan, Patrick Colm. [1996] 2008. On Interpretation: Meaning
and Inference in Law, Psychoanalysis, and Literature. 2d ed.
Athens: University of Georgia Press.
. 2007. Laughing brains: On the cognitive mechanisms and repro-
ductive functions of mirth. Semiotica 165.1/4: 391408.
Kripke, Saul. [1972] 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Lewis, David. 1986. Philosophical Papers. Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Putnam, Hilary. 1975. Mind, Language, and Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Salmon, Nathan. 1981. Reference and Essence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press. An important, relatively early critical analysis of ref-
erential essentialism.
Sosa, Ernest, and Enrique Villanueva, eds. 2006. Philosophy of lan-
guage. Philosophical Issues 16 (Special Issue). Includes recent essays
treating the extensive literature on these issues.
ETHICS AND LANGUAGE
his topic quickly threatens to become an unmanageably broad
because every ethical theory that regards value judgments as
subject to rational evaluation for example, utilitarianism,
Habermasian discourse ethics, Rawlsianism, virtue ethics,
Scanlons contractarianism, and neo-Kantianism contains
an account of the meaning of moral terms. But an account of
all of those theories would require a whole volume and would
take us away from issues speciically about language. Instead,
I focus on an issue that, impinging as it does on the ield of
lexical semantics on the one hand and the truth valuedness
of propositions on the other, is certainly linguistic and has
been central in both the philosophy of language and metaethics
for more than a century: the issue of cognitivism versus noncog-
nitivism. I describe how one form of noncognitivism, logical
positivism, became inluential, especially in the social sci-
ences, and how the logical positivists arguments came to be dis-
puted. But irst, of course, we need to deine our terms.
A cognitivist (with respect to ethical discourse) holds that at
least some ethical statements (e.g., George did a good thing
when he saved that child) are true. A noncognitivist holds that
such statements are not truth-apt; no ethical statement is either
true or false. (he logical positivists used to say that such state-
ments are cognitively meaningless.) he following is an excep-
tionally aggressive statement of the noncognitivist position: All
statements belonging to Metaphysics, regulative Ethics, and
(metaphysical) Epistemology have this defect, are in fact unveri-
iable and, therefore, unscientiic. In the Viennese Circle, we are
accustomed to describe such statements as nonsense (Carnap
1934, 26).
Although most cognitivists regard ethical statements as true or
false sans phrase, there are quasi-realist positions (Blackburn
1984), according to which it is linguistically appropriate to predi-
cate true of an ethical assertion, but the word true doesnt have
the same function as it does when we say of a scientiic claim that
Ethics and Language
it is true. (True doesnt ascribe realist truth when applied to
an ethical statement.) he position of Bernard Williams (1985),
according to which scientiic statements aspire to absolute
truth while ethical statements can be true in a particular com-
munitys conceptual scheme but not absolutely true, has a
close relation to this quasi-realism. Evidently, such positions
are noncognitivist in spirit, even though writers who adopt such
positions acknowledge that the word true can be used in ethical
discourse.
Logical Positivism
By calling ethical assertions nonsense, Rudolf Carnap meant
not only that they lack truth value but that they are outside
the sphere of rational argument altogether. he real world
inluence of this doctrine was enormous. For example, Lionel
Robbins (1932), one of the most inluential economists of the
1930s, enthusiastically endorsed it, as did Milton Friedman and
Paul Samuelson. And the idea of value-free science obviously
inluenced other social sciences as well
Even a critic of logical positivism must grant that it had one
enormous virtue, and that was its capacity for self-criticism. If
logical positivists seemed to the economists just mentioned to be
logicians of science who had discovered how to demarcate the
cognitively meaningful from nonsense, the positivists them-
selves were dissatisied with their formulations of the supposed
demarcation principle and constantly revised it (Hempel 1963;
see also Putnam 2002, 727).
Besides criticisms faced from within the movement itself,
the attempts to formulate a criterion of cognitive meaningful-
ness encountered criticisms from W. V. Quine, a lifelong friend
of Carnaps who shared his admiration for science and symbolic
logic and his noncognitivism with respect to ethics.
Basically, all the logical positivist formulations presupposed 1)
that all meaningful language except for pure mathematics and
logic could be reduced to observation terms (it was supposed to
be clear which these are) and 2) that mathematics and logic are
analytic or tautologous. Quine ([1951] 1961) famously demol-
ished these two dogmas of empiricism, as he called them, and
urged to the satisfaction of almost all philosophers of science
and philosophers of mathematics that neither the program of
reducing all meaningful language to the positivists observation
vocabulary nor the idea that mathematics consists of tautolo-
gies (or, alternatively, truths by convention) is defensible. he
pillars on which the positivist criterion of demarcation rested fell
in 1950.
Just as it was a friend of Carnap who rebutted many of Carnaps
claims, so it was a friend of Quine, Morton White, who pointed
out that with the positivists criterion of cognitive signiicance
demolished, the whole basis for the positivists claim that ethical
sentences are nonsensical was also gone. First of all, the notion
of an observation is extremely unclear: Why isnt I saw X steal
Ys wallet? an observation sentence? (Incidentally it would
seem that stealing is a fairly clear notion by comparison to being
an observable predicate [White 1956, 109].) Secondly, after
pointing out that once we accept the holistic view of conirma-
tion originally proposed by Pierre Duhem, according to which
scientiic explanation and prediction puts to the test a whole
body of beliefs, rather than the one which is ostensibly under test
alone, and which Quine generalized so that it becomes evident
that not only other scientiic principles, but also the logic and
mathematics we use in our explanatory and predictive reason-
ing are implicated (ibid., 255), White concluded that we may
say that just as Duhems view, when pressed to the extreme,
makes it diicult to maintain a radical separation between the
analytic and the synthetic and the method of establishing logical
as opposed to empirical truth, so the view we have advocated will
break down the remaining dualism between logic-cum-empiri-
cal science and ethics (ibid., 256; see also Walsh 1987).
Expressivism and Thick Ethical Concepts
Carnaps claim that ethical sentences are nonsense is simply
not believable if nonsense is supposed to have the meaning it
normally has. And Carnap continues in a way that makes it even
more unbelievable. Conceding that there is some sense in which
sentences of metaphysics and ethics (and poetry!) are meaning-
ful, he writes: We do not intend to assert the impossibility of
associating any conceptions or images with these logically invalid
statements. Conceptions can be associated with any arbitrarily
compounded series of words; and metaphysical statements are
richly evocative of associations and feelings both in authors and
readers (1934, 26). Obviously, the lines of Jabberwocky are
also richly evocative of associations and feelings as well, but
All slithy were the borogroves and John is a cruel parent are
linguistically very diferent indeed!
A year later, Carnap is a bit more sophisticated: [A] value
statement is nothing else than a command in misleading gram-
matical form (1935, 25). But there are many diferences between
imperatives and ethical statements. Carnap has failed to dis-
tinguish assertions of very diferent kinds.
More sophisticated attempts by logical positivists and their
allies to explain the sense in which ethical sentences are mean-
ingful were soon made. he most important for a long time were
Alfred Jules Ayer (1936) and Charles Stevenson (1944). Ayer
held that the function of ethical sentences is to express emo-
tions (hence, the term emotivism for this version of noncognitiv-
ism). Stevenson identiied the function of ethical sentences with
expressing and inluencing attitudes. He further claimed that
the disagreements that occur in science, history, biography are
disagreements in belief, whereas it is disagreements in atti-
tude that chiely distinguish ethical issues from those of sci-
ence (1944, 13). he task of explaining just what an attitude is
could be left to psychology, Stevenson thought.
he family of noncognitivist positions that regards ethical
assertions as having the function of expressing attitudes is today
known as expressivism; the most sophisticated contemporary
statement of this position comes from Allan Gibbard (1990).
Another family of noncognitivist positions (foreshadowed by
Carnaps description of ethical statements as commands in
misleading grammatical form) holds that ethical statements
have a basically imperative function. he most famous statement
of prescriptivism is by R. M. Hare (1952; see also Reichenbach
1951).
It will be noted that these positions concern the function of
ethical sentences as wholes. But ethical sentences have parts;
in particular, they contain ethical predicates. And cognitivists
in ethics, in addition to attacking the logical positivist roots of
291
Ethics and Language
emotivism and prescriptivism, stress the fact that ethical words
have descriptive as well as evaluative functions, thereby attack-
ing emotivism and prescriptivism as inadequate accounts of the
lexical semantics of ethical sentences. he idea that certain con-
cepts used to describe events, people, and actions in ethical dis-
course have simultaneously evaluative and descriptive functions
attracted wide philosophical attention after the appearance of
Williams (1985), who referred to such concepts as thick ethical
concepts. Williams himself says he irst encountered the notion
in a seminar given by Phillippa Foot and Iris Murdoch in the
1940s; Murdochs he Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts
(1967) is partly about such concepts, although she doesnt use
this terminology (see also Putnam 2002). hese authors argue
that to master the use of cruel, pert, deceit, propaganda, Berkeley: University of California Press.
brave, reasonable, and other thick words, one has to be
able to identify, at least in imagination, with an ethical point of
view. Although Stanley Cavell does not use the term thick ethical
concept, he does ague that the use of such words also requires
the acquisition of a number of practices, such as apologizing,
explaining why one did something when there is an ethical chal-
lenge, and ofering excuses (1979, Part III). In short, the picture of
these terms as merely expressing attitudes is naive.
he noncognitivist response has been to claim that the mean-
ing of a thick ethical term like cruel can be factored into two com-
ponents: causes deep sufering (this would be the descriptive
component) and an attitude of moral disapproval (this would be
the evaluative component) (Hare 1981, 72). Hilary Putnam (1981,
2035) and John McDowell ([1981] 1998, 2012) argue that there
is no reason to believe that such a disentangling manoeuvre
(as McDowell calls it) is in general possible. (his issue obviously
impinges directly on the concerns of linguists, as well as moral
philosophers.) Last but not least, the inal chapter of Paul Zifs
Semantic Analysis (1960) contains an interesting argument that
expressivist and prescriptivist analyses of the paradigm thin
(or purely evaluative) term good are unacceptable on purely
linguistic grounds.
Hilary Putnam
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Ayer, Alfred Jules. 1936. Language, Truth and Logic. London: Victor
Gollancz.
Blackburn, Simon. 1984. Spreading the Word. Oxford, Oxford University
Press.
. 1993. Essays in Quasi-Realism. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Carnap, Rudolf. 1934. he Unity of Science. London: Kegan Paul, Trench,
Trubner, & Co.
. 1935. he Logical Syntax of Language. London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, Trubner & Co.
Cavell, Stanley. 1979. he Claim of Reason. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Gibbard, Allan. 1990. Wise Choices, Apt Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hare, R. M. 1952. he Language of Morals. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
. 1981. Moral hinking: Its Levels, Methods and Point: Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Hempel, C. G. 1963. Implications of Carnaps work for the philosophy
of science. In he Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, ed. P. A. Schilpp, 685
710. La Salle, IL: Open Court. London: Cambridge University Press.
Horgan, Terry, and Mark Timmons. 2006. Metaethics after Moore.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
292
Ethnolinguistic Identity
McDowell, John. [1981] 1998. Non-cognitivism and rule-following. In
Mind, Value and Reality, 198218. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Originally published in Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule, ed. Stephen H.
Holtzman and Christopher M. Leich, 14172. London: Routledge.
Murdoch, Iris. 1967. he Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Putnam, Hilary. 1981. Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
. 2002. he Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Quine, W. V. O. [1951] 1961. Two dogmas of empiricism. In From a
Logical Point of View (2d ed.), 2046. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Reichenbach, Hans. 1951. he Rise of Scientiic Philosophy.
Robbins, Lionel. 1932. On the Nature and Signiicance of Economic
Science. London: Macmillan.
Stevenson, Charles. 1944. Ethics and Language. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Walsh, Vivian. 1987. Philosophy and economics. In he New Palgrave: A
Dictionary of Economics. Vol. 3. Ed. J. Eatwell, M. Millgate, and P.
Newman, 8619. London: Macmillan.
White, Morton. 1956. Towards Reunion in Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Williams, Bernard. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Zif, Paul. 1960. Semantic Analysis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
ETHNOLINGUISTIC IDENTITY
According to Epicurus (Letter to Herodotus), the diferent lan-
guages of the world arose historically from the diferences in feel-
ings and sensory perception among peoples: [M]ens natures
according to their diferent nationalities [ethn] had their own
peculiar feelings and received their peculiar impressions, and
so each in their own way emitted air formed into shape by each
of these feelings and impressions, according to the diferences
made in the diferent nations by the places of their abode as well
(Bailey 1926, 756). he idea of a strict linkage between a peo-
ple and its language is also found in the Book of Genesis (10:5),
when, after the Flood, Noahs descendants spread out over the
earth, every one after his tongue, after their families, in their
nations (King James Version).
he Bible is the most direct source of the modern (post-Re-
naissance) conception of the nation as a people linked by birth,
language, and culture and belonging to a particular place. his
had not been the general European way of thinking prior to the
Renaissance, when religious belonging provided a irst division
among peoples and dynastic rule a second. Language meant
Latin, pan-European, and largely insulated from the vernacular
dialects spoken by most people going about their daily lives.
hese vernaculars were not thought of as language or as having
any importance beyond the practical needs of communica-
tion, whereas Latin was the sacred vehicle of divine rites and
divine knowledge.
As the Reformation increased access to the Bible, the sense
of national belonging and the nation-language nexus spread
(see nationalism and language). Concern arose for ver-
naculars to be raised to the status of the language, making
them eloquent, able to fulill some of the functions previously
Event Structure and Grammar
reserved for Latin. his would come to be perceived as a duty to
the nation. he biblical-cum-modern conception of nation and
language remains powerful today, despite having been weak-
ened by various attempts to overthrow it. Among these, marx-
ism, with its internationalist aims, was the most potent. Research
into ethnolinguistic identity is at the heart of a broader program
of inquiry into language and identity and forms a key aspect
of the understanding of nationalism. According to social identity
theory, national and ethnic identities are grounded in the knowl-
edge that individuals have of membership of a social in-group.
Anyone we do not perceive as a member gets classiied into an
out-group which can come to represent not just the Other, but
the hreat, the Enemy. (See also stereotypes.)
Taken to extremes, ethnolinguistic identity always becomes
oppressive, but kept within bounds, it is a positive force, help-
ing to give people a sense of who they are, anchoring their lives,
and helping them avoid feelings of alienation. Since language
and nation are conceptually so closely bound together, it is not
surprising that the politics of language choice rarely depends on
purely functional criteria, such as the language that will be most
widely understood. he symbolic and emotional dimensions of
ethnolinguistic identity are powerful enough that language
policies that ignore them are likely to prove dysfunctional in
the long run.
John E. Joseph
WORK CITED
Bailey, C., ed. and trans. 1926. Epicurus: he Extant Remains.
Oxford: Clarendon.
EVENT STRUCTURE AND GRAMMAR
he concept of event structure is prominent in many disciplines,
such as cognitive science, computer science, linguistics, and phi-
losophy. Within grammar studies, event structure concerns the
level of linguistic representation of a basic unit or organization of
thought corresponding to individual acts or occurrences in the
world. Speakers attempt to conceptualize and express this unit
or organization the event structure by the use of natural lan-
guage elements, such as words, phrases, and sentences.
Event Structure, Tense, and Aspect
An understanding of event structure requires a diferentia-
tion between it and such related terms as tense and aspect.
Consider the following sentences that capture various situations:
(a) he cook melted the butter.
(b) he farmer pushed the wheelbarrow.
(c) he cook was melting the butter.
(d) he farmer was pushing the wheelbarrow.
Sentences (a) and (b) both encode events that took place in the
past, and are thus encoded by the past tense forms of the verbs,
melted and pushed. But there is a crucial diference between the
two in terms of the nature of the event. he melting has an end
point but the pushing could continue forever. Events with an
end point are termed telic, while those without an end point are
atelic events. Event structure is also distinct from viewpoint or
grammatical aspect. he event in (a) is telic, and in the speak-
ers viewpoint the action is ended. In grammatical aspect, this
is a perfective aspect. In (c), like in (a), the event is telic as it will
end in a change of state and a boundary reached in the melting
process. However, the speaker views the process as incomplete.
his is an imperfective aspect, while in event structure this is a
telic, bounded process. It is interestingly that (d) is seen as both
an imperfective aspect and as an atelic event. he action is not
completed in the speakers viewpoint presentation and, given
the nature of the object or theme, unlike the object of melting in
(a) and (c), the object of pushing will not change state, and thus
is an unbounded, atelic event.
Typology of Events
Event types are often distinguished based on Z. Vendlers (1957)
classic typology of lexical aspect or Aktionsarten, a German term
for kinds of action, which groups verbs into subclasses based
on their temporal features. hese subclasses or event types are
processes (e.g., activities such as walk and run), accomplish-
ments (events that culminate by the use of temporal adverbials,
e.g., build or cook in an hour), and achievements (instantaneous
events that inish in a short time period, e.g., win and ind). Event
itself is part of a larger notion called situations, divided into
two categories: events and states (e.g., know and love) (Mani,
Pustejovsky, and Gaizauskas 2005). Hence, the term situation
aspect is often used in preference to the term lexical aspect.
Main Theoretical Approaches
Event structure has become an important part of grammar stud-
ies, especially in the debate about the exact nature of the relation-
ship between syntax and semantics. Two of many questions
are often posed: At what level of the grammar should we repre-
sent event structure, and how should we indeed represent this
notion? Researchers difer on answers to these questions. he
following include the main formal theoretical approaches:
(i) Lexical and decompositional approaches: Under lexi-
cal approaches, event structure, in particular telicity, is
an inherent property of lexical items and is represented
in the lexicon (e.g., Vendler 1957; Levin 1999). A subset of
lexical approaches includes decompositional approaches
in which event structure is computed on the basis of a set
of semantic primitives, which are then used to character-
ize the meaning of every word in the language (e.g., Schank
1975; Jackendof 1991). For instance, in R. Jackendofs
decompositional approach, an accomplishment event like
X closes Y is represented on the basis of primitives such as
CAUSE and BECOME: X closes Y is decomposed as X CAUSE
Y TO BECOME NOT OPEN and is represented as CAUSE
(X, BECOME (NOT (OPEN (Y)))).
(ii) Compositional approaches: Event structure is represented
in the lexical structure where telicity is a lexical property and
can be computed from the lexical entry on the basis of accom-
panying material in the verb phrase (e.g. Folli 2001; Pustejovsky
1991; Goldberg 2006). For instance, in J. Pustejoveskys event
composition approach, sometimes referred to as a gener-
ative approach, an accomplishment event like X closes Y
293
Event Structure and Grammar
is represented as a preparatory stage of ACT (X, Y) & NOT
(CLOSED (Y)) and a result state of CLOSED (Y).
(iii) Semantic approaches: hese approaches represented in
works such as Krifka (1998) and Filip (2000) are quite distinct
from the lexical semantic approaches like Jackendofs works.
hese logical semanticists rely more on truth-conditional
resources of words and sentences to refer to the semantics of
events.
(iv) Syntactic approaches: hese approaches represented by
works such as Ritter and Rosen (1998, 2000), Travis (2000),
Butt and Ramchand (2001), and Borer (2005) take the posi-
tion that the event is nonlexical and argue that the event type
is read of of the clausal functional projections.
hese lexical, decompositional, compositional, semantic, and
syntactic approaches may overlap and are thus not to be seen
as clearly delineated alternatives. he lexical approaches, while
intuitive, impose a lot of burden on the lexicon. Decompositional
approaches are also intuitive, but a problem is that there is usu-
ally no general agreement on what primitives to set. he compo-
sitional, semantic, and syntactic approaches may also have their
weaknesses but these are among the most promising.
Future Trends
Beyond the current state, two main trends may be noted. First,
event structure is currently studied with reference to words and
sentences, mostly in isolation. In the future, we need to study it
in context, such as in speech and texts. D. Townsend and col-
leagues (2003) lead this trend. Second, current research mostly
studies how diferent types of objects and other functions inlu-
ence telicity. But we also ought to look at how event structure in
complex verbal constructions, such as serial verbs, is computed.
lexical-functional grammar analyses like Bodomo (1993,
1997) and Alsina, Bresnan, and Sells (1997) lead this trend.
Tenny and Pustejovsky (2000), Mani, Pustejovsky, and
Gaizauskas (2005), and Dolling, Heyde-Zybatow, and Schafer
(2007) are further recent book-length readings that put most of
these issues in perspective.
Adams Bodomo
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Alsina, A. Joan Bresnan, and Peter Sells. 1997. Complex Predicates.
Stanford, CA: CSLI.
Bodomo, A. 1993. Complex predicates and event structure: An inte-
grated analysis of serial verb constructions in the Mabia languages of
West Africa. Working Papers in Linguistics 20, Trondheim, Norway.
. 1997. A conceptual mapping theory for serial verbs. In On-line my statement is based on the assumption and general knowl-
Proceedings of LFG97, ed. M. Butt and T. King, CSLI, Stanford
University. Available online at: http://www-csli.stanford.edu/publi-
cations/LFG2/bodomo-lfg97.html.
Borer, H. 2005. Structuring Sense. Vol. 2. he Normal Course of Events.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Butt, Miriam, and Gillian Ramchand. 2001. Complex aspectual struc-
ture in Hindi/Urdu. Oxford Working Papers in Linguistics, Philosophy
and Phonetics 6: 130. M. Liakata, B. Jensen, and D. Maillat edited this
volume.
Dolling, Johannes, Tatyana Heyde-Zybatow, and Martin Schafer. 2007.
Event Structures in Linguistic Form and Interpretation. Berlin: Walter
de Gruyter.
294
Evidentiality
Filip, Hana. 2000. he quantization puzzle. In Events as Grammatical
Objects: he Converging Perspectives of Lexical Semantics and Syntax,
ed. Carol Tenny and James Pustejovsky, 3993. Stanford, CA: CSLI
Publications.
Folli, R. 2001. Constructing telicity in English and Italian. Ph.D. diss.,
Oxford University.
Goldberg, Adele. 2006. Constructions at Work: he Nature of Generalization
in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jackendof, R. 1991. Parts and boundaries. Cognition 41: 945.
Krifka, Manfred. 1998. he origins of telicity. In Events and Grammar,
ed. Susan Rothstein, 197235. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Levin, B. 1999. Objecthood: An event structure perspective.
In Proceedings of CLS 35: Part 1: he Main Session, 22347.
Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Mani, Inderjeet, James Pustejovsky, and Robert Gaizauskas. 2005. he
Language of Time: A Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pustejovsky, J. 1991. he syntax of event structure. Cognition 41: 4781.
Ritter,E.,and S.T.Rosen.1998.Delimitingeventsinsyntax.InheProjection
of Arguments: Lexical and Compositional Factors, ed. M. Butt and
W. Geuder, 13564. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
. 2000. Event structure and ergativity. In Events as Grammatical
Objects, ed. C. Tenny and J. Pustejovsky, 187238. Stanford, CA.: CSLI
Publications.
Schank, R. C. 1975. Conceptual Information Processing. Amsterdam:
North-Holland.
Tenny, C., and J. Pustejovsky, eds. 2000. Events as Grammatical
Objects: he Converging Perspectives of Lexical Semantics and Syntax.
Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Townsend, D., M. Seegmiller, R. Folli, H. Harley, and T. Bever. 2003.
Processing Events in Sentences and Texts. Upper Montclair, NJ: Montclair
State University Press.
Travis, L. 2000. Event structure in syntax. In Events as Grammatical
Objects, ed. C. Tenny and J. Psutejovsky. Stanford, CA: CSLI
Publications.
Vendler, Z. 1957. Verbs and times. Philosophical Review 66.2: 14360.
EVIDENTIALITY
his is a grammatical category that has source of information as
its primary meaning whether the narrator actually saw what is
being described, made inferences about it based on some evi-
dence, or was told about it, and so on. Tariana, an Arawak lan-
guage from Brazil, has ive evidentials marked on the verb. If I
saw Jos play football, I will say Jos is playing-naka, using the
visual evidential. If I heard the noise of the play (but didnt see it),
I will say Jos is playing-mahka, using the nonvisual. If all I see
is that Joss football boots are gone and so is the ball, I will say
Jos is playing-nihka, using the inferential. If it is Sunday and
Jos is not home, the thing to say is Jos is playing-sika since
edge that Jos usually plays football on Sundays. And if the infor-
mation was reported to me by someone else, I will say Jos is
playing-pidaka, using the reported marker. Omitting an eviden-
tial results in an ungrammatical and highly unnatural sentence.
About a quarter of the worlds languages have some gram-
matical marking of information source. he systems vary in their
complexity. Some distinguish just two terms. An eyewitness ver-
sus non-eyewitness distinction is found in Turkic and Iranian
languages. Other languages mark only the nonirsthand infor-
mation, for example, Abkhaz, a northwestern Caucasian lan-
guage. Numerous languages express only reported, or hearsay,
Evidentiality
information, for example, Estonian. Quechua languages have
three evidentiality speciications: direct evidence, conjectural,
and reported.
Systems with more than four terms have just two sensory
evidentials and a number of evidentials based on inference and
assumption of diferent kinds; these include Nambiquara lan-
guages, from Brazil, and Foe and Fasu, of the Kutubuan family
spoken in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea.
he terms veriicational and validational are sometimes used
in place of evidential. French linguists employ the term mdiatif
(Guentchva 1996). A summary of work on recognizing this
category, and naming it, is in Jacobsen (1986) and Aikhenvald
(2004).
Evidentiality does not bear any straightforward relationship
to truth, the validity of a statement, or the speakers respon-
sibility. he truth value of an evidential may be diferent from
that of the verb in its clause. Evidentials can be manipulated to
tell a lie: One can give a correct information source and wrong
information, as in saying He is dead-reported when you were
told that he is alive, or correct information and wrong informa-
tion source, as in saying He is alive-visual when, in fact, you
were told that he is alive but did not see this. he ways in which
semantic extensions of evidentials overlap with modalities
and such meanings as probability or possibility depend on the
system and on the semantics of each individual evidential
term. In many languages (e.g., Quechua, Shipibo-Konibo, or
Tariana, all from South America), markers of hypothetical and
irrealis modality can occur in conjunction with evidentials on
one verb or in one clause. his further corroborates their status
as distinct categories.
Nonvisual and reported evidentials used with the irst person
often refer to uncontrolled spontaneous action or have overtones
of surprise, known as mirative.
Every language has some lexical way of referring to informa-
tion source, for example, English reportedly or allegedly. Such
lexical expressions may become grammaticalized as evidential
markers. Nonevidential categories may acquire a secondary
meaning relating to information source. Conditionals and other
nondeclarative moods may acquire overtones of uncertain infor-
mation obtained from some other source for which the speaker
does not take any responsibility; the best-known example is the
French conditional. Past tense and perfect aspect acquire
nuances of nonirsthand information in many Iranian and
Turkic languages, and so do resultative nominalizations and
passives. he choice of a complementizer, or a type of comple-
ment clause, may serve to express meanings related to the way
in which one knows a particular fact. In English, diferent com-
plement clauses distinguish an auditory and a hearsay meaning
of the verb hear: Saying I heard Brazil beating France implies
actual listening, whereas I heard that Brazil beat France implies
a verbal report of the result. hese evidential-like extensions are
known as evidentiality strategies. Historically, they may give rise
to grammatical evidentials.
he maximal number of evidentials is distinguished in state-
ments. he only evidential possible in commands is the reported,
to express command on behalf of someone else: eat-reported!
means eat following someones command! Evidentials often
come from grammaticalized verbs. he verb of saying is
Evolutionary Psychology
a frequent source for reported and quotative evidentials, and
the verbs feel, think, hear can give rise to a nonvisual evidential.
Closed-word classes deictics (see deixis) and locatives may
give rise to evidentials, both in small and in large systems.
Evidentials vary in their semantic extensions, depending on
the system. Reported information often has overtones of prob-
ability or unreliability, while visual evidentials may develop
meanings of certainty. hey can be extended to denote the
direct participation, control, and volitionality of the speaker.
morphemes marking tense, aspect, mood, modality, and evi-
dentiality may occur in the same slot in the structure of a highly
synthetic language.
Evidentiality is a property of a signiicant number of linguistic
areas, including the Balkans, the Baltic area, India, and a variety
of locations in Amazonia. Evidentials may make their way into
contact languages, as they have into Andean Spanish. he texts
genre may determine the choice of an evidential. Traditional
stories are typically cast in reported evidential. Evidentials can
be manipulated in discourse as a stylistic device. Switching
from a reported to a direct (or visual) evidential creates the efect
of the speakers participation and conidence. Switching to a
nonirsthand evidential often implies a backgrounded aside.
Evidentiality is interlinked with conventionalized attitudes to
information and precision in stating its source.
Alexandra Aikhenvald
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y., and R. M. W. Dixon, eds. 2003. Studies in
Evidentiality. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Barnes, J. 1984. Evidentials in the Tuyuca verb. International Journal of
American Linguistics 50: 25571.
Guentchva, Z., ed. 1996. Lnonciation mdiatise. Louvain-
Paris: ditions Peeters.
Jacobsen, William H., Jr. 1986. he heterogeneity of evidentials in
Makah. In Evidentiality: he Linguistic Coding of Epistemology, ed.
Wallace L. Chafe and Johanna Nichols, 328. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. See
other papers therein.
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY
his term is used in several diferent, related senses. Among
behavioral, social, and cognitive scientists, it properly refers to
a new scientiic paradigm or framework, together with the dis-
cipline that has grown up around this framework, and the body
of knowledge produced by the researchers working within that
framework. Some scholars outside the ield, as well as many
journalists and lay people, use it more loosely to refer to any ind-
ing, speculation, or discussion that links evolution and behavior,
whether well informed or not. Evolutionary psychology as both
a research framework and a discipline is organized around the
proposition that the design features of the mechanisms compris-
ing a species psychology relect the character of the adaptive
problems they evolved to solve. his proposition was uncontro-
versial when applied by biologists to other species (e.g., Williams
1966). However, it generated signiicant debate and opposition
once it began to be applied to humans, who because of culture,
295
Evolutionary Psychology
intelligence, language and complexly variable social systems
appear notably diferent from other species (Sahlins 1977).
he ield shares some tenets with early Chomskyan propos-
als that the human mind contains numerous mental organs
specialized for carrying out diferent cognitive tasks, such as a
language acquisition device (Chomsky 1965). he anti-
functionalist strain in Chomskys thinking led him to largely set
aside natural selection for communicative functions in his dis-
cussions of language (Chomsky 1972). In contrast, evolutionary
psychologists such as the psycholinguist Steven Pinker (1994),
argue that the existence of mental organs can only be explained
as the consequence of natural selection. his is because selection
is the only process known to science that builds complex func-
tional systems into the designs of organisms (Williams 1966). By
this standard, the intricate functional interdependence of the
various cognitive mechanisms underlying language provides
very strong evidence for the organizing role of natural selection
in constructing such mechanisms (Pinker and Bloom 1992).
Evolutionary psychology began to emerge in the 1970s and
1980s when a small number of researchers tried to synthesize
several distinct research orientations in a mutually consistent
way (Tooby and Cosmides 1992). he most important of these
orientations were cognitive science, with its commitment to
information-processing descriptions of psychological mecha-
nisms; modern primatology, huntergatherer studies, and
paleoanthropology, which together ofered the prospect of char-
acterizing the conditions in which humans evolved; evolutionary
biology (including behavioral ecology, sociobiology, ethology,
and evolutionary game theory); and neuroscience, with its
prospect of discovering the physical implementation of cogni-
tive mechanisms. Evolutionary psychologists argued that cog-
nitive mechanisms were, ipso facto, biological adaptations,
a proposition that inevitably connected cognitive science to
evolutionary biology. If cognitive mechanisms are adaptations,
they then must exhibit an evolved organization, have an evolu-
tionary history, and have been naturally engineered to carry out
evolved functions. Most importantly, the identiication of cogni-
tive mechanisms with adaptations allowed the entire technical
apparatus developed within biology concerning adaptations to
be imported and validly applied to cognitive science.
Evolutionary psychologists start from the premise that
the brain, like our other organs, is the product of evolution.
Speciically, the brain is viewed as an information-processing
organ that evolved over evolutionary time in order to regulate
behavior in an adaptively successful way. In a world illed with
the disordering force of entropy, biologists and physicists rec-
ognize that natural selection is the only known natural physi-
cal process that can push the designs of organisms uphill into
functionally organized systems. It follows that whatever func-
tional organization there is to be found in the design of the brain
relects the history of selection that acted ancestrally on the
species. Evolutionary psychologists use the cause-and-efect
relationships between ancestral selection pressures and the
resulting functional architectures of the brains mechanisms as
one powerful new tool to guide scientiic discovery. On this view,
the structure of each psychological mechanism should relect
the actions of the selection pressures that built it. Consequently,
by considering ancestral adaptive problems, evolutionary
296
psychologists believe that they can more reliably, rapidly, and
efectively derive and test hypotheses about the functional orga-
nization of mental mechanisms than would be possible other-
wise. hey argue that many major wrong turns in the history of
the behavioral sciences for example, many important aspects
of the Freudian, Skinnerian, or Piagetian paradigms would not
have been made if their core propositions had been scrutinized
for consistency with the kinds of outcomes that natural selection
could plausibly have produced. he practice of using models of
ancestral-selection pressures as a guide to discovering previously
unknown psychological mechanisms renders them untroubled
by critics accusations that evolutionary analysis inevitably con-
sists of concocting post hoc just-so stories. To use general prin-
ciples to derive predictions, and then to use these predictions
to discover something previously unknown, demonstrates that
such explanations are not concocted post hoc.
he primary research goals of evolutionary psychology are
a) the discovery and progressive mapping of each of the evolved
mechanisms of the human brain (or the brains of other species
of interest) and b) the exploration of the systematic behavioral
regularities and population-level phenomena that these evolved
mechanisms generate in diferent social and cultural environ-
ments. So, for example, evolutionary psychologists claim to have
discovered and mapped the information-processing structure
of an evolved program in the human psychological architecture
whose function is to detect the individuals who are close genetic
relatives, and then to generate greater sexual aversion and
greater altruism toward these individuals compared to others
(Lieberman, Tooby, and Cosmides 2007). his evolved program
was predicted to be a part of our species-typical psychological
design, and is believed to explain some of the patterns involving
family sentiments found across cultures (such as disgust at the
prospect of incest with ones sibling).
Similarly, all human societies (and no nonhuman societies)
have complex languages and use them as the primary means of
communication. Evolutionary psychologists view languages as
the population-level expression of a suite of evolved species-typ-
ical programs tailored by natural selection to facilitate commu-
nication, especially of propositions (Pinker 1994). Although the
evolutionary origins of language are obscure, evolution-
ary psychologists consider it inevitable that the present design
of the cognitive mechanisms underlying language competence
were naturally selected to function in a linguistic environment
that is normal for our species. In consequence, a) they should be
selected to assume the presence of a linguistic environment that
conforms to human language universals, and b) they should be
designed to exploit the presence of these regularities to accom-
plish the functions of acquisition, comprehension, and produc-
tion (as they appear to; Musso et al. 2003). Natural selection
thus provides a causal explanation for Chomskys assertion that
strategies employed by the language acquisition device relect
abstract uniformities across human languages (see universal
grammar).
One central element that distinguishes evolutionary psy-
chology from other approaches is its focus on integrating what
is known about evolution into the research process, rather than
ignoring this knowledge. Applying information about ances-
tral conditions and selection pressures allows evolutionary
Evolutionary Psychology
psychologists to derive hypotheses about the design of human
information-processing mechanisms from the large preexist-
ing body of theories already developed and empirically tested
within modern evolutionary biology. For example, evolution-
ary biologists know that for organisms like humans, mating with
close relatives causes genetic defects to express themselves at far
higher rates in the incestuously produced children. his has led
evolutionary psychologists a) to the general prediction that nat-
ural selection had built a program in humans designed to iden-
tify close genetic relatives; b) to detailed predictions about the
cues that the program would use to identify genetic relatives; and
c) to detailed predictions about how this kin detection program
would be coupled to increased sexual aversion to individuals
it identiied as genetic relatives (as well as increased altruism,
as predicted by kin selection theory). he analysis of ancestral
selection pressures and huntergatherer conditions made it pos-
sible to design studies that could test (and did conirm) these
propositions. hese studies, in turn, mapped the information-
processing architecture of these functionally specialized pro-
grams (Lieberman, Tooby, and Cosmides 2007). In contrast, the
disregard by sociocultural anthropologists (and Freudians) of the
selection pressures that select strongly against incest prevented
them from discovering the existence of these evolved mecha-
nisms. Once a mechanism is mapped, its population-level social
and cultural expressions can also be analyzed such as moral
attitudes about incest in the case of kin detection and human lin-
guistic variation in the case of language.
Evolutionary psychology originally emerged among anthro-
pologists, cognitive scientists, biologists, and psychologists,
although it has subsequently difused into many other disci-
plines. Evolutionary psychology is not a subield of psychology,
and it is not devoted to the study of a speciic class of phenom-
ena. Rather, it is an approach to the behavioral, social, cognitive,
and neural sciences that can be applied to any of the topics they
deal with. Originally reacting against the mutually contradictory
claims about the mind and human nature advanced in diferent
disciplines, evolutionary psychologists constructed what they
argue is a logically integrated scientiic framework that attempts
to reconcile into a single body of knowledge the results drawn
from all relevant ields. Its advocates view it as an interdisci-
plinary nucleus around which a single uniied theoretical and
empirical behavioral science is being crystallized. Of course, not
everyone in behavioral science agrees, with disagreements rang-
ing from disputes over speciic analyses to broader rejection of
the program, often in favor of culturalist and social construction-
ist views.
A second feature that distinguishes evolutionary psychology
is the importance it places on achieving information-processing
descriptions of the designs of evolved mechanisms, rather than
stopping at behavioral or neuroscience descriptions. Along with
most cognitive scientists, evolutionary psychologists believe that
the brain, like any other computational system, can usefully be
mapped both in physical terms (which, for the brain, means in
neurophysiological and neuroanatomical terms) and also com-
plementarily in information-processing terms. Evolutionary
psychologists go on to stress that the brain and its subsystems
evolved as an organ (or set of organs) of computation: he brain
evolved in order to regulate behavior and physiology adaptively
based on information it is exposed to. Because the evolved func-
tion of a neural (or psychological) mechanism is inherently
computational (i.e., as a program mapping informational inputs
to outputs), the only form of description that can accurately
characterize how its organization solves its adaptive problem
is an information-processing description. Physical descrip-
tions of brain subsystems cannot, by their nature, fully capture
the information-processing interrelationships that embody the
function of an evolved program (mechanism, adaptation, etc.).
So, for example, however interesting it is to identify the brain
regions implicated in various aspects of language processing, it
is still important to develop a parallel account in terms of com-
putational steps (data structures, operations, etc.). Similarly,
simply observing that humans behaviorally tend to avoid incest
inside the nuclear family is very diferent from having mapped
the information-processing steps in the evolved programs that
take prespeciied cues to kinship as input, compute from them
magnitudes that capture estimated genetic relatedness, and then
pass these magnitudes into the sexual-choice motivational sub-
system, where they generate sexual disgust at mating with those
it identiies as genetic relatives.
A third diference in perspective between evolutionary psy-
chologists and most other behavioral scientists is in how numer-
ous and functionally specialized they expect the psychological
mechanisms of a species to be. For most of the last century, the
majority view among learning theorists, cognitive scientists, and
neuroscientists has been that the psychological mechanisms
that operate on experience to produce knowledge are likely to
be small in number, and to be primarily content independent
and general purpose (Pinker 2002; Tooby and Cosmides 1992).
Content independence means that a cognitive procedure (such
as association formation in connectionism) operates in the
same way regardless of the content it is processing. Hence, on
this view, the same cognitive procedures are expected to oper-
ate on all contents uniformly, whether language, ighting, eating,
sex, family interactions, or intergroup conlict. his blank slate or
environmentalist view can be expressed by comparing the oper-
ation of learning mechanisms or cognitive mechanisms to the
operation of a tape recorder that processes all sounds uniformly,
regardless of their meaning: he content that ends up on the tape
relects only the content present in the environment, and noth-
ing in the tape-recording machinery itself introduces content of
its own that was not present in the environment.
From a selectionist perspective, however, such a blank-slate
viewpoint seems extremely implausible, as well as inconsistent
with what is known about the cognitive architectures of nonhu-
mans (Gallistel 1990). Mutations for specialized design features
that exploit the rich recurrent structure of particular problem
domains should spread by natural selection whenever they cost-
efectively improve the organisms propensity to solve important
adaptive problems in a itness-promoting way. hat is, if there is
a particular set of cues that solves the problem of kin detection,
then the mind could evolve a specialization that is designed to
take only those cues as input. For a problem-solving strategy to
be applied generally across contents, it cannot employ problem-
solving shortcuts that work only on particular problem subsets,
such as grammar acquisition, depth perception, kin detection,
or mate selection. Hence, evolutionary psychologists consider it
297
Evolutionary Psychology
likely that the mind solves the diverse computational problems
posed by stereopsis, color vision, echolocation, face recogni-
tion, object mechanics, navigation, and reasoning about social
exchange by using at least some principles and operations that
are particular to each respective domain. Evolutionary psycholo-
gists argue that evolved specializations that are activated only by
certain content domains or adaptive problems seem virtually
inevitable, rather than implausible or exceptional outcomes of
the evolutionary process. his is because selection inherently
favors eiciency and puts no weight per se on uniformity or sim-
plicity (Tooby and Cosmides 1992).
Moreover, unlike a tape recorder, the designs of such evolved
psychological mechanisms might be expected to regularly intro-
duce particular contents, motivations, interpretations, and
conceptual primitives into the human mind that are not simply
derived from the environment. From an engineering perspec-
tive, it is easy to see how such reliably developing contents could
enhance adaptive performance. For example, the environmental
regularity of venomous snakes posed an evolutionarily long-en-
during adaptive problem. his regularity appears to have selected
for an evolved computational device implemented in the brains
of African primates (including humans). his adaptation con-
tains a psychophysical speciication of snakes linked to a system
that motivates snake avoidance. Additionally, this avoidance is
up-regulated to the extent that the individual is exposed to con-
speciics who display fear toward snakes (hman and Mineka
2001). his depends on mental content about snakes being built
into the mechanism. he human mind is suspected to contain
neurocomputational versions of what philosophers would once
have called innate ideas, such as snake, spider, mother, predator,
food, word, verb, agency, object, and patient (Tooby, Cosmides,
and Barrett 2005). By augmenting the cognitive architecture in
such a fashion, natural selection could supercharge perceiving,
learning, reasoning, and decision making in evolutionarily con-
sequential domains.
At a minimum, evolutionary psychologists expect that in addi-
tion to whatever general-purpose cognitive machinery humans
have, we should also be expected to have a wide array of domain-
speciic mechanisms, including specialized learning mecha-
nisms. So, for example, although the snake phobia system, the
kin detection mechanism, and the language acquisition system
are all learning mechanisms, they are each specialized only for
their particular type of content (snakes linked to fear intensity,
kinship cues linked to incest aversion and altruistic motivation,
and language inputs linked to linguistic competence). For this
reason, evolutionary psychologists do not regard learning as con-
stituting an alternative explanation for the claim that a particu-
lar kind of behavioral output was shaped by evolution. Evidence
that something is learned is not in the least inconsistent with the
claim that much of the knowledge produced was supplied by
specialized learning mechanisms permeated with evolved con-
tent. Critics of evolutionary psychology view its multiplication
of hypothesized cognitive mechanisms (e.g., specializations for
language acquisition, kin detection, mate selection, and so on)
to be unparsimonious. Evolutionary psychologists respond that
although parsimony may have been a useful principle in physics,
evolutionarily engineered systems are not designed to be simple
but, rather, to be adaptively efective.
298
Evolutionary psychology has grown rapidly in numbers and
acceptance over the last three decades, and it is now presented
in many sources alongside Freudianism, behaviorism, cogni-
tive science, and neuroscience as one of the basic approaches to
psychology. In that time, evolutionary psychologists have used
evolutionarily derived predictions to discover scores of previ-
ously unknown mechanisms and design features in the human
psychological architecture (Buss 2005). Nevertheless, it remains
signiicantly more controversial than other young ields, such as
cognitive neuroscience, and is still a minority viewpoint whose
speciics are vigorously disputed. Indeed, many researchers
who are reluctant to associate themselves with the controversies
surrounding evolutionary psychology have nonetheless quietly
adopted many of its core principles, so that claims of evolved
functional specializations and evolutionary origins are far more
common and unabashed in the behavioral sciences than they
were even a decade ago. For example, the modularist tradition
in cognitive development adopts what is largely an evolution-
ary psychological stance: Various specialized competences the
theory of mind module, intuitive physics, and intuitive biology
are viewed as evolved, reliably developing, domain speciic, and
designed to relect the special task demands posed by the adap-
tive problems special to each domain (Hirschfeld and Gelman
1994).
Some controversies over evolutionary psychology are gen-
erated by misunderstandings, while others concern unsettled
theoretical and empirical issues (e.g., how can neural plasticity
be reconciled with the existence of evolved specializations in the
brain?). However, heated resistance is perhaps attributable to
the sensitivity of applying evolutionary theories broadly across
human experience. For example, cognitive science originated
in philosophy and linguistics, and as a result tends to focus on
relective issues, such as knowledge acquisition and speech com-
prehension, which have only limited intrinsic personal or social
meaning. In contrast, evolutionary psychologists ambitions
extend to characterizing the mechanisms underlying all human
action. hese include social interactions such as aggression, sex-
ual attraction, exploitation, and cooperation. Evolutionary biol-
ogy provides rich theories about these domains, but analysis of
the causes of these phenomena inevitably triggers strongly felt
personal and ideological reactions.
Language is commonly viewed by evolutionary psycholo-
gists as the expression of a set of reliably developing cognitive
mechanisms that evolved to convey propositional information
through a serial channel (Pinker 1994). he high degree of func-
tional elaboration in language suggests that it has been shaped
by selection over long expanses of evolutionary time. Although
it seems likely that many mechanisms involved in language are
general in that they are used in other cognitive tasks, it is dii-
cult from an evolutionary psychological perspective to see how
such an important activity would not have strongly selected for
the emergence of proprietary cognitive specializations designed
to solve languages constituent subtasks with special eiciency.
Several lines of evidence argue that at least some (if indeed not
most) of the cognitive mechanisms underlying language are
adaptations designed by natural selection for language. he
competing hypothesis is that language is a by-product of gen-
eral intelligence, symbolic capacity, the capacity for culture,
Evolutionary Psychology
neo-associationistic mechanisms, or other general-purpose
alternatives (Pinker 1994). First, computationally intricate lin-
guistic capacities develop precocially far earlier than compa-
rable cognitive achievements in other domains. Second, genetic
and developmental conditions can doubly dissociate language
and general intelligence (i.e., one can speak well with low intel-
ligence and be unable to speak but have otherwise unimpaired
intelligence). hird, underneath linguistic variability are design
features like linear order, constituency (see constituent
structure), predicate-argument structure, case markers,
morphophonemic rules, and phonological rules that are a) uni-
versal and b) well designed to communicate propositional infor-
mation, such as who did what to whom, but poorly designed for
many other cognitive tasks, such as statistical induction, imag-
ery, face recognition, and so on (see phonology, universals
of; morphology, universals of; syntax, universals
of; semantics, universals of).
Finally, some evolutionary psychologists propose that
language was a critical ingredient allowing humans to enter
their peculiar adaptive mode, the cognitive niche. On this view,
the cognitive niche is a way of life in which massive amounts of
contingent information are generated and used for the regula-
tion of improvised behavior that is successfully tailored to local
conditions (Tooby and DeVore 1987; Pinker 1994). Essential to
increasing the supply of useful propositional information was
dramatically lowering the cost of its acquisition from others.
Language appears admirably designed to accomplish this
task.
Daniel Sznycer, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Buss, D. M., ed. 2005. he Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology.
Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Chomsky, N. 1965. Aspects of the heory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
. 1972. Language and Mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and
World.
Gallistel, C. R. 1990. he Organization of Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Hirschfeld, Lawrence A., and Susan A. Gelman, eds. 1994. Mapping
the Mind: Domain Speciicity in Cognition and Culture. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Lieberman, D., J. Tooby, and L. Cosmides. 2007. he architecture of
human kin detection. Nature 445.7129: 72731.
Musso, M., A. Moro, V. Glauche, M. Rijntjes, J. Reichenbach, C. Bchel,
and C. Weiller. 2003. Brocas area and the language instinct. Nature
Neuroscience 6: 77481.
hman, A., and S. Mineka. 2001. Fears, phobias, and preparedness.
Psychological Review 108: 483522.
Pinker, Steven. 1994. he Language Instinct. New York: Morrow.
. 2002. he Blank Slate. New York: Viking.
Pinker, Steven, and Paul Bloom. 1992. Natural language and natural
selection. In he Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the
Generation of Culture, ed. J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, 45193.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Sahlins, Marshall. 1977. he Use and Abuse of Biology. Ann Arbor: he
University of Michigan Press.
Tooby, John, and L. Cosmides. 1992. he psychological foundations
of culture. In he Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the
Exemplar
Generation of Culture, ed. J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, 19136.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Tooby, J., L. Cosmides, and H. C. Barrett. 2005. Resolving the debate
on innate ideas: Learnability constraints and the evolved interpen-
etration of motivational and conceptual functions. In he Innate
Mind: Structure and Content, ed. P. Carruthers, S. Laurence, and S.
Stich, 30537. New York: Oxford University Press.
Tooby, John, and I. DeVore. 1987. he reconstruction of hominid
behavioral evolution through strategic modeling. In he Evolution of
Primate Behavior: Primate Models, ed. Warren Kinsey, 183237. New
York: SUNY Press.
Williams, George C. 1966. Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique
of Some Current Evolutionary hought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
EXEMPLAR
his term occurs importantly in research and theorization in cat-
egory identiication, recognition, categorization, and learning. It
is used interchangeably with the terms instance or item across
various strands of research, including psychology, religion, and
history.
Within the context of category learning, for instance, the term
exemplar refers to a speciic instance, such as a speciic cat to
which a parent points when teaching a child the concept and
name of cat. Alternatively, during remediation of language skills
in children with severe disabilities, researchers have utilized var-
ious exemplars of graphical symbols to improve communication
(Schlosser 2003). In studies examining category relearning in
individuals who have sufered brain damage, training in naming
of a subset of exemplars results in improved naming of untrained
exemplars within the category (Kiran 2007).
Within the topic of categorization of semantic concepts,
the terms speciic usage comes in the context of exemplar
theory. Briely, this theory suggests that a category is repre-
sented by a collection of members (exemplars) that have been
previously encountered, experienced, and stored as unique
and individual memory traces. A new object/item is judged as a
member of a given category provided that it is suiciently similar
to the stored exemplars (Komatsu 1992). his speciic interpre-
tation of exemplar is at odds with an alternate view of catego-
rization, namely, the prototype theory, which suggests that a
category is represented in terms of a single summary representa-
tion (i.e., a prototype).
Not all theorists agree that exemplar and prototype models
are competitors; there is yet another class of models according
to which categorization decisions are made using exemplars,
although the efect of using exemplars necessitates the creation
of abstractions that can be later applied to novel exemplars (Ross
and Makin 1999). Similarly, some connectionist networks
assume that a category is represented by summary information
across the entire network and, depending upon the input pro-
vided, speciic connection strengths in the network have greater
inluence on the overall activation (Knapp and Anderson 1984).
Finally, the interpretation of the term exemplar can also be
inluenced by the level of category structure. As Edward Smith
and Douglas Medin (1999) argue, the term can refer to a spe-
ciic instance of the concept (e.g., your favorite blue jeans
in the category clothing) or to a subset of the concept (blue
299
Exemplar Theory
jeans). Further, whereas experimental investigations of exem-
plars typically refer to them as a basic level concepts (e.g.,
apple), exemplars can also refer to an individual entity such as
Macintosh apple, which is a subordinate concept.
Swathi Kiran
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Knapp, A., and J. Anderson. 1984. heory of categorization based
on distributed memory strorage. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 10: 61637.
Kiran, Swathi. 2007. Semantic complexity in the treatment of naming
deicits. American Journal of Speech Language Pathology 16: 112
Komatsu, Lloyd. 1992. Recent views of conceptual structure.
Psychological Bulletin 112: 50026.
Ross, Brian, and Valarie Makin. 1999. Prototype versus exemplar mod-
els in cognition. In he Nature of Cognition, ed. R. Sternberg, 20542.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Schlosser, Ralf. 2003. he Eicacy of Augmentative and Alternative
Communication: Toward Evidence-Based Practice. Amsterdam and
Boston: Elsevier.
Smith, Edward, and Douglas Medin. 1999. he exemplar view. In
Concepts: Core Readings, ed. E Margolis and S. Laurence, 20721.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
EXEMPLAR THEORY
An important goal of linguistic theory has been to develop explicit
approaches to describing, modeling, and explaining linguistic
behavior. Certainly, most familiar to linguists are the rule-based
models that derive abstract rules from linguistic exemplars, then
use those rules to predict linguistic behavior. Such rule systems
are readily shown to be empirically inadequate, both diachron-
ically, as in the shift from digged to dug as the past tense of dig,
and synchronically (see synchrony and diachrony), as in
the overgeneralization (see overregularizations) of glew
as the past tense of glow in place of glowed. hus, rule-based
models of language behavior must also incorporate some sort of
component that can account for analogical interactions among
linguistic items.
Generally speaking, there are two broad categories of analog-
ical models under investigation in current linguistic research.
One group consists of approaches that use linguistic exemplars
to derive an analogical system but which then do not consult
those individual exemplars of linguistic experience further in
predicting linguistic behavior. Best known among this cate-
gory of analogical models are the connectionist approaches
to language. Connectionist models typically pool their training
input into schematic, prototype-like representations of a cat-
egory that do not retain individualizing information about the
exemplars used to train the models. Such representations, how-
ever, make the models empirically inadequate in two respects.
First, connectionist models incorrectly predict behaviors such
as categorization and response times in terms of similarity to
the prototype encoded in the network, rather than in terms of
similarity to individual exemplars. Second, there is abundant,
and growing, evidence that memories for individual linguis-
tic experiences do inluence subsequent linguistic behaviors.
Research has derived clear evidence of speciic exemplars
300
subsequently inluencing phonetic and phonological out-
put (Pierrehumbert 2001), lexical and morphological output
(Goldinger 1997 and Bybee 2002), and childrens manipula-
tions of syntactic structures (Tomasello 2003; see also syntax,
acquisition of).
Exemplars are not prototypes. hey are individual instances of
linguistic usage retained in memory. Given the empirical neces-
sity for incorporating memory for exemplars into models of lan-
guage behavior, the crucial research question in exemplar-based
approaches becomes whether they alone can account for the
spectrum of linguistic behaviors or whether there remains inde-
pendent empirical justiication for the rule-based components.
Exemplar-based models of language are founded on the sim-
ple notion that in language use, speakers will compare a current
linguistic expression and its context (linguistic and nonlinguistic)
with their personal collections of memories for similar expres-
sions and then choose at least one of the tokens in memory an
exemplar as the basis for deciding how to interpret or other-
wise operate on that expression. Usually, the token(s) selected
will be similar to the input currently being considered and its
context. Such models imply that the brain stores vast invento-
ries of memories for individual episodes of linguistic experience
and that it employs some procedure for comparing the features
of the new input or current context to the features of those
remembered exemplars, and then has some basis for choosing
one of those exemplars as the model for an analogical response
(or interpretation).
Given the empirical evidence that memories for individual
exemplars of previous linguistic behavior inluence current
linguistic behavior, we restrict our discussion in this entry to
explicitly deined exemplar-based approaches that use actual
exemplars (typically gleaned from linguistic corpora) to predict
linguistic behavior. he approaches discussed here are all com-
putationally based and have actually been tested against real
linguistic behavior. he algorithms are also publicly available to
researchers.
In the three approaches that follow, the exemplars are
retained and directly used to predict linguistic behavior. A data
set of relevant exemplars is constructed from actual linguistic
corpora; then an algorithm is applied that compares the new
input to the exemplars in the data set and selects certain of those
exemplars while lessening or even zeroing out the chances of
other exemplars in the data set being used. Typically, the exem-
plars in the data sets are composed of outcomes associated with
various linguistic variables or features. A prediction is then made
for the outcome deined by an input set of variables (the given
context). Normally, exemplars that are in some sense closer to
the given context have a higher chance of being selected, but
sometimes the algorithm may select more distant exemplars. In
other words, these approaches sometimes allow exemplars that
are not nearest neighbors that is, most similar to be used.
The Generalized Context Model (GCM)
he generalized context model (Nosofsky 1992) was developed
primarily as a model of concept learning, choice behavior, and
categorization. he GCM has been tested most extensively against
nonlinguistic behavior, but has also been tested on morpholog-
ical processes, such as predicting the plural forms of German
Exemplar Theory
nouns (Nakisa and Hahn 1996). he GCM determines the con-
ditional probability of assigning a given linguistic form say, the
base form of a noun to a particular form class, for example, a
particular plural form. It does so by comparing the features of the
test form with the weighted sum of those features in all the exem-
plars of one response category, divided by the weighted sum of
those features across the exemplars of all the possible response
categories. he model also factors in a response bias value for the
diferent categories. hus, it arrives at a conditional probability
for choosing any one response over the alternatives.
In the application of the GCM to nonlinguistic data, the
accuracy of the models predictions depends crucially upon
the weightings assigned to the diferent stimulus features and
the response biases for the alternative categories. Typically,
both are determined ahead of time by constructing a confusion
matrix for the exemplars to be used. he resulting weightings
(said to account for the efects of selective attention during train-
ing) and response biases then apply only to the given data set
of exemplars. he feature weightings determined ahead of time
for a given data set are equivalent to the information gain values
described for the memory based learning model that follows and
are subject, therefore, to the same theoretical criticisms in that
they must be calculated ahead of time for a given data set and do
not generalize to a new data set. In applying the GCM to natural
language data, Ramin Nakisa and Ulrike Hahn (1996), of course,
were not able to obtain feature weightings for German nouns in
native speakers of the language, and the model therefore did not
perform as well as a competing connectionist model.
Memory Based Learning (MBL)
Memory based learning (Daelemans and van den Bosch 2005)
is a nearest neighbor model developed speciically for predict-
ing language behavior. Pure nearest neighbor approaches count
each variable, or feature, as equally important for comparing an
input item to the stored exemplars and identifying one or more
of the nearest neighbors, that is, most similar exemplars, as
the basis for predicting an analogical response. However, as is
widely recognized, simple nearest neighbor models are empiri-
cally inadequate for predicting actual language behavior. Real
people often give responses that clearly are not traceable to the
most similar exemplar already known.
Daelemans and his colleagues have addressed this empiri-
cal shortcoming by determining from the database ahead of
time the overall signiicance of each individual variable to be
used in predicting outcomes. In this way, the distance of vari-
ous neighbors from a particular input context can be adjusted
according to the importance of each variable to a particular task.
he researchers have developed a number of similarity or dis-
tance metrics for determining the signiicance of the individual
variables. Among the more important of these are informa-
tion gain (IG), gain ratio (GR), the chi-square statistic (2), and
shared variance (SV). Depending on the particular data set and
its behavior, one gets diferent rates of correct prediction, but the
predictions are almost always better than providing no weighting
of the variables at all. Indeed, without such adjustments in the
weighting of features, the nearest neighbor approaches cannot
predict actual language behavior accurately. Unfortunately, one
cannot know in advance which measure of similarity will provide
the best results for a particular task and a particular data set, and
although the diferences among them are usually not great, there
appears to be no principled basis for choosing one measure over
another.
One important contribution of the MBL studies to exemplar-
based modeling theory is that reducing the size of the data set by
omitting very low frequency exemplars, redundant exemplars,
and very rare but exceptional exemplars actually reduces the
level of correct predictability. hus, MBL researchers now rec-
ognize the need to construct large, complete data sets in order to
maximize overall predictability.
Analogical Modeling (AM)
Analogical modeling (Skousen 1989) is not a nearest neighbor
approach. While it includes nearest neighbors in its predictions,
it also regularly uses non-nearest neighbors to predict behavior.
In certain cases, the nearest neighbor model simply makes the
wrong prediction. (For an explicit example of where AM cor-
rectly rejects the nearest neighbors in predicting behavior, see
chapter 2 in Skousen, Lonsdale, and Parkinson 2002.)
AM is an explicit model of analogy. Non-neighbors can be
used, but only under a well-deined condition of homogeneity.
AM uses a simple decision principle to determine homogene-
ity: namely, never allow the analysis to increase uncertainty,
which means that no analogical analysis will ever allow any
unnecessary loss of information.
Unlike connectionist models, no training stage occurs in
AM, except in the trivial sense that one must collect exemplars
in order to make predictions. here is no setting of parameters
nor any prior determination of variable signiicance (see prin-
ciples and parameters theory). he signiicance of any
combination of variables is always determined in terms of the
given context for which we seek a predicted outcome.
he resulting probability of using a particular exemplar
depends upon three factors: 1) proximity: the closer the exem-
plar to the given context, the greater its chances of being selected
as the analogical model; 2) gang efect: when a group of exem-
plars in the same space behave alike, the chances of one of those
exemplars being selected is multiplied; and 3) heterogeneity: the
chances of an exemplar being used is zero whenever there is any
intervening exemplar closer to the given context that behaves
diferently (that is, has a diferent outcome).
Analogical modeling can be reinterpreted in terms of rules, as
follows: 1) Every possible true rule exists, and 2) the probability of
using a true rule is proportional to its frequency squared. A true
rule is a rule whose context is homogeneous in behavior. Despite
this equivalence, AM is not like regular rule approaches. Since all
of the true rules are said to exist, there will be overlapping rules,
redundant rules, and rules based on as little as one exemplar.
hese equivalent true rules, when considered from the perspec-
tive of AM, are created on the ly; they are not stored some-
where, waiting to be used. In fact, until an outcome is selected,
all the true rules are constructed in a kind of superpositioning
and are processed simultaneously and by the same reversible
procedures. his approach allows AM to be implemented as a
system of quantum computation.
Analogical modeling allows for imperfect memory. In fact, in
order to model the variability of language properly, it is necessary
301
Extinction of Languages
to assume that access to exemplars is not always available and, in
general, can be considered a random phenomenon.
One important result from AM is that one cannot assume in
advance which variables are signiicant and thus ignore the oth-
ers. Often, the potential value of a variable remains latent until
the model is required to predict the outcome for an appropri-
ate given context. his kind of result can occur when gangs of
non-neighbors are called upon to predict the behavior of a given
context.
Royal Skousen and Steve Chandler
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bybee, Joan. 2002. Phonological evidence for exemplar storage of multi-
word sequences. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 24: 21521.
Daelemans, Walter, and Antal van den Bosch. 2005. Memory-Based
Language Processing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goldinger, Stephen D. 1997. Words and voices: Perception and produc-
tion in an episodic lexicon. In Talker Variability in Speech Processing,
ed. K. Johnson and J. W. Mullennix, 3365. San Diego, CA: Academic
Press.
Nakisa, Ramin, and Ulrike Hahn. 1996. Where defaults dont help: he
case of the German plural system. In he Proceedings of the 18th
Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 17782. Hillsdale,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Nosofsky, Robert M. 1992. Exemplar-based approach to relating cat-
egorization, identiication, and recognition. In Multidimensional
Models of Perception and Cognition, ed. F. G. Ashby, 36393. Hillsdale,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Pierrehumbert, Janet B. 2001. Exemplar dynamics: Word frequency, leni-
tion and contrast. In Frequency Efects and Emergent Grammar, ed.
J. Bybee and P. Hopper, 119. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Skousen, Royal. 1989. Analogical Modeling of Language. Dordrecht:
Kluwer.
Skousen, Royal, Deryle Lonsdale, and Dilworth S. Parkinson. 2002.
Analogical Modeling: An Exemplar-Based Approach to Language.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based
heory of Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
EXTINCTION OF LANGUAGES
An increasing number of books, scholarly articles, and media
reports have predicted that 5090 percent of the worlds approxi-
mately 6,900 some languages may be at risk of extinction within
the next hundred years (see, for example, Krauss 1992; Nettle and
Romaine 2000; Crystal 2000; Abley 2003). his alarming igure does
not include dialects because no one knows exactly how many
languages and dialects there are, and there are no clear criteria for
distinguishing between language and dialect (see Wolfram and
Schilling-Estes 1998 for discussion of dialect endangerment).
Estimates of the number of languages in danger of extinction
vary depending on the criteria used to assess risk. UNESCOs
World Atlas of the Worlds Languages in Danger of Disappearing
(2001) estimates that 50 percent of languages may be in various
degrees of endangerment while Michael Krauss (1992) believes
that up to 90 percent may be threatened. More research is needed
in order to understand the role of various factors, such as size (i.e.,
number of speakers), status, function, and so on, in supporting
or not supporting languages. Most languages are unwritten, not
302
recognized oicially, restricted to local community and home
functions, and spoken by very small groups of people (see diglos-
sia and language policy). Languages are most obviously at
risk when they are no longer transmitted naturally to children in
the home by parents or other caretakers. UNESCO suggests that
languages being learned by fewer than 30 percent of the younger
generation may be at risk, yet there is very little information about
the number of languages no longer being transmitted.
Most projections of the scale of the problem rely on size as a
proxy for degree of endangerment, despite lack of agreement on
how many speakers are thought necessary for a language to be
viable. A large language could be endangered if the external pres-
sures on it were great (e.g., Quechua with some millions of speak-
ers) whereas a very small language could be perfectly safe so long
as the community was functional and the environment stable (e.g.,
Icelandic with fewer than 300,000). However, small languages can
disappear much more rapidly than large ones, and forces such as
the spread of farming, colonization, industrialization, and global-
ization have propelled a few languages all Eurasian in origin to
spread over the last few centuries (see modern world-system,
language and the; colonalism and language).
Manx, for instance, was spoken on the Isle of Man for about 1,500
years. Ned Maddrell, the last-known speaker, died in 1974. Not long
before his birth in 1877, nearly a third of the island (around 12,000
people) still spoke Manx. Today, all the remaining Celtic languages
such as Breton, Scots Gaelic, Irish, Gaelic, and Welsh, and so on,
are threatened to various degrees by the spread of English and/or
French. Marie Smith Jones (d. 2008) was the last person who spoke
Eyak, one of Alaskas twenty or so native languages. Only two,
Siberian Yupik (spoken in two villages on St. Lawrence Island)
and Central Yupik (spoken in seventeen villages in southwestern
Alaska) are being transmitted to children as the irst language of the
home. No children are learning any of the nearly hundred native
languages in what is now the state of California.
Based on estimates from the Ethnologue database compiled
by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (Gordon 2005), Table 1
displays the percentage of languages in diferent continents with
fewer than some number of speakers. he median number of
speakers for the languages of the world is only 5,000 to 6,000, and
nearly 85 percent of languages have fewer than 100,000. Languages
in Australia, the Paciic, and the Americas are mainly very small;
over 20 percent have fewer than 150 speakers, and nearly all have
fewer than 100,000, which is Krausss (1992) threshold for viability.
Africa, Asia, and Europe, however, have a fair number of medium
sized languages with 100,000 to 1 million speakers, in addition to
some giant languages. Such languages are probably safer in the
short term at least. Even if the viability threshold is set at the lower
level of 10,000 speakers, 60 percent of all languages may already
be endangered. he situation is slightly better in Africa (33%), Asia
(53%), and Europe (30%), but much worse in North and South
America (78% and 77%) and Australia and the Paciic (93%).
he issue of language extinction cannot be separated from
people, their identities, their cultural heritage, and their rights.
Maintaining cultural and linguistic diversity is a matter of social
justice because distinctiveness in culture and language has
formed the basis for deining human identities (see ethno-
linguistic identity; identity, language and). Because
language plays a crucial role in the acquisition, accumulation,
Family Resemblance

resemblance is the most prominent. However, it is crucial to be

Table 1. Percentages of languages according to continent of origin
clear about the nature and purpose of such terms in PI; they are
having fewer than indicated number of speakers
ofered by Wittgenstein as merely purpose-relative, perspicuous
Continent/ < 150 < 1000 < 10,000 < 100,000 <1 (ibid., 122), ways of presenting certain aspects of our language
Region Million use, proposed neither as elements of a theory of language nor as
methodological devices to be applied mechanically elsewhere.
Africa 1.7 7.5 32.6 72.5 94.2
Understanding the role and purpose of such terms is dependent
Asia 5.5 21.4 52.8 81.0 93.8 on understanding Wittgensteins vision of philosophy.
Europe 1.9 9.9 30.2 46.9 71.6 Wittgensteins vision of philosophy was that it is a therapeutic
North 22.6 41.6 77.8 96.3 100
activity, the purpose of which is the dissolution of philosophi-
America cal problems through the achievement of clarity. Such clarity is
not to be achieved by the production of philosophical theses, for
Central 6.1 12.1 36.4 89.4 100
philosophical problems and the consequent desire to produce
America
theories arise through our misunderstanding of the logic of our
South 27.8 51.8 76.5 89.1 94.1 language (1922, 3). herapeutic dialogue brings to the fore unac-
America knowledged or unconscious commitments to certain pictures
Australia/ 22.9 60.4 93.8 99.5 100 of the way things must be; once conscious, once acknowledged,
Paciic such commitments lose their thought-constraining grip.
World 11.5 30.1 59.4 83.8 95.2 One thought-constraining commitment that Wittgenstein
considered pervasive in philosophy was the commitment to
Source: From Nettle and Romaine (2000, 40). language as essentially representative: that words name objects,
the objects being their meaning ([1953] 1958, 1); as he wrote
maintenance, and transmission of human knowledge, the pros- on the irst page of the Blue Book (BB): we are up against one
pect of extinction raises critical issues about the survival of this of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment: a substan-
knowledge. Loss of linguistic diversity also threatens the scien- tive makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it (1958, 1; but
tiic study of language by diminishing the range of structures also see [1953] 1958, 4045 and 8990). It is not that such
for constructing hypotheses about universals. a view is explicitly espoused by philosophers but, rather, that it
often operates as an unconscious or unacknowledged picture
Suzanne Romaine of the way language must operate. Much of the opening of PI is
an attempt to bring to consciousness this hitherto unconscious
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING commitment, so that we might recognize it as nonobligatory; in
Abley, Mark. 2003. Spoken Here: Travels among hreatened Languages. recognizing it as such, the thought-constraining grip of this pic-
Toronto: Random House of Canada. ture will be loosened, and the philosophical problems and myths
Crystal, David. 2000. Language Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University to which it might lead, as well as the consequent desire to pro-
Press. pound theories, will dissipate.
Gordon, Raymond G., Jr., ed. 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. One strategy Wittgenstein employs is to suggest that we might
15th ed. Dallas: SIL International. Available online at: http://www. look at the use of a word when one wants to know its meaning.
ethnologue.com/. his is designed to wean one away from the desire to look for (or
Krauss, Michael. 1992. he worlds languages in crisis. Language
theorize into existence) the object for which one assumes a sub-
68: 410.
stantive must stand. As a prophylactic, he suggests that we might
Nettle, Daniel, and Suzanne Romaine. 2000. Vanishing Voices: he
Extinction of the Worlds Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
see language use and the practices in which it is embedded as a
UNESCO. 2001. World Atlas of the Worlds Languages in Danger of game ([1953] 1958, 7). Identiication of the language-game being
Disappearing. Paris: UNESCO. played such as the language-game of describing, that of order-
Wolfram, Walt, and Natalie Schilling-Estes. 1998. Endangered dialects: A ing, that of predicting, that of naming, and so on is suggested
neglected situation in the endangerment canon. Southwest Journal of as a procedure for identifying the use and thus the meaning of an
Linguistics 14: 11731. utterance. Having suggested this strategy, Wittgenstein responds
to an anticipated objection (ibid., 65) that in talking of language
in terms of diferent language-games, he leaves himself open to
F the charge of avoiding the question: What is the essence of a
language-game and thus of language as a whole? His response
to this anticipated objection is to suggest that there is nothing, of
necessity, common to all the activities that he is calling language-
FAMILY RESEMBLANCE
games, as there is nothing, of necessity, common to all uses of the
Ludwig Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations ([1953] 1958, word game. Rather, when we look and see, diferent uses of
hereafter PI) is one of the most inluential and well-known the word game do not have anything common to all, but rather
texts of twentieth-century philosophy. A number of terms a whole series of overlapping similarities and relationships (ibid.,
have been introduced into the philosophical lexicon by this 66). he notion of a family resemblance is a perspicuous way of
work. Alongside language-game, the related term family characterizing such similarities (1958 [1953], 67).

303
Feature Analysis
he suggestion of family resemblance as a way of understand-
ing the similarities between diferent language-games or diferent
uses of words helps bring to consciousness our unacknowledged
enthrallment to a picture of language-as-necessarily-having-
an-essence, that is, a picture of something being essential to
all instances of language use and to all uses of a word (such as
game). Family resemblance, as with all the terms introduced
by Wittgenstein in PI, serves, and should stay subservient to,
the therapeutic task (pace authors such as R. Bambrough and E.
Rosch and C. B. Mervis). Methodological readings and employ-
ments of the term, as in Bambrough (1960) and in Rosch and
Mervis (1975) (see prototype), therefore, fundamentally mis-
understand the language-game in which family resemblance has
its home in Wittgensteins work.
Phil Hutchinson
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Baker, Gordon. 2004. Wittgensteins Method: Neglected Aspects.
Oxford: Blackwell. Hugely important text on Wittgensteins vision of
philosophy.
Bambrough, R. 1960. Universals and family resemblances. Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society 61: 20722.
Rosch, E., and C. B. Mervis. 1975. Family resemblances: Studies in the
internal studies of categories. Cognitive Psychology 7: 573605.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London:
Routledge.
. [1953] 1958. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.
. 1958. he Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the
Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell
FEATURE ANALYSIS
Feature analysis extends to the cognitive domain the interest of
early Greek philosophers such as Democritus and Plato, in iden-
tifying the fundamental building blocks (atoms) of the physical
world (Greenberg 1967). Cognitive feature analysis starts from
the observation that animals appear to organize their perceptual
worlds in terms of inite sets of discrete abstract elements rather
than simply storing and manipulating unanalyzed streams of
continuous gradient stimuli. Evidence for the existence of dis-
crete representational features governed by abstract combi-
natorial principles (as opposed to concrete [e.g., phonetic]
categories emerging from lower-level gradient processes) comes
primarily from areas related to phonology but also from other
domains of human cognition, such as vision (Pylyshyn, Blaser,
and Holcombe 2000); computation of object similarity (Tversky
1977), induction (Sloman 1993), typicality, asymmetry, diver-
sity (Heit 1997), speech perception (Stevens 2002; Poeppel,
Idsardi, and van Wassenhove 2007), sign language phonolo-
gies, morphology, semantics, alphabet processing, and
vision and object perception (see Morgan 2003 and Vaux 2008
for references).
First explored formally by A. M. Bell (1867) for alphabets,
Alfred Kroeber (1909) for kinship systems, and A. G. Bell (1911)
for speech, feature theory was most famously developed for
phonology by Roman Jakobson, Serge Karcevsky, and Nikolaj
Trubetzkoy (1928 and [1939] 1958), with signiicant extensions
by Jakobson, Gunnar Fant, and Morris Halle ([1952] 1963),
304
Jakobson and Halle (1956), and Noam Chomsky and Halle
(1968). (It should be noted, though, that before the 1960s most
phonologists maintained that features and phonemes were not
necessarily psychological entities; cf. Sapir 1929.) he distinctive
feature theory developed in these works, which maintains that
phonemes are composed of bundles of abstract features, such
as [round], [nasal], and [high], stands in opposition to attempts
by connectionists and most phoneticians to deny the exis-
tence of features and other higher-order symbolic categories
in human linguistic cognition (cf. Shattuck-Hufnagel and Klatt
1979; Soli and Arabie 1979; Lisker 1985; and much work in artic-
ulatory phonology [Browman and Goldstein 1989]).
Evidence for Features
Auditory illusions such as the phonemic restoration efect
(Warren and Obusek 1971) crucially involve reference to higher-
level phonological representations. Evidence for these abstract
phonological representations being composed of features comes
from a wide variety of sources (see Vaux 2008 for a review of the
literature). Most frequently cited by linguists (cf. Tatham 1999;
Poeppel, Idsardi, and van Wassenhove 2007) is the patterning of
phonemes in natural classes with regard to synchronic alter-
nations and phonotactics, diachronic sound changes, and phe-
nomena of language acquisition and loss (see synchrony and
diachrony).
Class behavior of this sort, the reasoning goes, is eiciently
captured by assuming that the linguistic processes in question
operate on features rather than phonemes. For example, the
pin-pen merger of /I/ and // before nasal consonants in some
varieties of English (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006) makes refer-
ence to the distinctive feature [+nasal] rather than the individual
nasal phonemes of English, {m n }. Were the latter the case, we
would incorrectly predict the existence of similar neutralization
rules before arbitrary collections of segments such as {m s h}.
By requiring that phonological generalizations refer to feature
sets, on the other hand, we bring the inventory of possible pho-
nological rules signiicantly closer to what is actually attested.
(But see Flemming 2005 for a critique of this reasoning. For the
pin-pen merger in particular, a phonetician might respond that
the restriction to nasals can be explained phonetically, without
recourse to phonological features, by the fact that nasalization
renders formant structure less prominent and hence more con-
fusable. Some phonologists, such as Nick Clements, would reply
that phonetics underdetermines the attested range of phonolog-
ical patterns.)
Acquisition studies also support the idea that phonologi-
cal generalizations target feature-based natural classes rather
than arbitrary lists of segments. Jenny Safran and Erik hiessen
(2003), for instance, show that infants can extract feature-based
generalizations better than other generalizations, and Anne
Pycha and colleagues (2003) demonstrate that adult learners
acquire rules that manipulate a single feature faster and more
accurately than rules that manipulate two features. D. Swingley
and R. Aslin (2002) and Christopher Fennell and Janet Werker
(2003) show that humans are already sensitive to phonological
feature distinctions in the representation of familiar words by the
age of 14 months (see also speech perception in infants
and phonology, acquisition of).
Feature Analysis
Similar feature-based perceptual distinctions have been
found to take place in the auditory cortex of adults (Phillips,
Pellathy, and Marantz 2000) and in lexical access (Marslen-
Wilson and Warren 1994) and masked phoneme identiication
(Miller and Nicely 1955). he fact that humans analyze speech
signals in terms of distinctive features may be connected to the
quantal nature of auditory responses to sound, such as responses
to acoustic discontinuities and closely spaced spectral promi-
nences (Chistovich and Lublinskaya 1979; Delgutte and Kiang
1984; Stevens 1972, 1989, 2002; Clements and Ridouane 2006).
he same features have been implicated in speech produc-
tion as well, notably in studies of speech errors (Fromkin 1973;
Goldrick 2004).
In addition to the natural class patterns discussed, phonolog-
ical evidence for distinctive feature theory comes from consider-
ations of economy: Languages appear to organize their feature
systems so as to minimize the number of features employed to
distinguish among both consonants and vowels (Archangeli
and Pulleyblank 1994; Clements 2008; Poeppel, Idsardi, and van
Wassenhove 2007).
Content of Feature Theories
Feature theories tend not to strive for maximal economy, though,
preferring to balance their feature inventories in accordance with
the following principles (from Tatham 1999):
he inventory should be able to characterize all contrasting
segments in human languages;
It should be able to capture natural classes in a clear
fashion;
It should be transparent with regard to phonetic correlates.
As a rule, Jakobson prioritized simplicity and generality and
therefore had fewer features (e.g., 1215 in Jakobson, Fant and
Halle [1952] 1963); Trubetzkoy ([1939] 1958) and Chomsky and
Halle (1968) proposed much larger inventories, being more
interested in capturing phonetic detail and phonological gener-
alizations, respectively.
Phonologists also difer as to whether features are:
binary or equipollent (+/-; Jakobson, Fant, and Halle [1952]
1963; Chomsky and Halle 1968);
privative/unary (present vs. absent, as with Trubetzkoys
[1939] 1958 analysis of bilateral oral/nasal vowel contrasts;
cf. also dependency phonology [Anderson and Ewen 1987],
modiied contrastive speciication [Avery and Rice 1989],
and, with gestures instead of features, articulatory phonology
[Browman and Goldstein 1989]);
ternary (+/-/absent, as in theories that use archiphonemes
[Trubetzkoy [1939] 1958] or underspeciication [Dresher,
Piggott, and Rice 1994]);
multivalued (= the gradual oppositions of Trubetzkoy [1939]
1958; cf. also Ladefoged 1971; Lindau 1975; Williamson
1977);
variable (i.e., allowing diferent numbers of values for a given
feature in diferent contexts; Trubetzkoy [1939] 1958); or
a combination of privative features and binary features (Sagey
1986; Steriade 1995).
hough the lions share of phonologists currently appear to
prefer privative features, there are reasons to believe that fea-
tures can be ternary (q.v. Kim 2002). One needs both [+] and []
speciications, for instance, to account eiciently for exchange
rules such as height inversion in Brussels Flemish (Zonneveld
1976; Fitzpatrick, Nevins, and Vaux 2004). A third, un(der)speci-
ied value appears necessary to derive i) ternary patterns such
as Turkish voicing alternations (Inkelas, Orgun, and Zoll 1997),
ii) phonetic interpolation efects (cf. Keating 1988; Cohn 1990;
Anderson 1999), iii) permanent underspeciication (cf. Odden
2005 on tone in consonants), and iv) phonetic vacillation in
un(der)speciied segments (Vaux and Samuels 2005; Hale and
Kissock 2007).
Issues in Feature Theory
In terms of the substance of the features themselves, a number of
outstanding issues remain:
Are the features pure abstractions (as in classical structur-
alist phonology and Hale and Reiss 2000; cf. Meillet 1903
on the content of phonological reconstructions) or phoneti-
cally based (Jakobson, Fant, and Halle [1952] 1963 et seq.)?
David Odden (1991, 364) observes on this point that a theory
in which phonological features [i.e., pure abstractions] are
arbitrarily mapped onto phonetic features is more powerful
than one in which phonological and phonetic features are the
same, since the former property includes the latter.
If the content of features is phonetic, is it acoustic (Jakobson,
Fant, and Halle [1952] 1963; Flemming 1995), articulatory
(Chomsky and Halle 1968; Vaux 2008), or both interchange-
ably (Stevens 2003)? An articulatory basis for features makes
sense in light of increasingly robust evidence (pace Ohala
1996) that humans cognitively model relevant actions and
events in terms of the physical activities necessary to execute
them (motor theory; Ribot 1890; Taylor 1962; Liberman et
al. 1963; Tettamanti et al. 2005). he claims of motor theory
have recently been bolstered by imaging studies of the activ-
ity of mirror neurons in the premotor area of the monkey
brain, which are activated by both execution and observa-
tion of manual and oral actions by both irst and third person
agents (Fogassi and Ferrari 2004; see also mirror systems,
imitation, and language).
Are features the smallest units of discrete linguistic represen-
tations, or are they in turn composed of smaller elements,
either muscular (Halle 1983a) or acoustic (Kingston 2003)?
Are features universal (Chomsky and Halle 1968; Stevens
1972; Kuhl 2000), language-speciic (Pulleyblank 2001;
Pierrehumbert 2003), or drawn from a universal inventory
but only on the basis of observed phonological contrasts (the
Toronto School [e.g., Dresher, Piggott, and Rice 1994])?
Are features organized in hierarchical trees (Clements 1985;
Halle, Vaux, and Wolfe 2000), classes (Padgett 2002), or not at
all (Reiss 2003a)?
Do vowels employ some features that consonants lack
(Trubetzkoy [1939] 1958; Clements 1991)?
Do features encode markedness relations? Is it the case,
in other words, that + values of features are marked, and
values are unmarked? his seems to be the position taken
305
Feature Analysis
by Chomsky and Halle (1968). he Toronto School employs
essentially the same system, but with privative rather than
binary features; as a result, the more features a segment con-
tains, the greater its degree of markedness. (See Steriade 1995,
Reiss 2003b, and Clements 2008 for further discussion.)
Bert Vaux
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Anderson, John, and Colin Ewen. 1987. Principles of Dependency
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Anderson, Stephen. 1999. he nature of phonetic representations. Talk
given at Keio University. Available online at: http://bloch.ling.yale.
edu/Public/Phonetic_Reps.pdf.
Archangeli, Diana, and Douglas Pulleyblank. 1994. Grounded Phonology.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Avery, Peter, and Keren Rice. 1989. Segment structure and coronal
underspeciication. Phonology 6: 179200.
Baltaxe, Christiane. 1978. Foundations of Distinctive Feature heory.
Baltimore: University Park Press.
Bell, Alexander Graham. 1911. he Mechanics of Speech. New York and
London: Funk and Wagnalls.
Bell, Alexander Melville. 1867. Visible Speech: he Science of Universal
Alphabetics. London: Simkin, Marshall.
Browman, Catherine, and Louis Goldstein. 1989. Articulatory gestures
as phonological units. Phonology 6: 20151.
Chistovich, L., and V. Lublinskaya. 1979. he center of grav-
ity efect in vowel spectra and critical distance between the for-
mants: Psychoacoustical study of the perception of vowel-like stimuli.
Hearing Research 1: 18595.
Chomsky, Noam, and Morris Halle. 1968. he Sound Pattern of English.
New York: Harper and Row. See especially Chapter 7.
Clements, G. N. 1985. he geometry of phonological features. Phonology
Yearbook 2: 22352.
. 1991. Vowel height assimilation in Bantu languages. Working
Papers of the Cornell Phonetics Laboratory 5: 77123. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University.
. 2008. he role of features in phonological inventories.
In Contemporary Views on Architecture and Representations in
Phonological heory, ed. Eric Raimy and Charles Cairns. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Clements, G. N., and Rachid Ridouane. 2006. Quantal phonetics and dis-
tinctive features: A review. Proceedings of ISCA Tutorial and Research
Workshop on Experimental Linguistics, 2830 August 2006, ed. Antonis
Botinis, 1724. Athens: University of Athens Press.
Cohn, Abigail. 1990. Phonetic and Phonological Rules of Nasalization.
Ph.D. diss., University of Califonia at Los Angeles.
Delgutte, B., and N. Kiang. 1984. Speech coding in the auditory nerve: IV.
Sounds with consonant-like dynamic characteristics. Journal of the
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Dresher, B. E., G. L. Piggott, and K. Rice. 1994. Contrast in phonol-
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Fennell, Christopher, and Janet Werker. 2003. Early word learners abil-
ity to access phonetic detail in well-known words. Language and
Speech 46.2/3: 24564.
Fitzpatrick, Justin, Andrew Nevins, and Bert Vaux. 2004. Exchange rules
and feature-value variables. Presented at he 3rd North American
Phonology Conference, Concordia University, Montral, Qubec.
Flemming, Edward. 1995. Auditory representations in phonology.
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Fogassi, Leonardo, and Pier Francesco Ferrari. 2004. Mirror neurons,
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Fromkin, Victoria. 1973. Speech Errors as Linguistic Evidence. he
Hague: Mouton.
Goldrick, Matthew. 2004. Phonological features and phonotactic con-
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Greenberg, Joseph. 1967. he irst (and perhaps only) non-linguistic dis-
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Hale, Mark, and Madelyn Kissock. 2007. he phonetics-phonology
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FELICITY CONDITIONS
he distinction between felicity conditions and truth con-
ditions was introduced by J. L. Austin as the basis for dis-
tinguishing between two types of utterances, performative
and constative, respectively. As such, it is central to the view
within pragmatics that utterances perform actions, an idea
that gave rise to the theory of speech-acts. Constatives such
as Snow is white have truth conditions, that is, they assign truth
or falsity to the proposition expressed (Snow is white is true if
and only if snow is white). Performatives, on the other hand,
have felicity conditions (i.e., pragmatic conditions that must
be met if the utterance is to achieve its intended goal) and will
only function felicitously or happily if these conditions of use
are met.
So, for an utterance such as I hereby pronounce you husband
and wife to be felicitous, the following conditions must apply
(Austin 1962, 15):
307
Felicity Conditions
(1) a) here must exist an accepted conventional procedure
having a certain conventional efect (in our example, chang-
ing the wording to I reckon youre man and wife would make
it infelicitous); and b) the particular persons and circum-
stances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation
of the particular procedure invoked.
(2) he procedure should be executed by all participants cor-
rectly and completely. Stopping halfway through a marriage
ceremony, for example, would result in its being null and void.
(3) When the participants, as is often the case, are required
to have speciic thoughts or feelings or when any subsequent
conduct is speciied, the participants involved should actu-
ally (intend to) have these requisite thoughts and feelings and
conduct themselves appropriately.
Austin later abandoned the distinction between constatives and
performatives in favor of a model in which all utterances have
felicity conditions.
Acts that fail to meet criteria 1 and 2 are labeled misires, and
those that fail to meet criterion 3 abuses. his is an important
distinction: Misires simply result in the intended act not being
realized because of some deiciency in the procedure (e.g., the
speaker not having the requisite authority), whereas abuses
involve a conscious decision on the part of either the speaker (S)
or the hearer (H) to ignore or manipulate the action (e.g., when S
makes a promise that he/she does not intend to keep).
It should be noted that for Austin, the so-called uptake of the
action is an integral part of its being felicitous. So, for instance,
when S ofers H something, as in Have a cookie, not only must S
have the requisite intention of wanting to do something for H (as
stipulated in condition 3a), but H must actually act accordingly,
that is, perform the appropriate uptake and respond to the ofer
by either accepting or refusing. his notion is closely related to
the perlocution associated with the action, which is thus an
integral part of performing a speech-act happily, an aspect often
neglected by later speech-act theorists.
J. R. Searle (1969) used various classes of felicity conditions
as the main criterion for distinguishing between diferent types
of illocutionary acts. First of all, there are restrictions on the
propositional content expressed through the speech-act, which,
depending on the type of illocutionary force involved,
must be of a certain type, such as, for instance, a future act by S
(promises) or a past act by H (complaints). Secondly, there are
preparatory conditions associated with speech-act types, that
is, speciic social preconditions; for a command to be felicitous,
for instance, it is a precondition that S is in a position of author-
ity over H. Otherwise, the command will be inefective. hirdly,
Searles sincerity condition refers to the fact that S is supposed
to be sincere when performing a speech-act in order for it to be
felicitous, which crucially depends on the speaker having the
appropriate beliefs or feelings (as Austin had stated already). So,
when uttering a promise, S must sincerely intend to carry out
the future act. he fourth and most crucial criterion Searle calls
the essential condition, which summarizes the appropriate illo-
cutionary force of the utterance. So, for a promise, the speaker
assumes an obligation to commit to the carrying out of the action
expressed in the promise. It is the essential condition that deter-
mines all the others: If something is a request, that is, an attempt
308
Field (Bourdieu)
to get H to do something, it follows that this must be a future act
(propositional content), that S really wants H to carry out this
future act (sincerity condition), and that H would not have done
so spontaneously (preparatory condition). In addition to these
conditions, there are general felicity conditions applying to any
speech-act: Both S and H must be able to speak and understand
the language, they must have no pathological conditions, and
the act should not occur in a parasitical context, such as a joke
or a play.
On the basis of these criteria, Searle (1975) distinguishes ive
classes of acts: assertives or representatives (which describe
a state of afairs), directives (which attempt to get H to do
something), commissives (which commit S to some future
course of action), expressives (which express Ss psychological
state), and declarations (which efect institutional changes). As
S. C. Levinson points out, however, these classes are not really
built in any systematic way on felicity conditions (1983, 240).
he question remains how hearers determine the speakers
intended illocutionary force of the utterance in the absence of
any linguistic devices that mark it (such as performative verbs),
as is the case in indirect speech-acts.
Ronald Geluykens
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do hings with Words. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Levinson, S. C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Searle, J. R. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 1975. A taxonomy of illocutionary acts. In Language, Mind,
and Knowledge, ed. K. Gunderson, 34469. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
FIELD (BOURDIEU)
Field is one of Pierre Bourdieus two fundamental concepts
the other being habitus and is addressed in several contexts
in his work, with precise deinitions given. For example:
A ield may be deined as a network, or a coniguration, of objec-
tive relations between positions. hese positions are objectively
deined, in their existence and in the determinations they impose
upon their occupants, agents or institutions, by their present and
potential situation (situs) in the structure of the distribution of
species of power (or capital) whose possession commands access
to the speciic proits that are at stake in the ield, as well as by
their objective relation to other positions (domination, subordi-
nation, homology, etc.). (Bourdieu 1992, 97)
In fact, the notion of ield appears throughout Bourdieus
work. For example, his early studies were very much inspired
by personal experiences in the ield, in this case, Algeria and
his home environment in the Barn, southwest France (see
Bourdieu [1958] 1961 and 1962). Both of these works included
studies of language (see Grenfell 2006). However, the concept of
ield as an analytic tool developed slowly in the course of further
studies on education (see Bourdieu [1970] 1977 and [1964] 1979)
and culture (see Bourdieu [1965] 1990 and [1966] 1990) in the
Field (Bourdieu)
1960s. Increasingly, ield became Bourdieus main theoretical
tool in analyzing a wide range of social phenomena.
Bourdieus early work was developed in opposition to two
salient intellectual traditions, both of which were highly inlu-
ential during his formative years (the 1950s): existentialism and
structuralism. Existentialism is best represented by the
work of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, with its phi-
losophy of personal liberation through the subjective choices
we make in deining our lives. Structuralism is best represented
by the work of the anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss and his
study of the objective rules that can be found across cultures
and which govern human behavior taboos, myths, and so on.
here is a philosophy of language at the base of both of these
traditions, albeit from an objective and subjective point of view.
Bourdieu referred to the divide between objectivism and sub-
jectivism in the social sciences as the most fundamental, and
the most ruinous ([1980] 1990, 25). His entire theory of prac-
tice can be seen as an attempt to bridge this divide. He deined
his approach as a science of the dialectical relations between
objective structures and the subjective dispositions within
which these structures are actualised and which tend to repro-
duce them [1972] 1977, 3), and the relationship between ield
and habitus as one of ontological complicity (1982a, 47). he
same complicity can be seen in the relation between langue and
parole.
he notion of structure afords just such a reconciliation. Both
habitus and ield are structured. In other words, social spaces
need to be understood as diferentiated and thus structural
in essence. Similarly, individual cognition arises from, gener-
ates, and is generated by mental structures that are also essen-
tially structured because of their systems of diferentiation. In
a seminal paper in 1966 Intellectual Field and Creative Project
([1966] 1971) Bourdieu builds on the discovery of the historian
E. Panofsky that there was a link between Gothic art, for exam-
ple in the design of cathedral architecture, and the mental hab-
its of those involved. In other words, each was symptomatic of
the other. Bourdieu used this principle to argue that there was
a structural homology between subjective thought and objec-
tive surroundings, the latter most noticeable in forms of social
organization. Such homologies exist because they are both gen-
erated by and generate the logic of practice of the ield, itself
deined in terms of its substantive raison dtre. For Bourdieu,
therefore, social and mental structures were both structured
and structuring concrete and dynamic. Similarly, language is
both structured and structuring.
Much of Bourdieus own work subsequently brought this
understanding and methodology to a series of ield stud-
ies: for example, the academic ield ([1984] 1988); the artistic
ield ([1987] 1993); the religious ield (1982b); the judicial ield
([1986] 1987); the bureaucratic ield ([1989] 1996); the scientiic
ield (1975); the cultural ield (1993); the literary ield ([1992]
1996); the economic ield ([2002] 2005); and the political ield
(1981). Even the academic discipline of applied linguistics can
be regarded as a ield (see Grenfell 2004a). Many of these are
shown to be deined in terms of overarching power structures
in society: class, the state, economic interests. However, there
are also ields within ields microcosms which exhibit the
same features as macro ields but in local contexts. For example,
although all ields are in some ways interlocking, they all possess
a degree of independence or autonomy. hey are also bounded
with strict rules of entry. Moreover, they are ruled by speciic
values, logics, and behaviors (mostly implicit but also explicit),
which determine the legitimate ways of thinking and doing
things within the particular ield. Such legitimation is a nec-
essary part of the functioning of the ield according to its own
logic and purpose, as well as representing the interests of those
who hold position within it. Such social features also deine the
orthodoxy of the ield the doxa against which other nonor-
thodox forms oppose themselves heterodoxa. Similarly, ields
have a speciic orthodox language, which can be expressed at
any level: phonetic and syntactic, as well as gesture and
expression.
Fields are dynamic and in a constant state of lux; whole
sections of society can be understood historically as the move
from one ield structure and logic to another, for example, in
the way the ruling class in France moved from a situation of
basing their power on inherited money and industrial wealth
to one where intellectual and academic qualiications became
the main form of social legitimation. For Bourdieu, the cur-
rency of ields was capital social, economic, and cultural.
Diferent conigurations are held by individuals and groups
in the ield and can be used to buy social positioning. Fields
are therefore also the sites of struggle and conlict a process
by which they evolve according to the salient sociostructural
forces of society at large.
Fields can be studied internally or externally. In both cases,
position is all important. Bourdieu lists this method of ield
analysis (1992: 1047) as
(1) Analyze the position of the ield vis--vis the ield of
power.
(2) Map out the objective structural relations between the
positions occupied by those in the ield.
(3) Analyze the habitus of those involved.
In this way, both the logic of practice of the ield and its pro-
cedures can be rendered visible, making what is normally mis-
recognized open to public scrutiny. Studying language in this
way allows for a focus on linguistic features, while at the same
time relating them to ield position and the position of the ields
within the overall network of ields (see Encrev 1983; Fehlen
2004; Grenfell 2004b; and Vann 2004). Field positions and posi-
tioning can depend on economic power but also on symbolic
power acquired from taste, style, and language capital that
buys social prestige. Ultimately, ield language articulates and
expresses the power order found within it. In social ields, this is
the language of the state and dominant social classes.
Michael Grenfell
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bourdieu, Pierre. [1958] 1961. Sociologie de lAlgrie. New rev. ed.
Paris: Que Sais-je.
. 1962. he Algerians. Trans. A. C. M. Ross. Boston: Beacon.
, with Jean-Claude Passeron. [1964] 1979. he Inheritors: French
Students and their Relation to Culture. Trans. R. Nice. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
309
Field (Bourdieu)
, with Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, Jean Claude Chamboredon,
and Dominique Schnapper. [1965] 1990. Photography: A Middle-Brow
Art. Trans. S. Whiteside. Oxford: Polity.
. 1966. Champ intellectual et project crateur. Les Temps
Modernes 246: 865906.
. [1966] 1971. Intellectual ield and creative project. In
Knowledge and Control: New Directions for the Sociology of Education,
ed. M. F. D. Young, 16188. London: Collier Macmillan.
, with Alain Darbel and Dominique Schnapper. [1966] 1990. he
Love of Art: European Art Museums and heir Public. Trans. C. Beattie
and N. Merriman. Oxford: Polity.
. with Jean-Claude Passeron. [1970] 1977. Reproduction in
Education, Society and Culture. Trans. R. Nice. London: Sage.
. [1972] 1977. Outline of a heory of Practice. Trans. R. Nice.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 1975. he speciicity of the scientiic ield and the social conditions
of the progress of reason. Social Science Information 14.6: 1947.
. [1980] 1990. he Logic of Practice. Trans. R. Nice. Oxford: Polity.
. 1981. La representation politique: Elments pour une tho-
rie du champ politique. Actes de la receherche en sciences sociaels
37: 324.
. 1982a. Leon sur une leon. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.
, with Monique de Saint Martin. 1982b. La sainte famille.
Lpiscopat franais dans le champ de pouvoir. Actes de la recherch
en sciences sociales 44/45: 253.
. [1984] 1988. Homo Academicus. Trans. P. Collier. Oxford: Polity.
. [1986] 1987. he force of law: Toward a sociology of the judicial
ield. Hastings Journal of Law 38: 20948.
. [1987] 1993. Manet and the institutionalisation of anomie. In he
Field of Cultural Production, ed. and introd. Randall Johnson, 23853.
Oxford: Polity.
. [1989] 1996. he State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power.
Trans. L. C. Clough. Oxford: Polity.
, with Loc Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Relexive Sociology.
Trans. L. Wacquant. Oxford: Polity.
. [1992] 1996. he Rules of Art. Trans. s. Emanuel Oxford: Polity.
. 1993. he Field of Cultural Production. Oxford: Polity.
. [2000] 2005. he Social Structures of the Economy. Oxford: Polity.
Dreyfus, Hubert, and Paul Rabinow. 1993. Can there be a science
of existential structure and social meaning? In Bourdieu: Critical
Perspectives, ed. C. Calhoun, E. LiPuma, and M. Postone, 3544.
Oxford: Polity.
Encrev, Pierre. 1983. Le sens en pratique. Construction de la rfrence
et structure social de lintraction dans le couple question/rponse.
Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 46: 330.
Fehlen, Fernand. 2004 Pre-eminent role of linguistic capital in
the reproduction of the social space in Luxembourg. In Pierre
Bourdieu: Language, Culture and Education, ed. M. Grenfell and M.
Kelly, 6172. Bern: Peter Lang.
Grenfell, Michael. 1993. he linguistic market of Orlans. In
France: Nation and Regions, ed. M. Kelly and R. Bock, 7299.
Southampton: ASM & CF.
. 2004a. Language: Construction of an object of research. In
Pierre Bourdieu: Language, Culture and Education, ed. M. Grenfell and
M. Kelly, 2740. Bern: Peter Lang.
. 2004b. Bourdieu in the classroom. In Culture and Learning: Access
and Opportunity in the Curriculum, ed. M. Olssen, 4972. Wesport,
CT: Greenwood.
. 2006. Bourdieu in the ield: From the Barn to Algeria a timely
response. French Cultural Studies 17: 22339.
Grenfell, Michael, and Cheryl Hardy. 2003. Field manoeuvres: Bourdieu
and the young British artists. Space and Culture 6.1: 1934.
. 2007. Art Rules. London: Berg.
310
Film and Language
Grenfell, Michael, and David James. 1998. Bourdieu and Education: Acts
of Practical heory. London: Falmer.
Swartz, David. 1997. Fields of struggle for power. In Culture and
Power: he Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, 11742. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Vann, Robert. 2004. An empirical perspective on prac-
tice: Operationalising Bourdieus notions of linguistic habitus. In
Pierre Bourdieu: Language, Culture and Education, ed. M. Grenfell and
M. Kelly, 7384. Bern: Peter Lang.
FILM AND LANGUAGE
he thought that ilm is structured like a language is pervasive in
ilm studies. It even has echoes in ordinary talk, such as when we
speak of the grammar of ilm, of ilm as text, and of reading a
ilm. An early formulation is due to the Soviet director and theorist
Vsevelod Pudovkin (1958), who argued that each shot is akin to a
word, that the sequence of shots is like a sentence, and that the
editing relations constitute a syntax. A more sophisticated ver-
sion of the claim was developed by Sergei Eisenstein (1949), who
held ilms to be like hieroglyphic languages and ideograms.
he idea of ilm as a language became dominant in ilm stud-
ies through the inluence of semiotics in the 1960s, particu-
larly through the work of Christian Metz, who provided the most
nuanced defense of the view. Metz rejects Pudovkins analogy of
the shot with the word since a shot gives information, as does a
sentence but unlike a word. Indeed, he holds that the word, which
is the unit of language, is missing; the sentence, which is the unit of
speech, is supreme (Metz 1974, 69). he main structural parallel
to language lies in the editing relations, which constitute a gram-
mar of ilm. For instance, the alternate syntagma (parallel editing)
by which two scenes are intercut with each other in an A-B-A-B
sequence is said by Metz to be a code denoting simultaneity.
Although the view of ilm as a language is pervasive within
ilm studies, some ilm scholars are critics of the view, notably
Stephen Prince (1993), who points out that the empirical evi-
dence is at odds with the claim that ilm images have a merely
conventional relation to their denotata. Moreover, analytic
philosophers of ilm have almost universally rejected the claim
that ilm is structured like a language (for instance, Currie 1995,
11337; Harman 1977).
he reasons for this rejection are straightforward. A language
comprises a vocabulary and a syntax. he vocabulary must be
inite so that it can be learned, and the lexical units that com-
prise it refer to objects and properties by virtue of conventions.
he syntax consists of a inite set of rules for combining lexi-
cal units together. From this inite basis, a potentially ininite
number of meaningful sentences can be generated by recursive
procedures (see recursion, iteration, and metarepre-
sentation), and the meaning of these sentences derives sys-
tematically from the way that vocabulary is combined by syntax
(see compositionality).
In contrast, ilms are composed of photographs, which have
a causal, and therefore nonconventional, relation to their deno-
tata. Vocabulary is inite, but there is no limit to the number
of photographs that can be taken. And there is nothing like a
minimal lexical unit in a photograph: Each part of a photograph
of a cat denotes a part of the cat, down to the limits of visual
Film and Language Filters

indiscriminability, but if the cat is called Felix, this is a mini- FILTERS

mal unit, since its parts, such as lix, do not denote part of the
Filters are output constraints of the form *xy that rule out illicit
cat. Films are composed of pictures, but pictures do not have a
sequences generated by a computational system. Filters can be
merely conventional relation to the world. From acquaintance
added to any computational system, allowing hardware to
with at most a small number of pictures, one can go on to inter-
be kept maximally general. Filters play diferent roles in difer-
pret correctly any other picture in the same style, a feature that
ent theories, ranging from statements ensuring satisfaction of a
Flint Schier (1986) called natural generativity, grounded on the
universal property (the case ilter [Chomsky 1981; Rouveret and
fact that we use our object-recognitional capacities to recognize
Vergnaud 1980), which requires an (overtly realized) noun phrase
pictures of those objects. In contrast, acquaintance with a small
(NP) argument to be associated with a case coniguration), to the
number of words in a language does not allow one correctly to
ranked violable output constraints of optimality theory.
interpret other words in that language: Language lacks natural
Many named ilters, covering diverse phenomena, date from
generativity.
the 1970s and 1980s. Although they appear to be relections of
Nor should we hold that the shot is analogous to the sentence.
the underlying computational system and architecture, theoreti-
Indeed, Metzs version of the claim is, taken strictly, incoherent
cal understanding must await future research.
since he denies that there is anything corresponding to words
he doubly-illed C ilter (Chomsky and Lasnik 1977) excludes
in cinema; yet a sentence is by deinition composed of words.
the co-occurrence of a pronounced wh-phrase and complemen-
Moreover, there is nothing in a photograph corresponding to
tizer in Spec (speciier/subject position), CP (complementizer
subject-predicate structure. A photograph of a black cat lacks
phrase) and C (complementizer) (I wonder who (*that/*whether)
parts that pick out separately the cat and blackness, unlike the
she saw, *the [man [who that] you saw ). his ilter relates to the
sentence the cat is black.
more general question of how the distribution of overt and covert
he claim that ilms have a syntax is also untenable: if ilms have
material over hierarchical structures is determined.
nothing corresponding to words, they cannot have syntax since
he that-t ilter (Perlmutter 1971) prohibits an extraction site
syntax is what couples words together. Film structure does involve
next to the C (that, for): who do you think (*that) t left). hat-t
conventions, such as the alternate syntagma. But not all commu-
relects a very general, and theoretically not understood, prob-
nication conventions are structured linguistically: Pointing is a
lem with subject extraction.
convention, but pointing, though it is a referential device, is not
he person case constraint (Perlmutter 1971) expresses the
linguistic. And, in general, communication need not be linguistic,
interaction of case forms and person marking: It bans irst and
as is shown by animal communication. Nor does the alternate
second person accusative clitics or agreement markers in the
syntagma denote simultaneity in the way that a linguistic phrase
presence of a (third person) dative clitic or agreement marker.
such as at the same time does. he alternate syntagma joins
(French: le(ACC)-lui (DAT) but *me(ACC)-lui(DAT) *me.ACC- te.DAT ).
shots together; the linguistic phrase joins sentences or clauses
It is widely assumed to follow from universal person and case
together. However, as just noted, shots are not like sentences (or
hierarchies, either structurally hardwired or encoded as soft
clauses), and Metzs view that shots are like sentences that are not
constraints.
composed of words is incoherent. So, though it is a convention,
Some ilters deal with restrictions on recursion. he doubl-ing
the alternate syntagma is not a linguistic convention.
ilter (Ross 1977) restricts (complement) recursion of -ing forms
Philosophers of ilm have given good reasons to reject the ilm
in English. A verb like continue can combine with an -ing comple-
as language hypothesis. Film is a form of communication that, in
ment (it continued raining), unless continue is the complement
its visual dimension, communicates as pictures do: In terms of
of an -ing selecting head (*its continuing raining). he head-inal
Peirces semiotics, ilms are composed of icons, not symbols (see
ilter (Williams 1982) restricts recursion on the nonrecursive side
icon, index, and symbol).
of the head. (a man [afraid of dogs], *an [afraid of dogs] man.)
Berys Gaut here is no generally accepted theoretical understanding of how
restrictions on recursion emerge from the derivation (but see
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Koopman 2002).
Currie, Gregory. 1995. Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Hilda Koopman
Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eisenstein, Sergei. 1949. he cinematographic principle and the ideo-
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
gram. In Film Form, trans. Jay Leyda, 3844. San Diego, CA: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich. Bresnan, Joan, Shipra Dingare, and Christopher D. Manning. 2001. Soft
Harman, Gilbert. 1977. Semiotics and the cinema: Metz and Wollen. constraints mirror hard constraints: Voice and person in English and
Quarterly Review of Film Studies 2: 1524. Lummi. Proceedings of the LFG 01 Conference. Stanford, CA: CSLI
Metz, Christian. 1974. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Trans. Publications.
Michael Taylor. New York: Oxford University Press. Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht,
Prince, Stephen. 1993. he discourse of pictures: Iconicity and ilm stud- the Netherlands: Foris.
ies. Film Quarterly 47.1: 1628. . 1995. he Minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pudovkin, V. I. 1958. Film Acting and Film Technique. Trans. Ivor Chomsky, Noam, and Howard Lasnik. 1977. Filters and control.
Montagu. London: Vision. Linguistic Inquiry 8: 425504.
Schier, Flint. 1986. Deeper into Pictures: An Essay on Pictorial Koopman, Hilda. 2002. Derivations and complexity ilters. In Dimensions of
Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Movement, ed. A. Alexiadiou et al., 15189. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

311
Focus
Perlmutter, David. 1971. Deep and Surface Constraints in Syntax. New
York: Rinehart and Winston.
Ross, John. 1972. Doubl-ing. Linguistic Inquiry 3: 6186.
Rouveret, Alain., and Jean-Roger Vergnaud. 1980. Specifying reference
to the subject: French causatives and conditions on representations,
Linguistic Inquiry 11: 97202.
Williams, Edwin. 1982. Another argument that passive is transforma-
tional. Linguistic Inquiry 13:1603.
FOCUS
Focus refers to a constituent within a sentence that is highlighted
or emphasized by grammatical means. English sentences with
marked accent patterns provide prototypical examples, like (1)
(focus on the direct object):
(1) hey ordered COfeeF at the bar.
Focus realization typically has a high pitch accent, a local
maximum of the voices fundamental frequency, on the syllable
co (indicated by capitals). As important as, or perhaps even more
important than, the pitch accent on the focus itself is the lack of
pitch accents following it, for example, on bar.
he privative syntactic feature F is a common means of focus
representation in the syntax. he F-markers in the tree (its focus
structure) mediate between semantic interpretation and pro-
sodic realization.
he pragmatic functions of focus seem wide and varied, and
are often characterized in vague terms such as speakers high-
lighting, most important information, evoking alternatives, and
so on. More formal approaches toward focus interpretation start
from certain rather solid facts about the discourse distribution
of focus: In an answer to a constituent question, the phrase cor-
responding to the question phrase is focused: (1) can answer the
question What did they order at the bar? but not, for example,
Where did they order cofee? Who ordered cofee? or What
happened? Similarly, in corrections, the item that diers from
the corrected sentence is focused: (1) can be a correction to
hey ordered beer at bar but not, for example, hey spilled
cofee at the bar.
To predict such facts, the notion of alternatives proves useful.
Focused cofee in (1) has, among others, beer, milk, steak, and so
on as alternatives; nonfocused elements (the background) dont
introduce alternatives. By pointwise combination, the whole
sentence gets assigned an alternative set statements of the form
they ordered X at the bar, where X ranges over the alternatives
to cofee. Roughly, the alternative set of an answer must corre-
spond to other conceivable answers to the question; the alterna-
tive set of a correction must include the meaning of the utterance
corrected.
Alternative semantics, as it is called, also accounts well for
cases in which focus inluences truth conditional content,
in association with particles such as only: (2) excludes ordering
juice, beer, and so on at the bar (i.e., other members of the alter-
native set), but not ordering cofee elsewhere, or ordering sau-
sages at the grill:
(2) hey only ordered COfeeF at the bar.
If one accepts these uses of focus as deinitional, one can
explore focus realization beyond pitch accents. Many languages
312
Foregrounding
use cleftlike sentences or, more generally, marked constituent
order in corrections or answers (often in addition to intonation);
also common are special morphemes, as well as prosodic phrase
boundaries, to mark the edge of a focus.
Daniel Bring
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Beaver, David, and Brady Clark. 2008. Sense and Sensitivity: How Focus
Determines Meaning. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Bring, Daniel. 2007. Intonation, semantics and information structure.
In he Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces, ed. Gillian Ramchand
and Charles Reiss, 44573. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kadmon, Nirit. 2001. Formal Pragmatics: Semantics, Pragmatics,
Presupposition, and Focus. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Rooth, Mats. 1996. Focus. In he Handbook of Contemporary Semantic
heory, ed. Shalom Lappin, 27197. Blackwell.
Schwarzschild, Roger. 1999. GIVENness, avoidF and other constraints
on the placement of accent. Natural Language Semantics 7: 14177.
FOREGROUNDING
Foregrounding is the patterned deviation from anticipated lan-
guage, which is an important characteristic of literariness. In
general usage, the term sometimes describes the many conven-
tional means that language provides for certain information to
be made prominent in discourse, such as by variation of inten-
sity in speech or by given/new organization in syntax. In liter-
ary analysis, however, foregrounding refers speciically to the
efects achieved by textual devices that interrupt the automatic
processes of linguistic understanding. Foregrounding shifts a
readers or listeners attention away from linguistic meaning to
linguistic form so as to impart the sensation of things as they are
perceived and not as they are known, in the Russian formalist
Viktor Shklovskys words ([1917] 1988, 20).
At all levels of linguistic organization, perceptual processes
entail anticipation. Foregrounding devices defeat the process-
ing beneits of anticipation either by creating unconventional
patterns or by deviating from established patterns. Sonic-
level devices, such as alliteration, rhyme, assonance, (see
rhyme and assonance), and meter, are typically adduced as
examples of foregrounding because the repetition of individual
phones or regular metrical structures falls outside of languages
conventionalized means of sense making. Once these uncon-
ventional patterns are detected, some processing resources
are diverted to construing their signiicance. Devices operating
at more complex levels of structure must work diferently, as
ellipsis, metaphor, and irony, for example, regularly occur
in normal speech. Foregrounding with these devices is said to
be achieved by an unusual degree of diiculty, which requires
the reader consciously to attend to construal. Deviation from
expected patterns can also be achieved at any level of linguistic
organization. Creative punctuation, neologism, oxymoron, con-
versational infelicity, and unusual narrative structuring are just a
few of the many devices that have been recognized as deautoma-
tizing linguistic perception.
If foregrounding involves the creation of new patterns or
deviation from expected patterns, one must ask what gives rise
to the expectations against which foregrounding is recognized.
Forensic Linguistics
In most cases, expectations arise from experience with every-
day language, such as those evidenced by garden-path phe-
nomena in syntactic processing (see psycholinguistics),
but expectations can also arise from genre-speciic knowledge.
Emily Dickinsons verse, for example, often metrically evokes the
religious hymns that would have been familiar to her commu-
nity. he masculine end-rhyme patterns of these hymns estab-
lish an expectation against which the slant rhymes of her verse
stand out.
Foregrounding devices are not unique to literary texts but can
be found in traditionally nonliterary genres, such as advertising
copy or political speech. In literary texts, however, they usually
participate in larger patterns of meaning or coherence, such as
those established by thematization or iconicity (see literari-
ness for a discussion of the latter two terms). Empirical research
has established some support for the contribution of foreground-
ing devices to the literariness of a text. In studies, segments of
short stories with a higher degree of foregrounding were read at
a slower rate and were rated as more striking and more emotion-
ally evocative than segments with low foregrounding (Miall and
Kuiken 1994).
Claiborne Rice
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Miall, David S., and Don Kuiken. 1994. Foregrounding, Defamiliarization,
and Afect: Response to Literary Stories. Poetics Today 22: 389407.
Shklovsky, Viktor. [1917] 1988. Art as technique. Trans. Lee T. Lemon
and Marion J. Reis. In Modern Criticism and heory, ed. David Lodge,
1630. London: Longman.
Van Peer, Willie. 1986. Stylistics and Psychology. London: Croom Helm.
FORENSIC LINGUISTICS
Forensic linguistics refers to the use of linguistic expert evidence
in legal proceedings, and more broadly, to linguistic research in
legal contexts. Most forensic linguistic work published in English
pertains to the common law adversarial legal system of the United
Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Any area of
linguistics can have a forensic application. In order to do foren-
sic linguistics, a person must qualify as a linguist, specializing in
a particular area, such as phonetics or sociolinguistics.
here are a few graduate programs in forensic linguistics, but
most practitioners are linguists with a doctorate in their special-
ization who apply this expertise to legal questions and contexts.
Forensic phonetics is used mostly in disputes over transcrip-
tion of incriminating recorded speech, and over the identiica-
tion of individuals who have committed a language crime such
as a threat, bribe, or hoax by means of a recorded voice mes-
sage. acoustic phonetics is often combined with articu-
latory phonetics. Analysis of anonymous voice recordings
can be compared with recordings of suspects. Similarly, linguis-
tic discourse analysis of a written text may help to identify
an author, for example, of a so-called suicide letter in a case
where police have grounds for suspecting murder, rather than
suicide. For example, if discourse analysis inds striking similari-
ties between a suicide letter and previous (uncontested) corre-
spondence of the spouse of the deceased, together with a striking
lack of similarity to earlier correspondence by the deceased, this
analysis may be used to support a murder charge, in conjunc-
tion with nonlinguistic evidence. Most forensic linguists believe
that their evidence should not be used for positive identiication
(to identify a particular person as the perpetrator of the language
crime), but either for negative identiication (to exclude one or
more persons) or to provide supporting evidence for either a
positive or negative identiication.
Another forensic application of discourse analysis is in the
examination of covertly recorded conversations between under-
cover agents and suspects, as in drug cases. Topic analysis can
trace the extent to which a suspect initiates talk of criminal plans,
for example, or is merely an interlocutor in a conversation where
such planning is initiated by the agent.
Forensic linguists also analyze comprehension diiculties
in police interviews, mostly of suspects who speak English as a
second language or second dialect. his is of particular rel-
evance to questions involving suspects understanding of their
rights, including the right to silence and to a lawyer. Until the
widespread introduction of recording of police interviews with
suspects, discourse analysis had also been used to examine
claims of fabricated confessions to police. hese included the
notorious UK cases of the Guildord Four and Birmingham Six, in
which forensic discourse analysis was part of the complex legal
cases that resulted in overturned convictions of people found
to be falsely accused of involvement in bombings by the Irish
Republican Army.
he analysis of complex legal language often involves exami-
nation of morphology, syntax, and semantics in arguments
over legal interpretation (including the comprehensibility
of instructions to the jury) or trademarks. A famous U.S. example
of the latter concerned the use of the Mc preix to connote budget
quality in the name McSleep Inns for a new hotel chain. While
forensic linguists analyzed its generic use as a productive mor-
pheme, the McDonalds corporation/company argued that they
alone owned the use of this preix with this meaning.
Forensic linguists who testify in court often face the contradic-
tion between good scholarship, which entails openness to com-
peting theories and explanations, and the adversarial nature of
the legal system, which can make such openness problematic.
Research on courtroom hearings shows how rules of evi-
dence control and construe the contributions of witnesses in a
highly regulated speech event. he syntactic form of questions,
combined with metapragmatic rules that prevent witnesses from
asking questions or introducing their own topics, results in a
highly asymmetrical interaction, where most of a witnesss story
is told by lawyers. lexical semantics can uncover strategic
ways in which word choice constructs opposing views of reality.
critical discourse analysis of cross-examination in rape
cases reveals the central role of linguistic choices in construct-
ing defendants as passive participants without responsibility or
agency, for example through the use of nominalizations such as
the fondling of the breasts, and agentless sentences such as
there wasnt any major sexual activity.
A particular concern of sociolinguists has been the partici-
pation of vulnerable witnesses, especially children, second lan-
guage, and second dialect speakers. he language addressed
to child victim-witnesses in abuse cases is often complex and
313
Formal Semantics
confusing, and compromises their ability to tell their story. Second
language speakers rely on interpreters, whose role is often mis-
understood by legal professionals and witnesses. Microanalysis
demonstrates linguistic challenges involved in courtroom inter-
preting, inding that it is much easier for interpreters to accu-
rately interpret propositional meaning than pragmatic meaning.
Second dialect speakers are disadvantaged by widespread igno-
rance about subtle dialectal diferences. Where there are also
important cultural diferences in communicative style, as with
Australian Aboriginal English speakers, the possibilities for mis-
communication are disturbing. In Australia, forensic linguistics
has contributed to positive developments in delivery of justice
generally for Aboriginal people, and speciically in legal cases of
some individuals.
Forensic linguistics is also concerned with the language of
lawyer-client interviews and alternative legal processes, such as
mediation. For example, conversation analysis investigates
the extent to which mediators talk is neutral, as well as the ways
in which gender afects talk between lawyers and their clients.
Another recent focus is on the transformation of oral narratives
into written legal documents (see intertextuality). While
most forensic linguistics is concerned with criminal or civil law,
linguists concerns have recently been extended to immigration
law, notably immigration oicials use of untrained analysts who
examine the speech patterns of asylum seekers to determine
their national origin.
Diana Eades
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Eades, Diana. 2010. Sociolinguistics and the Legal Process. Bristol:
Multilingual Matters. Comprehensive examination of sociolinguistic
research, examining how language works and does not work in the
legal process.
Gibbons, John. 2003. Forensic Linguistics: An Introduction to Language
in the Justice System. Oxford: Blackwell. Accessible introduction to the
ield.
Tiersma, Peter. 1999. Legal Language. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. Authoritative textbook on written and spoken language in the
legal process.
FORMAL SEMANTICS
Formal semantics is an approach to semantics, the study of
meaning, with roots in logic, the philosophy of language, and
linguistics, and since the 1980s a core area of linguistic theory.
Characteristics of formal semantics treated in this entry include
the following: Formal semanticists treat meaning as mind inde-
pendent (though abstract), contrasting with the view of meanings
as concepts in the head (see i-language and e-language
and meaning externalism and internalism ); formal
semanticists distinguish semantics from knowledge of semantics
(Lewis 1975, Cresswell 1978), which has consequences for the
notion of semantic competence. A central part of the meaning
of a sentence on this approach is its truth conditions, and
most, though not all, formal semantics is model theoretic, relat-
ing linguistic expressions to model-theoretically constructed
semantic values cast in terms of truth, reference, and possible
314
worlds. his sets formal semantics apart from approaches that
view semantics as relating a sentence just to a representation
on another linguistic level (logical form) or a representation
in an innate language of thought. he formal semanticist
could accept such representations as an aspect of semantics but
would insist on asking what the model-theoretic semantic inter-
pretation of the given representation-language is (Lewis 1970).
Formal semantics is centrally concerned with composition-
ality at the syntax-semantics interface, how the meanings of
larger constituents are built up from the meanings of their parts
on the basis of their syntactic structure, and with the relation
between compositional sentence meaning and meaning in
discourse.
The History of Formal Semantics
Formal semantics developed out of the work of Richard
Montague (193071) (see montague grammar), with impor-
tant contributions by other philosophers, logicians, and linguists.
Montague built on Alfred Tarskis recursively deined model-
theoretic semantic interpretation for logical formulas based on
their recursively deined syntax. Donald Davidson, whose own
approach to formal semantics is not model theoretic, was also
inluential in urging a truth conditional semantics for
natural language, arguing from learnability that a initely
speciiable compositional semantics for natural languages must
be possible (1967). Montague grammar evolved into formal
semantics through the work of philosophers and linguists, devel-
oping a variety of approaches (Partee 1996; Partee with Hendriks
1997; Portner and Partee 2002).
Gottlob Frege, whose ideas were part of the foundation of
Tarskis and Montagues work, took an antipsychologistic view
of meanings, and so did many other logicians and philosophers
(including Bertrand Russell and Rudolf Carnap). But formal
semanticists who are linguists are very much concerned with
human semantic competence. he history of formal semantics has
been colored by tension between the Fregean antipsychologistic
tradition and the Chomskyan tradition of focusing on linguistic
competence, a tension only partially resolved. One step toward
a resolution has come from recognizing a distinction between
meaning, which may exist outside the head (E-language),
and knowledge of meaning, or semantic competence, which is
very much inside the head (but should probably not be called
I-language, a term better reserved for a semantic representation
language in approaches that include one.)
What is semantic competence? he answers to this ques-
tion will naturally be diferent with respect to diferent seman-
tic frameworks. For formal semanticists, it is common to take
the fundamental characterization of semantic competence to
involve the knowledge of truth conditions: Given a sentence in
a context, and given idealized omniscience about the facts con-
cerning some possible situation, a competent speaker can judge
whether the sentence is true or false in that situation. From that
basic competence, allowing idealizations about computational
capacity, it follows that a competent native speaker can also
make judgments about entailment relations between sentences.
So semantic competence is widely considered to consist in
knowledge of truth conditions and entailment relations of sen-
tences of the language.
Formal Semantics
The Current State of the Field
At the heart of formal semantics are the principle that truth
conditions form a core aspect of meaning and the methodolog-
ically central principle of compositionality. Diferences among
approaches can often be traced to three crucial theory-depen-
dent terms in the principle of compositionality: he meaning of
a whole is a function of the meanings of its parts.
MEANINGS. David Lewis provided a famous strategy for thinking
about what meanings are: In order to say what a meaning is, we
may irst ask what a meaning does, and then ind something that
does that (1970, 22). here are diferent proposals about what
to count as meanings (or as the linguistically relevant aspects of
meanings) within formal semantics. Montague formalized inten-
sions of sentences as functions from possible worlds and variable
assignments to truth values (see intension and extension;
proposition.) R. Stalnaker (1976), David Kaplan (1979), Hans
Kamp (1981), and Irene Heim (1982) emphasized the importance
of context-dependent expressions; Kaplan introduced the char-
acter of an expression, a function from contexts to intensions.
Kamp and Heim introduced a more dynamic semantics, treating
meaning as a function from contexts to contexts. Jon Barwise and
John Perry (1983) and Angelika Kratzer (1989) argued for replac-
ing possible worlds by (possible) situations, which for Kratzer are
parts of possible worlds, enabling more ine-grained analysis of
meanings (see Kratzer 2007).
IS A FUNCTION OF. How are meanings put together? How does
the compositional mapping from syntax to semantics work? he
question of the sorts of functions that are used to put meanings
of parts together is inextricably linked to the questions of what
meanings are and what count as syntactic parts. Frege (1892)
took the basic semantic combining operation to be function-ar-
gument application: Some meanings are construed as functions
that apply to other meanings (see compositionality). With a
syntax such as categorial grammar providing the relevant
partwhole structure, Freges function-argument principle could
be enough; with other kinds of syntax, other operations may be
needed as well.
Formal semanticists also difer on whether a level of semantic
representation is hypothesized to mediate between syntax
and model-theoretic interpretation. Montagues own work exem-
pliied both direct model-theoretic interpretation (Montague
1970) and two-stage interpretation via a language of intensional
logic (Montague 1973). Many linguists work with some interme-
diate semantic representation. Either approach can be composi-
tional: A two-stage interpretation procedure is compositional if
the syntax-to-semantic-representation mapping rules are com-
positional and the model-theoretic semantics of the representa-
tion language is also compositional. When those conditions are
met, the intermediate language is, from a model-theoretic per-
spective, in principle eliminable. But linguists hypothesize that it
may have some psychological reality: It may represent an aspect
of the means by which humans compute the mapping between
sentences and their meanings. But it is a major challenge to ind
empirical evidence for or against such a hypothesis.
It is worth noting that it is possible to advocate direct mod-
el-theoretic interpretation without being antipsychologistic,
via the notion of mental models (Johnson-Laird 1983). But
approaches using mentally represented formulas (logical forms,
conceptual representations) and computations on such formu-
las, as advocated by Ray Jackendof for many years, are preferred
by many Chomskyan linguists.
Kamps (1981) discourse representation theory (DRT) uses
the discourse representation structure (DRS) as a noneliminable
intermediate level of representation, with claimed psychologi-
cal reality: Kamp hypothesized that his DRS could be a common
medium playing a role in language and as objects of proposi-
tional attitudes. Kamp argued against full compositionality;
he was challenged by Jeroen Groenendijk and Martin Stokhof
(1991), who argued that a fully compositional dynamic seman-
tics could accomplish what Kamp could do with DRT. Reinhard
Muskens (1993) proposed a reconciliation with his composi-
tional discourse representation theory.
PARTS (SYNTAX). he relation between the preceding issues and
syntax shows up clearly in debates about direct compositional-
ity: Some linguists argue that a direct compositional model-
theoretic semantics can apply to nonabstract surface structures
(Barker and Jacobson 2007), without abstract syntactic represen-
tations, movement rules, or a level of logical form. Advocates
of direct compositionality use an enriched arsenal of semantic
combining rules, including not only function-argument applica-
tion but also function composition and a number of type-shift-
ing operators. here may or may not be an inevitable trade-of
between optimizing syntax and optimizing semantics; it is a sign
of progress that many linguists work on syntax and semantics
with equal concern for both.
An Example
We illustrate the methods of formal semantics without formal
details by considering one aspect of the analysis of restrictive rel-
ative clauses like who fed Fido in (1a) and (1b).
(1) a. I saw a boy who fed Fido.
b. I saw every boy who fed Fido.
In the 1960s, there were debates about whether the relative
clause combines with the noun boy, as in structure (2), or with
the phrases a boy, every boy, as in structure (3).
(2) I saw [a / every [boy [who fed Fido ]]]
(3) I saw [[ a / every boy] [who fed Fido ]]
here were also debates about the semantics of the relative
clause, with some arguing that in (1a) who fed Fido means and
he fed Fido, whereas in (1b) it means if he fed Fido, creating ten-
sion between the uniform surface structure of who fed Fido in
(1a) and (1b) and the very diferent underlying semantic inter-
pretations posited for them (see Stockwell, Schachter, and Partee
1973 ). he formal semantics perspective suggests searching for
a unitary syntax and meaning for who fed Fido and locating the
semantic diference between (1a) and (1b) in the semantics of
a and every. he solution (due to Quine [1960] and Montague
[1973]) requires structure (2): he noun and relative clause
denote sets, and their combination denotes the intersection of
those two sets. hen the phrase boy who fed Fido denotes the set
315
Formal Semantics
{x: x is a boy and x fed Fido}. Diferent theories of the semantics
of determiners give diferent technical implementations of the
rest of the solution, but that irst step settles both the syntactic
question and the core of the semantics. Sentence (1a) asserts
that the set of boys who fed Fido and the set of boys that I saw
overlap; (1b) says that the set of boys I saw is a subset of the set of
boys who fed Fido. See Partee (1995) for a fuller argument, and
Barwise and Cooper (1981), Heim (1982), and Kamp (1981) for
treatments of the semantics of determiners.
A Second Example
Also informally, we illustrate the beginnings of the more dynamic
semantics of Kamp (1981) and Heim (1982). Consider the con-
trasting minidiscourses in (4) and (5):
(4) A baby was crying. It was hungry.
(5) Every baby was crying. #It was hungry. (# means
anomalous.)
On the Kamp-Heim theory, an indeinite noun phrase (NP) like
a baby in (4) introduces a novel discourse referent into the con-
text, and the pronoun it in the second sentence of (4) can be
indexed to that same discourse referent, whose lifespan can
be a whole discourse, not only a single sentence. he discourse
referent introduced by an essentially quantiicational NP like
every baby in (5), however, cannot extend beyond its clause, so
the pronoun it in (5) is anomalous. he Kamp-Heim theory also
includes an account of the famous donkey-sentences of Peter
Geach (1962), variants of which are given in (6ab).
(6) a. If a farmer owns a donkey, he always beats it.
b. Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it.
hese sentences had previously resisted compositional analysis,
even with the tools of Montague grammar and its early exten-
sions. On Kamps and Heims theories, the indeinite a donkey
introduces a discourse referent into the local context, but has no
quantiicational force of its own; it ends up being bound by the
unselective quantiiers always in (6a) and every in (6b). he
theories thus involve the interdependent areas of quantiica-
tion and anaphora, and relating sentence semantics to discourse
semantics and pragmatics, giving rise to much new work in these
areas.
Formal Semantics and Cognitive Science
Formal semantics as developed within linguistics is as much a
part of cognitive science as any other part of linguistics, but there
are a number of misunderstandings and controversies surround-
ing this issue. his concluding section touches on a number of
broader issues and controversies.
In semantics, possibly unlike syntax or phonology, ones idi-
olect is not determined solely by ones own semantic knowl-
edge. Meanings are conventional social constructs (Lewis
1975), and as Hilary Putnam (1975) observed, his inability
to distinguish beeches from elms does not render the words
beech and elm synonymous or vague in his language, since the
meanings of our words and the truth conditions of our sen-
tences depend in signiicant part on the conventions of our
language community and only in part (for instance, in using
316
vague words with particular less vague meanings) on what
we have in mind when we speak (division of linguistic
labor). How the word elm in Putnams mouth can refer to
elms is a major topic in the philosophy of language (see natu-
ral kind terms ). Such issues distinguishing E-language from
I-language are especially acute for proper names (Kripke 1972).
Formal semanticists emphasize that human semantic compe-
tence includes the higher-order intention to use words with
their shared conventional meanings, unlike Humpty Dumpty
in hrough the Looking-Glass (When I use a word, Humpty
Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, it means just what I
choose it to mean neither more nor less.) At the same time,
formal semantics and pragmatics make room for the fact that
in a discourse context, conversational partners may mutually
understand possibly mistaken speakers meanings, so that a
false sentence can sometimes be used to express a true prop-
osition. For instance, hat beech is dying might successfully
communicate the fact that a certain tree that is in fact an elm
is dying, since the demonstrative that may be enough to enable
the hearer to recognize which tree is meant.
Some argue that formal semantics does not belong within
linguistics if formal semantics is concerned with truth, since
linguistics is concerned only with mental representations. Such
an attitude relects both a methodological decision (Noam
Chomskys position excludes model-theoretic semantics because
it extends beyond autonomously linguistic levels of represen-
tation) and a misunderstanding, since formal semanticists are in
fact not interested in truth but in truth conditions, and one can
very well know what a situation must be like for a sentence to be
true in it, without knowing what the facts are and so not know-
ing the actual truth value. For most of us, this is the case with a
sentence like here is now a white cat sitting in a window of an
apartment in Baltimore in which a piano teacher gave piano les-
sons in the 1950s.
he compositionality principle is arguably one aspect of
universal semantic competence that distinguishes human lan-
guage from all animal languages (see compositionality).
cognitive linguists sometimes charge that compositional-
ity is incompatible with the prevalence of metaphor. Formal
semanticists reply that metaphor principally involves shifts in
lexical meanings, and that the interpretation of metaphor is
driven in part by compositionality, that is, by the need to ind
suitable meanings for the parts so that they can be combined
into a meaningful whole. Compositionality is also a driving force
in childrens acquisition of lexical meanings: When context sup-
plies a plausible meaning for the whole and syntax supplies a
suitable structure, the child can use knowledge of the meaning
of the whole and of the other parts to solve for the meaning
of the unknown part. (Cf. the carefully structured context for the
learning of novel color words in experiments reported in Carey
[1978, 271]): Bring me the chromium tray not the blue one, the
chromium one.)
A word about the relation between word meaning (see
also lexical semantics) and compositional meaning: Some
semantic theories have focused largely on word meaning, while
formal semantics has focused on compositional meaning, but
in principle every semantic theory must address both, as well
as their integration. Formal semanticists give special attention
Formal Semantics
to the semantic types of lexical items, since that is crucial to the
combining principles. A classic work on lexical meaning and
word-formation rules is Dowty (1979); see also Partee (1995).
As a inal observation, we note that in contemporary work,
attention to context dependence has reached such a point that
formal semantics and formal pragmatics are close to becoming a
single discipline, and the role of context in determining meaning
is so important as to require a richly context-dependent notion of
meaning (semantics-pragmatics interaction).
Barbara H. Partee
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bach, Emmon. 1989. Informal Lectures on Formal Semantics. New
York: State University of New York Press. A user-friendly nontechnical
introduction.
Barker, Chris, and Pauline Jacobson, eds. 2007. Direct Compositionality.
Oxford Studies in heoretical Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Barwise, Jon, and Robin Cooper. 1981. Generalized quantiiers and nat-
ural language. Linguistics and Philosophy 4: 159219.
Barwise, Jon, and John Perry. 1983. Situations and Attitudes. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Carey, Susan. 1978. he child as word learner. In Linguistic heory and
Psychological Reality, ed. M. Halle et al., 26493. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Chierchia, Gennaro, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 1999. Meaning and
Grammar: An Introduction to Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
An accessible introduction to formal semantics and pragmatics.
Cresswell, M. J. 1978. Semantic competence. In Meaning and
Translation: Philosophical and Linguistic Approaches, ed. F. Guenthner
and M. Guenthner-Reutter, 943. London: Duckworth.
Davidson, Donald. 1967. Truth and meaning. Synthese 17: 30423.
Dodgson, Charles (Lewis Carroll). 1871. hrough the Looking-Glass and
What Alice Found here. London: Macmillan and Co.
Dowty, David. 1979. Word Meaning and Montague Grammar: he
Semantics of Verbs and Times in Generative Semantics and in
Montagues PTQ. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Reidel.
Frege, Gottlob. 1892. ber Sinn und Bedeutung. Zeitschrift fr
Philosophie und philosophische Kritik C: 2250.
Gamut, L. T. F. 1991. Logic, Language, and Meaning. Vol. 2. Intensional
Logic and Logical Grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. An
excellent introduction to formal semantics and its logical foundations;
requires some prior logic.
Geach, Peter. 1962. Reference and Generality. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Groenendijk, Jeroen, and Martin Stokhof. 1991. Dynamic predicate
logic. Linguistics and Philosophy 14: 39100.
Heim, Irene. 1982. he semantics of deinite and indeinite noun
phrases. Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts.
Heim, Irene, and Angelika Kratzer. 1998. Semantics in Generative
Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell. A systematic introduction to selected
topics in semantics that lays solid foundations for constructing and
arguing for formal semantic analyses.
Johnson-Laird, Philip N. 1983. Mental Models. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Kamp, Hans. 1981. A theory of truth and semantic representation. In
Formal Methods in the Study of Language: Mathematical Centre Tracts
135, ed. J. A. G. Groenendijk et al., 277322. Amsterdam: Mathematical
Centre.
Kaplan, David. 1979. On the logic of demonstratives. Journal of
Philosophical Logic 8: 8198.
Forms of Life
Kratzer, Angelika. 1989. An investigation of the lumps of thought.
Linguistics and Philosophy 12: 60753.
. 2007. Situations in natural language semantics. In he Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring ed.), ed. Edward N. Zalta. Available
online at: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2007/entries/
situations-semantics/.
Lappin, Shalom, ed. 1996. he Handbook of Contemporary Semantic
heory. Oxford: Blackwell. Contains articles by leading semanticists on
wide spectrum of topics, representing both formal semantics and other
approaches.
Lewis, David. 1970. General semantics. Synthse 22: 1867.
. 1975. Language and languages. In Language, Mind, and
Knowledge, ed. K. Gunderson, 335. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Montague, Richard. 1970. English as a formal language. In Linguaggi
nella Societ e nella Tecnica, ed. Bruno Visentini et al., 189224.
Milan: Edizioni di Comunit.
. 1973. he proper treatment of quantiication in ordinary English.
In Approaches to Natural Language, ed. K. J. J. Hintikka et al., 22142.
Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Reidel.
Muskens, Reinhard. 1993. A compositional discourse representation
theory. In Proceedings of the 9th Amsterdam Colloquium, ed. P. Dekker
and M. Stokhof, 46786. Amsterdam: ILLC, University of Amsterdam
Press.
Partee, Barbara. 1995. Lexical semantics and compositionality. In An
Invitation to Cognitive Science. Vol. 1: Language. Ed. L.Gleitman and
M. Liberman, 31160. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
. 1996. he development of formal semantics in linguistic theory.
In he Handbook of Contemporary Semantic heory, ed. S. Lappin,
1138. Oxford: Blackwell.
Partee, Barbara H., with Herman L.W. Hendriks. 1997. Montague gram-
mar. In Handbook of Logic and Language, ed. J. van Benthem and A.
ter Meulen, 591. Amsterdam and Cambridge, MA: Elsevier and MIT
Press.
Portner, Paul, and Partee, Barbara H., eds. 2002. Formal Semantics: he
Essential Readings. Oxford: Blackwell. A collection of classic papers
from the beginnings of the ield to the late 1980s, with an introductory
overview essay.
Putnam, Hilary. 1975. he Meaning of Meaning. In Minnesota Studies
in the Philosophy of Science. Vol. 7: Language, Mind, and Knowledge. Ed.
Keith Gunderson, 13193. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Quine, Willard van Orman. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Stalnaker, R. 1976. Propositions. In Issues in the Philosophy of Language, ed.
A. Mackay and D. Merrill, 7999. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Stockwell, Robert P., Paul Schachter, and Barbara H. Partee. 1973. he
Major Syntactic Structures of English. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston.
FORMS OF LIFE
Forms of life, an expression associated with Ludwig
Wittgenstein, is not one he made that much use of, employing it
only ive times in his Philosophical Investigations. It is not clear
from his usage exactly what he had in mind. Here are statements
in which the phrase occurs:
It is what human beings say that is true or false; and they
agree in the language they use. hat is not agreement in opin-
ions, but in forms of life (1958, 38), and
What has to be accepted, the given, is so one could say
forms of life (1958, 226), as well as
317
Forms of Life
I would like to regard this certainty, not as something akin
to hastiness or supericiality, but as a form of life (hat is
very badly expressed and probably badly thought as well).
(1969, 46)
Its use may nonetheless be associated with Wittgensteins
attempt to humanize matters especially logic that philosophers
had been prone to idealize to the extent of making them seem to
surpass all possibility of creation by merely human beings, mean-
ing that their objectivity must surely reside elsewhere than in the
contingent facts and incidental variety of human life. He seeks to
reassert the connection between seemingly immutable necessi-
ties (of logic and mathematics especially) and the contingencies
of human life. To counteract the idealization of logic into some-
thing almost superhuman, Wittgenstein is prepared to say that I
want to conceive of it [logic] as something that lies beyond being
justiied or unjustiied; as it were, something animal (1969, 47).
Arguments over Interpretation
From the previous quotations, it can be seen that Wittgenstein
does not enumerate the kinds of things that he has in mind, gives
no examples of the forms of life nor speciies what makes them
such. Inevitably, there is disagreement over what he meant by
forms of life. Is it that human beings, of every time and place,
have the same forms of life or, alternatively, that cultural varia-
tion amongst them is possible? (Emmett 1990, 213).
Gertrude Conway (1989, 423) lists four rival
interpretations: those
(1) equating forms of life with language games,
(2) interpreting forms of life on an organic model,
(3) equating forms of life with cultural systems, and
(4) presenting human nature as a form of life.
Among the sort of things that forms of life might cover, then,
are a) the human creature, which is a form of life when compared
with other forms of life (such as plants or ish), and b) activities
characteristic of a kind of creature: Periodically going to sleep
is one form of life in which humans engage, digging burrows
characteristic of rabbits. Wittgenstein certainly does not want to
lose sight of the fact that human beings are animals but, equally,
is aware that human beings are a distinctive sort of animal, a
language-using social one. In consequence, c) groups of people
may difer in cultural forms, as rural dwellers might have very
diferent forms of life than urban ones, or d) may difer in rela-
tively speciic ways of acting, including ways of speaking, within
a cultural community their ways of measuring, for example.
The Natural History of Human Beings
he development of language is connected with human biology
(but it is the physiognomy of the organism and the organization
of its life that Wittgenstein has in mind, not the physiology of its
nervous system). Language is made possible by characteristic
human capacities and responses, but the language developed is
not a direct outgrowth of those characteristics. he development
of language is interwoven with the formation of practical life,
for this involves the creation of ways of speaking integral to the
practical activity. he remark that to imagine a language means
to imagine a form of life (Wittgenstein 1958, par. 19) can be
318
understood as a challenge: Try to imagine understanding a lan-
guage without knowing something about how those who use the
language live their lives, some of the diferent sorts of things they
do. he language as a totality is an entirely contingent assem-
blage, accumulated ways of speaking that come from diferent
parts of life (as add, subtract, divide come from calculation, or
swing, putt, birdie from golf).
he direction in which natural human responses can be culti-
vated varies greatly, according to the multifarious ways in which
circumstances impact upon them, but Wittgenstein emphasized
both that and the importance of the natural, animal responses
of human beings. For example, consider the way in which the
human animal naturally responds to a pointing gesture (follow-
ing the direction of the inger) when other animals (cats, cows)
do not, and the role that gesture can play when embedded in a
parentchild relation in associating a color name with a color
sample. his is an efective way of teaching words because chil-
dren naturally respond to the rulelike connection made between
word and sample, and after a very few examples, can make the
same association for themselves. Such natural, and common,
reactions are what enable practices, as well as the development
of their associated language forms, to ind purchase as standard
practices: Agreement in the way color samples are extended to
cases is the basis for the possession of standard color names.
On that same basis, of course, varied color vocabularies have
arisen.
Necessities and Certainties
Forms of life can be considered as points of reference for two key
philosophical concerns, necessities and certainties. he obser-
vations on such forms of life as a childs responses to teaching
are not contributions to some general and systematic account of
the nature of human life and its practices, for they are taken by
Wittgenstein to be utterly obvious. hey are the sort of incontest-
able truths that cause philosophical confusion because they are
apt to be left out of account when someone moves into theoriz-
ing mode. Wittgensteins common method is to draw attention
back to these apparent matters to show that what seems deeply
puzzling when considered in isolation from the hurly-burly of
ordinary lives may cease to seem puzzling when set against the
background of practical activities from which it has been cut of.
Necessities
here can be a strong temptation to think that our institu-
tions, practices, and ways of acting can (sometimes at least) be
explained in terms of necessities. Logic was especially important
to Wittgensteins relections throughout his life. It was widely
assumed that the power of logical forms derived from the fact
that they relected necessities intrinsic to the way things are
logic could be no other way than it is because it corresponds to
unalterable features of reality. Wittgensteins was no attempt to
do away with logical necessities altogether, only to dereify them,
and to persuade, more generally, that our institutions and prac-
tices do not follow from external necessities. Rather, our idea
of necessity lows from our institutions, practices, and so on.
Getting things the right way round is, as Peter Winch summa-
rized it, a matter of understanding that logical relations among
propositions themselves depend on social relations between
Forms of Life
men (1958, 126). Wittgenstein suggested that when it seemed
that things could not be conceived of as being otherwise, this
was, if not an illusion, at most a function of the part that they
played in our ways of acting, not a sign of their essential relation
to any necessitating external reality. he temptation to appeal to
such externally imposed necessities could be alleviated by draw-
ing attention to the degree to which seemingly transcendental
necessity is connected with some familiar, unobtrusive feature of
the human organism or its life, by imagining the consequences
of some gross change in the character of the human organism,
or by imagining a cultural practice signiicantly diferent from
our own. hus, one need only imagine children not naturally
responsive to the rulelike link between instruction and sample to
quickly realize that color vocabularies and arithmetic (for exam-
ple) depend on the trainable susceptibilities of children for their
existence as stable practices. Alternatively, imagine how another
people might have diferent practices from ours in counting or
measuring, and then appreciate that the speciic forms that serve
these tasks in our society do not comprise the unique, eternal, or
universal essence of counting or measuring, and work as well as
they do only because they have connections with the practical
needs of our distinctive way of life.
Certainties
Certainty, too, is to be connected to natural human reactions,
to the way in which we commonly act without doubts or hesita-
tions we go about many of our activities in a way in which doubt
is simply absent; it does not occur to us. he philosophers stock
idea of certainty is something that we are entitled to only after
we have arrived at some inal, unquestionable justiication, have
given grounds for our practices that allow no logical possibility
of error. Rather than accepting the skeptics query as to whether
it is logically possible to doubt, Wittgenstein prefers, instead,
to relect on where we do doubt. We do not possess certainties
because we have arrived at them through critical relections, but
acquire them as an integral part of coming to mastery in various
activities. Is this not, however, simply a complete concession to
the skeptic? All our practices lack justiication; we cannot iden-
tify any ultimate, unquestionable self-evident truth that under-
pins them. No, it is a counterskeptical move: he certainties that
are incorporated into our learning and thus into our practices
are ones that serve as conditions of intelligibility, that shape our
capacity to understand what a doubt could be in an actual case.
hese certainties are not held in place by an utterly uncritical atti-
tude toward them but by their connection with our ways of doing
practical things, in which they act as the setting within which the
notions of doubt and justiication can have content.
he doubts that the skeptic tries to induce are pretend ones
only, ones that by their very design are empty of empirical
content, and are, as genuine doubts, unintelligible. Skepticism
is right only insofar as its continuing pressure for further justii-
cation until a rock-bottom certainty is reached leaves us (quite
soon) in a position where we have no further justiications. It is
misguided to think that this shows that we have been forced to
admit our inability to respond to legitimate demands for justi-
ication. Rather, we run out of justiications at the same point at
which the skeptics demands for justiication themselves pass
the limits of what can make sense as a doubt. We can settle the
Frame Semantics
doubts about the length of a table by recommending the use of a
tape measure as a dependable way of precisely determining this,
but what sorts of serious doubts are there about a tape measures
dependability in such a case? Our notion of reliable measure-
ment is very much tied up with the ways we use tape measures,
but, at the same time, we should not think that our practices of
measurement are the only ones that could possibly make sense,
and that other people might not have ways of measuring for
which our tape measures would be useless.
Wes Sharrock
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Conway, Gertrude.1989. Wittgenstein on Foundations. New
Jersey: Humanities Press International.
Emmett, Kathleen. 1990. Forms of life. Philosophical Investigations 13
(July): 21331.
Garver, Newton. 1990. Form of life in Wittgensteins later works.
Dialectica 44.1/2: 175201.
Hanling, Oswald. 2002. Wittgenstein and the Human Form of Life.
London: Routledge.
Hunter, John. 1968. Forms of life in Wittgensteins Philosophical
Investigations. American Philosophical Quarterly 5: 23343.
Winch, Peter. 1958. he Idea of a Social Science. London: Routledge.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations 2d ed.
Oxford: Blackwell.
. 1969. On Certainty. Oxford: Blackwell.
FRAME SEMANTICS
his term refers to a wide variety of approaches to the system-
atic description of natural language meanings. he one com-
mon feature of all these approaches which, however, does not
suiciently distinguish frame semantics from other frameworks
of semantic description is the following slogan from Charles
Fillmore (1977a):
Meanings are relativized to scenes.
According to this slogan, meanings have internal structure that is
determined relative to a background frame or a scene. he eas-
iest way to understand this thesis is by way of example. he fol-
lowing one is from Fillmore (1977c):
Suppose that two identical twins Mark and Mike are both in
a hospital sitting on the edge of their beds in exactly the same
position. When a nurse walks by Marks room, she says: I see that
Mark is able to sit up now, and when she walks by Mikes room
she remarks: I see that Mike is able to sit down now. Drawing on
what we know about hospitals our hospital background scenes
or frames we will interpret the two remarks of the nurse rather
diferently, thereby relativizing the meanings of her remarks to
the relevant scenes.
Another often-cited example of Fillmore (1977c) that clearly
demonstrates the previous thesis is the diference in meaning
between the following two sentences:
(1) I spent three hours on land this afternoon.
(2) I spent three hours on the ground this afternoon.
he background scene for the irst sentence is a sea voyage, while
the second sentence refers to an interruption of air travel. his
319
Frame Semantics

illustrates Fillmores use of the term frame as an idealization of a Table 1.

coherent individuatable perception, memory, experience, action,
BUYER buy GOODS (SELLER) (PRICE)
or object (1977c).
In order to understand frame semantics, it is helpful to begin Subject object From for
with a brief history. From here we turn to an overview of the most Angela bought the owl from Pete for $ 10
important theoretical concepts. Next, the relationship of frame
Eddy bought them for $ 1
semantics to one speciic version of construction grammar
is introduced and some examples analyzed. he entry ends with a Penny bought a bicycle from Stephen
short summary of applications of frame semantics and a note on
Table 2.
formalization. Usually, frame semantics is taken to be a very infor-
mal approach to meaning, but nevertheless, some approaches VERB BUYER GOODS SELLER MONEY PLACE
relating frame semantics to formal semantics exist. Buy subject object From For at
Sell to
History
Cost indirect subject Object at
here are at least two historical roots of frame semantics; the irst
object
is linguistic syntax and semantics, especially Fillmores case
grammar; the second is artiicial intelligence (AI) and the notion Spend subject on Object at
of frame introduced by M. Minsky (1975) in this ield of study.
A case frame in case grammar was taken to characterize a
small abstract scene that identiies (at least) the participants of prototypical descriptions of scenes. A prototype has the advan-
the scene and thus the arguments of predicates and sentences tage that it does not have to cover all possible aspects of the
describing the scene. In order to understand a sentence, the lan- meaning of a phrase; in other words, a prototype does not have to
guage user is supposed to have mental access to such schema- provide necessary and suicient conditions for the correct use of
tized scenes. a phrase. Fillmore (1977b) illustrates the use of prototypes within
he other historical root of frame semantics is more diicult to frame semantics by an analysis of the concept widow. he word
describe. It relates to the notion of frame-based systems of knowl- widow is speciied with respect to a background scene in which
edge representations in AI. his is a highly structured approach people marry as adults, they marry one person, and their lives
to knowledge representation that collects together information are afected by their partners death and perhaps other proper-
about particular objects and events and arranges them into a tax- ties. he advantage of a theory of meaning based on the prototype
onomic hierarchy familiar from biological taxonomies. However, concept, compared to a theory that insists on stating necessary
the speciic formalism suggested in the aforementioned paper by and suicient conditions for the meaning of a phrase, is that it
Minsky was not considered successful in AI . does not have to care about certain boundary conditions; that is,
it does not have to provide answers for questions like Would you
Some Basic Theoretical Principles call a woman a widow who has lost two of her three husbands but
he central theoretical concepts characterizing frame seman- who had one living one left? Fillmore (1977b). In a case like this,
tics originated with Fillmore and did not change much since his whether the noun widow applies or not is unclear since certain
irst writings on this approach. In order to understand the most properties of the background frame for this concept are missing.
important notions of frame semantics, let us briely consider a he concept prototype is not unproblematic either, however.
typical example of a frame, the commercial transaction frame that Note that Fillmore does not use this concept with respect to words
demonstrates the origin of frame semantics from Fillmores case but with respect to frames or scenes. Some words like bird cer-
frames as well. In Table 1, the concept frame is applied to verbs tainly have prototypes, but others may not have a corresponding
like buy with the intention to represent the relationsips between prototype. What is a prototypical vegetable, for instance, or a pro-
syntax and semantics. he verb buy, according to Table 1, requires totype corresponding to the adjective small? Moreover, applica-
obligatorily a buyer and goods and optionally a seller and a price. tions of prototype theory often involve two diferent measures for
Verbs with related meanings, such as sell, are expected to have category membership. A penguin, for example, is certainly not a
the same meaning slots but in a syntactically diferent order. his prototypical bird, but nobody hesitates to judge it as a bird. he
clearly shows the relation to Fillmores case frames. Combining other measure of category membership is typically used in the
these frames results in the commercial transaction frame about analysis of vague predicates, for instance, color adjectives. It may
which Table 2 provides partial information. Of course, the PLACE- sometimes be hard or even impossible to assign a given object to
feature just marks the beginning of an open-ended list, since every the category of pink or red entities .
event in Table 2 can be further speciied for instance, with respect Another central notion within frame semantics is the concept
to time. Moreover, the collection of frames forms an ordered struc- proiling. R. Langacker (1987) uses the example of hypotenuse for
ture. For instance, the commercial transaction frame itself is part explaining this concept. One can easily draw a mental picture
of the more general transaction frame prototypically expressed by of the concept hypotenuse. he interesting question concerning
the ditransitive verb give. his indicates that the system of depen- this mental picture is this: Can you imagine what a hypotenuse is
dencies between frames forms an intricate hierarchical structure. without imagining the whole right triangle? he answer is clearly
he concept prototype is one of the most important con- no. he triangle and the plane in which it is included is a frame,
cepts of frame semantics. Frames should be understood as and the terms hypotenuse and right triangle are interpreted

320
Frame Semantics
with respect to this frame, but they proile diferent parts of the
frame.
he following example taken from Goldberg (1995) illustrates
lexical proiling of participants. Consider the following difer-
ences between the closely related verbs rob and steal.
(3) a. Jesse robbed the rich (of all their money).
b. *Jesse robbed a million dollars (from the rich).
(4) a. Jesse stole money (from the rich).
b. *Jesse stole the rich (of money).
hese distributional facts can be explained by a semantic dif-
ference in proiling. In the case of rob, the victim and the agent
(the thief) are proiled; in the case of steal, the agent and the valu-
ables are proiled. Representing proiled participants in bold-
face, A. Goldberg proposes the following argument structure for
rob versus steal:
rob <thief target goods>
steal <thief target goods>
However, Goldbergs main concern is with constructions, for
which she uses frame semantics in order to provide highly struc-
tured rich meanings for them.
Construction Grammar: A Closely Related Framework
What are constructions? Here is Goldbergs deinition: A con-
struction is deined to be a pairing of form with meaning/use
such that some aspects of the form or some aspect of the mean-
ing/use is not strictly predictable from the component parts or
from other constructions already established to exist in the lan-
guage (1995, 68).
here is no doubt that constructions exist. Morphemes, for
instance, satisfy Goldbergs deinition. But do constructions dif-
ferent from morphemes exist? his is, of course, what defendants
of construction grammar try to show. Here, we take the existence
of constructions other than morphemes simply for granted.
Consider the following examples:
(5) Margaret baked Peter some cookies.
(6) Martin sneezed the napkin of the nightstand.
he peculiarity of example (5) is due to the fact that the verb
bake, which normally has two arguments, is used with three
arguments here. Peculiar as this sentence is, we nevertheless can
make sense of it. Margaret baked some cookies with the inten-
tion to give them to Peter. Note that this interpretation helps us
to make sense of the recipient role, which is not provided by the
verb bake; that is, we think of this sentence as an instance of the
ditransitive construction of which a more standard example is
(7) John gave Mary a present.
he crucial claim of construction grammar is that this is not
due to diferent basic meanings of the verb bake but due to the
integration of this verb plus its meaning into the ditransitive con-
struction, which has a meaning of its own. herefore, construc-
tion grammar distinguishes the semantics of argument structure
constructions from the semantics of the verbs that instantiate
them. An advantage of this approach is that it accounts for novel
uses of verbs in speciic constructions. In (6), the intransitive
verb sneeze has to be integrated into the caused motion construc-
tion and, therefore, is forced to be interpreted as some kind of
action.
Both verbs and constructions are associated with frame
semantic meanings. However, in contrast to the rich frame
semantic representations of verbs, the basic constructions are
associated with a more abstract semantics. hese basic con-
structions and their frames are supposed to be independent of
a particular language. hey are cross-cultural structures that are
deeply entrenched in human experience. his is the content of
Goldbergs scene encoding hypothesis.
Scene Encoding Hypothesis: Constructions that correspond to
basic sentence types encode as their central senses event types
that are basic to human experience. (Goldberg 1995)
Applications
Frame semantics has a wide range of applications reaching
from subields of linguistic theorizing such as morphology,
to typolology, linguistic discourse analysis, and
language acquisition. However, the central and most success-
ful application seems to be (computational) lexicography. In a
frame-based lexicon, the frame accounts for related senses of a
single word and its semantic relations to other words. A frame-
based lexicon, therefore, ofers more comprehensive informa-
tion than the traditional lexicon. An example is Petruck (1986), a
study of the vocabulary of the body frame in modern Hebrew. An
example of computational lexicography is the FrameNet-System
(see Boas 2002).
Formalization
Although frame semantics does not lend itself easily to formaliza-
tion there is an early approach by J. M. Gawron (1983) in which
basic insights of frame semantics were formalized by notations
like those of the LISP programming language, in combination
with situation semantics. A more recent approach is presented in
van Lambalgen and Hamm (2005) in which scenarios a concept
closely related to the frame concept are formalized as certain
kinds of logic programs. An explicit formalization of the combi-
nation of frame semantics and construction grammar based on
this work can be found in Andrade-Lotero (2006).
Fritz Hamm
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Aitchison, J. 1994. Words in the Mind. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Andrade-Lotero, E. 2006. Meaning and Form in the Event Calculus.
M.A. thesis, University of Amsterdam, MOL-200601.
Atkins, B. T. S. 1995. he role of the example in a frame semantics dic-
tionary. In Essays in Semantics and Pragmatics, ed. M. Shibatani and
S. hompson, 2542. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Boas, H. 2002. Bilingual FrameNet dictionaries for machine transla-
tion. In Proceedings of the hird International Conference on Language
Resources and Evaluation. Vol. 4. Ed. M. G. Rodriguez and C.P.S.
Araujo, 136471. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain: University of Las
Palmas de Gran Canaria.
Fillmore, C. 1977a. he case for case reopened. In Syntax and Semantics 8:
Grammatical Relations, ed. P. Cole, 5981. New York: Academic Press.
321
Framing Effects
. 1977b. Scenes-and-frames semantics. In Linguistic Structure
Processing, ed. A. Zambolli, 5582. Amsterdam: North Holland.
. 1977c. Topics in lexical semantics. In Current Issues in
Linguisticheory, ed. R. W. Cole, 76138. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Fillmore, C., and C. Baker 2000. Frame Net. Available online at: http://
www.icsi.berkeley.edu/framenet.
Gawron, J. M. 1983. Lexical representation and the semantics of comple-
mentation. Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley.
Goldberg, A. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to
Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hamm, F., H. Kamp, and M. van Lambalgen. 2006. here is no opposi-
tion between formal and cognitive semantics. heoretical Linguistics
32: 140.
Langacker, R. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 1. heoretical
Prerequisites. Stanford, CA; Stanford University Press.
Minsky, M. 1975. A framework for representing knowledge. In he
Psychology of Computer Vision, ed. P. H. Winston, 21177. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Petruck, M. 1986. Body part terminology in Hebrew. Ph.D. diss.,
University of California, Berkeley.
van Lambalgen, M., and F. Hamm. 2005. he Proper Treatment of Events.
Malden, MA: Blackwell.
For more information, the interested reader is advised to consult the
Frame Semantics Bibliography drawn up by Jean Mark Gawron.
FRAMING EFFECTS
A framing efect is usually said to occur when equivalent descrip-
tions of a decision problem lead to systematically diferent
decisions. Framing has been a major topic of research in the psy-
chology of judgment and decision making and is widely viewed
as carrying signiicant implications for the rationality debate
(e.g., Shair and LeBoeuf 2002). Framing efects are commonly
taken as evidence for incoherence in human decision making
and for the empirical inapplicability of the rational actor models
used by economists and other social scientists. he irst part of
this entry presents a brief review of the empirical phenomena;
the second part describes the standard normative interpretation
of these empirical efects. Although the literature has not typi-
cally focused on the structure of human conversational environ-
ments, framing efects involve utterances selected by a speaker
for a listener. A inal section considers the possible implications
of communicative factors for a normative and descriptive under-
standing of framing efects.
Empirical Review
In this section, we follow I. P. Levin, S. L. Schneider, and G. J. Gaeths
(1998) taxonomy of framing efects into three categories: attribute
framing, risky choice framing, and goal framing.
In attribute framing, a single attribute of a single object is
described in terms of either a positively valenced proportion
or an equivalent negatively valenced proportion. he subject
is then required to provide some evaluation of the object thus
described. he typical inding is a valence-consistent shift (Levin,
Schneider, and Gaeth 1998): Objects described in terms of a
positively valenced proportion are generally evaluated more
favorably than objects described in terms of the correspond-
ing negatively valenced proportion. For example, in one study,
322
beef described as 75% lean was given higher ratings than beef
described as 25% fat (Levin and Gaeth 1988); similarly, research
and development (R&D) teams are allocated more funds when
their performance rates are framed in terms of successes rather
than failures (Duchon, Dunegan, and Barton 1989). he valence-
consistent shift in attribute framing is a robust efect, observed in
a large range of experimental environments, with obvious impli-
cations for marketing and persuasion.
In risky choice framing, subjects are presented with two
options in a forced-choice task. he two options are typically
gambles that can be described in terms of proportions and prob-
abilities of gains or losses. Usually, one of these options is a sure
thing (in which an intermediate outcome is speciied as certain),
while the other is a risky gamble (in which extreme good and bad
values are both assigned non-zero probabilities). he gamble and
sure thing are both described either in terms of gain outcomes
and probabilities or in terms of equivalent loss outcomes and
probabilities. he two options are usually equated in expected
value (i.e., the mean outcome expected over many repeated tri-
als), enabling the framing researcher to interpret observed pat-
terns of preference in terms of subjects risk attitudes. Within this
rubric, preferences for the sure thing indicate risk aversion, and
preferences for the gamble indicate risk seeking. he best-known
risky choice framing problem is the so-called Asian Disease
Problem (Tversky and Kahneman 1981). In it, subjects irst read
the following background blurb:
Imagine that the U.S. is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual
Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two possible
programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume
that the exact scientiic estimates of the consequences of these
programs are as follows:
Some subjects are then presented with options A and B:
(A) If program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved.
(B) If program B is adopted, there is a one-third probability
that 600 people will be saved and a two-thirds probability that
no people will be saved.
Other subjects are presented with options C and D:
(C) If program C is adopted, 400 people will die.
(D) If program D is adopted, there is a one-third probabil-
ity that nobody will die and a two-thirds probability that 600
people will die.
he robust experimental inding is that subjects tend to prefer
the sure thing when given options A and B but tend to prefer the
gamble when given options C and D. Note, however, that options
A and C are equivalent, as are options B and D. Subjects thus
appear to be risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses, a
central tenet of prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky 1979).
In prospect theory, it is the decision makers private framing of
the problem in terms of gains or losses that determines his or
her evaluation of the options; the framing manipulation is thus
viewed as a public tool for inluencing this private frame.
In goal framing, subjects are urged to engage in some activ-
ity (e.g., wearing seatbelts). his plea involves a description
of either the advantages of participating in the activity or the
Framing Effects
corresponding disadvantages of not participating. he most
common result is that subjects are more likely to engage in the
activity when the disadvantages of not engaging, rather than the
advantages of engaging, are emphasized (Levin, Schneider, and
Gaeth 1998).
Normative Analysis
Risky-choice framing efects have been put forward as positive
evidence for prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky 1979),
a theory of choice that aims to be both formally tractable and
cognitively realistic. However, the focus in the framing litera-
ture has been largely on the negative evidence that framing
efects allegedly raise against classical expected utility theory
and other so-called rational actor models. he literature on
attribute framing, in particular, is concerned almost exclusively
with the normative and practical implications of the empiri-
cal efects. Framing efects, D. Kahneman has noted, are
less signiicant for their contribution to psychology than for
their importance in the real world and for the challenge they
raise to the foundations of a rational model of decision mak-
ing (2000, xv). his raises the important questions: Are fram-
ing efects always counternormative? And if so, what norm or
norms do they violate?
In an important paper, A. Tversky and Kahneman argued that
framing efects violate a bedrock normative condition of descrip-
tion invariance [a]n essential condition for a theory of choice
that claims normative status so basic that it is tacitly assumed
in the characterization of options rather than explicitly stated as
a testable axiom (1986, S253). Any theory of rational choice, they
argued, must stipulate that the same problem will be evaluated
in the same way, regardless of how the problem is described
thus, equivalent descriptions should lead to identical decisions.
Expected utility theory, for example, satisies this principle: it
evaluates choice options strictly as a function of probability and
outcome, with no speciication of probability-outcome fram-
ing. his reducibility of decision problems to a canonical form
is clearly a theoretical convenience; the principle of description
invariance states that it is also a normative requirement. Because
the framing phenomena observed both in the laboratory and in
real-world situations violate the description invariance prin-
ciple, these efects are taken to imply that no theory of choice
can be both normatively adequate and descriptively accurate
(ibid., S251).
Framing, Communication, and Rational Norms
Although framing efects are investigated mainly in relation to
normative choice models, such efects are clearly bound up with
human language, and closely related phenomena have been
investigated by language scholars. For example, markedness
theorists have documented subtly diferent information con-
veyed by opposing polar adjectives. he school of cognitive
linguistics has drawn on a more general notion of frame in
its treatment of fundamental issues in semantics (see frame
semantics). Framing, in the broad sense, enters crucially into
many processes of communication and can only be fully
understood in the context of those processes.
Experimental framing efects involve utterances selected by
speakers for listeners, but the standard normative analysis,
described in the previous section, applies to listener efects with-
out any consideration of associated speaker phenomena (i.e.,
regularities in how speakers choose frames in typical linguistic
environments). Researchers have tended to interpret the experi-
mental efects as if the experimenter had somehow surgically
implanted a framing of the decision problem into the subjects
brain. However, because linguistic utterances are employed,
regularities in speaker behavior may be relevant to the norma-
tive and descriptive understanding of listener behavior: If speak-
ers tend to choose diferent frames as a function of background
conditions, then listeners may reasonably draw inferences from
the speakers choice of frame. If knowledge of these background
conditions is relevant to the listeners choice, then the frames,
while logically equivalent, would not be information equivalent.
S. Sher and C. R. M. McKenzie (2006; cf. McKenzie and Nelson
2003) argued that the frames studied in the attribute framing
literature are commonly information nonequivalent, because
speakers tend to frame options in terms of attributes that are
relatively salient. For example, a generally impressive R&D team
is more likely to be described in terms of its success rate than a
generally incompetent team with the same success/failure rate.
A positive frame thus highlights the salience of the positive attri-
bute in the speakers conception of the option information rel-
evant to its evaluation.
Experiments convey information to subjects in framed state-
ments, and researchers have generally assumed that the only
information content is logical information content. he framing
of the logical content is assumed not to convey information but
simply to inluence the listeners construal of the logical content.
In this way, the usual normative analysis of framing experiments
leans on an implicit assumption of the information equivalence
of logically equivalent frames. However, while the logical equiva-
lence of a pair of frames can usually be determined on inspection
(though see Jou, Shanteau, and Harris 1996), a determination of
information equivalence requires empirical study of the human
communicative environments in which speakers typically frame
objects and options. At least in the domain of attribute framing,
logical equivalence does not imply information equivalence.
Whether the study of communicative environments will have
similar implications for traditional normative conclusions drawn
in risky choice and goal framing is an open question. here also
remain important questions about how, and how lexibly, listen-
ers use subtle information that is, in principle, available in par-
ticular framing experiments. However, an analysis of speaker
regularities in human communicative environments is likely to
be of some signiicance in any research area in which informa-
tion presented to experimental subjects is evaluated against a
normative standard of information equivalence (cf. Hilton 1995;
McKenzie 2004; Sher and McKenzie 2008; Schwarz 1996).
Shlomi Sher and Craig R. M. McKenzie
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Duchon, D., K. J. Dunegan, and S. L. Barton. 1989. Framing the problem
and making decisions: he facts are not enough. IEEE Transactions on
Engineering Management (February): 257.
Hilton, D. J. 1995. he social context of reasoning: Conversational infer-
ence and rational judgment. Psychological Bulletin 118: 24871.
323
Frontal Lobe
Jou, J., J. Shanteau, and R. J. Harris. 1996. An information processing
view of framing efects: he role of causal schemas in decision mak-
ing. Memory and Cognition 24: 115.
Kahneman, D. 2000. Preface. In Choices, Values, and Frames, ed.
D. Kahneman and A. Tversky, ixxvii. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Kahneman, D., and A. Tversky. 1979. Prospect theory: An analysis of
decision under risk. Econometrica 47: 26391.
Levin, I. P., and G. J. Gaeth. 1988. How consumers are afected by the
framing of attribute information before and after consuming the prod-
uct. Journal of Consumer Research 15: 3748.
Levin, I. P., S. L. Schneider, and G. J. Gaeth. 1998. All frames are not
created equal: A typology and critical analysis of framing efects.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 76: 14988. A
thorough taxonomy, review, and analysis of attribute, risky choice, and
goal framing efects.
McKenzie, C. R. M. 2004. Framing efects in inference tasks and
why they are normatively defensible. Memory and Cognition 32:
87485.
McKenzie, C. R. M., and J. D. Nelson. 2003. What a speakers choice of
frame reveals: Reference points, frame selection, and framing efects.
Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 10: 596602.
Schwarz, N. 1996. Cognition and Communication: Judgmental
Biases, Research Methods, and the Logic of Conversation. Mahwah,
NJ: Erlbaum. A summary of empirical evidence indicating that many
supposed shortcomings of human judgment are due to experimen-
tal subjects going beyond the literal meaning of the information
provided by the researcher and drawing on the pragmatic meaning.
Shair, E., and R. A. LeBoeuf. 2002. Rationality. Annual Review of
Psychology 53: 491517.
Sher, S., and C. R. M. McKenzie. 2006. Information leakage from logi-
cally equivalent frames. Cognition 101: 46794.
. 2008. Framing efects and rationality. In he Probabilistic the precentral gyrus. he primary motor cortex executes skilled,
Mind: Prospects for Bayesian Cognitive Science, ed. N. Chater and M.
Oaksford, 7996. Oxford: Oxford University Press. A summary of prob-
lems of information nonequivalence in the framing literature and of
the application of information equivalence to other areas of psycho-
logical research.
Tversky, A., and D. Kahneman. 1981. he framing of decisions and the
psychology of choice. Science 211: 4538.
. 1986. Rational choice and the framing of decisions. Journal of cortex (see Figure 2). his somatotopic mapping, also know as
Business 59: S25178. An inluential discussion of risky choice framing
efects and their implications for models of rational choice.
FRONTAL LOBE
he evolution of the frontal lobes in humans is strongly associ-
ated with the advent of language, the primary behavior distin-
guishing humans from other primate species. Although not
much is known about how the frontal lobes evolved, we do know
that there was a marked expansion 3.3 to 2.5 million years ago
in Australopithecus Africanus, a prehistoric form of human. his
frontal lobe development, coupled with growth of the temporal
lobes also associated with language function, coincides with the
creation and use of tools. Tool use may have given rise to the
development of hand preference and eventual lateralization of
language functions. Verbal communication likely evolved from
hand signals to vocalizations, which progressively came to sig-
nify common referents (i.e., words) used in spoken language.
hus, the genesis of a linguistic symbolic communication sys-
tem inluenced, and in turn was inluenced by, brain growth and
324
reorganization. he primary role of the frontal lobes has devel-
oped from behavior regulation through language, giving rise to
abstract thinking and the ability to plan and execute complicated
actions. It may very well be that the development of language
and the frontal lobes propelled humans from a hunting and
predatory species to a social species, capable of modifying and
manipulating their environments.
Neuroanatomical and Neurophysiological Overview
In humans, the frontal lobes are the largest lobes of the brain
and comprise about one-third of the cerebral cortex. As seen in
Figure 1, the frontal lobes lie anterior to the central (Rolandic)
sulcus and superior to the lateral (Sylvian) issure. Anatomically,
there are several important landmark sulci and gyri in the frontal
lobe. he precentral sulcus lies anterior and parallel to the cen-
tral sulcus and comprises a vertically placed precentral gyrus.
he superior and inferior frontal sulci, extending from the pre-
central sulcus, separate the lateral surface of the frontal lobe into
three horizontally parallel gyri: the superior, middle, and infe-
rior frontal gyrus. he inferior frontal gyrus is divided into three
parts: he pars orbitalis, the pars triangularis, and pars opercu-
laris constitute brocas area, an important region for speech
and language.
Functionally, the frontal lobe can be divided into motor areas
and prefrontal cortex. he motor areas include the primary
motor cortex, the premotor cortex, the supplementary motor
cortex, frontal eye ield, and Brocas area. he primary motor
cortex (Brodmanns area, BA 4), also called the motor cortex, is
located anterior to the central sulcus and the adjacent portion of
voluntary movement on the contralateral (opposite) side of the
body. hat is, the right hemisphere controls the left side of the
body and the left hemisphere controls the right side. he entire
human body is represented in the primary motor cortex, and
these representations are arranged somatotopically, such that
each area of the body is related to a speciic area on the motor
the homunculus (in Latin, little man), is mapped according to
the amount of brain matter devoted to each particular body part,
rather than by the proportional body-part size. hus, there is a
relatively larger portion of the motor cortex dedicated to laryn-
geal, tongue, and inger areas that involve ine and complex
movements, and a relatively smaller portion of the motor cortex
dedicated to the trunk and limbs that have relatively gross and
simpler movements.
he premotor cortex lies anterior and parallel to the primary
motor cortex. he premotor cortex stores motor schemata (ele-
mentary motor acts) and selects movements to be executed for
externally cued movements. Together with the prefrontal cor-
tex, the premotor cortex prepares, initiates, selects, and learns
movement patterns. For language, thus, the premotor cortex
determines how humans are going to move their articulators
to generate speech. here is also a supplementary motor area
located in the mesial prolongation of the premotor area. his
supplementary area helps to execute spontaneous or self-initi-
ated movements, and damage to this area causes reduced spon-
taneous speech and apraxia of speech.
Frontal Lobe

Figure 1. Frontal Lobe (left hemisphere).

Source: Adapted from Gray, Henry. Anatomy of the
Human Body. Edited by Warren H. Lewis. Philadelphia: Lea
& Febiger, 1918. New York: Bartleby.com, 2000.

Figure 2. The motor homunculus.

Source: Penield, W, and Rasmussen T. The Cerebral Cortex of
Man. New York: Macmillan, 1950.

325
Frontal Lobe
Brocas area consists of the foot of the third frontal convolu-
tion (the inferior frontal gyrus), just in front of the motor strip.
Traditionally thought to be responsible for the production of lan-
guage, it has also been implicated in comprehension of syntax.
As with any of the perisylvian regions involved in language, it
appears to contribute to lexical access as well.
he second major portion of the frontal lobe, in addition to
the motor areas just discussed, is the prefrontal cortex, located
in the foremost part of the frontal lobe, in front of the motor
area. he ratio of the prefrontal cortex to the rest of the cortex is
larger in humans than in any other species. he prefrontal cortex
is divided into three major regions: dorsolateral, orbitofrontal,
and medial prefrontal cortex. Although there is some contro-
versy, currently many researchers associate diferent behavioral
changes and cognitive disturbances with each of these three
prefrontal regions. Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is suggested to
have a role in working memory, attention, planning, and prob-
lem solving. Lesions in this area cause an inability to plan cor-
rectly and diiculty with multistep tasks. he orbitofrontal cortex
is associated with emotion and the initiation of behavior. Lesions
of this area lead to disinhibition, socially inappropriate behav-
ior, and change of afect. Finally, the medial/cingulate prefron-
tal cortex is related to motivation and drive. Lesions in this area
result in apathy, loss of interest in ones life, and reduced sponta-
neous speech and movement.
he prefrontal cortex is extensively connected to the motor,
perceptual, and limbic systems of the brain. It sends and receives
great amounts of information and controls cognitive processes
so that appropriate behaviors are carried out at the correct time
and place. It takes part in higher aspects of motor control and
various cognitive functions, such as inhibition, problem solv-
ing, abstract thinking, emotional control, and appropriate social
behavior. Neuropsychologists consider the prefrontal cortex
particularly responsible for executive function, by which they
mean the ability to plan, monitor, and make inferences, as well
as related self-governing behaviors. he old notion of a com-
puter with a central processor that determines how the rest of
the systems computational abilities are to be used is sometimes
employed when the role that executive function plays vis--vis
other cognitive abilities is discussed. When distinction is made
between automatic and controlled processes, it is the controlled
processes that the prefrontal cortex controls. Cognitive lexibility
is also considered a role played by the frontal lobes. working
memory the ability to keep a limited amount of information
available for analysis is either assumed to be a part of executive
function or to be closely linked to it.
Language behaviors that involve executive function are the less
automatic ones, such as appreciating humor, making inferences
from nonexplicit phrasing, appreciating the pragmatic aspects of
communication, monitoring ones speech for speech errors and
correcting them, monitoring ones interlocutors to rephrase or
shift register if they appear not to be comprehending, selecting
the right language or mix of languages to speak in bilingual and
polyglot situations, avoiding culturally taboo words or topics that
would be inappropriate in a given context, and reanalyzing input
when garden-pathed or on other occasions when it appears not
to make sense. One language task that appears to put substantial
burden on working memory is simultaneous interpretation.
326
Neurological Underpinnings of Our Knowledge
of Frontal Lobe Responsibilities
Lesions of the frontal lobe have resulted in a number of speech
and language deicits, as well as motor, memory, behavioral,
emotional and cognitive problems, that afect speech and lan-
guage functioning. he main speech and language disorders
include dysarthria, apraxia of speech, mutism, and aphasia.
Damage to the motor areas in the frontal lobe causes weakness
or paralysis of the face and articulators, such as the larynx, phar-
ynx, palate, tongue, lips, and jaw. Dysarthria is a speech pro-
duction disorder due to impaired control of these articulatory
systems, and the patients may show abnormal acoustic and
phonetic patterns, hypophonic speech (decreased vocal vol-
ume), deviant intonation, and prosody disturbances in their
speech. Apraxia of speech, a disorder of motor planning and
programming of speech without muscle weakness or paralysis, is
characterized by an inability to execute appropriate movement
for articulation of speech. Apraxic patients phonological
errors are inconsistent, and articulatory accuracy is better
for automatic speech than volitional speech. Also, patients with
frontal lobe damage may lack voluntary initiation of conversa-
tion and evidence marked reduction in language production.
In some cases, frontal lobe damage results in mutism, that is,
preserved comprehension but no verbal or gestural intent to
communicate with others. Patients with mutism show a lack of
frustration about their breakdown of expression, unlike patients
with Brocas aphasia.
Brocas aphasia is traditionally associated with a lesion to
Brocas area in the left frontal lobe, and characterized by rela-
tively intact comprehension but efortful, short sentence produc-
tion with morphosyntactic errors and few functors: his form of
speech production is often called telegraphic speech. However,
contemporary brain imaging studies suggest that more extensive
left frontal lobe lesions are required to cause persistent Brocas
aphasia. Also, transcortical motor aphasia, with good repeti-
tion and comprehension but impaired speech abilities, can also
result from damage of the frontal lobe.
Patients with frontal lobe damage in whom Brocas area is
spared generally do not produce grammatical errors. hey do,
however, usually show a deicit in verbal luency. Generally, ver-
bal luency is examined by so-called phonemic (e.g., list words
beginning with the letter s) or semantic category naming tasks
(e.g., list animals). Also, perseveration (uncontrollable repetition
of a particular word or phrase) is a frequently observed symptom
in patients with frontal lobe lesions.
Although reading and writing disorders (alexia and agraphia,
respectively) are more often associated with posterior brain
lesions, frontal lobe lesions can also manifest them. Frontal lobe
alexia, a reading disorder, involves diiculty in decoding words
by the grapheme-to-phoneme method. Frontal lobe agraphia, a
writing disorder, results in spelling errors, including inappropri-
ate letter repetition and erroneous word selection.
Deicits of behavioral and emotional problems due to fron-
tal lobe damage may afect language and communication func-
tion as well. he close association of personality changes and
prefrontal cortex damage is best evidenced by the famous case
of Phineas Gage. Gage was a railroad construction worker who
sufered a penetrating wound to his frontal cortex. Although he
Functional Linguistics
survived the serious accident, he was no longer himself. Before
the accident, Gage had been known as a hard-working, capable,
and sociable man, but his personality changed radically after the
accident. He uttered profanities, becoming impatient, obstinate,
itful, and antisocial. Indeed, in Gages case and similar ones,
diiculty in socializing follows frontal lobe brain damage. hus,
while no overt language problems regarding the form of lan-
guage, such as grammar, or regarding language content, such as
semantic meaning, were reported in these patients, their use of
pragmatic language skills was impaired.
In sum, the frontal lobes play a crucial role in various speech
and language processing tasks, including initiation of articula-
tory movement, phonetic/phonological selection, morphosyn-
tactic production, syntactic manipulation, and integration of
pragmatic function. Depending on the location and depth of the
frontal lobe lesion, a mixture of cognitive and behavioral symp-
toms can appear with the disorders of these speech and language
functions as well.
JungMoon Hyun, Elizabeth Ijalba, Teresa M. Signorelli,
Peggy S. Conner, and Loraine K. Obler
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Anderson, Steven W., Hanna Damasio, Daniel Tranel, and Antonio
R. Damasio. 2000. Long-term sequelae of prefrontal cortex dam-
age acquired in early childhood. Developmental Neuropsychology
18: 28196.
Baddeley, Alan. 2003. Working memory and language: An overview.
Journal of Communication Disorders 36: 189208.
Damasio, Hanna, Daniel Tranel, homas Grabowski, Ralph Adolphs, and
Antonio R. Damasio. 2004. Neural systems behind word and concept
retrieval. Cognition 92: 179229.
Miller, Bruce L., and Jefrey L. Cummings. 2006. he Human Frontal
Lobes: Functions and Disorders. New York: Guilford.
Penield, W., and T. Rasmussen. 1950. he Cerebral Cortex of Man A
Clinical Study of Localization of Function. New York: Macmillan.
FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS
Functional linguistics, broadly deined, includes a wide range of
diverse approaches that highlight the interdependence of lan-
guage structure and language function. In this view, structural
features of languages have evolved and continue to develop as
a result of competing cognitive, communicative, ecological, and
social pressures. (See also grammaticalization.) Functional
research treats language neither as a purely formal object nor as a
closed autonomous system; rather, it considers language form to
be tightly integrated with both the uses and users of language (see
also usage-based theory).
Within the context of current theories of linguistics, many
functional approaches difer sharply from so-called formal theo-
ries, such as government and binding or minimalism. While
lines of demarcation between formal and functional approaches
are, of course, not always clear-cut, formal theories tend to begin
with the premise that grammar is innate, to assume the auton-
omy of syntax, to hold to the modularity of language from
other cognitive faculties, and to impose a distinction between
competence and performance. Functionally oriented lin-
guistics, on the other hand, tends to question the validity of these
assumptions for a variety of empirical reasons (see papers in
Elman et al. 1996; MacWhinney 1999, and references therein).
Skepticism toward these tenets of formal linguistics has con-
sequences for the kinds of data and research methodologies
employed in functional approaches, many of which eschew
introspective grammaticality judgments and focus instead
on more inductive methodologies, such as evidence from cor-
pora of naturally occurring language, data gleaned from ield
elicitation, experimentation, statistical correlations, and ethno-
graphic observation (see corpus linguistics).
Widely known functional theories of grammar include sys-
temic functional linguistics (Halliday 1994), the theory of func-
tional grammar (Dik 1997), and the functional approach to
syntax explicated by Talmy Givn (2001), as well as role and
reference grammar. For the purposes of this entry, a func-
tionally oriented approach is any approach that holds that
structural aspects of language (phonology, morphology,
syntax, discourse organization [see discourse analysis
(linguistic)], etc.) are motivated and constrained by func-
tional concerns. hese can be broadly divided into at least four
overlapping, closely allied factors: 1) the role of communica-
tion and discourse, 2) the centrality of meaning, 3) human
cognitive, neurological, and physiological capacities, and 4) the
social and interactional nature of human beings (see papers in
Tomasello 1998 and 2002 for a thorough overview.) To arrive at a
full understanding of the functional constraints and motivations
that act on the form of language, it is necessary to consider the
joint contribution of all of these areas.
Functional research in the early twentieth century focused
primarily on the way in which communicative pressures orga-
nize sentence structure. For example, Prague School linguists
noted regular patterns of the placement of the theme (informa-
tion known by the recipient) and the rheme (information new to
the recipient). In pragmatically unmarked sentences in English,
for example, known information tends to come early in a sen-
tence as its subject, while new information comes later, and
both information statuses tend to co-occur with certain types of
prosody. he key insight of this approach is that the functional
need to organize and diferentiate known information from new
information leads to prosodic and structural consequences for
the ways in which sentences are organized an illustration of
function afecting form. Prague School work directly inluenced
the approach known as functional sentence perspective (Firbas
1992), the functional theory of Andr Martinet (1962), and was a
precursor to the cognitively based information low theory fully
articulated by Wallace L. Chafe (1994; see also information
structure in discourse.)
As work in this area began to develop and mature, research
expanded beyond the boundaries of simple communicative
pressure to encompass wider and more complex discourse and
pragmatic contexts. Such work has become widely known as
discourse-functional linguistics. Current discourse-functional
work seeks to describe the ways in which particular grammati-
cal constructions are used in discourse, to propose explanations
for the way those forms may have come into being through lan-
guage use, and to explicate the consequences of this research in
shaping the linguists understanding of the nature of grammar.
For example, Sandra A. hompson and Anthony Mulac (1991)
327
Functional Linguistics
describe the conditions for the occurrence and nonoccurrence
of the complementizer that in a corpus of English conversation
(e.g., in sentences like You can tell that its going to rain versus
I think its going to rain). hey ind the distribution of that to
be probabilistically determined by functional factors, such as
topic management and strength of epistemic commitment. he
explanation of these indings rests in the observed blurring of
the distinction between main and subordinate clauses in these
contexts, whereby the so-called main clause in constructions
without that are actually best analyzed as epistemic adverbial
phrases (see also hompson 2002). hese indings suggest that
the traditional binary distinction between main and subordi-
nate clauses is not categorical, as it emerges out of speciic com-
municative situations in natural discourse. (See Cumming and
Ono 1997 for a thorough explication of the discourse-functional
approach, including further examples and references; see also
emergent structure.)
In addition to communicative and discourse factors, func-
tional research of the last several decades has also focused on the
role of semantics in shaping grammar (Bolinger 1977 inter alia;
Halliday 1994). In these views, meaning is central in motivating
form, and, therefore, particular grammatical constructions have
the forms they do because of the particular meanings that they
convey. Two noteworthy paradigms emerging from this tradi-
tion include cognitive linguistics, which views language
form as motivated by meaning and conceptualization, and the
cross-linguistic approach known as typological-functional lin-
guistics, which explores the ways in which similar meanings are
expressed in the grammars of languages around the world (see
cognitive grammar and typology.)
Other strands of functional research investigate the ways in
which neurological, cognitive, and physiological faculties of the
human user motivate and constrain grammar and phonology.
For example, Sidney M. Lamb (1999) outlines a connectionist,
relational network model of language based in what is known
about neurons and connections among neurons and the neuro-
logical processes of activation and inhibition. Functional theories
of phonology likewise take seriously the conceptual, neurologi-
cal, and physiological aspects of language users, for example,
articulatory phonology (Browman and Goldstein 1986), which
views the abstract phonological system as constrained by the
physical system of articulatory phonetics. More recently,
Joan L. Bybee (2001) has proposed an exemplar-based theory
of phonology, which likewise treats phonology as grounded in
the concrete physiology of phonetics and considers speech as
a neural-motor activity subject to the same processes observed
in other complex motor activities such as routinization, simpli-
ication, and entrenchment based on frequency. (See also Bybee
2006 for an extension of this approach to grammar in general.)
Recent functional research has also begun to concentrate on
ways in which the inherent social and interactional nature of lan-
guage users likewise motivates and constrains language form. One
socially oriented approach has become known as interactional
linguistics, incorporating insights from sociology especially the
subields of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis.
Interactional linguistics views language as a form of highly sys-
tematic social action. Interactional research seeks to describe the
prosodic and syntactic forms that regularly accomplish speciic
328
Games and Language
social actions and, conversely, to understand in what ways social
activities, such as turn-taking, conversational repair,
sequential organization, assessments, and preference structure,
are directly implicated in shaping syntax and prosody. (For an
overview, several concrete examples, and further references, see
Ford, Fox, and hompson 2002).
Robert Englebretson
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bolinger, Dwight L. 1977. Meaning and Form. New York: Longman.
Browman, Catherine P., and Louis Goldstein. 1986. Towards an articula-
tory phonology. Phonology Yearbook 3: 21952.
Bybee, Joan L. 2001. Phonology and Language Use. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
. 2006. From usage to grammar: he minds response to repeti-
tion. Language 82.4: 71133.
Chafe, Wallace L. 1994. Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: he Flow
and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cumming, Susanna, and Tsuyoshi Ono. 1997. Discourse and grammar.
In Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, Vol. 1. Ed. Teun
A. van Dijk, 11237. London: Sage.
Dik, Simon C. 1997. he heory of Functional Grammar. 2 vols. 2d rev. ed.
Ed. Kees Hengeveld. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Elman, Jefrey, Elizabeth Bates, Mark Johnson, Annette Karmilof-
Smith, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett, eds. 1996. Rethinking
Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Firbas, Jan. 1992. Functional Sentence Perspective in Written and Spoken
Communication. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ford, Cecelia E., Barbara A. Fox, and Sandra A. hompson. 2002. Social
interaction and grammar. In he New Psychology of Language. Vol. 2.
Ed. Michael Tomasello, 11943. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Givn, Talmy. 2001. Syntax: An Introduction. 2 vols. Rev. ed.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Halliday, M. A. K. 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 2d ed.
London: E. Arnold.
Lamb, Sydney M. 1999. Pathways of the Brain: he Neurocognitive Basis of
Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
MacWhinney, Brian, ed. 1999. he Emergence of Language. Mahwah,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Martinet, Andr. 1962. A Functional View of Language. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
hompson, Sandra A. 2002. Object complements and conversa-
tion: Towards a realistic account. Studies in Language 26.1: 12564.
hompson, Sandra A., and Anthony Mulac. 1991. he discourse condi-
tions for the use of the complementizer that in conversational English.
Journal of Pragmatics 15: 23751.
Tomasello, Michael, ed. 1998, 2002. he New Psychology of
Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure.
2 vols. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
G
GAMES AND LANGUAGE
Rules and Language Games
One traditional view in philosophy and linguistics is that with-
out rules of usage common to the speaker and the listener,
Games and Language
communication would be impossible. According to it, every
linguistic expression has a meaning, which is determined by
the rules for its correct use. his obviously brings language and
games together, for it is in the latter that rules are explicitly given.
Here are two examples of language-games, which illustrate
in a very simple and ideal way how a communication language
could emerge out of language games. hey are from the Finnish
logician Erik Stenius, who thought that they are typical examples
of the view of language advocated by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his
later period.
he Garden Game is played by a gardener A and his assistant
B. here are pieces in the game, the letters a, b, c, P, and Q and
a lower bed divided into squares as in the following igure. In
every square there is a plant.
3rd day
2d day
c B a 1st day
he game amounts to this: Every day B writes on a piece of
paper the letters a, b, c, and to the left of any of these letters he
writes either the letter P or the letter Q, according to whether the
plant in the square corresponding for that day to the lowercase
letter is in lower or not. For instance, if in the rectangle for that
day the plant next to the path is in lower, whereas the two others
are not, B will write:
Pa Qb Qc
he teaching of the game is done by simple gestures of
approval and disapproval, depending on whether B writes the
correct tokens on the piece of paper.
Once the assistant masters the Garden Game, A and B move
to play the Report Game. A does not need to accompany B to
the lowerbed any longer. A now takes part in the game only
by receiving the written tokens from B. If B really follows the
rules of the game, A can read of certain facts from what B has
written.
It is obvious that by means of the report game, A and B have
created a small language for communication: a, b, and c are used
to denote certain squares, and so on. hey get a meaning.
Steniuss language games had more of a philosophical purpose,
namely, to give concrete examples of Wittgensteinian language-
games. hey inspired the philosopher David Lewis, who formulated
them in a more precise way. In doing so, Lewis thought to respond
to a challenge launched by another philosopher and logician,
Quine. W. V. O. Quine regarded with distrust conventional views
of language and doubted that one can give a coherent account of
how communication takes place without already presupposing
some degree of linguistic competence. Lewis formulated signal-
ing games, that is, communication games played by two players,
the sender and the receiver, the former sending messages or sig-
nals about the situation he or she is in, and the latter undertaking a
certain action after receiving it. he point to be emphasized is that
the messages do not have a prior meaning: Whatever meaning they
are going to acquire, it will be the result of the interactive situation
in the signaling game, or in other terms, they will be optimal solu-
tions in the game. Let us have a closer look at the game-theoretical
setting.
Strategic Games and Nash Equilibria
One of the most legendary games in classical game theory is the
Prisoners dilemma: Two criminals, 1 and 2, are interrogated in
separate cells. If they both confess, each of them will be punished
to stay three years in prison. If only one of them confesses, he will
be free while the other will be punished with four years in prison.
If neither of them confesses, each will stay one year in prison. he
following igure depicts the choices and payofs of the players of
the Prisoners dilemma:
D C
D (1,1) (4,0)
C (0,4) (3,3)
D stands for dont confess and C stands for confess.
As we see, a complete description of a strategic game with
two players requires a list of the players action repertoires A1
and A2, and a speciication of their utility functions u1 and u2.
u1 speciies, for each possible sequence of choices (a,b) (action
proile) player 1s payof. In our example, we have: u1(D,D) = 1,
u1(D,C) = 4, u2(D,C) = 0, and so on.
Many of the games studied in classical game theory are strictly
competitive (zero-sum games): he players payofs are strictly
opposed; that is, for each action proile (a,b), u1(a,b) + u2(a,b) =
0. Matching pennies is a typical example of such a game: Each
player chooses either Head or Tail. Player 2 pays player 1 one
euro if the two choices match. Otherwise, it is player 1 who pays
player 2 one euro in Matching pennies:
H T
H (1,1) (1,1)
T (1,1) (1,1)
Given a strategic game, we are interested in optimal plays of the
game, that is, in every players action being the best response
to the actions of his opponents. For simplicity, we consider the
Prisoners dilemma game, but the points we make are general.
Consider an arbitrary action proile (a,b). It is a Nash equilibrium
in the strategic game if none of the players would have been bet-
ter of by making a diferent choice:
uI(a,b) uI(c,b), for any c in A1
uII(a,b) uII(a,d), for any d in A2.
hus, in the Prisoners dilemma game, (C,C) is a Nash equilib-
rium, but there is no Nash equilibrium in the Matching pennies
game. here are games that have two Nash equilibria, like the
following one where both (L,L) and (R,R) are Nash equilibria:
L R
L (1,1) (1,1)
R (1,1) (1,1)
In this case, the problem is to devise a criterion for selecting
between them. One such criterion is Pareto optimality:
he action proile (a,b) is Pareto more optimal than (a,b), if a > a
and b > b.
329
Games and Language
Lewiss Signaling Games
Lewis modeled signaling games using the game-theoretical
apparatus just described. he game models an ideal communica-
tive situation, which involves a sender and a receiver, the former
sending messages that the latter tries to interpret. More precisely,
whenever he or she is in a state t (one of the many from the set
T of possible states), the sender selects a message or form f from
a set F that he or she sends to the receiver. he receivers task is
one of interpretation; that is, whenever a message f is received,
he or she will associate it with a state in T. he signaling games
are cooperative games; that is, both players try to achieve a com-
mon goal, communication. For this reason, whenever in state t
the sender sends f and the receiver interprets f as t, both players
receive an equally rewarding payof. As in Steniuss Report
Game, the receiver does not have full knowledge about the state
the sender is in. he situation becomes even more complicated
when, for instance, the sender may use more than one form in
the same state. he optimal situation is the one in which com-
munication is achieved: he receiver associates with each mes-
sage f the state t in which the sender was when he or she sent f.
he game-theoretical analysis is meant to show that the optimal
situation can be obtained as one of the solutions (Nash equi-
libria, Pareto optimality) to the game. We may, of course, won-
der how the game can achieve this somehow miraculous result
without the receivers having full knowledge of the situation the
sender is in. Well, in a way, the game cannot achieve it: In the
setting just described, the game will yield several solutions (Nash
equilibria); that is, there will be more than one way to pair mes-
sages with states. If we want to discriminate among them, more
information is needed. It may come in diferent layers.
One kind of additional information the players may have is a
prior probability distribution over the states in T: Some of them
are more probable than others. But even so, it is often the case
that there are several Nash equilibria in the game. Lewis would
say that in this case, one of those is chosen, the most salient one.
Anyhow, the existence of several equilibria shows, according to
him, the conventional character of the formsmeanings pairs.
If one does not like this form of conventionalism, then some
more discriminative information is needed. For instance, we may
assign costs to messages and assume that it is more rational for
the sender to send less expensive messages. It can be shown that
in some cases where these conditions are fulilled, the combina-
tion of Nash equilibria and Pareto optimality leads to a unique
solution.
Signaling Games and Gricean Pragmatics
We saw that signaling games are useful for modeling communi-
cative situations in which the players extract information from
linguistic messages according to some general principles of
rational behavior. We mentioned the case of the senders being
forced to consider alternative expressions he or she could have
used, together with their costs, and so on. It was then assumed
that it is more rational for the sender to send less expensive
messages.
One inds similar features in the so-called Gricean
pragmatics (see conversational implicature). In this
case, one is not so much concerned with the question of how
expressions acquire their meanings, but rather with the distinction
330
between what is said and what is conveyed or implied. he former
is more or less conventional, semantic meaning, while the latter
is something the speaker wants the hearer to understand from
what is said, although not explicitly stated. In a seminal paper,
Paul Grice tried to account for such pragmatic inferences by mak-
ing use of maxims of conversation, like Be relevant, Always say
the truth, or Be as informative as possible, and so on. Recently,
some attempts have been made to reduce and explicate these
maxims in terms of rational principles of communication, which
advise the speaker to say as much as he or she can to fulill com-
municative goals, and to say no more than he or she must to ful-
ill those communicative goals. Gricean pragmatics found its way
recently into optimality theory, a linguistic theory that basi-
cally compares alternative syntactic inputs to one another and
selects as the optimal meaning the one associated with the syntac-
tic form that expresses it in the most eicient way. It should come
as no surprise that the ranking and judging of representations and
meanings in optimality-theoretic interpretation has a structure,
which resembles principles developed in strategic games.
Hintikkas Semantical Games
Games are also used to characterize diferent notions of depen-
dence in logic and language. In contrast to communication
games whose task it is to model how expressions of the language
acquire an interpretation, in semantical games associated with
natural or formal languages, it is presupposed that expressions
already have an interpretation. What we want, instead, is a way
to characterize the dependence (and independence) of certain
expressions of the language on other expressions in terms of the
interaction of the players in a semantical game. Here is a typical
example from the mathematical vernacular:
A function y = f(x) is continuous at x0 if given a number however
small, we can ind such that |f(x) f(x0)|< , given any x such
that |xx0| < .
In game-theoretical terms, we can ind is represented by an
existential player, , and given any is represented by a universal
player, , both choosing individuals from the relevant universe
of discourse. hus, the property of the function f being continu-
ous at x0 is characterized by a game in which the universal player
chooses an individual from the universe, after which the exis-
tential player chooses an individual , and inally the universal
player chooses an individual x. he game stops here. Unlike
in the strategic games, which are one-shot games, semantical
games have a sequential element: here is a sequence of choices,
with later choices depending on earlier ones, and so on. he cru-
cial notion is not any longer that of Nash equilibrium but that of
winning strategy. In other words, the game-theoretical paradigm
in this case is that of extensive games.
Extensive Games
It is customary to exhibit extensive games as a sequence
G = (N,H,P,(ui)iN)
where N is a collection of players, H is a set of histories, P is a
function attaching to each nonmaximal history the player whose
turn it is to move, and ui is the utility function for player i, that is,
a function that associates with each maximal history in H a payof
Games and Language
for player i. In other words, each maximal history represents a
play of the game, at the end of which each of the players is given
a payof. Unlike communication or signaling games, semantical
games are strictly competitive 0-sum games: For each maximal
play, one of the players is winning and the other is loosing.
he crucial notion is that of a strategy for a given player, a
method that gives the player the appropriate choice depending
on the elements chosen earlier in the game. Such a strategy is
codiied by a mathematical function g that takes as arguments
the partial histories (a0,,an-1) in H where it is the players turn
to move, and gives him or her an appropriate choice g(a0,,an-1);
g is a winning strategy for the player in question if it guarantees a
win in every maximal play in which he or she uses it.
Semantical Games, Quantiiers, and Anaphora
Our informal description of the game associated with the dei-
nition of a continuous function should be suicient to con-
vey the idea that the game in question can be rephrased as an
extensive game. A maximal play of the game is any sequence
(,,x), with and x chosen by the universal player, and by
the existential player. As for utilities, if the chosen elements
stand in the appropriate relations, that is, if whenever |xx0| <
we also have |f(x) f(x0)|< , then we declare the play to be a
win for and a loss for . Otherwise, it is a win for and a loss
for . But now any winning strategy of has to be a function g
whose arguments are all the individuals chosen by earlier in
the game. In other words, the logical priority of the quantiied
expression given any over we can ind an is captured by and shift and is, therefore, relevant for linguists understanding
the strategy g of the existential player, which is deined over any
element chosen by . And the fact that this strategy is a win-
ning one amounts to any of the sequence of elements (,g(),x)
satisfying the appropriate conditions; that is: If |xx0| < g(),
then |f(x) f(x0)|< .
Another dependency phenomenon modeled by semantical
games is pronominal anaphora, as in the following sentence:
1. A woman is sitting on a bench. She smiles.
We witness here a phenomenon of semantical depen-
dence: Before an expression (She) gets an interpretation,
another expression that is its head (A woman) must get an
interpretation. he semantical games in this case are completely
analogous to the quantiier game (in fact, the game involves
quantiiers). he rules of the game will contain not only choices
prompted by quantiied expressions but also choices prompted
by the anaphoric pronoun: She prompts a move by the exis-
tential player, who must now choose the same individual chosen
earlier as a possible value of the indeinite A woman.
Gabriel Sandu
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Dekker, Paul, and Robert van Rooy. 2000. Bi-directional optimality the-
ory: An application of game-theory. Journal of Semantics 17: 21742.
Grice, Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation, In Syntax and Semantics 3:
Speech Acts, ed. P. Cole and J. L. Morgan. New York: Academic Press.
Hintikka, Jaakko, and Gabriel Sandu. 1991. On the Methodology of
Linguistics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Lewis, David. 1969. Conventions. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Stenius, Erik. 1967. Mood and language-game. Synthese 17: 25474.
Gender and Language
Van Rooy, Robert. 2002. Optimality-theoretic and game-theoretic
approaches to implicatures. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Available online at: http://plato.stanford.edu.
GENDER AND LANGUAGE
he term gender in this discussion refers to the social condition of
being a woman or a man as distinct from sex, biological female-
ness or maleness. Sex may be relevant in areas of inquiry where bio-
logical mechanisms are at issue (e.g., the organization of language
in the brain), but in most research, the issue is the social difer-
entiation of men and women. Gendered linguistic behavior arises
not because men and women are innately diferent but because of
the way the diference is made signiicant in the local organization
of social life. he forms and precise social signiicance of gender
can vary considerably across cultures and through time.
Gender in this sense is also distinct from the use of the term
gender to denote a grammatical category. he relationship
between linguistic and social gender across languages has been
studied extensively (e.g., Hellinger and Bussman 20013), but for
reasons of space, this body of work will not be considered here;
the focus will instead be on research investigating patterns of
language use linked to the gender of the user.
he relationship of gender to language has been of interest to
scholars for a variety of reasons. On the one hand, the social fact
of gender diferentiation (apparently universal in human cul-
tures) inluences processes such as language variation, change,
of those phenomena. On the other hand, language use is part
of the process whereby gender is produced and reproduced as
a social fact. his makes language of interest to scholars whose
main interest is in the social organization of gender relations,
language and identity, or inequality.
he modern ield of language and gender studies emerged in
the 1970s when the advent of second-wave feminism prompted
sympathetic researchers in language-related disciplines to under-
take a systematic examination of the language used by and about
women. Adopting a broadly feminist political standpoint and a
modern sociolinguistic perspective, these researchers reacted
against the assumptions pervading previous discussions, which
had stereotyped women language users as simultaneously
exotic and inferior. Questions about sex diferences in language
were reframed as questions about social identity, diference, cul-
ture, and power.
In the early phase of the ields development (roughly 1975 to
1990), researchers worked largely within a framework of inter-
est in identifying and explaining diferences between men and
women. his work continued the earlier tradition of treating
womens linguistic behavior as marked with respect to mens,
but the questions that researchers asked were diferent and so
were their motivations. Some gender diference studies were
animated by a desire to establish the (in)validity of sexist folk-
linguistic stereotypes like women talk incessantly or women
cant tell jokes. Other scholars were interested in exploring how
diferences between mens and womens ways of speaking might
arise from the social reality of male dominance (Lakof 1975).
his dominance current sought to raise consciousness about
the fact that in language as elsewhere, women were relegated to
331
Gender and Language
second-class citizenship by the way they were socialized to speak
and write, the way they were judged as speakers and writers, and
the way they were conventionally represented in speech and
writing. An alternative, cultural diference current placed more
emphasis on the idea that women and men (and, importantly,
girls and boys) grew up in diferent social worlds in which they
learned diferent rules for verbal communication (Maltz and
Borker 1982).
By the end of the 1980s, however, many researchers were turn-
ing away from the gender diference paradigm and abandoning
what was increasingly seen as an unproductive quest for global
generalizations. he more that empirical indings accumulated,
the more apparent it became that women and men could not use-
fully be treated as internally undiferentiated populations. It was
forcefully argued (notably by Eckert 1990) that since intragroup
diferences were as signiicant as intergroup ones, and since the
variable of gender did not exist in isolation but always interacted
with other social variables, such as class, race/ethnicity, and age,
general statements to the efect that women do X and men do Y
were unenlightening, if not meaningless.
he traditional focus on binary gender diference began
to yield to an approach that was more concerned with gender
diversity in other words, with the use of linguistic variability as
a resource for producing a range of gendered styles in diferent
communities or contexts. Researchers followed the injunction to
look locally (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992) at the forms
that gender identities and relations take in speciic communities
of practice (CoPs), on the grounds that gender-linked patterns
of language use will emerge from the localized social practices
in which women and men are engaged. his led, among other
things, to a wave of empirical research conducted with more
socially and linguistically diverse groups of subjects, and deal-
ing with masculinity as well as femininity (Johnson and Meinhof
1997).
he shift was also theoretical in nature, as language and gen-
der scholars were inluenced by the more general critique of gen-
der essentialism (belief in masculinity and femininity as ixed and
invariant essences). Some adopted the performative account of
gender put forward by Judith Butler (1990) (see also sexuality
and language), while others took up alternative theoretical
approaches exemplifying the shift from essentialism to a more
radical social constructionism. One inluential theoretical con-
tribution was made by linguistic anthropologist Elinor Ochs
(1992), who used the concept of indexicality (see indexicals to
give an account of the relationship between language and gen-
der that could accommodate empirical observations about its
locally variable and context-embedded nature. Pointing out that
few features of languages directly and exclusively index gender,
she suggested that masculinity and femininity were most often
indexed indirectly by the use of linguistic features whose primary
meaning related to particular roles or qualities (e.g., mother-
hood or modesty) but which had come to connote masculin-
ity or femininity by association.
he implication of this line of argument is that we should not
expect direct and unmediated correlations between speakers
gender and features of their language use. he correlations are
typically indirect, the results of a process whereby features with
other primary meanings are diferentially appropriated and/or
332
avoided by women and men. Some of the reasons for this difer-
entiation have to do with the inluence of gender norms and ste-
reotypes. Girls may be instructed by parents and teachers that the
use of features that index modesty or deference is appropriate for
them, whereas boys may be ridiculed for using those same fea-
tures; speakers in each gender group may develop an investment
in using the features to the extent that they also have an invest-
ment in being judged as gender appropriate. he approach, how-
ever, allows for the possibility that not everyone does develop
such an investment: here have been various studies of groups
whose behavior appears to be shaped by a conscious refusal of
gender appropriateness (e.g., Abe 2004; Bucholtz 1999; Okamoto
1995.) here are also speakers (e.g., some transgendered or
transsexual individuals) whose investment in using features that
will index their adopted gender identity is such that they produce
extreme gender stereotypes (Kulick 1999).
Other reasons for using or avoiding features that indirectly
index gender, though, have more to do with the demands of the
activities in which speakers are engaged. Bonnie McElhinny
(1995) reports that women police oicers in Pittsburgh adopt a
relatively afectless style of interaction regarded by some observ-
ers as defeminizing, but that they are quite clear that they are not
trying to talk like men; they are trying to talk like police oicers.
hey also believe that the style of talk required is not simply a
contingent norm relecting the historical domination of policing
by men but is intrinsically demanded by the nature of the work.
Although some styles do have gendered connotations (and his-
tories) that can pose problems for individuals whose gender is
stereotypically incongruent with them, it is clear that the way
men and women behave in diferent contexts has as much to do
with the nature of those contexts as with gender per se.
It is also clear that gender itself is not always and everywhere
indexed in similar ways because there is cross-cultural and his-
torical variation in the social roles allotted to men and women
and the qualities ascribed to them (linguistic markers of which
become secondary indices of gender). he Japanese association
of femininity with delicacy may seem natural to Westerners,
too, but the association is not made by, for instance, the villag-
ers of Gapun in Papua, New Guinea, who characterize womens
language, like women themselves, as blunt, direct, and aggres-
sive (Kulick 1993). Nor can it be automatically assumed that such
associations, ideologically powerful though they may be, deter-
mine the actual behavior of most speakers. For instance, recent
research analyzing the speech of working-class and rural women
in diferent parts of Japan points to the practical irrelevance for
many Japanese women of the idealized normative construct
womens language (Okamoto and Shibamoto Smith 2004).
Whereas early language and gender researchers often took
issue with prefeminist generalizations about mens and womens
language use, more recent researchers inluenced by the shifts
just outlined have revisited many of the generalizations made
during the 1970s and 1980s. he classic claims of variationist
sociolinguistics about gender (that women are generally closer
than men to prestige norms and lead in change from above
because of their greater status consciousness, but are otherwise
conservative) have been substantially revised (e.g., Labov 2001).
While the new variationist orthodoxy is still a gender generaliza-
tion (that women tend to lead in both change from above and
Gender and Language
change from below), it does not permit stereotypical explana-
tions in terms of roles or psychological dispositions shared by all
women but, on the contrary, requires an account to be given of
womens nonuniform sociolinguistic behavior. here continues
to be debate on the claim that women are by and large more
polite speakers than men (see politeness) by reason of their
subordinate social positioning (Lakof 1975; Brown 1980), with
some researchers suggesting that this generalization still has
value (e.g., Holmes 1995), while others are more skeptical (e.g.,
Mills 2003).
here is also debate on the theoretical assumptions of the
new paradigm itself: It can be asked whether the emphasis on
looking locally, stressing the diversity and variability of gen-
dered behavior, is resulting in a reluctance to think globally,
which risks throwing the feminist baby out with the essentialist
bathwater. For some commentators, caution about treating gen-
der as an overarching social category or making generalizations
about it is problematic, in that it obscures or downplays inequali-
ties that, although they may not be global in the sense of univer-
sal and exceptionless, are not localized to just one community
of practice. here is also concern that some current approaches
overemphasize the agency of subjects in constructing gendered
personae while downplaying the structural and institutional fac-
tors that in reality constrain their performances. his concern is
addressed in recent research dealing with womens use of lan-
guage in the workplace and in other public domains a tradi-
tional feminist research topic that is now being revisited from
newer theoretical perspectives (e.g., Baxter 2006; Holmes 2006;
Walsh 2001).
Penelope Eckert (2000) is among those researchers who
believe that looking locally can and should be combined with
thinking globally about gender. Eckert carried out research in
a suburban high school near Detroit, where identity and social
practice were organized around the contrast between jocks
(who embrace mainstream deinitions of school success, e.g.,
participating actively in both academic and extracurricular pur-
suits) and burnouts (who reject the schools values and resist
active participation in its oicial culture). Ailiation in these
groups was marked linguistically as well as in other ways: Jocks
made more use of conservative vowel pronunciations, whereas
burnouts used more innovative urban variants. In both groups,
however, it was girls who were more advanced in the use of the
variants that indexed group membership. Eckert suggests that
they were symbolically claiming status as good jocks or good
burnouts and that this relected the difering terms on which
the two sexes participated in their CoPs. Males gained status by
displaying ability (e.g., in sports or ighting), but females status
was more dependent on appearance and personal style: hey
were obliged to work harder to assert in-group status by means
of symbolic details like the styling of their jeans and the pronun-
ciation of their vowels.
Eckert argues that the pressures to which these high school
girls were responding are not conined to adolescent subcul-
tures. Women, as the subordinate gender, may perceive their sta-
tus and legitimacy to be in question in all kinds of CoPs; making
a symbolic display of in-group credentials pointedly present-
ing oneself as, say, a real lawyer/athlete/truck driver or using
resources such as language that are accessible to women as well
as men is one way to deal with this marginal social position-
ing. If so, it is evident that inequality, rather than just diference,
shapes the relationship of language use to gender.
A recent external development to which researchers are now
beginning to respond is the rise of scientiic paradigms such
as evolutionary psychology, which, in addition to being
generally critical of feminist social constructionism, have made
speciic claims (some of them empirically ill-founded see,
e.g., Hyde 2005) about malefemale linguistic diferences as
the hardwired products of millennia of natural selection. he
recent resurgence of biological essentialism in both academic
and popular culture constitutes a challenge, both intellectual
and political, that language and gender researchers, in my view,
should not ignore. Yet while in the future there may well be more
discussion of the relationship between sex and gender, I think
it is unlikely that researchers will abandon the commitment to
(some variant of) the social constructionism that has proved so
productive in recent years.
Deborah Cameron
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Abe, Hideko. 2004. Lesbian bar talk in Shinjuku, Japan. In Okamoto
and Shibamoto Smith 2004, 20521.
Baxter, Judith, ed. 2006. Speaking Out: he Female Voice in Public
Contexts. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave.
Brown, Penelope. 1980. How and why are women more polite? In
Women and Language in Literature and Society, ed. Sally McConnell-
Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman, 11149. New York: Praeger.
Bucholtz, Mary. 1999. Why be normal? Language and identity practices
in a community of nerd girls. Language and Society 28: 20323.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity. New York: Routlege.
Cameron, Deborah. 2006. On Language and Sexual Politics.
London: Routledge
Eckert, Penelope. 1990. he whole woman: Sex and gender diferences
in variation. Language Variation and Change 1: 24568.
. 2000. Gender and sociolinguistic variation. In Language and
Gender: A Reader, ed. Jennifer Coates, 6475. Oxford: Blackwell.
Eckert, Penelope, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 1992. hink practically
and look locally: Language and gender as community-based practice.
Annual Review of Anthropology 12: 46190.
. 2003. Language and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Hellinger, Marlis, and Hadumod Bussman, eds. 20013. Gender Across
Languages: he Linguistic Representation of Women and Men. 3 vols.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Holmes, Janet. 1995. Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.
. 2006. Gendered Talk at Work. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Holmes, Janet, and Miriam Meyerhof, eds. 2003. he Handbook of
Language and Gender. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Hyde, Janet Shibley. 2005. he gender similarities hypothesis. American
Psychologist 60: 58192.
Johnson, Sally, and Ulrike H. Meinhof, eds. 1997. Language and
Masculinity. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kulick, Don. 1993. Speaking as a woman: Structure and gender in domes-
tic arguments in a Papua New Guinea village. Cultural Anthropology
8: 51041.
. 1999. Transgender and language. GLQ 5: 60522.
Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change. Vol. 2. Social
Factors. Oxford: Blackwell
333
Gender Marking
Lakof, Robin. 1975. Language and Womans Place. New York: Harper
and Row.
Maltz, Daniel, and Ruth Borker. 1982. A cultural approach to male-
female misunderstanding. In Language and Social Identity, ed. John J.
Gumperz, 196216. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McElhinny, Bonnie. 1995. Challenging hegemonic masculini-
ties: Female and male police oicers handling domestic violence.
In Gender Articulated, ed. Kira Hall andMary Bucholtz, 21743.
London: Routledge.
Mills, Sara. 2003. Gender and Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ochs, Elinor. 1992. Indexing gender. In Rethinking Context: Language
as an Interactive Phenomenon, ed. Alessandro Duranti and Charles
Goodwin, 33558. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Okamoto, Shigeko. 1995. Tasteless Japanese: Less feminine speech
among young Japanese women. In Gender Articulated, ed. Kira Hall
and Mary Bucholtz, 297325. London: Routledge.
Okamoto, Shigeko, and Janet Shibamoto Smith, eds. 2004. Japanese
Language, Gender and Ideology. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Walsh, Clare. 2001. Gender and Discourse: Language and Power in
Politics, the Church and Organizations. London: Longman.
GENDER MARKING
Almost all languages have some grammatical means of divid-
ing up their noun lexicon into distinct classes, with devices
or markers occurring in surface structures under speciiable
conditions and providing information about the semantic
characteristics of the referent of the nominal head of the noun
phrase. Gender marking is one such device, typically found
in languages with a fusional or agglutinating proile; other
devices are frequently grouped under the term classiiers and
are typically found in isolating languages. he term gender is
used both for the particular classes of nouns (a language may
have two or more genders, or noun classes) and for the whole
grammatical feature (a language may or may not have the fea-
ture of gender).
here is always some semantic basis to gender classiication,
though it may be supplemented with additional formal (pho-
nological and morphological) criteria. he semantic
criteria include humanness, animacy, sex, shape, form, con-
sistency, and functional properties. A minimal gender system
consists of two genders (e.g., French), and this is the most com-
mon system; it was found in 50 languages of a sample of 256
(Corbett 2005). hree-gender systems (e.g., Russian) appear to
be roughly half as common, and larger systems are increasingly
less common. he largest system found so far is Nigerian Fula
with around twenty genders (the exact count depending on the
dialect). However, 144 of the 256 languages had no gender
system.
Semantic distinctions between classes of nouns, even lexical
derivations (e.g., the English poet versus poetess), do not in them-
selves make genders. his is because it is taken as the deinitional
characteristic of gender that some constituent outside the noun
itself must agree in gender with the noun. hus, gender refers
to classes of nouns within a language that are relected in the
behavior of the associated words (Hockett 1958, 231), and a lan-
guage has a gender system only if we ind diferent agreements
334
Generative Grammar
dependent on nouns of diferent classes, regardless of whether
or not the nouns themselves bear gender markers.
Agreement in gender with the head noun can be found in
other words in the noun phrase (adjective, determiner, demon-
strative, numeral, etc., even focus particle), in the predicate of the
clause, an adverb, and arguably in an anaphoric pronoun
outside the clause boundary. For example, in Polish the femi-
nine noun skarpeta sock (the controller) requires that many
other elements (targets) in the clause agree with it in gender: ta
jedna stara porwana skarpeta, ktra leaa na pododze this.f
one.f old.f torn.f sock(f) which.f lay.f on loor. Markers of
gender often do not mark gender alone but may be portmanteau
markers that combine information about gender with number,
person, case, or other features.
If antecedentanaphor relations are accepted as agreement,
languages in which free pronouns present the only evidence
for gender (gender distinctions being absent from noun phrase
modiiers and from predicates) can be counted as having a
(pronominal) gender system. Such languages are rare the best
known example is English, which is typologically unusual (see
typology) in this respect (Corbett 2005); another is Defaka
(Niger-Congo).
Anna Kibort
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Corbett, Greville G. 1991. Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
. 2005. Number of genders. In he World Atlas of Language
Structures, ed. Martin Haspelmath, Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil, and
Bernard Comrie, 1269. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hockett, Charles F. 1958. A Course in Modern Linguistics. New York:
Macmillan.
GENERATIVE GRAMMAR
he approach to linguistics known as generative grammar
(GG) was initially introduced by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s,
and though it has developed continuously ever since, the core
assumptions have remained remarkably constant. For instance,
at the highest level, GG has always maintained that a grammar
efectively constitutes a set of formal rules that recursively enu-
merate all, and only all, the well-formed (i.e.,grammatical)
sentences of a language (see recusion, iteration, and
metarepresentation ). As part of the process of construct-
ing such a model of linguistic knowledge, GG research has
consistently attempted to describe how a speaker-hearer can
generate and comprehend an ininite number of grammatical
sentences despite encountering only a inite amount of primary
linguistic data (PLD) while learning any given language. In
order to account for this apparent conundrum, GG standardly
assumes that the language capacity is a genetic endowment (see
innateness and innatism ) that is distinctive to homo sapi-
ens and which speciies those aspects of linguistic knowledge
that are genetically determined, as opposed to those that must
be acquired via contact with PLD. As a result of this emphasis
on language acquisition, GG is often closely associated with
biolinguistics.
Generative Grammar
he following sections summarize the main stages in the
development of GG from the 1950s to the present.
The Early Years
During the 1930s and 1940s, prominent linguists in North
America sought to discover, in a systematic fashion, the gram-
matical rules that regulated the sentential structure of utterances
in any given corpus. For instance, in his Methods in Structural
Linguistics (1951), Zellig Harris identiied distributional discov-
ery procedures that could determine the structure of a given lan-
guage, specifying rules that would enable (for instance) knife and
knives to be associated with a single underlying morphophone-
mic sequence. Such concerns came to typify the corpus-driven
structural linguistics of the 1940s.
While still a student, Chomsky became dissatisied with
the decompositional methodology that Harris (and others)
were advocating, and he developed an alternative approach,
transformational generative grammar (TGG), that was
designed to overcome limitations in the work of his contem-
poraries. Although the rudiments of TGG were summarized in
Chomskys celebrated 1957 publication Syntactic Structures,
this monograph merely provided a high-level overview of
various techniques and theoretical assumptions that had been
presented in earlier work, especially his then-unpublished
manuscript he Logical Structure of Linguistic heory ([1955]
1975; henceforth LSLT).
he theory presented in LSLT assumes a hierarchy of analyti-
cal linguistic levels (e.g., the phonemic level, the morphemic
level). Consequently, smaller linguistic units (e.g., morphemes)
can be combined in a rule-driven manner to create larger lin-
guistic units (e.g., words). A fully articulated grammar of this
kind would be able explicitly to produce all the grammatical sen-
tences in a given language, and therefore the model is generative
rather than decompositional. Eventually, TGG came to be asso-
ciated with a number of distinctive and inluential theoretical
stances such as the following:
Syntax can be analyzed independently of semantics that
is, sentences such as Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
are grammatical though they are meaningless (Chomsky
[1955] 1975, 57; 1957b, 15).
Statistical techniques (such as inite state machines and
stochastic grammars) cannot generate all, and only all, the
grammatical sentences in a given language, and therefore
they cannot usefully be incorporated into comprehensive lin-
guistic theories (Chomsky 1957a).
Linguistic theories can be developed and presented in a
rigorously axiomatic-deductive framework like that stan-
dardly used by mathematicians and logicians (Chomsky
[1955] 1975, 83).
he detailed arguments that Chomsky developed in order to jus-
tify such beliefs caused many of his contemporaries to claim that
TGG was a more scientiic linguistic theory than any of its pre-
decessors, and this partly explains why it was eventually received
with such enthusiasm by linguists who were keen to establish
their discipline as a scientiic enterprise (see Tomalin 2006).
Focusing speciically on the syntactic level of analysis, the stan-
dard TGG framework assumes that a set of phrase structure
rules (e.g., S NP VP) generates strings of symbols (the kernel
sentences of the grammar), and that a set of transformational
rules subsequently operates upon these strings, modifying them
in order to derive further sentences (see transformational
grammar).
Development and Transition
In the early 1960s, the irst generation of linguists who had
encountered GG as students came to maturity, and this group
included such inluential igures as John R. Ross, Paul Postal,
James McCawley, and George Lakof. However, Chomsky con-
tinued to guide the development of GG, and a revised version
was presented in Aspects of the heory of Syntax (1965; hence-
forth ATS). While various techniques from 1950s-style TGG
had been retained, there were also conspicuous diferences.
For instance, the topic of language acquisition was now explic-
itly addressed, and Chomsky suggested that the generation
of grammatical structures was determined partly by innate
knowledge of language, thereby stressing the connection
between linguistics and cognitive psychology (see Chomsky
1965). In order to clarify this idea, he distinguished between
competence (i.e., a speaker-hearers knowledge of the for-
mal aspects of language) and performance (i.e., a speaker-
hearers actual use of language in concrete situations), and he
suggested that the task of linguistic research was to provide a
description of the former. While elaborating this revised per-
spective, Chomsky contrasted descriptive and explanatory
adequacy (see descriptive , observational, and explana-
tory adequacy) and argued that a valid grammatical theory
must be both descriptively and explanatorily adequate. As a
result, a theory of universal grammar (UG) became pos-
sible. Speciically, since ATS encouraged linguists to explain
how an idealized speaker-hearer eventually achieves linguistic
competence while encountering only a inite amount of PLD,
researchers began to focus more on the task of identifying those
properties that are common to all known languages, rather than
merely producing isolated grammars for speciic languages.
In the ATS framework, in addition to TGG-style phrase struc-
ture rules such as
S NP Aux VP
VP V NP
NP Det N
NP N
Det the
Aux M
Chomsky also included subcategorization rules that contained
explicit information about sublexical features (1965, 85):
N [+N, Common]
[+Common] [Count]
[+Count] [ Animate]
[Common] [Animate]
[+Animate] [Human]
[Count] [Abstract]
335
Generative Grammar
LEXICON
D-STRUCTURE
Move
S-STRUCTURE
PHONETIC FORM LOGICAL FORM
Figure 2.
Such rule sets enable structures such as those found in
Figure 1 to be generated. Base-generated trees of this kind
constituted deep structure representations, and the transfor-
mational rules operated on them to produce surface structure
representations (see underlying structure and sur-
face structure ).
Principles and Parameters
By the late 1970s, GG had started to change once again, gradually
emerging in the early 1980s as the modular government and
binding (GB) theory. he GB framework associates UG with a
inite set of principles that are common to all languages, and a
inite set of parameters the settings of which vary from language
to language it therefore began to be referred to as the prin-
ciples and parameters (P&P) approach. In the GB formal-
ism, UG is understood to constitute a characterization of the
childs pre-linguistic initial state and the parameters are ixed
as PLD are encountered, thus creating a stable-state grammar
(Chomsky 1981, 7). Schematically,
S0 + PLD Ss
336
Figure 1.
LEXICON
NARROW SYNTAX
PHONETIC FORM LOGICAL FORM
Figure 3.
where S0 is the initial state and Ss is the resulting stable state
with ixed parameter settings. Also during this period, the term
E-language began to be used to refer to actual manifestations of
language in the external world, while I-LANGUAGE referred to
the ideal speaker-hearers internal, tacit knowledge of language.
Although it developed out of previous GG research, the GB
model certainly introduced a new framework for linguistic
analysis. For instance, while deep structure (i.e., D-structure)
and surface structure (i.e., S-structure) were retained, a single
rule, Move- (i.e., move anything anywhere), was used to gen-
erate S-structures from D-structures, rather than a set of speciic
movement transformations. In addition, the GB phrase struc-
ture component used x-bar theory, which posited structural
similarities between diferent phrasal categories, such as noun
phrase (NP) and verb phrase (VP), and, crucially, Chomsky
(1986) later extended these structural insights to functional cat-
egories as well. Consequently, the basic GB framework can be
represented as in Figure 2.
During the early 1990s, the P&P approach was reformu-
lated as the minimalist program (MP) (see minimalism ),
and in an attempt to reduce the theory to its bare essentials,
some familiar GB elements (e.g., D-structure, S-structure,
X-bar theory) were rejected in favor of a simpler, more eco-
nomical methodology. Accordingly, the basic schema for the
MP framework can be presented as in Figure 3. Specifically, in
the MP, an I-language generates expressions that pair instruc-
tions for the articulatory-perceptual (A-P) system interface
Generative Grammar
with instructions for the conceptual-intentional (C-I) system
interface. CHL (the computational component of UG) contains
a small set of operations (e.g., Select, merge ), which manipu-
late lexical items (LIs). LIs are defined in terms of irreducible
features, and (crudely) CHL combines LIs in various princi-
pled ways in order to create larger syntactic objects, with all
superfluous machinery (e.g., projections, labels) being omit-
ted. A computation converges if it converges at the A-P and
C-I interface levels, and, crucially, the MP hypothesizes that
natural language constitutes an optimal solution to the var-
ious demands imposed by the external interfaces. In other
words, the MP seeks to determine just how perfect natural
language actually is (Chomsky 1995, 9).
Chomsky was initially rather vague about the nature of this
perfection. However, he has recently attempted to deine
this notion with reference to the speciic requirements that
are imposed upon an I-language by the A-P and C-I interfaces.
Accordingly, it is possible to identify various degrees of the essen-
tial minimalist thesis, with the most stringent being the strong
minimalist thesis (SMT). In essence, if the SMT is correct, then
there are no elements of S0 that cannot be accounted for in terms
of interface requirements and general (nonlinguistic) computa-
tional properties; therefore, there are no inherently unexplain-
able aspects of S0. If this hypothesis is shown to be true, then
natural language would be, in this sense, perfect.
Marcus Tomalin
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Chomsky, N. [1955] 1975. he Logical Structure of Linguistic heory.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
. 1957a. Review of Hocketts A Manual of Phonology. International
Journal of American Linguistics 23: 22334.
. 1957b. Syntactic Structures. he Hague: Mouton.
. 1965. Aspects of the heory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Floris, the
Netherlands: Dordrecht.
. 1986. Barriers: Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 13. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
. 1995. he Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
. 2000a. New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 2000b. Minimalist inquiries: he framework. In Step by
Step: Essays on Minimalist Syntax in Honor of Howard Lasnik, ed.
D. Michaels, J. Uriagereka, and R. Martin, 89115. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
. 2004. Beyond explanatory adequacy. In Structures and
Beyond: he Cartography of Syntactic Structures. Vol. 3. Ed. A. Belletti,
10431. Studies in Comparative Syntax. New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Harris, R. A. 1993. he Linguistic Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harris, Z. S. 1951. Methods in Structural Linguistics. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Jackendof, R. 1977. X-Bar Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Johnson, D. E., and S. Lappin. 1997. A critique of the minimalist pro-
gram. Linguistics and Philosophy 20: 273333.
. 1999. Local Constraints vs. Economy. Monographs in Linguistics
Series. Stanford, CA: CSLI.
Lees, R. 1957. Review of Syntactic Structures. Language 33: 375408.
Matthews, P. H. 1993. Grammatical heory in the United States from
Bloomield to Chomsky. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Generative Poetics
Newmeyer, F. J. 1986. Linguistic heory in America. Orlando, FL: Academic
Press.
Tomalin, M. 2006. Linguistics and the Formal Sciences.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
GENERATIVE POETICS
Generative poetics comprises all theories that seek to explain the
production and reception of literary works by reference to a set
of rules or algorithmic procedures. It is closely related to cogni-
tive poetics. However, generative poetics has tended to draw
inspiration from Chomskyan generative grammar. In con-
trast, many writers in cognitive poetics have aligned their analy-
ses with cognitive linguistics.
Early work in generative poetics tended to track developments
in generative grammar. In Noam Chomskys usage, a generative
grammar produces all and only the grammatical sentences of
a language. For the early theorists of generative poetics, then,
a narrative grammar should produce all and only well-formed
narratives. Moreover, in both cases, it was commonly thought
that this goal is best accomplished through a transforma-
tional grammar.
Much of this early work was illuminating and important.
However, there are several problems with modeling, for exam-
ple, narratology on linguistic theory. First, linguistic theories
may change rapidly. If one bases ones narrative theory on any
speciic syntactic theory, ones narrative theory will probably be
outmoded by the time it is published. Second, there is no reason
to believe, a priori, that rules for the generation of stories should
directly parallel rules of syntax anyway. Finally, it is not clear that
there is any narrative counterpart to grammaticality. In other
words, the ambition of generating all and only well-formed
stories may be misguided. (he situation is, of course, diferent
for areas of poetics that are directly governed by linguistic rules.
Indeed, much of the most important work in generative poet-
ics has been done in such areas; see meter, verse line, and
poetic form, universals of.)
he point about well-formedness is worth considering in fur-
ther detail. here are, of course, speech actions that are clearly
not stories and speech actions that are. he diiculty is that
there is a gradient of more or less marginal cases, rather than a
strict division between stories and nonstories. In short, story is
a prototype concept. Given the prototype nature of story, it
is not clear just how the relevant data are organized, thus, just
what needs explaining. In other words, it is not clear precisely
what structures the generative rules should generate.
More exactly, the outputs of a generative system clearly
need to match the relevant data. At least two aspects of the
Chomskyan approach are generalizable here. First, the system
should not overgenerate. For example, a generative grammar
might produce all grammatical sentences. But it is still invalid if it
also produces he the of at as a grammatical sentence. Second,
the grammar cannot produce only sentences that have already
occurred. Such a grammar would be falsiied as soon as someone
uttered a new sentence. In short, the data comprise all possible
speech actions of the relevant type (sentences, narratives) and
no impossible ones. his returns us to the issue of intermedi-
ate cases. However we determine the data, a generative system
337
Generative Poetics
should produce structures in keeping with the categorial organi-
zation of the data. If the data have a sharp well-formed/not well-
formed division with few intermediate cases, the system should
generate structures divided in this way. If the data involve a more
gradual gradient from excluded to included cases as we ind
with stories then the system should generate structures orga-
nized in this way.
In addition to this diference in the data, there is a normative
component to our concept of stories that is largely absent from
our concept of sentences. We routinely refer to some stories as
better than others. However, we do not commonly think of some
sentences as better than others.
Although it is not usually referred to as generative poetics,
some recent work in cognitive science and literature does fall
into that category as deined here. his work avoids the prob-
lems of earlier approaches by developing theoretical principles
independently of particular grammatical theories and by recog-
nizing the prototype nature of our ordinary language concept of
stories.
In order to understand this recent work, we need to consider
what constitutes a generative rule system for a speech action.
Most obviously, a generative system needs a productive com-
ponent and a receptive component. Parts of these components
will be directly parallel. In other words, many rules of produc-
tion and reception have to be systematically coordinated so that
when I say Could you ask John to pass the salt? my addressee
will understand the question in such a way that I will most often
end up getting the salt. On the other hand, some parts of these
components will necessarily be diferent. For example, not every-
thing involved in producing an alliterative, rhyming, metered
verse line is also involved in reading that line.
Whether speaking of productive or receptive speech actions,
there are several ways in which we could organize the rules that
constitute a generative system. No matter how we do this, we are
likely to have processes (e.g., activation), structures in which pro-
cesses operate (e.g., episodic memory), and elements on which
processes operate (e.g., memories of particular experiences that
we activate from episodic memory). Note that these divisions
need not be absolute. Processes could themselves be the ele-
ments on which other processes (meta-rules) operate. Moreover,
some elements may incorporate processes operating on other
elements. We see this in the case of scripts, such as the script
for eating at a restaurant. When these scripts are activated, they
guide our speech and behavior by integrating various preexisting
processes and other elements. For example, when we decide to
eat at a restaurant and follow our script for doing so, such pro-
cesses as activating our prototype for a menu are involved so
that we can recognize menus and respond appropriately when
the server holds one out to us. Finally, diferent processes may
only operate at diferent derivation levels. A common case of this
sort would be the distinction between basic construction rules
and rules that adjust the outputs of the basic construction rules.
For example, certain rules of politeness might not afect our
initial production of a sentence, but may enter as adjustments
performed while we are speaking.
As the preceding analysis suggests, there are diferent levels
of commonality for the components and operations of any rule
system. he main levels would be as follows: 1) universal, 2)
338
speciic to a group, 3) speciic to an individual, and 4) speciic to
a speech action. Generative grammar focuses almost entirely on
the irst and second levels. Generative poetics, however, must be
concerned equally with the third and fourth levels. his is con-
nected with the fact that verbal art is a normative category. We
care about instances of verbal art, and we care about the people
who produce works of verbal art. (We commonly care less about
individuals who interpret works of verbal art. In keeping with this
preference, writers in generative poetics and related areas have
tended to focus on production rather than reception. Ultimately,
however, a research program treating these issues will need to
address reception as well; see competence and perfor-
mance, literary, for one inluential approach to reception in
this context.)
Consider a simple rule system for producing narrative. Such
a system might have three types of rules: 1) basic plot construc-
tion rules, 2) development principles that serve to specify the
basic plot, and 3) evaluation rules, a form of adjustment rules
that operates in authorial revision. here are two levels of basic
plot construction rules. At the irst level, a few simple processes
generate a story from a goal. hese processes might involve con-
structing an agent who pursues the goal and the development
of some problem that prevents the achievement of the goal.
Repeated over enough instances, such stories themselves form
a second constructive level narrative prototypes. Narrative
prototypes do not deine basic conditions for being a story. hey
crystallize what counts as a good case of a story. hese proto-
types help us to account for the gradient between central and
marginal cases of stories. One may put the point simply by refer-
ence to acquisition. A child learns that Nice day! is not a story
at all; I went out to buy a loaf of bread is a very marginal sort of
story; I went out to buy a loaf of bread, but there was a ifteen-
car accident on the highway is more prototypical and so on,
up to the experiences of Bambi, which are highly prototypical.
Some narrative prototypes are narrative universals.
hree in particular recur cross-culturally heroic, romantic, and
sacriicial tragi-comedy. hese are speciied and combined in
particular genres that vary from tradition to tradition.
he nature of prototypes is such that they are relatively abstract
and common or ordinary. In contrast, successful literary works
are both concrete and distinctive. Development principles serve
to particularize the prototypes. In many, perhaps most, cases,
development principles are universal or common to a group,
though their precise operation involves individual idiosyncrasy.
For example, in specifying characters, one common develop-
ment principle is to draw on exemplars, instances of particu-
lar people, real or literary. While this principle seems likely to be
universal or near universal, its results will vary with the precise
exemplars employed. hese exemplars will, in turn, vary cultur-
ally and individually. hus, we ind that diferent traditions com-
monly have a limited number of exemplary characters who serve
as important models to later writers. he principle is cross-cul-
tural, but of course the exemplars themselves difer (e.g., Jesus in
the Christian tradition versus Rama in the Hindu tradition).
Evaluation rules include self-conscious processes of adjust-
ment for a projected audience or readership. However, they
more importantly involve unself-conscious sensitivity to pattern-
ing, suggestiveness (see dhvani and rasa and suggestion
Generative Poetics
structure), and other complex features of the work. here are
obviously diferences in the nature of these rules and the way
they operate in writing and oral composition.
A brief example from Shakespeare should help to clarify these
points. Like any other author, Shakespeare had a diverse set of
principles that constituted his generative poetic system. hese
principles were multiple and stood in complex relations with one
another. he relations are probably best understood roughly in
terms of connectionism. hey were linked to one another with
diferent degrees of strength. Diferent principles were activated
at diferent times and in diferent degrees, depending on what
Shakespeare was reading, experiencing in his personal life, and
so forth. hese diferent activations would sometimes produce
very diferent cascades of activation within the system, leading
to diferent products.
Obviously, we can never have a sense of all these particulars.
However, the particulars are not without patterns. For example,
Shakespeare largely conined himself to the universal narrative
prototypes. Moreover, there are patterns to his development
of those prototypes cultural patterns (relating, for example,
to character types of Renaissance English drama) and individ-
ual patterns, patterns that are more distinctive of Shakespeare
himself. One standard development principle, a function of the
maximization of relevance (see the essay Elaborating Speech
and Writing: Verbal Art in this volume), is alignment, where
the author parallels diferent levels of the narrative world (e.g.,
presenting society and nature as in simultaneous turmoil).
Shakespeare sometimes intensiies such parallelism, extending
it to three or four levels for example, mental health and family
relations, along with society and nature. he most famous case
of such alignment in Shakespeare is in King Lear, when Lears
madness is paralleled with the division of his family, strife in his
kingdom, and a terrible storm.
here are other, less common, principles employed by
Shakespeare as well. Some are localized. In several cases, for
example, he represents rebels as having suicidal thoughts, even
when their rebellion seems entirely justiied. Others range more
broadly across a work. For instance, a number of Shakespeares
development principles serve to foster ambivalence toward vari-
ous actions and characters, complicating our sense of who is right
and who is wrong in particular conlicts. hus, we sympathize with
Hamlet, knowing that Claudius is a murderer. But Shakespeare
makes Hamlet, too, commit murder, if in somewhat more ambig-
uous circumstances. (See Hogan 2006 on this and other cases.)
Without access to Shakespeares drafts and revisions, it is dif-
icult to isolate his evaluation rules. However, we might guess
that they involved systematizing the execution of such devel-
opment principles (e.g., enhancing ambivalence through such
means as the addition of humanizing speeches for otherwise vil-
lainous characters).
Generative poetics is certainly not the only way of theoriz-
ing literature. However, it is highly promising, when dissociated
from particular linguistic theories and tied instead to a broader
understanding of rule systems in a cognitive context. As such, it
has great potential for helping us to understand both the univer-
sal patterns of verbal art and the speciicity of particular works.
Patrick Colm Hogan
Generative Semantics
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2006. Narrative universals, heroic tragi-comedy,
and Shakespeares political ambivalence. College Literature
33.1: 3466.
Pavel, homas G. 1985. he Poetics of Plot: he Case of English Renaissance
Drama. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Prince, Gerald. 1973. A Grammar of Stories. he Hague: Mouton.
GENERATIVE SEMANTICS
Generative semantics (GS) began as an orthodox development
within the standard theory (ST) of the transformational-
generative grammar (TGG) framework developed by Noam
Chomsky and his collaborators in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Its most prominent voices include one of those collaborators,
Paul Postal, two of Chomskys students, James D. McCawley and
Hj (John Robert) Ross, and others in the general circle, chiely
George Lakof and Robin Tolmach Lakof. While the developers,
and many onlookers, appeared to regard GS as a natural contin-
uation of ST, Chomsky clearly did not; antagonisms soon arose.
GS had considerably more adherents for several years, but within
a decade the situation had reversed, with more linguists adopt-
ing Chomskys extended standard theory, or EST. GS rapidly
disintegrated, leaving many proposals of lasting interest.
GS was a highly streamlined TGG model, with only two rep-
resentations, meaning and form the irst a syntactic structure
comprised of semantic primes and heavily inluenced by
symbolic logic, the second a phonetically completed syntac-
tic structure linked by a set of transformations, governed by
a set of derivational conditions called global rules. While the
generative role of semantics was both originary and titular, it
quickly became peripheral to GS, as proponents began tackling
a wide range of issues and phenomena previously discounted
or unnoticed within TGG. For instance, grammaticality had
been deined exclusively in terms of a speciic grammar, but
GSers regarded it as a psychosocial notion, relative to language
users and their contexts. Similarly, lexical categories had been
assumed to be discrete, but GSers explored categorization
in fuzzy and context-sensitive terms resonant with prototype
theory, developments which have been inluential in cogni-
tive grammmar (e.g., Ross 1973; Lakof 1972). GSers also
brought performative analyses into TGG, typically positing a
deletable hypersentence carrying the illocutionary force,
such as I warn you, into which a locution like Dont make a move
was embedded (Sadock 1969). his research helped bring prag-
matics into formal linguistics.
he legacy of GS is extensive, albeit notoriously unacknowl-
edged (Postal 1988). Frederick J. Newmeyer ofers this partial but
signiicant catalog of topics introduced to TGG by GS: capturing
semantic regularities in a representation utilizing symbolic logic;
the early exploration of phenomena that led to the development
of mechanisms like indexing devices (see indexicals), traces,
and filters; lexical decomposition; and several speciic propos-
als, such as the nonexistence of extrinsic rule ordering, postcy-
clic lexical insertion, and treating anaphoric pronouns as bound
variables (1986, 138; see anaphora).
Randy Allen Harris
339
Generic- and Speciic-Level Metaphors
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Harris, Randy Allen. 1993. he Linguistics Wars. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Huck, Geofrey J., and John A. Goldsmith. 1995. Ideology and
Linguistic heory: Noam Chomsky and the Deep Structure Debates.
London: Routledge.
Lakof, George. 1972. Hedges: A study in meaning criteria and the logic
of fuzzy concepts. Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistics Society
8: 183228.
Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1986. Linguistic heory in America. 2d ed. New
York: Academic Press.
Postal, Paul. 1988. Advances in linguistic rhetoric. Natural Language
and Linguistic heory 6: 12937.
Ross, J. R. 1973. Nouniness. In hree Dimensions of Linguistic heory,
ed. O. Fujimura, 137258. Tokyo: TEC.
Sadock J. 1969. Hypersentences. Paper in Linguistics 1: 283371.
GENERIC- AND SPECIFIC-LEVEL METAPHORS
The distinction between generic-level and specific-level met-
aphors was introduced in conceptual metaphor theory
(Lakoff 1993; Lakoff and Turner 1989). It identifies hierar-
chical relations between metaphorical concepts that are
hypothesised to be used in the understanding of figurative
language.
Examples of speciic-level metaphors are LOVE IS A JOUR
NEY, PEOPLE ARE PLANTS, or DEATH IS A THIEF. Examples
of generic-level metaphors are EVENTS ARE ACTIONS and
GENERIC IS SPECIFIC. he motivation for introducing this dis-
tinction was the observation that some topics are commonly
talked about using a small group of metaphors that share impor-
tant characteristics. George Lakof and Mark Turner (1989), in an
analysis of poetic language, noticed that time was metaphorically
personiied as a destroyer, a thief, or a devourer, as in Miltons
line time, the subtle thief of youth (cited on p. 35). While such
personiications might be common and easily understood, per-
soniications of time such as, say, a child or as a shop clerk do
not occur in the analyzed poems. he reason for this, Lakof and
Turner argued, is that metaphorical understanding in terms of
relatively speciic ideas (such as thieves or shop clerks) is con-
strained by generic-level metaphors, in this case EVENTS ARE
ACTIONS. Generic-level metaphors ensure that topics are meta-
phorically conceptualized using vehicles that share relevant
generic structure with the topic. In the example from Milton, the
event of middle age involves, among other things, the absence
of a previously experienced youth. Actions involving thieves as
agents typically result in the absence of previously held posses-
sions. Evidently, the two share generic structure, which licenses
the personiication of time as a thief via the events are actions
metaphor. Typical activities involving shop clerks as agents, on
the other hand, might be more diicult to relate to the experience
of middle age: Such activities do not share generic structure with
the onset of middle age. his is why, theoretically, the EVENTS
ARE ACTIONS metaphor should prevent poets from attempting
the line time, the subtle shop clerk of youth. he generic-level
metaphor EVENTS ARE ACTIONS constrains the range of viable
speciic-level personiication metaphors.
Generic-level metaphors difer from speciic-level metaphors
not only in the generality of the topics and vehicles they apply
340
to but also in their internal structure. Speciic-level metaphors
are held to involve a set of speciic mappings between a source
domain and a target domain (see source and target). In the
metaphor LOVE IS A JOURNEY, abstracted from conventional
expressions, such as our relationship has hit a dead-end street,
look how far weve come, or the relationship isnt going anywhere
(Lakof 1993, 206), the lovers correspond to the travelers, the dis-
tance traveled corresponds to the duration of the relationship,
and so on. However, generic-level metaphors do not involve
such a ixed set of correspondences. For example, the metaphor
EVENTS ARE ACTIONS does not specify the events that can be
metaphorically understood as actions or the actions that can be
used as metaphor vehicles, and, consequently, it does not spec-
ify any particular correspondences between such events and
actions.
he idea of generic-level metaphors was a signiicant turn-
ing point in the development of conceptual metaphor theory
because it marked a step away from the extrapolation of hypoth-
esized conceptual metaphors from linguistic data toward the
postulation of more abstract schemas with loose relations to
observable linguistic metaphors (e.g., Lakof and Johnson 1999).
Whereas in earlier work (Lakof and Johnson 1980), conceptual
metaphors were treated as generalizations over metaphors
in communication on the part of the analyst and, presum-
ably, the speaker, the direction of reasoning was reversed with
respect to generic-level metaphors: hese were explicitly held
to constrain the particularities of metaphor in language and
communication.
he idea of generic-level metaphors has attracted some debate.
One contention has been that the relation between actions and
events (EVENTS ARE ACTIONS) or between a speciic instance
and a general phenomenon (GENERIC IS SPECIFIC) is not itself
metaphoric (Jackendof and Aaron 1991; Stern 2000). Also, it
remains an open question whether abstract schemas such as
generic-level metaphors appropriately model metaphor under-
standing (e.g., Murphy 1996) or whether they are better regarded
as descriptive tools for the analyst. Some current cognitive-lin-
guistic approaches to metaphor are more concerned with the
development of metaphoric ideas in discourse communities (e.g.,
Musolf 2004).
he inluence of the idea of generic-level metaphors can be
seen in two developments. he notion of primary metaphors
(e.g., Grady and Johnson 2003) takes up the idea that metaphors
in verbal communication might be constrained by other met-
aphoric schemas that are not themselves manifest in language.
he notion of a generic space in conceptual blending the-
ory preserves the idea of a cognitive structure that identiies the
shared generic structure of arguments brought together in a
blended space, while abandoning the notion that such generic
structure is itself metaphoric.
Jrg Zinken
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Grady, Joseph, and Christopher Johnson. 2003. Converging evidence
for the notions of subscene and primary scene. In Metaphor and
Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast, ed. R. Dirven and R. Prings,
53354. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Genes and Language
Jackendof, Ray, and David Aaron. 1991. Review of More han Cool
Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor, by G. Lakof and M. Turner.
Language 67: 32038.
Lakof, George. 1993. he contemporary theory of metaphor. In
Metaphor and hought, ed. A. Ortony, 20251. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lakof, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: he Embodied Mind and Its Challenge
to Western hought. New York: Basic Books.
Lakof, George, and Mark Turner. 1989. More han Cool Reason: A Field
Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Murphy, Gregory. 1996. On metaphoric representation. Cognition
60: 173204.
Musolf, Andreas. 2004. Metaphor and conceptual evolu-
tion. Metaphorik.de 7: 5575. Available online at: http://www.
metaphorik. de.
Stern, Joseph. 2000. Metaphor in Context. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
GENES AND LANGUAGE
Why Should One Expect Genes to Play an Important Role in
Language?
Unlike ofspring of any other species, ordinary human children
routinely acquire complex language, characterized by open-
ended vocabularies and productive syntax. his cannot be a
result of input alone because juveniles of other closely related
primate species, such as chimpanzees, do not develop human-
like languages even with extensive tutelage (Terrace, Petitto,
et al. 1980). From the perspective of biology, the question is not
whether genes play roles in language but how (Fisher and Marcus
2006).
Clearly, the words and grammar that are speciic to any par-
ticular language are learned through exposure to appropriate
models. Nevertheless, the peculiar human capacity to acquire
and use language depends on a rich mixture of neural systems
that must be biologically constrained. hese include mecha-
nisms that need to simultaneously coordinate syntactic,
semantic, phonological, and pragmatic representations
with one another, with motor and sensory systems, and with
both speakers and listeners knowledge of the world. he func-
tional properties of the relevant neural systems are largely deter-
mined by the cellular architecture of the human brain, which
is itself the product of ongoing interactions between genes and
the environment (Marcus 2004). Genes contribute to the birth,
migration, diferentiation, patterning, and connectivity of neu-
rons during embryogenesis and development, and they con-
tinue to contribute to online functions in the mature brain, for
example, by mediating changes in the strengths of connections
between neurons. It is likely that hundreds or even thousands of
genes participate in the development and maintenance of the
neural systems that underlie language, some in ways that may
be tailored to linguistic functions, others (like housekeeping
genes that govern the basic metabolic processes of all cells) that
clearly are not.
As yet, it is unknown how many of the genes in the human
genome are closely tied to language, but studies of developmen-
tal syndromes that primarily disrupt speech and/or language
skills give strong reason to believe that such genes are there to be
found (Fisher, Lai, et al. 2003). Speech and language disorders
are repeatedly observed to cluster in families, and twin studies
indicate that they are highly heritable (Bishop 2001). In recent
years, geneticists have successfully located chromosomal sites
within the human genome that are likely to harbor genetic risk
factors involved in developmental language disorders (e.g., he
SLI Consortium 2002). Moreover, they have even been able to
zero in on a speciic gene, FOXP2, that is implicated in one par-
ticular disorder afecting speech and language (Lai, Fisher, et al.
2001).
FOXP2: What Is It and How Was It Discovered?
he FOXP2 gene, found on human chromosome 7, codes for a
special type of regulatory protein, technically known as a fork-
head-box (or FOX) transcription factor. his class of proteins
helps govern when and where genes are expressed (switched on
and of) during embryogenesis, in postnatal development, and
in the mature organism (Lehmann, Sowden, et al. 2003). Each
FOX protein contains a special structure, called a forkhead-box
domain, which enables it to bind to the DNA of a target gene and
afect how much of the product of that target gene is made in
the cell. Transcription factors like these may afect many down-
stream targets in chorus and, thus, represent central components
of gene regulatory networks that are important for implementing
developmental programs, allowing cells to respond to signals,
and so on.
he discovery of the human FOXP2 gene originated in stud-
ies of a large three-generational family (the KE family) sufering
from a rare form of speech and language impairment (Hurst,
Baraitser, et al. 1990; Gopnik and Crago 1991). he disorder is
characterized primarily by severe diiculties in the learning and
production of sequences of mouth movements that are neces-
sary for luent speech, usually referred to as developmental ver-
bal dyspraxia or childhood apraxia of speech (Vargha-Khadem,
Watkins, et al. 1998). Afected individuals simultaneously dis-
play problems in a wide range of language-related abilities,
in both oral and written domains, with impact on receptive as
well as expressive skills (Watkins, Dronkers, et al. 2002; Vargha-
Khadem, Gadian, et al. 2005). All 15 of the afected people in the
KE family have inherited a mutation altering a single nucleotide
letter in the DNA code of the FOXP2 gene (Lai, Fisher, et al. 2001).
his change afects the structure of the encoded FOXP2 protein
and prevents it from functioning properly (Vernes, Nicod, et al.
2006).
Although the mutation in question is private to the KE family,
diferent mutations disrupting FOXP2 function have been dis-
covered in other families, showing comparable problems with
speech and language acquisition (MacDermot, Bonora, et al.
2005). In all cases identiied thus far, the mutations have been
heterozygous; that is, people with the disorder have a muta-
tion in only one copy of FOXP2, while the other copy is intact.
(Humans are diploid organisms, carrying two copies of every
gene, one inherited from the father, the other from the mother,
with a few exceptions such as the genes on the sex chromo-
somes.) he consistent observations of heterozygosity in difer-
ent cases of FOXP2-related disorder suggest that afected people
have reduced amounts of working FOXP2 protein in brain cir-
cuits that are important for speech and language. herefore, the
341
Genes and Language
amount (dosage) of FOXP2 may be a critical factor in the proper
development of speech and language skills.
Does That Make FOXP2 the Language Gene?
No. Although studies of people carrying damaged versions of
FOXP2 are consistent with a role (or roles) in the development
and/or processing of language, it is already apparent from
genetic studies that no single gene is exclusively responsible for
this distinctive human trait. Indeed, FOXP2 is implicated (thus
far) only in one rare form of disorder, and not mutated in people
diagnosed with more common variants of specific language
impairment (SLI) (Newbury, Bonora, et al. 2002). Instead, most
developmental language disorders are likely to be multifacto-
rial: the product of multiple genetic risk factors, their interactions
with one another and interactions with the environment (Fisher,
Lai, et al. 2003). It is also worth noting that mutation of FOXP2
impairs not only aspects of speech and language but also aspects
of nonlinguistic orofacial motor control (Watkins, Dronkers, et
al. 2002; Vargha-Khadem, Gadian, et al. 2005).
More broadly, given what we know about the fundamen-
tals of genetics, developmental biology, and neuroscience, it is
highly unlikely that there is a single human-speciic gene whose
sole purpose is to endow our species with the capacity to acquire
language. Individual genes do not specify particular behavioral
outputs or aspects of cognitive function. Rather, they contain the
codes for assembling individual molecules that act in a highly
interactive fashion with other molecules in order to build and
maintain a working human brain (Marcus 2004). Often, a gene
will have a primary function that is very clearly deined at the
cellular level for example, by encoding an enzyme, structural
protein, ion channel, signaling molecule, or receptor but the
pathways that link the gene to higher-order brain function will
nevertheless be complex, indirect, and diicult to disentangle
(Fisher 2006).
he language gene shorthand is also misleading because
most, if not all, of the genes that are involved in language are
likely to play other roles, elsewhere in the brain and/or in other
tissues of the body. he expression of FOXP2 is not conined to
classical language-related regions of the cortex, or even to the
brain. Instead, it extends to additional brain structures, such
as the basal ganglia, thalamus, and cerebellum (Lai,
Gerrelli, et al. 2003), and to other parts of the body (e.g., the lungs
[Shu, Yang et al. 2001]); it also has close counterparts in all verte-
brates, as discussed in the section on evolution. In sum, FOXP2
can properly be a called a gene that participates in language
but not the language gene or even a gene that participates
exclusively in language.
How Representative Is FOXP2? Are Other Genes Involved in
Language Likely to Act in Similar Ways?
It is diicult to say for sure; thus far, the FOXP2 gene represents
the only known example where point mutations have been linked
to a developmental disorder which primarily afects speech and
language. However, since disruptions of FOXP2 are found in only
a very small subset of people with language-related disorders
(Newbury, Bonora, et al. 2002; MacDermot, Bonora, et al. 2005),
it is clear that there must be other genetic efects that remain to
be discovered.
342
Genetic studies of typical forms of speciic language impair-
ment have identiied other genomic regions that are likely to be
relevant to language, and researchers are focusing consider-
able attention on those chromosomal sites in the hope of pin-
ning down particular genes (e.g., he SLI Consortium 2002). For
developmental dyslexia, a disorder primarily characterized by
reading disability, but underpinned by subtle persistent deicits
in language processing, it has been possible to home in on sev-
eral candidate genes (DYX1C1, KIAA0319, DCDC2, and ROBO1).
hese genes difer from FOXP2 in that there have been no spe-
ciic causal mutations identiied instead, it is thought that the
increased risk of dyslexia stems from as-yet unknown variants in
the regulatory parts of those genes that govern their expression
(Fisher 2006). Nevertheless, there are some striking parallels
with FOXP2; each of the dyslexia candidate genes shows wide-
spread expression patterns in multiple circuits in the brain, and
each is active in additional tissues, not only the brain. None of
the genes is unique to humans; for example, highly similar ver-
sions of each are found both in other primates and in rodents. At
this stage, there is little understanding of why alterations in these
genes should have relatively speciic efects on reading abilities,
although their basic neurobiological functions are beginning to
be deined; three of the genes (DYX1C1, KIAA0319, and DCDC2)
have been linked to neuronal migration, and the fourth (ROBO1)
codes for a receptor protein involved in signal transduction,
which helps regulate axon/dendrite guidance.
At the time of writing, there are indications that alterations
in gene dosage may emerge as a general theme underlying overt
speech/language deicits. For example, it has been recently
shown that duplications of a speciic region on chromosome
7 (far away from the site of the FOXP2 gene) can cause speech
deicits (Somerville, Mervis, et al. 2005). What is especially inter-
esting about this inding is the fact that the relevant part of chro-
mosome 7, which contains several diferent genes, corresponds
to the region that is most commonly deleted in cases of Williams
syndrome, a well-studied disorder in which language skills can be
relatively well preserved as compared to other abilities. In other
words, while deletion of that part of chromosome 7 (i.e., reduced
gene dosage) tends to spare language, duplication of this same
set of genes (increased gene dosage) leads to speech disruptions.
Similarly, there is evidence to suggest that the number of func-
tional copies of a chromosome 22 gene called SHANK3, recently
implicated in autism spectrum disorders, may be critical for
speech development (Durand, Betancur, et al. 2007). Language,
like many aspects of biology, is likely to depend on a precise bal-
ance among many diferent molecules.
What Can Genes Tell Us about the Evolution of Language?
Genes, like species, are the product of the process that Darwin
called descent with modiication. Each gene has an evolution-
ary history, with its current function a modiication of earlier
functions. To the extent that the language system is the product
of descent with modiication, most genes that are associated with
language can be expected to have counterparts in nonlinguistic
species. As such, comparisons of gene sequences and expression
patterns in diferent species can help cast light on language evo-
lution, identifying which of the relevant neurogenetic pathways
are shared with other species and which have been modiied
Genes and Language
on the lineage that led to modern humans (Fisher and Marcus
2006).
FOXP2 again appears representative in this regard. Following
the discovery of the gene, molecular studies have shown that it is
present in similar form in many vertebrates, including mammals,
birds, reptiles, and ish, where it is expressed in corresponding
regions of the brain to those observed in humans (reviewed by
Vargha-Khadem, Gadian, et al. 2005; Fisher and Marcus 2006).
On the basis of such data, it appears that FOXP2 is evolutionarily
ancient, shared by many vertebrate species, regardless of speech
and language ability, where it may have conserved functions in
brain circuits involved in sensorimotor integration and motor-
skill learning (Fisher and Marcus 2006). For example, the stria-
tum in the basal ganglia is a conserved site of high FOXP2
expression, which shows reduced gray matter density in humans
carrying FOXP2 mutations (Vargha-Khadem, Gadian, et al.
2005). It is intriguing that in songbirds, changes in expression of
the gene in striatal Area X a key nucleus of the brain system
involved in song learning appear to relate to alterations in vocal
plasticity (see White, Fisher, et al. 2006).
Despite such notable conservations across distantly related
species, a comparison of the locus in diferent primates has
demonstrated that there was accelerated change in the FOXP2
protein sequence during human evolution, most likely due to
positive selection (Enard, Przeworski, et al. 2002). Mathematical
analyses of genomic sequences from diverse human populations
suggest that the version of FOXP2 now ubiquitous in modern
humans arose within the last 200,000 years, concordant with sev-
eral archaeological estimates of the time of emergence of pro-
icient spoken language (ibid.). We may never know for certain
why these modiications spread throughout the population, but
it seems plausible that they proliferated due to some advantage
inherent in enhanced vocal communication, perhaps achieved
through modiication of pathways already involved in motor-
skill learning. Still, this does not mean that changes in FOXP2
were the sole reason for the appearance of speech and language,
even if they did represent an important factor in the evolution of
human communication.
Whats on the Horizon?
Technological advances provide one reason for optimism.
Techniques for characterizing genes and genomes are quickly
becoming more rapid, cost-efective, and eicient which can
only speed up ongoing searches for genes involved in speech and
language. For example, it has recently become possible to simul-
taneously screen hundreds of thousands of genetic markers in
people with a disorder of interest, and compare the data to those
obtained from a control set of unafected individuals. Given an
adequate sample size, this kind of approach could uncover subtle
genetic diferences that are correlated with developmental lan-
guage disorders. Before long, it will even be feasible to sequence
the entire genome of every person participating in a study. We
might also expect to see developments in the ways we can image
gene expression patterns in the human brain, with the hope that
it may one day be possible to observe on-line changes in gene
expression in neural circuits during language processing. Still, it
is also clear that we will need major conceptual advances in order
to make sense of the vast quantities of sequence and expression
data that will soon emerge, both in terms of sheer data analysis
and in terms of relating these data to linguistic functions.
Another exciting prospect is the use of genetic manipula-
tion in order to ind out more about the functions of genes that
are involved language, for example, by examining the function
of nonhuman counterparts to those genes (White, Fisher et al.
2006). In this way, individual genes may provide the irst molecu-
lar entry points into neural pathways involved in human commu-
nication, and a direct way to understand how the twin processes
of descent and modiication led to the remarkable and uniquely
human faculty for complex language.
Gary F. Marcus and Simon E. Fisher
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bishop, D. V. 2001. Genetic and environmental risks for speciic lan-
guage impairment in children. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
356.1407: 36980.
Durand, C. M., C. Betancur, et al. 2007. Mutations in the gene encoding
the synaptic scafolding protein SHANK3 are associated with autism
spectrum disorders. Nat Genet 39.1: 257.
Enard, W., M. Przeworski, et al. 2002. Molecular evolution of FOXP2, a
gene involved in speech and language. Nature 418.6900: 86972.
Fisher, S. E. 2006. Tangled webs: Tracing the connections between genes
and cognition. Cognition 101.2: 27097.
Fisher, S. E., C. S. Lai, et al. 2003. Deciphering the genetic basis of speech
and language disorders. Annu Rev Neurosci 26: 5780.
Fisher, S. E., and G. F. Marcus 2006. he eloquent ape: Genes, brains and
the evolution of language. Nature Reviews Genetics 7: 920.
Gopnik, M., and M. B. Crago 1991. Familial aggregation of a develop-
mental language disorder. Cognition 39.1: 150.
Hurst, J. A., M. Baraitser, et al. 1990. An extended family with a domi-
nantly inherited speech disorder. Dev Med Child Neurol 32.4: 3525.
Lai, C. S., S. E. Fisher, et al. 2001. A forkhead-domain gene is mutated in
a severe speech and language disorder. Nature 413.6855: 51923.
Lai, C. S., D. Gerrelli, et al. 2003. FOXP2 expression during brain devel-
opment coincides with adult sites of pathology in a severe speech and
language disorder. Brain 126 (Part 11): 245562.
Lehmann, O. J., J. C. Sowden, et al. 2003. Foxs in development and dis-
ease. Trends Genet 19.6: 33944.
MacDermot, K. D., E. Bonora, et al. 2005. Identiication of FOXP2 trun-
cation as a novel cause of developmental speech and language dei-
cits. Am J Hum Genet 76.6: 107480.
Marcus, G. F. 2004. he Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes
Creates the Complexities of Human hought. New York, Basic Books.
Newbury, D. F., E. Bonora, et al. 2002. FOXP2 is not a major susceptibil-
ity gene for autism or speciic language impairment. Am J Hum Genet
70.5: 131827.
Shu, W., H. Yang, et al. 2001. Characterization of a new subfamily of
winged-helix/forkhead (Fox) genes that are expressed in the lung and
act as transcriptional repressors. J Biol Chem 276.29: 2748897.
SLI Consortium, he. 2002. A genomewide scan identiies two novel
loci involved in speciic language impairment. Am J Hum Genet
70.2: 38498.
Somerville, M. J., C. B. Mervis, et al. 2005. Severe expressive-language
delay related to duplication of the Williams-Beuren locus. N Engl J
Med 353.16: 1694701.
Terrace, H. S., L. A. Petitto, et al. 1980. On the grammatical capacity
of apes. In Childrens Language 2, ed. K. E. Nelson, 371495. New
York: Gardner.
Vargha-Khadem, F., D. G. Gadian, et al. 2005. FOXP2 and the neuro-
anatomy of speech and language. Nat Rev Neurosci 6.2: 1318.
343
Gesture

Vargha-Khadem, F., K. E. Watkins, et al. 1998. Neural basis of an

inherited speech and language disorder. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
95.21: 12695700.
Vernes, S. C., J. Nicod, et al. 2006. Functional genetic analysis of muta-
tions implicated in a human speech and language disorder. Hum Mol
Genet 15.21: 315467.
Watkins, K. E., N. F. Dronkers, et al. 2002. Behavioural analysis of an
inherited speech and language disorder: Comparison with acquired
aphasia. Brain 125 (Part 3): 45264.
White, S. A., S. E. Fisher, et al. 2006. Singing mice, songbirds, and
more: Models for FOXP2 function and dysfunction in human speech
and language. J Neurosci 26.41: 103769.

GESTURE

no ideas, just irritable mental gestures.

(remark attr. to Lionel Trilling,
New York Times, June 21, 2006, A1)

What Is Gesture?
Lionel Trilling, in this non-motto, invokes an all-too-common
view of gesture. he very phrase hand waving suggests triviality.
But let us imagine Trillings own gesture. It would have been (we
can predict) what Cornelia Mller has called the palm up open Figure 1. Gesture combining entity, upward movement, and interiority in
hand (PUOH), the hand seeming to hold a discursive object, one symbol. (Computer art by Fey Parrill.)
holding, in fact, Trillings view. hese kinds of gestures have been
linked to the conduit metaphor the metaphor whereby language Table 1. Gesture-speech binding resists interruption
or cognition is a container holding some content.
he PUOH is also one of a species of gesture termed by Kendon Domain Phenomenon
gesticulation, one of several kinds of gesture he distinguished Delayed auditory feedback Does not disrupt speech-gesture
and that I arranged on Kendons Continuum: synchrony.
Gesticulation Speech-Linked Pantomime Emblems Stuttering Gesture stroke onsets resist stuttering;
Sign Language stuttering cancels ongoing strokes.

Even though gesticulation is only one point on the continuum,
in storytelling, living-space descriptions, academic discourse
(including prepared lectures), and conversations, gesticulation is
the overwhelming gesture type 99+ percent of all gestures and
it is the gesture ofering the greatest penetration into language
itself. As one moves from gesticulation to sign language, two
reciprocal changes take place. First, the degree to which speech
is an obligatory accompaniment of gesture decreases. Second,
the degree to which gesture shows the properties of a language
increases. Gesticulations are obligatorily accompanied by speech
but have properties unlike language. Speech-linked gestures,
such as the parents were ine but the kids were [inger across
throat], are also obligatorily performed with speech but relate to
speech as a linguistic segment sequentially, rather than concur-
rently, and in a speciic linguistic slot (standing in for the com-
plement of the verb, for example). Pantomime, or dumb show,
by deinition is not accompanied by speech. Emblems such as
the OK sign have independent status as symbolic forms. Signs
in American Sign Language (ASL) and other sign languages are
not accompanied by speech and while simultaneously speaking
and signing is possible for ASL-English bilinguals, this is not typi-
cal, and the languages themselves have the essential properties
of all languages.
Clearly, therefore, speech and gesticulations (but not the
other points along Kendons Continuum) combine properties
Blindness Gestures occur when speaking to other
blind known as such.
Fluency Speech and gesture are complex or
simple in tandem.
Information exchange Information seen in gesture recalled as
speech, and vice versa,
that are unalike, and this combination of unalikes occupies the
same psychological instant a fact of importance for creating an
imagerylanguage dialectic. I use gesture, rather than gesticula-
tion, in the remainder of this entry.
he gesture-irst theory of language origin holds that the irst
form of language consisted largely of gestures, to be later sup-
planted by speech an idea going back to tienne de Condillac in
the eighteenth century. Gesture-irst has attracted much interest in
recent years. A diiculty, however, is that it predicts the wrong
gestures. he initial gestures would have been speechless panto-
mimes, nonverbal actions with narrative potential, but not the ges-
ticulations that pose dialectic oppositions to language at the far end
of Kendons Continuum. Pantomime may indeed have been pre-
sent but, if so, did not lead to the evolution of speech and gesture
units (growth points). Such units would likely have had their own
adaptive value. An implication is that diferent evolutionary tra-
jectories landed at diferent points along the continuum, relected
today in diferent forms and timing patterns with speech.

344
Gesture
1 2740 2 2769
so he gets a / hold of a big [oak tree / and he
3 2780 4 2828
bends it way ba ck]
Figure 2. Phases of a gesture timed with and he bends it way back. The insert is a frame counter (1 frame = 1/30
sec.). The total elapsed time is about 1.5 seconds. Panel 1: Preparation. Panel 2: A prestroke hold while saying
he. Panel 3: Middle of stroke bends it way ba(ck). Panel 4: End of stroke and beginning of the poststroke
hold in the middle of back.
Simultaneous Semiotic Modes
Figure 1 illustrates one gesture and how it is simultaneous with
coexpressive speech. he example is taken from the narration
of a cartoon story (the speaker had just watched the cartoon
and was recounting it from memory to a listener; instructions
emphasized that the task was storytelling without mention of
gesture). he speaker was describing an event in which one
character (Sylvester) attempted to reach another character
(Tweety) by climbing up a drainpipe conveniently attached
next to the window where Tweety was perched. He entered the
pipe and traversed it on the inside adding stealth to his efort.
he speaker said and he goes up thrugh the pipe this time
(the illustration captures the moment at which she is saying the
stressed vowel of thrugh). Coexpressively with up her hand
rose upward; coexpressively with through her ingers spread
outward to create an interior space. he upward movement and
the opening of the hand took place concurrently, not sequen-
tially, and these movements occurred synchronously with up
through, the linguistic package that carries the same meanings.
he contrastive emphasis on thrugh, highlighting interiority, is
matched by the added complexity of the gesture, the spreading
of the upturned ingers. What makes speech and gesture coex-
pressive is this joint highlighting of the ideas of upward motion
and interiority.
Note the diferences, too. In speech, meanings are analyzed
and segregated. Speech divides the event into semantic units a
directed path (up) plus the idea of interiority (through). Analytic
segregation further requires that direction and interiority be com-
bined in order to obtain the composite meaning of the whole. In
gesture, this composite meaning is fused into one symbol, and
the semantic units are simultaneous there is no combination
(meaning determination moves from the whole to the parts, not
from the parts to the whole). he efect is a uniquely gestural way
of packaging meaning something like rising hollowness, which
does not exist as a semantic package in the lexicon of English at
all. hus, speech and gesture, at the moment of their synchroniza-
tion, were coexpressive but nonredundant, and this sets the stage
for doing one thing (conception of the cats climbing up inside the
pipe) in two forms analytic/combinatoric and global/synthetic.
Properties of Gestures
THE UNBREAKABLE SPEECH-GESTURE BOND. Synchronized
speech and gesture comprise virtually unbreakable psycholin-
guistic units, unbreakable as long as speech and gesture are
coexpressive. A diverse range of phenomena show the insepa-
rability of the two modes; Table 1 summarizes some of them. In
each case, some disruption to speech-gesture combination is
resisted; it holds despite the disruption. To break this bond, one
has to drain the combination of meaning for example, through
rote repetition.
PHASES AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE. Gesture phases are organized
around the stroke: everything is designed to present it in proper
synchrony with its coexpressive speech segment(s). Figure 2
shows all gesture phases except retraction. he full span, from
the beginning of preparation to the end of retraction, brackets
what can be thought of as the lifetime of a speciic idea unit in
language-geared imagery. We see the image in a state of activa-
tion that did not exist before and does not exist after this span.
he dawn of the idea unit is seen in the beginning of the prepa-
ration, and the idea unit itself is the unit formed of the synchro-
nized coexpressive speech and stroke (called a growth point).
345
Gesture
WHEN DO GESTURES OCCUR? Somewhat surprisingly, the timing
of gestures in relation to speech has been the subject of contro-
versy. he question is whether gestures tend to anticipate their
linked linguistic material or coincide with it. he anticipation
view is often accompanied by a further idea that gestures take
place during speech pauses. he synchrony view, clearly, implies
that gestures and speech are co-occurring. When the question
is examined with careful attention to the distinction between
preparation and stroke, the facts are clear: he preparation for
the gesture precedes the coexpressive linguistic segment (with
a pause or not); the stroke coincides with this segment about
90 percent of the time. Holds ensure that this synchrony is
preserved.
Discourse and Social Interaction
In addition to fueling idea units, a signiicant intersection of ges-
tures with language is in the construction of discourse and social
interactions.
he gesture in Figure 1 was the second that this speaker had
performed for Sylvesters ascent of the pipe. In the cartoon,
Sylvester attempts to climb the pipe twice, irst on the outside, as
a kind of ladder, second on the inside, the version in Figure 1. he
outside gesture by this speaker, just before Figure 1, had been free
of pipelike features; it was pure ascent. he Figure 1 gesture thus
exhibited precisely what, in the immediate context, was distinc-
tive interiority creating communicative dynamism. Narrators
who, due to error, do not mention the outside attempt but only the
inside ascent tend not to include interiority. he fact of interiority is
not suicient; the gesture is sensitive to the distinctiveness of this
information in the discourse context. Coexpressive speech and
gesture apparently synchronize at points of high communicative
dynamism (experiments by S. Duncan and D. Loehr are currently
testing this hypothesis).
Gestures also code discourse frames by use of the second
hand. A two-handed gesture can initiate a discourse segment in
which one hand depicts events while the other hand maintains
the shape and/or location it had in the launching gesture, and
this frames the event in the continuing context. ASL exploits this
device for discursive cohesion.
A further concept provides an empirical route for inding the
context within which an idea unit is diferentiated. A catchment
comprises multiple gestures with recurring form features and
exposes the discourse segment to which a growth point belongs
(the use of two hands for discourse frames comprises a catch-
ment, but catchments are formed in a wide variety of ways).
Catchments ofer a second insight for linguistics: Discourse itself
takes on imagery form.
In addition to discourse, gestures are sensitive to the social-
interactive context of the speakers. Asli zyrek showed that
changing the number and the spatial loci of listeners has an efect
on the speakers gestural imagery. Janet Bavelas has pioneered
the study of a class of gestures she terms interactive gestures
whose signiicance lies in the structuring and management of
social interactions without yielding control of the loor. Along
similar lines, gesture mimicry and joint speakerlistener gesture
production cement social interactions. In roundtable discus-
sions, gestures are parts of turn-taking and speaker dominance.
Gestures with an interactive focus are not discontinuous from
346
Government and Binding
gestures relating to idea units. On the contrary, they exhibit con-
tinuity with ideas, as envisioned by L. Vygotsky.
David McNeill
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Beattie, G. 2003. Visible hought: he New Psychology of Body Language.
Hove, UK: Routledge.
Goldin-Meadow, S. 2003. Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us
hink. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Kendon, A. 2004. Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McNeill, D. 1992. Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about hought.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McNeill, D.. 2005. Gesture and hought. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
McNeill, D. ed. 2000. Language and Gesture. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
GOVERNMENT AND BINDING
Government and binding (GB) theory, originally developed
by Noam Chomsky (see Chomsky 1981, 1982), is an approach
to the study of the syntax of human languages based on
abstract underlying representations and transformations
successively altering those structures. The approach is cen-
tered around universal principles argued to be innately rep-
resented in the mind and simple parameters , fixed by the
language learner from simple evidence, determining how
languages can differ.
GB theory developed out of Chomskys earlier work in trans-
formational grammar. Like all of his work, it centered on
two fundamental questions:
(1) What kind of capacity is knowledge of language?
(2) How does this capacity arise in the individual?
From his earliest work, Chomskys answer to (1) posited a com-
putational system that provided statements of the basic phrase
structure patterns of languages (phrase structure rules) and
operations for manipulating these basic phrase structures (trans-
formations). GB strongly focused on question (2) by positing
heavier and heavier restrictions on the computational system,
thus limiting the choices available to the learner.
An innovation was the development of trace theory, which
proposed that when movement transformations operate, they
leave behind traces, silent placeholders marking the position
from which movement took place, as schematized in (3).
(3) Linguistics, I like t
Under trace theory, the earlier importance of deep struc-
ture (the initial representation in the syntactic derivation in the
standard theory) for semantic interpretation is ultimately
eliminated. It was already known that some aspects of meaning
(including scope of quantiiers, anaphora, focus) depend on sur-
face structure. Once surface structure is enriched with traces, even
grammatical relations (subject of, object of, etc.) can be deter-
mined at that level of representation. Using the term LF (logical
form) for the syntactic representation that relates most directly
Government and Binding
to semantics and PF (phonetic form) for the one relating most
directly to phonetics, we have the so-called (inverted) Y-model in
(4), which was at the core of GB theorizing.
(4) D-Structure
Transformations
S-Structure
PF LF
Modularity
he GB theory displayed a high degree of modularity. Complex
phenomena were seen as the result of interactions of simple
modules. he phrase structure module was virtually reduced to
x-bar theory (originally developed in Chomsky [1970] 1972),
with speciic instantiations following from properties of particu-
lar lexical items. Further, the X-bar schema itself was extended
from just lexical categories (noun, verb, adjective, etc.) to func-
tional categories. For example, a sentence came to be analyzed
as the projection of an inlectional head, Inl, containing tense
and agreement information.
he transformational module is also dramatically simpliied
in comparison with its predecessors. he GB framework replaced
the earlier numerous speciic transformations with very general
operations, Move (displace any item anywhere), or even Afect
(do anything to anything). here is thus very little transforma-
tional syntax that the child has to learn. A grammar this simple
and general would seem to massively overgenerate, producing
countless numbers of unacceptable sentences. To deal with this
overgeneration problem, GB theorists, further developing a line
of research begun in the 1960s, posited general constraints on
the operation of transformations (locality constraints, especially
subjacency, part of bounding theory) and also conditions
on the output of the transformational component (including
filters).
Parameters
he postulated universal (wired-in) parts of the computa-
tional system are called principles. he (limited) ways in which
languages can difer syntactically are called parameters. he sys-
tem is fundamentally based on principles and parameters.
he child learning a language is preequipped with the principles
and needs only to set the values of the parameters. he standard
assumption is that there are few parameters, they are very sim-
ple, and their values can be determined by the child on the basis
of readily available primary linguistic data.
-Theory and the Lexicon
he X-bar schema for phrase structure is one module of the
theory. he lexicon is another. hese modules determine
Dstructure conigurations via the regulation of a third mod-
ule, theta theory. Subcategorization properties follow, in large
measure, from semantic properties. hus, in a sentence with
the verb solve, there is a semantic function for a direct object to
fulill, while there is no such function in the case of sleep. hese
semantic functions that arguments fulill are called thematic
()roles. he verb prove demands a direct object since the
object would fulill a necessary -role (theme in this instance)
determined by the meaning of the verb. Conversely, an intransi-
tive verb like sleep does not take a direct object since there would
be no -role for it to fulill. hese paired requirements on assign-
ers and recipients of theta roles are called the -criterion: Every
-role must be assigned to one and only one argument, and every
argument must receive one and only one -role.
Case Theory
S-structures result from the transformational component oper-
ating on D-structures. Given the generality of Move , deriva-
tions often seem to yield ungrammatical sentences. One module
reining in this overgeneration by regulating S-structure is case
theory. here are characteristic structural positions that license
particular cases. In many languages (such as Latin, Russian,
German), these case distinctions are overtly manifested. In
English, only pronouns show an overt distinction between nomi-
native and accusative, for instance, but Case heory posits that all
noun phrases (NPs) have abstract case (henceforth, Case), even
when it is not phonologically visible. he requirement that all
NPs occur in appropriate Case positions is the Case Filter, a well-
formedness condition on the S-structure level of representation.
Government
he GB approach always sought regularities and generalizations.
he notion government is itself a generalization of the X-bar
theoretic head-complement relation. he basic deinition is as
follows:
(5) A head H governs Y if and only if every XP (highest projec-
tion of X) dominating H also dominates Y and conversely.
[Domination is ancestry in a phrase structure tree
diagram.]
By (5), a head governs its complement and also its speciier. Case
licensing then is under government, with the governor licens-
ing the governee. A transitive verb governs its direct object NP; a
preposition governs its complement NP; Inl governs its speciier
(the subject of the clause). hus, a Case-licensing head licenses
Case on a nominal expression that it governs. For example, a
transitive verb, such as prove licenses (accusative) Case on its
complement direct object.
Types of Movement
he transformational module of the theory recognizes three
major subtypes of movement. A-movement is movement to an
argument-type position (i.e., an A-position, especially subject
position. (non-A)-movement is movement of an XP (highest
projection of X, for variable X) to a non-A position. he move-
ment of an interrogative expression, such as Who in (6) (WH-
movement) is a central exemplar:
(6) Who will they hire t
WH-movement is standardly analyzed as movement to the
speciier of CP (complementizer phrase), a functional projec-
tion above IP (inlectional phrase). Both types of movement are
regarded as instantiations of one very general operation: Move .
he diferences follow from independent properties of the items
moved and the positions moved to.
347
Government and Binding
(8) CP
| refer to Mary]
C'
C IP
NP I'
| S-structure. However, more and more arguments were put for-
Susan I VP
V NP
| |
is a linguist
Figure 1.
he third major type of movement is head movement, where
an X0, a minimal X-bar theoretic element, adjoins to a higher
head (the very next higher head by the head movement con-
straint). One of the classic analyses of generative grammar was
restated in the GB framework in terms of head movement. Pairs
of sentences like those in (7) are related via movement of the
verb be/is to Inl, followed by movement of Inl to C, schematized
in (8) in Figure 1.
(7) a. Susan is a linguist
b. Is Susan a linguist
Similar head movement, along with WH-movement, is involved
in the derivation of (6).
Binding
he binding part of government and binding theory has as
its core anaphoric relations, circumstances under which one
expression can or cannot take another as its antecedent, that is,
pick up its reference from the other. In (9), him can take John as
its antecedent, while in (10), it cannot.
(9) John said Mary criticized him
(10) John criticized him
hat is, (10) has no reading corresponding to that of (11), with the
pronoun him replaced by the anaphor himself (see anaphora).
(11) John criticized himself
A pronoun cannot have an antecedent that is too close to it.
his is Condition B of the binding theory. Conversely, an anaphor
requires an antecedent quite close to it (Condition A). Compare
(11) with (12).
(12) *John said Mary criticized himself
he pertinent locality is, roughly, being in the same clause
(though in certain instances a more complicated notion involv-
ing government is implicated, hence, Chomskys name govern-
ing category for the relevant domain).
A third binding condition (Condition C) excludes an ana-
phoric connection between the higher in the tree She and the
lower Mary in (13), as contrasted with (14).
348
(13) *She thinks Mary will solve the problem [with She intended to
(14) Mary thinks she will solve the problem
The Role of Logical Form
In the core GB model schematized in (4), LF is not distinct from
ward that transformational operations of the sort successively
modifying D-structure, ultimately creating S-structure, also
apply to S-structure, creating a distinct LF. (See especially May
1977, 1985.) One such operation, quantiier raising (QR), moves
quantiiers from their surface positions to positions more trans-
parently representing their scope, with the traces of the moved
quantiiers ultimately interpreted as variables bound by those
quantiiers. Unlike the transformational operations mentioned
earlier, applications of QR exhibit no phonological displace-
ment. his follows from the organization of the grammar. When
a transformation operates between D-structure and S-structure,
it will have an efect on the phonetic output, since S-structure
feeds into PF. On the other hand, a transformational application
between Sstructure and LF will have no phonetic efect, since
LF does not feed into PF.
Another covert operation is the analog of overt wh-move-
ment. Assume that overt WH-movement positions an interroga-
tive operator in its natural position for interpretation (with the
trace it leaves behind in the natural position for a variable bound
by the operator). hen in sentences with multiple interrogatives,
such as (15), at the level of LF all are in sentence initial operator
position, as illustrated in (16).
(15) Where should we put what
(16) what1 [where2 [we should put t1 t2]
(16) is then rather transparently interpreted as:
(17) For which object x and which place y, we should put x at y
One of the most powerful arguments for covert WH-movement,
from Huang (1981/82), involves constraints on movement. For
example, it is diicult to move an interrogative expression out of
an embedded question (a question inside another sentence):
(18) *Why1 do you wonder [what2 [John bought t2 t1]]
If (18) were acceptable, it would mean What is the reason such
that you wonder what John bought for that reason. In languages
where wh-phrases are in situ (unmoved) at S-structure, such as
Chinese, their interpretation apparently obeys this same con-
straint. So, in Chinese, an example like (19) is possible but one
like (20) is impossible.
(19) ni renwei [ta weisheme bu lai]
you think he why not come
LF: [weisheme1 [ni renwei [ta t1 bu lai]
Why do you think he didnt come?
(20) *ni xiang-zhidao [Lisi weisheme mai-le sheme]
you wonder Lisi why bought what
LF: [weisheme1 [ni xiang-zhidao [Lisi t1 mai-le sheme]
*What is the reason such that you wonder what Lisi bought for
that reason?
Grammaticality
his argues that even though the weisheme is not phonetically
displaced, it really is moving; that is why it is obeying move-
ment constraints. But this movement is covert, occurring in
the mapping from Sstructure to LF, hence not contributing to
pronunciation.
he modular and very restrictive nature of the GB approach of
syntax led to theories that went well beyond descriptive adequacy
toward a high degree of explanatory adequacy, as it drastically
limited the types and numbers of grammatical rules available to
the learner. In fact, the success of the approach led Chomsky to
formulate a new program, minimalism, that aims to move even
beyond explanatory adequacy.
Howard Lasnik
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Chomsky, Noam. [1970] 1972. Remarks on nominalization. In Readings
in English Transformational Grammar, ed. Roderick A. Jacobs and
Peter S. Rosenbaum, 184221. Waltham, MA.: Ginn. Reprinted in
Noam Chomsky, Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar, 1161.
he Hague: Mouton.
. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht, the
Netherlands: Foris.
.1982. Some Concepts and Consequences of the heory of Government
and Binding. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam, and Howard Lasnik. [1993] 1995. he theory of prin-
ciples and parameters. In Syntax: An International Handbook of
Contemporary Research. Vol. 1. Ed. Joachim Jacobs, Arnim von Stechow,
Wolfgang Sternefeld, and heo Vennemann, 50669. Berlin: Walter
de Gruyter. Reprinted in Noam Chomsky, he Minimalist Program,
13127. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Haegeman, Liliane. 1994. An Introduction to Government and Binding
heory. 2d ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
Huang, C.-T. James. 1981/82. Move wh in a language without wh-move-
ment. Linguistic Review 1: 369416.
Lasnik, Howard, and Juan Uriagereka. 1988. A Course in GB Syntax: Lectures
on Binding and Empty Categories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
May, Robert. 1977. he Grammar of Quantiication. Ph.D. diss.,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
. 1985. Logical Form: Its Structure and Derivation. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Webelhuth, Gert, ed. 1995. Government and Binding heory and the
Minimalist Program. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
GRAMMATICALITY
A sentence that is well formed according to a given grammar
is grammatical. By analogy, the property can also be assigned
to constituents of a sentence, for example, noun phrases. In
generative linguistics, the term grammar has been used with
a systematic ambiguity: We must be careful to distinguish the
grammar, regarded as a structure postulated in the mind, from
the linguists grammar, which is an explicit articulated theory
that attempts to express precisely the rules and principles of the
grammar in the mind of the ideal speaker-hearer (Chomsky
1980, 220).
Each sense of grammar corresponds to a sense of gram-
maticality. If grammar is taken in the sense of competence,
a component of the speakers mind, grammaticality is a grad-
ual property that is realized in judgments by the speaker (see
Grammaticality Judgments
grammaticality judgments ). If grammar is taken in the
sense of theory, grammaticality may be a purely binary prop-
erty, depending on the degree and type of formalization of the
theory.
Noam Chomsky (1957, 15) introduces grammaticality in con-
trast to acceptability, illustrating them with the examples in (1).
(1) a. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
b. *Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.
c. Have you a book on modern music?
d. *Read you a book on modern music?
Ungrammaticality in (1) is indicated by a star, following
a convention introduced in the early 1960s. Whereas (1ab)
are diicult to interpret, (1cd) are readily understandable.
Nevertheless, (1a) is grammatical and (1d) not. he acceptability
problem in (1a) is entirely due to semantic incongruence. It can
be overcome by extending the meanings of the words in the sen-
tence. his is not possible for (1b). In (1d), the meaning is entirely
transparent, but English grammar does not allow questions to be
formed in this way.
As discussed in detail by Frederick J. Newmeyer (1983),
grammaticality is a theory-dependent property. he boundary
between the factors accounted for by the grammar and by other
components of knowledge is not given in advance. If a sentence
violates a condition of the grammar, it is ungrammatical, but if
it violates, for instance, only semantic or pragmatic condi-
tions, as in (1a), it is grammatical. Grammaticality in relation to
competence is a matter of degree. hus, Liliane Haegeman (1994,
56573) discusses the analysis of contrasts such as (2).
(2) a. *Whomi do you know [the date [whenj [Mary invited ti tj]]]
b. **Whenj do you know [the man [whomi [Mary invited ti tj]]]
Both sentences in (2) are ungrammatical, but (2b) is worse
than (2a). As this result is fairly robust, it is worth trying to
explain it in terms of grammatical theory. A fully formalized
grammar will normally partition the set of possible sentences
into grammatical and ungrammatical ones, without any inter-
mediate degrees.
Pius ten Hacken
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. he Hague: Mouton.
. 1980. Rules and Representations. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Haegeman, Liliane. 1994. Introduction to Government and Binding
heory. 2d ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1983. Grammatical heory: Its Limits and Its
Possibilities, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Discussion of gram-
maticality in Chapter 2.
GRAMMATICALITY JUDGMENTS
Grammaticality judgments involve explicitly asking speakers
whether a particular string of words is a well-formed utterance of
their language, with an intended interpretation stated or implied.
Among the many kinds of data available to linguistics, gram-
maticality judgments are particularly useful in distinguishing
349
Grammaticalization
possible from impossible utterances (the latter conventionally
marked *) among those that are not spontaneously produced.
Intermediate degrees of well-formedness may also be of inter-
est (e.g., ? questionable, ?? highly questionable). hese > chanterai. he end product of such changes is typically a para-
judgments can also bring to light knowledge of language in spe-
cial populations whose production and even comprehension
may not evince it. Contra widespread belief, however, like all
performance data they bear on linguistic competence only
indirectly and call for the same attention to methodology as
other data sources.
Carson T. Schtze
GRAMMATICALIZATION
Grammaticalization is a historical process whereby ixed gram-
matical forms, such as prepositions, conjunctions, suixes, and
auxiliaries, and the constructions of which they are part arise out
of what were previously independent categorial forms in freer
arrangements. he negative construction with ne pas in French
provides a good example: pas step, pace was originally a noun
that functioned to reinforce the ne that supplied the negative
meaning, as in il ne va pas he doesnt go (originally doesnt are going to melt.
go a step). Nowadays, pas has become grammaticalized as a
general marker of negation, as in il (ne) parle pas he doesnt
speak the ne being increasingly dropped altogether. As a ield,
grammaticalization is the study of those linguistic changes that
result in speciically grammatical forms and construction. he
standard history of grammaticalization is Lehmann 1995.
Grammaticalization involves two aspects: structural change
and semantic change. hese two kinds of change go hand
in hand, and it is impossible to assign priority to either of them.
Structural changes include reanalysis and phonological reduc-
tion. In reanalysis, adjacent forms are rebracketed: [I am going]
[to sell my pig] Im on my way to sell my pig becomes [I am going the appearance of ixed forms and rules is illusory, that the
to][sell my pig] and eventually [going to] assumes the meaning
of future tense. Characteristically, too, a major category, such as
verb or noun that was formerly the head of a phrase, is demoted to
a minor category, such as auxiliary or preposition, and becomes
a satellite to the new head; thus, when a cup full of lour becomes
a cupful of lour, the erstwhile head noun cup is reanalyzed as a
component of a quantifying expression, now reduced in status to
a determiner of the semantic head noun, and its place as seman-
tic head noun is usurped by lour. Similarly, full, previously the
head of the adjective phrase full of lour, is reduced to the status
of a suix on cup. his decategorialization of grammaticalized
forms (Hopper 1991, 303; Hopper and Traugott 2003, 10614)
means that the forms lose the typical attributes of the older cat-
egory, such as ability to take modiiers and determiners, avail-
ability as an argument of the verb, and independent referential
status. Parallel restrictions are placed on verbs that become
auxiliaries.
Phonological reduction, or erosion (Heine and Reh 1984,
215), is a frequent but not inevitable accompaniment of gram-
maticalization. English lets is clearly derived from let us, but
now serves to introduce an adhortative predicate, as in lets
leave. When [going][to sell] was reanalyzed as [going to][sell],
going to became reduced to gonna. he French future tense in
350
(je) chanterai I will sing (Benveniste 1968) came about when
the Old French descendents of Latin cantare habeo I have to
sing were collapsed into a single word: cantar ayo > cantarayo
digm in which the verb is decked out with person and number
aixes that were formerly pronouns and tense, modality, and
aspect aixes that were once auxiliaries.
In recent years, linguists have come to see forms undergoing
grammaticalization as spreading out into wider contexts and as
increasing their pragmatic usefulness (Traugott 1995; Traugott
and Dasher 2002). For example, the Old English ancestor of the
modal auxiliary can know how to occurred exclusively with
human subjects. Later, the restriction to humans was modiied
to include a wider variety of forms, including inanimates: hese
trees can grow to a height of 100 meters. his widening distribu-
tion presupposes a semantic change from knowledge to ability
to possibility. he English going to/gonna construction provides
another example. here is a change from the sense of purpose,
as in Shakespeares letters to my friends, And I am going to
deliver them (Two Gentlemen of Verona 3.1, 51), that is, I am
on my way to deliver them, to a predictive future tense in which
neither motion nor purpose is expressed, as in he ice carvings
he changes characteristic of grammaticalization are grad-
ual (Lichtenberk 1991) and unidirectional (Haspelmath 1999;
Hopper and Traugott 2003, 88139). hey evolve in the single
direction of semantic difuseness and increased pragmatic range
and, often, phonological reduction and grammatical agglutina-
tion. he exceptions to this directionality are idiosyncratic and
frequently turn out not to be true exceptions (see Hopper and
Traugott 2003, 1308 for further discussion).
Grammaticalization, while studied principally as a subield
of the study of change, has implications for general linguistics
in pointing to the essential luidity of grammar. It suggests that
grammarlexicon division is more blurred than is commonly
assumed, and that grammatical structure itself is emergent,
that is, subject to constant revision by speakers. While the paths
of grammaticalization are constrained by universal and cogni-
tive factors, their proximate causes are in discourse, through
frequency of use (Bybee and Hopper 2001) and the consequent
routinization (Haiman 1994) of word combinations.
Paul J. Hopper
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Aitcheson, Jean. 2001. Language Change: Progress or Decay? 3d ed.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A readable introduction to
the study of change, with an excellent chapter on grammaticalization.
Benveniste, Emile. 1968. Mutations of linguistic categories. In Directions
for Historical Linguistics: A Symposium, ed. Winfred Lehmann and
Yakov Malkiel, 8594. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bybee, Joan, and Paul Hopper, eds. 2001. Frequency and the Emergence of
Linguistic Structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Haiman, John. 1994. Ritualization and the development of language.
In Perspectives on Grammaticalization, ed. William Pagliuca, 328.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Haspelmath, Martin. 1999. Why is grammaticalization irreversible?
Linguistics 37: 104368.
Grooming, Gossip, and Language
Heine, Bernd, and Tania Kuteva. 2002. World Lexicon of
Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heine, Bernd, and Mechthilde Reh. 1984. Grammaticalization in African
Languages. Hamburg: Buske.
Hopper, Paul. 1991. On some principles of grammaticalization. In
Traugott and Heine 1991, I: 1735. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hopper, Paul, and Elizabeth Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization. 2d ed.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. An up-to-date survey of the
ield, with detailed discussion of current controversies.
Kuteva, Tania. 2001. Auxiliation: An Enquiry into the Nature of
Grammaticalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lehmann, Christian. 1995. houghts on Grammaticalization.
Munich: Lincom Europa. he standard work on the historical back-
ground to grammaticalization.
Lichtenberk, Frantiek. 1991. On the gradualness of grammaticaliza-
tion. In Traugott and Heine 1991, I: 3780.
Traugott, Elizabeth. 1995. Subjectiication in grammaticalization. In
Subjectivity and Subjectivisation in Language, ed. Dieter Stein and
Susan Wright, 3154. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Traugott, Elizabeth, and Richard Dasher. 2002. Regularity in Semantic
Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Traugott, Elizabeth, and Bernd Heine, eds. 1991. Approaches to
Grammaticalization. 2 vols. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
GROOMING, GOSSIP, AND LANGUAGE
Language (and speech) are unique to humans and, of course,
play a crucial role in making possible the human social and cul-
tural worlds. Yet the question as to why language might have
evolved, or even why it evolved only in the human lineage, has
seldom been asked. At best, there has been an implicit assump-
tion that language evolved to allow our ancestors to create and
manufacture the stone tools that have been so important a part
of the story of human evolution or to plan the hunts required to
obtain meat with those tools. However, a number of alternative
views of language evolution have recently been proposed that
emphasize the social aspects of language use. Perhaps the best
known of these is the gossip hypothesis. Others include the need
to make social contracts and the role of mate choice.
It is important to appreciate in this context that the use of the
term gossip in the gossip hypothesis does not imply the kinds of
pejorative, often malicious, forms of gossip that are often associ-
ated with the term today. Although conversations may include
statements of this kind (in efect, it is a form of policing designed
to control others behavior), the term gossip is here being used in
its much broader original sense to refer to all kinds of topics that
are essentially social in character (information about oneself,
ones likes and dislikes, ones relationship with ones interlocu-
tor, other people, arrangements for future social events, etc.). It
has more to do with the kinds of casual conversation one might
have around the hearth or over the garden fence.
In one sense, a conversation is a statement of intent or interest
in the other party: I would rather be standing here talking to you
than over there talking to so-and-so (and it does not really mat-
ter what we talk about). In this respect, language can be seen as
a form of social grooming, and one might envisage that the ori-
gins of language lie in some kind of wordless and contentless
chorusing when two individuals were physically separated and
engaged in other activities like feeding. One reason for suggesting
an intermediate state of this type is that we, in fact, ind exactly
this kind of vocal exchange in some species of monkeys (e.g.,
the contact calls of baboons; see primate vocalizations). In
gelada baboons, these calls are exchanged preferentially between
grooming partners when they are feeding or traveling. However,
an alternative (but not necessarily incompatible) hypothesis for
the origin of language might be that it evolved to allow us to com-
ment on, or even organize, our internal thoughts and only later
became externalized in response to a social context.
Background
Over the past century, a great deal of work has been done on
questions about the anatomical and neural bases of language
production (i.e., speech and phonetics; see brain and lan-
guage; speech anatomy, evolution of; phonetics and
phonology, neurobiology of) and on the structural bases
of language (i.e., grammar and related aspects of cognition).
However, while all of these are important to the grand story of
language evolution, none addresses the question of what we
actually do with language the reasons why it evolved in our
lineage in the form we now have. Understanding the function
of language might help to explain some of the design features of
language since it is function that drives evolution.
One aspect on which almost everyone would agree is that
grammar plays a central role in language: It is what allows us
to express complex thoughts and convey information to one
another. Without that capacity, language would be very impov-
erished, and humans would not have been able to achieve the
remarkable accomplishments of science, culture, and architec-
ture that we have. However, the fact that grammar exists or even
has a particular structure does not necessarily tell us what it was
designed to do. he fact that we can use language to create sci-
ence now does not necessarily mean that it originally evolved
for this purpose. Grammatical structure is an all-purpose tool
that allows any kind of information to be transmitted. he issue,
then, is which kinds of information are evolutionarily primi-
tive (i.e., were the initial driving force that selected for language
capacity).
he suggestion that language evolved for essentially social
purposes (but has since been exploited for the conveyance of
technical information) emerged from studies of social bond-
ing in monkeys and apes. Although grooming has an obvious
hygienic function in all animals (namely, removing debris and
perhaps parasites from the skin), it is obvious that some spe-
cies of monkeys and apes do far more grooming than is really
necessary for strictly hygienic purposes. Some of the more social
species, for example, devote as much as 20 percent of their day
to grooming each other. In these species, grooming functions
as a mechanism for social bonding: hrough the calming and
other physiological efects that grooming has on the recipient,
it establishes the bases for friendship and cooperative alliances.
More importantly, it turns out that the amount of time devoted
to social grooming by a given monkey or ape species is related to
the size of its social groups: he bigger the group, the more time
spent grooming. However, there seems to be an upper limit on
time spent grooming at about 20 percent of total daytime. his
limit is set by the demands of other essential activities, such as
foraging and traveling between feeding sites.
351
Grooming, Gossip, and Language
he puzzle that emerged out of this research was the realiza-
tion that if humans were to bond their groups in exactly the same
way as other monkeys and apes, then the size of typical human
social groups would require us to devote more than twice the
maximum amount of time that any monkey or ape species has
ever been known to devote to this activity which would involve
nearly half of all the hours in the day. Since the realities of having
to ind food seem to impose an upper limit on grooming time for
monkeys and apes, it seems unlikely that humans could bypass
this constraint. In addition, for primates, the amount of time that
is free to devote to grooming limits group sizes. Hence, if there
is an upper limit on the amount of time that could be devoted
to grooming, then human groups would be limited to the same
sizes as those of other primates. he fact that they are quite
obviously not so limited (however they are measured, modern
human groups are clearly many times larger than the largest
groups found in any primate species) means that some other
mechanism has been brought into play to enable humans to
break through the glass ceiling imposed by time limits on groom-
ing. Language was suggested as the likely explanation.
Language has several properties that make it more eicient
than grooming as a mechanism for social bonding. Grooming
is very much a one-on-one activity (as it still is, in fact, with us
today). hat means that if you have to invest a certain amount of
time in each social partner to create a working relationship, the
number of relationships is ultimately ixed by how much time
you can spare. But language has broadcast capacities that enable
us to have a onemany relationship with our social partners,
thus allowing us to service several relationships simultaneously.
Speech also has the useful property of allowing us to multi-
task: We can talk and walk, or talk and feed, at the same time,
whereas grooming does not allow that. In addition, language
allows us to exhibit badges of group membership: Being able to
use the local dialect or to understand subtle jokes or obscure
allusions helps to label us as members of a community.
Over and above these properties, however, the information-
transfer capacities of language allow us to do one thing that
grooming does not, and this is to pass on information about the
state of the social network in the absence of irsthand knowledge.
For monkeys and apes, what they do not see they will never know
about. But we can ask and be told about what others have been
up to in our absence. hat way, we can keep track of our dynam-
ically changing social world, know about cases in which indi-
viduals have reneged on their social obligations to us, and more
generally avoid the worst social faux pas by not knowing who is
or is not now friends with whom.
Evidence for the Gossip Hypothesis
Although we can never know what actually happened when lan-
guage irst evolved, the case for the gossip hypothesis would be
strengthened if we could show that language use was heavily
dominated by social functions (in the loose sense, gossip). A
number of studies provide evidence of this kind.
An early study of freely formed, natural conversations indi-
cated that around 65 percent of conversation time by both gen-
ders was devoted to social topics, with all other topics (including
sports, politics, religion, technical or work-related topics,
and factual matters of all kinds) accounting for only about 35
352
percent among them. A more detailed analysis of the social con-
tent itself suggested that the vast majority was concerned with
factual personal experiences (~30% of all social conversation
time), personal social/emotional experiences (~30%), or with
third-party social/emotional experiences (~30%). he balance
was devoted to critical comments about third parties and seek-
ing/giving advice.
More recently, an experimental study of language transmis-
sion in which groups of four participants were asked to relay
information passed on to them by a previous member of a chain
found that both gossip (in the racy sense) and social informa-
tion (about the actions of people in a story) were transmitted
much more reliably than was factual information about a social
event (with no motivational content) or descriptive information
about a nonsocial event (for example, tourist information about
a location). his suggests that information with a strong social
(and perhaps emotional) content is more memorable in some
way than other kinds of information. he transmission rates for
social and gossip content did not difer signiicantly, suggesting
that the issue is not the raciness of the content but the fact that it
concerns individuals social and emotional lives.
Alternative Hypotheses
Two alternative hypotheses as to how language might function
in the social domain have been suggested: the symbolic con-
tract hypothesis (proposed by Terrance Deacon in his book he
Symbolic Species) and the Scheherazade efect (proposed by
Geofrey Miller). Both are concerned with aspects of reproduc-
tive behavior.
Deacon observed that humans have a unique mating system
based on pairbonds that are embedded within a large multimale/
multifemale social group. What makes this a particular problem
is that the division of labor means that mates are often separated
for long periods of time in the presence of potential rivals. Since
the presence of rivals creates risks for the sexual idelity of a pair-
bond, Deacon argued that language must have been needed to
establish formal social contracts in which exclusive mating rights
are identiied and publicly agreed upon (his is my mate; you
are not allowed to interfere with him/her while I am away).
Millers Scheherazade efect is also concerned with the busi-
ness of mating, but in this case, the focus lies with the intrinsic
(as opposed to the extrinsic) dynamics of the pairbond: how to
woo and keep your mate interested, rather than merely guarding
him/her against rivals. Miller argued that the capacity to be witty
and entertaining (in the Arabian Nights sense) would have been
strongly selected for, especially in a context where more attrac-
tive rivals were readily available.
While both suggestions are undoubtedly plausible, for nei-
ther has any substantive evidence yet been adduced. However,
an alternative view might be to see both of these mechanisms
as being derivative of an initial situation for which language
had been selected as a more general mechanism for bonding
large social groups. One reason for this suggestion is simply that
Deacons paradox (the risk to pairbonds posed by the presence
of large numbers of rivals) can only be a problem when social
group size is large. But without some kind of bonding mecha-
nism over and above social grooming, it is diicult to see how
our distant ancestors would have been able to create and hold
Habitus, Linguistic
together large social groups. hus, we might see language evolv-
ing initially as a social bonding device and then subsequently see
the skills underpinning language having been exaggerated by
either or both of these two mechanisms.
R. I. M. Dunbar
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Deacon, T. 1997. he Symbolic Species: he Coevolution of Language and
the Human Brain. Harmondsworth, UK: Allen Lane.
Dunbar, R. I. M. 1993. Coevolution of neocortex size, group size and lan-
guage in humans. Behavioral Brain Science 16:681735.
Dunbar, R. I. M., N. Duncan, and A. Marriot. 1997. Human conversa-
tional behaviour. Human Nature 8: 23146.
Mesoudi, A., A. Whiten, and R. I. M. Dunbar. 2006. A bias for social infor-
mation in human cultural transmission. British Journal of Psychology
97: 40523.
Miller, G. 1999. Sexual selection for cultural displays. In he Evolution
of Culture, ed. R. I. M. Dunbar, C. Knight, and C. Power, 7191.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
H psychology. In linguistic habitus, objective patterns of social
HABITUS, LINGUISTIC
Habitus is one of Pierre Bourdieus two fundamental concep-
tual tools of analysis; the other being field. If ield relates to the
objective conditions of social space, then habitus is an expression
of subjectivity and is deined by Bourdieu as
systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured struc-
tures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is,
as principles which generate and organize practices and rep-
resentations that can only be objectively adapted to their out-
comes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an
express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain
them. Objectively regulated and regular without being in any
way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively
orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action
of a conductor. ([1980] 1990, 53)
Both habitus and ield are homologous in terms of structures that
are both structured and structuring. Linguistic habitus concerns
the language element of any individuals or group of individuals
habitus.
Linguistic habitus is a central theme in Bourdieus attack on
orthodox linguistics. In Language and Symbolic Power ([1982]
1991), he argues that conventional linguistic studies are based
on a fundamental misunderstanding. In linguistics, language is
studied very much as an object of contemplation. his tradition
began with Ferdinand de Saussure and treats the social world as
a series of phenomena of which language is one that can be
decoded or deciphered according to a particular established the-
oretical code. Bourdieu refers to this tradition as an intellectual-
ist philosophy against which he wishes to pose his own theory
of practice. For Bourdieu, it is not enough to treat language as
symbolic interactions; it is also necessary to see them as expres-
sions of symbolic power (see inequality, linguistic and
communicative). Every act of language takes place in a space
governed by the rules of a ield, which itself both forms and regu-
lates the linguistic habitus. Linguistic habitus is intimately con-
nected to habitus as a whole, which it helps to form and express.
It is a kind of social personality and, in language, is expressed
in linguistic dispositions. Such dispositions can be conscious but
are mostly unconscious motives, behaviors, and tendencies to
act and, in this case, speak in a certain way a way originating
from social background. he objective background of the lin-
guistic environment establishes norms of behavior in language,
which are both sanctioned and policed within the ield. In this
way, dominant linguistic patterns are established, legitimated,
and consecrated.
Linguistic habitus can express itself at any level of language.
However, it has particularly strong markers in phonetics, syn-
tax, and paralinguistic features (see paralanguage), such
as propensity to speak, interest, and expression. In efect, what
Bourdieu is attempting to do with this approach to language and
linguistics is to integrate the study of objective social variation
from sociolinguistics (see Vann 2004) with the patterns of
subjective afective convergence and divergence found in social
variations can be found together with subjective dispositions
expressed in and against a linguistic ield background. Field here
refers to both overarching dominant ields and ields within
ields. Because linguistic habitus is essentially formed as part
of and expresses power relations, all language acts whether of
comprehension or articulation, oral or aural need to be under-
stood as power relations and as symbolizing a certain relation
both to language and the ield in which it arises. here are con-
sequently forms of both self-censure and selectivity in language
uses, which express the linguistic habitus and the logics of prac-
tice that formed it and with which it is now confronted. here are
also strategies in language use, for example, euphemism in place
of direct expression. Such strategies can be seen to be employed
by those occupying positions of linguistic dominance in the
ield: hey play with language as a part of linguistic mastery.
Condescension is another of these features of linguistic dom-
inance. A further strategy is hypocorrection: he linguistically
dominant can descend into vulgar speech as an expression of
their complete control of the dominant vernacular. It is acknowl-
edged as such by those around them as a sign of distinction in
the way someone plays with the popular form. hese strategies
are not open to those less linguistically secure. In fact, some of
them may even have recourse to the opposite strategy hyper-
correction where anxiety to be linguistically correct is merely
interpreted as evidence of linguistic insecurity and, therefore, an
inferior position in the ield.
Bourdieu uses linguistic habitus in a number of ways and
ield contexts. However, it has particular signiicance in the areas
of culture and education. In culture, linguistic habitus is the
base generator of a certain style and way of being in the world.
Whether afected, direct, stylized, abrupt, or prompt, linguistic
manners can be understood in terms of the social conditions that
produced them and the social diferentiating purposes for which
they were created. In fact, at one point, he even argues that our
entire language and its classiicatory systems can be understood
as the expression of opposing (antagonistic) adjectives for
353
Habitus, Linguistic
example, high/low, ine/coarse, light/heavy, broad/narrow,
common/unique, brilliant/dull and that these adjectives have
as their social derivation the structure of society (and its domi-
nant ields to be found in social classes; see Bourdieu [1979]
1984, 468).
Language, of course, is the medium of education, and it is
here that the convergence or divergence between a particu-
lar linguistic habitus and the ield that surrounds it is most
apparent. In publications such as he Inheritors ([1964] 1979),
Reproduction ([1970] 1977), and Academic Discourse ([1965]
1994), Bourdieu shows the link between academic language and
individual habitus, expressed in cognitive and mental struc-
tures ways of thinking and the very language of such expres-
sion. here are power relations between teachers and students
played out when one linguistic habitus (that of the teacher) faces
another (that of the student) (see Grenfell 1998, 2004). he fact
that some students come from the same social origins as the cul-
ture represented in education and others do not is the basis of
matches and mismatches that impact academic achievement.
Put succinctly, the linguistic habitus of some students results in
their feeling like a ish in water during their schooling while oth-
ers are most certainly out of the water and left somewhat high
and dry. Parents own linguistic habitus even complements their
own explicit collusion in this process of hidden social selection,
as some students pass through to the upper echelons of acade-
mia while others drop out. Linguistic habitus, in this sense, is
their very being.
Ultimately, Bourdieu is seeking to transform empirical think-
ing (everyday/common sense) into scientiic thinking (in his
case, sociological) by altering the linguistic habitus of research-
ers in its empirical forms in such a way that everyday language
is replaced, at least in part or partially relected upon, by such
analytical thinking tools as habitus, ield, and so on.
Michael Grenfell
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bourdieu, Pierre. [1964] 1979. he Inheritors: French Students and heir
Relation to Culture. Trans. R. Nice. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
, with Jean-Claude Passeron and Monique De Saint Martin. [1965]
1994. Academic Discourse. Oxford: Polity.
, with Jean-Claude Passeron. [1970] 1977. Reproduction in
Education, Society and Culture. Trans. R. Nice. London: Sage.
. [1979] 1984. Distinction. Trans. R. Nice. Oxford: Polity.
. [1980] 1990. he Logic of Practice. Trans. R. Nice. Oxford: Polity.
. [1982] 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Trans. G. Raymond
and M. Adamson. Oxford: Polity.
, with Loc Wacquant. 1989. Towards a relexive sociology: A work-
shop with Pierre Bourdieu. Sociological heory 7.1: 2663.
Encrev, Pierre. 1983. La liaison sans enchainement. Actes de la recher-
ch en science sociales 46: 3966.
Grenfell, Michael. 1998. Language and the classroom. In Bourdieu
and Education: Acts of Practical heory, ed. M. Grenfell and D. James,
7288. London: Falmer.
. 2004. Bourdieu in the classroom. In Culture and Learning: Access
and Opportunity in the Curriculum, ed. M. Olssen, 4972. Westport,
CT: Greenwood.
Vann, Robert. 2004. An empirical perspective on prac-
tice: Operationalising Bourdieus notions of linguistic habitus. In
354
Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
Pierre Bourdieu: Language, Culture and Education, ed. M. Grenfell and
M. Kelly, 7384. Bern: Peter Lang.
HEAD-DRIVEN PHRASE STRUCTURE GRAMMAR
HPSG: A Preview
The core idea of head-driven phrase structure grammar
(HPSG), as a theory of grammatical representations, is
that local syntactic dependencies patterns of covariation
accounted for in earlier versions of generative grammar via
transformations can be reduced to epiphenomena of selec-
tional specifications on heads. In order to implement this
explanatory strategy, HPSG models linguistic expressions as
complex symbols, which interact with a small network of very
general constraints to admit a subset of possible representa-
tions. The constraints that restrict structural admissibility are
defined on local phrase structure representations phrasal
categories and their daughters and take the form of feature
(in)equality requirements, where feature/value pairs are used
to encode separately transmissable properties of linguistic
expressions. These constraints apply at a single level of rep-
resentation and jointly determine the status of complex lin-
guistic signs. Roughly speaking, sentences of the language
correspond one-to-one with these admissible signs.
A true theory of grammar is a completely explicit set of rep-
resentations, a subtheory of models for the representations the
theory sponsors, and fully interpreted constraints on those rep-
resentations. One objective of such a theory is to make it clear
why sentences such as Terry put that book on the table, hat
book, Terry put on the table, On that table Terry put the book, and
so on are well formed, whereas not only *Table put the on the that
Terry book but also *Terry put the book, *Terry put the book on,
*Terry put on the table, and so on, are all bad. he irst of these
bad examples has all the words of the well-formed versions cited
earlier but hopelessly scrambled together; the latter examples
have the right order, but all appear to be missing crucial parts.
he problem is to account for these facts and for the similarities
and diferences in the seemingly related sentences exhibited.
he theory of syntax embodied in HPSG appeals to principles of
valence satisfaction how lexical items combine with other ele-
ments that they require as parts of their idiosyncratic individual
(1)
PHON criticized
verb
HEA D VFORM fin
A UX
LOC
NP
SYNSEM LOC CA T SUBJ normi
COMS NP
normj
CONT w(j )(i )
CONX ...
MONLOC ...
Figure 1.
Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
(2)
(a) PHON criticized
verb
HEA D VFORM fin
A UX
LOC
SYNSEM LOC CA T SUBJ
NPnormi
COMPS
CONT w(j)(i)
PHON criticized NPnormi
verb
HEA D VFORM fin Leslie
A UX
LOC
LOC CA T SUBJ NP
normi
SYNSEM
COMPS NPnormj
CONT w(j)(i)
properties together with what are, in efect, lexical redundancy
rules, to account for all facts of the kind noted in the previous
paragraph and all syntactic dependencies, including parallelisms
between seemingly related construction types. he following
discussion presents a more technically leshed-out instantiation
of this general approach to characterizing grammatical well-
formedness.
An Illustration of the System: Constituency and
Dependencies
As noted, local dependencies are uniformly accounted for in
HPSG as instances of nothing more elaborate than valence sat-
isfaction, or systematic relationships between valence speci-
ications of related classes of lexica. his approach is suicient
to account for even quite distant linkages, such as It continues
to appear to have been raining during the night, by means of a
feature subj encoding subject-selection possibilities on lexical
heads and their phrasal projections.
LOCAL DEPENDENCIES. he best way to exhibit the nature of
HPSGs approach to an account of the patterns relected in natu-
ral language is to take an example of a single sentence and show
how it is licensed by the interaction of HPSG constraints. Assume,
for example, that the lexical entry for criticized comprises a num-
ber of separate (partial) descriptions that includes a description
roughly along the lines of (1) in Figure 1.
As this (partial) lexical entry illustrates, signs in HPSG com-
prise a ramiied feature geometry that simultaneously speciies
phon(ology) and synt(tax)/sem(antics), the latter a complex
information package revealing loc(al) and nonloc(al) prop-
erties, itemizing, respectively, the inherent morphosyntactic
and semantic properties of the category, on the one hand, and
the presence of elements within the sign with nonlocal link-
ages (the presence of a gap linked to a iller arbitrarily far away,
wh properties, etc.), on the other hand. Further subspeciica-
tions identify inherent morphosyntactic properties of the sign,
including head those necessarily shared with the heads
phrasal mother by virtue of the mother/head daughter rela-
tionship along with semantic and contextual information.
(b) VP
v NPj
criticized Leslie
Figure 2.
he key valence features comp(plement)s and subj(ect)
encode the combinatorial requirements of particular lexical ele-
ments, making it possible to eliminate speciic phrase structure
rules in favor of broad schemata that correctly project phrases
from lexica regardless of the latters valence peculiarities. Each
such schema identiies a certain very general kind of structure,
which will be leshed out in detail, depending, in many cases,
on the particular lexical item that heads the structure. Two of the
most important conditions interacting with these schemata are
the valance principle and the head feature principle, which can
be stated roughly as follows:
Valence Principle: For any valence feature f, the value on the
mother is the list containing the value of f, on the head daugh-
ter minus the values corresponding to the head daughters
sisters.
Head Feature Principle (HFP): For any phrasal category,
the value of the head feature is identical to the value of the
categorys head daughters head feature.
he valence principle speciies that the appearance of any
required valent in a local structural relationship to a select-
ing head removes the corresponding element from the must-
have list of the mother. his principle does not, of course, limit
the number of valents that may appear as the heads sisters.
But the schematic possibilities of English require a phrase of
this type to be lexically headed, and in order to satisfy both this
requirement and the valence principle, exactly the number
and type of complement sisters that the verb identiies on its
comps list (i.e., the list of descriptions that must be satisied by
the heads selected sisters) must appear in the structure so as
to yield the empty complements lists on the mother. We thus
license the structure in (2)a, which can be abbreviated as (2)b
in Figure 2. he head-subject schema allows a completely satu-
rated verb (V) to have a phrasal head daughter with a subj list
of length one. Again, in conjunction with the valence principle,
this schema allows a verb phrase (VP) combining with a con-
stituent that exactly meets the description indicated in its subj
to appear as a structure of type head-subject under an S (i.e.,
clausal) node, that is, a V with both an empty comps and an
355
Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
(3) (a) S PHON
NP S LOC 1
LOC 1 SLA SH 1 SYNSEM
Terry
NP VP SLA SH
1
I
V NP
SLA SH
know
N PP
SLA SH
stories
P NP
about
Figure 3.
empty subj list. hus, Robin criticized Leslie will be straightfor-
wardly licensed.
Note further that *Robin criticized and *Robin criticized Leslie
certain books will both be ruled out. Neither of them will satisfy the
head-complement schema under the constraint imposed by the
valence principle. In the irst case, the lack of a complement daugh-
ter will yield a result with a nonempty complements list, violating
the schema requirement. In the second case, the valence require-
ments on criticize will not equal the sum of those on the mother plus
the set of daughters that appear in the structure, as the full form of
the valence principle requires. Hence, both fail to be licensed.
he valence feature lists do not in fact specify information
about the entire sister sign selected by the head. Lexical selection
is universally blind to phonological form and also to the descend-
ing constituent structure of any selected phrasal constituent;
therefore, it makes sense to restrict valence speciications to syn-
sem values. But the latter contain enough information to imple-
ment virtually all local dependencies as simple expressions of
selection. hus, it is possible to select not only for coarse-grained
information, such as the number of valents and their respective
lexical category types, but also for information such as their case,
or the inlectional properties of their heads (on the assumption
that the latter are head features and will therefore be shared
between a phrasal valent and its lexical head daughter). he mor-
phosyntactic dependency in English between the identity of aux-
iliary elements, on the one hand, and the inlectional form of the
verb that immediately follows them, on the other hand, follows
simply and directly by specifying that, for example, each auxiliary
have selects as its complement a VP, preserving, in its own feature
speciications, the inlectional class of its head daughter (specii-
cally, the value psp, encoding past participial status).
Nonlocal Dependencies
Nonlocal dependencies, in contrast, do not depend on the
selectional possibilities of particular (classes of) lexical items.
Unbounded dependency constructions involving extraction, or
356
(b)
NONLOC|SLA SH 1
1
1
LOC 1
SLA SH 1
e
the percolation of wh properties (as in so-called pied-piping phe-
nomena), throughout arbitrarily large structures exist in natural
language and must be accounted for.
HPSG follows the central innovation introduced by Gerald
Gazdar a quarter of a century ago in treating iller/gap linkages
as a by-product of the difusion of a speciic feature slash, whose
value is correlated with that of the iller and which is driven
from mother to (at least one) daughter by the nonlocal feature
principle:
Nonlocal Feature Principle (NFP, simpliied): For any nonlo-
cal feature f the value of f on a phrase at any point below the
place in the structure where f was introduced is the union of
the values of f on the set of daughters.
he NFL states, in essence, that below the point where the non-
local feature is introduced, at least one daughter in each two-
generation tree must bear the value of f speciied. In the case of
iller/gap constructions, the feature slash is identiied at the top
of the dependency with the relevant part (called the loc value,
illustrated in Figure 2) of the iller. he descendents of the high-
est category with a nonempty slash feature preserve this value
in their own speciications, until at the bottom of the depen-
dency, the slash value is cashed out as an empty category. An
example is illustrated in (3)a, with the relevant lexical entry for a
slash terminal category listed in (3)b in Figure 3. his approach
to iller/gap dependencies comports well with familiar phenom-
ena in languages that mark such dependencies by local lagging
of extraction pathways; it also has considerable advantages over
movement-based approaches in the analysis of multiple gap
linkages to a single iller, such as parasitic and across-the-board
extractions in coordinate structures.
Remaining Issues
here are, of course, a number of other important aspects to
the grammar architecture incorporated in HPSG, some of them
involving major points of debate within the framework.
Hippocampus
he syntax/semantics interface issue is not fully resolved in
HPSG, in the sense that there are a number of competing
approaches to a variety of issues, ranging from the nature of
the objects in HPSG representations that map to semantic
representations to the mapping rules themselves. Diferent
answers to these questions typically correspond to major dif-
ferences in syntactic analyses.
Probably the most fundamental point of contention is the
disagreement within HPSG about the degree to which pat-
terns in natural languages relect, on the one hand, lexi-
cal properties and systematic mappings between lexical
descriptions, or restrictions on speciic constructions, as
encoded by constraints imposed on types belonging to very
elaborate ontologies, on the other hand. At one extreme,
HPSG includes a set of lexical heads with very abstract
properties and possibly no phonological realization, as in
earlier treatments of relative clauses. At the other extreme
are intricate multi-inheritance hierarchies in which prop-
erties of constructions are essentially posited as underived
primitives, or are derived by combining a number of such
underived primitives.
hese and a number of other foundational issues are currently
under intense discussion and debate within the HPSG research
community, and there is no reason to expect a consensus on any
of these questions in the near future.
On the basis of the relatively brief history of the framework
so far, it seems very possible that divergences in approaches
to these fundamental matters will in time yield major schisms
within the theory, leading in the end to two or more major ver-
sions of the theory, in much the way that categorial grammar has
split into combinatory categorial grammar, on the one hand,
and the type-logical version based on the Lambek calculus, on
the other. It remains to be seen whether the theory will develop
along these lines.
Robert D. Levine
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Borsley, Robert. 1996. Modern Phrase Structure Grammar.
London: Blackwells.
Levine, Robert, and homas Hukari. 2006. he Unity of Unbounded
Dependency Constructions. Stanford, CA: CSLI
Pollard, Carl, and Ivan Sag. 1994. Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
HIPPOCAMPUS
he hippocampus is a bilaterally symmetric subcortical structure
adjacent to the lateral ventricle in the medial temporal lobe
(mtl). Researchers in 1968 reported dramatic memory phe-
nomena associated with hippocampal-MTL damage, and data
reported from 1998 to 2006 have indicated parallel phenomena
for many other aspects of cognition, including language. I irst
discuss patient H. M., the initial source of data for the hippocam-
pal-memory and hippocampal-language links. I then discuss
related patient groups and the theoretical signiicance of the
hippocampal-language link.
Because of the unique and circumscribed nature of his
1953 surgery, H. M. is probably the most studied patient in the
history of neuropsychology (Ogden and Corkin 1991): A neu-
rosurgeon inserted thin metal tubes above the eyes, and via
suction, removed parts of H. M.s hippocampus and directly
linked MTL structures. his operation greatly ameliorated H.
M.s life-threatening epilepsy, left H. M.s neocortex virtually
undamaged, and spared all neocortex with known links to lan-
guage comprehension. However, the operation caused a selec-
tive memory deicit, with normal recall of information familiar
to H. M. before his operation and used frequently since then,
but impaired recall of information newly encountered after his
operation and not massively repeated since then (see MacKay
et al. 2007).
H. M. has sentence-level language deicits that precisely
mirror his memory deicits. D. G. MacKay et al. (2007) tested
H. M.s sentence-level comprehension in six tasks. In one task,
participants identiied the grammatical versus ungrammati-
cal status of never previously encountered sentences that were
either grammatical or ungrammatical (see grammaticality).
Here, H. M. responded with the correctly answer reliably less
often than controls matched for age, IQ, and education. his
comprehension deicit impaired a wide variety of syntactic struc-
tures, including ones that memory-normal participants ind easy
to recall: H. M. exhibited equivalent comprehension deicits for
easy- and diicult-to-recall sentences.
In a second task, H. M. again performed reliably worse than
controls in identifying grammatical sentences as grammatical
and in detecting, identifying, and repairing errors in sentences
containing incorrect and misordered words. A third task required
multiple-choice identiication of who-did-what-to-whom in
novel sentences. Here, H. M. identiied the correct thematic
role of sentence constituents reliably less often than controls. A
fourth task required multiple-choice recognition of the appropri-
ate interpretation for sentences containing novel metaphors.
Here, H. M. chose the correct interpretation reliably less often
than controls, and his errors indicated failure to recognize that
the sentences were metaphoric. A ifth task required yesno
recognition of the appropriate interpretation for ambiguous
sentences. Here, H. M. responded correctly less often than con-
trols and sometimes responded yes-and-no despite repeated
requests to respond yes-or-no.
Consistent with several earlier results discussed next,
H. M.s ambiguity comprehension deicits were not due to
memory overload associated with multiple meanings: In the
ambiguity detection and description task of MacKay, Stewart,
and Burke (1998), H. M. took much longer than controls to
begin to describe the irst of two meanings in ambiguous sen-
tences, even when he never discovered the second meaning.
H. M. also discovered both meanings without experimenter
help less often than controls and often failed to understand
meanings that the experimenter had just explained. Research
isolated seven deicits in how H. M. described the sentence
meanings: Grammatically impossible interpretations, misread-
ings relecting failure to comprehend sentence-level mean-
ing, errors in pronoun use (anaphora), error correction
failures, free associative responses, self-miscomprehensions,
357
Hippocampus
and failures to follow experimenter requests for clariication.
Research also indicated comprehension failure involving an
initial meaning for sentences, ambiguous or not.
To summarize, in a wide range of tasks involving many fun-
damental aspects of sentence comprehension, H. M. exhibited
deicits not caused by his memory problems (for corroborating
evidence on H. M.s comprehension deicits, see Corkin 1984;
Lackner 1974; and Schmolck, Stefanacci, and Squire 2000).
However, H. M.s comprehension deicits were selective rather
than across the board: Experiment six in MacKay et al. (2007)
demonstrated that H. M. comprehended familiar words and
phrases in isolation without deicit despite large deicits in com-
prehending these same stimuli when embedded within sen-
tences. Besides demonstrating selectivity, these results indicated
that H. M.s deicits were not attributable to low motivation, to
failure as a child to learn the meaning of the critical words and
phrases, or to failure to understand and follow instructions for
the task.
H. M. also exhibited signiicant production deicits when
describing the meanings of familiar words that he compre-
hended without deicit in MacKay et al. (2007): Judges blind to
speaker identity rated H. M.s meaning descriptions as reliably
more redundant, less coherent, less grammatical, and less com-
prehensible than those of controls. hese indings replicated
earlier results indicating deicits in H. M.s production of novel
or non-clich sentences (see MacKay, Stewart, and Burke 1998).
Again, however, H. M. exhibited selective production deicits that
mirrored his memory deicits, for example, spontaneously pro-
ducing clich phrases such as in a way (familiar from before his
surgery) without errors (ibid.).
H. M. also exhibited similar deicits and sparing in the seem-
ingly simple task of reading sentences aloud (MacKay and James
2001): He produced abnormal pauses at major syntactic bound-
aries unmarked by commas in the sentences, but normal pauses
at syntactic boundaries marked with commas, a prosodic marker
that H. M. had learned prior to his operation. H. M. also produced
abnormal pauses within unfamiliar phrases in the sentences, but
normal pauses within frequently used phrases. hese and other
selective deicits indicated that he has diiculty with the process
of reconstructing novel aspects of sentence structure when read-
ing aloud.
H. M. also exhibited similar deicits and sparing in visual
cognition: When detecting target igures hidden in concealing
arrays, he performed reliably worse than controls for unfamiliar
targets but not for familiar targets (MacKay and James 2000). In
short, H. M. exhibits similar selective deicits in visual cognition,
episodic memory, sentence-level comprehension, and sentence
production when speaking and reading aloud; impaired pro-
cessing of never previously encountered events, visual igures,
phrases, and propositions; but spared processing of informa-
tion familiar to him before his lesion and used frequently since
then.
Why are these parallels important? One reason is that H. M.
is not unique: Other patients with hippocampal-MTL damage
exhibit identical parallels, reinforcing the links among hippocam-
pus-MTL, language, and memory. For example, other amnesiacs
exhibit deicits in detecting the two meanings in ambiguous sen-
tences (Zaidel et al. 1995) and make errors resembling H. M.s
358
in reading novel sentences aloud (Friedman 1996; MacKay and
James 2001).
Second, these parallels are diicult to explain in current sys-
tems theories, in which independent systems process memory,
language comprehension, language production, and visual cog-
nition, and the hippocampus subserves only the memory sys-
tem (see, e.g., Schmolck, Stefanacci, and Squire 2000). Under
systems theories, hippocampal-MTL damage should yield
memory deicits without deicits in other cognitive systems, and
certainly without parallel deicits and parallel sparing across
supposedly independent systems for sentence comprehension,
sentence production, visual cognition, and episodic memory.
hese predictions have failed, and major attempts to rescue
current systems theories from these failed predictions have like-
wise failed (see MacKay 2001, 2006; and MacKay, James, and
Hadley 2008).
Third, a new theoretical framework known as binding the-
ory (not to be confused with the anaphoric binding theory
in linguistics; see Jackendoff 2003, 15) readily explains and,
indeed, originally predicted the links between hippocampal-
MTL damage and parallel deficits and sparing in memory,
sentence-level language, and other aspects of cognition.
Under binding theory, hippocampal-MTL damage impairs
binding mechanisms for forming new internal representa-
tions in the cortex but does not affect mechanisms for activat-
ing already existing cortical representations (see, e.g., MacKay
et al. 2007 and James and MacKay 2001 for important theoret-
ical details regarding forgetting, frequency of use, and aging
and language ).
To illustrate in detail how binding theory explains his selec-
tive deicits, consider H. M.s sentence production in a standard
picture-description task requiring the incorporation of prespeci-
ied target words (MacKay et al. 2007): H. M. described the word-
picture stimuli signiicantly less accurately and completely than
eight controls, included fewer target words, and produced more
incomplete sentences (e.g., lacking a subject or verb), viola-
tions of agreement rules, non sequiturs, and run-on sentences
than the controls. Descriptions by H. M. (1a2a) versus controls
(1b2b) for the same word-picture stimuli illustrate some of these
diferences.
(1a) H. M. description: Because its wrong for her to be
and hes dressed just as this that hes dressed and the same
way.
(1b) Control description: Well, I think Ill take that one
although it looks wrong.
(2a) H. M. description: I want some of that pie either some
pie and Ill have some.
(2b) Control description: Uh, there are two people getting
pie, but theres only one piece of blueberry pie left, and so,
either one of them will have to have it.
Note that H. M.s picture-description problems in 1a and
2a were selective: Unlike agrammatic aphasics, H. M . did
not produce morphemes and nonsense words jumbled
together into morphological salads (Jackendoff 2003,
264). Moreover, he produced frequently used units, such as
its wrong, to be, the same way (1a), some of that, and
Hippocampus
Ill have some (2a), without errors. Under binding theory,
separately stored syntactic units and rules serve to activate
already formed internal representations so that words and
phrases become produced in the appropriate order. Because
H. M.s syntax-based activation mechanisms are intact and
frequently used since his lesion, H. M. therefore produces
familiar words, phrases, and propositions such as its wrong
and Ill have some, without errors. However, he lacks already
formed internal representations for propositions that he
has used repeatedly before and after his lesion to describe the
MacKay et al. (2007) word-picture stimuli. The word-picture
stimuli, therefore, triggered familiar units that H. M. simply
concatenated without forming complete, appropriate, and
coherent utterances (see 1b, 2b).
In conclusion, the pressing problem for future research is to
test new binding theory predictions for relations among brain,
language, memory, and other aspects of cognition (see MacKay
et al. 2007).
Donald G. MacKay
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Corkin, S. 1984. Lasting consequences of bilateral medial tempo-
ral lobectomy: Clinical course and experimental indings in H. M.
Seminars in Neurology 4: 24959.
Friedman, R. B. 1996. Phonological text alexia: Poor pseudo-word
reading plus diiculty reading functors and aixes in text Cognitive
Neuropsychology 13: 86985.
Jackendof, R. 2003. Foundations of Grammar: Brain, Meaning, Grammar,
Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
James, L. E., and D. G. MacKay. 2001. H. M., word knowledge and
aging: Support for a newtheory of long-term retrograde amnesia.
Psychological Science 12: 48592.
Lackner, J. R. 1974. Observations on the speech processing capabilities
of an amnesic patient: Several aspects of H. M.s language function.
Neuropsychologia 12: 199207.
MacKay, D. G. 2001. A tale of two paradigms or metatheoreti-
cal approaches to cognitive neuropsychology: Did Schmolck,
Stefanacci, and Squire demonstrate that Detection and explanation
of sentence ambiguity are unaffected by hippocampal lesions but
are impaired by larger temporal lobe lesions? Brain and Language
78: 26572.
. 2006. Aging, memory and language in amnesic H. M.
Hippocampus 16: 4914.
MacKay, D.G., D. M. Burke, and R. Stewart. 1998. H. M.s language pro-
duction deicits: Implications for relations between memory, seman-
tic binding, and the hippocampal system. Journal of Memory and
Language 38: 2869.
MacKay, D. G., and L. E. James. 2000. Binding processes for visual cog-
nition: A hippocampal amnesic (H. M.) exhibits selective deicits in
detecting hidden igures and errors in visual scenes. Poster presented
to the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, San Francisco.
. 2001. he binding problem for syntax, semantics, and
prosody: H. M.s selective sentence-reading deicits under the
theoretical-syndrome approach. Language and Cognitive Processes
16: 41960.
. 2002. Aging, retrograde amnesia, and the binding problem for etymology that is, to claims about the origin of individual lexi-
phonology and orthography: A longitudinal study of hippocampal
amnesic H. M. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition 9: 298333.
MacKay, D. G., L. E. James, and C. Hadley. 2008. Amnesic H. M.s per-
formance on the Language Competence Test: Parallel deicits in
Historical Linguistics
memory and sentence production. Journal of Experimental and
Clinical Neuropsychology 30.3: 280300.
MacKay, D. G., L. E. James, J. K. Taylor, and D. E. Marian. 2007.
Amnesic H. M. exhibits parallel deicits and sparing in language and
memory: Systems versus binding theory accounts. Language and
Cognitive Processes 22.3: 377452.
MacKay, D. G., R. Stewart, and D. M. Burke. 1998. H. M. revis-
ited: Relations between language comprehension, memory, and the
hippocampal system. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 10: 37794.
Ogden, J. A., and S. Corkin. 1991. Memories of H. M. In Memory
Mechanisms: A Tribute to G. V. Goddard, ed. W. C. Abraham, M.
Corballis, and K. G. White, 195215. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Schmolck, H., L. Stefanacci, and L. R. Squire. 2000. Detection and expla-
nation of sentence ambiguity are unafected by hippocampal lesions
but are impaired by larger temporal lobe lesions. Hippocampus
10: 75970.
Zaidel, D. W., E. Zaidel, S. M. Oxbury, and J. M. Oxbury. 1995. he inter-
pretation of sentence ambiguity in patients with unilateral focal brain
surgery. Brain and Language 51: 45868.
HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS
Historical linguistics is the study of how languages change over
time. We can approach the study of change in various ways. One
is by studying the histories of individual languages. An example
would be analyzing the changes that have taken place in English
over the last thousand years. A second approach involves com-
paring various related languages in order to draw inferences
about the types of changes that have occurred since the time
they split from their common ancestor. We can further study the
frequency and naturalness of the changes that the languages are
hypothesized to have undergone and the efects of change in
one area on other parts of the language. Finally, historical lin-
guistics is also concerned with inding explanations for change,
including why languages change and how a particular change
was actuated in a particular circumstance. Historical linguistics
also intersects with other ields. For example, a linguist trying
to reconstruct the geographic extent of a proto-language may
also make use of data from both archaeology and historical
anthropology.
he following discussion begins with an abbreviated history
of the ield, from classical times to the early twentieth century.
From there, we turn to contemporary research and conclude
with a look at possible future directions for the ield.
History of the Field
Modern historical linguistics was developed in the nineteenth
century, although there were both eighteenth- and seventeenth-
century scholars who practiced something that todays linguists
would recognize. In contrast, Classical Greek and Roman lin-
guists had little to say about language history despite consider-
able sophistication in their synchronic descriptive techniques
(see synchrony and diachrony). he study of language
change in the Graeco-Roman world was largely conined to
cal items. For example, in Platos Cratylus, the word anthropos is
said to derive from the contraction of the phrase anathro:n h
po:pen (looking up at the things hes seen). Similar methods
were employed by Latin linguists such as Varro, who claimed that
359
Historical Linguistics
anas duck is related to the verb nre to swim. Furthermore, William Jones to the Royal Asiatic Society in 1786, in which he
although numerous similarities between Latin and Greek were
noted, it was assumed that all such words were direct borrow-
ings into Latin from Greek. Shared common ancestry from a lan-
guage no longer spoken was never considered (see extinction
of languages). Such an assumption was in keeping with the
strong cultural debt that the Roman world owed to the Greek
(see Law 2003).
he classical etymological method continued to be employed
throughout the Middle Ages, where it was joined by theories of
language change and diversity built on the biblical story of the
destruction of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11). A summary of the
theory can be found in Dantes de Vulgari Eloquentia (for one
English translation, see Shapiro 1990). Such a theory of diversity
speciies both a cause of language change and a partial model
of the origin of modern linguistic diversity. Work within a model
of change laid the foundation for much later linguistic scholar-
ship, for it led to questions about the language that was spoken
by those erecting the Tower of Babel (and, therefore, what the
irst human language was) and exactly how modern attested lan-
guages related to one another.
he de Vulgari Eloquentia is also a founding discussion of
relationships among the vernacular languages of Europe. he
rise of the study of Romance vernaculars led to an examination
of systematic diferences among those languages, as well as com-
parison with Latin (for example, why Latin de is a preposition
meaning from, but in French and Italian it marks possession).
As R. H. Robins (1968, 100 f) notes, it was this examination that
allowed the development of an adequate framework for dia-
chronic linguistics because of a chance to study change where
the parent language was already well understood.
In the early Middle Ages, there was also a highly sophisticated
Arabic comparative linguistic tradition. Ibn Hazm (9941064)
noted regular correspondences among Hebrew, Arabic, and
Syraic, and in the Ihkam Ibn Hazm further identiied changing
pronunciation and language contact as driving forces in the cre-
ation of linguistic diversity (see contact, language).
In the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, we begin to see the
study of language change linked to other branches of linguistics,
such as typology. Scholars such as Konrad Gessner ([1555]
1974), Joseph Justice Scaliger ([1599] 1610), and later Andreas
Jger (1686) and Peter Simon Pallas (1786) collected and com-
pared vocabularies of the languages available to them and made
hypotheses about linguistic relationships on this basis. However,
the comparisons are unsystematic and based mostly on very few
features. For example, Scaliger divides the languages of Europe
into four major classes, depending on whether their word for
god is based on deus, theos, gott, or bog (roughly correspond-
ing to Latin/Romance, Greek, Germanic, and Slavic, respec-
tively). Gessner ([1555] 1974, 110) deduces that Armenian is
closely related to Hebrew because of the similarity of words such
as lezu tongue (Hebrew laschon in Gessner) and hhatz cross is examined. hat is, a language is not homogeneous at any
(Hebrew etz or hetz). Moreover, until G. W. Leibniz, there is no
conception that languages could have been descended from a
language that is no longer attested.
he beginning of modern historical linguistics and the com-
parative method is often said to date from a speech given by Sir
360
noted similarities between Sanskrit and the languages of Europe
and hypothesized that they may come from a common ances-
tor: [N]o philologer could examine the Sanskrit, Greek, and
Latin, without believing them to have sprung from some com-
mon source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. here is a similar
reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the
Gothic and the Celtic had the same origin with the Sanskrit.
(he speech is quoted in almost all introductory textbooks for
historical linguistics; see, for example, Campbell 2004 and Trask
1996.) However, as we have seen, elements of comparative and
historical linguistic methods predate Jones by several hundred
years.
he nineteenth century saw an explosion of work on his-
torical linguistics and the reconstruction of language history;
in fact, many methods developed during this period are still in
use. It is this period that gives us the idea of the correspondence
set: a set of words in related languages that are descended from
a common proto-form and which exhibit regular phonologi-
cal correspondences. For example, English three, Latin trs,
Greek tris, Sanskrit tryas, and Gothic rs all relect proto-
Indo-European *treyes. Furthermore, the correspondences
among phonemes in these languages are regular. For example,
English th corresponds to Latin t in cognate words (cf. father
and pater, brother and frater, among others; for the method and
further reconstructions, see Trask 1996). he irst detailed dis-
cussion of such correspondence sets dates to A. Turgot ([1756]
1961), and the method was systematized by Rasmus Rask
(1818). We also, shortly afterwards, ind the irst reconstructions
of Indo-European. hese are in the work of August Schleicher
(1848), who not only reconstructed lexical items but also con-
structed an Indo-European fable. Schleicher also introduced
the Stammbaum, or family tree, model of linguistic relationship
(see language families ).
Neither Schleicher nor his contemporaries placed much
weight on the importance of regularity in correspondences,
however. Scholars of the following generation, including Karl
Brugmann and Berthold Delbrck (the Neogrammarians or
Junggrammatiker), were the irst to recognize the importance
of regularity in sound change for the comparative method
and to use it as a tool for discriminating between inheritance
and analogy. he recognition of regularity in sound change
is the pillar of historical reconstruction and forms the
basis of much modern work on historical linguistics. Without
a conception of sounds changing regularly in particular pho-
netic environments, it is impossible to identify irregularities,
to reconstruct proto-forms, and thereby to form a reliable idea
of linguistic relationships. However, arguments about the uni-
versal regularity of sound change continue. One area involves
the paradox between apparent regularity at the macro level
and irregularity when a language at a particular stage in time
stage because of the amount of dialectal variation among
speakers. A second point of debate is the applicability of mod-
els relying on regularity of sound change to languages outside
of Europe, for instance, those spoken by huntergatherer com-
munities in Australia.
Historical Linguistics
A further methodological coup is due to Ferdinand de
Saussure ([1915] 1972). Saussure hypothesized, on the basis of
both internal evidence of root structure and varied correspon-
dences among vowels in Indo-European languages such as Greek
and Sanskrit, that there had once been a further set of laryngeal
consonants (possibly /h/, // and /w/) that had disappeared in
all environments in attested languages. Saussures contribution
is very important to historical linguistics for two reasons: First, it
is the foundation of internal reconstruction, that is, the
hypothesis of reconstructions based on synchronic patterns in
one language, rather than a direct comparison of forms between
languages. Second, it demonstrates very clearly the power of the
comparative method and the importance of regularity in corre-
spondence sets. he subsequent decipherment of inscriptions in
Hittite and Luwian conirmed Saussures hypothesis since two of
the laryngeals are preserved in these languages precisely where
we should expect to ind them.
Historical linguists in the twentieth century made progress in
the reconstruction of families outside Europe, in the growing use
of quantitative methods in modeling and describing language
change, and in historical syntax (see syntactic change). Most
of the methods used today were developed through the recon-
struction of proto-Indo-European; however, the methods have
also been successfully applied to other families. Much early his-
torical work was done on Finno-Ugric languages (e.g., Sajnovics
[1770] 1968; Gyarmathi 1799), and more recently, there has been
considerable progress in the reconstruction of Austronesian
(Pawley and Ross 1993), Niger-Congo (cf. Hombert and Hyman
1999), and numerous families in North America (see, for exam-
ple, Campbell 1997).
While the family tree model has been very inluential in his-
torical linguistics, other models of language change are also
used. Perhaps the most commonly cited is the wave theory of
J. Schmidt and Jules Guilliron (see Guilliron 1921), who pro-
posed that sound changes difuse through the lexicon, gradually
afecting more and more instances of phonemes in a given envi-
ronment. Regularity in correspondences is thus epiphenomenal
and only appears once a change is complete. Another common
appeal to wave theory is in subgrouping, where it is argued that
the family tree is not an accurate representation of language split-
ting. Rather, linguistic diferentiation occurs through the gradual
building up of isoglosses and changes afecting individual lexical
items.
Current State of Research
he methods of historical linguistics can be applied to all areas
of language study. Within historical phonology, there has been
a great deal of work on types of sound change, the plausibility
of diferent changes, and the mechanisms by which change is
spread throughout a speech community. (For discussion and
diferent approaches, see Ohala 1993, Blevins 2004, and Labov
2001.) he study of morphological change was particu-
larly important in the nineteenth century, and the reconstruc-
tion of morphemes and paradigms is still an important area of
research, as is grammaticalization theory.
Historical syntax has received rather less attention than histor-
ical morphology or phonology mostly because of the diiculties of
applying the comparative method to syntactic constructions. Most
work on historical syntax concerns word order change in the syn-
chronic analysis of ancient languages or the causes of syntactic
change, rather than reconstruction per se. Inluential here has
been the work of David Lightfoot (e.g., 1999), who has developed
a theory of change that assigns the primary cause of change to
a childs acquisition of the language. Since children are exposed
to linguistic data that is slightly diferent from what their parents
were exposed to, they therefore draw slightly diferent conclu-
sions about the syntactic structure of their language. We see this
relected in the historical record as a syntactic change. Others are
less comfortable in ascribing change solely to grammar change at
acquisition and argue that syntactic changes also occur in adult
speakers as a result of exposure to new languages and dialects,
changing prestige, and other factors. here is ongoing debate
over the extent to which a person may spread change as an adult,
since there are also clearly generational diferences in linguistic
production (see age groups).
he study of reconstructions within historical phonology,
morphology, and syntax may also be used to classify languages
into genetic families. Language classiication must also take ideas
of language contact into account. Extensive contact between two
unrelated languages may over time lead to enough similarities
that it is diicult to tell whether they are related or not. Several
languages have been misclassiied on this basis. For example,
Armenian was originally classiied as an Indo-Iranian language
rather than as its own branch of Indo-European because of the
number of loans it exhibits.
here are other less widely accepted methods of investigat-
ing linguistic prehistory. One is lexicostatistics, which involves
estimating genetic relatedness by comparing the percentage of
vocabulary common to pairs of languages. Underlying the method
is the assumption that languages that share more common mate-
rial are likely to be more closely related. Glottochronology uses
the estimations from lexicostatistics to estimate the time depth
of a particular family. Mass comparison (e.g., Greenberg 1987)
involves using large-scale word lists to reconstruct further back
than the strict application of the comparative method allows, by
granting more exceptions to the regularity of sound change and
greater latitude in semantics. In each case, the methods are not
widely accepted. For example, gross similarity between two
languages may be caused by several factors apart from common
genetic inheritance, including chance and borrowings, and only
detailed reconstruction of correspondences by the comparative
method allows us to choose between them.
Future Prospects
Currently, our knowledge of the history of diferent language
families in the world is very uneven. Some families includ-
ing Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, and Algonquian have been
reconstructed in detail. In other cases, we are not even sure
which languages belong to the family, let alone what the proto-
language looked like.
here are still many pressing concerns and active areas of
research. he irst is in the reconstruction of various language
families. Basic original reconstruction research is needed for
much of the world. Secondly, there is an ever-increasing concern
with questions about how and why languages change. We have
long moved away from arguments of language change involving
361
Historical Linguistics
sloppy speech or linguistic degeneration by ignorant speakers.
Instead, research has focused on the relative importance of lan-
guage acquisition in language change versus social factors, such
as peer pressure, prestige, and diffusion. Linguistic research is
also important for the study of prehistory and ancient population
movement.
Not everyone is convinced that the methods discussed in
this entry are generally applicable to all languages and lan-
guage families in the world. As already noted, the family tree
has been the predominant model for 150 years. However, some
have pointed out its reliance on transmission from parents
to children, that ignores other types of transmission which
can lead to rapid language change, such as creolization (see
creoles) and the formation of mixed languages (homason
and Kaufman 1988).
Finally, historical work increasingly involves computational
modeling and the integration of techniques used in computa-
tional biology. he last 10 years have seen an increasing amount
of sophisticated statistical analysis and computational modeling
in research (for an overview, see McMahon and McMahon 2006).
We also see work that aims at estimating time depth and rates of
language change. It remains to be seen, however, how successful
this work will be. No matter how sophisticated the techniques for
statistical analysis, any estimates of time depth need also to take
into account sophisticated theories of language change. At this
point, we have no idea why languages change and split at difer-
ent rates, although such difering rates are clearly observable in
the historical record.
Claire Bowern
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Blevins, Juliette. 2004. Evolutionary Phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Campbell, Lyle. 1997. American Indian Languages: he Historical
Linguistics of North America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
. 2004. Historical Linguistics: An Introduction. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Gessner, Konrad. [1555] 1974. Mithridates: de Diferentiis Linguarum
tum Veterum tum quae Hodie apud Diversas Nationes in Toto Orbe
Terrarum in Usu Sunt. Neudruck der Ausgabe Zrich, Aalen: Scientia
Verlag.
Greenberg, Joseph. 1987. Language in the Americas. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Guilliron, Jules. 1921. Pathologie et thrapeutique verbales.
Paris: Champion.
Gyarmathi, Smuel. 1799. Affinitas linguae Hungaricae cum linguis
Fennicae originis gram matice demonstrata. Vocabularia dialec-
torum Tataricarum et Slavicarum cum Hungarica comparata.
Gttingen.
Harris, Alice, and Lyle Campbell. 1995. Historical Syntax in Cross-
Linguistic Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hock, Hans H. 1991. Principles of Historical Linguistics. Berlin:
Mouton.
Hombert, Jean-Marie, and Larry Hyman. 1999. Bantu Historical
Linguistics: heoretical and Empirical Perspectives. Stanford,
CA: CSLI.
Jger, Andreas. 1686. De Lingua Vetustissima Europae, Scytho-Celtica et
Gothica. Wittinberg.
362
Historical Reconstruction
Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Law, Vivian. 2003. he History of Linguistics in Europe: From Plato to
1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lightfoot, David. 1999. he Development of Language: Acquisition,
Change and Evolution. Oxford: Blackwell.
McMahon, April, and Robert McMahon. 2006. Language Classiication by
Numbers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ohala, John. 1993. he phonetics of sound change. Historical
Linguistics: Problems and Perspectives, ed. Charles Jones, 23778.
London: Longman.
Pallas, Peter Simon. 1786. Linguarum totius orbis vocabularia compara-
tiva. St. Petersburg.
Pawley, Andrew, and Malcolm Ross. 1993. Austronesian histori-
cal linguistics and culture history. Annual Review of Anthropology
22: 42559.
Rask, R. 1818. Undersgelse om det gamle nordiske eller islandske sprogs
oprindelse. Copenhagen.
Robins, R. H. 1968. A Short History of Linguistics. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Sajnovics, Jnas. [1770] 1968. Demonstratio idioma Ungarorum et
Lapponum idem esse, ed. homas Sebeok. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Saussure, Ferdnand de. [1915] 1972. Course in General Linguistics
[Cours de linguistique general]. Trans. Roy Harris. Peru, IL: Open Court
Classics.
Scaliger, Joseph Justus. [1599] 1610. Diatriba de Europaeorum linguis. In
Opuscula varia antehac non edita. Paris.
Schleicher, August. 1848. Sprachvergleichende Untersuchungen. / Zur
vergleichenden Sprachgeschichte. 2 vols. Bonn: H. B. Koenig.
Shapiro, Marianne. 1990. De Vulgari Eloquentia, Dantes Book of Exile.
Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.
homason, Sarah Grey, and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language Contact,
Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Trask, R. L. 1996. Historical Linguistics. London: Arnold.
Turgot, A. [1756] 1961. tymologie. Brugge: De Tempel.
HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION
Like all complex things in nature, languages change over
time. Historical reconstruction is a process of inference by
which changes are undone so as to recover certain aspects
of historically nonattested linguistic structure and content in
hypothetical form. Although it can be applied to languages
for which written documentation is available (e.g., the recon-
struction of proto-Romance next to the extant records of Latin)
or to single languages by means of internal reconstruction, his-
torical reconstruction typically is directed to prehistoric lan-
guages and requires the simultaneous comparison of multiple
witnesses.
he set of procedures used in historical reconstruction is
called the comparative method. After the elimination of
chance, borrowing, and universals as plausible causes of cross-
linguistic similarity, it can be shown that the resemblances
between two or more languages must result from a common
origin (usually called genetic relationship), coupled with diver-
gent descent. In this respect, historical reconstruction in lin-
guistics shows striking parallels to the study of the evolutionary
history of natural species, and much of its terminology is con-
ceptually modeled on that of biological taxonomy. Once it has
Historical Reconstruction
been determined that languages are genetically related, a more
exact picture of their historical connection can be achieved by
the reconstruction of a proto-language or hypothetical common
ancestor.
Although some progress has been made with other aspects
of historical reconstruction, it is widely agreed that the
comparative method has been successfully applied only in
phonology . For reconstruction to begin, it is necessary to
identify a corpus of cognate morphemes , that is, morphemes
that have a common historical origin, identified inductively
as forms of similar meaning that exhibit recurrent sound
correspondences. Distinct sound correspondences that are
found in the same or closely similar environments normally
must be attributed to different proto-phonemes , and the
inventory of proto-phonemes so inferred forms a hypothesis
about the sound system of the proto-language of a language
family . Since proto-phonemes can only be reconstructed in
lexical forms, phonological and lexical reconstructions
are inextricably bound together. Reconstructed phonemes
and reconstructed words (proto-forms) are preceded by an
asterisk to indicate their hypothetical status. Some linguists
take the position that the phonetic substance of such sym-
bols is beyond recovery and that proto-phonemes are, there-
fore, little more than abstract formulas used to summarize
sound correspondences (the formulaic position). The major-
ity view (the realist position) is more sanguine; although the
phonetic nature of some proto-phonemes clearly is contro-
versial, many others permit little latitude in interpretation.
A related, though distinct, issue concerns the structure of
reconstructed phonological systems, since some of these
have violated implicational universals in typology .
Where this occurs, most historical linguists today would
question the validity of the reconstruction, using the typo-
logical generalizations of the present as a guide to inferences
about the past.
Once lexical reconstructions are available, it becomes pos-
sible to determine sound changes in a large number of daugh-
ter languages. No topic in linguistics has a longer history than
the study of sound change, which commenced during the irst
quarter of the nineteenth century with the pioneering studies of
Rasmus Christian Rask and Jacob Grimm. A major point of con-
troversy in the study of sound change is the issue of regularity.
It is now generally agreed that the strict Neogrammarian posi-
tion, which ruled out the possibility of unconditioned phone-
mic splits, is overly restrictive. A second issue, which is yet to be
resolved, is whether all sound change is phonetically (or phono-
logically) motivated.
An examination of sound changes leads not only to theoret-
ical models of how (and why) this process occurs but also to
evidence for subrelationship within a language family. Sound
changes that are exclusively shared (exclusively shared inno-
vations) form the basis for linguistic subgroups. Subgrouping
allows linguists to move beyond the mere recognition of a
language family as an internally undiferentiated collection
of related languages to the reconstruction of a family tree that
deines the historical order of splits of major and minor groups
of languages within the family. he structure of a family tree,
in turn, supports inferences about the most likely center of
dispersal, or homeland, of a language family (or subgroup
ancestor) and, hence, gives rise to hypotheses about direction
of migration that can be tested against the evidence of other
scholarly disciplines, such as archaeology or population genet-
ics. However, it has been recognized since at least the 1870s
that not all processes of linguistic diferentiation are treelike,
and it is widely accepted that both family tree and wave mod-
els accurately describe the process of language split, the former
under conditions of sharp social separation and the latter under
conditions of gradual diferentiation of independent languages
from a dialect complex.
he reconstruction of the proto-Indo-European case system
in the irst half of the nineteenth century marked the beginning
of work on comparative morphosyntax, but many would argue
that since this involves the identiication of cognate aixes, it is
a variant of lexical reconstruction. In recent years, greater atten-
tion has been paid to problems of reconstruction in other areas
of syntax, such as word order, and in semantics. It is note-
worthy that the models for such work almost invariably derive
from typological approaches to synchonic linguistic structure,
rather than from formal theories of syntax (see synchrony and
diachrony).
A proto-language inevitably presents a very incomplete pic-
ture of the language that must actually have existed. Nonetheless,
the comparative method, which is generally thought to permit
reconstruction of languages up to about 6,000 years old, is a
powerful tool that allows a variety of inferences about prehis-
toric language communities and their cultures. he potential
use of linguistic reconstruction for inferences about culture his-
tory was recognized in the second half of the nineteenth century
and labeled linguistic palaeontoloy by Ferdinand de Saussure.
However, little use was made of this potential until relatively
recent times. Since roughly the 1970s there has been increasingly
fruitful interdisciplinary cooperation, especially between histor-
ical linguists and archaeologists, in exploring Holocene human
prehistory. his has led to a renewed inquiry into the antiquity of
the Indo-European settlement of Europe and has been a power-
ful force in understanding the prehistoric human settlement of
the Paciic.
Robert Blust
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Blust, Robert. 1987. Lexical reconstruction and semantic recon-
struction: he case of Austronesian house words. Diachronica
4: 79106.
Campbell, Lyle. 1999. Historical Linguistics: An Introduction. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Harris, Alice C., and Lyle Campbell. 1995. Historical Syntax in Cross-
Linguistic Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kiparsky, Paul. 1995. he phonological basis of sound change. In he
Handbook of Phonological heory, ed. John A. Goldsmith, 64070.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Renfrew, Colin. 1998. Archaeology and Language: he Puzzle of Indo-
European Origins. London: Cape.
Ross, Malcolm, Andrew Pawley, and Meredith Osmond, eds. 1998.
The Lexicon of Proto Oceanic: The Culture and Environment
of Ancestral ceanic Society. Vol. 1. Material Culture. Pacific
Linguistics C-152. Canberra: Department of Linguistics, Research
363
Holophrastic Stage, The
School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National
University.
. 2003. he Lexicon of Proto Oceanic: he Culture and Environment
of Ancestral Oceanic Society. Vol. 2. he Physical Environment. Paciic
Linguistics 545. Canberra: Department of Linguistics, Research
School of Paciic and Asian Studies, he Australian National
University.
HOLOPHRASTIC STAGE, THE
Despite extensive individual variation, children on average
begin to produce words around the end of the irst year of life.
Initially, there is period of slow word learning of several months,
when the rate of learning is usually not much more than eight or
so words a month. Toward the end of this period of slow word
learning, two changes take place. First, word learning begins to
increase, such that the rate eventually increases to between one
and two new words a day. Second, children begin to combine
words to form their irst sentences (see two-word stage ).
his period of word acquisition, demarked at the start by the
irst words and at the end by the onset of word combinations,
is commonly referred to as the holophrastic stage of language
acquisition.
An alternative would be to refer to this period as the one-
word stage. his option would be descriptively adequate, in
that it captures the fact that childrens productions are limited
to a single word. Lois Bloom (1973), in fact, in an extensive
study of her daughters irst words, made this choice, entitling
her book One Word at a Time. he term holophrastic, how-
ever, is making a somewhat diferent claim about childrens
language acquisition when they are producing single words.
Holophrastic can be deined as a single word expressing the
ideas of a phrase or sentence. he term more explicitly states
that something more than single word production is taking
place. When adults produce single words, such as doggie or
eat, it is usually with the intent to express the meaning of the
individual word. When a child around age one says doggie
(or probably a little later eat), however, he or she combines
the meaning of the individual words with the communica-
tive intention of the utterance, intending a broader mean-
ing, such as there is a doggie, and I can see it or there is an
apple, and I want to eat it.
he decision to call the period of slow word learning the one-
word stage versus the holophrastic stage is more than that of
personal taste. he former choice relects a more conservative
view of the childs grammatical knowledge at this point is lan-
guage acquisition. he latter choice, on the other hand, repre-
sents the position that childrens knowledge of grammar may
be greater than that directly seen in single-word productions.
he present entry provides an overview of these two viewpoints
and discusses the nature of childrens emerging grammatical
knowledge during the time in which they produce one-word
utterances. It suggests that grammatical development begins
during this period, as relected in childrens understanding of
sentences and in some of the patterns of their single-word pro-
ductions, particularly as they near the point of making word
combinations.
364
Theoretical Approaches
At the onset, it is important to understand the possible
claims about grammatical knowledge during the holophras-
tic period. The most conservative claim would be, basically,
what you see is what you get, that is, that children only pro-
duce single words because that is all they know at that point.
This approach has come to be known as a lean interpretation
of childrens knowledge. At the other extreme, one can claim
that childrens grammatical knowledge is greater than what is
reflected in single-word productions. This rich interpretation
is based on the fact that language acquisition is rapid and that
children must have innate language learning mechanisms
that enable them to determine the grammatical character-
istics of their language at a very early age (see innateness
and innatism ).
hese two positions can be demonstrated by again looking at
a childs production of the words doggie and eat. A lean interpre-
tation would be that the child has some initial semantic cat-
egorization of word meaning, such that doggie represents
an emerging category of animate objects, and eat represents
an emerging category of actions. A rich interpretation would
propose that innate principles enable the child to establish
explicit grammatical knowledge from these semantic categories.
One principle would be that languages universally categorize
things as nouns and actions as verbs. Another principle would
be that categories like noun and verb are heads of larger units
or phrases, that is, noun phrases (NPs) and verb phrases (VPs).
Another principle would be that NPs and VPs are semantically
connected through semantic relations such as agent and action.
Seeing the doggie eating would lead to the establishment of the
sentence category. his process of building grammatical knowl-
edge from semantics has been called semantic bootstrapping
(Pinker 1984).
How, then, does one decide between these two positions? he
answer depends on the importance placed on supporting chil-
drens grammatical advances with observable changes in their
linguistic behavior. he rich interpretation deals with grammati-
cal development as a logical problem. Since the complexities of
language are acquired so rapidly, it seems reasonable to assume
that linguistic principles must be at work at the very onset of
language acquisition. Researchers who study childrens actual
comprehension and production of language, however, set an
additional requirement. Claims about childrens abilities must
be supported in the way children are comprehending and pro-
ducing language. he remainder of the present entry discusses
the evidence for grammatical knowledge during the holophras-
tic stage, based on studies of childrens comprehension and
production.
Language Comprehension
Studying the language comprehension of one-year-olds can be
diicult since they are not capable of responding to the tasks typ-
ically used for older children and adults. Researchers, however,
have come up with several clever ways to get at least a general
idea of childrens understanding at this age. If childrens knowl-
edge of language is limited to single words, then one would pre-
dict that they should do as well or better responding to utterances
Holophrastic Stage, The
of one word than to those of multiple words. he results of sev-
eral studies, however, have shown that children can respond to
multiword utterances and that they have an awareness that the
words are related in a way suggestive of the relations between
words in a sentence.
E. Shipley, C. Smith, and L. Gleitman (1969) examined
young childrens responses to commands directed toward
them by their mothers while the children played. he com-
mands were a single word, for example, ball!, two words,
for example, throw ball!, and well-formed commands, for
example, throw me the ball! he results showed that children
around the end of the holophrastic period and beginning of
word combinations actually responded most often when they
heard the well-formed commands. While not directly show-
ing that the children understood the well-formed commands,
the results indicated that children were aware that such com-
mands met the characteristics of English sentences, while the
other two do not.
Other studies have examined more directly whether very
young children can diferentiate multiword utterances on the
basis of the speciic words in them. One potential problem in
testing children on this aspect is that they may give the appear-
ance of understanding a multiword utterance when they are only
doing what they typically would do. For example, a child who
throws a ball when told throw the ball may do so just because
that is what children typically do with a ball. To avoid this prob-
lem, J. Sachs and L. Truswell (1978) used novel combinations
that were not likely to be part of childrens experiences. Test sen-
tences included unusual commands, such as smell truck and
kiss truck. he results indicated that young children were able
to respond correctly to such novel commands, suggesting that
they were aware of at least two-word relations in the sentences
they heard. Other research by J. Miller and colleagues (1980) has
examined the range of sentence types that are understood by
children during the holophrastic stage. he results indicate that
this range is limited. Children did best on responding to sen-
tences that communicated an actionobject relation (e.g., kiss
the shoe) and to those that communicated a possessor to pos-
sessed relation (e.g., mamas shoe). hey did less well on other
relations, such as agent action (e.g., make the horsey kiss).
hese studies examined relations between lexical words in
sentences. A further question would be whether or not holo-
phrastic children are also becoming aware that sentences
contain smaller functional words as well, such as articles and
auxiliaries. he fact that young children preferred the well-
formed commands suggests that this may be the case. N. Katz,
E. Baker, and J. Macnamara (1974) explored this issue by show-
ing children pictures that contained either a single instance of
a nonsense igure (e.g., an odd-shaped form called zav) or a
picture of more than one instance. he children were then asked
either show me zav or show me the zav. It was found that the example, does a child who says eat cookie when she begins
children tended to indicate the picture of the single instance in
the former case and the picture of the multiple instances in the
latter case. he children in this study were a bit older than holo-
phrastic children, but they were not yet using articles in their
spontaneous speech.
In summary, a variety of studies on children in or around
the holophrastic stage indicate that they are beginning to
understand the nature of multiword utterances. hey can pro-
cess relations between at least two words in some sentences and
are aware that sentences contain both stressed lexical words
and unstressed words. hey may not be aware of the nature of
the latter words, but they know that sentences require them to
be well formed.
Language Production
he claim that preliminary knowledge of grammar takes place
during the holophrastic stage would be strengthened if evidence
could also be found in childrens spoken language. At irst glance,
this would seem impossible since holophrastic children are only
producing a single word at a time. here are, however, aspects
of childrens spoken language at this stage that, taken together,
indicate emerging grammatical knowledge as well.
It is well known that holophrastic children are not very intel-
ligible, the result of the fact that they are limited in their pho-
netic skills and are, in most cases, mixing their single-word
productions with babbling . A. Peters (1983) also pointed out
that some children are not exclusively single-word producers.
He identiied children who do not just attempt single words
but attempt to imitate and repeat longer sentences. hese lon-
ger utterances are often hard to interpret and may be identi-
ied in many cases as some form of jargon, that is, attempts
to produce sentence-length productions without meaning.
Peters found, however, that some of these jargon productions
may be meaningful, though the meaning may be missed by
their parents. hese productions do not represent evidence
that holophrastic children know grammar, but they support
the previously stated results on well-formed commands, that
is, that the children know that sentences consist of more than
single words.
Peters (1983) and others also drew attention to the fact that
even single-word productions are not exclusively single words.
With the advent of advanced tape recorders, researchers found
in their phonetic transcriptions that words often were pre-
ceded by brief phonetic material that was often diicult to hear
or interpret. For example, a child who was saying book, was
actually saying something like uh book or uhm book. hese
brief phonetic instances have been called several terms, such as
iller syllables, phonetically consistent forms, and presyntac-
tic devices. he last term relects the opinion of many research-
ers that these iller syllables are not yet syntactic units, such
as articles or auxiliaries, but they are evidence that children
are taking notice that they exist and noting their distributional
characteristics.
A further characteristic of holophrastic speech is that sin-
gle words are produced in sequences. Bloom (1973) exam-
ined the successive single-word utterances of her daughter to
see if these sequences relected later word combinations. For
word combinations show earlier single-word sequences, such
as eat, cookie, during the holophrastic stage? Such cases
would provide evidence of grammatical knowledge during
the holophrastic stage. Bloom found that her daughters early
sequences did not show these relations, in that each word had
its own context, that is, distinctly associated action. Later, how-
ever, toward the end of the holophrastic period, sequences on
365
Homologies and Transformation Sets
single words with a shared event began to emerge. For exam-
ple, one sequence of words involving up, neck, zip was
all produced in the context of her daughter wanting her mother
to zip up her coat.
he last piece of evidence to suggest that early words are holo-
phrastic comes from returning to the original sources of the term.
Early diary studies many years ago by parents on their childrens
language learning recorded observations that their children
used single words with difering communicative contexts. One of
the most famous was the study by W. Leopold (193949) on his
daughter, Hildegard. Leopold noted that Hildegard used her sin-
gle words to express distinct communicative intents. Some utter-
ances were intended to show her noticing something, some to
make a request for the parent to perform some action, and others
to demand something such as a toy out of reach. hese diferent
functions were distinguished by variations in the prosody of the
word and by the childs gestures.
Summary
Children go through a period of language acquisition of six
months or so during the second year of life when they produce
single words at a time. his time of acquisition has been referred
to as the holophrastic stage. he reason is that the single words
used often communicate the idea of a sentence, that is, the
meaning of the word expressed and the communicative intent
of the utterance. he term is suggestive that preliminary gram-
matical acquisition is taking place during this period. Research
on childrens comprehension and production during this stage
suggests that this may be the case.
David Ingram
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bloom, L. 1973. One Word at a Time. he Hague: Mouton.
Ingram, D. 1989. First Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Katz, N., E. Baker, and J. Macnamara. 1974. Whats in a name? A study of
how children learn common and proper names. Child Development
45: 46973.
Leopold, W. 193949. Speech Development of a Bilingual Child: A
Linguists Record. 4 vols. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press.
Miller, J., R. Chapman, M. Bronston, and J. Reichle. 1980. Language
comprehension in sensorimotor stages V and VI. Journal of Speech
and Hearing Research 23: 284311.
Peters, A. 1983. he Units of Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Pinker, S. 1984. Language Learnability and Language Acquisition.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Sachs, J., and L. Truswell. 1978. Comprehension of two-word instruc-
tions by children in the one-word stage. Journal of Child Language
5: 1724.
Shipley, E., C. Smith, and L. Gleitman. 1969. A study in the acquisition of
language: Free responses to commands. Language 45: 32242.
HOMOLOGIES AND TRANSFORMATION SETS
A fundamental principle of structuralism is that one cannot
understand elements in isolation. One can understand elements
366
only by locating them within complexes of relations or structures.
One simple and inluential technique of structuralist analysis,
developed by Claude Lvi-Strauss, is the isolation of homologies.
A homology is a simple binary opposition mapped onto another
binary opposition as its structural equivalent. One model here is
phonology, where, for example, voiced/unvoiced pairs (e.g.,
b/p and d/t) may be understood as structurally equivalent with
respect to voicing. Lvi-Strauss takes homologies to manifest
important structural relations across a range of higher linguistic
levels, including, for example, narrative. hus, we might say that
in Shakespeares Hamlet, Hamlet is to Laertes as Claudius is to
Hamlet.
In a way, this particular homology is self-evident. But why
does it work? Hamlet killed Laertes father, just as Claudius killed
Hamlets father. Moreover, Hamlet was in love with Laertes sis-
ter, just as Claudius was in love with Hamlets mother. Finally,
Hamlet was partially responsible for Laertes losing his sister,
as Claudius was responsible for Hamlet being, to some degree,
separated from his mother.
As this suggests, homologies operate through larger com-
plexes of relations. In his four-volume Introduction to the Science
of Mythology (see, for example, Lvi-Strauss 1969), Lvi-Strauss
systematically explored structural analysis beyond homologies
through the concept of transformation sets. A transformation set
is a series of multiplace structures that map onto one another.
he mapping is deined by transformation rules, which are trig-
gered by speciiable conditions, often cultural conditions. For
example, there may be a transformational relation between the
myths of two groups say, agriculturalists and ishers such that
when the myths of one group refer to earth, the parallel myths of
the other group refer to water.
One model here is morphology. For instance, in English,
the plural morpheme is pronounced s after unvoiced nonsi-
bilants (as in cats), z after voiced nonsibilants (as in dogs),
and z after sibilants (as in bushes). S, z, and z form a trans-
formation set, and the contextual trigger deining the transfor-
mation is phonological.
Clearly, the situation is more complex and the analysis less
straightforward with higher-level structures, such as literary
works. Consider Hamlet. In addition to the structures already iso-
lated, Hamlet and Ophelia may be mapped onto each other in
losing their fathers due to an older relative/older lover, in feigning
madness/going mad, in contemplating suicide/committing sui-
cide, and so on. he establishment of such a transformation set
raises intriguing questions. For example, are the Hamlet/Ophelia
structures diferentiated by a simple gender context (i.e., male
vs. female)? If so, how is this related to the mapping of Hamlets
mother onto Laertes sister in the Hamlet/Laertes transformation
set? Lvi-Straussian analysis allows us to recognize such complex
patterns and, perhaps, begin to understand them as well.
Patrick Colm Hogan
WORK CITED
Lvi-Strauss, Claude. 1969. he Raw and the Cooked. Trans. John and
Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper. his is the irst volume of
Introduction to the Science of Mythology.
Icon, Index, and Symbol
I association of general ideas, which operates to cause the sym-
ICON, INDEX, AND SYMBOL
he nineteenth-century American philosopher C. S. Peirce devel-
oped extensive sign theories in order to explain reference,
meaning, communication, and cognition. One of the central
and most innovative features of his theories was the icon, index,
symbol classiication of signs.
A crucial aspect of understanding Peirces icon, index, sym-
bol division is his account of sign structure. According to Peirce,
any instance of signiication consists of three interrelated parts: a
sign, an object, and an interpretant. For the sake of simplicity,
we can think of the sign as the signiier, for example, a written
word or an animals footprint. he object, on the other hand,
is whatever is signiied, for example, the object denoted by the
written word or the animal that left the print. he interpretant is
the understanding or interpretation that the sign/object relation
generates, for example, that the word or utterance is meant to
refer to its object or that the animal track signiies the presence
of the animal that made it. he importance of the interpretant
for Peirce is that signiication is not a simple dyadic relationship
between sign and object: A sign signiies an object only if it can
be interpreted as such.
With this structure in mind, Peirce was interested in classi-
fying the various ways in which the sign/object relation might
generate an interpretant. In particular, he thought that a sign
might come to signify its object, and so generate an interpretant,
in three possible ways. First, a sign may be understood as signify-
ing in virtue of similarities or shared qualities between it and its
object. As Peirce says, I call a sign which stands for something
merely because it resembles it an icon (1935b, 362). His own
preferred examples of icons are portraits or mathematical dia-
grams indeed, he thought icons were especially important to
mathematical thought. However, we can also include examples
such as color swatches, sculptures, and so on. What is central to
iconic signiication is that the qualities of the sign are also quali-
ties of the signiied object and that this sharing of qualities is cru-
cial in enabling the sign to signify.
he second way in which a sign might be understood as signi-
fying is in virtue of some physical or causal connection between
it and its object. Such a sign is an index. Peirces own description
of an index is as a sign which refers to the object that it denotes
by virtue of being really efected by that object (1935a, 248).
Again, there are numerous and wide-ranging examples, includ-
ing demonstratives and indexical expressions, weather vanes,
barometers, fever as a sign of an underlying illness, or smoke
as a sign of ire. What is crucial to indices is that the object has
a causal efect upon the sign (as in the case of ire causing the
smoke that indicates it) or has some spatio-temporal proximity
to its sign, which can be used to aid an interpreter of the sign
to grasp that object (as in the case of pointing to some nearby
object).
he third way in which a sign might be understood as signify-
ing is in virtue of some convention or law that connects it to its
object. Peirces own description of a symbol is as a sign which
refers to the object that it denotes by virtue of a law, usually an
bol to be interpreted as referring to its object (1935a, 249). here
are numerous examples of symbols, from the various words and
utterances in human languages to such things as road signs.
What is crucial in the case of symbols is that there exists some
underlying convention, agreement, habit, or law that means
that invoking some symbol invokes its associated object. For
instance, a red traic lights being symbolic of a lack of priority
at a road junction works because we have all agreed (by habit, by
convention, and by imposing traic regulations) to use red traic
lights this way.
hroughout his life, Peirce made numerous alterations to his
account of signs (see, for instance, Short 2004), but the broad
division among icons, indices, and symbols tends to ind a place
throughout. here are, of course, some subtleties to Peirces
account. For instance, it is not clear that there are very many
examples of signs that are purely iconic, indexical, or symbolic
that is, which do not overlap with one or both of the other ele-
ments of the trichotomy. As an example, take a painted portrait
as a sign of the person it depicts. his sign is an icon in that it sig-
niies its object in virtue of the qualities it shares with that object
the skin and hair color of the depicted person are replicated in
the painting. But, of course, many of the things that make a por-
trait a successful depiction of its sitter are due to particular con-
ventions governing paintings and how particular blocks of color
in two dimensions can stand for some subject. his seems to
make the painting look as though it has symbolic elements, too.
Similar considerations hold for indices such as barometers
although such signs indicate their objects in virtue of a causal
and physical connection with their object; conventions about
how we should interpret this physical connection also seem to
play a part in signiication. Whats more, there are clear instances
of symbols that have some iconic element. Obvious examples
might include forms of writing, such as Chinese, that involve
pictograms, at least partially. Even onomatopoeic words such as
cuckoo present clear cases of symbols with a strong iconic ele-
ment the phonic qualities of the object are aped by the phonic
qualities of the word.
Peirce was aware of the various overlaps among icons, indi-
ces, and symbols, and at some point proposed to call icons and
indices with symbolic elements hypo-icons and subindices as
a way of acknowledging this. However, in any case where more
than one of the three elements is present, one will be most
prominent. Consequently, we can think of Peirces trichotomy
as dividing signs according to whether they are predominantly
iconic, indexical, or symbolic.
he main inluence of Peirces division is in semiotics,
where his work is considered foundational. However, the icon,
index, symbol distinction has had some inluence in philoso-
phy, particularly through the work of Arthur Burks (1949), and
has even been used in such diverse areas as literary theory (see,
for example, Sherif 1989), ilm theory (see, for example, Wollen
1969; see also film and language), and musicology (see Turino
1999; see also music, language and). he use and relevance of
this distinction to linguistics are similarly diverse, but it features
most prominently in analyses of the relation between animal
communication and human language and in some expla-
nations of the evolution of language.
367
Icon, Index, and Symbol
In explaining animal communication, the distinction is espe-
cially useful since it allows us to classify various cases of ani-
mal language without treating all such instances as uniform.
Consequently, a diverse range of animal camoulage or cases
of mimicry can be classiied as iconic instances of communica-
tion. For example, the harmless milk snakes mimicking of the
poisonous coral snakes red, black, and yellow coloring in order
to avoid predation is easily explained as an instance of iconic
communication these colors mean poisonous! As for indexical
communication, a well-discussed case is vervet monkey warning
calls (see Seyfarth, Cheney, and Marler 1980; see also primate
vocalizations). In such an example, the calls are classiiable
as indexical since they rely upon a causal and physical connec-
tion with particular predators in order to refer the calls are made
in response to the snakes, eagles, or leopards whose presence is
perceived. And this is all in contrast to human language, which
is predominantly symbolic and can enable communication even
if the objects referred to are not present. Ingar Brinck and Peter
Grdenfors (2003) make compelling use of the icon, index, sym-
bol trichotomy in explaining animal communication where they
discuss the role of such communication in cooperation.
he most prominent use and interesting development of
Peirces icon, index, symbol trichotomy is Terence Deacons
(1997) account of the coevolution of human language and
brains. According to that account, language evolution is to be
explained by seeing iconic, indexical, and symbolic communi-
cation and reference as related to one another in a hierarchy.
What this means is that in order to master symbolic communi-
cation, we must irst master indexical communication. And in
order to master indexical communication, we must irst master
iconic communication. For instance, a predators inability to
distinguish the milk snakes coloring from that of a coral snake
is suggestive of iconic reference it is manifest in the preda-
tors inability to distinguish one type of snake from the other.
However, this iconic communication needs to be in place in
order for the predator to take the coloring of those snakes as
an indexical signiier of the poisonous status of the snake red,
yellow, and black banding are an index of a venomous snake.
Other instances of indexical reference work in just this way. It is
because the vervet monkey sees the eagle above as being quali-
tatively similar to previously experienced eagles (that is, as an
icon of a recognized predator) that it is able to produce a warn-
ing cry (an indexical reference) when that predator is present.
Symbolic reference requires the presence of indexicals but also
requires that the indexical relationship between words/sounds
and their objects has become ingrained, habitual, and appropri-
ately interconnected with other symbols so that reference and
communication are maintained even if the stimulus to indexical
reference is lost or removed.
Once this symbolic threshold is achieved, complex relation-
ships between words develop, allowing words to signify other
words and explain the relationships that exist among them. Such
a model is useful for explaining various diferences between
cases like vervet monkey warning calls, captive chimpanzee
symbol manipulation, and human language learning in the
two former cases, the connection between sign and object is lost
when the object is absent for sustained periods. Consequently,
the habituation and interconnectedness of indexical signs that
368
Ideal Speech Situation
allows for the symbolic communication typical of human lan-
guage is never attained, and vervet monkey calls and chimpan-
zee symbol manipulation never rise above the level of indexical
communication.
Albert Atkin
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Brinck, Ingar, and Peter Grdenfors. 2003. Co-operation and communi-
cation in apes and humans. Mind and Language 18: 484501.
Burks, Arthur. 1949. Icon, index and symbol. Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 9: 67389.
Deacon, Terence. 1997. he Symbolic Species: he Co-evolution of
Language and the Human Brain. New York: Norton.
Liszka, James Jacob. 1996. A General Introduction to the Semiotic of
Charles S. Peirce. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Peirce, C. S. 1935a. he Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce. Vol 2.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
. 1935b. he Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce. Vol. 3.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Seyfarth, R. M., D. L. Cheney, and P. Marler. 1980. Monkey responses
to three diferent alarm calls: Evidence for predator classiication and
semantic communication. Science 210: 8013.
Sherif, John K. 1989. he Fate of Meaning: Charles Peirce Structuralism
and Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Short, homas. 2004. he development of Peirces theory of signs.
In he Cambridge Companion to Peirce, ed. Cheryl Misak, 21440.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Turino, homas. 1999. Signs of imagination, identity, and experience: A
Peircian semiotic theory for music. Ethnomusicology 43: 22155.
Wollen, Peter. 1969. Signs and Meaning in he Cinema. London: Secker
and Warburg/British Film Institute.
IDEAL SPEECH SITUATION
his term was coined by the German social theorist and philoso-
pher Jrgen Habermas to refer to the conditions necessary for free
and transparent communication and discussion. he concept of
ideal speech situation plays a key part in his early formulations of
a theory of communicative action and of universal prag-
matics (Habermas 1979, 168; 1984; 1987). In his later writings,
the term has tended to be replaced by Karl-Otto Apels notion
of an unrestricted communication community (Apel 1980;
Habermas 1990, 88).
An ideal speech situation may be understood as the condi-
tions that would allow for open discussion between free and
equal participants, who strive to come to an agreement upon
any topic purely through the force of better argument. hus, the
participants enter a discussion assuming that their ideas may be
challenged by any other participant, but that only those ideas
and arguments that are rationally formulated and supported
by relevant and persuasive evidence will survive interrogation.
he personality, status, power, or rhetorical abilities of the per-
son holding the idea will be rendered irrelevant in the course of
debate.
he idea of an ideal speech situation has its origins in the work
of the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.
In his philosophy of science, Peirce proposed the notion of an ideal
community of scientists. He recognized that scientiic research is
a necessarily communal enterprise. Typically, scientists work in
Ideal Speech Situation
teams, but even if they work in individual isolation, they will still
be required to submit their research results to a process of peer
review. Scientiic hypotheses are thus formulated, reined, and
inally accepted as (provisionally) true only through a process a
collective debate, criticism, and defense. Peirce was aware that
in practice, scientiic debate falls well short of any ideal process
of rational scrutiny. Imperfections will occur in part due to prac-
tical limitations. Certain evidence may be unavailable due, for
example, to lack of suiciently reined experimental technology
to test a hypothesis rigorously. More importantly for Habermass
use of Peirce, however, is the distorting role that hierarchies of
status and power may play within the scientiic community. he
opinions of certain igures within the scientiic community will
carry more weight than those of others. he opinions of a senior
researcher trump those of a laboratory assistant. Peirces con-
cern is that open and rational debate is then being compromised
by hierarchies of power and status within the scientiic commu-
nity. he senior researchers opinions count not because of his or
her greater rationality or insight but simply because he or she is
in a position of power. Junior scientists may feel unable to raise
their criticisms in debate or may believe that their opinions have
no place in the debate. Peirces notion of an ideal community of
scientists can then be understood, in potential at least, as a crit-
ical tool that draws attention to the deiciencies of real scientiic
communication.
Habermas may, therefore, be seen to use the notion of the
ideal speech situation, particularly in his early formulations of
it, in a similarly critical manner. It encapsulates a perhaps unre-
alizable standard against which actual communication and dis-
cussion can be measured. Real communication will be distorted,
perhaps because of a lack of relevant information, perhaps
because of deiciencies in the participants ability to recognize
good argument and evidence, but also, crucially, because some
will exercise power over the discussion. Power can be used to
introduce topics, to silence certain forms of criticism or sup-
press evidence, and to silence certain potential contributors.
Power can be exercised openly through, for example, threats and
intimidation. More subtly, it may be exercised through rhetorical
means so that the other participants fail to recognize that weak
arguments have been given or that relevant evidence has not
been presented. Perhaps most signiicantly, Habermas argues
that power diferentials may be so ingrained in a culture that
participants take their inferiority or superiority for granted and,
as such, do not notice the inluence of power on discussion. For
example, in a patriarchal society, women will typically have less
opportunity to raise topics in conversation or to challenge and
interrupt other (male) speakers (see gender and language).
Such implicit and unacknowledged power is characterized as
systematically distorted communication (Habermas 1970).
he images of an ideal community of scientists and an ideal
speech situation have a utopian ring about them, suggesting per-
fect societies at the end of human history. Habermas is keen to
reject such utopian interpretations of the ideal speech situation
(Habermas 1982, 261f). his becomes clearer in his later formu-
lations of the argument. he ideal speech situation is under-
stood as a counterfactual assumption made by all participants
in conversation and discussion. Upon entering a conversation
where the participants strive for mutual agreement rather than
Identity, Language and
manipulation of one another, Habermas argues, they all presup-
pose, with a rather studied navet, that the other participants
are telling the truth and being sincere in their participation in
the conversation, and that they have the right to speak and act
as they do. In practice, these assumptions can quickly be over-
turned. However, Habermass point is that a person could not
enter into a conversation assuming that the other participants
were lying or systematically trying to deceive. Every utterance
would be treated with suspicion, and ultimately no ixed mean-
ing could be attributed to it. While some form of social interac-
tion might continue, it would not be a true conversation or what
Habermas understands as communicative action. hat is to say,
the participants would not be seeking to reach a mutual agree-
ment (constrained only by the force of better argument). Rather,
each would be trying to manipulate the other (in what Habermas
calls strategic action; 1982, 266).
Andrew Edgar
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Apel, Karl-Otto. 1980. Towards a Transformation of Philosophy.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Habermas, Jrgen. 1970. On systematically distorted communication.
Inquiry 13: 36075.
. 1979. Communication and the Evolution of Society. Trans. homas
McCarthy. Boston: Beacon.
. 1982. A reply to my critics. In Habermas: Critical Debates, ed.
John B. homas and David Held, 21983. London: Macmillan.
. 1984. he heory of Communicative Action. Vol 1. Reason
and the Rationalisation of Society. Trans. homas McCarthy.
Cambridge: Polity.
. 1987. he heory of Communicative Action. Vol. 2. Life World and
System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Trans. homas McCarthy.
Cambridge: Polity.
. 1990. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Trans.
Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
IDENTITY, LANGUAGE AND
Linguistic Identity
Our identities who we are are bound up with how we speak,
write, and sign. Whether or not we intend it or are even aware of
it, other people interpret clues from our use of language in order
to assign to us identity categories of all sorts, including gender,
race, ethnicity, nationality, the region, or even the precise local-
ity we come from, age or generation, sexual orientation, religion,
level of education, and that vague complex of factors that bundle
together as class. All this is in addition to and part and parcel
with the decisions they make about our intelligence, likeability,
and trustworthiness and whether or not to believe what we are
telling them.
Although self-identity has long been given a privileged role,
the identities we construct for ourselves and others are not difer-
ent in kind, only in the status we accord to them. he gap between
the identity of an individual and of a group seems most like a true
diference of kind, with group identities more abstract than indi-
vidual ones. Brazilianness, after all, does not exist separately
from the Brazilians who possess it, except as an abstract concept.
369
Identity, Language and
Yet combinations of such abstractions are what our individual
identities are made up of, and group identity frequently inds
its most concrete manifestation in a single, symbolic individual.
Group identities nurture our individual sense of who we are but
can also smother it.
Recent work on the evolution of language has suggested that it
came about to fulill something more than the two purposes tra-
ditionally ascribed to it, communication and representation.
Language also exists for the purpose of reading other people, in
order to discriminate useful allies from potential competitors.
sociolinguistic inquiry into identity and language is con-
cerned with the way people read each other, in two senses. First,
how are the meanings of utterances interpreted, not just follow-
ing idealized word senses and rules of syntax as recorded in
dictionaries and grammars, but in the context of who is address-
ing whom in what situation? Secondly, how are speakers them-
selves read, in the sense of the social and personal identities their
listeners construct for them based on what they say and how they
say it? his is a complex process because speakers output is usu-
ally shaped in part by how they have read their listeners and their
expectations. Every day, each of us repeatedly undertakes this
process of constructing our reading of the people we encounter,
in person, on the telephone, on the radio or the screen, or in writ-
ing, including on the Internet, on the basis of their language, at
least in part and in some of the media just mentioned, on the
basis of that alone.
Targeting Identity in the Analysis of Language
Modern linguistics has moved slowly but steadily toward embrac-
ing the identity function as central to language. he impediment
has been the dominance of the traditional outlook that takes
representation alone to be essential, with even communication
relegated to a secondary place. Although signiicant develop-
ments within linguistics (surveyed in Joseph 2004) pushed it in
the direction of attending to identity over the course of the twen-
tieth century, a crucial prompting came from social psychology,
where one approach in particular needs to be singled out: social
identity theory, developed in the early 1970s by Henri Tajfel (see
ethnolinguistic identity). his approach was novel in not
being concerned with power but in the status we give ourselves
as members of in-groups and out-groups. his would come
into even greater prominence in the self-categorization theory
that developed as an extension of the original model, notably in
the work of Tajfels collaborator J. C. Turner (see Turner et al.
1987).
Partly under the inluence of such work, many sociolin-
guists reoriented their object of investigation. L. Milroy (1980)
reported data from studies she conducted in Belfast showing
that the social class of an individual did not appear to be the
key variable allowing one to make predictions about the forms
that the person would use. Rather, the key variable was the per-
sons social network, a concept borrowed from sociology, and
deined as the informal social relationships contracted by an
individual (Milroy 1980, 174). Where close-knit localized net-
work structures existed, there was a strong tendency to maintain
nonstandard vernacular forms of speech.
Over the next two decades, sociolinguistic investigation
of groups ideologically bound to one another shifted from
370
statistically based examination of social networks to more inter-
pretative examination of communities of practice, deined
as an aggregate of people who come together around mutual
engagement in an endeavor (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet
1992, 464). In the course of this endeavor, shared beliefs, norms,
and ideologies emerge, including, though not limited to, linguis-
tic and communicative behavior. his line of research is thus
continuous with another one that has focused more directly
on the normative beliefs or ideologies by which national and
other group identities are maintained (see Verschueren 1999;
Blommaert 1999; Kroskrity 2000).
Other features of recent work on language and identity
include the view that identity is something constructed, rather
than essential, and performed, rather than possessed features
that the term identity itself tends to mask, suggesting as it does
something singular, objective, and reiied. Each of us performs
a repertoire of identities that are constantly shifting and that we
negotiate and renegotiate according to the circumstances.
Co-constructing National Identity and Language
Within these repertoires, any particular identity can become the
salient one in a given context. None inherently matters more
than the rest. However, national identity requires a separate
discussion because of its unique impact on views about what
a language is. Modern nationalism has been grounded in a
belief that the best proof of a peoples historical authenticity and
right to self-determination is the possession of a language that
is uniquely theirs. Hence, one of the irst obstacles to be over-
come in establishing a national identity is the nonexistence of a
national language.
he nation-state myth that basic view of the world as con-
sisting naturally of autonomous states, each corresponding to an
ethnically uniied nation assumes that national languages are
a primordial reality. Dantes treatise De vulgari eloquentia (ca.
1306) lays out the process by which he claimed to discover, not
invent, the national language of a nation, Italy, that would take
ive and a half centuries to emerge politically. his all seems a
iction, a pretense of discovery in what will actually be Dantes
invention of an illustrious vernacular which will, in turn, cam-
oulage how much of it is actually based on his native Tuscan.
But Dantes volgare illustre became the template upon which
other modern European standard languages were modeled.
Once the national languages existed, their invention was
promptly forgotten. he people for whom they represented
national unity inevitably came to imagine that the language had
always been there and that such dialectal diference that existed
within it was the product of recent fragmentation when, in fact, it
had preceded the uniication by which the national language was
forged. By the early nineteenth century, this nationalist mythol-
ogy would lead to Romantic theorizations of national political
identities being grounded in a primordial sharing of language.
One of the strongest expressions was that of Johann Gottlieb
Fichte ([1808] 1968, 1901):
he irst, original, and truly natural boundaries of states are
beyond doubt their internal boundaries. hose who speak the
same language are joined to each other by a multitude of invis-
ible bonds by nature herself, long before any human art begins;
Identity, Language and
they understand each other and have the power of continuing to
make themselves understood more and more clearly; they belong
together and are by nature one and an inseparable whole.
Fichte was writing in order to rouse the German nation
to repel the advance of Napoleon. However, in 1870, the shoe
was on the other foot when the Franco-Prussian War led to the
German annexation of Alsace, a German-speaking province that
had been part of France for more than two centuries and whose
population was mainly loyal to France in spite of their linguistic
diference. his provoked a sharp turn away from the Fichtean
view on the part of French linguists, such as Ernest Renan (1882),
who formulated a new view of national identity as based not in
any primordially determining characteristic such as language
but on a shared will to be part of the same nation, together with
shared memories.
he nation, in other words, exists in the minds of the people
who make it up. his is the conception that B. Anderson ([1983]
1991, 6) would return to in deining the nation as an imagined
political community. he legacy of memories to which Renan Tajfel, H. 1978. Social categorization, social identity and social com-
pointed would dominate future philosophical and academic
attempts to analyze national identity. M. Billig, a colleague and
collaborator of Tajfel, has explored how the continual acts of
imagination on which the nation depends for its existence are
reproduced (1995, 70), sometimes through purposeful deploy-
ment of national symbols but mostly through daily habits of
which we are only dimly aware. Examples include the national
lag hanging in front of the post oice and the national symbols
on the coins and banknotes we use each day. Billig introduced
the term banal nationalism to cover the ideological habits that
enable the established nations of the West to be reproduced. In
Billigs view, an identity is to be found in the embodied habits of
social life (1995, 8), including language. A. D. Smith (e.g., 1998,
Chapter 8) has emphasized how much of the efort of nation-
alism construction is aimed at reaching back to the past in the
interest of ethno-symbolism, and this can be seen particularly
in the strong investment made by modern cultures in maintain-
ing the standard language, by which is meant a form resistant to
change, hence, harking backward (see Hobsbawm 1990). Every
time we attend to the fact that someone has spoken or written
in a standard or nonstandard way, we take part, usually without
realizing it, in both the national construction of our language and
the linguistic construction of our nation.
John E. Joseph
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Anderson, B. [1983] 1991. Imagined Communities: Relections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism. 2d ed. London and New York: Verso.
Billig, M. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.
Blommaert, J., ed. 1999. Language Ideological Debates. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Bourdieu, P. [1982] 1991. Language and Symbolic Power: he Economy
of Linguistic Exchanges. Trans. G. Raymond and M. Adamson, ed.
J. B. hompson. Cambridge: Polity, in association with Basil Blackwell.
Cameron, D., and D. Kulick. 2003. Language and Sexuality.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eckert, P., and S. McConnell-Ginet. 1992. hink practically and look
locally: Language and gender as community-based practice. Annual
Review of Anthropology 21: 46190.
Ideology and Language
Fichte, J. G. [1808] 1968. Addresses to the German Nation. Trans.
R. F. Jones and G. H. Turnbull, ed. G. A. Kelly. New York: Harper Torch
Books.
Fishman, J. A., ed. 1999. Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hobsbawm, E. J. 1990. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programmes,
Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Holmes, J., and M. Meyerhof, eds. 2003. he Handbook of Language and
Gender. Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell.
Joseph, J. E. 2004. Language and Identity: National, Ethnic, Religious.
Houndmills: Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kroskrity, P. V., ed. 2000. Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and
Identities. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
Milroy, L. 1980. Language and Social Networks. Oxford and New
York: Blackwell.
Renan, E. 1882. Quest-ce quune nation? Confrence faite en Sorbonne,
le 11 mars 1882. Paris: Calmann Lvy.
Smith, A. D. 1998. Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey
of Recent heories of Nations and Nationalism. London and New
York: Routledge.
parison. In Diferentiation between Social Groups: Studies in the
Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, ed. H. Tajfel, 6176.
London: Academic Press.
Turner, J. C., M. A. Hogg, P. J. Oakes, S. D. Reicher, and M. J. Wetherell.
1987. Rediscovering the Social Group: A Self-Categorization heory.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Verschueren, J., ed. 1999. Language and Ideology: Selected Papers from
the 6th International Pragmatics Conference. Antwerp: International
Pragmatics Association.
IDEOLOGY AND LANGUAGE
he concept of ideology refers broadly to the ways in which a
persons beliefs, opinions, and value systems intersect with the
wider social and political structures of the society in which he
or she lives (cf. politics of language). Many linguists, espe-
cially those working in the traditions of critical linguistics (e.g.,
Fowler et al. 1979) and, more recently, critical discourse
analysis, take the view that language or more exactly, a range
of language practices are inluenced by ideology. From this
perspective, all texts, whether spoken or written, are seen as
being inexorably shaped and determined by a mosaic of political
beliefs and sociocultural activities. he critical linguistic position
on language is, therefore, one that challenges directly the liberal
construal of texts as natural products of the free communicative
interplay between individuals in society. For critical linguists,
texts are anything but neutral or disinterested, and so it falls to
close linguistic analysis to help us understand how ideology is
embedded in language and, consequently, to become aware of
how the relexes of dominant or mainstream ideologies are
sustained through textual practices.
Although coined in the early 1800s by the French philoso-
pher Destutt de Tracy, the term ideology is normally associated
with Karl Marx, particularly with his treatise on he German
Ideology, a project developed in 18456, but published, in
various languages and installments, from the 1930s onward (see
Marx [1933] 1965). Over the intervening years, the concept has
been adopted more widely (and without any necessary adher-
ence to Marxist doctrine) to refer to the belief systems that are
371
Ideology and Language
held either individually or collectively by groups of people and
to the social conditions that frame these systems. In Marxs
original conception, ideology is seen as an important means by
which dominant forces in society, such as royalty, the aristoc-
racy, or the bourgeoisie, can exercise power over subordinated
or subjugated groups, such as the industrial and rural proletar-
iat. His famous axiom that the ideas of the ruling class are in
every epoch the ruling ideas ([1933] 1965, 61), along with his
observation that the ruling material force is at the same time the
ruling intellectual force, has had a profound impact on the way
contemporary linguistic research has understood discourse
in the public sphere. Ideology, and its expression in the textual
practices that shape our everyday lives, is not something that
exists in isolation as a product of free will but is instead partial
and contingent. It is something whereby, as Louis Althusser
suggests, ideas are inserted into the hierarchical arrangement of
socially and politically determined practices and rituals, which
are themselves deined by material ideological state apparatuses
(Althusser 1971, 158). In short, in the Marxist tradition, ideology
is, most importantly, a system of beliefs that fosters consent to
social hierarchy, particularly class hierarchy. Subsequent writ-
ers inluenced by this tradition have expanded the notion from
class hierarchy (as in class or, more speciically, capitalist ideol-
ogy; see marxism and language ), to sex (patriarchal ideol-
ogy; see gender and language ), to colonialism (colonial
ideology), and so on.
Against this theoretical backdrop, scholars researching the
interconnections between language and ideology build from the
premise that patterns of discourse are framed in a web of beliefs
and interests. A texts linguistic makeup functions to privilege cer-
tain ideological positions while downplaying others such that
the linguistic choices encoded in this or that text can be shown
to correlate with the ideological orientation of the text. Even the
minutiae of a texts construction can reveal an ideological stand-
point, and productive comparisons can be drawn between the
ways in which a particular linguistic feature is deployed across
diferent texts. For instance, the following three simple examples
difer only in terms of the main verb used:
he senator explained the cutbacks were necessary.
he senator claimed the cutbacks were necessary.
he senator imagined the cutbacks were necessary.
Whereas the irst example suggests that while the cutbacks were
unavoidable, the senators actions are helpfully explanatory,
the more tenuous claimed of the second example renders the
senators attempt to justify an unpopular measure less convinc-
ing. he third example is arguably more negative again, with the
nonfactive verb imagined suggesting that the obverse condi-
tion applies in the embedded clause, namely, that the senator is
mistaken in his belief that the cutbacks were necessary.
Another important assumption in work on ideology and lan-
guage is that the linguistic structure of a text often works silently
or invisibly to reproduce relationships of power and dominance.
In consequence, the processor of a text such as the reader of a
tabloid newspaper, for example is encouraged to see the world in
particular ways and in ways that are often aligned with the domi-
nant or mainstream ideology espoused by the paper. Crucially,
372
these ideological assumptions are transmitted surreptitiously and
are mediated through forms of language that present as natural
or common sense certain beliefs and values that may prove to
be highly contestable or dubious in their own terms.
Take as an example the following discourse event that
unfolded over a few months in the British tabloid he Sun. his
popular daily voiced vehement opposition to the British gov-
ernments plans to celebrate the advent of the millennium by
the construction, at taxpayers expense, of a festival dome in
Greenwich, London. Notice how in these extracts the paper
sometimes uses italicization to enforce the common-sense sta-
tus of its position on the Millennium Experience:
he Sun Speaks Its Mind: DUMP THE DOME, TONY! (June 17,
1997; original emphasis)
MPS, businessmen and charities yesterday backed our see-sense
campaign to axe the 800 million Millennium Exhibition planned
for Greenwich. (June 18, 1997; italics in original)
hat dammed Dome has disaster written all over it. he creative
director accuses the Dome secretary of acting like a dictator
who is too easily swayed by public opinion. If only he was. Maybe
then this waste of public money would be axed. For thats what
public opinion wants. (Jan. 1, 1998; italics in original)
An appeal to commonsense values of the sort displayed here
allows the paper to present its objection to the dome as a posi-
tion with which any sensible member of society could concur.
Among other things, the papers tactic is a good example of natu-
ralization (Fairclough 1992, 678), which is the process whereby
an ideological position is presented as if it were simply part of
the natural order of things. Naturalization encourages us to align
ourselves with mainstream or dominant thinking, even when
that thinking is itself partisan, self-serving, and driven by eco-
nomic and political interests. Indeed, to demur from he Suns
position would be to place oneself outside the community of
notional sensible subjects who share the same set of norma-
tive values as the paper. Yet if proof were needed of the partisan
and capricious nature of such naturalized ideological positions
in discourse, consider as a footnote the following breathtaking
U-turn that appeared in the same tabloid newspaper shortly
after the publication of the previous diatribes:
he plans for the Millennium Experience are dazzling. If it all
comes of, the Prime Ministers prediction will be correct: the
Dome will be a great advert for Britain. (Feb. 24, 1998; italics in
original)
It may have been entirely coincidental that this sudden change
in direction occurred on the same day that the papers owner
pledged 12 million worth of sponsorship to the Millennium
Dome.
A range of linguistic models have been used over the last
quarter of a century to explore the interconnections between
language and ideology. Prominent among these has been
the concept of register, which is a variety of language that
is deined according to context and use. Linguists have
noticed that in times of war and conlict, in particular, spuri-
ous specialist registers of discourse are quietly disseminated
through the public sphere by inluential social and political
Ideology and Language
groups. In the speciic context of the widespread proliferation
of nuclear arms in the 1970s, critical linguists adopted the term
Nukespeak, in an echo of George Orwells Newspeak, to refer
to a (mis)use of register in order to mask what for the general
public were the unpalatable horrors of nuclear conlict (see
Chilton 1985). In fact, Nukespeak still reverberates in the con-
temporary discourses of war: Collateral damage refers to the
unintentional killing of civilians and noncombatants, incon-
tinent ordnance to poorly aimed missiles, and friendly ire to
the inlicting of injury or death to ones allies. While the phrase
human remains transportation pods is a heavily sanitized label
for body bags, the expression advanced marine biological sys-
tems refers rather improbably to dolphins, which, when suitably
armed, apparently make excellent seaborne weapons systems.
In addition to the exploitation of register, the strategic use
of metaphorical language has also been identiied as a mecha-
nism for sustaining and disseminating ideological dogma (see
Charteris-Black 2004). Paul Simpson (2004, 42) ofers the follow-
ing examples from print and broadcast coverage of the conlict
in Iraq in 2003:
he third mechanized infantry are currently clearing up parts
of the Al Mansur Saddam village area.
he regime is inished, but there remains some tidying up
to do.
Oicial sources described it as a mopping up operation.
hese examples rehearse the same basic conceptual meta-
phor through three diferent linguistic realizations. he experi-
ence of war, the target domain of the metaphor, is relayed by the
idea of cleaning, the source domain (see source and target),
such that the metaphorical formula might be rendered thus: WAR
IS CLEANING. he ideological signiicance of this metaphor is
that it downplays the signiicance (and indeed risk) of the con-
lict, implying that it is nothing more than a simple exercise in
sanitation, a perspective, it has to be said, that is unlikely to be
shared by military personnel on the opposing side.
Ideological standpoint in language can also be productively
explored by means of comparisons between diferent texts, espe-
cially when the texts analyzed cover the same subject matter. Of
the range of linguistic models that have been thus employed,
those from functional linguistics have proved particularly
useful as an analytic tool for investigating ideological standpoint
across diferent portrayals of the same event or experience (see
Fowler 1991; Simpson 1993).
he investigation of ideology in language is an undeniably
important focus for the language sciences. hat said, there have
been a number of stinging attacks on this area of study from
respected authorities (e.g., Widdowson 1995, 1996; Stubbs 1997;
Blommaert 2005), which have called into question the valid-
ity of key parts of the whole endeavor. hese criticisms have
tended to cluster around three main issues. he irst concerns
the term ideology itself, which, even since its inception in the
work of Marx and de Tracy, has proved too broad and too vague
a concept to slot comfortably into a formal analytic framework.
Indeed, Michel Foucault has argued that the notion of ideol-
ogy is diicult to make use of because it always stands in vir-
tual opposition to something else (1984, 60). he second type
Idioms
of criticism is about the sorts of texts that analysts choose to
subject to ideological analysis. To be blunt, if we know a text to
be ideologically problematic at the outset, then any subsequent
linguistic analysis will only conirm what we already know, and
any linguistic feature uncovered through the analysis can by
imputation be passed of as ideologically insidious. his deter-
ministic approach connects with the third major area of con-
cern, which is simply that studies of ideology and language tend
to be elitist. If the main purpose of the analysis is to uncover and
challenge the repressive discourse practices of powerful, inter-
ested groups, then what needs to be considered before anything
else are the efects of these practices on ordinary (nonacademic)
people. Reactions of ordinary communities to what the analysts
deem ideologically insidious discourse are rarely considered;
instead, the academic analyst comfortably assumes the perspec-
tive of those for whom the text was intended, moving seamlessly
in and out of the multiple interpretative positions of specialist
and nonspecialist alike. It is still early to say how these serious
and far-reaching criticisms will afect the ways in which scholars
investigate the widespread interconnections between ideology
and language.
Paul Simpson
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Althusser, L. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.
London: NLB.
Blommaert, J. 2005. Discourse: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Charteris-Black, J. 2004. Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis.
Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Chilton, P. 1985. Language and the Nuclear Arms Debate: Nukespeak
Today. London: Pinter.
Fairclough, N. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
. 2001 Language and Power. 2d ed. London: Longman.
Foucault, M. 1984. Truth and power. In he Foucault Reader, ed.
P. Rabinow, 5175. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books.
Fowler, R. 1991. Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the
Press. London: Routledge.
Fowler, R., R. Hodge, G. Kress, and T. Trew. 1979. Language and Control.
London: Routledge.
Marx, K. [with Frederick Engels]. [1933] 1965. he German Ideology. Ed.
and trans. S. Ryazanskaya. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Simpson, P. 1993. Language, Ideology and Point of View.
London: Routledge.
. 2004. Stylistics. London: Routledge.
Stubbs, M. 1997. Whorfs children: Critical comments on critical dis-
course analysis (CDA). In Evolving Models of Language, ed. A. Ryan
and A. Wray, 10016. Swansea: BAAL.
Widdowson, H. 1995 Discourse analysis: A critical view. Language and
Literature 4.3: 15772.
. 1996. Reply to Fairclough: Discourse and interpreta-
tion: Conjectures and refutations. Language and Literature
5.1: 5770.
IDIOMS
Idioms hold an important place in the class making up ixed, non-
literal expressions. hese have a perplexing characteristic: hey
373
Idioms
communicate something other than what the words usually
mean. Idioms are the best and most well known representative
of this class. Other examples are speech formulas (Nice to meet
you), proverbs (While the cats away, the mice will play),
clichs (Easy does it), and expletives (For heavens sake!). hese
difer from metaphors, which, though also nonliteral, are made up
of novel word combinations. Terminology is inconsistent, but the
term formulaic language has become standard (Wray 2002).
Deinitions are elusive, and lines between the categories are
not always clear. In deining formulaic expressions, it is easier
to say what they are not: hey are not newly created phrases or
sentences made up of lexical elements (words) according to
grammatical rules. Instead, they are learned, stored, and pro-
cessed as unitary conigurations. he meaning of the idiom She
has him eating out of her hand does not convey information
about eating or hands but, instead, refers to a complex human
relationship whereby one person is submissive to the other.
Idioms beneit from this ability to pack an aura of connotations
in a complex meaning.
Idioms have two characteristic properties: stereotyped form
and conventional meaning. Stereotyped form means that cer-
tain words appear in a particular order with a particular speech
melody. he idiom I wouldnt want to be in his shoes, to be
well formed, must have precisely those words in that order,
with the accent on his. Changes may be introduced because
idioms are decomposable. Linguists have attempted to charac-
terize syntactic operations that may be performed on idioms,
and many psychological studies have pursued this question.
It appears that much potential variation exists, depending on
communicative need. he complex meanings associated with
idioms contain emotional and attitudinal nuances. he idi-
omatic expression Its a small world signals recognition of a
chance meeting in an unexpected place by two acquaintances,
relecting surprise and serendipity. In contrast, the literal
statement Its a small tree merely conveys information about
relative tree size. he stereotyped forms and conventional
meanings of idioms are known to the native speaker but dif-
icult for the second language learner. Idioms are learned and
processed by cognitive and neurological mechanisms diferent
from those underlying novel expressions (Van Lancker Sidtis
2006). heir number is often underestimated; in eforts at com-
piling lists, no upper limit has yet been determined. Corpus
studies often utilize computer search techniques to quantify
incidence, but a human interface is necessary for identifying
idiomatic forms.
Diana Van Lancker Sidtis
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Cacciari, C., and P. Tabossi, eds. 1993. Idioms: Processing, Structure, and
Interpretation. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Nunberg, Geofrey, I. Sag, and T. Wasow. 1994. Idioms. Language
70: 491538.
Titone, Deborah, and C. Connine. 1999. On the compositional and non-
compositional nature of idiomatic expressions. Journal of Pragmatics
31: 165574.
Van Lancker Sidtis, Diana. 2006. Where in the brain is nonliteral lan-
guage? Metaphor and Symbol 21. 4: 21344.
374
Idle Talk and Authenticity
Wray, Alison. 2002. Formulaic Language and the Lexicon.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
IDLE TALK AND AUTHENTICITY
Martin Heideggers magnum opus, Being and Time, advances a
hermeneutical phenomenology that is, an interpretive descrip-
tion of what it means to be Dasein (a German word for exis-
tence, which Heidegger uses to mean human being). Dasein
is not the disembodied rational soul, mind, or subject described
by traditional metaphysics and epistemology but an embodied,
worldly person. Having a world is constitutive of human exis-
tence; as Heidegger says, Daseins being is essentially being-in-
the-world (In-der-Welt-sein).
To be in the world is to be thrown into an environment and a
tradition beyond your choosing and to take future-deining pos-
sibilities from it as your own or to fail to do so. he way in which
people typically fail to make their possibilities, hence their being,
their own is by simply doing what one does or, as Heidegger
says, being ruled by the one (das Man). Social conformity
cannot be avoided altogether, of course, but beyond a certain
point it amounts to what he calls inauthenticity, or disowned-
ness (Uneigentlichkeit). Authenticity, by contrast, he describes
as forerunning resoluteness (vorlaufende Entschlossenheit),
which is to say, facing up (resolutely) to the concrete situation
and embracing (running up into) your death. Forerunning res-
oluteness is nothing self-destructive or suicidal, though, since
by death, Heidegger means neither the biological end nor the
biographical conclusion of a life but, rather, the constant closing
down of possibilities.
A crucial contributing factor to Daseins characteristic lapse
into inauthenticity is its unavoidable involvement in a public
language governed by anonymous norms of correctness and
propriety. In Being and Time, Heidegger refers to language
not as a formal syntactic or semantic system, but as the
concrete manifestation of discourse (Rede), or expressive-
communicative behavior broadly construed. Most everyday
discourse, he says, is idle talk (Gerede) or chitchat, generic
conversation in which we merely pass the word along, as
opposed to speaking authentically. Although the public, generic
character of a shared language contributes to our lapse into idle
talk, not all speech is inauthentic. Dasein, that is, can speak in
conformity with publicly recognized norms of correctness and
yet still speak in its own voice.
Heideggers concept of idle talk owes a large but unacknowl-
edged debt to Sren Kierkegaards account of talkativeness, or
chat, in his critique of the present age in A Literary Review
([1846] 2001). Heidegger even follows Kierkegaard in describing
the banalizing, conformity-inducing efect of chatter as a kind of
leveling process. But whereas Kierkegaard saw such conform-
ism and supericiality as characteristic of modern European
culture, Heidegger regarded it is essential to our being-in-the-
world. For Heidegger, that is, there could be no shared public
world at all in the absence of a relatively bland background
of established ways of conducting oneself, linguistically and
nonlinguistically.
Taylor Carman
Ijtihd (Interpretive Effort)
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Blattner, William. 2006. Heideggers Being and Time. London:
Continuum.
Carman, Taylor. 2003. Heideggers Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse, and
Authenticity in Being and Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Dreyfus, Hubert L. 1991. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on
Heideggers Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and
E. Robinson. New York: Harper and Row.
Kierkegaard, Sren. [1846] 2001. A Literary Review. Trans. A. Hannay.
New York: Penguin.
Wrathall, Mark. 2005. How to Read Heidegger. New York: Norton.
IJTIHD (INTERPRETIVE EFFORT)
Ijtihd sometimes contrasted with taqld or uncritical accep-
tance of someone elses opinion (Chaumont 1997, 11) is a con-
cept from Muslim legal theory (see legal interpretation). It
refers to the interpretive efort involved in understanding a point
of law. he various schools of Muslim legal thought difer on the
degree to which they accept or advocate ijtihd.
here are two places in which ijtihd is likely to arise as an
issue. One is in the extension of particular judgments to new
cases. When this occurs, the common method of inference is
qiys or analogy (see Jokisch 1997). Take a simple example
using one hadth. (A hadth is a brief narrative of a decision or
practice, most often from Muhammad, that has been passed
down by tradition and has roughly the status of a precedent in
law.) Muhammad says that there is no tax payment required
for fewer than ive camels (Ali n.d., 215). One might narrowly
constrain the application of the hadth, not extending it beyond
camels. Alternatively, one might calculate the worth of the
camels and use that as a basis for application. A third possi-
bility involves qiys. But this is not simple. For example, ive
cars would probably not parallel ive camels. Perhaps the anal-
ogy should be based on the importance of the objects for ordi-
nary functioning in society. his is where interpretive efort is
required.
he second obvious place for ijtihd is in understanding the
general meaning of texts. he Quran suggests this, explaining of
itself that some of its verses are decisive and others are alle-
gorical (Ali 1995, 3.6). he mere existence of the allegorical or,
in Dawoods translation, ambiguous verses indicates the
necessity of interpretive efort in these cases. Indeed, the dif-
ference in translations suggests the importance of interpretive
efort. Moreover, once meaning is determined, interpretative
efort may be required for understanding the purpose of a pas-
sage. For example, many stories in the Quran are presented as
literally true accounts of Allahs responses to human behavior.
hese frequently serve as warnings. But understanding these
warnings may require interpretive efort to discern the exact
nature of the actions forbidden. When someone is punished,
we must infer what construal to give that persons actions so as
to understand the point of the punishment. For example, Lots
wife was punished because she remained behind when Lot
left (Dawood 1990, 7:83). What is her sin disbelief in a prophet,
disobedience of her husband, association with the sinful? (his
is what writers in the European ethical tradition refer to as the
problem of relevant act descriptions [see Chapter 2 of Nell
1975].)
here are some general principles that may guide ijtihd. For
example, in cases that involve punishment of an ofender, one is
to incline toward mercy (see Waines 1996, 81). More generally,
interpretation is to some degree constrained by two sorts of
coherence coherence with the body of the law and coherence
with the views of jurists. On the other hand, jurists often disagree.
Moreover, apparent contradictions with the body of law may be
resolved by reinterpreting other parts of the law. hus, in debat-
ing a passage P, one jurist may cite passage N against the inter-
pretation put forth by a second jurist. But this second jurist may
interpret the passage N in such a way that it its with his or her
initial interpretation of passage P. In this way, the criterion of
coherence is often not decisive.
In many ways, ijtihd is as much an attitude as a method. he
point is suggested by a hadth that contrasts Quranic verses that
anyone can understand with those that someone with a pure
mind can understand (Gleave 1997, 33). Ijtihd necessarily
draws on techniques of inference (such as analogy) and princi-
ples of selection across possible inferences (such as coherence).
But it fundamentally involves sincere and open-minded work to
understand the purport of a legal or other passage.
In this respect, ijtihd may be seen as an instance of a gen-
eral pattern in Islam. he word Islam means submission.
Submission to Allah is paired with a struggle against anything
that would inhibit that submission. A possible inhibition may be
a itnah, or trial. When faced with such a possible inhibition, the
believer engages in a struggle, or jihad, in order to bear witness to
truth. hat inhibition may be ones own inclination to err. In that
case, ones jihad is against that inclination. It may also be against
some violence perpetrated upon oneself or others. In that case,
jihad may take the form of battle (hence, the popular conception
of jihad as holy war).
One may think of ijtihd as analogous to jihad, thus as a strug-
gle to establish and bear witness for truth, in this case through
interpretation. (he words are etymologically related.) In keep-
ing with this, the Quran opposes right interpretation to itnah
connected with false interpretation (Ali 1995, 3.6).
hough linked in its origins to religious attitudes and faith in
revelation, the general concept of ijtihd may not be irrelevant
to secular forms of interpretation within or outside of Muslim
hermeneutic traditions (see philology and hermeneutics).
Indeed, the concept seems germane to a range of legal, liter-
ary, conversational, and even scientiic discourses (on the
relevance of issues in interpretation, including scriptural inter-
pretation, to science, see Lecture 4 of van Fraassen). It suggests
something about the ways in which we come to understand
these discourses when our spontaneous or automatic response
has been interrupted and we must engage in self-conscious
relection on meaning (cf. passing theories). Indeed, its
opposition to taqld suggests partially parallel oppositions
found in inluential Western theories, such as those of Bakhtin
(see dialogism) and Martin Heidegger (see, for example,
Heidegger 1962, 21114).
Patrick Colm Hogan
375
I-Language and E-Language
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Ali, Maulana Muhammad, ed. and trans. 1995. he Holy Qurn.
Columbus, OH: Ahmadiyyah Anjuman Ishaat Islam.
. N.d. A Manual of Hadith. Lahore: Ahmadiyya Anjuman Ishaat
Islam.
Chaumont, ric. 1997. Ijtihd et histoire en islam sunnite classique selon
quelques juristes et quelques thologiens. In Gleave and Kermeli
1997, 723.
Dawood, N. J., ed. and trans. 1990. he Koran. New York: Penguin.
Gleave, Robert. 1997. Akhbr Sh usl al-iqh and the Juristic heory of
Ysuf b. Ahmad al Bahrn. In Gleave and Kermeli 1997, 2445.
Gleave, R., and E. Kermeli, eds. 1997. Islamic Law: heory and Practice.
London: Tauris.
Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and
Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row.
Jokisch, Benjamin. 1997. Ijtihd in Ibn Taymiyyas fatw. In Gleave
and Kermeli 1997, 19937.
Nell, Onora. 1975. Acting on Principle: An Essay on Kantian Ethics.
New York: Columbia University Press.
van Fraassen, Bas C. 2002. he Empirical Stance. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Waines, David. 1996. An Introduction to Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
I-LANGUAGE AND E-LANGUAGE
In order to counter earlier misunderstandings, Noam Chomsky
(1986, 20f.) made a distinction between E-language and
I-language. E-language stands for externalized language and
I-language for internalized language. E-language is deined
as language independent of the properties of the mind/brain.
I-language, in contrast, is language seen as a property of an
individuals mind/brain. he neologism mind/brain relects
Chomskys belief that theories of mental faculties, particularly
generative grammars, are ultimately about the brain at
some level of abstraction.
here are various ways of seeing language as external to the
human mind. he immediate target of Chomsky (1986, 20) is
language as a collection (or system) of actions or behaviors of
some sort. his is the behavioristic view of language that Chomsky
criticized in L. Bloomield and B. F. Skinner. A related notion,
defended by W. V. Quine and R. Montague, sees human languages
as analogous to formal languages. According to this conception,
languages are extensionally deined as sets of sentences or well-
formed formulas, and there is no empirical dimension to the ques-
tion which grammar is the correct one: Grammars are equally valid
variants if they generate extensionally equivalent languages.
A very common tradition of E-language sees languages as
largely existing in some mind-external cultural record. his tra-
dition goes back to Aristotle, was selectively revived by J. G. von
Herder and the German Romanticists, and deeply inluenced
the European structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure and the
American structuralism of F. Boas and E. Sapir. Ludwig
Wittgensteins idea that language consists of conventional rules
constitutive of language games also its this tradition, as does
Karl Poppers proposal that language is part of his world 3 (some
recent ideas related to E-language may be found in meaning
externalism). Relativistically interpreted, this tradition is at
variance with universal grammar.
376
Illocutionary Force and Sentence Types
A last inluential tradition of E-language is platonism,
revived by J. Katz and others. According to this view, language
consists of abstract objects and properties that have an existence
independent of both our mind and cultural record.
As for I-language, Chomsky (1986, 21) refers to O. Jespersen,
who claimed that there is some notion of structure in the mind
of the speaker. According to Chomsky, it is a distinct system of
the mind/brain that grows in the individual from an initial state
S0 to a stable state Ss. his growth, comparable to the growth of
an organ, involves only minimal external factors, such as those
that help set the parameters that distinguish the grammars of dif-
ferent languages. Seen this way, the study of language is part of
individual cognitive psychology and, ultimately, part of human
biology. In order to counter the obvious objection that language
also involves external elements, Chomsky makes a distinction
between the faculty of language in the narrow sense (FLN) and
the faculty of language in the broad sense (FLB). he notion of
I-language particularly applies to FLN, which has recursion as its
core property (Hauser et al. 2002).
It is a matter of controversy whether the opposition of
E-language to I-language makes sense, since FLN, no matter how
internal, involves words and therefore externally coded conven-
tions. Even in its narrowest sense, then, language seems to inte-
grate E- and I-elements.
Jan Koster
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Chomsky, Noam. 1986. Knowledge of Language. New York: Praeger.
Hauser, Marc D., Noam Chomsky, et al. 2002. he faculty of lan-
guage: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science 298
(November): 156979.
ILLOCUTIONARY FORCE AND SENTENCE TYPES
John L. Austin (1962) and John R. Searle (1969, 1975) distinguish
the meaning (see sense and reference) of a sentence from
its illocutionary force. Austin and Searle conceive of the illo-
cutionary force as the act performed by the speaker with his/
her utterance. Examples of illocutionary force are expressing a
belief, asking the addressee a question, and warning or advis-
ing someone. he illocutionary force must be intended by the
speaker, and it must be possible for the addressee to recognize
it (see also speech-acts , performative and constative ,
perlocution).
Illocutionary force interacts with sentence grammar. his
short entry focuses on illocutionary consequences of the syn-
tactic sentence types declarative and interrogative, with some
reference to imperatives. (See Knig and Siemund 2007 on
the cross-linguistic usefulness of this traditional three-way
distinction.)
THE MEANING OF DECLARATIVES. In philosophical logic and
linguistic semantics, propositions traditionally represent
the content of both that-clauses (that it is raining) and declara-
tives (It is raining). Austin and Searle draw on this notion in dis-
tinguishing the meaning of a clause from its illocutionary force
according to the schema Force(proposition). For example, the
Illocutionary Force and Sentence Types
two aspects of the statement It is raining can be rendered as he
speaker expresses that (s)he believes (that it is raining).
THE MEANING OF INTERROGATIVES. Semantic theory (see, for
example, Karttunen 1977; Groenendijk and Stokhof 1982) has
since developed meanings for syntactic interrogatives that cover
unembedded interrogatives like (1a), (2a) and embedded inter-
rogatives like (1b), (2b). hese meanings (difering in detail
between authors) may be paraphrased as in (1c), (2c). he mean-
ings assigned by Jeroen Groenendijk and Martin Stokhof (1982)
are called partitions.
(1) a. Is it raining? (2) a. Whom did he invite?
b. Mary wonders b. Mary wonders
[whether it is raining] [whom he invited]
c. the true one of c. the true one(s) of
{that it is raining, {that he invited Bill,
that it is not raining} that he invited Jane, }
Note that the partitions in (1c) and (2c) do not contain a compo-
nent of illocutionary force. hey are also the meanings of embed-
ded interrogatives like (1b) and (2b), and embedded clauses are
standardly assumed not to have illocutionary force.
hus, the meaning of a declarative is a proposition and the
meaning of an interrogative is a partition. Let us consider how
illocutionary force of two kinds may be added to these mean-
ings: i) illocutionary force as a statement: the speaker expresses
that (s)he believes something to be true, and ii) illocutionary force
as a question: the speaker wants to learn from the addressee the
truth in an as-yet open issue. Let us begin by assuming that the
choice between statement and question is pragmatically inferred
rather than grammatically triggered.
THE ILLOCUTIONARY FORCE OF DECLARATIVES. he meaning of a
declarative (It is raining) as a proposition (that it is raining) makes
it likely that the speaker intends a statement interpretation of his/
her utterance (the speaker conveys that [s]he believes that it is rain-
ing), perhaps in connection with the maxim of quality in Grice
(1975), which requires such truthfulness (see also cooperative
principle). If we assume that this statement interpretation is not
hardwired into declaratives, we correctly allow declarative ques-
tions, as in It is raining? Here, a declarative sentence with ques-
tion intonation is used as a question. Unlike in statements, the
speaker does not convey that he/she believes that it is raining.
THE ILLOCUTIONARY FORCE OF INTERROGATIVES. No single state
of afairs (ordinary proposition) is ofered in the interrogative
meaning (the true one among , see [1c] and [2c]), and so his is unexpected on the view that a semantic partition is lexibly
there is no speciic content for an interpretation as a statement.
he interrogative meaning makes a question interpretation
particularly likely, in which the speaker wants the addressee
to pick the true one among the possibilities. If we assume that
this illocutionary force is not hardwired into root interrogatives,
we correctly allow the lexibility for untypical uses. In mono-
logical questions, such as in a lecture, the speaker later pro-
vides the answer him-/herself: Who was behind these reforms?
Everything points towards Bismarck (Brandt et al. 1992). In rhe-
torical questions like Am I your servant? the true one among
the given possibilities is to be inferred and need not be stated.
hus, the semantic distinction between declaratives and
interrogatives is useful for distinguishing typical and untypical
uses of declaratives and for distinguishing typical and untypical
uses of interrogatives. he lexibility for diferent uses for both of
these sentence types may suggest a purely pragmatic assignment
of illocutionary force to propositions and partitions.
GRAMMAR AFFECTS ILLOCUTIONARY FORCE. Yet, there is evi-
dence that grammar interferes with the assignment of illocution-
ary force:
First, a purely pragmatic account of declarative questions leads
to the expectation that a declarative questions like John is at
home? shares the illocutionary force of a yes/no question like
Is John at home? In the declarative question, the speaker would
indicate by the intonation that he/she does not commit to p, and
so the next likely interpretation would be that the speaker is won-
dering whether p is true and seeks the help of the addressee in
this regard. In fact, however, declarative questions strongly difer
from yes/no questions.
(3) [Telephone conversation] (4) [Steve calls Ann on the phone]
Ann: Hang on, Ill ask John Ann (picks up phone): Hello?
Steve: John is at home? a. Steve: # John is at home?
cf. b. Steve: Is John at home?
he declarative question John is at home? can be asked only
where the speaker can assume that the addressee believes that
John is at home (Gunlogson 2001). his is the case in (3) but
not in (4a), where the declarative question is accordingly infe-
licitous (symbolized by #; see also felicity conditions).
Interrogatives do not carry this strong requirement; compare
(4b). hus, even though declaratives cannot have a statement
interpretation hardwired into them, they seem to have some-
thing more lexible hardwired into them that goes beyond the
propositional content: A declarative sentence seems to either
commit the speaker to p (statement) or assume a commitment of
the addressee to p (declarative question) (see Gunlogson 2001).
Second, root interrogatives also seem to have an illocutionary
element hardwired into them. If Steve and Ann share ignorance
of things mechanic, Steve may say (5a) to Ann, but not (5b).
(5) Steve to Ann (both ignorant about car problems):
a. he carburetor of my car is broken. I wonder whether the
repairs will be expensive.
b. he carburetor of my car is broken. # Will the repairs be
expensive?
augmented with illocutionary force by pragmatic inferences. In
(5a), the matrix predicate I wonder conveys that Steve is inter-
ested in the answer but does not have an expectation toward Ann
to provide it. he felicity of (5a) shows that this is not excluded
for lack of conversational relevance or for other pragmatic rea-
sons. Why cannot the unembedded partition Will the repairs be
expensive? in (5b) have a pragmatically inferred similar illocu-
tionary interpretation? It seems that some hardwired element
of illocutionary interpretation here leads to an expectation of
an answer from the addressee and thus to the inappropriate-
ness in (5b). A promising hypothesis about such a hardwired
377
Illocutionary Force and Sentence Types
requirement is again that a commitment by a salient individual
is assumed or expressed. In the case of interrogatives, a commit-
ment to (1c)/(2c) is a commitment to the true element(s) of the
partition, that is, knowledge of the correct answer (whatever it
may be). he assumption of such a commitment in root interrog-
atives is compatible with the examples discussed here. In rhetor-
ical questions, knowledge of the correct answer is assumed of the
speaker and perhaps of the addressee. In monological questions,
knowledge of the correct answer can be assumed of the speaker,
who will later provide this answer. In standard questions,
knowledge of the correct answer would then be assumed of the
addressee. hen (5b) would be infelicitous because knowledge of
the correct answer could not be assumed of either the addressee
or the speaker (see Truckenbrodt 2004, 2006a, 2006b).
hird, German declaratives (syntactically V2-clauses) can
replace embedded dass-(that)-clauses under a range of atti-
tude verbs, including sagen (say) and glauben (believe) and Gunlogson, Christine. 2001. True to form: Rising and falling declaratives
excluding bezweifeln, (doubt) and leugnen (deny): Maria
glaubt/*bezweifelt, Hans ist zu Hause, Mary believes/*doubts,
Hans is at home. A semantic restriction seems to be in efect that
relates declaratives to a salient individuals beliefs (or a similar
domain) Marias beliefs in the preceding example, the beliefs
of the speaker or the addressee in unembedded use (statements
and declarative questions) (Truckenbrodt 2006a, 2006b). More
generally, there is a class of syntactic phenomena (root phe-
nomena) that occur in unembedded clauses, as well as embed-
ded under the verbs believe, say, and other predicates that have
been characterized as assertive (see discussion and references
in Heycock 2006). It is possible that root phenomena are phe-
nomena that trigger a semantic requirement of a commitment
by a salient individual. Such a requirement might lead to the
observed restrictions on embedded use. he requirement would
crucially contribute to illocutionary force in unembedded use.
Finally, verbal mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative) is a
grammatical category that interacts with illocutionary force. he
imperative seems to be interpreted deontically (Schwager 2005),
that is, along the lines of You should with strength varying
between a demand or request (Open the window!) to invitation
(Have another piece of cake!) or even a wish (Have a good break!).
A strong interaction of verbal mood with illocutionary force is
this: Have inished eating by 12:30! cannot be a statement to the
efect that the addressee has inished eating by 12:30 (rather than
by 12:45, as the addressee may mistakenly believe). Nor can it
be a question that wants the addressee to clarify whether in fact
the addressee has inished eating by 12:30. More generally, the
deontic interpretation of the imperative cannot be replaced with
an epistemic interpretation (i.e., one that negotiates knowledge),
while the indicative in declaratives and interrogatives typically
leads to epistemic (statement and question) interpretations. (See
Portner 1997 on indicative and subjunctive verbal mood.)
In sum, the grammatical distinction between declaratives
and interrogatives leads to a semantic distinction between a
proposition and a partition. his distinction is useful for a irst
understanding of the typical and untypical illocutionary force of
declaratives and of interrogatives. Illocutionary force may in part
be assigned pragmatically. However, the assignment seems also
to be subject to a grammatically triggered interpretation in root
clauses. For declaratives and interrogatives, these interpretations
378
Image Schema
can be approximated in terms of a commitment by a salient indi-
vidual that is expressed or assumed. Sentence mood (such as
imperative vs. indicative) plays a further crucial role in condi-
tioning the illocutionary interpretation of a clause.
Hubert Truckenbrodt
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Austin, John L. 1962. How To Do hings with Words. Oxford: Clarendon.
Brandt, Margareta, Marga Reis, Inger Rosengren, and Ilse Zimmermann.
1992. Satztyp, Satzmodus, und Illokution. In Satz und Illokution 1,
ed. Inger Rosengren, 190. Tbingen: Niemeyer.
Grice, H. P. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Syntax and Semantics
3: Speech Acts, ed. P. Cole and J. Morgan, 4158. New York: Academic
Press.
Groenendijk, Jeroen, and Martin Stokhof. 1982. Semantic analysis of
WH-complements. Linguistics and Philosophy 5: 175233.
as questions in English. Ph.d. diss., University of California at Santa
Cruz.
Heycock, Caroline 2006. Embedded root phenomena. In he Blackwell
Companion to Syntax. Vol. 2. Ed. M. Everaert and H. van Riemsdijk,
174209. Oxford: Blackwell.
Karttunen, Lauri 1977. Syntax and semantics of questions. Linguistics
and Philosophy 1: 344.
Knig, Ekkehard, and Peter Siemund. 2007. Speech act distinctions in
grammar. In Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Vol. 1. Ed.
T. Shopen, 276324. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Portner, Paul. 1997. he semantics of mood, complementation, and
conversational force. Natural Language Semantics 5: 167212.
Schwager, Johanna Magdalena. 2005. Interpreting imperatives. Ph.d.
diss., University of Frankfurt am Main.
Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts. An Essay in the Philosophy of Language.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 1975. A taxonomy of illocutionary acts. In Language, Mind,
and Knowledge, ed. K. Gunderson, 34469. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press. Repr. John R. Searle, Expression and Meaning
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 129.
Truckenbrodt, Hubert. 2004. Zur Strukturbedeutung von
Interrogativstzen. Linguistische Berichte 199: 31350.
. 2006a. On the semantic motivation of syntactic verb movement
to C in German. heoretical Linguistics 32: 257306.
. 2006b. Replies to the comments by Grtner, Plunze and
Zimmermann, Portner, Potts, Reis, and Zaeferer. heoretical
Linguistics 32: 387410.
IMAGE SCHEMA
A foundational concept in cognitive linguistics, image
schemas are associated most closely with the work of Mark
Johnson (1987) and his collaborator George Lakof (1987). Image
schemas are thought to play a key role in the acquisition, struc-
ture, and use of language; a central tenet of cognitive linguistics
is that the perceptual interactions and motor engagements with
the physical world shape the way we think. An image schema
can be deined as a condensed representation of bodily motor
experience for purposes of mapping spatial structure onto con-
ceptual structure. According to Johnson, these patterns emerge
as meaningful structures based on our bodily movements
through space, our manipulations of objects, and our percep-
tual interactions (1987, 29). Jean Mandler aptly likens image
Image Schema
schemas to the representations one is left with when one has
forgotten most of the details (2004, 7981).
Lack of speciicity and content makes image schemas highly
lexible preconceptual and primitive patterns used for reasoning
in an array of contexts (Johnson 1987, 30). A partial inventory of
image schemas is as follows: container; balance; blockage;
counterforce; restraint removal; source-path-goal; link;
center-periphery; verticality; scale; part-whole; support.
Since the publication of the inluential works of Johnson and
Lakof, the notion of image schemas has been theorized, inves-
tigated, and applied in multiple domains of inquiry. Within
cognitive linguistics, the notion of an image schema has taken
center stage in research in semantic and grammatical analy-
sis, psycholinguistics, cognitive development, and neuro-
computational modeling, to name the most prominent areas of
activity in the language sciences. Controversy has ensued over
the deinition of and criteria for positing something as an image
schema, over its status as conscious or unconscious representa-
tions, and even over its status vis--vis individual and social cul-
tural cognition.
Image Schemas Among Cognitive Linguists
Image schemas play an important role in studies focusing on
polysemy of words and constructions, semantic change,
and text analysis. Studies of words and constructions include
Alan Cienkis (1998) comparison of the metaphoric projec-
tions of straight and prjamo in English and Russian. Likewise,
image schemas igure prominently in arguments about seman-
tic change. For instance, Marolijn Verspoor (1995) argues that
semantic change preserves image schematic structure, whereas
Yo Matsumoto (1995) challenges a strong version of that hypoth-
esis. Much text analysis and literary criticism inspired by cog-
nitive linguistics specify image schemas as that which make
linguistic innovation possible. Literary and textual criticism
within the image schema tradition is represented most promi-
nently by Mark Turner (1991).
Raymond W. Gibbs (2005) has conducted extensive psycho-
linguistic experiments designed to demonstrate that image sche-
mas organize not only experience but also semantic structure and
usage. His early experiments support the claim that image sche-
mas are psychologically real and imply that they are enduring
mental representations, while his later experiments reine
this view, suggesting that they are real but not representational
structures per se. Rather, they are emergent structures con-
tinuously created on the ly as part of human beings dynamic
simulations of actions and situations. In short, Gibbs argues that
the psychological reality of image schemas emerges from con-
tinuous interaction in a three-dimensional world and not from
their being prestored representations in long-term memory
(2005, 132).
Image schemas igure prominently in some developmen-
tal accounts of the acquisition of concepts and language. Two
notable lines of research in this area include Mandler (2004)
and Sinha and Jensen de Lopez (2000). Mandler has argued that
image schemas arise from a process of perceptual meaning anal-
ysis. Human neonates and infants appear to be engaging in forms
of perceptual analysis of space and motion, such that primitive
schemas for goal-path; linked path; self-motion; animate
Implicational Universals
motion; and caused motion emerge as preverbal, perceptually
based conceptual primitives underlying cognitive development
and language acquisition. Chris Sinha and K. Jensen de Lopez
take a slightly diferent tack in emphasizing the social-cultural
and artifact dimensions of the acquisition of locative preposi-
tions in and under in Danish-acquiring, English-acquiring, and
Zapotec-acquiring children. hey conclude that the sociocul-
tural environment plays a greater role in cognitive development
than previously thought. Image schemas may in fact be distrib-
uted throughout the local environment, with considerable dif-
ferences appearing among cultures with very diferent material
makeups.
Finally, image schema theory is a central pillar of the neural
theory of language project initiated by Jerome Feldman (2006),
Lakof (1987), Srini Naryanan, and others. A crucial component
of this neural computational model is the execution or x-schema
protocol for representing human actions, which include models
for enacting drop-schema that simulate the neural computa-
tional activity involved. For instance, a computational represen-
tation for distinguishing between verbs such as push and shove
invokes the slide x-schema but difers in the microdetails of
body-part movement and acceleration.
Todd Oakley
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTION FOR FURTHER READING
Cienki, Alan. 1998. Straight: An image schema and its transformations.
Cognitive Linguistics 9.2: 10749.
Feldman, Jerome. 2006. From Molecule to Metaphor. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Gibbs, Raymond W. 2005. he psychological status of image schemas.
In Hampe 2005, 11335.
Hampe, Beate, ed. 2005. From Meaning to Perception: Image Schemas
in Cognitive Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. An edited collec-
tion of essays presenting a wide range of views on the nature of image
schemas.
Johnson, Mark. 1987. he Body in the Mind. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press. his book is considered the locus classicus of image
schema theory.
Lakof, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous hings.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mandler, Jean. 2004. he Foundations of Mind. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Matsumoto, Yo. 1995. From attribution/purpose to cause: Image
schema and grammaticalization of some cause markers in Japanese.
In Lexical and Syntactic Constructions and the Construction of
Meaning, ed. Marolijn Verspoor, K. Dong, and E. Sweetser, 287307.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Sinha, Chris, and K. Jensen de Lopez. 2000. Language, culture, and the
embodiment of spatial cognition. Cognitive Linguistics 11.1/2: 1741.
Turner, Mark. 1991. Reading Minds. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Verspoor, Marolijn. 1995. Predicate adjuncts and subjectiication.
In Lexical and Syntactic Constructions and the Construction of
Meaning, ed. Marolijn Verspoor, K. Dong, and E. Sweetser, 43349.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
IMPLICATIONAL UNIVERSALS
typological universals seek to capture the limits of gram-
matical variation, that is, the extent to which particular traits
379
Implicational Universals
or features of languages may covary, both within languages
and across languages. Typological universals may be classifed
along several dimensions. he most important distinction is
between substantive and implicational universals. he for-
mer deal with a single property and relect what occurs in all
languages (e.g., all languages have vowels). Since such unre-
stricted universals tell us little about variation, they are con-
sidered to be of moderate interest. For the study of variation,
implicational universals are of considerably greater interest
since they relect not only the existence of variation but, cru-
cially, the constraints imposed on it.
Implicational universals relate two (or more) logically inde-
pendent features or properties and apply to some subset of
languages for which the given features or properties obtain.
Implicational universals may be absolute or statistical.
Absolute implicational universals hold for all languages; that is,
they specify that if a language has feature A, then it will have
feature B. By contrast, statistical implicational universals spec-
ify relationships that hold only at a certain level of probability.
Statistical implicational universals take the form, If a language
has feature A, then with greater than chance frequency it will
have feature B. Examples of the two types of implicational uni-
versals are given in (1a) and (2a), respectively, and the distribu-
tion of features that each universal relects is presented in (1b)
and (2b) (in the form of a tetrachoric table). (he data depicted
in (2b), where the numerals relect the number of languages
with the speciied features, are taken from Greenberg (1963,
Appendix II.)
(1) a. If the demonstrative follows the head noun, then the rela-
tive clause also follows the head noun
b. DemN NDem
RelN +
NRel + +
(2) a. If a language has basic subject-object-verb (SOV) order,
than with greater than chance frequency it will have
postpositions
b. SOV non-SOV
prep 5 73
post 97 10
Note that the ive prepositional SOV languages are counterex-
amples to the universal. Although many absolute implicational
universals have been posited in the typological literature, most,
particularly of the simple kind (see the following), have turned
out to be in fact statistical.. Needless to say, these may be assessed
from the point of view of their relative strength (the number of
overall languages considered, the number of languages display-
ing the features in question, the number of exceptions to the
universals) and their validity in relation to criteria such as those
presented in Stassen (1985, 201).
Implicational universals may be monodirectional or bidirec-
tional. he absolute implicational universal in (1) is monodi-
rectional since NRel order is compatible with both DemN and
NDem. Consequently, while NDem order entails NRel, NRel
order does not entail NDem. he statistical implicational univer-
sal in (2), on the other hand, is bidirectional; not only does SOV
order favor postpositions over prepositions, but postpositions
380
also favor SOV order over non-SOV order. However, given the
data in (2b), the strength of the implicational universal with SOV
as the antecedent and postpositions as the consequent is greater
(95%) than the converse universal with postpositions as the ante-
cedent and SOV order as the consequent (91%).
he implicational universals in (1) and (2) are simple ones,
as they specify a dependency between only two traits. Relations
between several traits are captured by means of complex univer-
sals that may involve conjunctions or disjunctions of traits within
the antecedent and/or the consequent, as depicted in (3).
(3) a. X (Y & Z)
b. (X or Y) Z
Individual implicational universals may be combined into
chains or hierarchies, such that the implicatum (or conclusion)
of the irst universal is the implicans (or premise) of the second,
the implicatum of the second is the implicans of the third, and so
on. Since representing chains of implicational universals as such,
that is, as in (4a), is quite cumbersome, they tend to be depicted
in the form of a hierarchy, as in (4b).
(4) a. ((A B) & B C) & C D
b. D > C > B > A
It is important to note that the distributions captured in the form
of these typological hierarchies deine a frequency cline, such
that the phenomenon in D is more frequent than that in C, which
in turn is more frequent than in B, and so on. his follows from
the fact that if any term involved in the hierarchy is present, all
the terms to the left of it on the chain must also be present. And if
any term involved in the hierarchy is absent, all the terms to the
right of it must also be absent.
Typological hierarchies thus make very strong statements
about the possible distribution of properties across languages
and their overall frequency of occurrence. Consequently, much
typological research has been aimed at elaborating such hier-
archies, be it with respect to segmental inventories (see, e.g.,
the sonority hierarchy of Hopper 1976, 196), morpho-syntactic
encoding (see, e.g., the complement deranking-argument
hierarchy of Cristofaro 2003, 131), or behavioral properties
(see, e.g., Keenan and Comries 1977 noun phrase accessi-
bility hierarchy).
While statistical implicational universals are the dominant
means of expressing typological generalizations by typologists,
it must be pointed out that there is a long-standing controversy
over whether such universals do indeed capture signiicant
relationships between aspects of linguistic structure or merely
incidental relationships resulting from historical accident
(see, e.g., Maslova 2000; Bakker 2008). A technique of critically
evaluating such universals has been recently developed by
Elena Maslova (2003), and an excellent account of typological
universals in general is provided by William Croft (2003, 4969,
1228).
Anna Siewierska
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bakker, Dik. 2008. LINFER: Inferring implications from the WALS data-
base. STUF 61.3: 18698.
Indeterminacy of Translation
Cristofaro, Sonia. 2003. Subordination. Oxford Studies in Typology and
Linguistic heory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Croft, William. 2003. Typology and Universals. 2d ed.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Greenberg, Joseph. 1963. Some universals of grammar with particu-
lar reference to the order of meaningful elements. In Universals of
Human Language, ed. Joseph Greenberg, 73113. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Hopper, Joan Bybee. 1976. An Introduction to Natural-Generative
Phonology. New York: Academic Press.
Keenan, Edward, and Bernard Comrie. 1977. Noun phrase accessibility
and universal grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 8: 6399.
Maslova, Elena. 2000. A dynamic approach to the veriication of distri-
butional universals. Linguistic Typology 3/4: 30733.
. 2003. A case for implicational universals. Linguistic Typology tain a translation of the French word lapin (rabbit) as stone.
7.1: 1018.
Stassen, Leon 1985. Comparison and Universal Grammar. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
INDETERMINACY OF TRANSLATION
In Word and Object (1960), one of the most inluential books in
the history of American philosophy, W. V. O. Quine presents an
argument along the following lines. One may always formulate
mutually exclusive hypotheses regarding the meaning of a lin-
guistic item such that there is no fact as to which hypothesis is
correct. Put diferently, there are always divergent ways of dein-
ing a given word such that no one of these ways is correct. his
highly inluential, and highly controversial, indeterminacy of
translation thesis extends Quines argument against analyt-
icity (the view that some statements are true simply due to the
meaning of the terms see Quine 1961; see also meaning and
belief) and points toward his conception of ontological relativ-
ity (that reference is not absolute, but relative to a coordinate
system [Quine 1969, 48], that Factuality is internal to our
theory of nature [Quine 1981, 23]).
To explore Quines idea, we might begin with a simple dis-
tinction between decidability criteria and demarcation crite-
ria. A decidability criterion allows us to chose among diferent
hypotheses regarding a words meaning (see word meaning).
A demarcation criterion distinguishes in principle between the
validity of two such hypotheses. A demarcation criterion presum-
ably isolates a factual diference; a decidability criterion, irst of
all, isolates an evidential diference (or, more broadly, a distinc-
tion by the lights of scientiic method; thus, it may incorporate
simplicity or other adjudicative criteria). Quine argues that there
is no strict decidability criterion for meaning. We may refer to
this as uncertainty. But he also maintains that for at least some
set of mutually exclusive hypotheses, there is no demarcation
criterion either. he latter is indeterminacy proper.
Quines arguments are bound up with his holism, the
view that hypotheses of any sort, including hypotheses regard-
ing meaning, are part of larger complexes of belief and are not
understandable outside those complexes. Crucially, this means
that apparent counterevidence regarding one part of the whole
need not have simple, local consequences. Such counterevi-
dence may be accommodated by alterations elsewhere in the
whole. Suppose I am a ield linguist investigating a new language.
I encounter the word vagavai, which I take to mean gold. I then
ind a native speaker apparently referring to brass as vagavai. I
might conclude that vagavai does not mean gold. But I might also
conclude that the speaker does not know the diference between
brass and gold, that the speaker (e.g., a young child) is mistaken
about the meaning of vagavai, and so on.
Of course, Quines claims are more signiicant and less intui-
tive than this example suggests. To get a better idea of what is at
stake in the indeterminacy of translation, we might distinguish
two levels or perhaps two poles of uncertainty and indetermi-
nacy. he irst is global. his is the level at which we may say that
any meaning may be mapped onto any translation, given enough
manipulation of the rest of the system. For example, if we are will-
ing to revise enough of our beliefs about the world, we can main-
Of course, it wont be easy. But it is possible. We expect any word
to have a number of misuses even by luent speakers. Typically,
however, the correct uses overwhelmingly outnumber the incor-
rect uses. We may have to change our assumed proportions in the
case of lapin. For example, we might infer that French speakers
are correct in their use of lapin only when they point to rabbit
sculptures or when, at a distance, they mistake a stone for a rab-
bit to put the matter in our commonsense, lapin = rabbit idiom.
Chomskys inluential criticisms of Quines views on inde-
terminacy most obviously concern this pole. Chomsky rightly
points out that all theories are underdetermined by evidence
(1980, 15). One consequence is that we rely on other criteria for
adjudication, such as simplicity. It is presumably simpler (or, in
another terminology, less ad hoc) to assume that luent speakers
err at similar rates for all frequently used common nouns than to
assume that lapin is exceptional in this regard. hus, one might
conclude that there is uncertainty here. However, the uncertainty
is adjudicable (at least within limits), and there is no reason to
conclude that this uncertainty implies indeterminacy.
he other level or pole is highly local. It is limited to difer-
ences that we cannot formulate or, more generally, that we do
not encode (i.e., roughly, make into information that may be
processed cognitively) in particular cases. For instance, one of
Quines central examples is that of a ield linguist encounter-
ing gavagai. he ield linguist takes the term to mean rab-
bit. However, the available evidence is equally consistent with
undetached rabbit part, rabbit stage, and so on. Here, one
might argue that this is really best understood as a case of global
uncertainty/indeterminacy, which we have already consid-
ered. Speciically, given the structure of human perception and
human memory, it seems very unlikely that speakers of other
languages would not encode part and stage, thus distinguishing
rabbit, undetached rabbit part, and rabbit stage in some way. But
that is merely a problem with the particular example. here are
clear cases where one language involves distinctions that speak-
ers of another language do not encode. For instance, a particular
group may not distinguish between gold and brass or, better
still, fools gold. Examples such as this may suggest that there is a
sort of indeterminacy at the subencoding level across languages,
or even within languages. For example, when I use the word gold,
I have no sense of diferent types of gold. In this sense, relative to
jewelers, my use of gold is indeterminate among those diferent
types. On the other hand, one might reasonably contend that this
is not really indeterminacy at all, since there is presumably some
381
Indexicals
psychological fact about the degree of vagueness or ambigu-
ity of my usage at particular times and places.
hese arguments, then, point toward global, though still adju-
dicable uncertainty along with local, subencoding indeterminacy
in the limited sense of vagueness or ambiguity. Both are signii-
cant and both are highlighted by Quines discussions. However,
neither is radical indeterminacy.
On the other hand, to make these arguments is to go against a
range of Quines other views for example, his behaviorism and
his commitment to ontological relativity. Like all theories, Quines
own theories operate holistically. Even if he were to accept some
version of the preceding arguments, he could accommodate
these arguments by alterations elsewhere in the system. hus,
despite such arguments, radical indeterminacy remains at least
a continuing and important philosophical challenge.
Patrick Colm Hogan
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Chomsky, Noam. 1980. Rules and Representations. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Fllesdal, Daginn, ed. 2001. Philosophy of Quine. Vol. 3. Indeterminacy of
Translation. New York: Garland.
Glock, Hans-Johann. 2003. Quine and Davidson on Language, hought
and Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Quine, W. V. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
. 1961. From a Logical Point of View: Logico-Philosophical Essays.
2d ed. New York: Harper and Row.
. 1969. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia
University Press.
. 1981. heories and hings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
INDEXICALS
An indexical is a linguistic expression whose reference (exten-
sion) may vary from one context of use to another even when
used with the same meaning (sense) and with respect to the
same possible world or story. An example is the pronoun I,
which I use to refer to myself and you to yourself. Sentence (1)
itself is indexical: true when used by Harry Truman in 1951 but
not when used by Churchill.
(1) I am president.
Tensed verbs (am, was) are indexical, as are many adjectives
(foreign, local), common nouns (enemy, neighbor), and adverbs
(yesterday, recently).
Indexicals are often deined simply as terms with diferent
extensions in diferent contexts. But plane has diferent exten-
sions (airplanes versus wood planes) because it is ambiguous
rather than indexical. I too is ambiguous, meaning one (1) or
iodine as well as me. But it is used with the very same mean-
ing when you and I use it to refer to ourselves. Furthermore, while
the 34th president refers to Dwight Eisenhower when describ-
ing the actual world, it refers to Adlai Stevenson when describ-
ing a hypothetical case in which he won in 1954. he referent of
an indexical varies even when speakers are describing the same
possible world.
It is often said that the meaning of I is given by the rule that
its referent in any context of use is the speaker. his holds for the
382
deictic use (see deixis), but indexicals have many other uses.
I is used demonstratively when (1) is written near a picture of
Truman with an arrow pointing at the picture. It is used ana-
phorically in (2) as opposed to (3):
(2) Truman believes I am president.
(3) Truman believes that I am president.
It refers to Truman in (2), the speaker in (3). Indexicals are often
used pseudodeictically in novels. When Gore Vidal wrote (4) in
Live From Golgotha,
(4) I am Timothy,
he was not referring to himself. Finally, indexicals are often used
non-referentially, as in
(5) Je means I in French.
(6) Many a car is such that it needs gas.
In a semantic use like (5), it is crucial that I be used with the irst
person meaning we have been focusing on; if it means iodine,
(5) is false. Sentence (6) illustrates the quantiicational use, with
pronouns bound by quantiiers like variables in quantifica-
tion theory.
Indexicals present a problem for formal theorists because
assigning extensions and intensions (functions from possible
worlds to extensions) to indexicals cannot adequately represent
their role in determining the truth conditions of sentences (see
truth conditional semantics). David Kaplans ([1977]
1989) seminal solution was to represent the meanings of indexi-
cals by assigning them characters (functions from contexts to
intensions). For I, Kaplan had in mind the function satisfy-
ing the following condition: i(c) is the intension whose value in
any world w is the speaker uttering I in c. hus, the value of
i(c) in any context in which heodore Roosevelt used I is the
constant function tr(w) whose value is heodore Roosevelt for
every world. he value of i(c) in any context in which Franklin
Roosevelt used I is the constant function fdr(w) whose value
is Franklin Roosevelt for every world.
he character theory of meaning has many of the diiculties
of referential theories generally. For example, I and the per-
son identical to me have the same character, but not the same
meaning (Freges problem). he character function for he would
seem to be undeined when it is used in After Santa came down
the chimney, he left the presents; Santa does not exist (Russells
problem). Quantiicational and semantic uses are nonreferential
for diferent reasons. Another diiculty is the Enterprise problem.
Suppose Mary points at the bow of a big ship and says hat is
the Enterprise and then points at the stern and says hat is not
the Enterprise. he character function for that would assign it
the same intension in both these contexts the one whose value
at every world is the Enterprise. Yet Mary is not contradicting
herself the way she would if the same pointing gesture accompa-
nied both her utterances. he essential indexical problem is that
sentences like (2) and (7) may difer in truth value, as in cases of
amnesia or delusion.
(7) Truman believes that Truman is president.
On the standard analysis, S believes p is true if and only if S
stands in the belief relation to the proposition expressed by
Inequality, Linguistic and Communicative
p. But if propositions are intensions, then the complement in
(2) expresses the same proposition as the one in (7): the proposi-
tion true in any world if and only if Truman is president.
Fregean theories solve the essential indexical problem by tak-
ing indexicals to express a distinctive type of mode of presentation
(concept or mental representation) and taking proposi-
tions to be structured entities consisting of modes. hen, (2)
entails that Truman believes the proposition whose subject is his
own self-concept, whereas (7) entails that Truman believes
the proposition whose subject is the concept of Truman. Marys
two utterances are not contradictory because they express prop-
ositions with diferent modes of presentation of the Enterprise. A
diiculty for Fregean theories is to explain why I is not ambigu-
ous if it is used by diferent speakers to express diferent con-
cepts. Another is to account for nonreferential uses, in which I is
not used to express the speakers self-concept.
Wayne A. Davis
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Braun, D. 1996. Demonstratives and heir linguistic meanings. Nos
30: 14573.
Burks, A. W. 1949. Icon, index, and symbol. Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 9: 67389.
Evans, G. 1980. Pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 11: 33762.
Forbes, G. 1987. Indexicals and intensionality: A Fregean perspective.
Philosophical Review 96: 331.
Frege, G. [1918] 1977. houghts. In Logical Investigations, ed.
P. T. Geach, 130. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Gale, R. M. 1967. Indexical signs, egocentric particulars, and token-
relexive words. In Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 4. Ed. P. Edwards,
1514. New York: Macmillan.
Kaplan, D. [1977] 1989. Demonstratives. In hemes from Kaplan, ed.
J. Almog, J. Perry, and H. Wettstein, 481563. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Knne, W. 1997. First person propositions: A Fregean account.
In Direct Reference, Indexicality, and Propositional Attitudes, ed.
W. Knne, A. Newen, and M. Anduschus, 4968. Stanford, CA: CSLI
Publications.
Nunberg, G. 1993. Indexicality and deixis. Linguistics and Philosophy
16: 143
Perry, J. 1979. he problem of the essential indexical. Nos 13: 321.
INEQUALITY, LINGUISTIC AND COMMUNICATIVE
he idea that linguistic variation goes hand in hand with linguis-
tic inequality was brought on stage by Basil Bernstein and started
inluencing the development of the new discipline of sociolin-
guistics, which became a discipline devoted to the study of the
unequal and nonrandom distribution of linguistic resources in
society. Bernstein (1971), in an attempt at understanding class
diferences in the education system, distinguished between two
codes, one elaborate and characteristic of middle-class chil-
dren, another restricted and characteristic of working-class
and minority children. he elaborate code was the normative
one: It was privileged by the teachers and used as the yardstick,
not only for good language but also for wider behavioral and
cognitive assessments of pupils. Bernstein demonstrated that
speaking diferent varieties of language meant speaking unequal
varieties of language, varieties that did not ofer the same social,
cultural, and political rewards as others.
he central insight here is indeed the parallelism between
linguistic variation and social diferentiation, between linguis-
tic diferences and social hierarchies and forms of stratiication
often organized around the dynamics of prestige and stigma.
his insight has been developed by a number of scholars in soci-
olinguistics and related ields of study (Irvine 1989). I irst give a
brief survey of the development of this topic in sociolinguistics
and then turn to a discussion of two authors: Pierre Bourdieu
and Dell Hymes.
Inequality in Sociolinguistics
Bernsteins thesis about elaborated and restricted codes became
a deeply controversial one, though often for the wrong reasons. It
coincided with the emergence of modern sociolinguistics, a dis-
cipline that saw itself initially as devoted to the study of linguistic
variation and distribution as a horizontal exercise: an exercise
in mapping linguistic varieties over fragments of a population,
based on an assumption of the fundamental equivalence of every
linguistic variety. hus, Bernsteins vertical image of stratiied
variation variation that comes with diferential value attribu-
tion was countered by William Labov (1972) and others, who
argued that a linguistic variety such as black American English
should not be seen as bad English (which Labov chose to equate
with Bernsteins restricted code) but as a complex, sophisticated
code used by virtuoso speakers. Labov, like Bernstein, started
from an awareness of real inequalities in language: he black
American English variety was stigmatized in U.S. education and
its speakers were often negatively categorized. But Labovs eforts
were aimed at demonstrating the intrinsic linguistic equiva-
lence of these diferent varieties, whereas Bernstein addressed
the extrinsic attributional, ideological nonequivalence of
the varieties. Seen from a historical distance, both eforts were
connected by a joint concern for how particular language vari-
eties disenfranchized speakers, not because of their intrinsic
inferiority but because of social and political perceptions of the
varieties and their speakers. In other words, both were addressing
a language-ideological efect in which linguistically equivalent
varieties indexed socially unequal features and categories.
Similar ideas were to be found in the work of many of the early
sociolinguists. John Gumperz (1982) stressed the diferent ways
in which intercultural misunderstandings were not a result of
participants intentions but were an efect of small diferences
in linguistic and communicative structures in a particular con-
text of diferent contextualization cues. In his work as well, we
encounter an awareness of relativity: Diferent language varieties
can fulill the same functions, but the perception of these func-
tions by people not sharing the contextual conventions of a par-
ticular variety can difer. Here again, we encounter the tension
between intrinsic equivalence and extrinsic nonequivalence.
From a diferent vantage point, sociolinguists concerned
with language policy stressed the fact that the political
institutionalization of language in multilingual societies (see
bilingualism and multilingualism) usually involved a
stratiication based not on intrinsic superiority of one language
but on prestige hierarchies and ideological images of society.
J. Fishman (1974) presented studies in which former colonial
383
Inequality, Linguistic and Communicative
as well as local languages were lifted ideologically to the status
of prestige language by means of language policies favoring a
standardized, tightly controlled, and preferably ethnically
neutral language; C. Eastman (1983) described the diferent
stages of language planning, demonstrating how language vari-
eties could be turned into institutionalized, power-emanating
elements of social structure.
A central ingredient of every form of language planning is the
construction of a written, orthographically standardized variety
of language. Scholars in the ield of literacy also devoted atten-
tion to the ways in which literacy may introduce stratiication in
languages and communities and often becomes an opportunity
as well as an obstacle deining peoples social mobility trajec-
tories (Street 1995; Kress 2000). he creation of a literate norm
almost invariably means that access to the prestige variety of
the language comes to be controlled by the education system,
which functions as a very efective ilter on social mobility.
State of Affairs
In all of the work discussed so far, there is an awareness of
inequality, notwithstanding that the emphasis would be on dif-
ference and variation, rather than on the power and inequality
dimensions of diference and variation. Other scholars developed
full-blown theories of linguistic and communicative inequality,
and two stand out: Bourdieu and Hymes.
Bourdieu (1991) emphasized the ways in which language is
part of the superstructural apparatus of society; as a nonmate-
rial resource, it can nevertheless be imbued with an economic
value: social or cultural symbolic capital. As in hard economic
sectors, the value of diferent resources is diferent and can luc-
tuate, and not every resource can be traded for another one; the
terms of exchange are unpredictable. Bourdieus work on lan-
guage itted into his larger program of analyzing the economies
of taste, culture, and ideas from within a generalized materialism
and with the aim of redeining (and empirically substantiating)
the notion of social class. In his view, the traditional distinc-
tion between material and immaterial resources in society was
unjustiied since the same forces of diferential value allocation
appeared to operate on both: Class is both a material and an
immaterial thing, and language diferences do play a role in this
value allocation. Consequently, the stability of class as a material
complex is also there in the immaterial aspects: A lack of real capi-
tal is often paralleled by a lack of symbolic capital, and social hier-
archies play as much into the symbolic diacritics as they do into
the material ones. (See also field and habitus, linguistic.)
It is not diicult to see the similarities between the project
developed by Bourdieu and the (more limited) one presented
by Bernstein. Both treat language not just as an opportunity a
positive feature of humans but also as a constraint, as some-
thing inherently limited and limiting. And rather than enabling
people to perform particular acts, language also restricts them
and prevents them from performing other acts. Underlying this
idea of language as constraint is a model of society as nonegali-
tarian and stratiied, with relatively stable strata, some of which
are tightly controlled as to access while others are more demo-
cratically accessible. Particular language resources are required
to move into the more controlled strata, and membership of
these strata for example, elite, professional milieux requires
384
a constant reenactment of communicative practices dependent
on these exclusive resources (Bourdieus analyses of academic
discourse are telling in this respect; see Bourdieu, Passeron, and
de Saint Martin 1994).
It is at this point that the contribution of Hymes (1980, 1996)
comes into view. He draws on a long anthropological tradition of
seeing language in context and use speech and when lan-
guage is seen from this practical angle, diversity and inequality
are the rule rather than the exception. Whereas Bernsteins and
Bourdieus relections on language remained largely abstract
and general, Hymess approach is soundly empirical. Hymes
starts from registers, repertoires, and genres rather than
languages, and such practical linguistic and communicative
instruments are performed in contexts where they take actual
shapes: conversations, stories, lectures, and so on. Hymes
himself focused on narrative, and he observed that one
form of inequality in our society has to do with rights to use
narrative, with whose narratives are admitted to have cog-
nitive function (1980, 126). he reason is that conventions for
producing narratives are culturally and socially sensitive, and
particular contexts in society require particular types of narra-
tive. People can be very good storytellers in their neighborhood
but inefective ones in front of a judge in court, because the
stylistic and genre conventions for those particular events are
fundamentally diferent. hus, the capacity to be recognized as
a competent speaker or an articulate storyteller, lecturer,
or conversationalist is a socially sensitive phenomenon on
which social forces of diferential value attribution operate. For
Hymes, this dialectic between real capacity and expected per-
formance deines voice, and one can be voiceless for many
reasons (Blommaert 2005).
he approaches of Bourdieu and Hymes both present a fully
developed theory of inequality in the ield of language and com-
munication. From their work, we can see how the production of
meaning is a regulated, regimented process in which the speak-
ers choice is never unlimited and in which the efects of his/her
words are judged by others using social and ideological yard-
sticks. he advantage of Hymess approach is its strongly devel-
oped empirical dimension, which ofers a range of opportunities
for applied research.
Evaluation
Despite its implicit focus on inequality, sociolinguistics privi-
leges diference and variation as its objects and avoids explicit
analyses of how such variation converts into social inequality.
his is an efect of the descriptive bias in sociolinguistics, as well
as of the hesitant and ambivalent relationship between socio-
linguistics and social theory (Williams 1992). Many studies of
variation, consequently, consider diferences merely in terms of
spread and distribution and see the power and inequality rela-
tionships among language varieties in simpliied terms. he fact
that speaking with a stigmatized accent is not merely a matter
of distribution but a matter of social opportunities, determined
by the way in which others rank such accents in an ideologically
informed hierarchy, could be more central to sociolinguistic
relections.
his is a critical insight and eminently applicable to many
sociolinguistic and discursive phenomena in the contemporary
Infantile Responses to Language
world. Emergent applied studies have shown its relevance,
for example, in the ield of asylum seekers narratives (Maryns
2006), literacy in education (Collins and Blot 2003), and social
work (Hall, Slembrouck, and Sarangi 2006).
Jan Blommaert
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bernstein, B. 1971. Class, Codes and Control. Vol. 1. heoretical Studies
Towards a Sociology of Language. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Blommaert, J. 2005. Discourse: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge,
UK: Polity.
Bourdieu, P. J. C. Passeron, and M. de Saint Martin. 1994. Academic
Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Collins, J., and R. Blot. 2003. Literacy and Literacies. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Eastman, C. 1983. Language Planning: An Introduction. San Francisco:
Chandler and Sharp.
Fishman, J., ed. 1974. Advances in Language Planning. he Hague:
Mouton.
Gumperz, J. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Hall, C., S. Slembrouck, and S. Sarangi. 2006. Language Practices in Social
Work. London: Routledge.
Hymes, D. 1980. Language in Education: Ethnolinguistic Essays.
Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.
. 1996. Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Toward an
Understanding of Voice. London: Taylor and Francis.
Irvine, J. 1989. When talk isnt cheap: Language and political economy.
American Ethnologist 12: 73848.
Kress, G. 2000. Early Spelling: Between Convention and Creativity.
London: Routledge.
Labov, W. 1972. Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Maryns, K. 2006. he Asylum Speaker: Language in the Belgian Asylum
Procedure. Manchester: St Jerome.
Street, B. 1995. Social Literacies. London: Longman.
Williams, G. 1992. Sociolinguistics: A Sociological Critique.
London: Routledge.
INFANTILE RESPONSES TO LANGUAGE
Infant responses to speech and language have been used to study
both early communicative development and early language per-
ception in infants. Observations of interactions between infants
and caregivers have shown that infants under three months of
age become quiet in response to speech. Infants as young as
six weeks engage in interactions or protoconversations, or turn-
taking in gaze and/or vocalizations with caregivers (Bruner 1975;
Trevarthen 1974). Between four and six months, infants respond
to speech with vocalizations (see babbling), and by six to nine
months they begin initiating interactions, including games such
as peek-a-boo.
Experimental investigations into infant responses to speech
have yielded information about infants abilities to decode lan-
guage well before they begin to produce language themselves.
Numerous experimental methods have been employed to exam-
ine their perception, including behavioral, biological, and, more
recently, brain measures. he major behavioral measures rely on
infants ability to associate a behavioral response with stimuli.
Behavioral measures examine either their responses to new
stimuli after habituation or their attention (e.g., eye gaze, head
turn) to certain types speech or language stimuli. For example,
High-Amplitude Sucking and Conditioned Headturn are both
habituation paradigms. Researchers using these paradigms
habituate the infant to the stimulus, change the stimulus, and
then measure whether the infant responds to the change. Other
procedures, namely, the Headturn Preference Procedure and the
Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm, measure how long
infants attend to stimuli by measuring either headturns toward
attention-getting lights or gazes to pictures/video accompanying
the stimuli. Biological techniques measure reactions to speech,
most frequently by measuring infant heart rate. More recent
research has turned to brain measures, including electrophysi-
cal responses such as event related-potentials (ERP), electroen-
cephalogram (EEG), and neuroimaging techniques such as
fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to examine early
speech and language perception. For an overview of methods,
see Jusczyk (1997); Mills, Cofey-Corina, and Neville (1997).
Using experimental methods, researchers have investigated
a wide range of issues concerning infants understanding of
speech and language, including responses to individual speech
contrasts, diferences in speakers, sensitivity to the prosody of
the language, lexical learning, and ability to detect gram-
matical patterns. (See also speech perception in infants.)
his research has shown that fetuses can hear during the third
trimester of development (although the sound is low-pass il-
tered by the amniotic luid and the uterine walls) and will recog-
nize recurrent patterns (e.g., rhymes) from the mothers speech
(DeCasper et al. 1994). Neonates prefer their mothers voices
to others (DeCasper and Fifer 1980). In addition, neonates and
infants prefer to listen to infant-directed speech (speech with
fewer words per utterance, more repetition, slower articula-
tion, and greater prosodic swings) over adult-directed speech
(Fernald 1985; Cooper and Aslin 1990)
Two-month-old infants can distinguish their native language
from other languages on the basis of prosodic characteristics; by
six months infants are sensitive to their native language stress
patterns and by nine months to native language phonotactics.
Infants use prosodic information to group words and are sen-
sitive to prosodic units that mark both clauses (by 46 months)
and phrases (by 9 months). As prosodic units often correspond to
grammatical units, this ability may give infants additional infor-
mation about grammatical structure. here is also evidence that
prosody can help infants remember information about speech
(Jusczyk 1997).
Work on the perception of speech contrasts has shown that
from birth, infants can discriminate both consonants and vowels
that contrast in any of the worlds languages, even if the sounds
are not found in the infants native language (Werker and Curtin
2005; Kuhl 2000). his ability holds even if the sounds are pro-
duced by diferent speakers of diferent ages. Work has also
investigated the acoustic cues infants use to detect diferences,
as well as the nature of categorical perception. Results suggest
that infants can be sensitive to the same range of acoustic cues
as adults, including the efects of coarticulation (where sounds
385
Infantile Responses to Language
in a word afect the articulation of each other) and the multiple
acoustic cues that can indicate the identity of a phonetic con-
trast. he ability to discriminate phonetic contrasts from native
and unfamiliar languages is maintained until 6 months, but by
1012 months, infants only discriminate contrasts that are pho-
nologically contrastive in the target language. his shift from
language-general to language-speciic discrimination occurs
irst for vowels (by 68 months) and later for consonants (1012
months) (Werker and Curtin 2005).
Infants perception of speech sounds shifts as they begin
to learn words. Infants younger than 8 months are sensitive to
phonetic diferences, while infants approaching one year ignore
allophonic variation and attend only to phonological diferences
found in their native language(s). At the same time, young word
learners (14-month-olds) do not attend to some phonetic detail
(e.g., dih vs. bih) when in a word-learning task (Stager and
Werker 1997), even though younger infants can discriminate
these contrasts in perception tasks and older infants attend to
these diferences in word-learning tasks. hus, the experience
learning language inluences how and when contrasts are per-
ceived (Kuhl 2000).
Infants also attend to statistical regularities in the speech
stream. hese abilities have been shown in the perception of
phonetic segments, in word segmentation, and grammatical
patterns (Safran 2003). Attention to statistical regularities can
help infants extract familiar patterns and track relationships
within a speech stream and, thus, may help infants uncover
basic structural relations in sentences as they move into the
acquisition of grammar. Infants sensitivity to grammar has
been demonstrated both behaviorally and with brain measures.
It begins with sensitivity to the phonetic form of function words
that mark grammatical relations. English-learning infants of
1011 months demonstrate sensitivity to the phonetic proper-
ties of functor words and can use them to help segment nouns.
French-learning and German-learning infants show even earlier
sensitivity to functor words, segmenting them by 78 months of
age. By 16 months, infants can distinguish passages in which
English functors are properly or improperly ordered (Shady,
Jusczyk, and Gerken 1998). By 18 months, infants are beginning
to be able to track grammatical relations, such as that which
occurs between is and -ing.
Infants acquiring both English and German are able to per-
form these tasks, though their ability to do so is inluenced by
language-speciic factors (Santelmann and Jusczyk 1998; Hhle
et al. 2006). English infants are sensitive to the distance between
the morphemes, whereas German infants are sensitive to the
type of constituent. In addition, by 17 to 18 months, infants are
able to use the presence of nouns in a sentence to help decode
verb meanings. his result is most likely due to the structure of
the two languages: English allows few elements between auxil-
iary and main verbs (mostly adverbs, or in questions, subjects).
he structure of German (with noninite verbs occurring at the
end of the sentence) requires objects and adverbs to occur in
between the auxiliary and main verbs. It appears that infants
in the two languages are sensitive to these distributional prop-
erties in the syntax and are using these patterns to help orga-
nize the speech stream. Sentences with two nouns (Oscar chases
Elmo) are matched with transitive actions, while sentences with
386
a compound noun (Oscar and Elmo are running) are matched
with intransitive actions. hus, infants are able to both track
grammatical information and use word order to determine rela-
tionships in English (Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkof 1996).
More work is needed to examine how infants from diferent
backgrounds, in particular infants from non-Western cultures,
non-Indo-European languages, and bilingual infants, perceive
speech and language. Existing work with bilingual infants sug-
gest that exposure to more than one language helps infants
maintain categorical contrasts found in both languages (Werker
and Tees 1984) and that lateralization can occur independently
for each language to which an infant is exposed (Conboy and
Mills 2006; see bilingualism, neurobiology of). Research
is just beginning to explore the relationship between early speech
perception and later language development. Early results sug-
gest that some aspects of speech perception are related to later
vocabulary development (e.g., Newman et al. 2006).
One area of debate concerns protoconversations (turn-
taking in gaze and/or vocalizations), whether they are driven
primarily by the caregivers or the infant takes an active role in
shaping them. Research suggests an active role for infants in
co-constructing interactions (e.g., Trevarthen, Kokkinaki, and
Fiamenghi, Jr. 1999). Another long-standing debate resulting
from experimental work concerns whether infants responses
result from a specialized speech-processing system or from
general auditory processing plus categorization abilities. Most
researchers currently argue that the ability to discriminate
speech contrasts is domain-general with some innate perceptual
biases (Kuhl 2000). A further current debate parallels an ongo-
ing debate in cognitive science concerning whether infants use
statistical regularities alone or create abstract rules from statis-
tical information (Safran 2003). Evidence from other domains
(e.g., production) suggests that infants can abstract rules, and
most linguists would argue for rule creation rather than pure
statistical learning (Marcus et al. 1999), while many connec-
tionists would argue that rule-like efects are artifacts of stable
connections. hey argue that learning is based on the speciic
stimuli and is possible without the abstraction of rules (Conway
and Christiansen 2006).
Lynn Santelmann
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bruner, Jerome S. 1975. From communication to language: A psycho-
logical perspective. Cognition 3: 25587.
Conboy, Barbara T., and Debra L. Mills. 2006. Two languages, one devel-
oping brain: Event-related potentials to words in bilingual toddlers.
Developmental Science 9.1: F1F12.
Conway, Christopher M., and Morten H. Christiansen. 2006. Statistical
learning within and between modalities: Pitting abstract against stim-
ulus-speciic representations.. Psychological Science 17: 90512.
Cooper, R. P., and R. N. Aslin. 1990. Preference for infant-directed
speech in the irst month after birth. Child Development 61: 158495.
DeCasper, A. J., and W. P. Fifer. 1980. Of human bonding: Newborns
prefer their mothers voices. Science 208: 11746.
DeCasper, Anthony J., Jean-Pierre Lecanuet, Marie-Claire Busnel,
Carolyn Granier-Deferre, and Roselyne Maugeais. 1994. Fetal reac-
tions to recurrent maternal speech. Infant Behavior and Development
17: 15964.
Information Structure in Discourse
Fernald, A. 1985. Four-month-old infants prefer to listen to motherese.
Infant Behavior and Development 8: 18195.
Hirsh-Pasek, Kathy, and Roberta M. Golinkof. 1996. he Origins of
Grammar: Evidence from Early Language Comprehension. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press. Overview of studies examining infants sensitivity to
grammar, including description of methodologies.
Hhle, B., M. Schmitz, L. M. Santelmann, and J. Weissenborn. 2006.
he recognition of discontinuous verbal dependencies by German
19-month-olds: Evidence for lexical and structural inluences on
childrens early processing capacities. Language Learning and
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INFORMATION STRUCTURE IN DISCOURSE
he phrase information structure is used to indicate the organiza-
tion of elements within a sentence in terms of their pragmatic
contribution (in terms of givenness-newness, theme-rheme)
to a piece of discourse or text, as opposed to their syntactic
role (subject, object, etc.) or their semantic role (agent, goal,
beneiciary, etc.). A sentence elements degree of importance,
or salience, will have certain repercussions on its linguistic
realization; in particular, it will inluence grammatical choices
(most prominently word order patterns but also, for instance,
voice), prosodic choices (choice of intonation contours and,
especially, placement of sentential stress), and lexical choices
(such as deiniteness, ellipsis, pronominalization, and use of
speciic particles).
Modern notions of information structure can be traced back
to the Prague School work on functional sentence perspective, as
summarized most accessibly in Firbas (1992). J. Firbas developed
the idea that sentence elements have varying degrees of commu-
nicative dynamism (CD), depending on the extent to which they
carry the message forward. In the unmarked case (the basic
distribution), degrees of CD will be relected in the linear order-
ing of elements, with sentences starting with the element carry-
ing the lowest CD (deined as the theme), followed by a gradual
rise in CD. It should be noted that there is a relationship between
the degree of CD of an element and its status in terms of given-
new (see the following).
Given-New Structure versus Theme-Rheme Structure
Two dimensions, which may be to some extent correlated but
should be kept conceptually distinct, are important here. On
the one hand, the degree of givenness of a piece of information
relects the extent to which an element can be treated as in some
way recoverable from what precedes or can be assumed to be
present in the hearers consciousness; its thematicity, on the
other hand, relects the extent to which it represents what the
message is about. As an illustration of how these dimensions
inluence linguistic choices, consider the following example:
(1) A: What happened to Mary? Is she still single?
B: Well, Mary married John last year, but shes already
divorced him.
In Bs response, the noun phrase (NP) Mary in the irst sen-
tence (or, more accurately, the piece of referential informa-
tion represented by the NP Mary) is given information, as it
was mentioned in the immediately preceding turn; John, on
the other hand, is new information, as it cannot be assumed to
be in the hearers consciousness. In Bs second sentence, both
Mary and John are now given information, which explains why
they can be pronominalized as she and him, respectively. At
the same time, it could be argued that both sentences are more
about Mary than about John and that Mary is, therefore, the
theme of both sentences, the remaining information being rhe-
matic (i.e., providing additional information about the theme).
Although both levels are functionally independent, they do
appear to correlate strongly, in that themes tend to consist of
given information.
Example (1) also illustrates some tendencies with regard to
word order and prosody. First of all, new information tends to
occur toward the right of the sentence, whereas given informa-
tion tends to be initial (in English, therefore, being an subject-
verb-object (SVO) language, there is a strong correlation between
givenness and grammatical subjecthood, as shown by Mary in
Bs contribution). Secondly, thematic information tends to be
sentence-initial. In fact, some linguists argue that the theme
is initial by deinition (e.g., Halliday 1994). hirdly, the main
387
Information Structure in Discourse
sentence stress, or tonic nucleus (i.e., the syllable carrying the
stongest degree of prosodic prominence), normally falls some-
where on the new information, namely, on John in sentence 1 of
Bs turn and perhaps on the second syllable of divorced in sen-
tence 2.
he efects of givenness and/or thematicity on word order
are acknowledged by most authors. However, in a substantial
proportion of the worlds languages, word order is partially, or
even predominantly, determined by syntactic rather than infor-
mation structure considerations. English is a case in point since
it has a fairly strict SVO order from which it is hard to deviate.
Some languages, therefore, have developed other mechanisms
for marking information structure, such as particular nonpro-
totypical patternings resulting in diferent ordering of elements.
Examples that are prominent in English are the passive voice
(not, strictly speaking, a word order variation but nevertheless
a syntactic operation that has a big impact on linear order); cleft
and pseudocleft constructions (e.g., It is a beer that I would like
or What I would like is a beer); the fronting of an element (some-
times referred to as topicalization, or Y-movement; e.g., A
beer I would like); extraposition of an element (e.g., It is enjoy-
able to drink a beer on a warm evening); and left and right dis-
location (e.g., [As for] John, he loves beer and He loves beer, John
[does], respectively). Some languages may employ other formal
resources for marking thematicity or givenness-newness, the
best known examples perhaps being particles (such as ga and
wa in Japanese).
Example (1) also reveals some potential problems for any
deinitions of givenness or thematicity. First of all, it raises the
question whether the given-new distinction is a simple binary
distinction. he verb married in Bs irst sentence, for instance,
is new in the sense that it has not been mentioned, but one could
also argue that previous mention by A of the element single has
to some extent activated its antonym (see spreading activa-
tion), so that married does not have quite as high a degree of
newness as, say, last year. Secondly, it is important here to distin-
guish between thematicity on a sentence level, which attempts to
provide an answer to the question what a sentence (or clause) is
about, and the notion of aboutness on the macro level of a longer
stretch of discourse; in the latter case, the term topicality or topic-
hood is often employed (see Brown and Yule 1983). In the previ-
ous example, one could argue that the entire exchange is more
about Mary than it is about John, making Mary the discourse
topic for the whole exchange (but not necessarily the theme for
all sentences comprising the exchange).
It should be noted, incidentally, that conceptual vagueness
and terminological confusion abound in the literature: he
terms topic and theme are often used interchangeably, as are
terms such as given-new and background-focus. As has already
been pointed out, Firbas deines the theme as the element with
the lowest degree of CD. Others deine theme in terms of about-
ness, which is reminiscent of the concept of psychological sub-
ject, or what the speaker is talking about. M. A. K. Halliday
deines the theme as the point of departure for the message,
which always correlates with clause-initial position; the rheme
then represents what is said about the theme. He thus assumes
a direct link between discourse function (theme) and linguistic
form (word order).
388
Previous Research on Given-New
In her inluential paper on the given-new distinction, E. F. Prince
(1981) starts with an appealing classiication of the literature on
given-new according to three approaches to givenness: given-
ness in terms of shared knowledge, in terms of cognitive salience,
and, inally, in terms of recoverability or predictability. When
givenness in terms of shared knowledge is evaluated, the basic
criterion is the speakers assumption that the hearer knows,
assumes, or can infer a particular thing (but is not necessarily
thinking about it). his deinition is problematic in that it fails
to distinguish systematically between knowledge that the hearer
can derive through contextual clues (such as is needed for the
decoding of an anaphoric element) and what he/she knows
as part of his or her background knowledge of the world.
Givenness in terms of cognitive salience can be deined as
knowledge that the speaker assumes to be in the hearers con-
sciousness at the time of utterance. One problem with this view
is that while it might well represent an accurate picture of the
decisions that the speaker has to make on a cognitive level, this
dimension is inherently inaccessible to the outside observer. A
discourse analyst confronted with textual data can only assess
what the speaker might have assumed as given by examining the
linguistic choices the speaker has made (in terms of word order,
intonation, pronominalization, deiniteness, and so forth).
he view of givenness in terms of recoverability, inally, is most
often associated with Hallidays systemic-functional framework
(e.g., 1994), which was in turn inluenced by the Prague School.
Given information is deined as information that is predictable
or derivable from the preceding discourse context, new infor-
mation being deined as what the speaker presents as not being
recoverable. Important to note here is that, for Halliday, given-
new information is marked almost exclusively through prosody,
more particularly the placement of the tonic nucleus (or sentence
stress). Word order does play an important part in information
structure, but is argued by Halliday to be an indicator of thema-
ticity rather than givenness-newness. Having said that, he does
acknowledge that some noncanonical word order formats, such
as cleft sentences, can be used as markers of given-new low.
Princes taxonomy of given-new information (1981) deines
givenness (or assumed familiarity, as she calls it) in terms of
speaker assumptions regarding an elements cognitive salience
but ofers an attempt at a more sophisticated classiication.
First of all, elements can be new, inferrable, or evoked (given).
New entities can be either brand new (i.e., not assumed to be in
any way known to the hearer) or unused (i.e., part of the hear-
ers background knowledge but not in his/her consciousness at
the time of utterance). Inferrables can be retrieved from other
entities via inferential processes (as in he car was useless, as
the battery was lat, where the battery is inferrable from the car
through the inference that cars have batteries). Evoked entities,
inally, can be either textually evoked (i.e., from the surround-
ing text) or situationally evoked (i.e., through the physical con-
text). he familiarity status of an element will have an inluence
on its potential linguistic realization: Brand-new entities, for
instance, will be typically realized as indeinite full NPs (e.g.,
a guy in I met a weird guy yesterday), whereas unused entities
will be deinite NPs (e.g., the game in I went to the Knicks game
yesterday).
Information Theory
Challenges for Future Research
One important drawback of most research in this area of dis-
course analysis has been that quite often, a top-down analytical
apparatus is employed, whereby a classiication of givenness
types is proposed on the basis of constructed examples and
is then applied to actual texts (often focusing on narra-
tives, mostly written narrative texts). On the whole, informa-
tion structure in conversation has not received the attention it
deserves; some so-called word order variations appear primar-
ily to be interactive phenomena, cases in point being left and
right dislocations (see Geluykens 1992, 1994). In particular, the
dynamic, procedural nature of conversation as a collaborative
enterprise and the efect that the turn-taking system may have
on the givenness status of elements have not yet been exam-
ined systematically. In addition, there is a dearth of experimen-
tally based analyses trying to determine the exact efect of one
potential variable (such as the referential distance between an
element and its previous mention, for instance) on the given-
ness status of an item. If one assumes that givenness erodes
over time due to the limits of short-term memory (a reasonable
enough assumption), then that efect should be measurable
under controlled conditions. Experimental studies, however,
tend to be limited to the impact of givenness status on prosodic
realization.
Ronald Geluykens
WORK CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Birner, B. J., and G. Ward. 1998. Information Status and Noncanonical
Word Order in English. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.
Brown, Gillian, and George Yule. 1983. Discourse Analysis.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Firbas, J. 1992. Functional Sentences Perspective in Written and Spoken
Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Geluykens, R. 1992. From Discourse Process to Grammatical
Construction: On Left-Dislocation in English. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
. 1994. he Pragmatics of Discourse Anaphora in English: Evidence
from Conversational Repair. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Halliday, M. A. K. 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 2d ed.
London: Edward Arnold.
Lambrecht, K. 1996. Information Structure and Sentence Form.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Prince, E. F. 1981. Toward a taxonomy of given-new information. In
Radical Pragmatics, ed. P. Cole, 22355. New York: Academic Press.
INFORMATION THEORY
his is a general purpose and abstract theory for the study of
communication. Standard information theory was founded
by Claude Shannon (1948) and is based on a communication
framework in which a) the sender must transform a message
into a code and send it through a channel to the receiver, and
b) the receiver must obtain a message from the received code.
Communication is successful if the message of the sender is the
same as the message obtained by the receiver. For instance, a
speaker utters a word for a certain meaning and then the hearer
must infer the meaning that the speaker had in mind. Noise can
alter the code when traveling from the sender to the receiver
through the channel (for instance, the speaker produces Paul
but the hearer understands ball).
While mainstream linguistics is focused on human language,
information theory has been applied to many other contexts,
such as the communication systems of other species (McCowan,
Hanser, and Doyle 1999; Suzuki, Buck, and Tyack 2006), genetic
information storage in the DNA (Li and Kaneko 1992; Naranan
and Balasubrahmanyan 2000), and artiicial systems such as
computers and other electronic devices (Cover and homas
1991).
Information theory has myriad applications even within the
domain of the language sciences. I give only a few examples. First,
it provides powerful metrics in psycholinguistics for mea-
suring the cognitive cost of a) processing a word (McDonald and
Shillcock 2001), b) an inlectional paradigm (Moscoso del Prado
Martn, Kostic, and Baayen 2004), or c) the whole mental lexi-
con (Ferrer i Cancho 2006). Second, information theory allows
one to explain certain actual properties of human language. For
instance, the tendency of words to shorten as their frequency
increases (Zipf 1935) can be interpreted as increasing the speed
of the information transmitted (e.g., the number of messages
per second) by assigning shorter codes to more frequent codes.
Another well-known property of human language is G. Zipfs
law for word frequencies, one of the most famous laws of
language. It has been argued that this law could be an optimal
solution for for maximizing the information transmitted when the
mean length of words is constrained (Mandelbrot 1966) or maxi-
mizing the success of communication while the cognitive cost of
using words is minimized (Ferrer i Cancho 2006). hird, informa-
tion theory has shed light on the evolution of language. It
has been hypothesized that the presence of noise in the commu-
nication channel could have favored the emergence of syntax
in our ancestors (Nowak and Krakauer 1999), which turns out to
be a reformulation of fundamental results from standard infor-
mation theory (Plotkin and Nowak 2000). Finally, information
theory ofers an objective framework for studying the diferences
between animal communication and human language.
It is well known that the occurrence of a certain word depends on
distant words within the same sequence, for example, a text, in
human language (Montemurro and Pury 2002; Alvarez-Lacalle
et al. 2006), and information theory studies in other species
provide evidence that long-distance dependences are not
uniquely human (Suzuki, Buck, and Tyack 2006; Ferrer i Cancho
and Lusseau 2006). Furthermore, research on humpback whale
songs (Suzuki, Buck, and Tyack 2006) questions the conjecture
of Marc Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch (2002)
that only humans employ recursion to structure sequences.
Ramon Ferrer i Cancho
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Alvarez-Lacalle, Enric, Beate Dorow, Jean Pierrer Eckmann, and Elisha
Moses. 2006. Hierarchical structures induce long-range dynamical
correlations in written texts. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences USA 103.21: 795661.
Cover, homas M., and Joy A. homas. 1991. Elements of Information
heory. New York: Wiley.
Ferrer i Cancho, Ramon. 2006. On the universality of Zipfs law for word
frequencies. In Exact Methods in the Study of Language and Text: To
389
Innateness and Innatism
Honor Gabriel Altmann, ed. Peter Grzybek and Reinhard Khler,
13140. Berlin: Gruyter. It discusses the problems of classic models for
explaining Zipfs law for word frequencies.
Ferrer i Cancho, Ramon, and David Lusseau. 2006. Long-term cor-
relations in the surface behavior of dolphins. Europhysics Letters
14: 10951101.
Hauser, Marc, Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch. 2002. he fac-
ulty of language: What is it, who has it and how did it evolve? Science
298: 156979.
Li, Wentian, and Kunihiko Kaneko. 1992. Long-range correlations and
partial 1/f spectrum in a noncoding DNA sequence. Europhysics
Letters 17: 65560.
Mandelbrot, Benoit. 1966. Information theory and psycholinguistics: A
theory of word frequencies. In Readings in Mathematical Social
Sciences, ed. P. F. Lazarsield and N. W. Henry, 15168. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
McCowan, Benoit, Sean F. Hanser, and Laurance R. Doyle. 1999.
Quantitative tools for comparing animal communication sys-
tems: Information theory applied to bottlenose dolphin whistle reper-
toires. Animal Behavior 57: 40919.
McDonald, Scott A., and Richard Shillcock. 2001. Rethinking the word
frequency efect: he neglected role of distributional information in
lexical processing. Language and Speech 44: 295323.
Montemurro, Marcelo, and Pedro A. Pury. 2002. Long-range fractal cor-
relations in literary corpora. Fractals 10: 45161.
Moscoso del Prado Martn, Fermn, Alexander Kostic, and Harald R.
Baayen. 2004. Putting the bits together: An information theoretical
perspective on morphological processing. Cognition 94: 118.
Naranan, Sundaresan, and Vriddhachalam K. Balasubrahmanyan. 1998.
Models for power law relations in linguistics and information sci-
ence. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 5.3: 3561. A summary of
many optimization models of Zipfs law for word frequencies that are
based on information theory.
. 2000. Information theory and algorithmic complex-
ity: Applications to linguistic discourses and DNA sequences as com-
plex systems. Part I: Eiciency of the genetic code of DNA. Journal of
Quantitative Linguistics 7.2: 12951.
Nowak, Martin A., and David Krakauer. 1999. he evolution of language.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 96: 802833.
Plotkin, Joshua, and Martin A. Nowak. 2000. Language evolution and
information theory. Journal of heoretical Biology 205.1: 14759.
Shannon, Claude E. 1948. A mathematical theory of communication.
Bell Systems Technical Journal 27: 379423, 62356.
Suzuki, Ryuji, John R. Buck, and Peter L. Tyack. 2006. Information
entropy of humpback whale songs. Journal of the Acoustical Society
of America 119: 184966.
Zipf, George Kingsley. 1935. he Psycho-biology of Language.
Boston: Houghton Milin.
INNATENESS AND INNATISM
What does our knowledge come from? Innatism is the position
that at least some of our knowledge is inborn rather than derived
from experience. If so, the question naturally comes up con-
cerning what types of knowledge should be taken to be innate,
giving rise to speciic hypotheses about innateness. In linguis-
tics, innateness became an important issue with the develop-
ment of generative grammar, giving rise to a debate that
is inextricably linked to language acquisition, namely, whether
or not language acquisition is based on an innate universal
grammar (UG). Innatism originated as a philosophical posi-
tion, often focusing on concepts varying from god to justice to
390
mathematics. he issue in linguistics is empirical, though. he
question of whether some knowledge of language must be innate
has sparked a great amount of controversy over the last decades,
during which philosophical positions (rationalism versus empir-
icism) were not always kept separate from the empirical issue.
Prominent protagonists include Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor,
Ray Jackendof, Steven Pinker, Kenneth Wexler, Geofrey Pullum,
Terrence Deacon, Michael Tomasello, and earlier, from some-
what diferent perspectives, W. V. O. Quine and Eric Lenneberg.
he debate arises in essentially two domains: concept learn-
ing and the acquisition of the structure of a language. Concept
learning is associated with Quines thesis of the indetermi-
nacy of translation (1960), illustrated by his gavagai
example: Suppose one is trying to learn a hitherto unknown lan-
guage. One is walking around accompanied by one of the speak-
ers of the language. Suddenly a rabbit runs by and the speaker
utters gavagai. As Quine shows, there are innumerable English
translations one could come up with for gavagai, among which
it would be impossible to decide on the basis of the experience
alone. To the extent to which in practice we succeed in doing
so, this is something to be explained, for instance, by ascribing
to us an innate conceptual structure, which is how Fodor (1983
and subsequent work) proposes that we should account for our
convergence.
he task of acquiring a language can be characterized as fol-
lows (as in Chomsky 1986 and subsequent work). A human infant
who is exposed to a language will in the course of roughly four to
six years (seven years if one counts full mastery of irregular mor-
phology, or raising verbs; for the latter, see Hirsch and Wexler
2007) acquire a knowledge of that language identical to that of
a human adult who knows the same language (with the excep-
tion of the lexicon, which keeps on growing in adulthood). In this
respect, he or she is entirely unlike apes, dogs, bees, and so on,
that, regardless of how much they are exposed to a language, will
never reach anything like human adult competence. It is also
uncontroversial that a child is not more predisposed to learn-
ing one language than another. But given that a child exposed
to Dutch ends up learning Dutch and not, for instance, Chinese,
and that the converse holds for a child exposed to Chinese, the
input must be crucial in determining which language ends up
being learned.
Consequently, language acquisition can be schematically rep-
resented as in Figure 1, where the various stages that a child goes
through are represented by Si and the Di are the data to which
he or she is exposed, yielding a change in state (not prejudging
the question of whether these stages involve major qualitative
discontinuities). S0 is termed the initial state, before the child is
exposed to language. (For the discussion, it is immaterial at what
age we put S0. If exposure to language can already take place in
some form in the womb, as there is evidence to believe, S0 can be
put just before the irst exposure in the womb.) Sn is the steady
adult state that does not change anymore if over time more data
are presented (with the exception of the lexicon).
his sketch as such should be uncontroversial, and even by
a professed non-nativist such as Tomasello (2003), it can be
rejected only at the price of incoherence. he real issue involves
the properties of S0 (abstracting away from the possible role of
maturation of the brain). By deinition, S0 is the state of being
Innateness and Innatism
S0 S1 S2 Si Sn Sn
D1 D2 Di Dn Dn+1
able to acquire language, distinguishing humans from apes,
dogs, and so on. hat is, it relects mans innate capacity for
language. By the deinition of the term universal grammar as it
is used in generative grammar, S0 coincides with UG. Whereas
a non-nativist could object to the term UG, nothing more is
involved than a terminological issue. What is really at stake are
questions such as the following: i) What properties must S0 have
in order to be able to account for the fact that language can be
acquired, given what we know about time course and access
to data? ii) Which of these properties are speciic to man? And
iii) What aspects of S0 are speciic to language, and how are the
other aspects related to other human cognitive capacities? he
irst question can only be successfully approached by carefully
investigating necessary and sufficient conditions for
learning and for learnability of (classes of) languages of the
human type. he second and third questions require an under-
standing not only of the human language capacity but also of
those other cognitive capacities among which it is embedded.
Logically, S0 could be empty. However, this would entail no
diference between humans and animals, contrary to what we
know. So for this empirical reason alone, S0 cannot be empty.
But as is discussed in the next section, it would also entail that
humans cannot acquire language contrary to what we know.
The Logical Problem of Language Acquisition
A useful strategy for demonstrating the diiculty of a problem is
to simplify it. If the simpliied problem is still hard, one knows
that the original problem is at least as hard. So we take a highly
simpliied question as a starting point (Wexler and Culicover
1980): What does a person who knows a language minimally
know? A reasonable answer is the following: A person who knows
a language knows at least which strings of words correspond
to well-formed sentences in that language and which strings
dont. (his simpliication is valid irrespective of the changes in
the signiicance attached to this particular aspect of linguistic
knowledge, from Chomsky 1957 to Chomsky 1995.)
In this simpliied picture, we view a language as a subset
of the set of all expressions one can form over a given vocabu-
lary. hat is, assuming that the vocabulary of English contains
the elements the, dog, bites, man, the set of English sentences
will contain the dog bites, the dog bites the man, and so on, but
not the bites man, bites dog the, and so on. he task of the child
acquiring English, therefore, minimally includes determining
what the full set of English sentences is like on the basis of the
sentences he/she is exposed to for some period of time, lets say
for six years. he question is then to get an impression of how
hard this task is.
Note that there is no upper bound to the length of individual
sentences. his makes the set of sentences in a language efec-
tively ininite. However, even if restricted to sentences under
Sn
Figure 1.
Dn+2 ........
a reasonable length, the number of well-formed sentences in
English is astronomical. It has been estimated that the number
of grammatical English sentences of 20 words and less is 1020
(Levelt 1967). (Note that this very normal sentence is exactly 21
words and costs nine seconds to pronounce). At an average of six
seconds per sentence, it will cost 19 trillion years to say (or hear)
them all. In the case of nonstop listening, the percentage of these
a child could have heard in six years time is 0.000000000031,
clearly still a gross overestimation as compared to what the child
can actually be expected to hear. So on the basis of at most such
an extremely small percentage of the potential input, the child
gets to know how language works.
here are many further practical complications we ignored,
such as lack of homogeneity and the presence of errors in the
data. If we were to take these into account, the task would only
become more formidable. his sets the stage for the logical
problem of language acquisition (for instance, Chomsky 1965,
1986), which can be formulated as the projection problem:
Consider a given inite set taken from some (ininite) superset.
Determine (the characteristic function of) this superset on the basis
of this subset.
Like anyone can see, this task is in its generality impossible. For
any inite given set, the projection problem has ininitely many
solutions.
For a concrete illustration, consider the following task involv-
ing the completion of a series of numbers:
(1) 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, .
One might say that inding the next number is easy. It should
obviously be 8. But of course, this is not at all guaranteed. It is easy
to think of a perfectly well-behaved function that enumerates the
irst seven natural numbers, followed by their doubles, triples,
quadruples, and so on. his illustrates a very simple point: here
is no general procedure to establish the correct completion of
some initial part of a sequence, whether a sequence of numbers
as in (1) or a data sequence (D1, D2, Di, Dn) as in Figure 1.
his fact relects a poverty of the stimulus in a fundamental
sense, as a trivial logical truth.
he completion task may become possible, however, if it is
redeined as the task to ind a solution within a restricted space of
possible solutions. In that case, certain instances of the projection
problem become even trivial. For instance, (1) can be trivially
completed if it is given that there is a constant diference between
each member of the series and its successor.
As E. Gold (1967) showed, even highly restricted hypothesis
spaces may not ensure a solution of the projection problem as
deined. he task may become easier if the input does contain
systematic evidence as to what is not in the target language.
Since, as is generally acknowledged, the input to the child does
391
Innateness and Innatism
not contain systematic negative evidence, it becomes of prime
importance to identify the types of hypothesis spaces that do
allow learning of natural languages by presentation only. he
absence of negative evidence, together with the fact that a sub-
stantial number of actual utterances a child may hear will be less
than entirely well formed, are often referred to as poverty of the
stimulus as well. But this is, in fact, not the same notion as the
fundamental, logical one employed in the discussion of Figure 1
and (1). For a rational debate it is crucial to keep the, irst, logical
sense and the, second, narrower, empirical sense apart.
Given the poverty of the stimulus in the logical sense, lan-
guage acquisition cannot be accounted for without the assump-
tion of innate genetically determined restrictions. he poverty
of the stimulus in the empirical sense may help provide further
evidence on what these are. In the generative literature, it is
often claimed that these restrictions have the form of an inven-
tory of grammatical principles. It is presumably this reference
to grammatical principles that led to the poverty of the stimulus
debate that is, for or against the existence of innate principles
of grammar as it is usually conducted with its emphasis on the
poverty of the stimulus in the narrower sense. But for a fruitful
discussion, it is crucial to distinguish between the minimal prop-
erties that S0 must have in order to explain language acquisition
and the further question of whether S0 has properties that are
speciic to language.
Learnability and Complexity
Each restriction on the hypothesis space deines a class of gram-
mars and languages. As pointed out by Gold (1967) and Wexler
and Peter Culicover (1980), learnability does not depend on the
complexity of the individual language/grammar but only on the
structure of the class in which the selection must be carried out.
Many contributions to the debate center on speciic exam-
ples, such as the question of whether the child uses and under-
stands utterances that are unexpected given the input up to a
certain stage, whether or not the input is restricted (as in the case
of motherese, a restricted register caretakers use in addressing
their children), or whether the input is richer and provides more
clues than one might have initially expected. As Pullum and
Barbara Scholz (2002) point out, one must distinguish between
the general issue of a speciic genetic endowment and debates
as to whether particular clues that have been argued to be non-
existing can or cannot be found in natural language corpora. But
important as issues of the latter type are, they are independent of
the general problem.
Deacon (1997) attributes to Chomsky the position that natural
language is too complex to be learned without rich innate mech-
anisms and then proceeds to argue that it is in fact not as com-
plex as is being claimed. Part of the argumentation in Tomasello
(2003) is based on the same premises. As demonstrated in the
previous section, none of these issues bears on the poverty of the
stimulus in its logical sense.
he same applies to arguments stating that the input is much
richer than nativists presuppose. As Wexler and Culicover
(1980) show, proposals involving an enriched input (a more
structured presentation in which pragmatic clues are provided
by the context of the utterance, as in the case of motherese ) mag-
nify the logical problem instead of decreasing it. Such proposals
392
require a theory of how to acquire the ability to use the context of
utterance, or a formal proof that this structuring of the presenta-
tion suiciently aids the child in setting up correct hypotheses
and rejecting incorrect ones but, crucially for the non-nativists,
without attributing to the child innate knowledge as to what evi-
dence is to be absorbed and what evidence ignored. hese are all
equally susceptible to the poverty of the stimulus argument in
the logical sense.
Clearly, it is important to have a conception of what it means
for something to be a property of UG. For instance, Chomsky
(1980) suggests that the speciied subject condition (SSC) dein-
ing the domain in which anaphors must be bound (condi-
tion A) and pronominals must be free (condition B) is part of
our genetic endowment. he question is, then, what it means
for UG. Must an SSC be hardwired as such? Or is it suicient
if the restrictions on binding descriptively captured by the SSC
follow from basic properties of our computational system, mod-
ulo properties of the mental space in which these computations
take place? For instance, Chomsky (1995) and subsequent work
argue that grammar is based on a very simple set of combina-
tory principles (essentially merge and Agree) and conditions
that follow from general properties of computation. If so, that
is what UG essentially amounts to. Reuland (2005) shows
that the core of condition B the need to license relexivity of
a predicate follows from the fact that no computational sys-
tem can distinguish between indistinguishables, as in the case
of the arguments of a relexive predicate. Elements like self or
other morphological markers must be added for the system
to handle these arguments. To derive condition A, no more is
needed than a general principle of economy of encoding, the
general combinatorics of the language system, and the lexical
semantics of self as an identity predicate. hus, prima facie
substantive properties of language and UG reduce to the inter-
action between general properties of mental computations and
lexical representations. If so, there is indeed no sense in which
conditions A and B are acquired. hey relect basic properties
of the system embedded in our wetware but it takes extensive
linguistic research to show that this is so.
Language and Pattern Recognition
Non-nativists crucially invoke general learning strategies that
originate in our general cognition. However, a statement that
language is an emergent property of our general cognitive sys-
tem requires a substantive theory of its workings, specifying how
its operations account for language with the same amount of
precision as the rules of formal linguistics (none of the proper-
ties in the explanans should invoke the explanandum). So far, no
precise proposals have been made available.
he essence of Tomasellos claim is that there is no interest-
ing problem in language acquisition, since whatever is needed is
provided by our abilities for pattern recognition. Tomasello (and
others) assume that there exists an ability for pattern recognition
that provides the tool for inding the patterns in language. Of
course, we humans have the ability to ind patterns. However, it
is a fallacy to think that what we do is inding the patterns that
are out there. he main message about concept learning to be
gleaned from Quines insights is that our mind must impose pat-
terns. Elementary considerations from particle physics show us
Innateness and Innatism
the same: Our common senses are blatantly incapable of seeing
reality as it is. As our extended senses (in the form of experi-
mentation and model building) teach us, what is actually out
there bears minimal resemblance to what we can observe with
our common senses. If even individual events that we observe,
imprint in our memory, and store can only have a remote resem-
blance to what is there, the more so for the patterns that we
ind.
Any pattern involves extrapolation beyond what can be
observed; even the simplest of observations requires an active
mind shaping our internal representation of what is out there.
We can do no more than impose a pattern (one of the zillions of
possible patterns any piece of reality embodies), hopefully in
a way compatible with our survival. he good thing is that evo-
lution resulted in our patterns being useful enough for every-
day purposes since we managed to survive (for the moment).
he bad thing is that we can do so not because we are so smart
but because we are so limited. We can learn only if we ignore
the many logically possible alternatives. Evolution keyed us
to the universe. he key to understanding how we learn is to
understand our limitations, the logically possible patterns we
ignore.
In this respect, learning a language is like inding the pat-
terns in the surrounding universe. In another respect, there is
a diference, although it has been misconstrued. Deacon (1997)
proposes that our capacity to learn language is not surprising
since language is a human product and, therefore, is made to
be learned. However, unless we are careful, this leads us back
to the whole range of issues discussed, framed slightly difer-
ently: How are the properties allowing language to be learned
relected in its structure, and what does the fact that we acquire
language tell about our cognitive abilities?
Nevertheless, it also contains a relevant insight. Unlike the
physical world, language is a product of the human mind. So we
know that the childs mind is keyed to getting to know language
in a way he or she will never know the physical world: Complete
knowledge is attainable. As in the case of the physical world, the
input for learning language is external. However, unlike in the
case of the physical world, we know the nature of the input to
an extent that is unique. So language acquisition relects labo-
ratory conditions for learning, facilitating an understanding of
learning per se.
It is surprising that so many researchers of human learning
have such a hard time accepting the implications of the projec-
tion problem, though the moral is so simple, like the irst law of
thermodynamics prohibiting the perpetuum mobile. At it reads
in the well-known words of C. P. Snow:
You cannot win (that is, you cannot get something for nothing)
Applied to learning:
Learning a recursive step by presentation only, without restrictions
on the hypothesis space, is as impossible as creating the perpetuum
mobile.
he last sentence in Tomasello reads: How children become
competent users of a natural language is not a logical problem
but an empirical problem (2003, 328). Paradoxically, I agree
and, at the same time, would like to say that it illustrates the
Integrational Linguistics
depth of misunderstanding involved: It is an empirical problem,
but analyzing the logical problem is essential for solving it.
All this does not demonstrate that the restrictions necessary
for language acquisition are speciic to language. It does show
that such restrictions are there and have to be studied if we are to
understand language acquisition. No insight can be gained unless
precise and substantive hypotheses are formulated and tested in
a way that relects what we already know about language.
Eric Reuland
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. he Hague: Mouton.
. 1965. Aspects of the heory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
. 1980. On cognitive structures and their development. In
Language and Learning, he Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam
Chomsky, ed. M. Piattelli-Palmarini, 3552. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
. 1986. Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use. New
York: Praeger.
. 1995. he Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Deacon, Terrence. 1997. he Symbolic Species. New York: Norton.
Fodor, Jerry. 1983. he Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gold, E. 1967. Language identiication in the limit. Information and
Control 16: 44774.
Hirsch, C., and K. Wexler. 2007. he late development of raising: What
children seem to think about seem. In New Horizons in the Analysis
of Control and Raising, ed. W. Davies and S. Dubinsky, 3770.
Heidelberg: Springer.
Kandel, Eric, James Schwartz, and homas Jessell. 2000. Principles of
Neural Science. 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Lenneberg, Eric H. 1967. Biological Foundations of Language. New
York: Wiley.
Levelt, Willem. 1967. Over het Waarnemen van Zinnen. Groningen,
Germany: Wolters.
Pullum, Geofrey K., and Barbara C. Scholz. 2002. Empirical assessment
of stimulus poverty arguments. Linguistic Review: 19.1/2: 950.
Quine, Willard Van Orman. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Reuland, Eric. 2005. Binding conditions: How are they derived? In
Proceedings of the HPSG05 Conference Department of Informatics,
University of Lisbon, ed. Stefan Mller. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Available online at: http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/
Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a Language. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Wexler, Kenneth, and Peter Culicover. 1980. Formal Principles of
Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
INTEGRATIONAL LINGUISTICS
his is the application of integrational semiology to the study
of language. Integrational linguistics is based on the assump-
tion that human communication, whether verbal or nonverbal,
involves the creation of signs in particular contexts whereby two
or more individuals engage in joint integration of their respec-
tive activities. hus, for example, speech communication would
be impossible without integration of the biomechanically sepa-
rate activities of vocalization and hearing. Written communica-
tion requires the production of marks on a surface that can be
integrated with programs of optical scanning. he appropriate
integration of these and many other activities is one of the major
393
Integrational Linguistics
functions of the cerebral cortex, and failure to achieve the inte-
grational proiciency required for social luency in communi-
cation is commonly perceived as a defect or handicap of some
kind (e.g. deafness, dyslexia, etc.) when due to physiological
factors. Integrationists diferentiate forms of communication
according to the range of activities typically integrated by the
participants, and the kinds of integrational proiciency typically
required for participation. A blind person, for obvious reasons,
lacks the integrational proiciency presupposed in various forms
of visual communication (see blindness and language).
From this perspective, the term language does not correspond
to any one mode of communication but straddles or conlates
several. In this respect, integrational linguistics difers radically
from mainstream schools of thought in linguistics and neigh-
bouring disciplines, which tend to assume that language is a sin-
gle human faculty, common to all humanity, and that languages
(English, French, Latin, etc.) are diferent social codes enabling
individual users to exercise this faculty. For integrationists, on
the other hand, individuals are not language users but language
makers. hey make language by their creative integration of ver-
bal signs into a myriad diverse activities, in both expected and
unexpected ways, with due regard for the circumstances, just as
they make human relationships by the ways in which they inter-
act with others in particular cases.
Axioms of Integrational Semiology
he axioms of integrational semiology are as follows:
1. What constitutes a sign is not given independently of the
situation in which it occurs or of its material manifestation in
that situation.
2. he value of a sign (i.e., its signiication) is a function of the
integrational proiciency that its identiication and interpre-
tation presuppose.
As applied to language studies, this means that verbal com-
munication of whatever kind cannot be decontextualized.
Episodes of communication are episodes in the lives of partic-
ular individuals at particular times and places. hese episodes
have to be studied as such. We learn nothing from an analysis
telling us, for instance, that someone uttered the sentence John
loves Mary, that John is the subject of the sentence, Mary is the
direct object of the verb love, love is a transitive verb, and so on
nothing, that is, except information about the metalinguistic
assumptions of the analyst. (hese assumptions may be worth
studying in their own right, but that is not the same as studying
the facts pertaining to the utterance in question. On the contrary,
the analysis is one that already embarks on a decontextualization
of the episode allegedly described.)
It is not simply a matter of knowing who said what to whom,
where, and in what circumstances. Nor are the circumstances
what happened immediately before and after. Orthodox modern
linguistics, like traditional grammar, routinely assumes the legit-
imacy of abstracting from all these features of context. Its state-
ments are supposedly generalizations across indeinitely many
unidentiied episodes of language use. Integrational linguistics
rejects on principle the legitimacy of such generalizations: Again,
they tell us nothing about linguistic facts only about the intel-
lectual preferences or prejudices of the analyst.
394
The Principle of Noncompartmentalization
It also follows from the semiological axioms that there is no strict
or objective dividing line between linguistic knowledge and non-
linguistic knowledge, or, as some theorists put it, between knowl-
edge of a language and knowledge of the world. Recognition of
this indivisibility is referred to by integrationists as the principle
of noncompartmentalization. In other words, human beings do
not live in a communicational environment where what pertains
to language belongs to one compartment and the rest belongs to
some other compartment (or compartments).
Non-compartmentalization is also heresy in orthodox lin-
guistics, since it implies that linguistics cannot be a science.
(A physicist who confessed inability to diferentiate between the
facts of the physical world and the nonphysical world would be
confessing to a similar heresy.) In an academic milieu where
every inquiry aspires to be scientiic, this doctrine is not
popular.
he integrationist view can be illustrated by considering what
happens at a cocktail party. Physically, a certain level of audible
vibration is generated (often said to be deafening, though very
small as compared with the energy required to light one electric
lamp). Physiologically, there is much expenditure of efort in
terms of the muscular action of vocal apparatus (but again very
small by comparison with the efort required to walk across the
road). Mentally, there is doubtless engagement in interactions
with others, but it cannot be quantiied. So where in all of this is
the language component? It seems to be in there somewhere,
but exactly where deies exact location. To ask where is itself a
nonsense question. And to grasp why it is a nonsense question is
already halfway to subscribing to the integrationist principle of
noncompartmentalization.
he orthodox linguistic answer is that the language compo-
nent resides somewhere in the heads of the talkers and listen-
ers. But so, presumably, does their knowledge of football, food,
local politics, and everything else; that is, all the things being
talked about at the cocktail party. So exactly the same compart-
mentalization perplexity arises at one remove. Human beings
cannot in their everyday lives distinguish between knowing
something about X and being able to talk about it.
The Principle of Cotemporality
he integrationist principle of cotemporality complements the
principle of noncompartmentalization. Everyday experience
recognizes that an event occurring at time t may afect how we
interpret an event occurring earlier or later than t. Temporal
sequence is an intrinsic aspect of contextualization.
Compare the situation in which (1) landlord says he water
is turned of today and tenant says I must have a shower with
the situation in which (2) tenant says I must have a shower and
landlords response is he water is turned of today. Ostensibly,
the same information has been exchanged and the same words
used. But what emerges from the communicational episode is
quite diferent in the two cases.
For integrationists, the question of temporal sequence
involves both verbal and nonverbal behavior. In brief, there is no
way that what is said can be set apart from the train of events in
which it occurs, whether these are verbal or nonverbal. We all
know this. hat is why in legal disputes courts treat diferently
Integrational Linguistics
a case in which A insulted B, who then struck A, from a case in
which A struck B, who then insulted A. As individuals, we are
time-bound agents in all our activities. Our linguistic acts do
not have some special time track of their own. here is no such
thing as a contextless linguistic sign.
his does not mean that the context simply is a given
sequence of events. Integrationists take a very diferent view of
context from that usually found in orthodox linguistics. Context
is not to be equated with situation (which may be irrelevant)
and even less with preceding or following speech-acts. It is
not some kind of local backdrop against which communication
takes place. Context, for the integrationist, is always the product
of contextualization, and each of us contextualizes in our own
way. he individual participants in any communication situation
will each contextualize what happens diferently, as a function
of the integrational proiciency each exercises in that situation.
his does not mean that we can never reach communicational
agreement, but it explains why we often do not. It is not enough
to say that every act of communication is unique. Each such act
is in principle subject to multiple contextualizations and recon-
textualizations. hat is what makes it essential in linguistic analy-
sis for the analyst to specify what forms of contextualization are
presupposed (a requirement that the great majority of orthodox
linguists ignore). For integrationists, a sign is not a sign until it
has been contextualized: he act of contextualization and the
establishment of the sign are one and the same.
Meaning
It follows, then, that integrationists take a quite diferent view of
meaning from that which informs most work in orthodox linguis-
tics, where the meaning of a linguistic form is usually construed
as some kind of concept (as in the deinitions of conventional
dictionaries) or, even more vaguely, mental representation.
his is traditionally imagined to yield a more or less permanent
value attached to the form and known to all competent speak-
ers and writers of the language in question (even if the language
is no longer living). hus, the meaning of classical Latin aqua is
treated as timeless: It still means for Latin specialists what it
meant in the days of Julius Caesar and will mean in a thousand
years from now.
For integrationists, this assumption conlicts with the princi-
ple of cotemporality. here are no atemporal invariants in lan-
guage. Meaning is made by participants as part of the process of
communication. It is thus subject to the principle of cotemporal-
ity in just the same way as all other aspects of communication.
here are no ixed meanings. here is nothing in language to pro-
vide us with a miraculous guarantee of the stability of meaning(s)
over time or even from one moment to the next. To demand
such a guarantee for any mode of communication is as futile as
demanding that a currency remain stable in value from one day
to the next. (he indeterminacy holds regardless of whether peo-
ple shopping in High Street are aware of it.)
We have no option but to interpret particular episodes of
communication by integrating them into the unique temporal
sequence of events that constitutes our previous experience.
hus, where there are two or more participants, what is com-
municated must be open to two or more interpretations. hese
cannot be guaranteed to coincide. People are no more obliged
to agree about the meanings of words than they are obliged to
agree about the value of goods. In both cases, it usually suits their
purposes to make some kind of compromise with those they are
dealing with. But the nature of this semantic compromise is
essentially ad hoc.
Parameters of Communication
For integrationists, there are certain capacities required of an
individual in order to participate in communication. hese
capacities are of three kinds: biomechanical, macrosocial, and
circumstantial. he irst relates to the human organism and the
ability to integrate activities requiring a wide variety of physi-
ological and mental processing (e.g., the very diferent biome-
chanical requirements involved in speech production and
hearing). he second relates to the human ability to integrate
particular activities into sets of assumptions provided by social
conventions of various kinds. he third relates to the ability to
integrate ones activities into whatever else is going on at the
time.
A simple illustration of all three is provided by what happens
when a motorist encounters a pedestrian about to cross the road.
At the macrosocial level, there are assumptions about the road,
the conventions of the highway code, and so on. At the biome-
chanical level, there are questions about what the motorist sees
within a certain range of visibility and the alertness necessary for
initiating the appropriate physiological actions for driving the
vehicle. At the circumstantial level, even when all of these aspects
have been taken into account, the individual motorist must con-
stantly be prepared to modify any action taken, depending on the
moment-to-moment behavior of the pedestrian and other road
users.
his does not mean that the levels of integration are inde-
pendent. Circumstantial factors intervene across the board. An
accident may be caused because the pedestrian is shortsighted
or the road badly lit. he drivers exercise of biomechanical skills
may be afected by knowing or not knowing that the brakes of
this particular vehicle are not very reliable.
Much recent work in integrational linguistics has focused on
analyzing how, at the macrosocial level, societies succeed in con-
structing supercategories, which integrate what would otherwise
be quite separate activities in such a way as to set up a common
framework for the intellectual and practical pursuits of society as
a whole. hese supercategories include science, art, history, and
religion, each with a dedicated discourse of its own.
Roy Harris
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Harris, R. 1998. Introduction to Integrational Linguistics. Oxford:
Pergamon. A concise survey of the whole ield.
Harris, R., and C. Hutton. 2007. Deinition in heory and Practice.
London: Continuum. An integrationist approach to problems of dei-
nition, with particular reference to lexicography and the law.
Love, N., ed. 2006. Language and History: Integrationist Perspectives.
London: Routledge. Collection of papers bearing on the construction
of the macrosocial supercategory history.
Toolan, M. 1996. Total Speech: An Integrational Linguistic Approach to
Language. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Includes interesting
discussions of literal meaning, metaphor, and related issues.
395
Intension and Extension

Wolf, G., and R. Harris , eds. 1998. Integrational Linguistics: A First Reader. difers in meaning from
Oxford: Pergamon. Collection of papers covering a wide range of topics
from an integrationist perspective. (4) Lola believes that Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens.

For if (3) and (4) have the same meaning, then they are either
INTENSION AND EXTENSION both true or both false. But (3) may be true while (4) is false for
example, if Lola does not realize that Mark Twain and Samuel
semantic theories commonly distinguish two aspects of linguis-
Clemens refer to the same man. Since (3) is just like (4) except for
tic meaning: intension and extension. Roughly, the intension of a
an occurrence of Samuel Clemens instead of Mark Twain, Mark
linguistic expression is what it means, and its extension is what it
Twain and Samuel Clemens difer in meaning.
refers to. For example, on some views, Neil Armstrong and the
Such are two arguments that Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens
irst human being to walk on the Moon have the same exten-
difer in meaning. But if the extension of a proper noun is its
sion but diferent intensions. Often it is held that intension deter-
referent, then Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens have the same
mines extension (expressions with the same intension have the
extension. hus, some (but not all) conclude, there is a distinc-
same extension) but is not determined by extension (expressions
tion between two aspects of meaning: intension and extension.
with the same extension may have diferent intensions).
his entry describes various roles that intensions and exten-
Extensional and Nonextensional
sions play in contemporary semantic theories. While much
Arguably, then, a true sentence (3) may be turned into a false sen-
recent discussion uses formal methods, the presentation here is
tence (4) merely by substituting an occurrence of Mark Twain by
nontechnical.
Samuel Clemens. Suppose that the extension of a sentence deter-
Some possible terminological confusions should be noted.
mines its truth value and that Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens
A long tradition of distinguishing diferent aspects of meaning
have the same extension. If so, then to change (3) into (4) is to
(including Porphyrys third-century commentaries on Aristotle,
replace part of sentence (3) with a coextensional expression,
the Port-Royal logic of 1662, Mill [1843] 1872, and Frege [1892]
while failing to preserve the extension of the entire sentence.
1997) has left us with a hodgepodge of terms and distinctions.
Contexts like Lola believes that are typically thought to
One should be wary whether, for example, the Port-Royal log-
be nonextensional. An extensional context is a context wherein
ics comprehension and extension, or Freges Sinn and
substitution by a coextensional expression always preserves the
Bedeutung (often translated sense and reference; see sense
extension of the larger expression. A nonextensional context is
and reference), or Mills connotation and denotation
thus a context wherein substitution by a coextensional expres-
mark the same distinction as intension and extension in
sion sometimes fails to preserve the extension of the larger
recent theories. Moreover, extension is sometimes, but not
expression.
always, taken to be synonymous with denotation, designa-
Nonextensional contexts appear to be widespread in natural
tion, or referent, while intension, intensional, and inten-
language. In English, for instance, propositional attitudes
sionality are sometimes, but should not be, confused with
(like Lola believes that , John desires that ), as well as
intention, intentional, and intentionality. Arguably, there
many other constructions (involving, for example, seeks,
is a relation between a speakers intentions and the meanings of
admires, avoids, resembles, necessary, possibly,
the words he or she uses; however, the connection should not
must, may, obviously, and because), have been held to
be drawn via terminological confusion. intentionality, the
be nonextensional.
distinctive property of thoughts and other mental phenomena,
Nonextensional contexts are often called intensional. But
is yet something else entirely.
sometimes, more carefully, intensional is reserved for those
contexts wherein substitution of a cointensional expression
Why Accept a Distinction Between Intension and
always preserves the intension of the larger expression. Contexts
Extension?
wherein cointensional substitution may fail are then called non-
Knowing what sentence (1) means is enough to be able to know
intensional or hyperintensional. Lola believes that is one
that it is true.
context thought by some to be non-intensional in this sense. For
(1) Mark Twain is Mark Twain. example, according to some, eye doctor and ophthalmolo-
gist have the same intension, but Lola believes that Eve is an
However, (2) difers.
eye doctor and Lola believes that Eve is an ophthalmologist
(2) Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens. have diferent intensions: If Lola doesnt know the word ophthal-
mologist, the former may be true and the latter false.
Although (2) is true, merely knowing what (2) means is not
enough to be able to know that it is true. So (1) and (2) difer
Semantics Without Intensions
in meaning. But (2) is just like (1) except for an occurrence of
W. V. O. Quine argued that intensions and other elements of tra-
Samuel Clemens instead of Mark Twain. So, Mark Twain and
ditional theories of meaning have no place in a scientiic descrip-
Samuel Clemens difer in meaning since the meanings of (1) and
tion of the world. He claimed that intensions are on a par with
(2) are determined only by the meanings of their parts and the
the Homeric gods: Intensions play no useful explanatory role in
way they are put together. (See compositionality.)
a scientiic description of the world. According to one of his most
Similarly,
inluential arguments, there is no noncircular way to make sense
(3) Lola believes that Mark Twain is Mark Twain. of traditional notions like meaning, synonymy, analyticity,

396
Intension and Extension
and the like. Indeed, he argued, there is no distinction between
sentences true simply in virtue of meaning analytic truths and
other true sentences synthetic truths (Quine 1953, 1960).
Greatly inluenced by Quine, Donald Davidson (1967) pro-
posed a semantic theory for natural language with no place for
intensions. In a Davidsonian theory, each linguistic expression
is paired with an extension (other terms like referent or semantic
value are often used instead of extension), and rules of composi-
tion state how the extension of a larger expression is determined
by the extensions of its parts. For example, in one version of the
theory, the extension of John is John, the extension of runs
is the set of running things, and the extension of John runs is a
truth value (see truth conditional semantics).
Challenging for this approach are the problems that drive
some to posit intensions in the irst place. If Mark Twain and
Samuel Clemens have the same extension, then how to explain
the diferences between (1) and (2) or between (3) and (4)? But
if Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens have diferent extensions,
then how to explain why Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens is
true? (For possible answers see, for example, Larson and Segal
1995.)
Semantics with Intensions
More commonly, intensions are taken seriously. In Meaning and
Necessity, Rudolf Carnap ([1947] 1956) presented his method
of intension and extension as an improvement over Gottlob
Freges way of distinguishing sense and reference. In Carnaps
system, each meaningful expression is assigned both an exten-
sion and intension. For example, the extension of human is the
class of human beings, the intension of human is the property of
being human, the extension of Walter Scott is Walter Scott, the
intension of Walter Scott is an individual concept of Walter Scott,
the extension of a sentence is its truth value, and the intension
of a sentence is the proposition it expresses. Notably, unlike
Freges senses, Carnaps intensions do not vary with linguistic
context, thereby, according to Carnap, avoiding a serious objec-
tion both to Freges approach and the related proposal by the
inluential logician Alonzo Church (1951).
In applying a precise distinction between intension and exten-
sion to natural language, Richard Montague (1974; see montague
grammar) was particularly inluential. Inspired by Carnap and
Church, Montague took an intension to be a mathematical func-
tion. his permitted a graceful way for meanings to combine, as
the application of function to argument. In one version of this
sort of theory (possible world semantics), the intension of
a sentence is a function from possible worlds to truth values, and
the extension of that sentence relative to a possible world is the
result of applying its intension function to that possible world. For
example, the intension of the sentence Hong Kong is in China
might be a function yielding the value true for all possible worlds
where Hong Kong is in China and false otherwise. Variations and
improvements to Montagues general approach have dominated
the ield of formal semantics (Gamut 1991; Heim and Kratzer
1998; Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet 2000).
Complications and Problems
Complications ensue when accounting for context-sensi-
tive expressions like the indexicals I or here or now.
Montague proposed complex intensions, mapping not possible
worlds but indices a combination of a possible world with
persons, places, times, and so on. David Kaplan (1989) instead
divided intensions into two pieces: character (the linguistic
meaning of an expression type) and content (the meaning of an
occurrence of an expression). Roughly, character plus context
determines content, and content plus context yields extension.
Kaplans arguments about indexicals and demonstratives, as
well as Saul Kripkes and Hilary Putnams on proper names and
natural kind terms, have led many to accept that these terms
are devices of direct reference; in efect, occurrences of these
terms have extensions but no intensions. Others have responded
by adopting the framework of two-dimensional semantics,
where expressions are assigned two diferent intensions (Garcia-
Carpintero and Maci 2006).
While semantic theories inspired by Carnap and Montague
do deal in intensions, they have much in common with the no-
intension theories discussed earlier. Not only are both sorts of
theories compositional and referential, but both sorts of theories
can also arguably fail in various ways to capture intuitive notions
of meaning. For example, if the intension of a sentence is a func-
tion from possible worlds to truth values, then if two sentences
have the same truth value at every possible world, then they have
the same intension. hat means that all true mathematical sen-
tences have the same intension, for presumably a mathematical
truth is true at every possible world. But 2 < 3 and 2 + 2 = 4 do
not have the same meaning.
Within current frameworks, lively discussion about these and
other questions continues. (For a useful introduction, see von
Fintel and Heim 2007.) More radically, others propose to rework
the foundations of semantics to produce more ine-grained
intensions (e.g., Fox and Lappin 2005). And then there is the
extreme view of J. J. Katz (1990): We should give up the claim that
intension determines extension and adopt an internalist notion
of intension better suited to the traditional duty of explaining
analyticity, synonymy, meaningfulness, and so forth.
A variety of views about the distinction between intension and
extension are alive. Widely, but not universally, it is thought that
both intensions and extensions are needed in semantics. Debate
continues about what intensions and extensions are, about what
the relation between intension and extension is, and about the
sorts of linguistic expressions that have them.
Patrick Hawley
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Carnap, Rudolf. [1947] 1956. Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics
and Modal Logic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chierchia, Gennaro, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 2000. Meaning and
Grammar. 2d ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Church, Alonzo. 1951. A formulation of the logic of sense and deno-
tation. In Structure, Method and Meaning: Essays in Honor of H. M.
Shefer, ed. P. Henle, H. Kallen, and S. Langer, 324. New York: Liberal
Arts Press.
Davidson, Donald. 1967. Truth and meaning. Synthese 17: 30423.
Reprinted in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1984).
Fox, Chris, and Shalom Lappin. 2005. Foundations of Intensional
Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.
397
Intentionality
Frege, Gottlob. [1892] 1997. On sense and reference. In he Frege
Reader, ed. M. Beaney, 15171. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gamut, L. T. F. 1991. Logic, Language and Meaning. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Garcia-Carpintero, Manuel, and Josep Maci, eds. 2006. Two-Dimensional
Semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heim, Irene, and Angelica Kratzer. 1998. Semantics in Generative
Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kaplan, David. 1989. Demonstratives. In hemes from Kaplan, ed. J.
Almog, J. Perry, and H. Wettstein, 481563. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Katz, J. J. 1990. he Metaphysics of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kripke, Saul. Naming and Necessity. 1980. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Larson, Rich, and Gabriel Segal. 1995. Knowledge of Meaning. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Mill, John Stuart. [1843] 1872. A System of Logic. 8th ed.
London: Longmans.
Montague, Richard. 1974. Formal Philosophy: Selected Papers of Richard
Montague, ed. Richmond homason. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Porphyry. 2003. Porphyrys Introduction. Trans. and commentary by
Jonathan Barnes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Putnam, Hilary. 1975. he meaning of meaning. In Philosophical
Papers. Vol. 2. Mind, Language and Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Quine, W. V. 1953. Two dogmas of empiricism. Philosophical
Review 60: 2043. Reprinted in From a Logical Point of View, 2d ed.
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961).
. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
von Fintel, Kai, and Irene Heim. 2007. Intensional Semantics. Manuscript,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
INTENTIONALITY
Aboutness
he closest thing to a synonym for intentionality is aboutness;
something exhibits intentionality if and only if it is about some-
thing. he relevant sense of about is best elucidated by exam-
ple: he sentence Saul Kripke is a philosopher is about Saul
Kripke; my belief that the weather in South Bend is dreary is about
the city of South Bend, Indiana; the black lines and curving blue
stripe on the map in my hand are about the streets of South Bend
and the St. Joseph River; the position of the needle on the gas
gauge in my car is about the amount of gasoline in its tank. While it
is diicult to ind an uncontroversial and illuminating paraphrase
of the relevant sense of about, its hard to deny that there is some
reasonably clear sense of aboutness common to these examples.
his characterization of intentionality as aboutness is only
true to a irst approximation because something can exhibit
intentionality without being about anything if it purports to be
about something. Zeus is not about, does not represent, any-
thing; this name, unlike Saul Kripke, does not have a worldly
correlate. Nonetheless, Zeus counts as an example of intention-
ality by virtue of the fact that it (in a diicult to explain sense)
aims to be about something, even if it does not succeed.
Intentionality, Content, and Reference
Glossing over a wealth of distinctions, we see that the vocabulary
used in discussions of intentionality is divisible into two broad
398
categories. On the one hand, we have reference, denotation,
and extension; on the other hand, we have content, meaning,
sense, connotation, and intension. he relationship between
these categories of terms is best illustrated via the intentionality
of linguistic expressions.
Just as names are about, in the relevant sense, the objects for
which they stand, so, one might think, predicates are about
the things of which they are true. Green is about the green
things, happy about the happy things, and so on. he things
that words are about, in this sense, are their references (deno-
tations, extensions). But, plausibly, a theory of reference for a
language would not be a full account of the content (meaning,
sense) of expressions of the language. To adapt an example from
W. V. O. Quine (1953), the sentences Dolly is a renate and
Dolly is a cordate may be alike with respect to the reference
of the expressions that compose them (because the set of cor-
dates is identical to the set of renates) even though, intuitively,
the two sentences say diferent things about Dolly. So it seems
that two expressions can have the same reference while difer-
ing in content. But many have thought that, as Gottlob Frege
(1892) suggested, the converse does not hold: two expressions
cant have the same content without also having the same refer-
ence. Intuitively, two sentences cant say the same thing about
the world or express the same thought without being about the
same things. his combination of views that the content of an
expression is standardly something over and above its reference,
and that the content of an expression determines its reference
is very widely accepted. (hough not universally; it is rejected by
defenders of a Chomskyan internalist view of meaning who take
meanings to be internal to the language-processing systems of
language users [Pietroski 2003] and by skeptics about content
[Quine 1953, 1960; Kripke 1982].)
hese views about the relationship between content and ref-
erence structure much contemporary work on intentionality, for
if content determines reference, it is natural to think that content
explains reference: Intentional phenomena come to be about
things by virtue of their possessing a content. his way of think-
ing about intentionality has several virtues. One is that it seems to
ofer an explanation of the aforementioned example of Zeus; if
aboutness is typically explained by possession of a content, then
perhaps the sense in which Zeus aims to be about something is
that it, like expressions that are genuinely about something, has
a content. Its just that in the case of Zeus, this content fails to
determine a reference.
Virtually nothing more can be said about content, reference,
and the relationship between the two without entering into mat-
ters about which there is not even rough agreement. heorists
difer about what sorts of things contents are, about whether
there are any expressions for which content and reference
coincide, and about whether there are any kinds of expressions
that cannot possess a content without possessing a reference.
Canonical works on these topics include Frege (1892), Russell
(1905), Frege (1918), Carnap (1947), Kripke (1972), and Kaplan
(1989).
Intentionality, Intensionality, and Intentions
It is worth mentioning at this point two persistent, though purely
terminological, sources of confusion about intentionality: the
Intentionality
distinctions between intentionality and intensionality, on the
one hand, and intentionality and intentions, on the other.
Intensionality is a property of sentence contexts. Given any
context in a sentence, we can then ask: Can we, by replacing
one expression or phrase in that context with another that has
the same reference, change the truth value of the sentences as a
whole? If so, then the context is said to be intensional.
So far, the connection between intentionality and intensional-
ity may seem to be merely orthographic. But it has been claimed
that the latter is a criterion for the former: that descriptions of
intentional phenomena will always include an intensional con-
text (Chisholm 1957). For descriptions of propositional atti-
tudes like beliefs, this seems plausible. For example,
John believes that the worlds most famous sheep is famous.
may be true while
John believes that Dolly the sheep is famous.
is false, even if the worlds most famous sheep and Dolly the
sheep have the same reference. But the criterion seems to fare
less well in other cases. For example,
he thick blue line on my map of South Bend represents the
St. Joseph River.
appears to ascribe the right sort of aboutness to qualify as a sen-
tence about intentionality, but the sentence does not contain
any intensional contexts. And many sentences that do contain
intensional contexts dont seem to be descriptions of intentional
phenomena. For example,
Mammals have a greater chance of heart failure than latworms
because they are cordates.
and
Mammals have a greater chance of heart failure than latworms
because they are renates.
difer in truth value, even though cordates and renates have the
same reference.
A second potential source of confusion is the similarity of
intention, and intentionality. Intention, like belief and original and derived intentionality. We began by noting the
desire, is the name of a type of mental state. Like beliefs and
desires, intentions exhibit intentionality, but they are no more
essential to intentionality than other mental states.
Intentionality and Mentality
hough intentionality is derived from intentio, a technical term
that had wide use in medieval philosophy, and intentio is itself
a translation of technical terms from premedieval Arabic phi-
losophy, modern usage of the term is usually traced to Franz
Brentanos 1874 Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint.
Brentano is standardly taken to have made two basic claims
about intentionality, the irst of which is that intentionality is
internally related to mentality:
Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what we might
call direction toward an object. Every mental phenomenon
includes something as an object within itself, although they
do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is
presented, in judgement something is airmed or denied, in love
loved, in hate hated, in desire desired, and so on.
his is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No
physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We can, there-
fore, deine mental phenomena by saying that they are those
phenomena which contain an object intentionally within them-
selves. (Brentano [1874] 1997, II.i.5)
We can think of Brentanos thesis as having two components:
Intentionality is necessary for mentality; all mental states
exhibit intentionality.
Intentionality is suicient for mentality; everything that
exhibits intentionality is a mental state.
he claim of necessity is uncontroversial when we are thinking of
propositional attitudes like believing, supposing, and judging. It
is more controversial but still plausible when we think of percep-
tual states; the sense in which my visual experience is currently
of or about a computer screen is recognizably the same as the
sense in which a name is a name of its bearer.
Bodily sensations like itches and pains, however, may seem
to be counterexamples to Brentanos claim that intentionality is
necessary for mentality. My sensation of throbbing pain is clearly
a mental state but can it be said to represent, or be about, any-
thing at all? Many have thought not and have seen the attempt
to ind intentionality in sensations as an ad hoc attempt to ind
something common to mental phenomena (Rorty 1979). But
this negative verdict can be challenged, and it has been in recent
philosophy of mind. For one thing, pains are felt as located, and
given this, it is not implausible to think of them as about the part
of the body where they are felt to be (Tye 1995; Byrne 2001).
On the face of it, the other half of Brentanos thesis that inten-
tionality deines the mental seems to be less well-of. How can
one claim that intentionality is suicient for mentality when
things that are clearly not mental states like words, parts of
maps, and gas gauges exhibit intentionality?
Original and Derived Intentionality
he best answer to this question invokes a distinction between
diversity of things that exhibit intentionality: mental states, lin-
guistic expressions, maps, gas gauges. But it is plausible to think
that at least some of these intentional phenomena acquire this
status via a relation to some other more fundamental intentional
phenomenon. If this is correct, we can recast the second half of
Brentanos thesis as the claim that only mental phenomena have
original intentionality: intentionality not explicable in terms of
other intentional phenomena.
his sort of defense of Brentano carries with it a commit-
ment to the research program of explaining the intentionality
of language, maps, and gas gauges in terms of the intentionality
of the mental. his research program has considerable promise
and has received sophisticated development over the last few
decades, with most of the attention focused on explanations of
linguistic meaning in terms of mental content.
One well-developed attempt to provide such an explana-
tion begins with the thought that linguistic expressions mean
what they do because of what speakers intend to convey by
399
Intentionality
using them (Grice 1957, 1969; Schifer 1972, 1982). On this
view, what a speaker means by uttering an expression on an
occasion (speaker-meaning) is a function of the beliefs that
that speaker intends to bring about in his or her audience via
their recognition of that communicative intention, and, fur-
ther, what an expression means in a community is a function
of what speakers mean or would mean by using the expression
on various occasions. By this two-part reduction (of expres-
sion-meaning to speaker-meaning, and speaker-meaning to
communicative intentions), the intentionality of language is
explained in terms of the intentionality of intentions. Critics
of this approach have focused on its inability to explain uses
of language in thought and apparently normal examples of
communication in which speakers lack the requisite commu-
nicative intentions (Chomsky 1975; Schifer 1987). But despite
the problems faced by speciic versions of this reductive pro-
gram, there is widespread agreement that there is some way of
explaining the intentionality of language via the intentional-
ity of the mental states of language users if not their inten-
tions, then perhaps their beliefs (Lewis 1975). (Opposed views
of the source of the intentionality of language are defended in
Laurence 1996 and Brandom 1994.)
The Reduction of Original Intentionality
Supposing that there is a genuine distinction between original
and derived intentionality, there is a further question about
whether original intentionality can itself be explained. he sec-
ond thesis about intentionality often associated with Brentano
is that it cant be: Original intentionality is not only deinitive of
mentality but also inexplicable in nonintentional terms. By con-
trast, the view dominant in recent years may be summed up as
follows:
I suppose that sooner or later the physicists will complete the
catalogue theyve been compiling of the ultimate and irreduc-
ible properties of things. When they do, the likes of spin, charm,
and charge will perhaps appear on their list. But aboutness surely
wont; intentionality simply doesnt go that deep. If aboutness original intentionality to nonintentional facts, what attitude
is real, it must really be something else. (Fodor 1987, 97)
In part because most recent theorists have adopted the view,
sketched here, that original intentionality is found at the level of
thought, these theorists have approached the task of explaining
original intentionality by constructing theories of mental con-
tent. he standard method of theory construction takes as given
the following broad thesis: Being in a certain mental state is a
matter of being in an internal state that has properties that make
it a mental state of the relevant type with the relevant content.
his view is sometimes called the representational theory of the
mind though this label is sometimes used for the conjunction
of the present view with the language of thought hypothe-
sis (about which more later) and other times is called function-
alism though this label is sometimes used for the conjunction
of the present view with the thesis that the content-determining
properties of internal states are their functional roles.
he natural next questions are, therefore: What properties of
internal states make them mental states of a certain type with
a certain content? And which internal states are the bearers of
content?
400
he internal states in question will presumably be complex
physical states of subjects. Given this, we can ask: Is the content
of such states derived from the contents of its parts so that, in
the case of a state that has the content that grass is green, the
state would have one part representing grass, and another rep-
resenting the color green or are the fundamental content-con-
ferring properties a matter of the propositional attitude state as
whole? To take the former option is to endorse the language of
thought hypothesis (Fodor 1975; Rey 1995) and to take the latter
is to reject it (Stalnaker 1990; Blackburn 1984).
Whether or not the language of thought hypothesis is true,
the principal challenge in constructing a theory of content is to
specify the properties that confer contents on those representa-
tions. Here, the proliferation of theories is such that it is hardly
possible to do better than the following list of candidate comple-
tions of an internal representation x has the content p if and
only if:
x is actually caused by ps being the case / ps being the case
would, under epistemically ideal conditions, cause that inter-
nal state (Stalnaker 1984) / x covaries with ps being the case
during the learning period when the state is acquiring a
content (Dretske 1981).
It is the biological function of x to be present when p is the
case (Millikan 1989).
x has nomological connections of speciied kinds with prop-
erty p (Fodor 1990).
here is an isomorphism between the system comprised of x
and the rest of the agents internal representations and a sys-
tem containing p which maps x onto p (Cummins 1989).
A (speciied) theory maps xs functional role its causal con-
nections to perceptual input, behavioral output, and other
internal representations onto p (Block 1986; Harman [1988]
1999).
he discussion so far leaves open an important metaquestion
about intentionality: Supposing that there is no reduction of
should we take toward the claims about the intentionality of
mental states to which we unhesitatingly subscribe in daily life?
Some who have rejected such analyses have put alleged inten-
tional facts into the same category as alleged facts about phlo-
giston, witches, and other posits of false theories (Quine 1960;
Churchland 1981); others have taken the failure of reductions of
original intentionality to show that intentionality is an unana-
lyzable feature of the world, and no less real for that (Chisholm
1957; Searle 1983).
Jef Speaks
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Blackburn, S. 1984. Spreading the Word. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Block, N. 1986. Advertisement for a semantics for psychology. In
Mental Representation: A Reader, ed. S. Stich and T. Warield, 81141.
Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.
Brandom, R. 1994. Making It Explicit. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Brentano, F. [1874] 1997. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint.
London: Routledge.
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Byrne, A. 2001. Intentionalism defended. Philosophical Review
110: 199240.
Carnap, R. 1947. Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal
Logic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chisholm, R. 1957. Perceiving: A Philosophical Study. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Chomsky, N. 1975. Relections on Language. London: Temple-Smith.
Churchland, P. 1981. Eliminative materialism and the propositional
attitudes. Journal of Philosophy 78.2: 6790.
Crane, T. 1998. Intentionality as the mark of the mental. In Current Issues
in Philosophy of Mind, ed. A. OHear, 22951. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Cummins, R. 1989. Meaning and Mental Representation. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Dretske, F. 1981. Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. 1975. he Language of hought. Hassocks, UK: Harvester.
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Frege, G. 1892. On sense and reference. In Translations from the
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Grice, P. 1957. Meaning. Philosophical Review 66.3: 17788.
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Words, 86116. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Harman, G. [1988] 1999. Wide functionalism. In Reasoning, Meaning,
and Mind, 23543. Oxford: Clarendon.
Husserl, E. [1901] 2002. Logical Investigations. 2 vols.
London: Routledge.
Kaplan, D. 1989. Demonstratives. In hemes from Kaplan, ed.
J. Almog, J. Perry, and H. Wettstein, 481563. Oxford: Oxford
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Kripke, S. 1972. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
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Exposition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Laurence, S. 1996. A Chomskian alternative to convention-based seman-
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Lewis, D. 1975. Languages and language. In Language, Mind, and
Knowledge, ed. K. Gunderson, 335. Minneapolis: University of
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Millikan, R. 1989. Biosemantics. Journal of Philosophy 86.6: 28197.
Moran, D. 1996. Brentanos thesis. Proceedings of the Aristotelian
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Perler, D., ed. 2001. Ancient and Medieval heories of Intentionality.
Boston: Brill.
Pietroski, P. 2003. he character of natural language semantics. In
Epistemology of Language, 21756. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Quine, W. V. 1953. Two dogmas of empiricism. In From a Logical Point
of View, 2046. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rey, G. 1995. A not merely empirical argument for a language of
thought. Philosophical Perspectives 9: 20122.
Rorty, R. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Russell, B. 1905. On denoting. Mind 14: 47993.
Schifer, S. 1972. Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Internal Reconstruction
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Logic 23: 11956.
. 1987. Remnants of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Searle, J. 1983. Intentionality. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Stalnaker, R. 1984. Inquiry. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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22540. New York: Oxford University Press.
Tye, M. 1995. Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational heory
of the Phenomenal Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
INTERNAL RECONSTRUCTION
Internal reconstruction (IR) is a method, or group of methods,
used to establish unattested earlier forms of languages. It difers
from the comparative method, which has similar aims, in
being based on the features of one language, without external
reference, and it is therefore appropriately applied to languages
without relatives, such as language isolates or reconstructed
protolanguages. Languages reconstructed by these means are
referred to as prelanguages, as opposed to the protolanguages
that result from the application of the comparative method.
IR arose in the later nineteenth century as an extension of
the comparative method. For example, Ferdinand de Saussures
reconstruction of sonant coeicients later termed laryngeals
for Indo-European was based largely on this method, though it
was not recognized as legitimate at the time, and his reconstruc-
tions were largely ignored. he method was identiied in the early
twentieth century but was considered too speculative, method-
ologically unsound, and lacking controls on its results. It was not
until documentary evidence for laryngeals was found in Hittite
that its value was recognized, and then not universally.
IR is not a single method but a group of approaches having
in common reliance on internal features of the language. It is
possible to identify three such approaches, which are not nec-
essarily completely distinct nor mutually exclusive: historical
morphophonemics, regularization of systems, and universal and
typological reconstruction.
Historical Morphophonemics
his approach, applicable only to phonology, is fairly well
deined methodologically. It is based on the structuralist
principle of the morphophoneme, which also corresponds to
the underlying phoneme of classical generative phonology.
Morphophonemes comprise a set of morphologically related
phonemes, that is, occurring in diferent forms of the same
morpheme. he principle is that the diferent phonemes result
from the application of diferent phonological changes in difer-
ent contexts; by reducing these alternating phonemes to a single
form, we efectively establish the original phoneme from which
they are derived. For example, in Latin /s/ became /r/ between
vowels, giving alternations such as los/lor-. Synchronically, this
provides us with a morphophoneme {S}; historically, we assume
that this corresponds to an original phoneme /s/. A weakness of
this method is that it assumes that there was no morphophone-
mic alternation in earlier stages of languages.
Regularization of Systems
While historical morphophonemics works by eliminating
alternations and apparent irregularities, the regularization of
401
Internal Reconstruction
systems method involves, in efect, the generalization of this
process to whole systems. hus, where there are inconsistencies
in paradigms for example, with diferent classes of nouns or
verbs the method seeks to eliminate these diferences in order
to produce a single paradigm, on the assumption that inconsis-
tencies arise through change. For example, the diferent declen-
sions or conjugations of Latin and Greek or the forms of Germanic
strong verbs can be reduced to single patterns. Again, a weakness
of this approach is that it assumes complete consistency in the
prelanguage.
Universal and Typological Reconstruction
his is the most speculative and perhaps methodologically the
least controllable approach, which to some extent goes beyond
purely internal reconstruction inasmuch as it invokes general
properties of languages. hese properties may be either universal
or typological. In the former case the method relies on language
universals, which are held to determine either the synchronic
structures of languages or the diachronic processes of change
(see synchrony and diachrony). hese have the efect of
constraining possible reconstructions since we may not postu-
late earlier states nor processes of change that do not conform to
the universals.
hus, in phonology we may assume universal phonetic
processes (for example, the palatalization of velar consonants
in the neighbourhood of front vowels); a reconstruction that
assumes the reverse (palatalization with back vowels) would be
ruled out. Similarly, the universal process described by the term
grammaticalization the development of lexical items
into grammatical items precludes reconstructing the reverse.
here may also be constraints on structures and systems; if all
languages must have, say, vowels, then we cannot reconstruct
an earlier stage without them. In all such cases, our reconstruc-
tions will seek to establish earlier forms in compliance with
these universal constraints.
he typological approach (see typology) is similar, but it
relects language types rather than universal properties. he
principle here is that language typology involves not just iso-
lated features but, rather, sets of harmonizing or co-occurring
features. According to one widely used typology, languages fall
into two basic types, VO and OV, according to the order of verb
and object, but this ordering is also relected in the order of other
items, such as noun and adjective (VO languages generally also
have NA, and OV languages have AN), and the occurrence of
prepositions or postpositions (VO languages favor the former,
OV languages the latter). Given such principles of harmony, a
language that has one such order, say, NA, will be expected to
have the other harmonic orders; if it does not, we can reconstruct
this harmony for an earlier period of the language. In the case
of English, for example, which has VO but AN, we can assume
an earlier stage that had either NA or OV (the latter is assumed).
Other typological parameters can be used in an analogous fash-
ion. A weakness of this method, however, is that it assumes that
languages will originally have been typologically consistent,
though consistency is not necessarily an inherent attribute of
language.
In spite of potential weaknesses, the methods of IR have
proved useful in establishing earlier stages of languages in cases
402
Interpretation and Explanation
where the comparative method cannot be applied. he meth-
ods and especially the approach that relies on universals and
typology are extremely powerful, and for that very reason they
have often been regarded with some suspicion and must be used
with caution.
Anthony Fox
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Campbell, Lyle. 1998. Historical Linguistics: An Introduction.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. See Chapters 7 and 8.
Fox, Anthony. 1995. Linguistic Reconstruction: An Introduction to heory
and Method. Oxford: Oxford University Press. See Chapters 7 and 8.
Lehmann, Winfred. 1992. Historical Linguistics. London: Routledge. See
Chapter 8.
INTERPRETATION AND EXPLANATION
An interpretation is an account of what is said, done, and thought
by some person or people an account at the level of content. An
interpretation may take as its subject some particular episode
involving some agents action. Consider a bosss remarks to a
new employee about her skirt. (Is the boss generally a fashion
maven? Does the boss wear skirts or chase skirts?) What is the
agent saying, doing, and thinking? An interpretation may take as
its subject some kind of utterance or activity in a social group.
Consider some students at a game chanting Were gonna beat
the hell out of you. What were they really saying, doing, and
thinking? An understanding of such matters an interpretation
depends epistemically on an associated explanatory understand-
ing of why such things are said and done.
An interpreted episode or a phenomenon typically involves
some linguistic activity. Yet an interpretation is more than a
straightforward translation for those utterances. he chanting
of the students can be homophonically translated. But is their
utterance primarily a part of a ritual of hope and group identi-
ication or an expression of belief? Consider also one historical
episode: George W. Bushs insistance that it is morally wrong
to destroy life in order to save life (quoted in Stolberg 21 May
2005). Again, for speakers of English, homophonic translation is
uncontroversial. Yet just what was expressed? What would his
principle allow, and what would it rule out? What is Bush saying
and doing here?
Interpretation goes beyond translation in part because inter-
pretation comes to terms with pragmatic elements of an
utterance what speech-acts are performed and how con-
versational implicature may outrun what is explicit. An
acceptable treatment of these matters is bound up with rich
understandings of agents situated projects their beliefs and
desires.
An interpretation may constrain the translation of some sub-
jects language on which it depends. his is common in anthro-
pological studies of a peoples religion or magic as one
translation may strongly suggest an understanding that is at odds
with an anthropological interpretation, whereas an alternative
translation may support that interpretation. he classic debates
between symbolist and intellectualist anthropologists over how
to interpret various folk religions had implications for whether
Interpretation and Explanation
the associated linguistic constructions should be translated into
terms that suggested theories about causes (as intellectu-
alists such as Horton 1970, 1982 urge), or into more guarded
terms that suggested symbolic expression (as symbolists such as
Leach 1954 and Beattie 1970 urge) perhaps understandings
and inluences. Here, translation (treating the literal said) and
interpretation (of what is ultimately said, done, and thought) are
interdependent. (Turner 1980; Henderson 1993; Risjord 2000;
Stueber 2006). As Donald Davidson (1984) argued, in settling
upon an interpretation and translation, several matters must
be sorted out together interrelated matters having to do with
belief, desire, and meaning (see meaning and belief, radi-
cal interpretation, agreement maximization, and
charity, principle of).
What, then, is the mark of a good interpretation? Surprisingly,
many theorists, both historical and contemporary from various
traditions, can be seen to agree on an answer to this epistemo-
logical question: A successful or adequate interpretation afords
an explanatory understanding of what is said, done, and thought.
An interpretation of someone or some folk as doing or saying
some sort of thing is of a piece with an explanatory understand-
ing. Epistemologically, the two stand or fall together. he agree-
ment here is pervasive but does not run deep. Writers quickly
come to difer over what makes for a successful explanation of
thought and deed and, thus, what marks good interpretation.
(For example, those urging a strong principle of charity such
as Davidson typically think of explanation here as a matter of
exhibiting rationality, while others may see more place for expla-
nations that do not rationalize. Various conceptions of what
make for explanatory understandings are discussed later.)
Focus for a time on the agreement. Consider again Bushs
assertion that it is wrong to destroy life in order to save life. he
irst thing to notice is the wide range of information that we rec-
ognize as relevant to its interpretation. It was uttered in the con-
text of legislation regarding research using embryonic stem cells.
In keeping with the venerable discussions of hermeneutics (see
philology and hermeneutics), one should consider what
was also said in the wider context in which the assertion was
advanced. Its interpretation is bound up with the interpretation
of the whole of Bushs remarks which, in turn, is dependent
on successful treatment of the various component utterances.
Information having to do with much beyond this set of remarks is
also relevant. For example, how did Bush and his political advis-
ers understand their political situation? hat Bush was politically
beholden to right-wing conservative Christians even was one
is relevant. hat they hold that human life begins at conception is
relevant. So also is information regarding the wider political con-
text. Was the conservative Christian component of his political
base at that time disenchanted and thought to need iring up?
Sweeping moral statements are commonly best interpreted as
containing an implicit ceteris paribus clause. One might wonder
if Bushs statement should be understood as likewise qualiied.
What is known about whether Bush would authorize the military
to destroy lives to save lives? How does Bush understand col-
lateral damage in warfare? Is the military context one in which
ceteris is not paribus? Is the principle unqualiied except that
it expresses a prima facie duty that can be overridden by other
duties? But what other duties? All this information, and much
more, bears on which of several possible interpretations is ulti-
mately most satisfactory. Bush might be understood as having
advanced a moral principle that is implicitly qualiied so that
there is no inconsistency with his military policies. Alternatively,
there might have been unnoticed inconsistency as all humans
exhibit some inconsistency. Finally, one might consider whether
Bush might have noticed an inconsistency that he conveniently
omits to mention.
he central point concerns how diverse information allows
one to decide among such alternative interpretations: It bears
on the explanation of what is said, done, and thought in the epi-
sode interpreted. he political concerns of Bush and his advis-
ers might help to explain the assertion as political boilerplate.
Certainly the staking out of political positions, the responsive-
ness to constituencies, and the like can lead politicians to cast
about for simple (simplistic) formulations of sweeping principles
in which to wrap the desired policy. Is this the explanation, and
interpretation, of Bushs assertion? Understood and explained
as boilerplate, these questions about the exact content of the
asserted principle (whether or how it is implicitly qualiied), the
way it then squares with various policies, and the obviousness of
inconsistency (if any) may become less pressing as they matter
less to the explanation of the episode. What is then central is the
sense of certain politicians for how taking the moral high road
will play in the relevant constituencies. But perhaps one senses
that Bush is a politician whose public face is here tied to his
own moral view of the world. hen, the degree of inconsistency
and how he could be insensitive to it become more central as a
matter of explanatory concern. In either case, one is informed
both by a general sense for what makes humans tick (cogni-
tively and otherwise) and for an antecedently formed impres-
sion of this person in particular by the sedimented results of
past interpretations. his is to draw upon generic resources for
explaining human action and thought and on resources more
speciic to this individual. Again, each is the fruit of past prac-
tice that is both interpretive and explanatory. One has a sense for
how humans think and act and for variations. One has a sense
for Bushs character as one variation, one that is the product
of his biography, and one that is evinced in past interpreted and
explained practice.
Just how one ends up interpreting the assertion in question
and the associated political or moral act depends on the explana-
tion for this episode that one judges to be most likely, given all that
one knows about the agent or agents involved and about humans
as agents. Interpretation, it seems, is a matter of abduction or
inference to the best explanation of an ongoing, always revis-
able, sort. (Readers should ind it easy to explore many further
alternatives and wrinkles in understanding the Bush case and
to assure themselves that their plausibility devolves onto the
question of greater or lesser explicability.)
he interdependence of interpretation and explanation, their
being two faces of the same coin, is widely appreciated. What is
contested is how to understand the explanation of thought and
deed. here are two broad schools of thought here, although rep-
resentatives of each have been diverse.
Some think of explanation as subsumption as a matter of
deploying generalizations to show that the case or phenomenon
in question was dependent on certain antecedents. To conceive
403
Interpretation and Explanation
of the explanation of thought and action along these lines is to
generalize a common understanding of scientiic explanation. C.
Hempel (1965) provides a particularly clear variant in his vener-
able hypothetical-deductive and statistical-probabilistic models
of explanation. (However, there are reasons to think that the
approach to scientiic explanation is itself lawed; see, for exam-
ple, Salmon 1989.) A very diferent subsumptive model is pro-
vided by James Woodwards (2000) discussions of explanation in
the special sciences. Woodward thinks that the generalizations
produced and deployed are themselves not exceptionless nomic
generalizations, but relatively invariant generalizations holding
within imperfectly speciied limits.
he second school of thought views explanation of thought
and action as revealing intelligibility explanation is understood
as a matter of understanding what is said and done as having or
expressing a signiicance or meaning so that the whole thereby
becomes intelligible. Just what being intelligible comes to is ing and explanation of the agent answering the why-question by
itself understood variously. Certainly a kind and degree of inter-
nal contentful coherence plays a role as does the interpreters
ability to then see how and why one would do as indicated on the
basis of such reasons. hose who draw on the hermeneutic tradi-
tion are representatives. So also is R. G. Collingwood (1946) with
his conception of explanation as reenactment. Something like
Collingwoods approach has enjoyed a contemporary revival of
sorts within cognitive psychology where there has been much
work on explanation of thought and deed as a kind of simula-
tion in which ones own cognitive processes are taken of line
and put to work on imagined input that relects ones provisional
interpretation of a subject. One imaginatively puts oneself in
the others shoes and deliberates or reasons; if ones simula-
tion then accords with observed actions or expressed beliefs, one
has a prima facie successful explanation (see Stueber [2006] for a
recent overview and discussion).
As noted, the representatives of each approach have been
diverse. Still, we can appreciate that while proponents of these
approaches difer over what makes for explanation, they com-
monly understand that interpretation epistemically depends
on explanation. (It is worth adding that most would also rec-
ognize that the information supposed in an explanation itself
depends on interpretations so that there is ultimately a holistic
epistemic interdependence here.) A uniied understanding can
then be had by way of drawing on a very general understanding
of explanation. When we do this, elements of the diverse inter-
pretive/explanatory approaches can be understood as comple-
mentary epistemologies of explanation, rather than as competing
accounts of what it is to explain thought and action. Let me
explain by drawing on what has come to be called the erotetic
account of explanation (see Salmon 1989; van Fraassen 1980).
his label refers to the logic of questions and answers erotetic
logic. On this approach, an explanation is an answer to a ques-
tion typically a why-question or a how-question. In either case,
the resources for answering the question allow one to under-
stand a pattern of dependencies. he resources for answering a
why-question (let us focus on these) should allow us to appreci-
ate that what is done or said was dependent on certain standing
states and events. If we can do this, we can answer a range of
associated what-if-things-had-been-diferent questions explor-
ing these dependencies (see possible worlds semantics).
404
To illustrate, economic theory might inform our explanation
and interpretation of an individuals verbal exchange with his or
her broker as the reception of and risky use of insider information
to avert a loss, interpreting and explaining this as an expectable
form of proit maximization in light of the agents understand-
ing of situated risks of detection. (Perhaps the agent said, hat
is unacceptable exposure to risk. he explanation envisioned
supports interpreting this as an instruction to sell, rather than as
a merely general point about levels of risk in certain portfolios.)
Without drawing on theory, one might imaginatively put oneself
in the agents shoes (under tentative interpretation) and see that
one would do the same as the simulation theorist envisions. In
both cases, one appreciates that with diferent information and
antecedent beliefs and values, the agent would have done system-
atically otherwise. hus, generalizations about economic agents
and imaginative simulation might support a single understand-
attention to the same dependencies (under interpretation).
If explanation is understood as a matter of answers to how-
and why-questions (and associated what-if-things-had-been-
diferent questions), then what have been taken to be competing
accounts of explanation can be understood in a fashion that
renders them compatible, and afords us a multifaceted under-
standing of the explanatory practice associated with interpreta-
tion. he pivotal move is to abandon each tradition insofar as
it attempts to delimit what counts as an explanation treating
the erotetic understanding as the more generic and acceptable
account of explanation. hen, approaches such as Woodwards
(appealing to subsumption under generalizations with signii-
cant invariance) and the simulation theorists (appealing to the
imaginative use of our of-line cognitive capacity) can each be
recognized as part of a full epistemic story. Subsumption and
simulation each have their role in coming to appreciate why the
agent or agents acted thus and what they would have done if
things had been relevantly diferent. hus, my suggestion is that
explanation is the mark of a good interpretation, that explana-
tion typically itself supposes a tentative interpretation, that the
generic understanding of explanation is that provided by erotetic
logic, and that it commonly is attained by some amalgamation of
the epistemic resources that have been of concern in traditions
that have wrongly claimed to provide the account of explana-
tion in the human sciences.
David Henderson
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Beattie, J. H. M. 1970. On understanding ritual. In Rationality, ed. Bryan
Wilson, 24068. Worchester, UK: Basil Blackwell.
Collingwood, R. G. 1946. he Idea of History. Oxford: Clarendon.
Davidson, Donald. 1984. Belief and the basis of meaning. In Inquiries
into Truth and Interpretation, 14154. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Hempel, C. 1965. Aspects of Scientiic Explanation and Other Essays. New
York: he Free Press.
Henderson, David. 1993. Interpretation and Explanation in the Human
Sciences. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Horton, Robin. 1970. African traditional thought and Western sci-
ence. In Rationality, ed. Bryan Wilson, 13171. Worchester, UK: Basil
Blackwell.
Interpretive Community
. 1982. Tradition and modernity revisited. In Rationality and
Relativism, ed. Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes, 20160. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Leach, E. R. 1954. he Political Systems of Highland Burma. London: Bell.
Risjord, Mark. 2000. Woodcutters and Witchcraft. Albany: State University
of New York Press.
Salmon, Wesley. 1989. Four decades of scientiic explanation. In
Scientiic Explanation, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science.
Vol. 13. Ed. P. Kitcher and W. Salmon, 3219. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Stolberg, Sherly Gay. In Rare hreat, Bush Vows Veto of Stem Cell Bill.
New York Times, 21 May 2005. Stueber, Karsten. 2006. Rediscovering
Empathy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Turner, Stephen. 1980. Sociological Explanation as Translation.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
van Fraassen, Bas. 1980. he Scientiic Image. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Woodward, James. 2000. Explanations and invariance in the special
sciences. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 51: 197254.
INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITY
In 1976, literary critic Stanley Fish used this term to describe
the unspoken (often unknown) alliances among readers who
share similar strategies for determining what a text means. his
theory of pragmatics, he says, is the explanation for both the
stability of interpretations among diferent readers (they belong
to the same community) and for the regularity with which a sin-
gle reader will employ diferent interpretive strategies and thus
make diferent texts (he belongs to diferent communities) (Fish
1980, 171).
he notion of interpretive community insists upon the pri-
macy of situated readers, and it can be thought of as a theory
of creative reading. Fish says that a set of general assumptions
on how one ought to interpret a text precedes every act of inter-
pretation; thus, a reader always perceives a given text within an
already in-place hermeneutical framework. One does not read
the words on a page and then decide what those words mean
because no temporal separation exists between acts of percep-
tion and interpretation. Instead, ones community conditions
how its members read those words in the irst place. As such,
readers actually write a text for themselves as they read, for they
have a tool kit of interpretive strategies always at work determin-
ing what certain words will mean should they arise in a given
context. Readers using the same tool kit belong to the same
community.
One can see interpretive communities at work in Christian
typology, a mode of biblical exegesis that aims to square Old
Testament texts with the events recounted in the New Testament.
For the typologist, the belief that Jesus was God combines with
other assumptions in order to form the exegetes set of interpre-
tive strategies. Other readers who share these strategies make up
this exegetes community even if they do not know one another,
which explains how two Christians might independently inter-
pret some events in the Old Testament as prophesies of Jesus
Christ. Of course, a Jew, Gnostic, or pagan produces a much dif-
ferent meaning of those same Hebrew texts because he or she
works from a community that reads/writes those texts difer-
ently. And inally, a look at Paul of Tarsus demonstrates how the
Intertextuality
same person writes two diferent texts for himself when reading
from diferent interpretive communities, for he understands the
Hebrew texts as prophesies of Jesus Christ only after his conver-
sion at Damascus.
Fishs theory has been criticized for making words have no
meaning. He responds with just the opposite: Words always have
meaning, in fact many meanings, all of which are constructed by
situated readers in various communities. Fish adds that his the-
ory is sociological, not normative, that is, it describes only what
people say (or think) a text means; it does not prescribe how
we ought to interpret texts. Finally, to the objection that some
authors use certain techniques to ensure that their texts convey
certain meanings, he responds that those meanings come to frui-
tion only if the reader belongs to the same interpretive commu-
nity as that author.
Jefrey R. Wilson
WORK CITED
Fish, Stanley Eugene. 1980. Is here a Text in his Class? he Authority of
Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
INTERTEXTUALITY
Building on Mikhail Bakhtins (1981) discussion of the dialogic
nature of language, Julia Kristeva (1986) coined the term inter-
textuality for the multiple ways in which texts refer to and draw
on other texts. his notion highlights the interconnectedness of
texts and challenges deep-rooted literary values, such as auton-
omy, uniqueness, and originality (Allen 2000, 56). An inter-
textual perspective views text production as a social practice in
which diferent texts, genres, and discourses are drawn upon and
text consumption as a process in which readers may bring addi-
tional texts not only those that have shaped production into
the interpretation process (Fairclough 1992, 845). he study
of intertextuality does not focus solely (or even primarily) on
the speciic prior texts that are brought into play in a given text;
rather, it also examines the implicit texts underlying production
and interpretation (e.g., presuppositions, genre conventions)
(Culler 1976, 1388). hus, a newspaper crime report has inter-
textual links not only to eyewitnesses accounts and previous
reports on the same and/or similar events but also to newswrit-
ing conventions, propositions that the journalist takes as given,
and even the journalists/readers understanding of crimes in
general.
Reported speech, a prime example of intertextuality, has been
extensively studied in sociolinguistics. Reporting speech is
always a reformulation of the original act. Even if prior speech is
reported verbatim, the reporting speaker may use prosodic fea-
tures like stress and intonation to indicate his/her interpre-
tation of the utterance, or he/she may frame the reported speech
in such a way as to manipulate the addressees perception of the
reported speaker. In some cases, material represented as reported
speech is not spoken by anyone at all. hese observations have
led Deborah Tannen (1989) to conclude that reported speech is
primarily the creation of the reporting speaker and serves to cre-
ate a sense of interpersonal involvement between the reporting
speaker and the addressee in the reporting context.
405
Intertextuality
Reported speech is an example of what Norman Fairclough
(1992) calls manifest intertextuality. Manifest intertextuality
refers to the way in which speciic other texts are overtly drawn
upon within a text. In addition to reported speech, it covers such
phenomena as irony, negation, and presupposition. In
contrast, constitutive intertextuality also known as interdiscur-
sivity refers to the way in which texts draw on abstract sets of
conventions like genres and styles. In their research on inter-
discursivity, several critical discourse analysts have
noticed a widespread appropriation of conversational styles in
public discourse. Focusing on a consumer feature about lipstick
from a British teenage magazine, Mary Talbot (1995) examines
how the text producer exploits features of conversational speech
(e.g., the pronoun you, expressive punctuation) to establish an
informal, friendly relationship with the reader. his practice,
however, is far from benign. Under the guise of ofering sis-
terly advice, the consumer feature serves as covert advertising
and trains teenage readers to become consumers of cosmetic
products.
Generic intertextuality, a notion developed by anthropologists
Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs, can be viewed as a particu-
lar kind of interdiscursivity. hey deine generic intertextuality as
the construction of the relationship between a text and a genre,
and they are interested in how and for what purposes this rela-
tionship is established in communicative practice (Briggs and
Bauman 1992). hey see genre as a speech style that serves as an
orienting schema for the production and reception of discourse.
Genre interacts with such factors as the interactional context and
the speakers/writers communicative goals in shaping a given
text. In turn, these factors may lead to the selective adoption of
the constituent features of the generic framework and create an
intertextual gap between the text and its generic model. Briggs
and Bauman argue that research on strategies for manipulating
intertextual gaps between texts and their generic schemas can
shed light on issues of power, ideology, and political economy.
In cultures with traditional genres that are invested with great
power, speakers/writers often minimize the distance between
their texts and these genres. his serves as a powerful strategy
for creating textual authority. At times, however, speakers/writ-
ers may maximize the intertextual gaps between texts and their
generic models. hey may do so to resist the hegemony of estab-
lished genres or to claim authority in cases where creativity is
highly valued.
Appropriation, a speciic case of intertextuality, refers to the
practice of adopting words, expressions, or ways of speaking
that are generally thought to belong to someone else. Many
white American teenagers use elements of African-American
vernacular English (AAVE) in their speech so as to align them-
selves with hip-hop culture and/or to project an urban youth
identity by exploiting certain connotations of AAVE (e.g., tough-
ness). Appropriation, however, may also serve disailiating or
even denigrating purposes. In the United States, some monolin-
gual Anglos use what anthropologist Jane Hill (1993) call Mock
Spanish that is, a subregister of colloquial English made
up of (pseudo-)Spanish expressions (e.g., maana) to proj-
ect a congenial persona. Yet to make sense of Mock Spanish,
one also requires access to certain racist beliefs about Spanish
speakers. Maana works as a humorous substitute for later
406
Intonation
only because of the stereotype of Spanish speakers as lazy
and procrastinating.
Several issues continue to dominate sociolinguistic research
on intertextuality. One, to which I have alluded, focuses on
the relation of intertextuality to power. Others are concerned
with the conditions that make decontextualization and recon-
textualization possible, as well as the semantic and functional
changes that texts undergo as a result of recontextualization.
Intertextuality also raises interesting issues about authorship.
If all texts are created out of prior texts and conventions, what
is an author, and who is responsible for what is said/written?
hese issues are likely to be worked out diferently in diferent
cultures.
Andrew Wong
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Allen, Graham. 2000. Intertextuality. London: Routledge.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. he Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist,
trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas
Press.
Bauman, Richard. 2004. A World of Others Words: Cross-Cultural
Perspectives on Intertextuality. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Briggs, Charles, and Richard Bauman. 1992. Genre, intertextuality, and
social power. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2: 13172.
Culler, Jonathan. 1976. Presupposition and intertextuality.
MLN: Modern Language Notes 91: 138096.
Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge,
UK: Polity.
Hill, Jane. 1993. Hasta la vista, baby: Anglo Spanish in the American
Southwest. Critique of Anthropology 13: 14576.
Kristeva, Julia. 1986. Word, dialogue, and the novel. In he Kristeva
Reader, ed. Toril Moi, 3461. New York: Columbia University Press.
Talbot, Mary. 1995. A synthetic sisterhood: False friends in a teenage
magazine. In Gender Articulated, ed. Kira Hall and Mary Bucholtz,
14365. Routledge: New York.
Tannen, Deborah. 1989. Talking Voices. New York: Oxford University
Press.
INTONATION
this term refers to the fundamental frequency (or its percep-
tual correlate, pitch) contour associated with phrases and other
large prosodic units. Language communities use intonation to
serve a wide range of functions, both grammatical and discourse
based. For example, intonation is used to signal prosodic bound-
aries: he ends of utterances are characteristically associated
with terminal pitch excursions, either a rise or a fall depending
on semantic factors. Another function of intonation is to cue
many types of semantic distinctions, such as the diference
between yes/no questions and neutral declarative statements
in many languages. Intonation is also used to convey emotional
(see emotion and language) and expressive states, as well as
pragmatic information.
Intonation is a universal property in that speakers of all lan-
guages manipulate pitch to communicate linguistic and para-
linguistic functions (see paralanguage and phonology,
universals of). Even languages that use pitch to diferentiate
individual lexical items, for example, tone languages such as
Mandarin Chinese and pitch accent languages such as Swedish,
Intonation
also have intonation systems that are evident when words are
grouped into larger prosodic constituents or uttered in isolation.
Intonation systems may vary substantially, however, from lan-
guage to language and also potentially from speaker to speaker.
hus, while a yes/no question is associated with a terminal rise in
pitch in many languages (e.g., German, Japanese, and Korean),
there are other languages (e.g., Finnish and Chickasaw) that
mark yes/no questions with a inal pitch fall. One nearly univer-
sal property, however, is the lowered pitch characterizing the
end of semantically neutral declarative utterances.
he study of intonation has witnessed many important theo-
retical advances over the last 30 years. Whereas certain schools
of intonation (e.g., the British school) described pitch contours
in terms of their overall shape or gestalt, many current models
of intonation capture changes in pitch in terms of discrete tonal
sequences, thereby bringing the study of intonation into line with
the analysis of segmental and word-level phonological phenom-
ena. his type of approach assumes that peaks and troughs in a
fundamental frequency contour are attributed to phonological
high and low tones aligned with various phonological elements.
Actual surface phonetic intonation patterns result from inter-
polation between these high and low tonal targets.
As one of the pioneering works in this school of intonation,
Janet Pierrehumbert (1980) developed an analysis of English
intonation in which a wide range of pitch contours conveying
several diferent semantic and pragmatic functions are captured
as a sequence of phonological high and low tones associated
with hierarchically arranged prosodic constituents. A funda-
mental insight of Pierrehumberts analysis is that tones may be
classiied into two groups: those that are associated with promi-
nent, that is, stressed, syllables and those that are associ-
ated with the periphery, especially the end, of prosodic domains.
Tones that are associated with stressed syllables are termed pitch
accents. Pitch accents difer according to whether they consist of
a single tone, high or low, or a sequence of tones, such as H + L
or L + H, which phonetically yield a tone fall or rise, respectively.
In addition to pitch accents on certain stressed syllables, tonal
excursions are often observed at the end (and potentially the
beginning) of phrases. hese phrase-level tonal movements are
attributed to boundary tones, which may be associated with rela-
tively small phrases, termed intermediate phrases, or with larger
phrases, termed intonation phrases or intonation units. Like
pitch accents, boundaries may be characterized by a single tone
or a sequence of tones. For example, intonation phrase boundar-
ies in Korean consist of as many as ive tonal targets, for example,
LHLHL, which conveys a sense of annoyance on the part of the
speaker (Jun 2005a).
One of the challenges facing linguists interested in the
typological investigation of intonation is the relative dearth
of reliable descriptions of intonation on a broad cross sec-
tion of languages. Fortunately, recent years have witnessed
a dramatic expansion of cross-linguistic studies intonation.
Daniel Hirst and Albert Di Cristo (1998) studied intonation
in 20 languages, including several non-Indo-European lan-
guages. Jun (2005a) compiled investigations of 13 languages
all analyzed within a Pierrehumbert-type framework. A typo-
logically and geographically diverse array of languages is dis-
cussed in this work, including languages with word-level stress
Irony
(Dutch, English, and German), tone languages (Cantonese and
Mandarin Chinese), pitch accent languages (Japanese, Swedish,
and Serbo-Croatian), languages lacking word-level stress, lex-
ical tones, or pitch accents (Korean and French), and indige-
nous languages of North America and Australia (Chickasaw and
Bininj Gun-wok, respectively).
An issue common to the intonation systems of all languages
is the mapping between intonational tunes and their meanings.
Because intonation is used to convey many subtle diferences in
meaning, often in gradient fashion, it is a challenge to determine
which diferences in intonation merit diferent phonological anal-
yses. Phonological distinctions between intonational tunes must
be captured as diferences either in the sequence of tones com-
prising the tunes or in the alignment of those tones with words.
Yet another topic inextricably linked to intonation is pro-
sodic constituency. Since pitch excursions are often observed
at prosodic boundaries, a comprehensive analysis of intona-
tion hinges on the characterization of the types of constituents
constituting utterances. Research has shown that prosodic con-
stituency and the mapping between constituency and intonation
vary from language to language. For example, some languages
divide utterances into groupings of words that are characterized
by a tonal template. hus, phrases in Chickasaw (Gordon 2005)
are associated with a LHHL sequence, whereby the irst and the
last low tonal targets associate with the beginning and the end of
phrases, respectively, and the two high tones associate with the
second syllable (or the irst syllable if it contains a long vowel or
ends in a sonorant consonant) and the beginning of the inal syl-
lable, respectively.
A number of researchers have published books providing
overviews of these and other issues in the study of intonation,
including Ladd (1996), Cruttenden (1997), and Gussenhoven
(2004).
Matthew Gordon
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Cruttenden, Alan. 1997. Intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Gordon, Matthew. 2005. Intonational phonology of Chickasaw. In Jun
2005b, 30130.
Gussenhoven, Carlos. 2004. he Phonology of Tone and Intonation.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hirst, Daniel, and Albert Di Cristo, eds. 1998. Intonation Systems: A Survey
of Twenty Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jun, Sun-Ah. 2005a. Korean intonational phonology and prosodic tran-
scription. In Jun 2005b, 20129.
Jun, Sun-Ah, ed. 2005b. Prosodic Typology the Phonology of Intonation
and Phrasing. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ladd, D. R. 1996. Intonational Phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Pierrehumbert, Janet. 1980. he phonology and phonetics of English
intonation. Ph.D diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Reproduced by the Indiana University Linguistics Club, Bloomington,
1987.
IRONY
here are several types of irony described in the literature, all of
which rely on an incongruity or discrepancy between appearance
407
Irony
and reality. In dramatic irony, for instance, the incongruity is cre-
ated by having the audience aware of information about which a
character in a play is ignorant (such as in Sophocles Oedipus Rex).
In situational irony and irony of fate, the disconnect is between
ideal expectations of justice and actual (or idealized) outcomes,
such as would occur if Bill Gates, one of the worlds most wealthy
individuals, won a lottery or as exempliied by Beethovens inabil-
ity, on going deaf, to hear his own musical masterpiece.
he form of irony most studied in the language sciences
is verbal irony, traditionally conceptualized as a trope in
which the meaning one intends to communicate is opposite
of that expressed literally by the words that are used. hus,
in Shakespeares Julius Caesar, when in his famous solilo-
quy (Act 3, Scene 2) Anthony states: For Brutus is an honor-
able man / So are they all, honorable men, it is understood
that Anthony is emphasizing the opposite of being honorable,
namely, the dishonorable action of Brutus and the other con-
spirators. In principle, with irony one should be able to convey
negative attitude by expressing something positive (as in the
Shakespearean example above) or positive attitude by stating
something negative.
here is also a general recognition that because the expressed
utterances are literally plausible, the recovery of ironic intent is
consequently highly context dependent and facilitated by sig-
nals fashioned (or unintentionally employed) by the ironist.
Tone of voice is one such hint in spoken language, but because
irony can be detected even when ironic intonation is not
employed (such as when reading text), this cue is not necessary.
Other cues include hyperbole, understatement, and excessive
politeness, but it is generally agreed that there is no signal that
points exclusively to irony.
he context necessary for the recovery of ironic intent tradi-
tionally has been limited to the discourse in which the irony is
embedded, but in more recent years, the concept of context has
been widened, even for verbal irony, to encompass an ironic
environment that includes social-cultural factors, such as those
dependent on discursive communities that share knowledge,
beliefs, values, and communicative strategies (e.g., Hutcheon
1994).
Over the past three decades, the standard pragmatic
approach to nonliteral language processing (see metaphor )
has framed much of the discussion on irony. Based on the prag-
matics of conversation and on speech-act theory, irony is
described accordingly as the outcome of a conversational
implicature initiated by a violation, or based on exploita-
tion, of H. P. Grices (1975) Maxim of Quality: he recognition
that the literal expression does not make sense in the context
in which it is produced leads one to initiate a search for a con-
text-appropriate interpretation in which the literal sense of the
expression is denied, suppressed, and replaced by the logical
opposite.
here have been challenges over the years regarding the tra-
ditional emphasis on the initial processing of the literal expres-
sion and then substituting it with its opposite meaning, on both
logical and empirical grounds. Consider, for instance, the analy-
sis of a passage from Voltaires Candide given by Dan Sperber
and Deirdre Wilson: When all was over and the rival kings were
celebrating their victory with Te Deums in the respective camps
408
(1995, 241). One cannot claim that the opposite counterpart to
the literal expression is that the kings were not celebrating with
Te Deums or that the irony can be substituted by a literal expres-
sion of the opposite, namely, that the kings were bewailing their
defeat with lamentations.
Empirically, it has been shown that the processing of state-
ments in a discourse context that emphasizes the irony is not
slower than that observed for the same statement in a discourse
that is consistent with its literal sense, a inding incompatible
with predictions arising from the standard pragmatic approach.
Moreover, there is empirical evidence incompatible with the
notion of rejection and substitution of the literal, demonstrat-
ing instead that the diference between the literal and nonliteral
sense is important in determining the magnitude of the per-
ceived irony (the tinge hypothesis of Ellen Winner) and that rec-
ognition of irony requires the processing of both of the opposing
meanings in order to determine that the two messages are in an
ironic relation (the indirect negation hypothesis of Rachel Giora
[2003]).
Other theories have de-emphasized the importance of the
literal expression as well and accord greater importance to psy-
chological factors. With pretense theory, there is the recognition
that the ironist is taking on the role of a person who holds the
opinion expressed in the irony, thus mocking both the opin-
ion and the people who would hold it. Two competing theories
(echoic mention and echoic reminder) share the assumption that
a verbal utterance can be seen as a mention or an allusion about
the expression, about expectations, or about cultural norms. In
this way, the ironist communicates his or her attitude about the
actual and expected state of afairs (see Gibbs 1994, Chapter 8,
for a review).
Extant theories have been criticized rightfully for their
inability to encompass all types of irony and for a theoretical
vagueness that make them of questionable scientiic utility.
he importance accorded background context or identiication
of an ironic environment is especially problematic for process
and computational models of irony comprehension, given the
failure to identify any signal of irony that is both necessary and
suicient, though recent models based on constraint satisfac-
tion or graded saliency principles are encouraging (see Colston
and Katz 2004)
Albert N. Katz
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Colston, H., and A. Katz. 2004. Figurative Language Processing: Social and
Cultural Inluences. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Gibbs, R. 1994. he Poetics of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Giora R. 2003. On Our Mind: Salience, Context and Figurative Language.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Grice, H. P. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Syntax and
Semantics: Speech Acts, ed. P. Cole and J. Morgan, 4158. New
York: Academic Press.
Hutcheon, L. 1994. Ironys Edge. London: Routledge.
Katz, A., ed. 2000. Uses and processing of irony and sarcasm. Metaphor
and Symbol 15 (Special Issue): 1116.
Sperber, D., and D. Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and
Cognition. 2d ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
Language, Natural and Symbolic
L language is not. No one without the idea of reading and writing
LANGUAGE, NATURAL AND SYMBOLIC
he paradigm of language is natural language, a naturally evolved
system of human communication using spoken or signed words
according to the various ways they can be combined. But in an
extended sense, many species of nonhuman animals also have
language, in this case, a means of communication through inar-
ticulate sounds; and humans similarly have various nonver-
bal means of expression and communication through facial
expressions, gestures, and body language more generally, and
through music, dance, and the imitative arts (see animal com-
munication and human language; art, languages of;
communication, prelinguistic). For more than a thou-
sand years, we have also had the positional Arabic numeration
system, together with its algorithms for the basic arithmetical
operations, a symbolic language that was extended in the sev-
enteenth century to include the literal notation of algebra as
well. he twentieth century, inally, saw the development of very
powerful formal languages, for example, the language of math-
ematical logic and programming languages, both of which are
constituted by a collection of signs together with rules governing
their use, that is, by a syntax but not, at least not essentially, a
semantics (see artificial languages).
Although natural language is the paradigm of language, the
foregoing suggests a continuum of sorts: irst with systems of
animal and human nonverbal communication, then natural
languages, followed by the symbolic language of arithmetic and
algebra, and inally programming and other formal languages.
Given their centrality, both along this continuum and in our
lives, the focus here is on natural language and the symbolic lan-
guage of arithmetic and algebra.
Natural language and the symbolic language of arithmetic
and algebra share two fundamental, and related, features. Both
are vehicles of inquiry and knowing, and both are a medium for
the expression of what we know. Not only do we learn from expe-
rience as animals can but we also, in virtue of our immersion in
natural language, can relect on what we learn, wonder at how
we learn, and question whether we really know what we seem to
know. Because we reason not only implicitly and involuntarily as
other animals do but also explicitly, in words, we can question
our reasons and strive to discover better ones. Just the same is
true of the language of arithmetic and algebra by means of which
we discover, for example, negative, rational, real, and complex
numbers, explore their manifold natures, and display in familiar
symbols that which we know. hough for very diferent reasons,
neither systems of nonverbal communication nor merely formal
languages can serve in this way as a vehicle of critically relective
inquiry.
Natural language and the symbolic language of arithmetic
and algebra are also very diferent, however. Natural language
is, for example, primarily spoken (or signed) and a vehicle of
communication between a speaker and a hearer; the symbolic
language of mathematics is instead essentially written and serves
primarily as a vehicle of reasoning. Spoken natural language is
intelligible independent of written natural language; symbolic
could learn the language of mathematics. Symbolic language is
essentially written.
A second, related diference between the two sorts of language
is that natural language is enormously versatile. One can do all
sorts of things in and with natural language. Symbolic languages,
by contrast, are speciically designed for particular purposes and
are useless for others. One cannot tell a joke or a story, describe
a room (or a language), or even greet a friend in the formula lan-
guage of arithmetic.
Natural language is also constantly evolving through its use;
it is inherently social and deeply historical. Symbolic language is
instead self-consciously created, often by a single individual, and
has no inherent impulse to change with use. Although French
has changed considerably over the past four centuries, the lan-
guage of algebra that Descartes introduced in 1637, and which
every schoolchild learns today, has changed not at all.
A subtler diference concerns the characteristic sorts of con-
cepts of the two languages. he concepts of natural language
are paradigmatically object-involving and, for that reason, sen-
sory: we talk, irst and foremost, of the objects met with in every-
day experience, for example, of the things we eat, navigate by,
enjoy, and fear. Although our concepts of such things do involve
much more than the way they appear sensorily to us in appropri-
ate circumstances, they could not be understood in abstraction
from those appearances, that is, from the subjective character of
our experience of them. he concepts of natural language (those
owing nothing to the development of symbolic language) are con-
cepts of sensory entities, of things that look, feel, taste, smell, and
sound in characteristic ways (compare embodiment). Insofar
as they are, they resist expression in a symbolic language.
Consider, for example, the notion of a sphere. According to
Aristotle, a sphere is a common sensible; it is an object that
contrasts with a proper sensible, such as the color red or a
certain bitter taste, in being perceptible not merely through one
sense organ (say, by sight as color is, or by taste as bitterness is)
but through more than one. Red things have a characteristic
look; spheres have a characteristic look and a characteristic feel.
Aristotles concept of a sphere is not the modern, mathemati-
cal, and nonsensory concept of a two-dimensional surface all
points of which are equidistant from a center; it is the concept
of a three-dimensional, essentially sensory object. he mod-
ern mathematical concept of a sphere can be expressed in the
symbolic language of mathematics (namely, as x2 + y2 + z2 = r2);
Aristotles essentially sensory concept cannot.
We have seen that a symbolic language, unlike a natural lan-
guage, is self-consciously created and expresses concepts that
can be fully understood in abstraction from our sensory experi-
ence. It is unsurprising, then, that the rules governing the use of
signs in a symbolic language can be explicitly formulated and,
hence, that it is relatively easy to build a machine that correctly
manipulates those signs. Because natural language is instead
social, historical, essentially sensory and object-involving, mak-
ing the rules of its use explicit (in order, perhaps, to build a
machine capable of correctly manipulating its signs) is an alto-
gether diferent, and much harder, possibly intractable, prob-
lem. It may be that natural language users can only be grown or
raised, that they cannot be built.
409
Language, Natural and Symbolic
he fact that natural language embodies a particular sensory
view of the world, one that is inextricably tied to human biol-
ogy, has other implications as well. Our common experience,
grounded in our common (biological) form of life, explains, for
example, the intertranslatability of all human natural languages
and predicts the untranslatability of the natural languages of
creatures evolved to have radically diferent (biological) forms
of life. Given the role of acculturation in the acquisition of natu-
ral language, any being capable of learning a particular natural
language must share at least some sense modalities with other
speakers of the language; but nothing in the very idea of accul-
turation into a natural language requires that there be some
favored sense modalities. Symbolic language is not similarly
rooted in our bodily being. Not only are symbolic languages
universal to all people whatever their natural language; they
are in principle, at least along this dimension, accessible to any
rational being.
Why, then, is translation from one natural language to
another so diicult? Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests an answer
in his Philosophical Investigations. As he points out, although
some of our everyday concepts can be adequately understood by
reference to a standard or paradigm case, most (including lan-
guage) are correctly applied to a range of things that exhibit only
a family resemblance. Whereas in the former instance all
correct applications refer back to the one standard or paradigm
case, in the case of concepts that exhibit only a family resem-
blance, similarities between correct applications need only over-
lap, like ibers twisted one on another over the length of a thread.
Such similarities are essentially historically conditioned: Some
applications will, at a particular moment in the evolution of the
language, seem appropriate, natural; others will not work so
well, or at all. And because what works crucially depends on pre-
vious successful applications, diferent natural languages come
to employ common words in quite diferent ways. here is noth-
ing like this in the case of symbolic language. Although the words
may be borrowed from natural language (e.g., group, ring,
and ield in abstract algebra), the concepts of a symbolic lan-
guage have a ixed content and univocal application. It is only
our understanding of those concepts that develops and deepens
in the course of inquiry. he nature and structure of meaning is
quite diferent in the two sorts of language.
he two sorts of language tend to difer, inally, in their
predicative structure: a natural language is constitutively
narrative, a language within which to tell what happens; a
symbolic language is not. And natural language is narrative
because the everyday world is a world of becoming, of change.
To speak of it, then, requires two modes of predication, that
marking what something is and that marking properties a thing
can acquire and lose and also (as a matter of its form, not merely
in its content) tense. Symbolic languages generally involve nei-
ther diferent modes of predication nor tense. he language of
mathematics, for example, speaks timelessly of what is: 7 + 5 = 12,
(a + b)2 = a2 + 2ab + b2.
Natural language is primarily spoken and communicative,
narrative, essentially sensory and object-involving, and histori-
cal, that is, constantly evolving with use. A symbolic language,
such as the language of arithmetic and algebra, is essentially
written, non-narrative, nonsensory, and self-consciously created
410
Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
with no inherent impulse to change. he two sorts of language
are, then, quite diferent. And yet most work in the language sci-
ences is pursued on the assumption that symbolic language dif-
fers from natural language only in its degree of clarity, rigor, and
perspicuity. We may, as a result, fail adequately to understand
either. By importing considerations relevant only to the work-
ings of a symbolic language, we are liable to falsify the work-
ings of natural language; and by taking natural language as our
paradigm, we risk radically misconceiving the nature of symbolic
language. (It has, for example, long been assumed that the con-
ception of generality, or quantification, that is needed in
mathematics is identical to that employed in natural language,
but perhaps this is just not so.) If natural and symbolic languages
are essentially diferent, then the language sciences need to take
those diferences into account, showing how they do, or do not,
matter to research programs in those sciences.
here are further ramiications for psychology and for peda-
gogy. For example, given the diferences between natural and
symbolic language, it is reasonable to ask whether one reads
symbolic languages diferently than one reads written natural
language, whether one looks at the page of marks diferently in
the two cases. If one does, then perhaps what prevents some
students from thriving in mathematics is that they try to read its
symbolic language as if it were a written natural language. Maybe
students who are adept at modern, symbolic mathematics are, in
fact, primarily adept at catching on, without explicit instruction,
to the way of writing and reading it involves. hese are testable
hypotheses, but they are hypotheses we will think to test only if
we comprehend the diferences between natural and symbolic
languages.
Danielle Macbeth
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Gupta, Anil. 1980. he Logic of Common Nouns. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press. Argues for the two sorts of predication needed in
speaking about change.
Macbeth, Danielle. 2004. Vite, Descartes, and the emergence of mod-
ern mathematics. Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 25: 87117.
Explores diferences between premodern, nonsymbolic and modern,
symbolic mathematical understanding.
. 2005. Freges Logic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Argues
that Gottlob Freges language, unlike the language of mathematical
logic, which is merely formal, without content, is a fully contentful
symbolic language, a vehicle of inquiry.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations.
Oxford: Blackwell. Deeply insightful investigation into the nature of
natural language.
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DEVICE (LAD)
his term refers to Noam Chomskys early proposal of what
would be necessary for construction of a language acquisition
model (1965, 303). More precisely, this early proposal for a
language acquisition device (LAD) provides a logical analysis
of the components that would be minimally necessary for any
such model to account for language acquisition. Its components
are summarized in Figure 1. hese can be viewed as specifying
logically and abstractly what would be minimally necessary to
Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

(i) Technique for representing input signals

(ii) Way of representing structural information about these signals

(iii) Some initial delimitation of a class of possible hypotheses about language structure

(iv) Method for determining what each such hypothesis implies with respect to each sentence

(v) Method for selecting one of the (presumably infinitely many) hypotheses that are allowed by

(iii) and are compatible with the given primary linguistic data.

Figure 1. LAD components (Chomsky 1965, 30).

the child as language learner in the initial state, that is, before
language experience.
hese components, which were proposed as necessary for
language learning, were formulated as accounting for the map-
ping from primary language data (data which is necessarily
inite and inherently variable) presented at the initial state to
complex, ininite, and systematic language knowledge in the end
state. hey characterized the foundations of the speciic innate
abilities that make this achievement possible for the language
learner (Chomsky 1965, 27).
At the same time, the components in Figure 1 were to indicate
what a linguistic theory would have to treat in order to support
an acquisition model and thus attain explanatory adequacy
(see descriptive, observational, and explanatory
adequacy). For example, such a theory would need to pro-
vide a representation of possible sentence in order to support
(i), a deinition of structural description for (ii), generative
grammar for (iii), a method for determining structural descrip-
tions for (iv), and an evaluation metric for (v).
he original Chomsky proposal is often interpreted as though
it described a realistic device. However, it is best viewed as pro-
viding an explication of the logical foundations that any compre-
hensive model for language acquisition would have to presuppose
and account for, with the precise nature of each of the compo-
nents to be subsequently determined as an empirical matter
(Chomsky 1965, 37). Perhaps at least partially because of this
divergence in interpretation, subsequent language acquisition
research over the last decades has frequently pursued divergent
paths, one pursuing the logical problem of language acquisi-
tion consisting of linguistic analyses of potential data mapping
(e.g., Baker and McCarthy 1981), another pursuing a realistic
approach consisting of empirical studies of language develop-
ment (initiated largely by Roger Brown and his students [1973]).
In fact, certain components in Figure 1 proved particularly
challenging to a realistic model. For example, if there were a real-
istic device, it would have to include a mechanism for (i) and (ii).
If (iii) were to be implemented in terms of an enumeration of
the class G1, G2 of possible generative grammars (Chomsky
1965, 31), then there is the de facto impossibility of predeining
given grammatical hypotheses across 6,000 to 7,000 actually
potentially innumerable human languages, as well as the risk
of begging the question of language acquisition, that is, how the
individual grammars arise. Similarly, the nature of an evaluation
measure for (v) required speciication. he absence of a temporal
or developmental component was especially challenging, given
that an instantaneous view of language acquisition is obvi-
ously false (Chomsky 1975, 119, 121).
Subsequent formulations of linguistic theory that pursue
a generative approach now ofer a number of developments
of the original LAD proposal. In general, they seek to deine
a theory of universal grammar (UG) as a theory of the ini-
tial state. Deined as an abstract partial speciication of the
genetic program that enables the child to interpret certain
events as linguistic experience and to construct a system of
rules and principles on the basis of this experience (Chomsky
1980, 187) and as of course, not a grammar, but rather a sys-
tem of conditions on the range of possible grammars for pos-
sible human languages (Chomsky 1980, 189), UG opens the
possibility for developing future integration of logical and real-
istic approaches to language acquisition and language devel-
opment. a principles and parameters version of UG, for
example, formulates parameters as providing a speciic mech-
anism for (i)(v). (See Table 4.4 in Lust 2006 for examples of
current approaches to modeling language acquisition within
this framework.)
Combining these and subsequent theoretical advances with
signiicant recent empirical advances concerning infant map-
ping to language data (e.g., Jusczyk 1997; Morgan and Demuth
1996), which informs us on actual mechanisms in (ii) and (iii),
may now allow the ield to approach the more comprehensive
model of language acquisition that LAD was irst intended to
underlie (see discussion in Chomsky 2000). See Chapter 4 in Lust
2006 for further discussion of this LAD-based model and a review
of several proposed alternatives to the LAD, derived from oppos-
ing theoretical paradigms.
Barbara Lust
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Baker, C. L., and J. McCarthy, eds. 1981. he Logical Problem of Language
Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Brown, R. 1973. A First Language. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Chomsky, N. 1965. Aspects of the heory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
. 1975. Relections on Language. New York: Pantheon.
. 1980. Rules and Representations. New York: Columbia University
Press.

411
Language Change, Universals of
. 2000. he Architecture of Language, ed. J. Mukherji, B. Narayan
Patnaik, and R. Agnihotri. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jusczyk, P. 1997. he Discovery of Spoken Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Lust, B. 2006. Child Language: Acquisition and Growth.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Morgan, J., and K. Demuth, eds. 1996. Signal to Syntax: Bootstrapping
from Speech to Syntax in Early Acquisition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum.
LANGUAGE CHANGE, UNIVERSALS OF
All aspects of language can change, and with every aspect we see
broad tendencies that have inspired the search for universals of
change. In some areas, powerful universals have emerged, sug-
gesting that many of the synchronic similarities we see across
languages may have their source in shared cognitive and process-
ing mechanisms. Researchers have identiied cross-linguistically
similar paths of change in sound change in morphological
change, and in grammaticalization.
Given any two related items, A and B, one could in principle
expect a change from A > B or from B > A to be equally prob-
able. However, the facts of change show that this is not the case.
Across the languages of the world, we ind that one direction
predominates and the other is rare. hus, we speak of unidirec-
tionality in language change. Claims about unidirectionality are
sometimes controversial because apparent counterexamples
do emerge. For this reason, it is important to deine types of
change clearly before making proposals about the directionality
of change.
he importance of such unidirectional trends cannot be over-
stated. Universals attested in the diachronic plane appear to be
more powerful than those that can readily be stated for the syn-
chronic plane. hus, diachronic typology is a theory of universals
that proposes that the synchronic patterns are not in themselves
the universals but, rather, the result of strong diachronic trends
(Greenberg 1969, Greenberg, Ferguson, and Moravcsik 1978).
he structure of language is created by change that is ongoing in
language use (see usage-based theory); because languages
are used by human beings in very similar ways across cultures,
languages tend to be similar to one another.
An important question to ask concerns the sense in which
there can be universals of change. No change has to occur; there
are many changes that could occur. he universals, then, specify
only similar paths of change that can be found in diferent lan-
guages. If these languages are not closely related genetically,
then the similar paths of change cannot be attributed to a shared
history but must be viewed as independent developments. hus,
even though we cannot say that a change has to occur, nor can
we predict when it will occur, there are still many substantive
predictions that we can make about change.
In examining trends in language change, it is important to
consider how well documented a particular change is. Some
changes are reconstructed on the basis of a comparison of
related languages (see comparative method ). Since known
trends in change are often used in this reconstruction, such
changes cannot be taken as evidence for trends in change. Only
well-attested changes are valid inputs to a theory of universals
of change.
412
Sound Change
he symmetry of the terms used to describe sound changes
assimilation/dissimilation, weakening/strengthening, deletion/
insertion makes it seem as though all directions of change were
equally probable. he facts now known from a wide array of lan-
guages show instead that assimilation, weakening, and deletion
are vastly more common than dissimilation, strengthening, and
insertion. If sound change is rigidly deined as language internal,
phonetically motivated, and lexically general, then the less com-
mon types of change show up even more rarely.
Common assimilation changes involve consonants taking
on the properties of adjacent vowels, for instance, palataliza-
tion before front vowels, labialization or rounding before round
vowels. Or vowels can take on properties of consonants, as
when vowels become nasalized in the same syllable with nasal
consonants. For some of these changes, more detailed hierar-
chies of contexts for change can be established. Palatalization
of coronal consonants (such as [t], [d], [s]) occurs irst and most
commonly before a high front glide ([j]), occurs next before a
high front vowel ([i]), and then progresses to the lower front
vowels.
Paths of reductive change can also be established. For
instance, a common consonant reduction involves the loss of [p]
via the pathway p > f > h > . Parts of this path are documented
in diferent languages: Japanese has undergone a change that
reduced all prevocalic instances of /p/ to a fricative that assimi-
lates to the place of articulation of the following vowel. Spanish
and other Romance languages have undergone a change that
reduced word-initial [f] to [h] and further to . he positions in
which such reductions occur also show regularity: Syllable-inal
position favors the reduction of consonants, as does intervocalic
position. Word-initial position is least likely to condition reduc-
tion of consonants.
It is commonly assumed that such changes are caused by
phonetic tendencies. In the articulatory domain, some general
principles of change have been proposed that deal with the way
articulatory gestures change during production. he primary
directions in phonetic change are the reduction of the magnitude
of the gestures, leading to reduction or loss, and their increased
overlap, leading to assimilation (Browman and Goldstein 1992;
Mowrey and Pagliuca 1995).
As mentioned earlier, the importance of universals of language
change is that they can predict and thus explain synchronic pat-
terns across languages. For instance, the presence of nasal vowels
in a language is almost always due to assimilation to a nasal conso-
nant. Sometimes this consonant is lost, leading to phonemic nasal
vowels. he diachronic source explains why nasal vowels always
have a more restricted distribution and frequency compared to
oral vowels (Greenberg 1966). Similarly, the fact that some lan-
guages lack the phoneme [p] can be explained by its tendency to
undergo reduction. he restrictions against certain consonants
in syllable-inal position can be attributed to their propensity for
loss in that position (Vennemann 1988, Blevins 2004).
After Sound Change: Morphologization
Another set of unidirectional changes involves the results of
sound change. Phonetically conditioned sound change creates
alternations that gradually acquire morphological or lexical
Language Change, Universals of
conditioning, as, for example, when vowel shortening before a
consonant cluster created an alternation in English keep/ kept,
sleep/slept and weep/wept.
Another example is the alternation in nouns such as wife, wives.
At irst, in Old English there were no voiced fricatives: /v/, /z/, and
// did not occur. Later, by a regular sound change /f/, /s/, and
// became voiced when they occurred between two vowels, as
in the plurals of house, wife and wreath (at that time the plural
suix had a vowel in it, putting the fricative between two vow-
els). Nowadays, the alternation is not phonetically productive. In
words such as classes, efort, and ether, voiceless fricatives occur
between vowels. Also /v/, /z/, and // have become phonemes
and they occur in all positions. So now the alternation still found
in wife, wives, and so on is associated with certain nouns and the
morphological category of plural. In this way, morphologically or
lexically conditioned alternations are created; such alternations
tend to be unproductive phonologically and to involve segments
that are contrastive elsewhere.
Morphological Change: Analogy
Morphological and lexical alternations that are created in the way
just described tend to undergo further change on the basis of the
patterns found in the paradigms of the language. Certain gen-
eral trends in analogical change have been identiied (Mazcak
1980). In analogical leveling, when an alternation is lost, it is
the high frequency form of the paradigm, such as the singular
in nouns or the present indicative in verbs, that serves as the
basis for new formations. hus, the alternation weep/wept is lev-
eled by the creation of a new past tense, weeped. Low-frequency
words are more likely to undergo analogical leveling than high-
frequency words. hus, wept is more likely to change than kept.
he productive pattern that prevails in leveling is the one that has
the largest number of members. One synchronic consequence
of these trends is that the irregular paradigms in a language are
usually among the most frequent.
Extension of an alternation to a paradigm that did not have it
before is less common than is leveling. It occurs where there is
strong phonological similarity to a productive pattern, as when
the regular verb string gets a new past tense strung due to its simi-
larity to swing, swung.
Morpho-Syntactic Change: Grammaticalization
Most change in the morpho-syntax is a product of the general pro-
cess of grammaticalization. Grammaticalization itself, however,
involves phonetic, semantic, and pragmatic change, in addition to
morpho-syntactic change. Various cross-linguistic paths of change
have been identiied in recent research into grammaticalization.
First, there is a general path of change for the form of the gram-
maticalizing element as it progresses from lexical to grammatical:
content item > grammatical word > clitic > inlectional aix >
stem change > loss
his progression involves a loss of the properties originally
associated with the content word (its ability to occur as a noun
or verb) and a growing fusion of the element with lexical items
nearby. A good example is the development of the Spanish future
suixes. In Latin, there was a construction that consisted of an
ininitive with the conjugated verb habere. For example, dicere +
habeo meant I have to say, In medieval Spanish, the verb had
reduced to he and consistently followed the ininitive. Eventually
the former verb (now a grammatical word) fused with the inini-
tive, giving decir. In further changes, the stem of some verbs lost
a syllable, in our example creating dir I will say. he last stage
(loss) is occurring in this case as a new future from ir a + verb go
to + verb replaces the old future.
Parallel to this path of change are the many paths of semantic/
pragmatic change that have been identiied as creating the gram-
matical morphemes of the languages of the world. he numeral
one with a noun tends to develop into an indeinite article; demon-
stratives develop into deinite articles and complementizers; verb
constructions involving a verb meaning want or go to plus
another verb develop into future markers; resultative construc-
tions with have or be and a past or passive participle, such as I
have gone, develop into perfect, pasts, and perfectives; construc-
tions with locative verbs or movement verbs develop into progres-
sives, which may go on to become imperfectives. Verbs meaning
know or be able develop into auxiliaries indicating possibility.
A preposition meaning to or in order to develops into an inin-
itive marker. Body-part terms such as head and back become spa-
tial and later temporal adpositions. Passive constructions develop
into ergative constructions. All of these paths of change (and many
others) are documented as independent developments in unre-
lated languages (Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994).
In comparing these speciic paths, certain general patterns
are discernible: As a construction grammaticalizes, its mean-
ing becomes more general and abstract; its form becomes more
reduced and dependent upon surrounding material; it under-
goes an extreme frequency increase; and its category member-
ship can change, say, from verb to auxiliary, from noun or verb
to adposition. he lexical material upon which grammaticaliza-
tion works is similar across languages, as are the mechanisms of
change. he fact, for instance, that one can infer intention from
a construction of be going to VERB and then later infer future
from that intention seems not to be culture speciic, inasmuch
as the development of such a construction into future occurs in
languages all over the world. hus, the commonalities found in
grammaticalization point to interactive, cognitive, and process-
ing mechanisms that are shared across cultures.
Joan Bybee
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Blevins, Juliette. 2004. Evolutionary Phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Browman, Catherine P., and Louis M. Goldstein. 1992. Articulatory pho-
nology: An overview. Phonetica 49: 15580.
Bybee, Joan, Revere Perkins, and William Pagliuca. 1994. he Evolution of
Grammar: Tense, Aspect and Modality in the Languages of the World.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Greenberg, Joseph. 1966. Language Universals: With Special Reference to
Feature Hierarchies. he Hague: Mouton.
. 1969. Some methods of dynamic comparison in linguistics.
In Substance and Structure of Language ed. Jan Puhvel, 147203.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Greenberg, Joseph H., Charles Ferguson, and Edith. Moravcsik, eds.
1978. Universals of Human Language. Vols. 14. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
413
Language Families
Maczak, Witold. 1980. Laws of analogy. In Historical Morphology ed.
J. Fisiak, 2838. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Mowrey, Richard, and William Pagliuca. 1995. he reductive character
of articulatory evolution. Rivista di Linguistica 7.1: 37124.
Vennemann, heo. 1988. Preference Laws for Syllable Structure and the
Explanation of Sound Change. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
LANGUAGE FAMILIES
A language family is a set of languages that developed from the
same ancestral language. he best-known example is the Indo-
European family, which comprises more than a hundred lan-
guages that, even in premodern times, extended from the Indian
subcontinent to northwestern Europe. his family is well known
not only because it contains many of the worlds most widely
spoken languages, such as Bengali, English, French, German,
Hindi, Portuguese, and Russian, but also because it was the main
focus of research in the nineteenth century, when linguistics
was established as a modern science. However, many other lan-
guage families are subjects of intense research today, such as the
following:
Afro-Asiatic, which includes Arabic, Hebrew, and several
languages of northern Africa, including Ancient Egyptian,
Hausa, and Somali
Algic, which includes several native languages of North
America, such as Wiyot, Yurok, Cheyenne, Ojibwa, and
Shawnee
Austronesian, which includes more than a thousand lan-
guages spoken from Madagascar to Polynesia, such as Bahasa
Indonesia, Fijian, Tagalog, and Tahitian
Dravidian, which includes most of the non-Indo-European
languages of India, such as Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu
Niger-Congo, which includes most of the languages of sub-
Saharan Africa, including Igbo, Swahili, and Zulu
Sino-Tibetan, which includes Burmese, Chinese, and Tibetan
Tupi, comprising several languages of South America, includ-
ing Guarani
Uralic, which includes most of the non-Indo-European lan-
guages of Europe, such as Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian,
Nenets, and Sami (Lapp)
his list is only a sample of the hundreds of known language
families and of the languages included in each one. For a com-
prehensive listing, see Gordon (2005).
Familial metaphors are the standard terms of art. Languages in
the same family are said to be genetically related to one another.
A language from which other languages developed is called an
ancestor, or parent, of those languages. Words that descend from
the same form in an ancestral language are related, or cognate.
his homey terminology is undergoing some competition with
that of modern cladistics as used in biology, but certain linguistic
concepts do not translate well. In biology, it is understood that
all biological taxa are related to one another, and family is but
a midlevel taxon. Linguists assume that relationships between
languages must be proved, and a language family is a maximal
taxon. In principle, even isolates languages that do not group
with other languages can trivially be considered families by
reinterpreting their dialects as separate languages.
414
he common ancestor of an entire language family is assigned
a name by preixing Proto- to the name of the family, as in Proto-
Indo-European and Proto-Afro-Asiatic. he place where the pro-
tolanguage was spoken is called the homeland of the language
family.
he study of language families is part of historical lin-
guistics and is contextualized within a particular model of
language change: divergence. When innovations in one part
of a language community fail to spread to other parts, diferences
accumulate until the community can be said to speak diferent
languages. It is this historical process that language-family the-
ory is meant to model. But perhaps because language families
are commonly illustrated by showing similarities between lan-
guages (e.g., English mouse is cognate with Latin mus), the idea
arises that relatedness is about similarity between languages. In
fact, there is no requirement that cognates be similar at all (e.g.,
English two is related to Armenian yerku), and many sources of
similarity are disavowed as being irrelevant to the model. hese
include borrowing (see contact, language), onomatopoeia,
universals (absolute and statistical universals), and
chance similarities.
he study of language families typically involves one or more
of the following enterprises:
Demonstrating that languages are related
Reconstructing the common protolanguage
Subgrouping the languages by hypothesizing intermediate
ancestors
Associating linguistic data with historical and archaeological
data
he following sections irst describe the traditional and still-
dominant methods for pursuing these tasks and then sketch and
evaluate some new methodologies.
Traditional Methods
he traditional technique is the comparative method. he
linguist studies characteristics that rarely recur across languages,
such as grammatical paradigms and the associations between
sound and meaning in morphemes. Eforts are made to discard
loans and onomatopoeia, although the former is a diicult and
often intractable problem. Matching morphemes across lan-
guages by meaning, one looks for recurrent sound correspon-
dences. For example, English f corresponds to Latin p in father
= pater, feels = palpat, few = pauca, and many other words. If a
large number of recurrent correspondences are found, the lan-
guages are related. he recurrences are also used to reconstruct
the protolanguage (see historical reconstruction).
After a language family is identiied, the next step is sub-
grouping, identifying the branches or groups within the fam-
ily. Subgrouping seeks to uncover the history of the divergence
(cladogenesis) of a language family. If the family contains three
or more languages, the linguist looks for evidence that some
proper subset of those languages may have descended from
an intermediate common ancestor. his is done by looking for
shared innovations (synapomorphies) sound changes or new
words or grammatical constructions that were not in the ances-
tor language but are found in two or more of the descendant
languages. For example, the fact that English, German, Swedish,
Language Families
and several other languages have f where Proto-Indo-European
had p is a shared innovation that indicates that those languages
may have a shared intermediate ancestor that underwent this
change; otherwise, we would have to assume that each of those
languages separately innovated the change of p to f or borrowed
the innovation from another language. In fact, the preponder-
ance of evidence supports such an intermediate language and
a branch (clade) of languages descending from it: the Germanic
languages. Other branches of Indo-European include the Balto-
Slavic (including Bosnian, Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian),
Celtic (including Breton, Irish, and Welsh), Italic (including Latin
and the Romance languages), Indo-Iranian (including Bengali,
Farsi, Pashto, and Urdu), and the extinct Anatolian branch,
which included Hittite, Luvian, and Lycian. Several other lan-
guages, including Greek, Albanian, Armenian, and half a dozen
extinct languages (see extinction of languages), do not
share an agreed-upon intermediate branch at all.
Associating language history with external facts entails pinning
the protolanguage to a particular time and place its homeland
and demonstrating how it spread from there. he time depths
under consideration mean that written records are rarely, if ever,
available. he primary linguistic tool is to look for words found
in multiple branches of a language family and exhibiting all of
the regular sound correspondences; they are assumed to date
back to the protolanguage and, therefore, to name objects found
in its environment. For example, a pan-Indo-European word for
wheel suggests that the protolanguage split up no earlier than
the invention of the wheel, some six thousand years ago (Mallory
1989). Another technique is to look for areas of greatest linguis-
tic diversity. he fact that the Austronesian languages are much
more diverse in Taiwan than anywhere else supports the theory
that they developed there longest, that is, that Taiwan was the
homeland for the Austronesian family (Blust 1999). A third tech-
nique is to seek archaeological evidence of population move-
ments that may have disseminated a language family. In the
case of Austronesian, knowledge of how people spread through
the Paciic and Indian Oceans is consistent with the theory of
a Taiwan homeland. In the case of Indo-European, it has often
been noted that early adopters of horse-drawn wheeled chariots
would be in an ideal position to spread their languages through-
out much of Europe and Asia. A well-received theory points to
the chariot users who lived in the PonticCaspian region about
six thousand years ago (Mallory 1989).
Challenges to the Traditional Method
he traditional comparative method is still the basic framework
within which language families are researched, but it is not per-
fect. It is a complicated process that demands a great deal of
knowledge about all of the relevant languages. It can be misled
by loanwords, and it ofers little guidance in distinguishing true
shared innovations (synapomorphies) from independent iden-
tical innovations (homoplasies). he linguist must constantly
decide whether multiple languages could have undergone a
particular change independently and how likely they would be
to have borrowed it. In reality, of course, anything that happens
once can happen twice, and there is nothing that is not subject to
borrowing (homason and Kaufman 1988). he true solution is
probabilistic, but hard numbers are lacking, and the investigator
is often left with unlikely cladograms like the 15-way branching
tree of Indo-European.
Another disappointment is that little progress has been made
in the past century in pinning down the Indo-European home-
land or proving that additional languages are related to English
topics of recurrent interest among linguists, archaeologists, and
enthusiasts alike. More disappointing is that when linguists have
claimed that language families such as Uralic are related to Indo-
European such groupings often being given the Eurocentric
name Nostratic (our family) the methodology has given no
irm guidance as to how signiicant the evidence is, with the
result that many linguists ind themselves uncomfortably agnos-
tic on whether Nostratic has been proved or not. Unlike in mod-
ern experimental sciences, there are no statistical techniques for
estimating the probability that the number of correspondences
found is due to a real relationship between languages rather
than to chance. Rules of thumb were developed to provide some
guidance; a typical piece of advice is to treat words as potentially
cognate only if at least three of their consonants are found in
recurrent correspondence sets. But such rules are very approx-
imate, not tailored to the speciic structures of the languages at
hand, and they have discouraged linguists from applying the
method to languages with short morphemes.
Joseph H. Greenberg addressed several of these concerns
with a technique called multilateral comparison. Tables are con-
structed listing the translation equivalents for many concepts in
many diferent languages. It is claimed that the tabular layout
itself makes the relationships among the languages, even their
correct subgrouping, patent. Using this technique, Greenberg
presented an analysis of the languages of Africa (1963), which is
now considered standard, then went on to hypothesize language
families that lumped established families together into much
larger families what became known as deep linguistic relation-
ships. he dozens of families and isolates of the Americas were
reduced to three families (Greenberg 1987); Indo-European,
Uralic, Japanese, and several other families were lumped into a
family called Eurasiatic (Greenberg 2002). Multilateral compari-
son has proven popular among enthusiasts, in part because it
requires no special language expertise, in part because it appears
to reveal many new, deep relationships. Unfortunately, there is
no way to evaluate a methodology that simply calls for contem-
plating raw data until patterns emerge.
Several researchers have shown, however, that some of
Greenbergs key ideas can be transformed into algorithmic
(reproducible) methodologies that introduce to language fam-
ily research the beneit of statistical signiicance testing. Robert
L. Oswalts procedure (1998) minimized experimenter bias by
requiring that a speciic concept list be used and that one specify
in advance speciic criteria for measuring degree of similarity
between two languages. William H. Baxter and Alexis Manaster
Ramer (2000) added reliable signiicance-testing procedures
based on randomization tests. Brett Kessler and Annukka
Lehtonen (2006) adapted the technique to handle multiple lan-
guages in a single test, informally conirming Greenbergs claim
that such large-scale comparisons are inherently more power-
ful than two-language comparisons. Don A. Ringe (1992; see
Kessler 2001 for extensive discussion and methodological reine-
ments) measured not similarity but the number of recurrent
415
Language Families
sound correspondences. his has the advantages both of being
closer to the traditional comparative method and of generating
correspondences useful for subgrouping and reconstruction.
Disappointingly, however, none of these neo-Greenbergian
techniques found evidence for the deep relations that were
advertised for the original, impressionistic method.
Other new techniques have concentrated on subgrouping.
Lexicostatistics (Swadesh 1955) was an early attempt to facilitate
subgrouping and also assign dates to protolanguages. he idea
was that if languages replace a constant number of words per
century with new words, then by measuring the percentage of
a list of words that is cognate between languages, one could cal-
culate when the languages diverged and even construct a family
tree. Although these assumptions were mostly wrong and were
therefore rejected by most linguists, many people still use lexi-
costatistical techniques as a rough indication of a languages his-
tory in the absence of more compelling data.
Arranging many shared innovations into a binary tree is an
extremely laborious undertaking, especially given the possibil-
ity that some identical innovations are independent (homoplas-
tic). he recent development of computational cladistic
methods similar to those used in biology (e.g., Ringe, Warnow,
and Taylor 2002) is a tremendous advance in helping the lin-
guist ind optimal trees. In addition, several solutions to the
problem of borrowing have emerged in the form of programs
that construct networks instead of trees. Shared innovations
that cannot be cleanly attributed to a shared ancestor are taken
as evidence of contact, obviating somewhat the need to make a
priori judgments about whether borrowing was involved (e.g.,
Bryant, Filimon, and Gray 2005; Nakhleh, Ringe, and Warnow
2005).
he problems of inding homelands and tracing the spread
of languages still requires one to resort to data that are often
suggestive but not deinitive. Colin Renfrew (1987) added a new
perspective when he theorized that languages may be spread
by the movement of culture, rather than by the movement of
people. He suggested that Indo-European languages were
spread from Anatolia along with the adoption of agriculture.
Most linguists have not accepted this theory, in part because it
is incompatible with such linguistic data as an Indo-European
word for the wheel, which postdates the spread of agriculture
by millennia. Recently, further data are aforded by genetic
analyses of populations (genes and language). he pres-
ence of a Pontic genetic component in Europe is compatible
with the idea that invaders from the PonticCaspian region
brought Indo-European languages into Europe (Cavalli-Sforza,
Menozzi, and Piazza 1994).
Prospects
Recent computer techniques add simplicity, reproducibility,
and quantitative rigor to methodologies for proving relation-
ships between languages, but so far there has been no notice-
able increase in power over what experts are able to do by hand.
Failure to corroborate the sort of deep relationships conceived
by Greenberg may mean that better techniques need to be devel-
oped, or that the languages are not in fact related, or that the
answer is unknowable. Because languages are always changing,
they constantly lose information that links them to their relatives;
416
there must come a point at which any remaining commonalities
between languages are indistinguishable from chance levels.
But even if the more pessimistic predictions are true and new
methods are unlikely to greatly expand intensively studied fami-
lies like Indo-European, they may greatly ease new analyses of
lesser-known languages.
New computerized cladistic methods are, likewise, already
aiding the analysis of complex language families and are provid-
ing Indo-Europeanists food for thought. However, the develop-
ment and application of such algorithms could beneit from the
compilation and deployment of data about the probability of
various types of linguistic innovations and borrowings.
To date, the new methodologies have not been adopted
by most practitioners. While it is easy to fault established
researchers for conservatism, it is also true that quantita-
tive methods typically cannot take into account the diverse
types of information that linguists are accustomed to reason-
ing with. Fortunately, the emerging partnerships between lin-
guists and cladists should help bridge the gap between old and
new approaches and lead to the widespread adoption of hybrid
methodologies.
Brett Kessler
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Baxter, William H., and Alexis Manaster Ramer. 2000. Beyond lump-
ing and splitting: Probabilistic issues in historical linguistics. In Time
Depth in Historical Linguistics, ed. Colin Renfrew, April McMahon,
and Larry Trask, 16788. Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for
Archaeological Research.
Blust, Robert. 1999. Subgrouping, circularity and extinction: Some
issues in Austronesian comparative linguistics. In Selected Papers
from the Eighth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics,
ed. E. Zeitoun and P. J. K. Li, 3194. Taipei: Academia Sinica.
Bryant, David, Flavia Filimon, and Russell D. Gray. 2005. Untangling
our past: Languages, trees, splits and networks. In he Evolution of
Cultural Diversity: A Phylogenetic Approach, ed. Ruth Mace, Clare J.
Holden, and Stephen Shennan, 6985. London: UCL Press.
Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza, 1994.
he History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press
Gordon, Raymond G., Jr., ed. 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World.
15th ed. Dallas: SIL International. Content also available online
at: http://www.ethnologue.com/
Greenberg, Joseph H. 1963. he languages of Africa. International
Journal of American Linguistics 29.1 (Supplement): Part 2.
. 1987. Language in the Americas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
. 2002. Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: he Eurasiatic
Language Family: Lexicon. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Kessler, Brett, 2001. he Signiicance of Word Lists. Stanford, CA: Center
for the Study of Language and Information.
Kessler, Brett, and Annukka Lehtonen. 2006. Multilateral comparison and
signiicance testing of the Indo-Uralic question. In Phylogenetic Methods
and the Prehistory of Languages, ed. P. Forster and C. Renfrew, 3342.
Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Mallory, J. P. 1989. In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language,
Archaeology and Myth. London: hames and Hudson.
Nakhleh, Luay, Don Ringe, and Tandy Warnow. 2005. Perfect phyloge-
netic networks: A new methodology for reconstructing the evolution-
ary history of natural languages. Language 81: 382420.
Language-Game
Oswalt, Robert L., 1998. A probabilistic evaluation of North Eurasiatic
Nostratic. In Nostratic: Sifting the Evidence, ed. J. C. Salmons and B. D.
Joseph, 199216. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Renfrew, Colin. 1987. Archaeology and Language: he Puzzle of Indo-
European Origins. London: Pimlico.
Ringe, Don A., Jr. 1992. On Calculating the Factor of Chance in Language
Comparison. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society.
Ringe, Don, Tandy Warnow, and A. Taylor. 2002. Indo-European and
computational cladistics. Transactions of the Philological Society
100: 59129.
Swadesh, Morris. 1955. Towards greater accuracy in lexicostatistic dat-
ing. International Journal of American Linguistics 21: 12137.
homason, Sarah Grey, and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language Contact,
Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
LANGUAGE-GAME
At the beginning of the Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig
Wittgenstein questions the Augustinian or traditional picture of
the essence of human language, according to which the meaning
of a word is the object for which it stands, so that a word to which
no object corresponds has no meaning. Learning language con-
sists in giving names to objects, and the association between
the word and the object is established by ostensive teaching of
words. Wittgenstein attacks this conception as both confused
and reductive. It makes naming seem like a queer connection of
a word with an object, a kind of baptism of the object, as if mean-
ing existed separately from the word and was attached to it by
a mental process: a remarkable act of mind or occult process.
Moreover, making the correspondence between name and object
a condition of meaning has the absurd consequence that when
the object no longer exists, the word no longer has any meaning.
Here, the meaning of a name is confounded with the bearer of
the name, whereas in fact when Mr. N. N. dies, one says that the
bearer of the name dies, not that the meaning dies (Wittgenstein
[1953] 1997, 40). he Augustinian picture of language is also
reductive. Even if we were to correct its conception of ostensive
deinition (e.g., by replacing the occult process with training), it
would still err in being an oversimpliication: Ostensive deini-
tion is too narrow; it does not describe everything that we call
language. We think that language consists in giving names to
objects, whereas in fact we do the most various things with our
sentences: hink of exclamations alone, with their completely
diferent functions. Water! Away! Ow! Help! Fine! No! 1997, 65).
([1953] 1997, 27).
he functions of words, suggests Wittgenstein, are as diverse
as the functions of tools in a toolbox ([1953] 1997, 11). And
these are countless. But his toolbox analogy does more than
underscore the diversity of the uses of language; it also suggests
that words work much like tools in that their meaning resides in
their use: We remain unconscious of the prodigious diversity
of all the everyday language-games because the clothing of our
language makes everything alike ([1953] 1997, 224) and so it
is use that is the distinguishing mark. In reaction to the mental-
ist conception of meaning, which sees it unilaterally as a mental
connection between words and objects, Wittgenstein airms
that the meaning of a word or sentence resides in the use we
make of it. He introduces the term language-game to highlight
the interplay, in the determination of meaning, between lan-
guage and the actions into which it is woven and to bring into
prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of
an activity, or of a form of life ([1953] 1997, 23; see forms of
life ).
In fact, Wittgenstein nowhere provides a well-rounded dei-
nition of language-game because his employment of the term
evolves and because it is what he calls a family resemblance
concept. He employs the term
i. to circumscribe various more or less broad domains of lan-
guage. Here, we can speak of single and speciic language-games,
such as those we play in our use of particular words or con-
cepts (e.g., fear, game, hand, knowing) or in speciic
activities (e.g., lying, thanking, cursing, making a joke,
following a rule, giving orders and obeying them); but these
speciic language-games are subsumed under more general uses
of the term either a generic use: he calls the whole, consisting of
language and the actions into which it is woven, the language-
game ([1953] 1997, 7) or an anthropological use, that is, what
he calls the human language-game (1977, 554) (as opposed, say,
to the language-game of alien tribes).
ii. to describe the degree of sophistication of language use.
Here, Wittgenstein speaks of primitive or complicated language-
games.
iii. to describe how language works.
It is in its encapsulation of how language works that the
expression language-game is most eloquent. he expression
is due to the analogy Wittgenstein makes between language and
games, which supersedes the calculus analogy of the Tractatus,
thereby signaling the switch from his own conception of language
as a ixed and timeless symbolism to a conception of language as
essentially embedded in human practice language as essen-
tially in use. In the Blue Book, he begins to question the idea that
speaking a language is, in all cases, to apply a calculus according
to strict and exact rules; rather, using language is much like play-
ing a game. he game analogy is more itting than the calculus
analogy in several ways:
1. Like game, language is a family resemblance concept. Just
as there is a multiplicity of games with nothing common to all,
there is nothing common to all of our uses of language that
makes them into language or parts of language, but they are
related to one another in many diferent ways, and it is because
of this relationship that we call them all language ([1953]
2. Language is an activity, and it is essentially connected with
practice or use: our language-game is a piece of behaviour
(1980, 151); a language-game incorporates both language and
the actions into which it is woven ([1953] 1997, 7). To use lan-
guage meaningfully is analogous to making a move in a game;
to understand a word is to know how to use it. Just as we learn
how to play a game by learning what the permitted moves are
in the game, we learn the meaning of words by learning what
is accepted as a meaningful use of the word. And here, it is not
the application of explicit rules but training (1970, 186) and
repeated exposure that are needed to play a game properly or
to use a word meaningfully. he concept of language-games
highlights the idea that the mastery of language is an acquired
skill or know-how, not a systematic (innate or acquired)
417
Language-Game
application of rules: To understand a language means to be
master of a technique ([1953] 1997, 199).
3. Like games, languages are rule governed, but this does not
mean that there are strict and precise rules for each language-
game: Just as there are not rules to legislate for everything in
a game (e.g., there are no rules for how high or how hard one
throws the ball in tennis), language, too, is not everywhere cir-
cumscribed by rules. And as in games, the learning of explicit
rules is not always necessary someone can have learned a
game without ever learning or formulating rules ([1953] 1997,
31) and so, too, in language can the game be learned purely
practically, without learning any explicit rules (1977, 95).
he constitutive rules of language are those of grammar
(1974, 184). What Wittgenstein means by grammar is not, how-
ever, what grammarians mean by grammar: It is neither a tax-
onomy of the structural features of a language nor a science
that describes or prescribes the correct or standard usage of
words or arrangement of words. Wittgensteinian grammar is a
generic term for the publicly determined (though this determi-
nation is not due to a concerted, but to an unconcerted, con-
sensus) conventions or conditions (1974, 138, 88) that govern
our meaningful use of words or expressions. Languages are rule
governed, but the rules that govern them are not metalinguistic
norms that exist in advance of use; learning the meaning of a
word is learning how the word is used. Moreover, if grammat-
ical rules determine what it makes sense to say, they cannot
themselves belong to the language-game: a grammatical rule
is a preparation (1993, 72) for a language-game, except in
heuristic language-games (e.g., pedagogical language-games;
language teaching) where the formulation of some rules is the
object of the language-game (the distinction here is an instance
of the use and mention distinction). To learn grammatical
rules is to learn what the conventional conditions and con-
straints of the uses of a word are, which linguistic moves are
meaningful and which are not. Just as the rules of a game con-
stitute the game and its allowable moves, grammar constitutes
language and its allowable moves:
4. Like games, language is embedded in our social, cul-
tural and natural ways of living that is, in our form of life.
Languages cannot be abstracted from the context in which
they live: words have meaning only in the stream of life
(1982, 913). Language is a normative practice, but it is also a
social practice. Any language is founded on convention ([1953]
1997, 355); it is embedded in the shared activities of the lan-
guage users in a given community: To obey a rule, to make a
report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs
(uses, institutions) ([1953] 1997, 199). To understand a lan-
guage-game, one must be either immersed in the community
in which it is embedded or knowledgeable about that commu-
nitys practices: Someone not accustomed to, or aware of, the
practice in some Semitic cultures of saying Hamsa! (Five!)
a verbal conjuring of the ive ingers of the hand that protects
against the evil eye would not understand the purpose of Wittgenstein, Ludwig. [1953] 1997. Philosophical Investigations. Trans.
the utterance. For a language to emerge or be possible, there
has to be something shared. What is shared is a distinct form
of life: the particular biosocial conditions and activities that
make particular languages possible. he human form of life
could not have produced a feline language, nor a feline form
418
of life a human language. Language and form of life are intern-
ally related: To imagine a language means to imagine a form
of life ([1953] 1997, 19), and to imagine a human language is
necessarily to imagine a human form of life, a human way of
being and acting that essentially involves both our biological
makeup and our social behavior. For our language-games are
impacted by the facts of our natural history, such as our bio-
logical human constraints; for example, the language-game
with colors is characterized by what we can and what we can-
not do (1970, 345). herefore, if certain very general facts of
nature were diferent from what they are, so would our con-
cepts and language-games be. But to say that our language-
games are conditioned by certain facts (1977, 617), is not to
say that our language-games are justiied by, or answerable to,
these facts.
5. Like games, language and language-games are autono-
mous. By this, Wittgenstein means that although our language-
games are rooted in our form of life, they are not accountable
to, or rationally grounded in, any reality: he language-game is
not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It
is there like our life (1977, 559). Rather than speak of symbols,
words, or sentences as the primary or elementary units of mean-
ing (as logicians, including Wittgenstein himself in the Tractatus,
had done), the later Wittgenstein views the language-game as
the basic unit in linguistic activity; he urges us to look on the
language-game as the primary thing ([1953] 1997, 656), that
which does not have to be explained by any fact. Here, he can
be viewed as broadening Gottlob Freges context principle: he
context necessary for meaning is not the proposition but the
language-game (e.g., a sound is an expression only in a language-
game [(1953)1997, 261]).
In his last work, On Certainty, Wittgenstein dwells on the
importance of unmoving foundations for the possibility of
language-games: It is essential for our language-games that
no doubt appears at certain points (cf. 1977, 524). He argues
that some basic certainties such as The world exists or
This is a hand or Cats dont grow on trees are necessary,
unmoving foundations of our language-games (cf. 1977, 403,
411), that the whole language-game rests on this kind of cer-
tainty (cf. 1977, 446). This kind of certainty, however, is non-
epistemic; he views it as a kind of trust: I really want to say
that a language-game is only possible if one trusts something
(1977, 509).
Danile Moyal-Sharrock
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Baker, G. P., and P. M. S. Hacker. 1980. Wittgenstein: Understanding
& Meaning: An Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical
Investigations. Vol. 1. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Canield, John V. 1993. he Living Language: Wittgenstein and
the Empirical Study of Communication Language Sciences 15.3:
16593.
G. E. M. Anscombe. 2d ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
. 1970. Zettel. Ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans
G. E. M. Anscombe. Berkeley: University of California Press.
. 1974. Philosophical Grammar. Ed. R. Rhees, trans. A. Kenny.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Language-Learning Environment
. 1977. On Certainty. Ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von
Wright, trans. D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe. Amended 1st ed.
Oxford: Blackwell.
. 1980. Remarks on he Philosophy Of Psychology. Vol. 1. Ed.
G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe.
Oxford: Blackwell.
. 1982. Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology. Vol. 1. Ed.
G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. C. G. Luckhardt and
M. A. E. Aue. Oxford: Blackwell.
. 1993. Moores Wittgenstein lectures in 19301933. In stimulus. For example, John Lewis and Jefrey Elman (2001) have
Philosophical Occasions: 19121951, ed. J. C. Klagge and A. Nordman,
46114. Indianapolis: Hackett.
LANGUAGE-LEARNING ENVIRONMENT
his term refers to the linguistic and sociocultural environment
in which children learn to talk and, in particular, to the language
to which they are exposed. he irst systematic studies of the lan-
guage-learning environment were conducted in response to the
claim that, like the language used among adults, the language
heard by children was grossly defective full of false starts, gram-
matical errors, and misleading pauses and as such represented
a very poor sample of the language that the child must eventually
learn. hese studies showed that speech addressed to children
was largely clear, well formed, and semantically and syn-
tactically simpler than speech addressed to adults, leading
some researchers to argue that in simplifying their speech, par-
ents were presenting their children with graded language lessons
that could bear at least some of the burden of explanation for the
childs remarkably swift progress in language learning (see Pine
1994 for a review).
In fact, there are a number of problems with this view. First,
it confuses the notions of facilitating interaction and facilitating
acquisition. hus, some of the adjustments made by parents to
facilitate interaction (e.g., the extensive use of questions) prob-
ably have the efect of increasing the complexity of the language
to which children are exposed during the early stages. Second,
it is unclear to what extent the adjustments made by Western
middle-class parents generalize across cultures. Indeed, ethno-
graphic researchers have identiied cultures in which parents
react with mirth or horror to the idea of holding conversations
with young language-learning children (see Lieven 1994 for a
review). hird, the notion that the language-learning environ-
ment somehow facilitates acquisition is theoretically rather vac-
uous in the absence of a reasonably well-speciied theory of how
the child is learning from this environment.
Cognizant of this last problem, more recent work has focused
on the kind of information that is present in the environment
and the way in which this might be exploited by the childs
language-learning mechanisms. hus, work in computational
modeling has shown that there is a great deal of information in
the statistical structure of human languages that could, in prin-
ciple, be used to solve particular language-learning problems.
For example, work on segmentation has shown that it is pos-
sible to use information about the stress pattern, the phonot-
actics, and the transitional probabilities between syllables in
a language to identify boundaries between words (Brent 1999),
and work on the acquisition of syntactic categories has shown
that it is possible to categorize words quite successfully on
the basis of their co-occurrence statistics (Redington, Chater,
and Finch 1998) or their occurrence in frequent frames (Mintz
2003). Moreover, studies using modern infant techniques have
shown that very young children are sensitive to all of these
potential sources of information (Jusczyk 1999; Gomez and
Gerken 2000).
An interesting feature of this kind of work is the extent to which
it sheds new light on classical arguments from the poverty of the
shown that it is possible for a simple recurrent network to learn
to obey structure-dependent rules such as those involved in the
formation of complex yes-no questions (e.g., Is the boy who is
dancing singing?) in the absence of exposure to complex yes/
no questions. his occurs because the knowledge that the net-
work has acquired by processing simple yes/no questions and
complex declaratives constrains the way in which it deals with
complex yes/no questions.
A inal strand of research has investigated the relation between
variation in language development and variation in the language
to which children are exposed. For example, research on chil-
dren learning English has found a relation between their aux-
iliary development and mothers use of yes/no questions (e.g.,
Can you kick the ball?) in which the auxiliary occurs in stressed
utterance-initial position (see Richards 1990 for a review). One
problem with this kind of research is that covariance in patterns
of within-language variation often makes it diicult to distinguish
empirically between alternative explanations of the efects that
are found. One way of avoiding this problem is to focus on the
relation between cross-linguistic diferences in patterns of devel-
opment and cross-linguistic variation in the language to which
children are exposed. For example, Daniel Freudenthal and his
colleagues (2007) have recently shown that it is possible to simu-
late cross-linguistic variation in childrens tendency to use non-
inite verb forms in inite contexts in English, Dutch, German,
and Spanish as a function of the interaction between one identi-
cal mechanism that learns from the right edge of the utterance
(MOSAIC, Model Of Syntax Acquisition In Children) and the
statistical properties of child-directed speech in these four lan-
guages. MOSAIC produces high proportions of noninite verb
forms in inite contexts in Dutch, German, and English because
in these languages, the verb forms occurring in utterance-inal
position in the input are much more likely to be noninite than
inite. However, it produces much lower proportions of noninite
verb forms in inite contexts in Spanish because in this language,
inite verb forms are much more likely than noninite verb forms
to occur at the right edge of the utterance.
Julian Pine
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Brent, Michael. 1999. Speech segmentation and word discovery: A com-
putational perspective. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 3: 294301.
Freudenthal, Daniel, Julian Pine, Javier Aguado-Orea, and Fernand
Gobet. 2007. Modelling the developmental patterning of initeness
marking in English, Dutch, German and Spanish using MOSAIC.
Cognitive Science 31: 31141.
Gomez, Rachel, and LouAnn Gerken. 1999. Infant artiicial language
learning and language acquisition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences
4: 17886.
419
Language of Thought
Jusczyk, Peter. 1999. How infants begin to extract words from speech.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences 3: 3238.
Lewis, John, and Jefrey Elman. 2001. Learnability and the statistical
structure of language: Poverty of stimulus arguments revisited. In
Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Boston University Conference
on Language Development, 35970. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla.
Lieven, Elena. 1994. Crosslinguistic and crosscultural aspects of
language addressed to children. In Input and Interaction in
Language Acquisition, ed. Clare Gallaway and Brian Richards, 5673.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mintz, Toby. 2003. Frequent frames as a cue for grammatical categories
in child-directed speech. Cognition 90: 91117.
Pine, Julian. 1994. he language of primary caregivers. In Input and
Interaction in Language Acquisition, ed. Clare Gallaway and Brian
Richards, 1537. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Redington, Martin, Nick Chater, and Steven Finch. 1998. Distributional
information: A powerful cue for acquiring syntactic categories.
Cognitive Science 22: 42569.
Richards, Brian. 1990. Language Development and Individual
Diferences: A Study of Auxiliary Verb Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT
his is a special language that has been postulated by a number
of writers G. Harman (1972), J. Fodor (1975, 1987) to explain
how humans and many animals represent and think about the
world. he language of thought (LOT) is claimed to be coded,
or entokened, in their brains, rather than in the way certain
formal languages are entokened in the circuitry of a computer.
What makes the LOT a language is that it possesses semantically
valuable, causally eicacious logico-syntactic structure: hat is, it
consists, for example, of names, predicates, variables, quantiiers
(all, some) logical connectives (not, and, only if) and cally structured sort (see Smolensky 1988). Its sometimes also
operators (possibly, probably) that are combined to form thought that some kind of system of imagistic representations
complex sentences that can be true or false.
he LOT need not be the natural language (e.g., English,
Chinese), if any, that a creature speaks, although some writers
have supposed that in adult humans the two may coincide (pro-
viding an interesting perspective in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
that thought is determined by language). Indeed, given that the
relevant sorts of intelligent behavior are displayed by many infra-
linguistic creatures infants, chimpanzees its postulation need
not be conined to natural language users. Nor need the LOT be
in the least conscious or introspectible: A persons thought pro-
cesses might be explained by a LOT, while introspectively his or
her mental life might seem to consist wholly of images, feel-
ings, and inarticulate impulses. Most importantly, processing a
LOT need not require any sort of intelligent creature to read and
understand the sentences being processed in the brain. Along
lines set out by Alan Turing, the processing of the LOT symbols
can be executed purely mechanically.
As in discussing any language, there are two issues raised by
such a postulation: i) here are syntactic issues regarding the
character of the actual symbols and the computations deined
over them. his is the kind of issue regularly addressed in rich
detail by programmers dealing with artifactual computers, and
with psychologists dealing with naturally occurring, living crea-
tures, in their concern with data structures and algorithms for
dealing with them, for example, for vision or reasoning; and
420
ii) there are semantic issues regarding the meaning or interpreta-
tion of the symbols and data structures. In the case of artifactual
computers, this issue is usually conveniently settled by stipula-
tion: he artifactor gets to say what the symbols represent (e.g.,
bank balances, chess moves). In the case of natural creatures,
there is, of course, no relevant artifactor, and so the meaning
of the symbols must be determined by some natural facts or
relations.
here are two (not necessarily exclusive) kinds of candidates
for a theory of meaning of a LOT:
i. Meaning is spelled out in terms of some of the symbols cru-
cial causal/ conceptual roles in relation to other symbols, mirror-
ing patterns of inference. his is a natural suggestion for logical
symbols, such as and and not: A symbol, @, might mean
and because states entokening sentences p and q separately
might cause and in turn be caused by a state entokening p@q
by itself (see Block 1986; Peacocke 1994).
ii. Meaning is spelled out in terms of causal relations that
the individual symbols bear to phenomena in the world. For
example, a symbol S might be entokened in a creatures brain in
a way that covaries with the presence of a certain shape before
the creatures eyes in various circumstances, such as under ideal
conditions, under evolutionarily selective ones, or under ones
that display a certain counterfactual structure (see Dretske 1988;
Stalnaker 1984; Fodor 1987).
he chief rivals to the LOT hypothesis are either one or another
form of interpretativism, according to which a creature has prop-
ositional attitudes only because ascription of such states permits
the most rational interpretation of their behavior (see Davidson
[1973] 1984; Dennett 1987), and/or the brain structures underly-
ing that ascription are of a radical connectionist nonsyntacti-
would not only be truer to introspection but also explain various
response-time results that suggest that people think in images
(see Kosslyn 1994).
he main reasons for believing in a LOT as opposed to these
rivals is that it would explain a number of interesting phenom-
ena associated with the mind. Salient among these are the
following:
1. he propositional structure of attitudes: he standard
object of, for example, a thought, belief, desire, hope, or expec-
tation is some kind of truth-valuable object, most perspicuously
expressed by a sentence; neither images nor connectionist
networks are able to systematically represent logically com-
plex thoughts, involving, for example, negations and nested
quantiiers (what image could express Not everyone loves
someone?).
2. he causal eicacy of thought: A thought can cause bodily
states and movements because it is a structure entokened in the
brain.
3. he productivity of thought: People can potentially under-
stand an ininitude of diferent thoughts formed by logical com-
binations of simpler ones, for example, Its possible for every
cat to chase some rat that eats some cheese that that lives in
the house that Jack built, since the LOT entokened in their brain
can (under reasonable idealization) produce a corresponding
ininity of sentences.
Language Policy
4. he systematicity of thought: If people can think some
thought p, then they can also think all logical permutations of
p; for example, people can think If John leaves, then someone
insulted Mary if and only if they can think If someone leaves, then
Mary insulted John, since they can mechanically recombine the
simple expressions of a sentence.
5. he intensionality of thought: People can think of things
in one way without thinking of those very things in another; for
example, they can think that the morning star is Venus without
thinking that the evening star is, and they can think about dif-
ferent nonexistent things, such as Zeus and Santa Claus. Indeed,
the LOT can explain the hyperintensionality of thought: People
can think about things that are even necessarily identical, as
when one thinks that Mark Twain but not Sam Clemens is
funny, because they employ correspondingly diferent LOT
symbols.
6. he multiple roles of attitudes: Diferent attitudes can be
directed upon the very same thought; for example, people can
believe, desire, suspect, doubt the same thought, that God exists.
Fodor (1975, 1987) and Georges Rey (1997) have argued that
these and other phenomena cannot be explained by the rival
views without substantial, additional ad hoc assumptions, for
example, that certain images or networks express logically com-
plex thoughts and are causally related in the aforementioned
ways. For these reasons, the language of thought is to be pre-
ferred on empirical grounds (for more of an a priori argument
see, e.g., Davies 1991).
Georges Rey
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Block. N. 1986. Advertisement for a conceptual role semantics. In
Studies in the Philosophy of Mind. Ed. P. French, T. Uehling, and
H. Wettstein, 61578. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Davidson, D. [1973] 1984. Radical interpretation. In Inquiries into Truth
and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon.
Davies, M. 1991. Concepts, connectionism, and the language of thought.
In Philosophy and Connectionist heory, ed. W. Ramsey et al., 22956.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Dennett, D. 1987. he Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Dretske, F. 1988. Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Fodor, J. 1975. he Language of hought. New York: Crowell.
. 1987. Psychosemantics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Harman, G. 1972. hought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kosslyn, S. 1994. Image and Brain: he Resolution of the Imagery Debate.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Peacocke, C. 1994. A Study of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rey, G. 1997. Contemporary Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Blackwell.
Smolensky, P. 1988. On the proper treatment of conectionism.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11: 5974.
Stalnaker, R. 1984. Inquiry. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
LANGUAGE POLICY
Deinition and History
Language policy studies the regular choices among varieties and
variants within a speech community the language practices
of members of the community, their beliefs about the values to
be assigned to the varieties, and eforts by individuals or groups
with or claiming authority to modify the practices or beliefs of
other speakers. Practices, beliefs, and management can be stud-
ied separately, although they turn out to be interdependent.
Early language managers were the Sanskrit and Arabic gram-
marians who guarded the purity of sacred texts, the medieval
European rulers who switched from Latin to the vernacular for
legal matters, and the language nationalists in the nineteenth
century who made their national language diferent from that of
their previous ruler.
Einar Haugen (1966) described how rival political ideolo-
gies supported competing invented varieties of Norwegian and
compromised by requiring schoolchildren to learn both. In the
1960s, scholars became interested in the language-planning
problems of postcolonial Africa and Asia (Fishman, Ferguson,
and Das Gupta 1968). hey focused on status planning (mak-
ing one variety of language oicial or designating it for school
use) and corpus planning (changes in the language itself, such
as standardizing it or providing it with a writing system or new
terminology) (Kloss 1966). Others concentrated on the culti-
vation and standardization of developed European languages
(Nekvapil 2007).
In status policy, the problem was to decide between the
demands of contending varieties; as a decision depended on
nonlinguistic values, such as the power of social or ethnic or eco-
nomic groups, language planners had little real inluence. here
was work to do in language academies or in writing textbooks
to purify the linguistic usage of schoolchildren. In the 1970s,
some scholars tried to evaluate the efect of corpus planning,
but it proved easier to keep doing it than to study its efective-
ness (Fishman 1977). Language policy expanded when Robert
L. Cooper (1989) added a third area, language-acquisition plan-
ning, or language-education management, the efort to increase
the number of speakers. Related is language difusion, govern-
ments working to spread their language outside their political
boundaries (Cooper 1982).
Rights and Theories
In the last half century, a further development has been the
study and promotion of human or civil rights associated with
language (Laitin and Reich 2003; May 2005; Skutnabb-Kangas,
Phillipson, and Rannut 1995). Building on principles irst pro-
posed after World War I, several international covenants of lan-
guage rights for minorities have been formulated, and some have
been adopted by international bodies such as UNESCO and the
European Community; a smaller number have been ratiied by
nation-states, and a few have been implemented.
here is no generally accepted theory of language policy.
homas Ricento (2001), in fact, argues that there cannot be one.
However, Joshua A. Fishman (1991) has presented a model of
reversing language shift, which includes a graded intergenera-
tional disruption scale intended both to describe the state of a
language and its likelihood of being maintained and to suggest
how to resist further loss or reestablish earlier strength. Bernard
Spolsky (2004) has proposed that language policy has three
components (language practices, language ideology or beliefs,
and language management), and has sketched a theory based
on this proposal. Ji Nekvapil (2006), following Bjoern Jernudd
and J. V. Neustupn (1987), has put forward a theory of language
421
Language Policy
management, ranging from individual self-correction to the
organized management of all micro and macro levels. Detailed
descriptions of language policy such as Grenoble (2003), Kaplan
and Baldauf (2003) and Zhou (2004) have started to clarify the
complex dimensions that a theory must handle.
The Politics of Language Policy
One of the most critical facts or beliefs about language vari-
eties concerns their power. There are many nation-states
that assume monolingualism to be ideal and combine this
assumption with a belief in the value, beauty, efficiency,
and desirability of their own national variety. This is true of
English-speaking nations, although it is challenged by coun-
terassertions in South Africa, which has a long tradition of
claims for Afrikaans and has recently extended nominal rec-
ognition to nine African languages, and in Canada by the lan-
guage-related claims of Quebec for independence. The belief
was first manifested in Spain, which continued its search for
purity after the expulsion of Moors and Jews with a procla-
mation carried to the New World of the value of Spanish; this
resulted in the virtual destruction of Native American lan-
guages. The belief in the importance of a single national vari-
ety was adopted by the Jacobins during the French Revolution
and gradually implemented in France and French territories
(Ager 1999): The difficulty of its implementation continues
to be demonstrated by the need to pass new laws and regula-
tions. German Romanticism and nationalism (Fishman 1973)
provided an ideological base with the proclamation of the
truth of one nation, one language. Another example of ideo-
logical monolingualism is Japan, which during its period of
colonial expansion required conquered peoples to switch to
Japanese, and which has only recently taken note of minority
languages (Katsuragi 2005).
Commonly, the existence of two or more major languages
within a single nation-state or confederation is associated with
political conlict. One resolution is to favor a single variety, either
that spoken by the majority or that controlled by the dominant
elite. In the Soviet Union, a Lenin-inspired policy of recognizing
minority languages to speed up the spread of communism was
replaced under Stalin by a Russiication policy (Grenoble 2003;
Lewis 1972). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, most of the
newly independent states reasserted the signiicance of their
territorial languages, so that currently each of the former Soviet
states (including Russia itself) appears to be working toward
monolingualism in the territorial language (Landau and Kellner-
Heinkele 2001; Ozolins 2003).
Territoriality
A second solution to problems associated with having multiple
major languages within a single nation-state is territoriality.
India tried to base its internal political divisions on language.
he partition into a Hindu-dominated India and Moslem-
dominated Pakistan was paralleled by a language-management
efort to divide what was previously considered a single lan-
guage, Hindustani, into two Hindi written in Devanagari script
and Urdu with Perso-Arabic script (Annamalai 2001). he split-
ting up of India into states relected major language diferences,
although it could not capture the complexity of a nation with
422
2,000 varieties. Central Europe and the Balkans repeated this
process, as the partition of Czechoslovakia has led to oicial sta-
tus for Czech and Slovak (Neustupn and Nekvapil 2003), and
the division of Yugoslavia has now led to eforts to distinguish
Serbian and Croatian (Pranjkovic 2001).
Belgium and Switzerland use territoriality to resolve language
conlict. Externally, both are believed to be bilingual. In fact,
Belgium is divided into language regions, some of which are oi-
cially French-speaking, others oicially Dutch-speaking, and a
few oicially German-speaking. Only Brussels is oicially bilin-
gual. he varieties spoken in these regions are neither Dutch nor
French but regional dialects; as a result, 40 percent of Belgian
high school students report that they are taught in a language
that they do not speak at home (Aunger 1993). In Switzerland,
each canton establishes its own language policy, choosing among
German, French, Italian, and Romansch. Knowledge of a second
language (other than the expanding use of English associated
with globalization) is no better than in other European countries
(Harlow 2004; Hrdegen 2001).
he special language problems of Africa were produced by
the fact that the borders drawn by colonizing European powers
in the nineteenth century did not coincide with ethnic, tribal, or
linguistic boundaries. After independence, African states had
to choose among a variety of languages, most of which were
also spoken in a neighboring states (Bamgbose 2000). Colonial
educational policy had favored the use of European metropoli-
tan languages, absolutely in the case of French and Portuguese
colonies and, after initial use for a few years of local vernaculars,
in British colonies. Partly because choice of any one vernacular
would provide excessive power to its speakers, partly because
the elite already spoke the metropolitan language, and partly
because of inertia, postindependence eforts to establish the sta-
tus of African languages have generally failed (Phillipson 1992).
Globalization and Local Resistance
Globalization has a major impact on language policy. One efect
has been the unparalleled difusion of English, the most widely
used second language in most of the world. English is the favored
irst foreign language in all European countries, spreading also
into former Soviet nations. In Asia, English is the lingua franca
for intercommunication among Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, and
hais. International corporations, even those located in European
countries, tend to prefer English. Foreign language teaching is a
topic of interest mainly in English-speaking countries; elsewhere,
the major concern is English language teaching.
he protection of endangered languages is a recent concern
of many language policy scholars. hey have noticed the rapid
loss of smaller minority languages, estimating that most of the
current 6,000 languages in the world will disappear in the next
hundred years (Krauss 1991). he threat comes not just from
world languages like Spanish (which has virtually denuded
Latin America of its rich linguistic diversity) or French (with its
strong monolingual ideology) or English (universally feared as
the exemplar of linguistic imperialism) but also from stronger
local languages like Swahili. Fishman (1990) provides a set of
benchmarks for studying loss and suggests how to reverse it. So
far, the most successful eforts at reversal have been associated
with grants of political autonomy, as in Spain (Hofmann 1995),
Language Policy
the United Kingdom ( Laoire 1996; Coupland et al. 2006), and
Canada (Bourhis 2001). here are also eforts in New Zealand
(Spolsky 2005; May and Hill 2005), in South America (Hornberger
and King 2001), and among other indigenous peoples (McCarty
2003; Omoniyi 2003).
Speakers of major languages also fear language loss. his
can be seen in Spain, with the sensitivity of its Academy to lan-
guage change; in France, with its growing number of regulations
and language agencies; in Russia, with its refusal to recognize
non-Cyrillic alphabets for minority languages and its claim of
defending the language rights of Russian-speakers in former
Soviet states; and even in the United States, where an English-
only movement is struggling against what it sees as the threat of
Spanish and other immigrant languages to the survival of what
most people believe to be the strongest language in the world
(Baron 1990).
Language policy is a new and rapidly developing ield, the
urgency and seriousness of which has resulted in activism by
scholars who feel responsible for correcting what they see as
injustices or blindness to the potential loss of linguistic diversity,
as well as in academic attempts to develop theories to explain
data from increasingly detailed descriptions of situations and
policies.
Bernard Spolsky
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Ager, Dennis E. 1999. Identity, Insecurity and Image: France and Language.
Clevedon and Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters.
Annamalai, E. 2001. Managing Multilingualism in India: Political and
Linguistic Manifestations. New Delhi: Sage.
Aunger, Edmund A. 1993. Regional, national and oicial languages
in Belgium. International Journal of the Sociology of Language
104: 3148.
Bamgbose, Ayo. 2000. Language and Exclusion: he Consequences of
Language Policies in Africa, Beitrage zur Afrikanistik. Mnster and
Hamburg: LIT Verlag.
Baron, Dennis E. 1990. he English Only Question. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Bourhis, Richard Y. 2001. Reversing language shift in Quebec. In Can
hreatened Languages be Saved? ed. J. A. Fishman 10141. Clevedon
and Avon: Multilingual Matters.
Cooper, Robert L. 1989. Language Planning and Social Change.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cooper, Robert L., ed. 1982. Language Spread: Studies in Difusion and
Social Change. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Coupland, Nicholas, Hywel Bishop, Betsy Evans, and Peter Garrett. 2006.
Imagining Wales and the Welsh language: Ethnolinguistic subjectivi-
ties and demographic low. Journal of Language and Social Psychology
25.4: 35176.
Fishman, Joshua A. 1973. Language and Nationalism: Two Integrative
Essays. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
. 1977. Comparative study of language planning: Introducing a sur-
vey. In Language Planning Processes, ed. J. Rubin, B. H. Jernudd, J. Das
Gupta, J. A. Fishman and C. A. Ferguson, 3140. he Hague: Mouton.
. 1990. What is reversing language shift (RLS) and how can it suc-
ceed? Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 11.1/2:
536.
. 1991. Reversing Language Shift: heoretical and Empirical
Foundations of Assistance to hreatened Languages.
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Fishman, Joshua A., Charles A. Ferguson, and Jyotirinda Das Gupta. 1968.
Language Problems of Developing Nations. New York: Wiley.
Grenoble, Lenore A. 2003. Soviet Language Policy. Dordrecht, the
Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Harlow, Ray. 2004. Switzerland. In Encyclopedia of Linguistics, ed.
P. Strazny. London: Taylor and Francis.
Haugen, Einar. 1966. Language Conlict and Language Planning: he
Case of Modern Norwegian. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hofmann, Charlotte. 1995. Monolingualism, bilingualism, cultural
pluralism and national identity: Twenty years of language planning
in contemporary Spain. Current Issues in Language and Society
2.1: 5990.
Hornberger, Nancy H., and Kendall A. King. 2001. Reversing language
shift in South America. In Can hreatened Languages be Saved? ed.
J. A. Fishman, 16694. Clevedon and Avon: Multilingual Matters.
Hrdegen, Stephan. 2001. he Fribourg linguistic case controversy
about the language of instruction in schools in the light of freedom
of language and equal educational opportunities in Switzerland.
European Journal for Educational Law and Policy 5: 7382.
Jernudd, Bjoern, and J. V. Neustupn. 1987. Language planning: For
whom? In Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Language
Planning, ed. L. LaForge, 7184. Quebec: Presses de lUniversite Laval.
Kaplan, Robert B., and Richard B. Baldauf. 2003. Language and
Language-in-Education Planning in the Paciic Basin. Dordrecht, the
Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Katsuragi, Takao. 2005. Japanese language policy from the point of view
of public philosophy. International Journal of the Sociology of lan-
guage 175/176: 4154.
Kloss, Heinz. 1966. German-American language maintenance eforts.
In Language Loyalty in the United States, ed. J. Fishman, 20652. he
Hague: Mouton.
Krauss, Michael. 1991. he worlds languages in crisis. Language
68.1: 410.
Laitin, David D., and Robert Reich. 2003. A liberal democratic
approach to language justice. In Language Rights and Political
Theory, ed. W. Kymlicka and A. Patten, 80104. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Landau, Jacob, and Barbara Kellner-Heinkele. 2001. Politics of Language
in the Ex-Soviet Muslim States: Azerbaijan, Usbekistan, Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. London and Ann Arbor:
C.Hurst & Co. and University of Michigan Press.
Lewis, E. Glyn. 1972. Multilingualism in the Soviet Union. he
Hague: Mouton.
May, Stephen. 2005. Language rights: Moving the debate forward.
Journal of Sociolinguistics 9.3: 31947.
May, Stephen, and Richard Hill. 2005. Mori-medium education: Current
issues and challenges. International Journal of Bilingual Education
and Bilingualism 8.5: 377403.
McCarty, Teresa L. 2003. Revitalising indigenous languages in homoge-
nising times. Comparative Education 29.2: 14763.
Nekvapil, Ji. 2006. From language planning to language management.
Sociolinguistica 20: 92104.
. 2007. Language cultivation in developed contexts. In Handbook
of Educational Linguistics, ed. B. Spolsky and F. M. Hult, 25165.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Neustupn, J.V., and Ji Nekvapil. 2003. Language management
in the Czech republic. Current Issues in Language planning
4.3/4: 181366.
Laoire, Muiris. 1996. An historical perspective of the revival of Irish
outside the Gaeltacht, 18801930, with reference to the revitaliza-
tion of Hebrew. In Language and State: Revitalization and Revival in
Israel and Eire, ed. S. Wright, 5175. Clevedon and Avon: Multilingual
Matters.
423
Laws of Language
Omoniyi, Tope. 2003. Local policies and global forces: Multiliteracy and
Africas indigenous languages. Language Policy 2.2: 13352.
Ozolins, Uldis. 2003. he impact of European accession upon language
policy in the Baltic States. Language Policy 2.3: 21738.
Phillipson, Robert. 1992. Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Pranjkovic, Ivo. 2001. he Croatian standard language and the Serbian
standard language. International Journal of the Sociology of Language
147: 3150.
Ricento, homas, ed. 2001. Ideology, Politics and Language Policies: Focus
on English. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove, Robert Phillipson, and Mart Rannut. 1995.
Linguistic Human Rights: Overcoming Linguistic Discrimination. Berlin
and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Spolsky, Bernard. 2004. Language Policy, Key Topics in Sociolinguistics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 2005. Maori lost and regained. In Languages of New Zealand, ed.
A. Bell, R. Harlow, and D. Starks, 6785. Wellington: Victoria University
Press.
Zhou, Minglang, ed. 2004. Language Policy in the Peoples Republic
of China: heory and Practice since 1949. Dordrecht, the
Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
LAWS OF LANGUAGE
The Concept of Law
he philosophy of science deines the term scientiic law as a
meaningful universal hypothesis that is systematically connected
to other hypotheses in the ield and, at the same time, well cor-
roborated on relevant empirical data (cf. Bunge 1967). A law is
called universal because it is valid at all times, everywhere, and
for all objects of its scope.
A system of laws is called a theory. he construction of a the-
ory is the highest and most demanding goal of scientiic research
and can be undertaken only if and when a number of interre-
lated laws have been found. here is much confusion about the
term theory, especially in linguistics, where all kinds of formal-
isms, thoughts, approaches, descriptive tools, deinitions, and
concepts are called theories. he philosophy of science distin-
guishes two kinds of theories: 1) the axiomatic theories of logics
and mathematics and 2) the empirical theories in the factual sci-
ences. While the irst ones make statements only within a given
axiomatic system and can be used only to construct analytical
truths, the latter ones make statements about parts of the world.
he truth of an empirical theory and of its elements, the laws,
depends not only on internal correctness but also on the cor-
respondence with the facts of reality although every empirical
theory must have an axiomatic kernel.
he value of theories and their components, the laws, lies not
only in their role as the containers of scientiic knowledge but
also in the fact that there can be no explanation without at least
one law: A valid scientiic explanation (the so-called deductive-
nomological explanation; cf. Hempel and Oppenheim 1948) is a
subsumption under laws taking into account boundary condi-
tions. Laws must not be confused with rules, which are either
prescriptive or descriptive tools without any explanatory power;
hence, grammars and similar formalisms also cannot explain
anything. Another signiicant diference is that rules can be vio-
lated laws (in the scientiic sense) cannot.
424
Laws in the Study of Language and Text
In quantitative linguistics, the exact science of language
and text, distributional and functional kinds of laws are known.
he irst kind takes the form of probability distributions; that is,
it makes predictions about the number of units of a given prop-
erty. A well-known example of this kind is the Zipf-Mandelbrot
Law. he status of the corresponding phenomenon has been
discussed since the days of George K. Zipf, who was the irst to
systematically study quantitative properties of language from
a scientiic point of view. he law relates a) the frequency of a
word in a given text (in any language) to the number of words
with the given frequency (called frequency spectrum) and b) the
frequency of a word in relation to its rank (called rank-frequency
distribution). he irst formulation by Zipf was later modiied
and corrected by Benoit Mandelbrot, who derived the law from
the assumption that languages optimize their lexicons with
respect to code-production efort in the long run. his resulted
in the famous formula (1), which has the form of a rank-fre-
quency distribution: If the words are arranged according to their
frequency, the most frequent word is assigned rank one, and so
on. he formula gives the frequency that a word should have at
a given rank:
K
(1) f (r) =
(b+ r)
where f (r) is the frequency, r the rank, b and empirical param-
eters, and K a normalizing constant that makes the probabilities
sum up to 1.0.
Since the seminal works of Zipf and Mandelbrot, numerous
laws have been found. Other examples of distributional laws
are (in morphology and lexicon) the distribution of length,
polysemy, synonymy, age, part of speech (see word classes),
and so on, (in syntax) the frequency distribution of syntac-
tic constructions, the distribution of their complexity, depth of
embedding, information, and position in mother constituent; (in
semantics) the distribution of the lengths of paths in semantic
networks (see also semantic fields), semantic diversiica-
tion, and so on. Any property and any linguistic unit studied so
far displays a characteristic probability distribution.
he second kind of law is called the functional type, because
these laws link two (or more) properties. An illustrative example
of this kind is Menzeraths Law (also called Menzerath-Altmann
Law), which relates the size of linguistic constituents to the size
of the corresponding construct. hus, the (mean) length of the
syllables of a word depends on the number of syllables the
word consists of; the (mean) length of the clauses in a sentence
depends on the length of the sentence (measured in terms of the
number of clauses it consists of). he most general form of this
law is given by formula (2):
(2) y = Ax be-cx
where y is the mean length of the constituents, x the length of the
construct, and A, b, and c are parameters. (his law predicts the
function [2] but not the values of its parameters. hey are esti-
mated empirically on the data under analysis. Future research
may provide an enhanced version of the law that will also deter-
mine these parameters.) Experience shows that the parameters
are determined mainly by the level of the units under study. hey
Laws of Language
3.2
3.0
2.8
2.6
2.4
2.2
2.0
0 2 4 6 8
Figure 1. The functional dependence of mean syllable length (y-axis) on
word length (x-axis) in Hungarian. The line represents the prediction; the
marks show the empirical data points.
Figure 2. Typical curve representing the replacement of a linguistic unit
by a new one.
increase from the level of sound length gradually to the sentence
and suprasentence level. Figure 1 gives an impression of a typical
curve. Other examples are the dependence of word (or morph)
frequency on word (or morph) length, and the frequency of syn-
tactic constructions on their complexity, of polysemy on length,
of length on age, and so on.
A special variant of a functional law is the developmental one.
Here, a property is related to time. he best-known example is
the Piotrowski Law, which represents the development (increase
and/or decrease) of the portion of new units or forms over time.
his law is a typical growth process and can be derived from a
simple diferential equation with the solution (3):
c
p=
(3) 1 + ae bt
where p is the proportion of new forms at time t, c is the
saturation value, and a and b are empirical parameters.
Figure 2 shows the increase of the forms with /u/ at the cost
of the older form with /a/ in the German word ward > wurde
(/vart/ > /vurde/) in the time period from 1445 to 1925. As the
graph shows, the replacement was very limited for the irst 200
years, but even a much shorter time span can provide enough
information to predict the development over the next several
hundred years.
Another variant of this third kind of law is based on (discrete)
linguistic instead of (continuous) physical time. he simplest
way to operationalize linguistic time is the reference to text
position. In oral texts, there is a direct correspondence of the
sequence of linguistic units to physical time intervals.
Several linguistic characteristics can be investigated using
indices that relate their frequency to current text position, among
them the type-token-ratio (TTR). At each text position, the num-
ber of types occurred to that point is counted, which yields a
monotonously increasing curve, because the number of words
used before a given text position cannot decrease in the course
of the rest of the text. A straightforward theoretical derivation of
this law was given by Gustav Herdan (1966), represented by the
simple formula (4):
(4) y = ax b
where y is the number of types, x the number of tokens (= text
position), and b a text characteristic. he parameter b is also an
indicator of the morphological type of the language under study
if word forms are considered because morphologically rich lan-
guages display a faster increase in word-form types than isolat-
ing languages.
A problem of the TTR, if used for text comparison, is that it is
not independent of the overall text length. herefore, more com-
plicated formulae are used to take this inluence into account or
quite diferent models (cf. Popescu and Altmann 2006a, 2006b)
are applied.
Recent investigations have found that other linguistic units
show a similar behavior in their text dynamics (letters, morphs,
syntactic constructions, syntactic function types, etc.). However,
depending on the size of their inventory in language (which may
vary over several orders of magnitude compare, e.g., the size
of an alphabet or a phoneme system to the size of a lexicon),
diferent models have to be used. he TTR of syntactic units, for
example, is shown in Figure 3.
Theory Construction
Currently, there are two approaches to the construction of a lin-
guistic theory (in the sense of the philosophy of science): 1) syn-
ergetic linguistics and 2) Gejza Wimmer and Gabriel Altmanns
uniied theory.
The basic idea behind synergetic linguistics (cf. Khler 1986,
2005) is the aim to integrate the separated laws and hypoth-
eses found so far into a complex model that not only describes
the linguistic phenomena but also provides a means to explain
them. This is achieved by introducing the central axiom that
language is a self-regulating and self- organizing system .
An explanation of the existence, properties, and changes of
linguistic, more generally semiotic, systems is not possible
without the aspect of the (dynamic) interdependence of struc-
ture and function. The genesis and evolution of these systems
must be attributed to repercussions of communication upon
structure (cf. Bunge 1998 and Khler and Martinkov 1998).
425
Laws of Language
100
Types
50
0
0 300 600 900 1200
Tokens
Synergetic modeling in linguistics starts from axiomatically
assumed requirements that a semiotic system must meet: the
coding requirement (semiotic systems have to provide a
means to create meaningful expressions) and the require-
ments of coding and decoding efficiency, of memory saving,
of transmission security, of minimization of effort, and many
others.
he other approach at theory construction in linguistics is
Wimmer and Altmanns uniied theory. Integration of sepa-
rately existing laws and hypotheses starts from a very general
diferential (alternatively: diference) equation, as well as two
very general assumptions: 1) If y is a continuous linguistic vari-
able (i.e., some property of a linguistic unit), then its change
over time or with respect to another linguistic variable will be
determined in any case by its temporary value. Hence, a cor-
responding mathematical model should be set up in terms of
its relative change (dy/y). 2) he independent variable that
has an efect on y also has to be taken into account in terms
of its relative change (i.e., dx/x). he discrete approach is ana-
logical; one considers the relative diference yx/yx. Hence, the
general formulas are dy/y = g(x)dx and yx-1 / yx-1 = g(x). he
solutions of these equations are quite interpretable linguisti-
cally and yield the same results as the synergetic approach. he
great majority of laws known up to now can be derived from
these equations.
Both models, the uniied and the synergetic, turn out to be
two representations of the same basic assumptions. he syner-
getic model allows easier treatment of multiple dependencies for
which partial diferential equations must be used in the uniied
model.
Reinhard Khler
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Altmann, Gabriel. 1980. Wiederholungen in Texten. Bochum, Germany:
Brockmeyer.
Bertalanfy, Ludwig van. 1968. General System heory: Foundations,
Development, Applications. New York: George Braziller.
Bunge, Mario. 1967. Scientiic Research I, II. Berlin and Heidelberg:
Springer.
426
Figure 3. The TTR of syntactic constructions in a text.
The smooth line corresponds to the prediction; the
irregular line represents the empirical data.
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. 1998. Semiotic systems. In Systems: A New Paradigm for the
Human Sciences, ed. Gabriel Altmann and Walter A. Koch, 33749.
Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Haken, Hermann. 1978. Synergetics. Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer.
Haken, Hermann, and R. Graham. 1971. Synergetik. Die Lehre vom
Zusammenwirken. Umschau 6: 191.
Hempel, Carl G., and P. Oppenheim. 1948. Aspects of scientiic explana-
tion. Philosophy of Science 15: 13575.
Herdan, Gustav. 1966. he Advanced heory of Language as Choice and
Chance. Berlin: Springer.
Hebek, Ludek. 1997. Lectures on Text heory. Prague: Oriental
Institute.
Khler, Reinhard. 1986. Zur linguistischen Synergetik. Struktur und
Dynamik der Lexik. Bochum, Germany: Brockmeyer.
. 1990. Elemente der synergetischen Linguistik. Glottometrika
12: 17988.
. 1995. Bibliography of Quantitative Linguistics = Bibliographie zur
quantitativen Linguistik = Bibliograija po kvantitativnoj lingvistike.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
. 2005. Synergetic linguistics. In Quantitative Linguistik. Ein
internationales Handbuch. Quantitative [Linguistics: An International
Handbook], ed.Reinhard Khler, Gabriel Altmann, and Rajmund G.
Piotrowski, 76075. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Khler, Reinhard, and Zuzana Martinkov. 1998. A systems theoreti-
cal approach to language and music. In Systems: A New Paradigm for
the Human Sciences, ed. Gabriel Altmann and Walter A. Koch, Berlin,
51446. New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Mautek, Jn, and Gabriel Altmann. 2007. Discrete and Continuous
Modeling in Quantitative Linguistics. Journal of Quantitative
Linguistics 14: 8194.
Popescu, Ioan-Iovitz, and Gabriel Altmann. 2006a. Some aspects of
word frequencies. Glottometrics 13: 2346.
. 2006b. Some geometric properties of word frequency distribu-
tions. Gttinger Beitrge zur Sprachwissenschaft 13: 8798.
Wimmer, Gejza, and Gabriel Altmann. 2005. Uniied derivation of
some linguistic laws. In Quantitative Linguistik. Ein internationales
Handbuch. [Quantitative Linguistics: An International Handbook],
ed. Reinhard Khler, Gabriel Altmann, and Rajmund G. Piotrowski,
76075. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
Zipf, George Kingsley. [1935] 1968. he Psycho-Biology of Language: An
Introduction to Dynamic Philology. 2d ed. Boston: Houghton-Milin.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
. 1949. Human Behaviour and the Principle of Least Efort. Reading,
MA: Addison-Wesley.
Learnability
LEARNABILITY
generative grammar shifted the foundations of theoretical
linguistics away from discovery procedures the automatic con-
struction of an optimal grammar to the problem of language
learnability, the question of how a natural language could be
learned in principle. his statement of the problem is so vague
as to be useless; so let us break the question into subparts and
consider them in turn.
he study of language learning might proceed from the obser-
vation and investigation of actual human children engaged in the
process of learning their mother tongue or tongues. However fas-
cinating and useful this approach is, it is fraught with a number
of diiculties. Real children are engaged in a number of diferent
tasks and are changing along a number of diferent dimensions
while in the process of learning their irst language. he develop-
mental psycholinguist must, then, be careful of all these diferent
factors.
he investigation of learnability seeks to circumvent these dif-
iculties by considering language learning as a problem in com-
putational logic. he researcher in language learnability seeks to
construct an explicit algorithm that will produce a grammar for
a target language after inite exposure to evidence from that lan-
guage. Such a researcher takes the rareied view of language as
a set of strings, corresponding to the grammatical sentences
of that language. He or she supposes that the learner is actually
an algorithm that takes as input a text, an ininite sequence of
sentences. he text is constructed by drawing strings from the
language and presenting them, one at a time, to the learner. In
this case, the learner is presented with positive only evidence;
he/she is given information about sentences that are in the lan-
guage but no information about sentences that are outside the
language. An alternative learning setting would be to allow the
learner to be tutored by giving him/her strings that are marked
for grammaticality. Such information demonstrably simpli-
ies the learning task, but in real learning, the child is unlikely
to receive systematic evidence about grammaticality. As a result,
learnability research has generally proceeded from the assump-
tion of positive-only evidence.
After each example is presented to the learner, that learner
makes a guess about the grammar of the target language. A
learner is said to converge to a grammar for a language just in
case the learner hypothesizes that grammar after inite exposure
to the text and never alters the hypothesis after that. If the gram-
mar is correct, then the learner is said to have learned the target
language; truly, learning a language means that the learner has
hit the correct grammar and never changes his/her mind after
that. We only require, at this point, that the grammar generate
the correct set of sentences; we have not said anything about
how the grammar does so, and so we place no constraints on the
structural descriptions assigned to sentences.
A language is learnable if there exists a learner who, upon
inite exposure to the language, learns the language in the afore-
mentioned sense. A set of languages is learnable if the leaner can
learn every language in the set.
We can turn to an early learnable result from E. M. Gold
(1967; see also Osherson, Stob, and Weinstein 1986). Imagine a
set of languages deined as follows: We deine a language, call it
L0, which is an ininite set consisting of the symbol a repeated an
arbitrary number of times:
L0 = { a, aa, aaa, ... }
Otherwise, a language Li in the set consists of all strings of as
shorter than, and including, a repeated i times. Learning a lan-
guage in this set just means converging to the i that is the index
for the language Li.
It is easy to see that this set of languages is not learnable from
positive-only evidence. Suppose that the longest string that the
learner has seen to date is of length n. Nothing about the text will
allow the learner to distinguish between L0 and Ln, and so the
learner will be incapable of converging. hus, this class of lan-
guages is not learnable.
Golds result might seem to spell disaster for the learnability
project. he derivational machinery needed for the languages
that Gold used to prove his theorem is much simpler than what
would be required for the set of natural languages, yet Golds set
is unlearnable. Gold seems to have shown that the natural lan-
guages are not learnable in the sense outlined here.
We neednt fret for too long over this particular bugbear since
another way of thinking about Golds result is near at hand. In
particular, the set of learnable languages does not contain the set
that Gold constructed for his proof. Some have found it tempt-
ing to massage Golds result into an argument that the learner
is equipped with prior information (innate knowledge) about
the set of natural languages, although this goes beyond the actual
content of the result.
here are a number of interesting responses to Golds result.
Complexity bounds can be placed on the grammars that the
learner can consider. M. Kanazawa (1998) has shown that
restricted sets of categorial grammars are string learn-
able learnable using the kind of text presentation that we have
considered. Golds result entails that the entire class of categorial
grammars cannot be learned using this kind of evidence. Note
that Kanazawas result does not conlict with Golds theorem
since it holds only of a particular subset and not the entire class,
the latter case being what Golds theorem excludes.
Alternatively, learners might receive more evidence about the
target language than is present in a positive-only text. K. Wexler
and P. Culicover (1980) developed a proof of the learnability of
the set of rules in the transformational component of a 1970s style
transformational grammar. In their system, the learner is
presented with pairs consisting of the surface syntactic string
along with a base structure. his base structure is akin to the level
of deep structure (see underlying structure and sur-
face structure), where the syntactic representation is a kind
of mentalese the language of thought, and would be invariant
across languages (the Universal Base Hypothesis). he learner
is presented occasionally with both a grammatical sentence and
its meaning. he proof shows both that the transformation rule
component could be learned and that a complexity bound could
be placed on the input evidence that the learner needed in order
to converge (their Degree 2 Learnability result).
S. Pinker (1984) considered the cases whereby the learner has
access to the string and a representation of its semantic content.
his process, called semantic bootstrapping, uses a set of heu-
ristic rules to link semantic categories to syntactic categories.
427
Learnability
Costa Florencio (2003) has shown that the full range of categorial
grammars can be learned if the learner is presented with unla-
beled structures.
Another response to Golds result is to impose diferent types
of constraints on the learners hypothesis space. For example,
the idea that universal grammar consists of a set of invariant
principles whose expression is regulated by a inite set of param-
eters has played a seminal role in linguistic theory over the past
quarter of a century (see principles and parameters the-
ory and language acquisition). he learner is taken as
being faced with the inite task of discovering the correct value
of each parameter, where each parameter can take on one of a
inite set of parameters, given a text consisting of simple gram-
matical sentences.
he parametric approach usually assumes that the learner
is given positive-only input. After a sentence is presented to
the learner, it produces a hypothesis, possibly by changing the
value(s) of one or more parameters. It is obvious that even a rela-
tively small set of parameters could produce an enormous space
of languages. he space of languages might, for example, con-
tain local maxima. A local maximum might look correct to the
learner since it would always yield a structural analysis for any
input sentence, but it would systematically give the sentence an
incorrect structural analysis, for example. If this happened, then
the set of languages deined by that parameter space would not
be learnable relative to a simple learning device with positive-
only evidence.
In response to this problem, a number of diferent algorithms
were proposed. R. Clark (1992) proposed using a kind of artiicial
evolution to converge to the target. A population of grammars
would be exposed to the input text, with the best performers
allowed to combine and produce ofspring that had inherited
properties from the parent grammars. his approach uses the
parallelism implicit in a population to avoid the problem of local
maxima. his approach to learning falls into the class of probably
approximately correct (or PAC) learning; in this framework, the
learner is guaranteed to converge within a margin of error, where
the margin of error can be made arbitrarily small, but not zero.
Clark and I. Roberts (1993) extended this work to try to account
for language change. P. Niyogi (2006) has developed a more
sophisticated computational approach to this problem (see also
Yang 2002).
E. Gibson and Wexler (1994) tried to develop a learner that
used an algorithm that tests to see if resetting a parameter to
a new value actual improves the learners performance on the
input example. In order to avoid local maxima, they proposed
ordering the parameters according to a maturational sequence.
Readers should consult Frank and Kapur (1996) for an extensive
critique. S. Kapur (1991) developed a learning algorithm that
avoids local maxima by using a statistical model of indirect nega-
tive evidence. his algorithm is, once again, clearly within the
PAC learners.
Others have proposed using triggering evidence to set param-
eters (Dresher and Kaye 1990). On this model, each value of a
parameter would be associated with the abstract description of
a piece of triggering evidence that would cause the parameter
to be set to that value. he learner would scan the input text,
searching for examples that matched the description of a trigger;
428
Left Hemisphere Language Processing
only then would the learner set the parameter to the exempliied
value.
Charles Yang (2002) has imported a number of mathematical
tools from population biology to develop a sophisticated model
of parameter setting that is clearly inspired by evolutionary the-
ory. Equally interesting work has been done on the learnability of
optimality theory (Tesar and Smolensky 2000) using tech-
niques drawn from statistical machine learning. Although no full
proof of the learnability of parametric approaches yet exists, the sta-
tistical approaches as well as work in conventional machine learn-
ing (see Manning and Schutze 1999) promise to yield new insights
in language learning, language variation, and language change.
Robin Clark
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Clark, R. 1992. he selection of syntactic knowledge. Language
Acquisition 2: 83149.
Clark, R., and I. Roberts. 1993. A computational model of language
learnability and language change. Linguistic Inquiry 24: 299345.
Dresher, E., and J. Kaye. 1990. A computational learning model for met-
rical phonology. Cognition 34: 13795.
Florencio, C. C. 2003. Learning categorial grammars. Ph.D. diss.,
Universiteit Utrecht.
Frank, R., and S. Kapur. 1996. On the use of triggers in parameter set-
ting. Linguistic Inquiry 27: 62360.
Gibson, E., and K. Wexler. 1994. Triggers. Linguistic Inquiry 25: 40754.
Gold, E. M. 1967. Language identiication in the limit. Information and
Control 10: 44774.
Kanazawa, M. 1998. Learnable Classes of Categorial Grammars. Stanford,
CA: CSLI Publications.
Kapur, S. 1991. Computational learning of languages. Ph.D. hesis,
Cornell University.
Manning, C. D., and H. Schutze. 1999. Foundations of Statistical Natural
Language Processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Niyogi, P. 2006. he Computational Nature of Language Learning and
Evolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Osherson, D., M. Stob, and S. Weinstein. 1986. Systems hat Learn: An
Introduction to Learning heory for Cognitive and Computer Scientists.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pinker, S. 1984. Language Learnability and Language Development.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Tesar, B., and P. Smolensky. 2000. Learnability in Optimality heory.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wexler, K., and P. Culicover. 1980. Formal Principles of Language
Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Yang, C. D. 2002. Knowledge and Learning in Natural Language.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
LEFT HEMISPHERE LANGUAGE PROCESSING
Some History
he left hemisphere (LH) has been considered to be the primary
locus of language-speciic processing for centuries. We now
know that the right hemisphere (RH) has considerable lan-
guage abilities and should no longer be considered the minor
hemisphere. Recent research has demonstrated that both the left
and right hemispheres contribute to varying aspects of language
processing (Beeman and Chiarello 1997). Even so, historical and
current work still regards the left hemisphere as having a primary
and signiicant role in language processing.
Left Hemisphere Language Processing
One of the irst functional accounts of brain-language rela-
tions geared to the LH, the Wernicke-Lichteim model, separated
language into activities such as listening, reading, writing, and
speaking. Based on classic lesion localization eforts, these activ-
ities were thought to be localized in diferent LH brain regions.
Geschwinds (1965) model proposed that brocas area a
region located in the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) at the foot
of the motor strip near regions controlling mouth and tongue
movements was the seat of speech production, while
wernickes area in the posterior superior temporal regions
adjacent to the primary auditory cortex was the seat of audi-
tory comprehension. While this simple model was appealing, it
has been clear since at least the 1970s that this view of language
is likely inaccurate. For example, individuals diagnosed with
Brocas aphasia have auditory comprehension deicits that are
exposed on simple experimental probing and have production
deicits that go well beyond those described by luency measures
(Zurif and Caramazza 1976; Friedmann 2006).
Beginning in the 1970s, eforts were made to characterize lan-
guage in the LH by reference to linguistic levels of analysis along
the lines of syntax, semantics, and phonology. he LIFG
has been suggested to be critical for syntax, while the temporal
lobe has been suggested to be important for the normal func-
tioning of word-level semantics. Moreover, the posterior supe-
rior temporal gyrus (pSTG) has been suggested to play a critical
role in phonology. Even within these linguistic divisions, eforts
have been made to discover exquisitely detailed neurological
instantiations. he trace deletion hypothesis (Grodzinsky 2006),
for example, has taken a minimalist position on syntax-brain rela-
tions (see syntax, neurobiology of) and has suggested that
only sentence constructions that are derived from the displace-
ment of an argument (e.g., a noun phrase) and that yield a trace
(see also movement) rely on an intact Brocas area, and that
other hypothesized aspects of syntax rely on more widely distrib-
uted anatomical regions. Other accounts of the relation between
syntax and the brain suggest that only those constructions that
are deined as complex rely on an intact LIFG. Alternative theories
suggest that syntax, broadly deined, requires a neuroanatomical
language network consisting of Brocas region as well as STG, the
middle temporal gyrus (MTG), and the white matter iber tracks
(arcuate fasciculus) connecting these regions.
A Real-Time Perspective
he most current approach to brain-language relations as we
near the end of the irst decade of the twenty-irst century is for-
mulated in terms of processing metaphors such as activation
and maintenance that require a real-time analysis. It has been
suggested that within the LH, Brocas area is required for fast-
acting, relatively automatic and relexive processing routines;
more frontal areas are critical for executive functions underly-
ing language processing, including selecting among alternatives;
left posterior temporal areas seem important for activating and
maintaining argument structure, an aspect of lexical-semantics
or conceptual structure.
Take, for example, the activation of meaning-related word
forms during sentence comprehension. It has been argued that
unimpaired individuals initially activate multiple meanings of
ambiguous words, regardless of the context of the sentence.
here is evidence that this exhaustive access is controlled imme-
diately by the LH (Burgess and Simpson 1988). Soon after, a
lexical choice is made on the basis of frequency and context.
Evidence from aphasia also supports the role of the left anterior
frontal cortex in lexical access. For example, individuals with
Brocas aphasia appear to show a slow rise time of the initial
activation of multiple meanings, while those with Wernickes
aphasia evince normal patterns (Prather et al. 1991). Other acti-
vation accounts suggest that individuals with Brocas aphasia
(with damage to LIFG) underactivate lexical forms, while those
with Wernickes aphasia (with damage to STG) overactivate
(Blumstein and Milberg 2000).
he role of LIFG in real-time processing also appears to extend
to the comprehension of sentences that contain displaced argu-
ments or those with iller-gap dependencies, for example, in
object relative (OR) constructions (e.g., he audience liked the
wrestler that the priest condemned *____ for foul language) where
a direct object argument or iller (e.g., wrestler) has been dis-
placed from its canonical, post-verb position or gap (noted by *).
Individuals with Brocas aphasia do not activate the iller at the
gap in real time, unlike what is observed for neurologically intact
individuals and those with Wernickes aphasia or RH lesions
(Swinney et al. 1996). hus, a real-time processing deicit may
underlie the inability for Brocas individuals to ultimately com-
prehend these constructions when they are probed with simple
sentence-picture matching tasks or grammaticality judgments.
Variability
Much of the work detailing the role of the LH in language pro-
cessing has been based on descriptions of neuroanatomy con-
ducted in the later third of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. K. Brodmann (1909) suggested that the most func-
tionally relevant parcellation of the brain is by cytoarchitecton-
ics (cellular composition), but the map of Brodmanns Areas
is based on manually drawn borders of a single brain. K. Amunts
and colleagues (1999) examined 10 postmortem brains, and the
borders for each brain were automatically drawn and super-
imposed on a template to produce a group cytoarchitectonic
map. Large intersubject variability was uncovered, perhaps par-
tially explaining why so much variability exists in the mapping
between behavior and anatomy from both lesion and functional
imaging studies.
Another possible contributor to intersubject variability is the
assumption of dead tissue only in and around the lesion. For
many years, investigators have assumed that structural lesions
(and the ischemic penumbra surrounding the lesion) were the
primary loci contributing to language deicits. With the advent
of more reined neuroimaging technology, such as perfusion
weighted and difusion tensor imaging, researchers have been
investigating areas of the brain that are found to be structurally
intact yet not receiving an optimal supply of blood low. hese
hypoperfused regions give way to functional lesions inside seem-
ingly intact neural tissue (Hillis 2007; Love et al. 2002).
The Role of Functional Neuroimaging in the Investigation
of Left Hemisphere Language
Lesion studies alone must be interpreted with caution as these
can only provide information regarding a speciic (i.e., the
429
Left Hemisphere Language Processing
damaged) neural regions necessity to perform a particular
language task. Functional neuroimaging patterns, on the other
hand, describe the level of recruitment of speciic area(s), not
the necessity of only the lesioned area for the process itself (Hillis
2007). It is the fusion of these and other methodologies that best
aides in the understanding and modeling of the brain basis of,
and networks involved in, language processing.
Neuroimaging research has demonstrated that the LH is par-
ticularly well suited for language processing, regardless of the
modality of language input (auditory or visual, as is found in
sign languages; Hickok, Love-Gefen, and Klima 2002). he
literature has demonstrated a LH bias for the neural circuitry
involved in the processing of complex versus simple sentence
constructions. More speciically, it has been argued that there
exists active recruitment of BA 44 and BA 45 (pars opercularis
[Stromswold et al. 1996] and pars triangularis [Caplan and
Waters 1999]) of the LH during the parsing of complex sentence
constructions (e.g., the iller-gap constructions described ear-
lier). Yet other reports examining sentence comprehension have
found anterior temporal cortex activation, including STG and
MTG (e.g., Humphries et al. 2005; Stowe et al. 1999). It is quite
likely that the discrepancies found in the imaging literature are
due to varying methods of presentation, and difering behavioral
requirements of the participants, as well as experimental design
issues and analysis procedures.
The Integration of Language Processing in the Left
Hemisphere
Work from multiple tasks and methodological techniques have
been integrated to form the basis of neurocognitive models of
language processing. hese models capture the choreographed
workings of neural regions during language processing. One
such model posited by A. Friederici (2002) argues for an LH
biased temporofrontal network. According to this model, iden-
tiication of a word into a grammatical category (e.g., noun, verb,
determiner, etc.) begins at about 200 milliseconds after the word
is encountered in the speech stream, localized in the regions sur-
rounding the anterior superior temporal cortex. At this temporal
point, such grammatical categories are placed into a hierarchical
syntactic form, which relies on the regions surrounding Brocas
area. At about 300500 milliseconds after a word is encountered,
the lexical entry is accessed, which allows for subsequent syntac-
tic integration via Brocas area and semantic integration via
temporal lobe regions.
Translational Research
Finally, the investigation of language processing in the LH has
yielded a growing enterprise devoted to mapping recovery of
function in aphasia following brain damage. Converging evi-
dence from clinical studies along with functional neuroimag-
ing studies have demonstrated that, depending on individual
factors such as size and extent of lesion, premorbid handed-
ness, and so on, recovery of language function may include the
undamaged regions of the LH language processing network or
homologous RH regions (Heiss et al. 1999; Kinsbourne 1971).
Treatment of language disorders for individuals with brain
damage, and the subsequent behavioral and neural changes
430
that are observed, may help illuminate brain-behavior map-
ping in both the left and the right hemispheres (e.g., hompson
and Shapiro 2007).
Tracy Love and Lewis P. Shapiro
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Amunts, K., Axel Schleicher, U. Brgel, Hartmut Mohlberg, Harry Uylings,
and Karl Zilles. 1999. Brocas region revisited: Cytoarchitecture
and intersubject variability. Journal of Comparative Neurology 412
(August): 31941.
Beeman, M., and C. Chiarello, eds. 1997. Right Hemisphere Language
Comprehension: Perspectives from Cognitive Neuroscience. Hillsdale,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Blumstein, S., and W. Milberg. 2000. Comprehension in Brocas and
Wernickes aphasia: Singular impairment. In Language and the
Brain, ed. Y. Grodzinsky, L. P. Shapiro and D. Swinney, 16783. San
Diego: Academic Press.
Brodmann, K. 1909. Vergleichende Lokalisationslehre der Grohirnrinde
in ihren Prinzipien dargestellt auf Grund des Zellenbaues. Leipzig:
Barth JA.
Burgess, C., and G. Simpson. 1988. Cerebral hemispheric mechanisms
in the retrieval of ambiguous word meanings. Brain and Language 33
(March): 86103.
Caplan, D., and G. Waters. 1999. Verbal working memory capacity and
language comprehension. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22.1: 7794.
Friederici, A. 2002. Towards a neural basis of auditory sentence
processing. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences 6.2: 7884.
Friedmann, N. 2006. Speech production in Brocas agrammatic
aphasia: Syntactic tree pruning. In Brocas Region, ed. Y. Grodzinsky
and K, Amunts, 6382. New York: Oxford University Press.
Geschwind, N. 1965. Disconnection syndromes in animals and man.
Brain 88: 585644.
Grodzinsky, Y. 2006. A blueprint for a brain map of syntax. In Brocas
Region, ed. Y. Grodzinsky and K. Amunts, 83107. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Heiss, W., J. Kessler, A. hiel, et al. 1999. Diferential capacity of left
and right hemispheric areas for compensation of poststroke aphasia.
Annals of Neurology 45.4: 4308.
Hickok, G., T. Love-Gefen, and E. Klima. 2002. Left temporal lobe
supports sign language comprehension. Brain and Language
82.2: 16778.
Hillis, A. 2007. Magnetic resonance perfusion imaging in the study of
language. Brain and Language 102.2: 16575.
Humphries, C. , T. Love, D. Swinney, and G. Hickok. 2005. Response
of anterior temporal cortex to syntactic and prosodic manipu-
lations during sentence processing. Human Brain Mapping
26.2 : 12838.
Kinsbourne, M. 1971. he minor cerebral hemisphere as a source of
aphasic speech. Archives of Neurology 25.4: 3026.
Love, T., D. Swinney, E. Wong, and R. Buxton. 2002. Perfusion imaging
and stroke: A more sensitive measure of the brain bases of cognitive
deicits. Aphasiology 16.9: 87383.
Prather, P., L. Shapiro, E. Zurif, and D. Swinney. 1991. Real-time exami-
nations of lexical processing in aphasics. Journal of Psycholinguistic
Research 20.4: 27181.
Stowe, L., A. Paans, A. Wijers, F., et al. 1999. Sentence comprehension
and word repetition: A positron emission tomography investigation.
Psychophysiology 36.6: 786801.
Stromswold, K., D. Caplan, N. Alpert, and S. Rauch. 1996. Localization
of syntactic comprehension by positron emission tomography. Brain
and Language 52.3: 45273.
Legal Interpretation
Swinney, D., E. Zurif, P. Prather, and T. Love. 1996. Neurological dis-
tribution of processing operations underlying language comprehen-
sion. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 8.2: 17484.
hompson, C., and L. P. Shapiro. 2007. Complexity in treatment of
sentence deicits in aphasia. American Journal of Speech-Language
Pathology 16: 3042.
Zurif, E., and A. Caramazza. 1976. Psycholinguistic structures in
aphasia: Studies in syntax and semantics. In Studies in Neurolinguistics,
ed. N. Avakian-Whitaker and H. Whitaker, 26092. New York: Academic
Press.
LEGAL INTERPRETATION
he judicial practice of legal interpretation provides the model
for other versions of legal interpretation, such as the interpreta-
tion of law by practicing lawyers. Interpretation of three types
of texts prior judicial decisions (which serve as precedents for
a present interpretive exercise), statutes, and constitutions
provides the model for interpretation of other texts, such as
regulations and treaties. It has a temporal and an institutional
dimension. Decision makers interpret texts written earlier,
sometimes substantially earlier, and produced by institutions
diferent from the ones engaged in the interpretive enterprise
(if only because of changes in personnel). hese characteristics
generate some problems common to all three forms of legal
interpretation.
Case Law and the Interpretation of Precedents
Prior judicial decisions play an important part in every system
of legal interpretation. Civil law systems, such as those in France
and Germany, are committed to a legal ideology in which judges
revert to statutory texts directly, without reference to any prior
judicial decisions. Judicial decisions in such systems rarely refer
to prior decisions, but even in such systems, precedent plays an
important role before courts issue their opinions (Lasser 2004).
he common law system of unwritten law, the foundation of
law in Great Britain and the United States, was developed by the
courts themselves to regulate large portions of the law of prop-
erty, contracts, and torts (accidents, among other topics). he
common law is unwritten only in the sense that the texts on
which it is based are prior judicial decisions, rather than legis-
lative enactments.
Interpreting a judicial decision in order to apply it to a new
problem involves several analytic steps. Typically, a decision will
describe a cases facts and articulate several legal rules that the
court says lead it to its conclusion. he interpreter later must dis-
tinguish the decisions holding from any obiter dicta found in the
decision. On standard accounts, the holding is the rule or rules
necessary to support the conclusion, dicta any rule or rules that
could be eliminated from the courts discussion without altering
its conclusion (Marshall 1997). Later courts do not always disre-
gard dicta, however, sometimes inding that they provide useful,
though not binding, guidance.
he prior decisions holding, once identiied, must be applied
to the new problem. Again typically, that problem will difer in
some respects from that presented by the precedent. Courts apply
the precedents rule in two ways. For much of the nineteenth
century, and to some extent today, courts applied precedents
formalistically. hey took the rule supporting the precedents
holding to follow deductively from some set of higher or more
general principles. he answer to the present problem then could
be deduced from those principles. he deductive process incor-
porates an efort to ensure that the application of a precedent in
the case at hand cohere with the entire set of abstract principles
that, taken together, constitute the common law. (Interpretation
of the codes in civil law systems is said to follow the same model,
except that the general principles are found in the codes provi-
sions, rather than extracted by interpretation from prior decided
cases.)
he formalist approach to precedent was subjected to with-
ering criticism in the twentieth century, primarily by the rule
skeptics associated with American legal realism (Rumble 1968).
hey argued, and to much of the legal community demonstrated,
that the purported deductions never satisied minimal standards
of deductive reasoning. he legal realists argued that what courts
actually did was to interpret precedents with an eye to the poli-
cies advanced by the rules articulated by the courts: he present
problem would be resolved by determining how the policies
embodied in the rules articulated in the precedents would best be
advanced. In the nineteenth century, for example, courts barred
an employee injured by the negligence of another employee
from recovering damages from their joint employer, in part
because the injured employee was said to be in a good position
to notice whether the other employee was a careful worker. Later
courts had to decide whether that policy was applicable where
the negligent worker labored in a diferent department, or was
the injured workers supervisor. Critics of the strongest versions
of legal realism wondered why the policy-oriented approach
should be described as involving interpretation at all. Policy-
oriented decisions, they argued, were entirely forward looking,
and the precedents did no more than provide a convenient heu-
ristic to guide thinking about the present problem.
he temporal dimension of legal interpretation is apparent
on the surface when courts interpret prior decisions. he insti-
tutional dimension is revealed when we ask, particularly of the
policy-oriented interpreter, Why should a court today give any
weight to the rules articulated by courts in the past? Answers
vary, but most combine a Burkean ideal that judges today should
not be overly conident that they know better than their prede-
cessors what good policies are, with a pragmatic sense that some
degree of reliance on prior decisions conserves judicial efort.
Statutory Interpretation
Questions of statutory interpretation as such arise only when
someone an enforcement oicial or a judge, for example has
some question about what a statutes terms mean. Where statu-
tory terms are thought to be unambiguous, oicials simply apply
the statutes, an operation that to them seems preinterpretive
(see also philology and hermeneutics). Application rather
than interpretation is likely to be more common soon after a
statutes adoption, because people will generally be familiar with
what the statutes enactors were trying to do unless, as happens
with some frequency, the adopters deliberately left speciic pro-
visions in the new statute unclear.
here are three prominent approaches to statutory interpre-
tation in the United States, with parallels in other legal systems.
(For an overview of the contemporary discussion in the United
431
Legal Interpretation
States, see Vermeule 2006.) he textualist approach interprets a
statutes terms by asking what the words would mean to an ordi-
nary reader (usually, a reader at the time the statute was enacted)
who is reasonably well informed about the meaning of the tech-
nical terms and about the entire statutory environment within
which the contested term is located.
Textualism is a rather bare-bones interpretive approach,
which to its critics requires the interpreter to ignore real and
accurate information about what a statute is designed to do.
Proponents of textualism often claim more clarity for the out-
comes they reach than there actually is. Where ambiguity per-
sists after considering the sources to which textualists limit
themselves, some other basis is needed for resolving the contro-
versy. he most prominent candidate emerges from the assump-
tion that ambiguous legislation should not be taken to disturb
the status quo. his assumption is sometimes expressed as a
canon of construction that ambiguous statutes should not be
construed to change the common law (that is, the background
rules that would apply if the legislature took no action). An alter-
native defense of textualism is comparative: that it reaches better
outcomes overall than alternative approaches that ask interpret-
ers to assess information that they are not well equipped to han-
dle, even though in particular cases the use of one or the other
approaches might produce a better result than textualism.
he intentionalist approach shifts the focus from the reason-
able reader to the enacting legislature. It asks what the legisla-
ture intended to accomplish by enacting the statute. In its least
controversial version, the intentionalist approach directs the
interpreters attention to the problem the statute was designed
to solve, producing an interpretation that, in the judges view,
solves the problem as well as possible within the bounds set by
the statutes words as reasonably understood. Intentionalists in
the United States, more than in the United Kingdom, are will-
ing to consult documents produced as the statute proceeded
through the enactment process (the statutes legislative his-
tory), such as reports by the committees that considered the
legislation and statements by the statutes supporters and oppo-
nents, to determine what the legislature meant by the terms it
used.
Textualists criticize these more expansive versions of inten-
tionalism. Most narrowly, they note that materials drawn from
the legislative history are readily deployed strategically by advo-
cates, who present only the materials that support the interpreta-
tion that will yield the result they favor, and selectively by judges,
who refer only to those parts of the legislative history that favor
that result the judges prefer for reasons independent of the inter-
pretive enterprise. Critics also observe that referring to legisla-
tive history gives some degree of authority to committees and
individual members, whereas only the entire legislature has any
authority to enact law. Finally, critics question the coherence of
invoking intentionalist terms with respect to multimember legis-
lative bodies. Some legislators might have favored the adoption
of a statutory provision because they thought that it solved an
important public policy problem, others because their constit-
uents favored it, still others because important contributors to
their campaigns did so. How can these varying states of mind be
aggregated into an intent of the legislature? Continental legal
theorists elide this question by referring to the legislator in the
432
singular when discussing the institutions that adopt statutes, but
it cannot be avoided so easily.
he inal prominent approach, usually called purposivism,
implicitly shifts the focus from the enacting legislature to the
interpreter. In a classic formulation, the purposivist assumes
that the legislature was composed of reasonable people seeking
to pursue reasonable purposes reasonably. Ambiguous statu-
tory terms are to be interpreted so that the goals imputed to the
legislature are most likely to be achieved. Purposivism avoids
most of the problems associated with intentionalism, because,
although its proponents ordinarily refer to the legislatures
purposes, they are not truly concerned with a real institution
stafed by real people. Rather, purposivists construct an ideal-
ized legislature to which they impute purposes that they then
seek to implement. Yet purposivism typically lacks an account
of whether the interpreter should posit abstract or more con-
crete purposes.
Purposivism makes the institutional dimension of legal inter-
pretation clear. It allocates efective decision-making authority to
courts, at least once the legislature does something that licenses
the courts to engage in the interpretive enterprise. Its proponents
believe that purposivism contributes to the good functioning of
the government overall, as courts and legislatures collaborate in
accomplishing good for the society. Critics respond with some
skepticism about the very idea of the public good as something
independent of the choices made by legislatures, and with the
observation that what the purposivists are doing cannot fairly be
described as interpretation. Rather, they suggest, the judges are
reading into the law their own policy preferences and then attrib-
uting those purposes to the statute.
Statutory interpretation also involves the use of canons of
statutory construction, which might be thought as well to con-
strain the judges power to interpret statutes merely to advance
their policy preferences. One example is the rule of lenity,
according to which criminal statutes should be construed where
fairly possible to limit the scope of criminal liability. Another
example, in legal systems with some form of judicial review for
constitutionality, is the canon that statutes should be construed,
again where fairly possible, to make them consistent with the
constitution or basic human rights. Scholars divide canons of
construction into two groups, substantive and legislative-intent
canons. Substantive canons embody policies that courts seek
to pursue independent of what legislatures actually sought
to accomplish in enacting particular statutes. he rule of len-
ity and the rule that statutes should be construed to limit their
impact on background law are examples. Legislative-intent
canons are rebuttable presumptions about what legislatures
seek to accomplish in enacting particular statutes. he canon
dealing with avoiding constitutional questions can be justiied
on the ground that courts should not assume that legislators
sought to enact unconstitutional statutes. Karl Llewellyn ofered
a classic critique of canons of interpretation, suggesting that
for each thrust built into one canon, there was a parry from
another equally well-established canon of statutory interpreta-
tion (Llewellyn 1950). So, for example, the canon Every word
and clause must be given efect was parried by the canon If
inadvertently inserted or if repugnant to the rest of the statute,
they may be rejected as surplusage.
Legal Interpretation
Canons of interpretation can it into each of the interpretive
approaches. For the textualist, the canons are part of the general
background the ordinary reader is assumed to know as he or she
reads a contested statutory text. he intentionalist can defend the
substantive canons on the ground that legislatures typically do
not intend to infringe on the policy goals embodied in substan-
tive canons. he purposivist has an easy time with substantive
canons, which directly embody judgments about good policy,
and can treat the other canons as similarly relecting good policy
judgments, rather than imputations of legislative intent.
Constitutional Interpretation
Questions of statutory interpretation typically involve speciic
and detailed provisions of complex statutes. Constitutional
interpretation, in contrast, typically involves the application of
general and abstract constitutional terms, such as freedom of
speech, due process of law, and equal protection of the laws to this group of approaches, general and abstract constitutional
(to take examples from the U.S. Constitution) to speciic prob-
lems. Here, too, there are two primary families of approaches.
he irst family includes varieties of originalism. One ver-
sion holds that constitutional provisions should be interpreted
to conform to the intent of the constitutions adopters. As with
intentionalism in statutory interpretation, original-intent
approaches run into many diiculties, such as the problem of
aggregating individuals intentions. In addition, when, as with
the U.S. Constitution, major provisions were adopted two centu-
ries earlier, the task of identifying what any particular individual
understood a provision to mean is extremely diicult.
Finally, the abstract terms that constitutions use pose an addi-
tional problem: Should the provisions be interpreted according
to the abstract or the concrete understandings of their adopters?
Ronald Dworkin uses the term concept to describe the abstract
understanding, conception the concrete one (Dworkin, 1977).
Consider, for example, a constitutional provision dealing with
equality. Does that provision enact into fundamental law the
particular understandings the adopters had about equality, such
as the understanding that laws could treat men and women dif-
ferently while still providing equality, or does it enact equality
itself, that is, the best understanding an interpreter can devise at
the moment of interpretation?
Some proponents of originalism responded to these and
other problems with an original-intent approach by arguing that
constitutional provisions should be interpreted according to the
original public meaning of their terms. he interpreter should
identify what the terms meant to a reasonable and well-informed
member of the public when the provisions were adopted. his
does not completely eliminate the evidentiary problems associ-
ated with original-intent approaches, because one is still search-
ing for what the terms meant to individuals, but it substantially
expands the range of relevant materials to include uses of the
terms in newspaper discourse and the like. Similarly, it shifts ter-
minology about abstract versus concrete intentions to references
to abstract versus concrete public meanings.
he temporal problem is perhaps the most diicult one fac-
ing originalist approaches. he problem is that the adopters or
the general public years ago could have no intentions about, or
understanding of, what the terms they used meant, in connec-
tion with developments they did not and could not anticipate.
One can rely on concrete intentions to rule out the possibility
that a practice they understood to be constitutionally permis-
sible would later be found to be constitutionally impermissible,
but even then the reliance on concrete intentions or understand-
ings requires a defense that goes outside the terms set by origi-
nalism itself. An alternative, similar to that ofered by canons
of statutory interpretation, is to hold a practice constitutionally
permissible unless it is clearly precluded by the constitution
as originally understood. he justiication for this alternative is
institutional: he constitution of a liberal democracy taken as a
whole should be understood to commit decision-making author-
ity to democratically elected legislatures, unless the constitution
clearly takes that authority away from the legislatures and gives
it to the courts.
he second family has no standard name, but probably can be
best described as including varieties of perfectionism. According
provisions should be interpreted in accordance with some over-
arching principles of good government and individual liberty.
hese principles can be relatively modest, as in a commitment
to democratic self-governance (Ely 1980), or more robust, as in
a commitment to justice broadly understood (Dworkin 1996).
Germanys constitutional court inds the perfectionist approach
to interpretation embodied in its constitutions commitment
to what it calls a basic order of values. (he Muslim con-
cept of ijtiha-d might be thought to have a similar underlying
structure.)
Perfectionist approaches to constitutional interpretation
resemble purposivist approaches to statutory interpretation.
Interpreters, it appears, are to rely on their own best understand-
ing of what the basic order of values is. his, some believe, is
inconsistent with democratic self-governance because it allows
judges to substitute their judgments about what justice or equal-
ity requires for the judgments made by elected representatives.
Critics suggest, in this setting as well, that what perfectionists
do cannot be called interpretation. he sting of that observation
might be reduced by responding that a constitutions text as such
has no authority anyway; only the long-standing practices that
people have come to accept have authority, and perfectionist
practices have been widely accepted for many years.
Another response, suggested by Stanley Fish (1994), is that
perfectionist interpretation is not as unconstrained as its critics
think. Judges are part of an interpretive community whose
shared understandings place signiicant limits on what even the
most willful judge will take as a responsible interpretation of a
constitutional provision. One important version of this view
describes a common law constitution, in which what judges
interpret is not primarily the constitution as written but the prior
decisions interpreting the constitution (Strauss 1996). Here,
constitutional interpretation reproduces common law interpre-
tation. It is worth noting that these two defenses of perfectionist
interpretation do not preclude interpretations that are norma-
tively unattractive, if the people or the interpretive community
settle on unattractive practices.
Consistent with the idea that judges are members of inter-
pretive communities, judges in diferent nations take diferent
approaches to interpreting their constitutions (Goldsworthy
2006). he practice in the United States is quite eclectic, with
433
Lexical Acquisition
judges using originalism and perfectionism relatively unsystem-
atically; the practice in Germany is more perfectionist, and that
in Australia is formalist.
Legal theorists have recurrently been attracted to the idea
that law, and legal interpretation, could become a science. he
direct invocation of sciences, such as linguistics, psychology, and
more recently neuroscience, to understand legal interpretation
has produced relatively little enlightenment, to the point where
it seems more likely than not that whatever science of law there
might eventually be, it will not be a science on the model of the
physical or biological sciences.
Mark Tushnet
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Dworkin, Ronald. 1996. Freedoms Law: he Moral Reading of the
American Constitution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
. 1977. Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Ely, John Hart. 1980. Democracy and Distrust: A heory of Judicial Review.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Fish, Stanley E. 1994. heres No Such hing as Free Speech: and Its a
Cood hing, Too. New York: Oxford University Press.
Goldsworthy, Jef. 2006. Interpreting Constitutions: A Comparative Study.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Lasser, Mitchel de S.-O.-LE. 2004. Judicial Deliberations: A Comparative
Analysis of Judicial Transparency and Legitimacy. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Llewellyn, Karl. 1950. Remarks on the theory of appellate decision and
the rules or canons about how statutes are to be construed. Vanderbilt
Law Review 3: 395406.
Marshall, Geofrey. 1997. What is binding in a precedent. In Interpreting
Precedents: A Comparative Study, ed. Neil MacCormick and Robert S.
Summers, 50317. Brookield, VT.: Ashgate/Dartmouth.
Rumble, Wilfrid E. 1968. American Legal Realism: Skepticism, Reform,
and the Judicial Process. Ithaca, NY.: Cornell University Press.
Strauss, David A. 1996. Common law constitutional interpretation.
University of Chicago Law Review 63: 877935.
Vermeule, Adrian. 2006. Judging Under Uncertainty: An Institutional
heory of Legal Interpretation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
LEXICAL ACQUISITION
Children start to produce their irst recognizable words between
12 and 18 months of age, and typically understand more than
they produce. his asymmetry is a lifetime efect. he forms of
their earliest words often depart radically from the adult versions
(consider ga for squirrel) and may be hard to understand. But
as their pronunciation becomes more skilled (see phonology,
acquisition of), children add rapidly to the vocabulary at their
disposal. hey add words for people, animals, everyday objects,
toys, food, and various activities and by age two generally pro-
duce between 200 and 800 distinct words.
Researchers have taken one of two main approaches to the
study of word acquisition in the last two decades: With the irst
approach, they have postulated built-in constraints that would
limit the hypotheses children entertain about possible mean-
ings, typically limited to noun meanings only (Markman 1989),
constraints that must later be overridden since they are incom-
patible with semantic relations, such as inclusion, overlap, and
434
partonomy, as well as with the meanings of verbs, adjectives,
and prepositions. Or, alternatively, they have argued that chil-
dren rely on many of the same pragmatic principles as adults
in making inferences in context about possible meanings. Under
this view, childrens initial inferences are limited only by what
they know and the words they have already acquired (Bloom
2000; Clark 1993).
How do children assign some meaning to an unfamiliar
word? Once adult and child are both attending to the same
object or action, for example, the child can infer that that object
or actionat their locus of joint attention in the physical con-
textis the adults intended referent. hat is, the child draws on
both physical and conversational context in assigning meanings
to unfamiliar words, regardless of word class (Clark 2009).
Moreover, once an object or action has been labeled, the child
can often infer that subsequent utterances are also relevant to
the newly identiied referent. And these utterances, in turn, may
supply added information about properties (size, texture; man-
ner of motion), relations (role of the object as agent, location, or
entity-afected, say; see thematic roles), function (common
uses, use on that occasion), and so on. he inferences children
make about meanings are guided by adult usage (a way of ind-
ing out the conventional way to designate each category) and by
the fact that new words must contrast in meaning with whatever
vocabulary they already know.
As children acquire more vocabulary, they build up seman-
tic domains words for food, clothing, cars, animals; types of
motion and location; and relations in space, for example and
they organize and reorganize each domain as they add new
members. Members of a domain are typically linked by semantic
relations like X is a kind of Y, Z is part of A, B is made of C,
or D is used for E. But not all relations hold in every domain.
hey depend on the meanings of individual lexical items. Among
verbs, for instance, the relations typically include their argu-
ment roles. A locative verb like put, for instance, is accompanied
by three arguments an agent, an object, and a location, as in
Miranda put the cup on the shelf. But a verb of motion like run
requires only one argument role: the doer or agent, as in Robert
ran fast (Clark 2003).
Building up each semantic domain also involves identifying
words that co-occur (dogs bark, but horses neigh), and common
collocations (compare disappearing ink and vanishing cream). It
requires working out the semantic relations that link such terms
as tiger, predator, and mammal, or tree, aspen, and gingko, on
the one hand, and throw, toss, twirl or break, tear, and cut, on the
other. It also requires that children learn the terms for parts and
wholes (thumb, inger, hand), for groups (lock, pod, herd; crowd,
reunion, meeting), for complex events (circus, opera, play), for
cycles (days of the week, months of the year), for relations (in,
above, behind; before, after; if, because), abstractions (justice,
equality, goodness), and much more.
Learning words is also the irst step in learning constructions.
Many constructions are linked initially to speciic verbs, and only
later extended to others that can take the same construction.
Children may learn want irst with a direct object, as in I want
that. hen they start to use nouns in place of demonstrative that
(I want the ball, I want a spoon), and only sometime later do they
start to use want with a to-complement, as in I want to go out.
Lexical-Functional Grammar
hey take even longer to add a subject to the complement, as in I
want Anna to come. Constructions often appear to be built up on
single lexical items on a one-by-one basis. his takes time (Clark
and Kelly 2006; Tomasello 2003).
Finally, adult usage plays a crucial role in acquisition.
Children track the frequencies of constructions in parental
speech and acquire irst those constructions that occur most
often. It is adult speakers who model word use, who ofer chil-
dren conventional terms for talking about types of objects,
activities, and relations. And it is adults who continually check
up with young children on just what meanings the children
intended to convey.
Eve V. Clark
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bloom, Paul. 2000. How Children Learn the Meanings of Words.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. his book reviews how meaning acquisi-
tion is linked to speaker intentions and theory of mind.
Clark, Eve V. 1993. he Lexicon in Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. his book examines childrens word learning and
their ability to coin words to ill gaps in their current vocabulary.
. 2009. First Language Acquisition. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. A review of irst language acquisition, and how cogni-
tive and social factors interact in a usage-based approach.
Clark, Eve V., and Barbara F. Kelly, eds. 2006. Constructions in Acquisition.
Stanford, CA: CSLI. his book reports on studies of how children
acquire constructions.
Markman, Ellen M. 1989. Categorization and Naming in Children.
Cambridge, MA: MIT. his book presents a constraints-based account
of lexical acquisition.
Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a Language. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press. his book presents a usage-based approach to early
syntactic acquisition (see syntax, acquisition of).
LEXICAL-FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR
Lexical functional grammar (LFG) is what is known as a con-
straint-based parallel correspondence architecture for a theory of
language (Bresnan 1982, 2001; Dalrymple 2001). It was called lexi-
cal because certain relations between elements, like that between
an active and a passive verb, were dealt with in the lexicon, as a
relation between lexical items. his contrasts with the approach
in transformational theories. Functional ambiguously refers
to grammatical relations, which are prominent in the theory, and
mathematical functions, which are used in the LFG-formalism.
he LFG-formalism can be mathematically modeled and, hence,
analyses expressed within it are susceptible to computational test-
ing (see Dalrymple et al. 1995). LFG is often referred to as a syn-
tactic theory, but like many other syntactic theories, it is actually
a framework within which theories of language can be expressed.
As one of the founders of LFG puts it: [T]he formal model of LFG
is not a syntactic theory in the linguistic sense. Rather, it is an
architecture for syntactic theory. Within this architecture, there
is a wide range of possible syntactic theories and sub-theories,
some of which closely resemble syntactic theories within alterna-
tive architectures, and others of which difer radically from famil-
iar approaches (Bresnan 2001, 43).
A crucial underpinning idea is that any meaningful linguistic
element has associated with it diferent types of linguistic infor-
mation, for instance, information about prosodic structure, about
category and constituent structure (see phrase structure),
about grammatical relations (also referred to as functions), and
about semantic structure (see semantics). It is furthermore
assumed that the organizational principles for these dimensions
may vary and that the formalisms used to represent the diferent
types of information should capture this variation. he informa-
tion is represented in diferent dimensions, for instance c-struc-
ture (for category and constituent), f-structure (for functional),
a-structure (for argument structure), and i-structure (for infor-
mation structure). Each dimension operates with its own funda-
mental categories and principles. he diferent dimensions are
related through mapping principles.
C-structure is represented in terms of a version of x-bar syn-
tax, employing both lexical categories, such as noun, adjective,
verb, and preposition, and functional categories, such as comple-
mentizer, inlection, and determiner. Quite a restrictive approach
to functional categories tends to be taken; they are used for ele-
ments expressing crucial functional features whose distribution
is limited to a certain position within a phrase. Hence, a category
such as I, assumed in some transformational theories to form a
part of every clause in every language, is motivated within LFG
for languages where an inlected verbal element occupies a par-
ticular structural position. One example would be verb second
languages, where the inite verb occurs in the second position in
the clause and, hence, initeness can be associated with this posi-
tion. his can then be captured through a functional category IP,
headed by the inite verb in I and the initial element placed in the
specifier position. In English, inite auxiliaries have properties
that motivate the use of a functional category I (see Dalrymple
2001, 534).
A principle of economy of expression applies to constituent
structure to yield trees that look rather unorthodox from a stan-
dard X-bar perspective. his principle states that any constituent
introduced by a rule is optional unless some separate principle
requires its presence. his can be illustrated by the analysis of
inite auxiliary verbs in English. he category I, to which these
verbs belong, is assumed to be introduced by a rule I I VP;
however, in sentences that do not contain a inite auxiliary, the I
is not present, giving a tree such as that in (1).
(1) IP
DP I
VP
here is assumed to be a fair amount of typological
variation in c-structure among languages. A language such as
Wambaya, which has relatively free word order apart from the
constraint that an auxiliary-like element has to appear in second
position, is assumed to have a functional category IP, where the
435
Lexical-Functional Grammar
I takes an exocentric category S as its complement (for a discus-
sion of the relevant data and potential constraints on the typo-
logical variation in constituent structure, see Nordlinger 1997).
F-structure is assumed to be reasonably invariant among
languages. It takes the shape of feature-value matrices, where
the features capture grammatical relations and functional fea-
tures. he simplest features are those with atomic values, such as
[number plu]. Grammatical relations such as subj(ect), obj(ect)
or adj(unct) are represented as features that take f-structures as
their values. Each element that has lexical semantic content has
associated with it a feature pred, which has a semantic form as
its value. A verb such as tickle, for instance, has the feature-value
pair [pred tickle < (subj) (obj) >], that is, in the pred value of this
verb, tickle requires a subject and an object (for more details
on semantics within LFG, see especially Dalrymple 2001, 21754,
who develops an approach to semantic composition called glue
semantics). he pred feature also captures selectional properties,
which are based on functions and functional properties, rather
than on syntactic categories; a transitive verb selects for a subject
and an object, not for two noun phrases. An f-structure for the sen-
tence Oscar tickled the cat can be found in (2).
PRED
( )(
tickle SUBJ OBJ
) ments. English is an example of a language wherein functions
PRED Oscar
SUBJ GEND masc
(2) PRED cat
NUM sg
OBJ
SPEC def
TENSE
past
hree well-formedness conditions apply to f-structures. he
general uniqueness condition requires each feature to have a
unique value. he completeness and coherence conditions ensure
compatibility between the requirements of a pred feature and its
local f-structure. Completeness requires that all functions spec-
iied by an elements pred feature be present in the f-structure
built up around that element; if, for instance, there had been
no obj in (2), completeness would have been violated. It also
requires those functions to have a semantic value, which prevents
an argument position from being illed by an expletive pronoun,
for instance. he coherence condition requires that all functions
present in a local f-structure be licensed by another elements
pred feature. If, for instance, there had been an obl(ique) in (2),
coherence would have been violated since no such function is
licensed by tickle. his is one example of the way that constraints
accounted for in terms of structure in other approaches are
expressed through f-structure in LFG.
he information captured in the pred feature is not a primi-
tive of the theory. he syntactic valency is, in fact, derived from
the semantic roles associated with the verb; hence, this aspect
of the f-structure is derived from the a-structure of the element.
he relation between semantic and syntactic valency is speci-
ied through lexical mapping theory (LMT). LMT works in terms
of two features [o(bject)] and [r(estrictive)]. he feature [o]
captures the fact that certain thematic roles cannot ill an
object function, for instance agents, which can be subjects or
obliques, but not objects. he feature [r] distinguishes those
functions that are not restricted as to which thematic roles can
436
ill them from those that are restricted in this way; a subject, for
instance, can be associated with a large number of thematic
roles, whereas an oblique is restricted as to which thematic
role can ill it. LMT associates feature values to thematic roles
intrinsically for example, an agent is intrinsically associated
with [o] and by default for instance, the highest thematic
role according to a typologically motivated thematic hierarchy
is associated with [r]. Grammatical functions are then deined
in terms of these two features; a subject, for instance, is [-o] in
not being object-like and [-r] in not being restricted to any par-
ticular thematic role, whereas an oblique is [-o] but [+r]. Two
well-formedness constraints apply to the mapping; the func-
tion-argument bi-uniqueness condition which states that each
thematic role must be associated with exactly one function and
each function with exactly one thematic role and the subject
condition which states that every predicate must have a sub-
ject. For examples of how LMT works and how it can analyze
constructions such as locative inversion or complex predicates
in interesting ways, see, for instance, Dalrymple (2001, Chap. 8)
or Bresnan (2001, Chap. 14).
The mapping between c-structure and f-structure can be
structurally defined or identified through morphological ele-
are determined through their hierarchical position; the sub-
ject appears in the specifier of the IP. This is then captured
formally through the phrase structure rule in (3a), where the
up arrow should be read as the f-structure associated with
my mother node and the down arrow as the f-structure
associated with this node. The resulting tree can be found in
(3b), where indices have been inserted to identify f-structures;
the f-structure associated with the IP is referred to as f1, and
so on.
(3) a.
b. IP f1
DP f2 I' f 3
(SUBJ)= =
he arrows can now be replaced by the indices, and we get the
equations in (4).
(4) f 1 SUBJ = f 2
f1 = f 3
hese equations refer to three f-structures and deine their rela-
tions; the f-structure f1 contains a feature subj which has as its
value the f-structure f2. he second equation states that f1 is iden-
tical to f3, which means that any featurevalue pair associated
with either of the two will also be associated with the other; the
two nodes IP and I will then be associated with one f-structure.
In fact, the categories that form the clausal backbone CP, IP
and VP will always share f-structure, so that featurevalue pairs
introduced to any of them will also be shared by the others. hese
Lexical-Functional Grammar
categories are referred to as co-heads (Bresnan 2001, 102). he
equations in (4) give rise to the partial f-structure in (5).
(5) SUBJ [ ] f
2
f f
1 3
As further elements are added, the information contributed by
their lexical entries or by functional equations associated with
structure will be inserted into the f-structure as dictated by the
functional equations. his mapping procedure from c-structure
to f-structure, like all LFG mapping relations, has the property
of monotonicity; information can be added but never deleted,
moved, or changed.
For a language like Latin, there are no arguments for an
elaborate hierarchical clause structure, but rather a latter exo-
centric structure is appropriate. In such a language, functions
are not deined structurally and there is no structural equation
of the kind illustrated in (3a). Instead, functions are identi-
ied through case marking, and this is captured directly in LFG
through an association between the value for the feature case
and a function. For Latin, there would then be a global equation
as in (6).
(6) (CASE) = nom (SUBJ) =
his equation can be inserted at any noun phrase node and is
read as if the f-structure associated with this node contains the
featurevalue pair [case = nom], then the f-structure associated
with the node above contains the feature subj and the f-structure
associated with this node is the value of that subj feature. Or in
less formal language, if this node is nominative, then it is the sub-
ject of the node above.
he mapping principles permit non-one-to-one correspon-
dences between dimensions of information. For instance, an
f-structure can contain a subj function without there being
a noun phrase in the corresponding c-structure. his is how
constructions generally referred to as pro-drop are analyzed,
though in LFG they are more appropriately named pronoun
incorporation. he verb in the Italian sentence Rido I laugh,
for instance, is analyzed as consisting of just a verb. his verb
contains in its f-structure description the type of informa-
tion contributed by the subject pronoun in the corresponding
English sentence. he verb form rido would be associated with
equations such as those in (7).
(7)
The crucial part of (7) is the equation that introduces a pred
feature with a pronominal value for its subject. This means
that the principle of completeness is satisfied by the verb
itself.
Some of the fundamental properties of LFG have been illus-
trated here mainly through reference to f- and c-structure.
Lexical Learning Hypothesis
Information about dimensions of information not discussed
here can be found in publications listed in the bibliography on
the LFG Web site. At this site, information can also be found on
extensions and applications of LFG, such as combining LFG with
optimality theory (Bresnan 2000), as well as work by Rens
Bod and Ron Kaplan (2003), which combines linguistic theory
and statistical methods to create an exemplar-based theory of
syntax.
Kersti Brjars
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bod, Rens, and Ron Kaplan. 2003. DOP model for lexical-functional
grammar. In Data-Oriented Parsing, ed. Rens Bod, Remko Scha, and
Khalil Simaan, 21133. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Bresnan, Joan. 2000. Optimal syntax. In Optimality heory: Phonology,
Syntax and Acquisition, ed. Joost Dekkers, Frank van der Leeuw, and
Jeroen van de Weijer, 33485. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
. 2001. Lexical-Functional Syntax. Oxford: Blackwell.
Bresnan, Joan, ed. 1982. he Mental Representation of Grammatical
Relations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dalrymple, Mary. 2001. Lexical Functional Grammar. San Diego,
CA: Academic Press.
Dalrymple, Mary, Ronald M. Kaplan, John T. Maxwell III, and Annie
Zaenen. 1995. Formal Issues in Lexical-Functional Grammar. Stanford,
CA: CSLI Publications.
Falk, Yehuda. 2001. Lexical-Functional Grammar: An Introduction to
Parallel Constraint-Based Syntax. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Nordlinger, Rachel. 1997. Constructive Case: Evidence from Australian
Languages. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
he LFG Web site is located online at: http://www.essex.ac.uk/
linguistics/external/LFG/.
LEXICAL LEARNING HYPOTHESIS
According to this hypothesis, childrens grammatical develop-
ment is incremental and driven by the learning of lexical ele-
ments (see Pinker 1984; Clahsen 1996; and Eisenbeiss 2000,
2003, 2009 for overviews and references). he lexical learn-
ing hypothesis was developed by proponents of generative
grammar in order to address the poverty-of-the-stimulus
argument: In order to produce and understand new sentences,
children must generalize beyond individual input utterances.
However, they do not have reliable access to systematic correc-
tions that would allow them to reject incorrect generalizations
about the target language. herefore, generative linguists have
postulated an innate language acquisition device, uni-
versal grammar (UG), that constrains childrens hypothesis
space. According to the principles and parameters the-
ory, UG contains i) principles that constrain all grammatical
representations and ii) open parameters that provide a inite
set of values, that is, options from which learners can choose
(Chomsky 1981). For instance, generative linguists assume
that all sentences contain subjects, but that languages may dif-
fer with respect to the positioning of subjects and their overt
realization (e.g., optional subjects in Italian versus obligatory
subjects in English). In such a model, language acquisition
only involves i) setting parameters to their target values and ii)
acquiring the lexicon.
437
Lexical Learning Hypothesis
If one assumes such a powerful acquisition device, one must
explain why children need several years to acquire their tar-
get grammar and initially produce non-target-like sentences
for example, subjectless sentences in English. Faced with this
developmental problem, proponents of the lexical learning
hypothesis argue that UG is available from the onset of grammat-
ical development, but in order to set parameters, children still
need to learn the grammatical properties of the lexical elements
associated with these parameters.
hese assumptions are in line with lexicalist generative
models: Initially, parameters referred to a heterogeneous set of
linguistic properties, for example, subject omissions, word order,
or morphological marking. However, cross-linguistic (parametric)
variation is closely linked to lexical properties, in particular to
properties of grammatical morphemes (see, e.g., Manzini and
Wexler 1987). For instance, Germanic languages with postverbal
negation exhibit a morphological distinction between irst and
second person. Proponents of lexicalist models argue that this sug-
gests a relationship between parameter values for word order and
the person speciications of subject-verb-agreement markers.
In recent generative models, such markers or function words (e.g.,
auxiliaries) are analyzed as realizations of functional categories
that project to phrases, just like the lexical categories verb and
noun. For instance, subject-verb-agreement markers are viewed
as realizations of the functional category INFL (Chomsky 1986).
Proponents of lexical learning regard functional categories
as the only source of parametric variation (Chomsky 1989), and
they argue that children should ix parameters and build up pro-
jections of functional categories by learning the properties of the
lexical elements that encode the respective functional categories.
Hence, one should ind developmental correlations between the
acquisitions of lexical items and the acquisition of the syntactic
properties associated with the projections of the corresponding
functional categories. Such correlations have been documented
for instance, a correlation between the acquisition of the German
subject-verb-agreement paradigm and the target-like ordering
of subjects, verbs, and negation (Clahsen 1996). Moreover, if one
assumes incremental phrase-structure building, one can explain
developmental dissociations between realizations of diferent
functional categories for instance, the observation that German
children master the use of agreement markers associated with
INFL before they consistently produce complementizers, that is,
realizations of the functional category COMP.
Children show even more complex dissociations, however
(Eisenbeiss 2003): First, they start to realize diferent features of
the same category at diferent points. For instance, for the cat-
egory case, German children mark the nominative/accusative
distinction before the accusative/dative distinction. Second, chil-
dren do not acquire all instantiations of the same features simul-
taneously. For example, German children show case distinctions
on pronouns earlier than on articles. hird, childrens realiza-
tions of functional categories show lexeme-speciic restrictions.
For instance, German children initially restrict the possessive -s
to some familiar names (e.g., Mamas mommys).
hese observations can be captured in feature-based, lexi-
calist versions of the lexical learning hypothesis (see Eisenbeiss
2003, 2009 for discussion): In these models, cross-linguistic var-
iation is not so much related to functional categories, as such,
438
but to their individual grammatical features (e.g., tense), which
are stored in lexical entries for grammatical morphemes and
project to phrases whenever these morphemes are combined.
According to such models, children should be able to acquire
individual features independently of one another, integrate them
into lexical entries for individual lexical/morphological elements
in an item-by-item fashion, and project each of these features
into phrases when these elements are combined. hus, whether
or not a childs utterance involves a realization of a particular
grammatical feature and the corresponding syntactic operations
does not depend on a global parameter value. Rather, it depends
on the individual lexical items that the child has acquired so far.
Hence, developmental dissociations between individual lexical
items and individual features are expected. For instance, dei-
nite and indeinite articles are diferent lexical realizations of the
functional category determiner, and German children acquire
indeinite articles before deinite articles. Similarly, when they
start producing deinite articles, German children use feminine
forms correctly, but then incorrectly combine masculine forms
of articles with both masculine and neuter nouns. his suggests
that German children acquire the [FEMININE] distinction
before they instantiate the feature [MASCULINE] that distin-
guishes masculines from neuters.
hus, in sum, the lexical learning hypothesis, that is, the idea
that syntactic development is driven by lexical development,
can provide accounts for the incremental nature of syntactic
development, as well as for the observed correlations between
lexical and syntactic development and the developmental dis-
sociations that have been observed in childrens grammatical
development.
Sonja Eisenbeiss
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht,
the Netherlands: Foris.
. 1986. Barriers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
. 1989. Some notes on economy of derivation and representa-
tion. In MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 10, 4374, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Cambridge.
Clahsen, Harald, ed. 1996. Generative Perspectives on Language
Acquisition: Empirical Findings, heoretical Considerations and
Crosslinguistic Comparisons. Amsterdam: Benjamins. With relevant
contributions by Harald Clahsen, Sonja Eisenbeiss, and Martina
Penke; Jrgen Meisel and Maria-Jose Ezeizabarrena; Andrew Radford;
and homas Roeper.
Eisenbeiss, Sonja. 2000. he acquisition of the determiner phrase in
German child language. In he Acquisition of Syntax: Studies in
Comparative Developmental Linguistics, ed. M.-A. Friedemann and
L. Rizzi, 2662. London: Longman.
. 2003. Merkmalsgesteuerter Grammatikerwerb. Eine Untersuchung
zum Erwerb der Struktur und Flexion der Nominalphrase. Available
online at: http://www.ub.uni-duesseldorf.de/home/etexte/diss/
show?dissid=1185.
. 2009. Generative approaches to language learning. Linguistics
47.2: 273310.
Manzini, Rita, and K. Wexler. 1987. Parameters, binding theory, and
learnability. Linguistic Inquiry 18 (July): 41344.
Pinker, Steven. 1984. Language Learnability and Language Development.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lexical Processing, Neurobiology of
LEXICAL PROCESSING, NEUROBIOLOGY OF
he lexicon is the store of words in the mental dictionary.
A typical English-speaking high school graduate knows about
60,000 words, a literate adult perhaps twice that number (Miller
1991, 138). A word can be regarded as a long-term memory
association of semantic, syntactic, phonological, and
orthographic structures. For example, the lexical entry for rose
includes the following components, with the semantic compo-
nent symbolized by a picture for convenience:
rose
meaning:
part of speech: noun
phonology: /roz/
orthography: ROSE
During the past two decades, there has been remarkable prog-
ress in understanding the neural substrates of lexical processing,
mainly because of advances in two complementary approaches for
investigating the functions of speciic brain structures: 1) the lesion
method, which, when used with ample numbers of patients who
are carefully studied both neuropsychologically and neuroanatomi-
cally, can yield indispensable insights about the neural systems that
are necessary for particular abilities; and 2) functional imaging tech-
niques, such as fMRI, which allow researchers to identify with more
ine-grained spatial resolution the brain structures that are engaged
during the normal performance of certain tasks (see neuroimag-
ing). Much more has been learned about the neural substrates of
lexical processing than can be summarized here, and so this review
concentrates on cortical regions that have been linked with the rec-
ognition and production of spoken and written word forms.
Neural Substrates of Spoken Word Recognition and
Production
It is well established that the sensorimotor aspects of spoken
word processing depend on the left perisylvian cortex, and
there is growing evidence that both the posterior superior tem-
poral (auditory-related) and the posterior inferior frontal
(motor-related) sectors of this large anatomical territory contrib-
ute to both speech perception and speech production (Imada
et al. 2006; Okada and Hickok 2006; Pulvermller et al. 2006;
Skipper et al. 2008). hese two regions interact not only via direct
connections but also via an indirect pathway mediated by the
inferior parietal lobule (Catani, Jones, and Ffytche 2005).
To understand spoken words, listeners must irst use the audi-
tory input to activate stored representations of lexical-phono-
logical form. It is only after this process of lexical access has been
achieved that the semantic and syntactic properties of words can
be activated and used to construct higher-level representations of
the utterance. Numerous behavioral studies suggest that speech
information is continuously projected to the lexicon, so that an
initial sequence like bla will activate all the words in the listen-
ers lexicon that begin with those sounds (black, bland, blanket,
etc.); as the input accumulates, the set of activated words dimin-
ishes until only a single one matches the input, at which point
recognition can be said to occur (McQueen, Dahan, and Cutler
2003). Pseudowords (e.g., blash) also activate partially matching
candidate words, but ultimately no winner is selected.
A broad perspective on the neural correlates of spoken word
recognition is provided by P. Indefrey and A. Cutler (2004), who
report a meta-analysis of 55 experiments in which subjects pas-
sively listened to tones, pseudowords, words, or sentences. It
was found that all of the diferent types of auditory stimuli reliably
activate overlapping, as well as partially diferentiated, central
and posterior regions of the superior temporal gyri in both hemi-
spheres. In addition, the following hierarchical organization was
observed: As the linguistic complexity of the stimuli increases,
there is recruitment of progressively more anterior regions of the
left superior temporal sulcus. hus, moving anteriorly, there is
irst an area responsive to pseudowords but not tones, then an
area responsive to words but not pseudowords, and inally an
area responsive to sentences but not words. he anterior area
that is selectively activated by words may contribute to the res-
olution of the lexical competition process described here; how-
ever, it is also conceivable that this operation is subserved by one
of the more posterior word-speciic areas (Orfanidou, Marslen-
Wilson, and Davis 2006). After the phonological form of a word
has been recognized, its semantic and syntactic components are
retrieved. As summarized by Indefrey and Cutler (2004), these
processes may be executed by a wide distribution of predomi-
nantly left hemisphere brain regions, including most notably
the middle and inferior temporal gyri and the posterior inferior
frontal gyrus.
Turning to spoken word production, one of the most inlu-
ential theories is that proposed by W. J. M. Levelt, A. Roelofs,
and A. S. Meyer (1999). According to their model, the produc-
tion of spoken content words depends on multiple processing
stages, each of which generates its own characteristic output
representation (Figure 1). First, conceptual preparation involves
identifying the meaning of the word to be produced. Second,
lexical selection involves activating the lemma for the word
that is, a unit that intervenes between semantics and phonology
and that serves as the gateway to syntactic features (e.g., gram-
matical category, number, tense, etc.; these features are not
shown in Figure 1). hird, form retrieval involves calling up the
phonological code for the word. Fourth, syllabiication involves
determining segmental clusters and metrical assignments. Fifth,
phonetic encoding involves transforming syllabic units into
motor instructions. And sixth, articulation involves the inal pro-
gramming of overt speech.
he neural correlates of the irst stage, conceptual prepara-
tion, remain mysterious, largely because this stage constitutes
the complex interface between language and thought and is also
heavily inluenced by social-cognitive perspective-taking abili-
ties for example, the same piece of real estate can be called the
coast, the shore, or the beach, depending on ones communicative
goals (Tomasello 1999, 119). Future research may show that con-
ceptual preparation is subserved by widespread cortical struc-
tures that underlie semantic processing (Kemmerer 2010; see
semantics, neurobiology of). he next two stages, lemma
selection and phonological form retrieval, both involve core
lexical processes, and their neural correlates are beginning to be
understood. In a meta-analysis of 58 functional imaging studies
including several studies employing magnetoencephalography,
which has excellent temporal resolution Indefrey and Levelt
(2004) found that lemma selection is linked with the midsection
439
Lexical Processing, Neurobiology of

Figure 1. The LRM (i.e., Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer) model of spoken word production. Left column: Word pro-
duction tasks involving lead-in processes that enter the central word production architecture at different stages.
Middle column: Core processes of word production and their characteristic output. Right column: Example fragments
of outputs generated at each stage. Reprinted by permission from Elsevier, copyright 2004, from P. Indefrey and
W. Levelt, The spatial and temporal signatures of word production components, Cognition 92: 10144.

of the left middle temporal gyrus and typically occurs during a
time window of 150225 milliseconds (ms) post-stimulus in oral
picture-naming tasks (see Color Plate 4). hey also found that
phonological form retrieval is linked with the posterior portions
of the left middle and superior temporal gyri and occurs during
a time window of either 200400 or 275400 ms, depending on
the studies that are considered. he three postlexical stages of
spoken word production are known to rely on a variety of motor-
related brain structures; however, the exact neural correlates of
each stage are not yet clear (Bohland and Guenther 2006).
Independently of Levelt, Roelog, and Meyers (1999) model,
a great deal of neuroscientiic research has focused on the pro-
cess of mapping the meanings of words onto their correspond-
ing phonological forms during speech production. One
important line of work, conducted by Hanna Damasio, Daniel
Tranel, and their colleagues (2004), suggests that this process

440
Lexical Processing, Neurobiology of
is subserved by intermediary units that are analogous to lem-
mas insofar as they function as relays, taking lexical-semantic
structures as input and then pointing to the appropriate lexical-
phonological structures. It is interesting that these intermediary
units may be neurally organized according to both semantic and
grammatical principles. For example, lesion data suggest that,
contrary to Indefrey and Levelts (2004) proposal, the retrieval
of nouns for diferent categories of concrete entities may hinge
on intermediary units that do not reside in the left middle tem-
poral gyrus but, rather, in the left temporal pole (TP) and inf-
erotemporal (IT) cortices. Speciically, studies in which oral
picture-naming tasks have been administered to large cohorts of
brain-damaged patients have shown that 1) impaired access to
proper nouns for unique persons (e.g., Jennifer Aniston) is asso-
ciated with left TP lesions, 2) impaired access to common nouns
for animals (e.g., horse) is associated with damage to the anterior
sector of left IT, and 3) impaired access to common nouns for
tools (e.g., hammer) is associated with damage to the posterior
sector of left IT, a region called IT+ (Damasio et al. 1996; Damasio
et al. 2004). Crucially, the patients have intact object recognition
and conceptual knowledge since they can accurately describe
the entities they cannot name; in other words, the disorders are
purely anomic. Furthermore, functional imaging data indicate
that the same cortical regions are activated in normal subjects
in the same category-speciic ways when concrete entities are
orally named from either pictures (Damasio et al. 1996, 2004)
or characteristic sounds (Tranel et al. 2003; Tranel et al 2005).
here is also increasing evidence from several methodologies
that the process of retrieving action verbs engages a quite difer-
ent neural pathway that includes the left ventrolateral premotor/
prefrontal cortex (Damasio et al. 2001; Shapiro and Caramazza
2004; Tranel et al. 2001; Tranel et al. 2008). his region is reliably
activated when action verbs are accessed, and damage to it fre-
quently impairs the production of verbs but not nouns.
Neural Substrates of Written Word Recognition and
Production
Reading and writing are recent inventions in human history
and must be explicitly taught. For literate individuals, how-
ever, word representations include not just a phonological
component but also an orthographic component that is ei-
ciently processed by neural circuits that are gradually being
elucidated.
he activity of reading recruits numerous brain regions in
the temporal, parietal, and frontal lobes (Hillis and Rapp 2004;
Hillis and Tuiash 2002). Perhaps the most controversial region,
however, has been the visual word form area (VWFA), located
in the left occipitotemporal sulcus bordering the fusiform gyrus
(McCandliss, Cohen, and Dehaene 2003; Dehaene 2005). his
area responds more strongly to printed words than to other types
of visually presented objects, such as faces, animals, and tools.
Also, disruption of the input projections to this area can induce
pure alexia without agraphia, a disorder in which reading can be
accomplished only in a laborious letter-by-letter manner, while
writing and all other linguistic skills are unafected. Despite these
indings, the question of whether the VWFA plays a genuine causal
role in reading has been hotly debated (e.g., Price and Devlin
2003). Recently, however, a compelling case study supporting
the VWFA was reported by R. Gaillard et al. (2006; see also Martin
2006). In brief, prior to surgery for intractable epilepsy, the patient
exhibited normal single-word reading, including a lack of increase
in reading time for common words varying in length from three to
eight letters; moreover, fMRI revealed his VWFA to have normal
functional-anatomical characteristics, and local ield potentials
recorded from implanted electrodes showed that this area was
sensitive to word frequency but not word length, again within
normal parameters. After excision of tissue just posterior to the
VWFA, the patients epileptic seizures were successfully elim-
inated, but his reading was markedly slow and inaccurate, with
reading times increasing linearly with word length (i.e., letter-
by-letter reading). In addition, the VWFA no longer responded
to printed words, even when they were contrasted with a simple
ixation point. his study, therefore, provides powerful new evi-
dence that the VWFA is in fact necessary for access to the stored
orthographic forms of words during reading.
Writing also depends on a large network of widely distributed
brain regions (Hillis and Rapp 2004; Rapcsak and Beeson 2002).
Information about the neural basis of lexical access during writ-
ten word production comes primarily from patients with lexical
agraphia, a disorder in which words with regular mappings
between phonology and orthography are spelled correctly, but
words with irregular mappings (e.g., choir) are misspelled. he
errors are usually phonologically plausible (e.g., circuit serkit)
and afect low-frequency words more than high-frequency
ones. Lexical agraphia is typically caused by damage to the left
temporo-parieto-occipital junction (Brodmann areas 37 and/or
39), although in some cases, there is involvement of the left ven-
tral occipitotemporal region, close to, if not encompassing, the
VWFA. Several functional imaging studies with normal subjects
provide further support for a role of these cortical regions in writ-
ten word production (e.g., Petrides Alvisatos, and Evans 1995;
Nakamura et al. 2000).
Conclusion
When people recognize and produce the spoken and written
forms of words, they usually concentrate on the meanings being
expressed and remain blithely unaware of the complex compu-
tations being executed by their brains in order to rapidly and
efectively process the lexical structures themselves. Cognitive
neuroscience is beginning to reveal the intricasies of these neural
systems, and dramatic advances are likely to happen in the com-
ing years. Exciting new discoveries are appearing in the literature
almost daily, and this explosion of research will undoubtedly
provide fresh insights into the neurobiology of lexical process-
ing, with signiicant implications for understanding and treating
disorders that result from brain injury.
David Kemmerer
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bohland, J. W., and F. H. Guenther. 2006. An fMRI investigation of sylla-
ble sequence production. NeuroImage 32: 82141.
Catani, M., D. K. Jones, and D. H. Ffytche. 2005. Perisylvian language
networks of the human brain. Annals of Neurology 57: 816.
Damasio, H., T. J. Grabowski, D. Tranel, R. D. Hichwa, and A. R. Damasio.
1996. A neural basis for lexical retrieval. Nature 380: 499505.
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Lexical Processing, Neurobiology of
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LEXICAL RELATIONS
Lexical relations are ways in which words, or lexemes, share
something in common. his broad deinition includes relations
based on phonological relatedness, such as rhyming, and
morphological relatedness, like being the range of tensed
forms of a verb. However, in most contexts, the term is used to
refer speciically to semantic relations among words and, most
frequently, to paradigmatic semantic relations among words,
including synonymy, hyponymy, and antonymy. Such relations
are sometimes called sense relations (Lyons 1977), as it is usually
a single denotative sense of a word rather than every sense and
every aspect of the lexical item that is relevant to the relation.
hus, we expect the postal, rubber, and stomp senses of
stamp to enter into lexical relations with diferent sets of words.
Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Relations
Semantic relations are generally divided into two types, usu-
ally called paradigmatic and syntagmatic. Syntagmatic rela-
tions are relations of combination that is to say, words that
ill diferent slots in a phrase, like book and read or delicious
and food. hese can be grouped into relational types like mod-
iiermodiied or event verbagent. Some theories of lexical
Lexical Relations
semantics build such relations into lexical entries, for exam-
ple in the selectional restrictions of Jerrold J. Katz and Jerry A.
Fodor (1963) and the lexical functions of meaning-text theory
(Meluk 1996).
Paradigmatic relations are relations of substitutability; the
words in a semantic paradigm are diferent options for illing the
same phrasal slot. For example, red/yellow/blue are three options
for subject position in X is a primary color. Paradigmatic relations
are studied because of their role in logical relations among sen-
tence meanings, such as entailment, and because of what they
might tell us about how the mental lexicon is organized.
Semantic versus Lexical Relations
he term lexical relation is ambiguous, in that it can refer either
a) to [semantic] relations among words or b) to [semantic] rela-
tions among words that are represented in the mental lexicon,
as information in or links between the lexical entries for those
words. Some authors reserve lexical relations for the b mean-
ing and use semantic relations for the a meaning. For exam-
ple, Derek Gross, Ute Fischer, and George A. Miller (1989) claim
that while large and little are semantically opposite, they are not
directly related to each other as lexical antonyms, whereas large
and small are both semantically and lexically related. In other
words, large and small are not only semantically opposed; we
have also learned through linguistic experience that the words
themselves are opposed. his distinction between lexical and
nonlexical relations is intended to explain why some word sets
are particularly strongly linked to each other, both in terms of co-
occurrence in corpora and psycholinguistic behavior for
example, in word association experiments.
Types of Paradigmatic Relations
he most studied paradigmatic lexical-semantic relations are
synonymy, hyponymy, and antonymy/contrast, because a) sub-
stitution of members of these sets typically results in regular con-
sequences for truth conditional semantics, and thus b)
they are central organizational principles in many lexicological
theories (see semantic fields). While each of these relations
is easily exempliied, deinitions and the role of the relations in
the mental lexicon is still the subject of debate. Traditionally,
deinitions that depend on the logical consequences of substi-
tution have been used (e.g., Lyons 1977). More recently, D. A.
Cruse (1994) has proposed prototype-based deinitions of
these relations, and M. Lynne Murphy (2003) has proposed a
pragmatic approach. Next, we look at the relations in turn and
highlight some research issues associated with each.
SYNONYMY. Synonymy, or sameness of meaning, is usually
deined in terms of a substitution test. If word X can be substi-
tuted for a particular sense of word Y in any sentence with no
change to the truth conditions of the sentence, then X and Y are
synonyms. However, this deinition does not include many of the
things that are called synonyms in thesauruses and everyday
discourse, for a few reasons.
First, languages generally avoid synonymy since it is eco-
nomical (both in lexical acquisition and in any interaction) to
assume that diferent forms signal diferent meanings (see, e.g.,
Clark 1992). When a language variety chances on a pair of perfect
synonyms, for example, when the same object is named inde-
pendently by two subcommunities, either one word falls into dis-
use or one or both of the words become specialized to a slightly
diferent sense or context type. English, through its history of
contact with other languages, has come to have many such
near-synonyms, such as riseascend, smartintelligent, and dead
deceased. While these are substitutable for each other in many
contexts, they all difer in meaning and use. For example, while
a balloon could ascend or rise, a person rises, rather than ascends,
from a chair. And while people can be dead or deceased, plants
can only be said to be dead. Many other cases of not-quite-synon-
ymy involve words that refer to similar, but not identical, things
for example, tapas and hors doeuvres or shovel and scoop.
he second problem with a truth-conditional deinition of
synonymy is that it allows as synonyms items that have difer-
ent non-truth-conditional content. For example, the nouns dog,
doggy, and pooch may all be truthfully applied to a particular
animal, but choosing pooch implies diferent things about the
animal and the speakers relation to it than dog does. hus, some
apply a more restrictive substitution test that takes into account
connotational and social aspects of meaning, as well as the truth
conditional. To the extent that goodness of synonym relations
can be afected by non-truth-conditional issues like register
and morphological complexity, synonymy can be considered a
lexical relation, as well as a semantic relation.
Synonymy currently receives much attention in compu-
tational linguistics, as language generators and machine
translators require principled means for selecting the most
appropriate word for a context from a lexicon illed with near-
synonyms. Such studies can be particularly concerned with dis-
cerning ways in which synonyms or near-synonyms can difer
(see, e.g., DiMarco, Hirst, and Stede 1993).
HYPONYMY. Hyponymy, the type of relation, is the relation of
sense inclusion, although it is often deined in terms of referen-
tial, or categorial, inclusion. In sense terms, beer is a hyponym
of beverage because the sense of beer includes all the informa-
tion that is in the sense of beverage, plus additional information
that identiies beers as special types of beverages. In catego-
rial terms, everything that beer denotes is included in the set of
everything that beverage denotes. Hyponym relations are, thus,
linguistic relexes of categorial inclusion relations, and, as such,
some theorists consider them to be semantic, but not lexical,
relations.
Unlike synonymy, hyponymy is an asymmetrical relation, in
that beer is a type of beverage but beverage is not a type of beer.
Hyperonymy is the term for the converse relation from beverage
to beer. Hyponymy is usually said to be a transitive relation. For
example, if beer is a hyponym of beverage and beverage is a hyp-
onym of liquid, then beer is a hyponym of liquid. However, tran-
sitivity holds only in cases of proper sense inclusion not in all
cases that pass the is a type/kind of test (thus proving that the test
can be misleading). For example, speed-reading is a type of read-
ing, and reading is a type of leisure activity, but speed-reading is
not usually considered to be a leisure activity. While reading can
function as a leisure activity, it is not deined in terms of being
leisurely, and thus reading is not a hyponym of leisure activity in
the logical sense of the term.
443
Lexical Relations
Inclusion relations, along with contrast relations, are central
to most approaches to lexical meaning, particularly in the treat-
ment of noun meaning. For other word classes, hyponym rela-
tions are less frequent or less clearly paradigmatic. For example,
the adjectives happy and sad describe states that belong to the
category designated by emotion, but since emotion is a noun, it is
not substitutable for happy and sad.
ANTONYMY/CONTRAST. While perfect synonymy involves words
that always refer to the same thing, logical incompatibility
involves words that never overlap in reference. his logical rela-
tion contributes to two lexical-semantic relations, antonymy and
contrast.
Binary opposition seems to have special status in language
and conceptualization since even where more than one incom-
patible alternative is available, binary relations may be dis-
cerned. For example, although there are many emotions (happy,
sad, angry, afraid, disgusted), happy is generally understood as
having a single antonym, sad.
Logical approaches to antonymy distinguish various types.
Complementary (or contradictory) antonyms perfectly bisect
a semantic domain. For example, in relation to electrical
items, if something is not on, then it is necessarily of and vice
versa. Contrary antonyms designate the extremes of a scale.
For instance, something that is large is necessarily not small,
but something that is not small is not necessarily large. (Some
authors, including Lyons 1977 and Cruse 1986, restrict the term
antonym to just contraries.) Converse antonyms indicate difer-
ent perspectives on the same relationship for example send/
receive, teacher/student, north/south. So, if X is north of Y, then Y
is south of X. Other types of antonymy have received some atten-
tion, but these tend not to show the same kinds of logical rela-
tions as those mentioned earlier. For example, kinship terms can
be opposed on the basis of gender (brother/sister) or generation
(mother/daughter).
In the broad sense of the term, antonymy is often deined as
a relationship of minimal diference; that is, antonymous words
share most of their semantic content, but for one diference that
makes the two terms incompatible. On such a deinition, mother
and daughter are opposites because they only difer in the gen-
eration they refer to, while mother and son are not opposites
because they difer in both gender and generation.
As mentioned, the lexical relation antonymy is sometimes
contrasted to the semantic relation opposition, and antonym
pairs present the best evidence in favor of the position that rela-
tions between lexical items, not just senses, are represented in
the mental lexicon. Antonym pairings are particularly strong in
experiments such as word association tasks and lexical prim-
ing, and antonyms co-occur frequently in text leading some
(e.g., Jones 2002) to question whether antonymy is also a syntag-
matic relation.
Larger sets of incompatible items exist, for example solid/
liquid/gas, but more linguistic-semantic attention is usually paid
to the not-necessarily-incompatible relation of co-hyponymy
or contrast, which, along with hyponymy, is basic to the taxo-
nomic organization at the basis of semantic ield and network
approaches. Such relations can also be deined in terms of min-
imal diference. For example, the basic color terms are similar
444
Lexical Semantics
in all being direct hyponyms of color but difer in the part of
the spectrum they designate. Still, they are not truly incompat-
ible since they may overlap some shades of turquoise may be
considered to be both blue and green. he fact that most people
would insist that it must be one or the other, however, indicates
our preference for acting as if contrast sets are incompatible.
OTHER RELATIONS. he foregoing types of paradigmatic rela-
tion are generally held to be the most important to lexical and
semantic theories, but many more have been noted in the lit-
erature. he most discussed of these is meronymy, the part of
relation, though this can be thought of as a cover term for many
other types of relation, such as segmentwhole (slicecake),
materialwhole (woodtable), leaderorganization (captain
team), and so on.
Whether a precise taxonomy of relations is possible or neces-
sary is an open question. While semantic ield views of the lex-
icon rely on a small number of well-deined relations, theories
employing looser semantic networks or semantic domains might
allow for as many types of lexical relations as there are possible
relations among entities in the world. As the subtypes of anton-
ymy and meronymy show, there is also the question of the level
of speciicity that needs to be employed in representing these
relations in linguistic theory.
M. Lynne Murphy
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Clark, Eve V. 1992. Conventionality and contrast. In Frames, Fields, and
Contrasts, ed. Adrienne Lehrer and Eva Feder Kittay, 17188. Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Cruse, D. A. 1986. Lexical Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
. 1994. Prototype theory and lexical relations. Rivista di Linguistica
6: 16788.
DiMarco, Crysanne, Graeme Hirst, and Manfred Stede. 1993. he seman-
tic and stylistic diferentiation of synonyms and near-synonyms.
Proceedings, AAAI Spring Symposium on Building Lexicons for Machine
Translation, Stanford, CA: 11421.
Gross, Derek, Ute Fischer, and George A. Miller. 1989. he organi-
zation of adjectival meanings. Journal of Memory and Language
28: 92106.
Jones, Steven. 2002. Antonymy. London: Routledge.
Katz, Jerrold J., and Jerry A. Fodor. 1963. he structure of a semantic
theory. Language 39: 170210.
Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Meluk, I. A. 1996. Lexical functions: A tool for the description of
lexical relations in a lexicon. In Lexical Functions in Lexicography
and Natural Language Processing, ed. Leo Wanner, 37102.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Murphy, M. Lynne. 2003. Semantic Relations and the Lexicon.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
LEXICAL SEMANTICS
Lexical semantics is often loosely described as the study of word
meaning, but both word and meaning require more precise
deinition in this context. he term is usually used to describe the
study of lexical, or content, words or lexemes (including nouns,
Lexical Semantics
verbs, adjectives), rather than grammatical words (conjunctions,
determiners), which are more usually studied in the context of
sentential (or propositional) semantics. Lexical semantics can
also refer to the semantics of non-word lexical items, such as
idioms. he meaning aspect of lexical semantics most often
refers to denotative sense in particular that is, determining
what such words can and cannot refer to, as opposed to their
connotation or social import. Some of the main issues that con-
cern lexical semanticists are the following:
How is the meaning of a word best represented in a model of
the mental lexicon?
Are diferent types of representation required for diferent
kinds of meaning?
How should multiple interpretations of a single word be
described and explained?
How are diferent words meanings related to one another?
Lexical Semantics in Linguistic Theory: Historical Context
Word meaning is a long-standing area of interest in philosophy
and, of course, lexicography, but attention to it in theoretical
linguistics has varied by time and place. In recent decades, lex-
ical semantics (and lexicology more generally) has experienced
revitalization after a slow period in the early to midtwentieth
century. For instance, Noam Chomsky (1965, 84) described the
lexicon as simply an unordered list of all lexical formatives,
and Leonard Bloomield claimed that we have no way of dein-
ing most meanings and therefore the linguist cannot deine
meanings, but must appeal for this to students of other sciences
(1933, 1446). Of course, inluential lexical semantic work was
pursued in this period, but much of the work in the generative
tradition (e.g., Katz and Fodor 1963 and generative seman-
tics in the 1970s) ran into problems of internal consistency or
explanatory insuiciency. Other semantic work was pursued in
Europe by practitioners of structuralism and functional
linguistics or by philosophers of language.
Nowadays, the lexicon is central to most major theories of
language. here are several reasons (presented here in no par-
ticular order) for the (re)emergence of the lexicon and lexical
semantics in linguistic study: 1) Psychological experimentation
in the 1970s (particularly by Eleanor Rosch) provided evidence
that word meaning is represented in the mind quite diferently
from the way that it is represented on a dictionary page that
some lexical meanings might be based on prototype repre-
sentations. Since the goals of general linguistics were, by this
time, mostly concerned with the mental representation of
language, such evidence needed to be integrated with linguistic
theory more generally. 2) Since the 1980s, theories of grammar
have become more lexically driven (e.g., head-driven phrase
structure grammar, lexical-functional grammar,
and minimalism). In such theories, the main constraints on
sentence structure come from the syntactic and semantic
requirements of the lexemes in the sentence, and lexical struc-
tures and rules account for the types of things that transformations
did in earlier Chomskyan approaches (cf. transformational
grammar). 3) Around the same time, the group of theoreti-
cal approaches called cognitive linguistics was emerging.
Cognitive linguistic theories hold that semantic considerations
are a major force in determining the form of a language and that
lexicon and grammar do not constitute completely separate
types of linguistic knowledge. hus, such approaches are usually
lexico-centric. 4) Lexical concerns have also been at the forefront
of computational linguistics, in part because lexically
driven approaches to grammar have proved most computation-
ally practicable. Furthermore, the goals of most computational
linguistics programs involve the creation of systems that can use
language meaningfully thus requiring models of how meanings
might be represented and means to acquire and use such seman-
tic information. 5) Meanwhile, advances in computer hardware
and software led to the growth and development of corpus
linguistics, which is particularly suited to the study of words
and their use and has become one of the major methodological
tools of lexical semantics and lexicography.
his conluence of diverse motivations and assumptions has
contributed to the variety of approaches to lexical semantics and
to contrary positions on major questions in the ield.
Major Distinguishers of Theoretical Approaches
Any semantic theory must say something about the representa-
tion of lexical meaning, and theories of lexical meaning must it
into theoretical accounts of the meaning and grammar of larger
constituents. hus, in a sense, there is no such thing as a free-
standing lexical semantic theory, but instead there are theories
of meaning that pay more or less attention to representation at
the lexical level.
heories thus difer in the extent to which they take the lexical
or sentential meanings as their starting point. hose that start at
the lexical level of analysis, for example, Anna Wierzbickas (e.g.,
1996) Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach, are sometimes
criticized for lack of attention to the way that word meanings
combine in order to create sentence meanings. On the other
hand, those that start with complete propositions in mind, for
example, Ray Jackendofs (e.g., 1990) Conceptual Semantics, tend
to focus on the aspects of word meaning that interact with each
other in sentential contexts (particularly the relation between
predicate and argument), but not with more detailed
nuances of meaning, as would interest a lexicographer.
One of the most basic issues for a lexical semantic approach
is the issue of whether lexical meanings should be distinguished
from concepts. hat is to say, is the meaning of a content word,
like apple, diferent from our conceptualization of the category
apple? Is knowing about apples diferent from knowing the
meaning of apple? hose theorists who think that lexical meaning
is diferent from conceptualization generally make the distinc-
tion between deinitional and encyclopedic aspects of meaning.
On this view, only deinitional meaning that which is suicient
to identify a referent and allow for grammatical interpretation of
the sentential context is relevant to lexical semantics. To use
a simple example, the deinition of girl would be young female
human. Encyclopedic information, on the other hand, includes
other information that comes from our experience of the things
and situations referred to by words. For girl, this might include
information such as may wear pigtails and associated with
the color pink. Jerrold J. Katz and Jerry A. Fodors (1963) desid-
erata for a theory of linguistic semantics takes the position that
encyclopedic information should not be represented as part of
445
Lexical Semantics
linguistic (including lexical) meaning. However, many, if not
most, theories of meaning have moved away from this assump-
tion and treat lexical semantics as involving the interface between
language and conceptualization. Such approaches are less likely
to hold that meanings are represented in the mental lexicon (i.e.,
the repository of linguistic information about words), but instead
see lexical meaning as represented in the conceptual realm. In
this case, lexical semantic theories become intertwined with the-
ories regarding the representation of concepts and must explain
a) whether/how lexicalized concepts difer from nonlexicalized
concepts, and b) how the formal aspects of language interact
with the conceptual representations of meaning.
Another issue that has divided lexical semanticists (and lexi-
cologists) is whether word meanings can be deined on their own
or whether lexical meaning is derived (at least in part) through
semantic relations (lexical relations) among words. hat
is, does a words meaning emerge (to some degree) through the
relations between words in a languages lexicon? Lexical ield
theorists and some computational linguists (e.g., the WordNet
project Fellbaum 1998) take the position that meaning emerges
from relations, whereas most working within a componential
framework presume that lexical semantic relations should be
explained by a lexical semantic theory, rather than being primi-
tive elements of the theory.
Finally, there is the very big question of how the senses of
words are to be represented in a linguistic model. he most com-
mon approach is to devise a componential semantic metalan-
guage, which provides a limited and precise vocabulary for
representing elements of meaning and some form of grammar
for combining those elements into more complex meanings. he
form that such metalanguages take varies considerably among
theories, and some cognitive linguistics theories eschew meta-
languages as such in favor of representations (for example, the
image schema) with more visual-schematic elements than lin-
guistic ones. What all of these approaches have in common is the
aim to represent meaning using a restricted set of meaning ele-
ments. hat is, meanings are composed from smaller meaning-
ful parts (often semantic primitives [primes]), and the set of
meaningful parts available to a semantic theory is smaller than
the set of lexical items that could be described by such a repre-
sentational system (cf. language of thought).
Conclusion Lexical Semantics Today
he range of lexical semantic research today is extremely varied
in the topics studied, the methodologies applied, and the theo-
retical assumptions behind them. Unlike some other subdisci-
plines of linguistics, no particular theoretical approach can be
said to be the clear leader in the ield. he advent and develop-
ment of corpus linguistics means that much lexical work is now
based on empirical rather than just introspective evidence,
and continuing developments in that ield strengthen the value
of that evidence.
M. Lynne Murphy
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bloomield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and
Winston.
446
Lexicography
Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the heory of Syntax. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Cruse, D. A. 1986. Lexical Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Fellbaum, Christiane, ed. 1998. WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jackendof, Ray. 1990. Semantic Structures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Katz, Jerrold J., and Jerry A. Fodor. 1963. he structure of a semantic
theory. Language 39: 170210.
Pustejovsky, James. 1995. he Generative Lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Ravin, Yael, and Claudia Leacock, eds. 2000. Polysemy: heoretical and
Computational Approaches. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1996. Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
LEXICOGRAPHY
While lexicography is often thought of as a subield of linguis-
tics, it is a scholarly discipline in its own right with its own prin-
ciples and practices. his discipline is divided into two subields,
practical lexicography and theoretical lexicography. Practical
lexicography is concerned with compiling, writing, and editing
dictionaries, which serve a double function: as a record of the
vocabulary of the language and as a reference work to meet the
needs of users for information about words, their usage, and
their spelling. heoretical lexicography is concerned with the
deinition of general principles governing the compilation of
dictionaries.
Dictionaries difer in their selection of vocabulary and other
items that the editors believe merit inclusion, given the size
and purpose of the volume. While most dictionaries use alpha-
betized word lists, certain others such as Rogets hesaurus of
English Words and Phrases are arranged by topic. It lists words
according to the ideas that they express, for example, abstract
relations (existence, relation, quantity, etc.), space (generally,
dimensions, etc.), and intellect (formation of ideas, communica-
tion of ideas, etc.), among others. Words and phrases are listed in
the main body of a thesaurus according to their word class, but
without a deinition or any information about pronunciation or
etymology.
Dictionaries come in various formats. Besides traditional
print dictionaries, online dictionaries and dictionaries on solid
state media (such as CD or lash memory) have become increas-
ingly popular during the last quarter of the twentieth century
because they facilitate rapid access to information, cross-refer-
encing, and immediate updates with the latest vocabulary.
General-purpose monolingual dictionaries are organized
alphabetically and use the same language for both the object and
the means of description. While all dictionaries aim for compre-
hensiveness, the number and structure of lexical entries depends
upon the target audience, as well as constraints in funding and
time to complete the dictionary. General-purpose dictionaries
focus on the description of a standard language, aim to provide
an exhaustive coverage of the words in a language (abridged
dictionaries focus on somewhat shorter lists), and are typically
more linguistic than encyclopedic.
Dictionaries are usually divided into three parts: an intro-
duction (including instructions on how to use the dictionary),
Lexicography
the body (the alphabetically ordered list of entries), and appen-
dices (other information, such as weights and measures, punc-
tuation, etc.). he arrangement of the entries of a dictionary
is referred to as its macrostructure. Dictionaries difer in the
placement of homonyms, derived words, compounds, and
phrases, which can be given independent entries or included
in an entry. he layout and organization of the individual entry
is referred to as the microstructure of the dictionary. Each dic-
tionary difers in its conventions for structuring lexical entries.
Typically, the headword at the beginning of an entry is in bold
and indented by a few spaces. Bold or italic typeface may be
used to mark the part of speech at the beginning of a lexical
entry. Some dictionaries include the standard pronunciation of
headwords and spelling variants. When a word is polysemous,
its senses are often numbered, with the most frequently occur-
ring sense irst. Similarly, when a sense or a group of senses
belong to a diferent word class or subclass, the sense(s) are
labeled accordingly, in combination with deinitions, exam-
ples, and usage notes. More technical, archaic, or obsolete
senses and idiomatic phrases usually appear toward the end of
the lexical entry.
he headword of a lexical entry consists of a lemma (the basic
word form) that conventionally represents all of the inlected
forms of the unit. Following the headword, lexical entries pro-
vide a deinition of it in the form of a paraphrase (in the same
language), which is semantically equivalent to it. Lexicographers
aim to ofer deinitions that are simpler than the word itself.
Another goal is to avoid circularity of deinitions, that is, to not
deine two or more lexemes in terms of each other. he most
common type of deinition is the analytic deinition since it
aims at maximal inclusion and independence from the context.
Synonyms or antonyms are sometimes used as alternatives to
analytic deinitions because they are short. However, they may
require the dictionary user to look up other deinitions to under-
stand their meanings. Depending on the scope and aim of the
dictionary, lexical entries also provide examples that illustrate
the headwords syntactic behavior or ofer additional semantic
information.
Metalexicography has the goal to improve the structure
and content of dictionaries. One way of achieving this goal is
to be involved in research about lexicography. here are sev-
eral professional organizations and academic journals devoted
to metalexicography. Another way is to suggest methods and
criteria for reviewing and evaluating dictionaries. Evaluating
and assessing dictionaries, also known as dictionary criticism,
is diicult because it is not always clear what types of criteria
should be applied. One solution to this problem has been to
take large sets of dictionary reviews and determine the range
of criteria applied by diferent reviewers in their evaluations.
hese include reversibility, alphabetization, directionality,
coverage, reliability, currency, redundancy, retrievability, and
equivalents.
Another diiculty of dictionary criticism is the large number
of entries. Reviewers analyze only a small sample of entries or
focus on particular features of dictionaries. To begin with, they
typically focus on the preface of the dictionary that explains how
to use it, who the intended audience is, and what types of infor-
mation are included in the main body. After lipping through the
Linguistic Relativism
dictionary to get an idea of the microstructure of lexical entries,
reviewers generally conduct an arbitrary sampling of diction-
ary entries. Depending on the time constraints, this procedure
may, for example, lead the reviewer to scrutinize every 10th main
entry on every 20th page for completeness, clearness, accuracy,
simplicity, and modernity. To ensure that the review is based on
a representative sample, it is necessary to check that the difer-
ent parts of speech are adequately represented, that polysemy is
taken into account, and that there is a balance between words
from both the general and speciic domains. In reviewing dic-
tionaries and devising methods for improving the structure of
dictionaries, the reviewer notes the presentation of the text on
the page, as it plays a signiicant role in inluencing the acces-
sibility of the content. he range of vocabulary is also important
since users typically expect dictionaries to ofer the latest words
from the domains of fashion, technology, and business, among
others, while at the same time including variants. Polysemy, the
structure of deinitions, usage notes, examples, and etymologi-
cal information are also important criteria for the evaluation of a
dictionarys content.
Hans C. Boas
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Atkins, Beryl T. S., and A. Zampolli. 1994. Computational Approaches to
the Lexicon. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bjoint, Henri. 2000. Modern Lexicography: An Introduction.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hartmann, R. R. K., and G. James. 1998. Dictionary of Lexicography.
London and New York: Routledge.
Zgusta, Ladislav. 1971. Manual of Lexicography. he Hague: Mouton.
LINGUISTIC RELATIVISM
Linguistic relativism refers to the idea that language inluences
thought and worldview (see also language of thought). In
essence, thinking and worldview are relative to the language one
learns to speak in childhood. Language, thought, worldview, and
inluence are thus key concepts in linguistic relativism.
Various understandings of language have led to propos-
als for several levels of relativism, from semiotic relativity when
referring to the general faculty of language, to structural relativ-
ity when referring to the grammatical properties of languages,
and to functional relativity when referring to communicational
patterns of interaction within and across languages (Lucy 1997;
Hymes 1966). Most past and current research has concentrated
on structural relativity.
Several levels of thought have been posited as potentially
under the inluence of language, including the neurologi-
cal, cognitive, and propositional levels. To date, little work has
investigated neurological variation across speakers of diferent
languages (Gilbert et al. 2006). Most work addresses conceptu-
alization by examining cognitive processes, such as memory,
categorization, inference, analogy, and emotions (Lucy
1992; Levinson 2003; Boroditsky, Schmidt, and Phillips 2003).
Very few studies, if any, have proposed that language may inlu-
ence the actual content, or propositional level, of thought. his
idea, known as linguistic determinism, is commonly discredited
as scientiically untenable.
447
Literacy
Concerning the relationship between language and thought,
language has variably been suggested to inluence, impact,
shape, mould, condition, limit, or channel thinking.
An important issue, then, concerns the scope of these efects.
Current research has been asking whether language efects are
on line in the process of producing and comprehending lan-
guage (see Slobin 1996 on thinking for speaking) or whether
language efects pervade human cognition (i.e., efects exist
whether or not one is engaged in linguistic acts). Most research
has assumed the latter type of language efects on thought.
Finally, note that linguistic relativity was originally formulated
as a scientiic principle by Benjamin Lee Whorf in 1940 (1956,
214, 221). he principle has since then been relabeled the Sapir-
Whorf hypothesis, following an article by Harry Hoijer (1954)
referring to Edward Sapir and Whorf, who contributed to the
early development of linguistic relativity in the 1920s and1930s
(Sapir 1985; Whorf 1956).
Stphanie Pourcel
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Boroditsky, Lera, Lauren Schmidt, and Webb Phillips. 2003. Sex, syntax
and semantics. In Language in Mind, ed. Dedre Gentner and Susan
Goldin-Meadow, 6179. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gilbert, Aubrey, Terry Regier, Paul Kay, and Richard Ivry. 2006. Whorf
hypothesis is supported in the right visual ield but not the left.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103: 48994.
Hoijer, Harry. 1954. he Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. In Language in
Culture, ed. Harry Hoijer, 92105. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Hymes, Dell. 1966. Two types of linguistic relativity. In Sociolinguistics,
ed. William Bright, 11457. he Hague: Mouton.
Levinson, Stephen. 2003. Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations
in Cognitive Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lucy, John. 1992. Grammatical Categories and Cognition.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 1997. Linguistic Relativity. Annual Review of Anthropology
26: 291312.
Sapir, Edward. 1985. Selected Writings in Language, Culture and
Personality. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Slobin, Dan. 1996. From thought and language to thinking for speak-
ing. In Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, ed. John Gumperz and
Stephen Levinson, 7096. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1956. Language, hought, and Reality. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
LITERACY
Prominent Research Frameworks
Written symbolic codes of languages may be alphabetic, syl-
labic, morphosyllabic, (Perfetti 2003; Ho et al. 2007), or alpha-
syllabic (Mishra and Stainthrope 2007). In each case, children
must irst learn how the written code of their language embodies
spoken language units (Perfetti 2003, 17). Children must also
have language socialization experiences that promote thinking
and talking in more literate ways if they are to achieve academic
language proiciency (Wilkinson and Silliman 2000) or linguis-
tic literacy (Ravid and Tolchinsky 2002). Contemporary research
frameworks and their related studies relect diferent aspects
448
of the code and sociocultural emphases in the cross-linguistic
study of literacy learning.
he code approach is the most prominent research frame-
work because of its focus on the universal and language-spe-
ciic features that can explain the cognitive-linguistic processes
underlying
decoding mastering a languages written code relative to its
spoken language units. For English, this means that children
must become aware of how letter patterns (graphemes) cor-
respond to the smallest segment of their spoken language, the
phoneme, as the means for achieving automatic and luent
word-level recognition.
comprehension deriving an overall interpretation of an
authors intended meanings as actively constructed through
interactions with the textual medium.
composition the generation and organization of ones own
ideas as expressed through interactions with the textual
medium.
A contentious debate concerns whether proicient word-decod-
ing abilities must occur before reading comprehension skills can
develop (known as the simple view of reading) (Vellutino et al.
2007) or whether reading comprehension develops concurrently
with general spoken language comprehension (Cain and Oakhill
2007).
A second perspective integrates facets of the code and social-
ization frameworks in highlighting purposes and types of literacy,
especially for alphabetic knowledge. he basic level of literacy is
alphabetic and functional. Individuals who break the alphabetic
code are able to negotiate daily activities that involve recogniz-
ing and accessing known meanings from their spoken language,
such as reading street signs or writing familiar food items for a
grocery list. Functional literacy is inadequate for meeting current
standards in either educational or workplace contexts. In con-
trast, critical literacy stresses proiciency. Individuals must be
capable of using literacy tools competently for learning how to
learn. Proiciency includes knowing how to analyze critical link-
ages among ones prior knowledge the meaning or signiicance
of a read or written text relative to perspectives expressed and,
at the highest level, integrating this information with other texts
as the process for generating new questions. his ability to draw
on and contrast multiple sources of information to formulate
new understandings entails intertexuality.
A third stance broadens the concept of literacy proiciency
from the traditional code and socialization emphases to mul-
tiple literacies. his construct, rooted in the profound sociocul-
tural changes in communication brought about by the digital
age, encompasses computer literacy, information literacy, and
digital media literacy as components.
hese three literacy frameworks are not mutually exclusive.
Moreover, notions of being literate and their associated stan-
dards will continue to evolve as outcomes of sociocultural inter-
actions with new technologies.
Since literacy knowledge originates from spoken language
knowledge, the study of literacy crosses multiple disciplines and
subareas. Language studies range from language-learning
environment; theory of mind and language acqui-
sition; word meaning; the mental lexicon; and acquisition
Literacy
of syntax (see syntax, acquisition of), to language varia-
tion and second language acquisition. Literacy learning
processes are also subjects of developmental language study
from difering viewpoints. Subareas include phonological
awareness, reading, composition, spelling, distinctions
between the spoken and written communication modes, and the
efectiveness of teaching reading and teaching writing
in educational programs that, internationally, span alphabetic
and nonalphabetic languages. Furthermore, literacy research
has expanded to incorporate neuroimaging in order to iden-
tify neurobiological correlates of dyslexia and efects on brain
function of scientiically based reading (SBR) interventions.
Behavioral studies have examined associations among oral lan-
guage impairment, dyslexia, and text comprehension and related
disorders of reading and writing (for reviews, see Cain
and Oakhill 2007; Scarborough 2005).
Modern History
Research on literacy learning is relatively new, initiated in
the 1970s. Since its inception, one major principle has guided
this work: Children should have signiicant home and school
opportunities for the integration of oral and written language
experiences. hese experiences support the development of lit-
erate stances in comprehension, speaking, reading, and writing.
Becoming literate is a social process, inluenced largely by chil-
drens search for meaning. Prior to school-based reading and
writing, childrens engagement in literacy-like actions in play,
such as scribbling on paper with crayons, and with adults, for
example, storybook reading, forms the foundation for later liter-
acy learning.
Initial research on literacy was strongly shaped by studies of
classroom language. Nearly four decades ago, sociolinguists
launched a new direction for inquiry into language and literacy
learning, focusing on oral language use in classrooms. he irst
research concentrated on language functions, the communi-
cative demands of classrooms, individual diferences, and the
social basis and social integration necessary for learning. Initial
reading studies addressed assessments of reading comprehen-
sion, whereas current studies emphasize efective instructional
models of decoding and reading comprehension. In the United
States with the 2001 passage of the No Child Left Behind Act
(NCLB), federal educational policies for the irst time exerted a
profound inluence on the way that beginning reading is taught.
he expectation was that explicit SBR instruction would guide
reading practices and curriculum development in phonemic
awareness, decoding, and luency.
A broader array of language-related features is implicated in
more literate spoken and written language uses beyond phone-
mic awareness, however. hese include the scope and density of
vocabulary knowledge, command of more advanced syntactic
constructions applied to diverse reading and writing purposes,
and familiarity with a variety of narrative and expository dia-
logue structures and their organization. Non-language factors
also contribute, such as working memory capacity for difer-
ent kinds of information-processing demands, the motivation to
learn, inferencing and integration, and metacognitive strategies
for the self-regulation of literacy learning. he causal relation-
ship of these language and non-language-related variables and
their interactions for proicient literacy learning remain uniden-
tiied (Cain and Oakhill 2007).
Current State of Research
OVERVIEW OF THEORY. Contemporary research on literacy has
been catalyzed by two general theoretical traditions on the
human capacity for knowledge: Sociocultural science and cog-
nitive science. Each involves an efort to build a comprehensive
and coherent account of human knowledge capacity, but difer
in their view of how knowledge accrues to individuals.
he sociocultural tradition, which encompasses the language
socialization framework, counts its origins in American prag-
matism, such as that of William James and John Dewey. he
key concept is that human knowledge is embedded in the social
and physical context; socioculturalists view the individual within
a speciic social context as the fundamental unit of analysis for
studying human learning and development. Diferent strands of
the sociocultural tradition emphasize alternate ways of social/
cultural analysis (e.g., interpersonal exchanges versus broad cul-
tural patterns versus local sociopolitical power hierarchies). Two
of these variations, social constructivism and participation/prac-
tice theory, have played signiicant roles in language and literacy
research. Sociolinguistic approaches have been prominent in
academic discourse studies, whereas critical theory, which advo-
cates for social change and empowerment, has played a major
role in literacy studies.
he cognitive science tradition traces its origins to the nine-
teenth-century studies of individual diferences in perceptual
processing (e.g., Wilhelm Wundt). Modern-day approaches,
however, highlight the mechanisms by which people process
and integrate information, and the unit of analysis tends to be the
individual. he cognitive science tradition also represents a vari-
ety of conceptual approaches sharing the premise that the indi-
viduals real-time information processing should be the focus
of inquiry. Diferent approaches vary from a strong nativist (see
innateness and innatism) and representational perspec-
tive to the primacy of the emergence of knowledge from system
experience interactions, as stated by the connectionists. For
example, neuroimaging studies range from information process-
ing, which emphasizes the processing constraints and multilevel
integration of information, to connectionism, which investigates
parallel processing and the extraction of inherent regularities
from the input.
ELABORATION OF APPROACHES. he cognitive science approach
in which the code framework is embedded has been most inlu-
ential in revealing a) the precursory phonological awareness
knowledge needed for beginning reading across alphabetic
and nonalphabetic languages and necessary language-speciic
knowledge (e.g., how the consonant cluster patterns of spoken
Czech inluence phonemic awareness development) (Caravolas
and Bruck 1993); b) the instructional design and content that
best facilitates beginning reading in struggling readers; and
c) neurobiological signatures of dyslexia. he focus in instructional
studies is on experimental investigations as the scientiic basis for
determining the treatment validity of instruction to prevent read-
ing problems in grades 1 to 3. hese studies, conducted primarily
in the United States, employ randomized controlled ield trials,
449
Literacy
often using a response to intervention model to determine the
eicacy of outcomes in alphabetic reading. While diferences exist
in the form of response to intervention designs, all involve a hier-
archical process of alphabetic instruction and ongoing reading-re-
lated assessments. Minimal responsiveness may mean that a child
requires special education support to be successful.
he cognitive-experimentalist approach is not without criti-
cism, particularly as this research is relected in the NCLB goal
that all grade 3 children will read proiciently by 2014. One cri-
tique pertains to individual diferences. Given the individual
diversity in neurobiological makeup and sociocultural experi-
ences, it is not possible to erase normal variation in the distri-
bution of reading ability. Instead, normal variation should be
treated as an asset to build upon and not as a liability (Berninger
and Richards 2002).
In contrast, sociocultural approaches converge on the belief
that literacy learning does not consist exclusively of recruiting
neurobiological and cognitive events inside the learners head.
A signiicant question is how academic discourse serves as the
social mechanism for children to learn how to do literacy
and advance their language learning as members of the larger
school literacy culture. Study designs are typically descrip-
tive or quasi-experimental. A limitation of the sociocultural
tradition is that descriptive studies function best to generate
new hypotheses about causal mechanisms but cannot yield
broader generalizations unlike randomized controlled trials.
However, future literacy research may lead to mixed-methods
approaches that combine the tools of the cognitive and socio-
cultural sciences.
AN EXAMPLE OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES. Literacy research in
both the cognitive and sociocultural sciences examines group
diferences. However, classrooms consist of particularized difer-
ences. he translation of group-diferences research into every-
day practices that meet the learning needs of individual children
is far from an easy task. In any third grade in the United States,
some children are still struggling with luent decoding and spell-
ing; others have no problems with decoding but face signiicant
comprehension barriers when reading expository texts; and still
others may be exerting great efort to unravel the complexity of
academic discourse demands, which then impedes their lan-
guage and literacy learning. No uniform set of reasons accounts
for these individual patterns. Some patterns may be grounded
primarily in sociocultural experience, such as less familiarity
with academic discourse; other patterns may involve complex
interactions of neurobiological, cognitive, social, linguistic, and
communicative factors.
While much has been learned about literacy processes, two
signiicant educational challenges persist: understanding varia-
tions in individual proiles and how to craft evidence-based prac-
tices that will assist individual children to become full members
of their larger literacy communities.
Elaine R. Silliman and Louise C. Wilkinson
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Berninger, Virginia W., and Todd L. Richards, 2002. Brain Literacy for
Educators and Psychologists. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
450
Literariness
Cain, Kate, and Jane Oakhill, eds. 2007. Childrens Comprehension
Problems in Oral and Written Language: A Cognitive Perspective. New
York: Guilford.
Caravolas, Markka, and Margaret Bruck. 1993. he efect of oral and
written language input on childrens phonological awareness: A cross-
linguistic study. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 55: 130.
Ho, Connie, David W. Chan, Kevin H. Chung, Suk-Han Lee, and Suk-Man
Tsang. 2007. In search of subtypes of Chinese developmental dys-
lexia. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 97: 6183.
Mishra, Ranjita, and Rhona Stainthrope. 2007. he relationship between
phonological awareness and word reading accuracy in Oriya and
English: A study of Oriya-speaking ifth-graders. Journal of Research
in Reading 30: 2337.
Perfetti, Charles. A. 2003. he universal grammar of reading. Scientiic
Studies of Reading 7: 324.
Ravid, Dorit., and Liliana Tolchinsky. 2002. Developing linguistic liter-
acy: A comprehensive model. Journal of Child Language 29: 41747.
Scarborough, Hollis S. 2005. Developmental relationships between lan-
guage and reading. In he Connections between Language and Reading
Disabilities, ed. H. Catts and A. Kamhi, 324. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum.
Silliman, Elaine R., Louise C. Wilkinson, and Maria R. Brea-Spahn.
2004. Policy and practice imperatives for language and literacy
learning: Who shall be left behind? In Handbook on Language and
Literacy: Development and disorders, ed. C. Stone, Elaine R. Silliman,
B. Ehren, and K. Apel, 97129. New York: Guilford.
Vellutino, Frank R., William E. Tunmer, James J. Jaccard, and RuSan
Chen. 2007. Components of reading ability: Multivariate evidence for
a convergent skills model of reading development. Scientiic Studies
of Reading 11: 332.
Wilkinson, L.C., and E. R. Silliman 2000. Classroom language and lit-
eracy learning. In Handbook of Reading Research. Vol. 3 Ed. M. Kamil,
P. Mosenthal, P. Pearson, and R. Barr, 33760. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum.
LITERARINESS
his term refers to the perceived distinctive quality of the lan-
guage of literary, as opposed to nonliterary, texts. If the linguis-
tic study of literature attempts to understand how linguistic
form is adapted to literary purposes, then identifying a text as
literary based on its language is one of the central problems.
here is currently among scholars of literature, both linguists
and literary critics alike, little agreement about the status of lit-
erature as language. Despite this lack of consensus, or maybe
because of it, the investigation of literature using linguistic
models has become a productive ield within applied linguis-
tics. he question of literariness is closely tied to the modern
concept of literature and its history, and so it seems best to pro-
ceed by examining irst the history of the concept of literature
before turning to central issues that the question of literariness
has raised.
Although most cultures consider verbal art a separate,
recognizable class of speech, its rendering into print has sub-
jected it to the transforming efects that mark the inluence
of print on every aspect of modern culture (see print cul-
ture ). Literature (from Latin littera letter) in its restric-
tive, modern English sense of imaginative writing in the main
genres of poetry, prose, and drama which has claim to con-
sideration on the ground of beauty of form or emotional efect
(Oxford English Dictionary), arose in the nineteenth century in
Literariness
conjunction with the increasing availability of authorship as a
profession. Before the advent of movable type printing, to write
or copy a book required a great investment of time and energy,
and so only highly valued items would have been widely circu-
lated. Even after print technology began slowly to difuse into
the wider culture, it was never doubted that only important
works would ever be printed, distributed, and saved. he rise of
industry and the middle class, with increased literacy rates and
an expanded market for writing, saw the normative concept of
literature emerge essentially as a means for diferentiating tra-
ditionally sanctioned texts from those of supposedly ephemeral
quality. he reading and study of the superior texts were pro-
moted in secondary and university curricula as proitable for
cultural improvement and development of national identity
(see nationalism and language ).
Arguments for the suitability of literature for this project
depended for their success on demonstrating that the privileged
texts possessed certain inalienable qualities. Matthew Arnold,
an English school inspector and poet, argued in 1880 that the
superior character of truth and seriousness in the matter and
substance of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority
of diction and movement marking its style and manner ([1880]
1988, 416). For Arnold, and the liberal humanism he has come to
represent, the reading of literature functions to stabilize soci-
ety because it educates citizens in supposedly universal sociobe-
havioral norms.
Like Arnold, most inluential theorists in the irst half of the
twentieth century never questioned the status of literature as
an identiiable and beneicial form of linguistic behavior. hey
expected that the literary text could be diferentiated from non-
literary texts by some constellation of intrinsic linguistic char-
acteristics, the discovery of which, Roman Jakobson argued in
1921 when he coined the term literariness, should be the goal of
literary linguistics. But when formalist investigators failed over
time to adduce a convincing set of characteristics necessary and
suicient for identifying literature, attention turned to the role of
extrinsic factors, such as audience and medium, in establishing
literary distinctiveness. Many literary critics have resolved the
problem by historicizing the concept of literature itself, arguing
that the search for intrinsic features determinate of literariness
cannot be successful because wherever or whenever the cate-
gory of literature arises, it does so from speciic sociocultural
forces that situate readers diferently with regard to the purposes
attributed to the literary texts within the cultural or theoretical
discourse that promotes the concept. Approaches grounded in
linguistics, however, prefer the term verbal art for their subject
because they also question the suiciency of the traditional con-
cept of literature to account for the variety of genres developed
around the world, by principally oral cultures, that function in lit-
erary ways for the culture in question. Most contemporary study
can thus be characterized as interactionist, refusing to privilege
intrinsic or extrinsic characteristics but understanding textual
genre categorization as a complex process involving interaction
among text, reader, performance situation, and various sociocul-
tural practices.
Some intrinsic characteristics that have been recognized
as occurring across time and languages in texts that become
literary include iconicity and defamiliarization. Iconicity is an
important element in the organicist metaphors of literary struc-
ture developed principally by Robert Penn Warren and other
so-called New Critics in the United States, though by no means
unique to them. Organicist approaches see the form of a text as
highly responsive to its meaning, and the New Critics especially
valued the ability of a text to reconcile within itself the various
strands of meaning that its language evokes. In semiotic terms,
an icon is a sign in which the signiier somehow resembles its
referent. Iconicity operates to a limited extent in language, for
example, in onomatopoeia, where a word sounds like the thing
it represents, as is often the case for linguistic representations
of animal sounds English cows moo and sheep baa (but
see Haiman 1985 for arguments that iconic signs are widely
exploited in language). In poetry, sounds sometimes mimic the
thing being described, as in these lines from Tennysons he
Princess:
he moan of doves in immemorial elms
And murmuring of innumerable bees (7.2212)
he repeated nasal consonants suggest the hum of bees on a
summer afternoon.
Iconicity often contributes to thematization, the acting out
by a texts words or other speech elements of a particular theme
given semantically in the text. he speaker of George Herberts
Deniall, for example, laments that his prayers are not being
heard by God:
When my devotions could not pierce
hy silent eares;
hen was my heart broken, as was my verse:
My breast was full of fears
And disorder:
he inal line of the stanza does not rhyme, nor does it match the
iambic rhythm established in the irst four lines. he disorder
spoken of in the line is acted out by the lines lack of sonic it,
implying in the process a parallel between the form of the prayer
and its failure to penetrate. In the inal line of the inal stanza the
prayer at last comes around:
O cheer and tune my heartlesse breast,
Deferre no time;
hat so thy favours granting my request,
hey and my minde may chime,
And mend my rime.
When the speakers mind is aligned with Gods wishes, his prayer
also becomes formally complete. Iconicity is one way that pat-
terns of linguistic elements can contribute to larger patterns
of meaning. Poetic iconicity is a local phenomenon, however,
which depends on the immediate environment of the signs
involved. he phrase and disorder is not without rhythm, nor is
it unrhymable, but in the context Herbert has created, the phrase
stands out for its ill it. Organicist approaches value the extent to
which the local patterns of signiicance can be reconciled to one
another, making each poem a coherent emotional and semantic
whole. In the inal stanza of Deniall, the local pattern of end
rhyme acts out an additive semantic logic, so that the notions
of chime and time together constitute the meaning of the word
rime, and at the same time the words function sonically within
451
Literariness
the rhyme scheme to act out the metonymy whereby my rime
refers to the poem as a whole.
he ideological content for the New Critical emphasis on
unity and coherence in literature is illuminated by comparison
to Viktor Shklovskys inluential theory of ostranenie defamiliar-
ization. Shklovsky was one of several scholars and writers who
met informally in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Often referred to
as the Russian Formalists, this group was the irst to mix literary
analysis with an increasing awareness of the status of the liter-
ary text as a linguistic object and, therefore, subject to descrip-
tion by speciically linguistic tools (see Erlich 1955). Shklovsky
argued that the distinguishing characteristic of the literary text
was that it defamiliarized items or events the perception of which
had become automatized by the reader due to familiarity or
repeated exposure. Leo Tolstoy, as Shklovsky points out in sev-
eral examples, makes the familiar seem strange by not naming
the familiar object, like the description in War and Peace of an
opera scene as pieces of painted cardboard, or when the nar-
rator of Shame describes the sequence of actions in a logging
without using the word ([1917] 1988, 21). Shklovsky called these
and similar techniques of creative distortion prim devices,
and Jakobson went so far as to claim in 1921 that if literary his-
tory wants to become a science, it must recognize the artistic
device as its only concern (quoted in Erlich 1955, 57; see also
foregrounding).
he young Jakobson, whose speciically linguistic theory of
poetics eventually became widely inluential, believed that he
could justify his admiration for the futurist poetry of Velimir
Khlebnikov by explicating in linguistic terms the complex, sug-
gestive, phonemic, and morphemic patterning of poems heavy in
neologisms, like Kuznechik he Grasshopper (Jakobson 1987,
252). Khlebnikovs poetry, and that of other so-called Russian
Futurists, so clearly eschewed traditional forms of poetic prac-
tice that there was no question of its being considered canoni-
cal. Like Arnold, the Futurists were interested in distinguishing
true literature from the products of the mass marketers, whom
they called traitors, and they also identiied a strong nation-
alistic purpose in reading and writing literature. Unlike Arnold,
however, they saw literature as having a revolutionary, rather
than a stabilizing, purpose (inluenced perhaps by the difer-
ing cultural conditions prevailing under the unstable czarist
regime in Russia and the imperative to govern as a global power
in England).
As Jakobsons poetics matured, he increasingly saw the role
of the device in terms of a Peircean semiotics. he devices do not
function alone to interrupt the direct awareness of the iden-
tity between sign and object (1987, 378), but the whole text is
revealed as a system of systems of equivalences, that, through
similarities and contrasts at all levels of linguistic organization,
up to and including the arrangement of the entire text, display
the text as primarily interested in the linguistic medium, the
materiality of its linguistic signs. his approach resembles the
organicist metaphors of the New Critics in that linguistic form
is motivated by poetic meaning, and devices are valued less for
their interruption of usual relationships of signiicance than for
the surplus of meaning that iconic relationships create.
In Jakobsons best-known literary-critical essays, however,
such as Baudelaires Les Chats, written with Claude Levi- genre categorization as a complex process involving interaction
452
Strauss, he and his co-authors exhaustively catalog patterns of
linguistic or structural elements within a poem, often with no
attempt to discover motivations for individual patterns except to
observe their interaction as formal patterns. hey aim to demon-
strate that the whole poem is essentially a tissue of many such
overlapping and interlocking patterns, a complex and indivis-
ible totality where a perpetual interplay of sound and mean-
ing establishes an analogy between the two facets, a relationship
either paronomastic and anagrammatic, or igurative (occasion-
ally onomatopoeic) (1980, 23).
Objections to internalist theories of literariness include skep-
ticism about any readers being able to detect all or even many
of a poems linguistic patterns, as well as observations that some
passages of nonliterary prose contain as many patterns as poetry.
Indeed, the strongest reactions against internalist theories con-
cern the genre of prose. Internalist theories of literariness often
elevate the importance of poetry because as a genre, it is maxi-
mally distinct from everyday language. As a result, objections
to these theories are often concerned with accounting for the
characteristics of prose genres. Prose generally has observably
fewer sonic foregrounding devices and is more likely than poetry
to make use of devices that also appear in everyday language,
such as irony, metaphor, or repetition. here is some evidence
that these devices occur with greater frequency in literary than in
nonliterary prose, and that there are some linguistic forms, such
as free indirect speech, that tend to occur only in literary prose
(see Miall 2006 and narrative). On the balance, however, liter-
ary prose tends to require some attention to elements of literary
interaction that are extrinsic to the text in order to account for
literariness.
One important class of extrinsic approaches, often termed
reader response theories, focus on the reader as the source of the
distinctiveness of literature. Perhaps the strongest version of this
extrinsic theory is ofered by Stanley Fish (1980), who describes
an impromptu experiment (later executed to the same ends with
readers from three continents) in which he told undergraduates
that a list of linguists on a classroom chalk board was a poem
and asked them to interpret it, which they had no trouble doing.
his demonstrated for Fish that literariness was wholly a func-
tion of prior reader commitment, rather than of anything within
the text. Readers learn interpretive practices from the communi-
ties of which they are members, and so what counts as literary is
what the community has determined to be so. Although Fishs
description of the interpretive community has not generally been
retained, his position on literariness became, until very recently,
the default standard within literary theory. Feminist and postco-
lonialist challenges to the hegemony of Western literary cultural
practice, demonstrating that texts created and valued by a domi-
nant class will be read quite diferently by less privileged classes,
helped establish that a precise mode or history of reception can-
not be inferred from the text itself (Harrison 2005, 7). Evacuating
the text of any determining role in its own reading allows critics
to explore how the text participates in the various discourses of
power circulating at the time of its writing and reception.
Current theories of literariness that utilize linguistic tools for
analysis are unwilling to locate the determining characteristics
speciically within the text or the reader, but generally see textual
Literariness
among text, reader, and various sociocultural practices. Reuven
Tsurs sophisticated analysis of religious trance poetry, for exam-
ple, identiies not only textual devices that contribute to a hypnotic
reading but also diferent types of cognitive styles of individual
readers, who are psychologically predilicted to react to certain
environmental variables in diferent ways and so read texts dif-
ferently. Nigel Fabb, on the other hand, adopts a modularist
approach, identifying two types of structures in poetry, inherent
and communicated structure. Inherent structure is determinate
and is processed, rather than interpreted, by the appropriate
module (such as syntax or meter). Communicated structure is
implied by textual evidence in the context of the readers knowl-
edge, so that being a sonnet holds of a text by inference, rather
than as an independent fact about the text. he important thing
for literariness is again that the text provides only some of the
cues necessary for categorizing it as literary. Communicated
structure is dependent on individual learning, so that responses
to any given textual characteristic might readily vary by indi-
vidual. Fabb also argues that literary texts communicate more
about their form than verbal behavior generally does, and so in
a Jakobsonian sense draw more attention to form. Form in this
sense takes on the characteristics of meaning (because implied);
therefore, form is more likely to be ambiguous, indeterminate,
metaphorical, or ironic in literary texts.
Emotional responses to literature have always been impor-
tant for the identiication of literariness. Indian theories of
rasa, for example, categorized texts by the type of emotion they
prompted (see dhvani and rasa). Fresh empirical approaches
to the issue of literariness have focused on the role of emotion in
literary response. Miall identiies literariness as a combination
of formal elements in the literary text and the array of responses
these initiate when read (2006, 144). Readers who encounter
foregrounding devices experience them as defamiliarizing, a
cognitive response that has an associated afective dimension.
Subsequent changes in understanding seem to be guided largely
by the feeling evoked by defamiliarization, especially the feeling
of self-modiication that, Miall argues, accompanies the recon-
textualization of the defamiliarized concept (see literature,
empirical study of).
In the last decade, literary critics interested in the ethical
dimensions of literary reading have begun to reconsider, to some
degree, the importance of the defamiliarizing efect of literature.
Derek Attridge (2004) has recuperated the concept of literariness
for literary studies by identifying it with the inventiveness that a
text manifests whenever it is enacted by a reader. For Attridge,
literariness inheres not in some fundamental unchanging core in
the work but in the inventiveness it shows over time, because it
remains open to change and porous to new contexts, continuing
to introduce what is unknown into the known. Readers experi-
ence that inventiveness anew when they perform the work, and
they desire to do justice to it by shifting the norms and habits
they use for dealing with the world.
As literature undergoes remediation into digital for-
mats (and it should be noted that the Russian Formalists were
applying Shklovskys concept of ostranenie to ilm analysis
already before 1920), the notion of literariness is undergo-
ing concomitant reinement. Motivated in part by new media
forms of verbal art, Jerome J. McGann and Lisa Samuels
Literary Character and Character Types
(2001) have proposed the expansion of the notion of read-
ing to include the manipulation of poems to deform them
in ways that defamiliarize the poems and prompt new expe-
riences of them, by reversing them (so that they can be read
backwards), rearranging the words or lines, even removing or
replacing parts of speech. Such formally interactive processes
of reading, increasingly built into hypertext, video games, and
other forms of electronic textuality, continue to obscure the
traditional text/reader division that igured so prominently in
early notions of literariness. Arguments for the literariness of
nontraditional (i.e., nonprint, nonverbal) formats usually rely
on some form of the strong sociocultural construction argu-
ment, yet there are also attempts to canonize some digitally
mediated works over others based on intrinsic characteristics,
suggesting that interactive deinitions of literariness continue
to prevail for the time being.
Claiborne Rice
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Arnold, Matthew. [1880] 1988. he study of poetry. In he Critical
Tradition, ed. David H. Richter, 41116. Boston: Bedford.
Attridge, Derek. 2004. he Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge.
Bauman, Richard. 1984. Verbal Art as Performance. Long Grove,
IL: Waveland.
Erlich, Victor. 1955. Russian Formalism. he Hague: Mouton.
Fabb, Nigel. 2002. Language and Literary Structure. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Fish, Stanley. 1980. Is here a Text in his Class? he Authority of
Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Haiman, John. 1985. Natural Syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Harrison, Nicholas. 2005. Who needs an idea of the literary? Paragraph
28.2: 117.
Herbert, George. [1633] 1974. Deniall. In he English Poems of George
Herbert, ed. C. A. Patrides, 96. London: J. M. Dent & Sons.
Jakobson, Roman. 1980. A postscript to the discussion on grammar of
poetry. Diacritics 10.1: 2135.
. 1987. Language in Literature. Ed. Krystyna Pomorska and
Stephen Rudy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. his text collects
Jakobsons writing on literary topics throughout his career.
McGann, Jerome J., and Lisa Samuels. 2001. Deformance and interpre-
tation. In Radiant Textuality, 10536. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Miall, David S. 2006. Literary Reading: Empirical and heoretical Studies.
Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Shklovsky, Viktor. [1917] 1988. Art as technique. Trans. Lee T. Lemon
and Marion J. Reis. In Modern Criticism and heory, ed. David Lodge,
1630. London: Longman.
Tompkins, Jane P., ed. 1980. Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism
to Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
hough somewhat dated, this remains an excellent introduction to the
range of ideas usually identiied as reader-response.
Tsur, Reuven. 2003. On the Shore of Nothingness: A Study in Cognitive
Poetics. Exeter: Imprint Academic.
LITERARY CHARACTER AND CHARACTER TYPES
Discussions of character types date back to Aristotle and appear
within numerous brands of literary criticism. Within the context
of the language sciences, however, character types have particu-
lar relevance to two strands of narratology.
453
Literary Character and Character Types
he irst strand, which David Herman refers to as classical
narratology (see also generative poetics and narrative,
grammar and), irst lourished in the 1960s. hese linguistic
approaches to literature heavily inluenced by Vladimir Propps
Morphology of the Folktale (originally published in 1928 but not
available in translation until some 30 years later), the works of
Algirdas Julien Greimas, and structuralism in general treat
character types as functional units of meaning. Propps seven
classiications of character types were determined by the roles
that characters commonly occupy in Russian folktales: the hero,
the villain, the helper, the donor (provider of magical agents),
the sought-for-person and her father, the dispatcher, and the
false hero. Building upon Propps model, Greimas claimed that
characters were signiicant for the actantial roles they perform
within a narrative. In Structural Semantics ([1966] 1983, 198),
he described actants as embodying a small number of roles
in the drama of discursive utterances. Greimass three pairs
of actants subject/object, sender/receiver, and helper/oppo-
nent were intended to correspond to grammatical concepts.
Subjects (characters who do the action) and objects (characters
who undergo the action) are clearly related to the equivalently
named sentence constituents, while helper and opponent can be
regarded, in Mieke Bals words, as adverbial adjuncts ([1985]
1997, 201). he category of sender/receiver proved most prob-
lematic: While it attempted to supplement Propps dispatcher
with Roman Jakobsons distinction between the initiator of a
communication (e.g., a speaker) and the addressee of that com-
munication (the receiver), the relationship between those linguis-
tic concepts and the corresponding character types was unclear.
Critics have since expanded on the theoretical foundations laid
by Propp and Greimas, and such work has provided useful gener-
alizations about characters as structural units of meaning within
narratives (see Schleifer and Velie 1987, for instance, for a typol-
ogy of literary genres based upon Greimass receiver-actant).
Furthermore, Bals use of semantic axes and Michael Toolans
semantic feature analysis ofered ways to account for the less
generalizable details of characterization such as speciic physi-
cal and psychological qualities which were outside the scope of
story grammars.
Within the second strand of narratology, or what Herman
terms postclassical narratology, considerably more attention has
been devoted to narrative reception. his change in focus has
occurred in tandem with the rise of cognitive linguistics
in the 1970s and 1980s, which focused more attention on the
mental processes behind grammatical systems; it also undoubt-
edly was inluenced by reader response theories that considered
the impact of a readers experience and expertise, literary and
otherwise, upon their interpretations of a text (see interpre-
tive community and competence and performance,
literary). Recently, literary characters have been discussed as
mental models or schemas (see story schemas, scripts,
and prototypes) sets of expectations generated by exem-
plars, personal experience, stereotypes, and literary knowl-
edge which undergo continual modiication as the reader
receives more information about a character (see Gerrig and
Allbritton 1990; Schneider 2001).
heorists continue to mine the connections between linguis-
tic models and narrative. Work done on literary universals
454
Literary Universals
or narrative universals, which is modeled in part on the
study of language universals, focuses more on the construction
than the reception of texts. Such approaches tend to treat char-
acter types as narrative components that carry out action neces-
sary for certain prototypical plot structures (see prototype). At
the same time, writers adopting this approach (e.g., Hogan 2003)
also consider the emotional efects elicited by diferent forms of
characterization in terms of empathy and identiication. In addi-
tion, recent work by such writers as Toolan suggests that certain
contemporary grammars might provide better models of char-
acter types than the early generative grammar and trans-
formational grammar upon which the theories of classical
narratology relied. For example, Toolan examines characters in
terms of the meaning-oriented grammar detailed by Michael
Halliday, which considers the diferent types of participants
in actions. hese participants include a medium (the afected
participant), agent (a participant acting intentionally), force
(an inanimate agent), instrument (participant controlled by the
agent), beneiciary, and recipient (see also thematic roles).
Karen Renner
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bal, Mieke. [1985] 1997. Narratology: Introduction to the heory of
Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Culler, Jonathan. 1975. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics,
and the Study of Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Contains an excellent survey of structuralist approaches to narrative,
including a section on character, pp. 2308.
Gerrig, Richard J., and David W. Allbritton. 1990. he construction of lit-
erary character: A view from cognitive psychology. Style 24: 38092.
Greimas, A. J. [1966] 1983. Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a
Method. Trans. Daniele McDowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan Velie.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Herman, David. 1997. Scripts, sequences, and stories: Elements of a
postclassical narratology. PMLA 112: 104659.
Hogan, Patrick. 2003. he Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and
Human Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Propp, Vladimir. [1928] 1968. Morphology of the Folktale. Trans. Laurence
Scott. 2d ed. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Schleifer, Ronald, and Alan Velie. 1987. Genre and structure: Toward an
actantial typology of narrative genres and modes. Modern Language
Notes 102: 112250.
Schneider, Ralf. 2001. Toward a cognitive theory of literary charac-
ter: he dynamics of mental-model construction. Style 35: 60740.
Toolan, Michael. [1988] 2001. Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction.
2d ed. New York: Routledge.
LITERARY UNIVERSALS
In parallel with language universals (see laws of language,
universal grammar, and universals, nongenetic,
among other entries), literary universals are, generally speaking,
patterns and structures exhibited widely by works of literature
across various familiar literary boundaries, whether national,
generic, or historical. Literary universals apply to various domains
besides world literature as a whole: individual regional and
national traditions; discrete literary forms and genres (poetry,
drama, narrative, etc.); separate literary histories and periods;
foundational literary concepts (plot, character [see literary
Literary Universals
character and character types], etc.); and common liter-
ary devices (e.g., metaphor), among others. Literary universals
may also be present as correlations across these various scalar
domains. hus, Aristotles observation that tragedies have a
beginning, a middle, and an end applies to literary works more
broadly.
A speciic call for literary universals appeared in Hogan (1994;
as a subtype of aesthetic universals), but the general concept
can be traced to Goethe, if not Aristotle. he Aristotelian bina-
ries of universal/particular and substantial/nonsubstantial,
when intersected, generate a four-category ontology (see Lowe
2006). Literary universals include both nonsubstantial univer-
sals (abstract properties and relationships) and substantial uni-
versals: literary kinds (genres) and literary morphology, very
generally considered. Examples of the latter include metrical
analysis, biblical form criticism, thematics of creation stories,
Freytags pyramid, Proppian functions, Bakhtinian speech
genres, and so on. Substantial universals implies something
very diferent from the oxymoron concrete universals, some-
times invoked by New Critics and others, to suggest the possibil-
ity that literature can entirely transcend the universal/particular
dichotomy. Even when substantial (i.e., measurable, able to
be cataloged), literary universals work outside of any particular
instantiation or touchstone.
his entry briely discusses ive areas of literary universals: their
rationale and origins, some basic terminology, their relationship
to dominant strands of literary theory, various successful ind-
ings and limitations, and possible lines of future investigation.
he focus remains on universals as they apply directly to liter-
ary study, as opposed to universalist models conceived as more
purely linguistic or cognitive, and which merely invoke literary
terms (e.g., story grammar). In contrast, literary universals
seek to explore what uniies the incredible richness, beauty, and
diversity of global literatures, past and present.
Rationale and Origins
As with language universals, the key criterion for literary univer-
sals is not that they occur in all known literatures (though this
is possible for absolute universals; see absolute and statis-
tical universals), but that they are represented, more often
than chance alone would suggest, by literatures that are areally
and genetically distinct (see areal distinctness and litera-
ture), that is, free from the kinds of relations and inluences that
are to be expected when literatures are linked by literary history
or geography (Hogan 2003, 1719). hus, if epic can be called a
universal genre, it is not so because it was written both by Homer
and by Milton, who knew (i.e., read) Homer, but because it is a
literary form also recognizable in the Mahbhrata in India, the
Tale of the Heike in Japan, and the Popul Vuh in South America
all traditions that are areally and genetically unrelated.
One of the earlier precursors of literary universals is the idea
of Goethes world literature or Weltliteratur, by which Goethe
seems to have meant a broad cultural unity whose understand-
ing could also lead to global social progress. Weltliteratur was
one of the inspirations for the discipline of comparative litera-
ture. Relecting its scientiic ambitions, this ield was subdeined
so that comparative literature per se examined the relation-
ships of two national literatures, world literature compared
three or more, and general or universal literature examined
all literatures as a whole (see Wellek and Warren 1977, 4653).
Such distinctions correlated with the nineteenth-century evolu-
tionary paradigm: Comparative literature is coined by analogy
with the sciences of comparative zoology, comparative anat-
omy, comparative philology, and so on (see philology and
hermeneutics).
he nature of literature as verbal art, and thus cognitively
founded in language, is not the sole spring of its universality
(see verbal art, evolution and, and verbal art, neu-
ropsychology of). he roots of literary universals also lie in
the common stock of anthropological development and social
behavior, or human universals (Brown 1991). Art is one such
human universal and, if the prehistoric impulse of making spe-
cial is the ultimate origin of all kinds of artistic production and
aesthetic appreciation (Dissanayake 1992), it follows that liter-
ature, as one of the arts, will also exhibit certain universal and
nontrivial patterns. To the extent that it stems from the mysteri-
ous biology of play, literature may re-present any or all of the four
fundamental types of human and biological play described by
Roger Caillois (1961): mimesis (dress-up and lets pretend/
mimicry and camoulage), alea (games of chance/random varia-
tion), agon (sports and contests/survival of the ittest), and ver-
tigo (swings and slides/light and chasing). It could also be that
literature somehow recapitulates the Darwinian drama of sur-
vival (Meeker 1997), and the analysis of basic plots in world lit-
erature (e.g., Polti [1921] 1977) suggests that the same social and
sexual competitions of early human life are repeatedly replicated
in literature. On the other hand, given the diiculty that socio-
biology and evolutionary psychology have in explaining
why the human is so diferent from the rest of the natural world,
more promising ways of sourcing literary universals may lie in
the study of creativity as a universal human phenomenon. Only
the human seems to actualize the original sense of creature, or
the still-becoming-creation.
Terminology
he basic vocabulary of literary universals stems from paral-
lels in the theory of language universals. Absolute universals
are those that apply to all literatures, past and present. As with
absolute universals of language, these may be few in number
and diicult to substantiate completely since available informa-
tion about both the languages and literatures of the world is far
from complete. Nevertheless, some absolute literary universals
do appear to exist. One simple absolute universal is that liter-
ature (including oral literature or orature) occurs in all known
cultures. Whether this is historically monogenetic, like language
in Homo sapiens sapiens may be, or polygenetic, like the inven-
tion of writing systems certainly was, remains an open ques-
tion since oral literature long precedes the written record (see
oral composition). Another possible absolute is that all
literatures (eventually) develop fundamental generic diferen-
tiations, such as between poetry and prose (see poetic form,
universals of). Another content-oriented absolute is the uni-
versality of myth (stories of creation, lood, etc.) in the earliest
recorded traditions. Often, there are striking parallels between
very speciic elements among even the most areally and genet-
ically distinct myths, which may lend credence to the existence
455
Literary Universals
of a monogenetic mother literature. For instance, it is possible
to reconstruct a protoline of Indo-European epic poetry like he
killed the dragon (Watkins 1995), suggesting that heroic tales
are a common origin for global literatures.
Of course, common origin may imply prevalent rather than
across-the-board. If universals are not absolute, they are statis-
tical, that is, occurring more often than chance alone would pre-
dict. he common distinction between poetry, drama, and iction
is a statistical universal because these forms are widely but not
universally distinguished in the literary traditions of the world.
Universals that correlate (in ways also not inluenced genet-
ically or areally) are typological universals (see typology).
One typological universal may be that if a tradition has a cate-
gory for noniction, it will also (n.b. the awkward non-) have
a category for iction, or that drama presupposes poetry. de Saussure alongside the birth of modern structural lin-
In other words, such literary categories may function like basic
color terms (Berlin and Kay 1991), with traditions that difer-
entiate fewer kinds of literature, including the same few kinds.
Logical universals are typological universals that are logically
entailed by the nature of the given literary phenomena: hus, a
narrative has only two options for recounting a plot sequence,
either temporally or out of that temporal order (e.g., a lashback).
his suggests, in turn, a less obvious but important statistical uni-
versal: very few plots are atemporal, far from the half expected by
random distribution.
Above all, literary universals are empirical they can be
(coldly) documented and are not the products of one cultural
point of view imposed upon another. hus, any of the common
usages of universal(ity) in literary studies that imply norma-
tive, hegemonic, or totalizing judgments do not pertain to lit-
erary universals as discussed here but are instances of critical
contamination that parallel genetic and areal inluence. (For
further discussion of this issue, along with other terminology of
literary universals, see Hogan 2006.)
Universals and Literary Theory
One of the irst universalist schemes in Western literary theory is
presented in Platos Ion, which probes the inability of oral poets
to account for their activities. Socrates explains poetic divine
possession by imagining a magnetic chain beginning with the
Muse, the oracular lodestone, whose power suspends a descend-
ing series of iron rings: original composer, intermediate reciter,
and inal audience. hough meant in the Platonic scheme to
belittle all of art as a derivative and irrational form of knowledge,
this doctrine of inspiration has remained a fundamental myth of
literary theory through the twentieth century and beyond, as for
Muse has been substituted a virtual series of pervasively pow-
erful and likewise subconscious lodestones: psyche, economy,
ideology, identity, empire, and so on.
Modern literary theory, however, has taken an attitude
toward universals that is schizophrenic, tacitly assuming that
universalizing theoretical modes are possible while vociferously
denying that literary works are anything but contingent idio-
graphic particulars. Two passages from Ren Wellek and Austin
Warrens inluential heory of Literature, just a page apart, are
symptomatic. he irst distances itself from scientiic universal-
ism of any kind: [N]o general law can be assumed to achieve
the purpose of literary study: the more general the more the
456
concrete object of the work of art will elude our grasp (1977, 18).
In short, universal formulas have little purchase in any individ-
ual act of literary criticism. Yet, one page later, the fundamental
need for a universal theory reasserts itself: Like every human
being, each work of literature has its individual characteristics;
but it also shares traits with humanity. [hus, the] characteriza-
tion [of its individuality] can be accomplished only in universal
terms, on the basis of literary theory (1977, 19). he universal/
particular paradox of literary studies was already in place at the
ields birth around the turn of the twentieth century, when the
nomothetic/idiographic divisions of the German university were
dominant, and all disciplines were preconceived in the category
of Wissenschaften, sciences.
Linguistic approaches to literature, inaugurated by Ferdinand
guistics, also imply universals. hough an odd literary digression
from his linguistic theory, the mysterious anagrams Saussure
culled from Latin texts might serve to show that literature
involves an equally systematic (and compensatorially non-ar-
bitrary?) selection of signs (even if authorially unintended; see
Starobinski 1979). In any case, the literary situation is an instance
of language, and thus the linguistic universals of the moment of
communication will apply and will also be available for artis-
tic exploitation. Roman Jakobson (1960) famously delineated
how each of six components of the communicative situation
(addresser, message, contact, etc.) could be exploited for difer-
ent linguistic and literary purposes (emotive, poetic, referential,
etc.), with diferent purposes predictably dominant in diferent
literary genres. Among other brilliant readings, Jakobsons per-
spicacious exploration of the neuropsychology of the metaphoric
and metonymic poles of linguistic competence in relation to
the divergent styles of various Russian novelists (1956) also sug-
gests that literary universals (pace Wellek and Warren) can illu-
minate seemingly idiographic cases in literary criticism.
he coming of various posts in late-twentieth-century lit-
erary theory (poststructuralism, postmodernism, postcolonial-
ism) has added new complexity and urgency to the search for
universals in literature (see Carroll 1995). Even while prioritiz-
ing irreducible diferences, polyvalent identities, and the local
particulars of each text and reader, current literary theory none-
theless proceeds by placing literature in the context of grand
sociopolitical, economic, or linguistic structures.
Findings and Limitations
he domains with the most advanced treatment of literary uni-
versals thus far are poetics (i.e., prosody and meter) and nar-
rative. Literary universals in the study of narrative are treated
thoroughly elsewhere (see narrative universals, narra-
tology, and story schemas). One recent discovery by Patrick
Colm Hogan is that narratives seem to fall into three prototype
stories, a signiicant improvement over existing, more reductive
approaches (e.g., Joseph Campbells androcentric monomyth
of the heros journey).
Well before literary universals was coined, Paul Kiparsky pre-
sciently argued for a universal metrics: [A] theory of meter
cannot restrict itself to one poetic tradition, any more than a the-
ory of grammar can restrict itself to one language. We must make
our theory account for metrical systems of other languages, and
Literary Universals
begin to construct a universal metrics (1981, 266). Metrical
schemes are by nature universal formulas for generating and
judging individual poems: [W]e can only begin to state invari-
ant facts about the iambic pentameter line if we state them in
terms of an abstract representation of the line, rather than by ref-
erence to any of the actual performances of the line (Fabb 2002,
6). Although the stanza has received some attention, the focus of
prosody is the verse line (or line group, e.g., the elegiac cou-
plet), afording a vast corpus for analysis.
Other suggestive work on literary universals has been done
on the level of fundamental literary concepts. Evolutionary psy-
chology has conlated Darwinian survival with literary conlict
(the primary problem or adversary to be overcome in a given
story), but this is only one of the bases of literature, being limited
primarily to narrative or dramatic works. In poetry, probably the
most ancient literary form, the dominant literary universals seem
to be imagery (regarding content) and meter (regarding form).
Some early formalists believed that imagistic language was the
root of all literature. However, literature is animated by both
imagistic tropes and also schemes (recalling the classical distinc-
tion within the rhetorical canon of style), that is, the deliberate
patterning of existing linguistic components (i.e., multitudes of
parallelism: rhyme, chiasm, ascending cola, etc.). Schemes
are, in Jakobsons vocabulary, either poetic or phatic (i.e., myth typically diverge into history (fact) and iction (imag-
at play with the message itself or its instantiation in a linguistic
code), rather than referential, iconic, or invoking deliberate
visualization.
Tropes have found other universalizing uses since Peter
Ramus, Giambattista Vico, and other Enlightenment rhetori-
cians elevated four of these traditional igures of thought to the
status of master tropes: metaphor (see metaphor, universals
of), metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. Of these, metaphor
has been most ascendant (see, e.g., Kvecses 2005). he cogni-
tivist theory of conceptual metaphor even suggests that the
fundamental metaphoric principle, to understand one thing in
terms of another, applies to all concepts, since the mind is uni-
versally embodied through the constant real-world experience
of comparison (Lakof and Johnson 1999). Kenneth Burke took a
speciic form, the drama, as a metaphor of all social action ([1945]
1969). Going a step beyond both Aristotles triad and Jakobsons
six factors of communication, Burkes pentad of dramatism
(scene, act, agent, agency, purpose; with a sixth term, attitude,
supplemented later) was conceived synecdochically so that its
terms could pair into any of ten ratios (e.g., the pathetic fallacy
is an instance of the scene-act ratio).
Even as previously literary things as metaphor and drama
show great power for comprehending human thought and soci-
ety, however, there remains the problem of the way that such
indings feed back to illuminate literature per se. If we all use met-
aphor continually in language, what then sets apart the poetic
metaphor of a Shakespeare sonnet? Is all literature ultimately
dramatic? As the study of literary universals moves forward, it
must be remembered that ever since Saussurean structuralism
and Russian (and other Eastern European) formalisms, that the
fundamental theoretical agenda is literariness (literaturn-
ost), rather than the particular literary work (which remains the
realm of criticism) the langue of literature, as it were, rather
than the parole.
Future Directions
As the aforementioned paths are furthered, two broad new ave-
nues of investigation present themselves. he irst has to do with
deining and integrating the fundamental disciplinary unit of
analysis of literature. In each discipline, the unit of analysis drives
the research paradigm, such as event and its time-context for
history, or the atom and its forces in physics. Literary studies are
blessed, or cursed, with an array of merely informative terms,
such as character, theme, genre, and reading, of which none by
itself provides the overarching anecdote for literary studies. In
practice, moreover, the ield is divided among such competing
intradepartmental interests as criticism, theory, creative writing,
rhetoric and composition, education, ilm studies, and jour-
nalism. here may nonetheless be a grand theory of literariness
that unites these disparate subields; if so, it would also likely
reveal the fundamental interconnections among all the sister
arts (literature, visual art, performing art, and new media). Will
there be a new grammatike, the ancient word for literary study,
now a more limited purview of linguistics?
he second little-explored territory for literary universals
(even since Carroll 1995) is the area of diachronic universals
(cf. language change, universals of). For instance, do all
literatures begin with poetry and then proceed to prose? Does
ination)? Are there other universals of the rise and fall of various
genres over time? he word tradition, often used in this entry as
synonymous with a literature, implies an entire literary history,
and the historical mode is one of the literary disciplines oldest
and largest strands. Much of this standing evidence might be
mined for diachronic literary universals.
Christopher M. Kuipers
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Berlin, Brent, and Paul Kay. 1991. Basic Color Terms: heir Universality
and Evolution. 2d ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Brown, Donald E. 1991. Human Universals. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Burke, Kenneth. [1945] 1969. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Caillois, Roger. 1961. Man, Play, and Games. Trans. Meyer Barash. New
York: Free Press.
Carroll, Joseph. 1995. Evolution and Literary heory. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Dissanayake, Ellen. 1992. Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes from and
Why. New York: Free Press.
Fabb, Nigel. 2002. Language and Literary Structure: he Linguistic
Analysis of Form in Verse and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hogan, Patrick Colm. 1994. he possibility of aesthetics. British Journal
of Aesthetics 34.4: 33750.
. 1997. Literary universals. Poetics Today 18.2: 22349.
. 2003. he Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human
Emotion. New York: Cambridge University Press.
. 2006. What are literary universals? Literary Universals Project.
Available online at: <http://litup.unipa.it/docs/whatr.htm>.
Jakobson, Roman. 1956. Two aspects of language and two types of apha-
sia disturbances. In Fundamentals of Language, ed. Roman Jakobson
and Morris Halle, 5582. he Hague: Mouton.
. 1960. Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics. In Style in
Language, ed. homas Sebeok, 35077. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
457
Literature, Empirical Study of
Kiparsky, Paul. 1981. Stress, syntax and meter. In Essays in Modern
Stylistics, ed. Donald C. Freeman, 22572. New York: Methuen.
Kvecses, Zoltn. 2005. Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lakof, George, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: he
Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western hought. New York: Basic
Books.
Lowe, E. J. 2006. he Four Category Ontology: A Metaphysical Foundation
for Natural Science. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Meeker, Joseph. 1997. he Comedy of Survival: Literary Ecology and a
Play Ethic. 3d ed. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Polti, Georges. [1921] 1977. he hirty-Six Dramatic Situations. Trans.
Lucille Ray. Boston: he Writer.
Starobinski, Jean. 1979. Words upon Words: he Anagrams of Ferdinand
de Saussure. Trans. Olivia Emmet. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Watkins, Calvert. 1995. How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European
Poetics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wellek, Ren, and Austin Warren. 1977. heory of Literature. 3d ed. San
Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
LITERATURE, EMPIRICAL STUDY OF
he broad ield of empirical research over the last three decades
has included a range of topics and approaches. Sociologically
oriented researchers have taken up literary socialization, such as
the reputation of authors, and audience research; book histori-
ans have surveyed the experiences of readers, especially those in
the working class over the last two centuries, and the role of read-
ing clubs; writers interested in aesthetic response have studied
individual literary experience and compared literary response to
experiences of other media, such as ilm, computer gaming, or
hypertext. At the heart of the empirical endeavor is the formation
of theories and narratives about the role and status of literature
based on actual data, either verbal or numeric: his may consist
of readers memoirs or statistics for library borrowings, the study
of questionnaires elicited from readers, or evidence of reading
processes gathered during carefully controlled laboratory exper-
iments. In this entry, the primary focus is on the formal aspects of
literary texts as relected in studies of literary reception.
Reception studies cover a wide spectrum of topics, includ-
ing style and narrative; readers feelings and the relation of liter-
ary understanding to the self; individual diferences in readers
preferences or the inluence on reading of personality traits;
cross-cultural diferences in reading; and the relation of literary
experiences to other media. Some empirical studies attempt to
clarify or improve on the models of reading developed by dis-
course psychologists; others may represent an attempt to test a
particular claim about reading proposed by literary theorists or
narratologists. Either explicitly or implicitly, a number of
studies have raised the question of literariness: whether lit-
erary texts involve response processes that are measurably dis-
tinctive in some way.
Experimental Examples
In this section I discuss three themes that have been pursued
empirically and provide examples of the ways that readers
responses have been studied.
he term foregrounding refers to stylistically distinctive
aspects of literary texts. hese may be apparent at the level of
458
sound (metrical efects or alliteration), syntax (such as
ellipsis or inversion), or semantics (metaphor, hyperbole,
etc.). he Russian Formalist critic Victor Shklovsky, commenting
on the purpose of literary devices, argued that literary art exists
to make one feel things; its purpose is to increase the diiculty
and length of perception ([1917] 1965, 12). he immediate efect
of foregrounding is to make strange (ostranenie), to defamiliar-
ize. hese ideas allow the empirical researcher to frame speciic
hypotheses addressing the impact that foregrounded passages
have on readers.
First, as studied by Willie van Peer (1986), readers should ind
that passages high in foregrounding are striking when compared
with passages low in foregrounding. To test this hypothesis, van
Peer chose four short poems and carried out a comprehensive
analysis of the foregrounding in each line at the three diferent
levels (sound, syntax, semantics). his enumeration enabled
the lines of the poems to be rank-ordered for density of fore-
grounding. Readers were then asked to respond to the poems by
underlining all words and phrases they found striking. In all of
the poems, the frequency of readers underlinings was found to
correlate highly with the density of foregrounding.
A similar study by David S. Miall and Don Kuiken (1994) took
up the additional suggestions of Shklovsky that art makes us feel
and that perception is lengthened. Working with three modern-
ist short stories, they analyzed the presence of foregrounding in
each sentence. he stories were then presented a sentence at a
time on computer; reading times per sentence were recorded
while readers undertook a irst reading at their normal reading
speed; they then read the story a second time while providing
a rating of each sentence. For all of the stories, after adjusting
for sentence length, the speed of reading correlated signiicantly
with foregrounding (highly foregrounded sentences took about
twice as long to read as sentences without foregrounding); and
readers ratings for strikingness and intensity of feeling also cor-
related with foregrounding. he readers in both this study and
that by van Peer were university students from a wide range of
backgrounds, yet correlations with foregrounding were signii-
cant regardless of their expertise in literature; thus, response to
foregrounding appears to be independent of literary education.
hese indings suggest a theory of text processing: he encoun-
ter with foregrounding is found striking by the reader, who then
slows down in order to gain a better apprehension of the unusual
textual features; the experience is defamiliarizing and arouses
feeling, and feeling may be the vehicle by which the reader elicits
an alternative framework for reconceptualizing the meaning of
the text at that moment. he main indings have been conirmed
in several later studies on the efects of foregrounding.
Literary reading is often said to be engaging in its power to
evoke ideas and feelings about the self. A method for investigat-
ing this idea, termed self-probed retrospection, was irst demon-
strated in a study by Ufe Seilman and Steen F. Larsen (1989).
hey proposed that a literary text was more likely to evoke per-
sonal resonance than a nonliterary text. Readers were given either
a short story or an expository text (on population growth), both
of about 3,000 words. While reading, readers put a pencil mark
in the margin whenever they were reminded of something from
their own lives; otherwise, reading occurred at a normal pace.
he two texts gave rise to the same number of remindings: about
Literature, Empirical Study of
13 for each text. After reading, readers reviewed their marks and
completed a short questionnaire on each reminding: its type,
vividness, emotional quality, and the like. he types of remind-
ing were found to distinguish the two texts: For the literary text,
twice as many remindings involved a memory of the self as an
actor. he expository text, in contrast, invoked more memories of
things heard or read about. It was also noticed that remindings
in general were more frequent in the opening sections of both
texts (the downward trend was more marked in the literary text).
hese indings suggest that readers of a literary text situate them-
selves by recruiting speciic, self-related information, particularly
at the beginning of a text where an appropriate schema must be
developed, and that this information refers predominantly to the
active engagement of the reader in the world.
Several subsequent studies have built on the remindings
method. Larsen and Jnos Lszl (1990) studied the cultural
proximity of readers, working with Hungarian and Danish read-
ers of a Hungarian story. Of the remindings produced, they
found that markedly more event memories were produced by
the Hungarians and, of these, signiicantly more were of expe-
rienced rather than reported events. Lszl and Larsen (1991)
then extended the method to look at the implications of point
of view in iction. Several passages of the Hungarian story
were rewritten to change point of view. As before, personal-
event remindings were signiicantly more frequent among the
Hungarian readers; in addition, shifting to the inside point of
view of a character increased the percentage of such remind-
ings from 55 percent to 75 percent for the Hungarians (but had
no efect on Danish readers). here was also some evidence that
inside point of view inluenced readers toward more emotional
remindings, regardless of their cultural background.
Another variant of the remindings method was developed by
Keith Oatley (1999) to examine gender and personality diferences
in readers. Instead of a simple mark, readers were instructed to
write a letter in the margin: an E for an emotion; M for an autobio-
graphical memory; and T for a train of thought. Among readers of
short stories by Alice Munro and Carson McCullers, female read-
ers produced overall signiicantly more emotions than the male
readers; in addition, male readers produced fewer emotions when
the protagonist was female, whereas gender of protagonist had
no inluence on female readers. In a second study, the method
was used to examine the aesthetic distance of readers from a
short story and how their responses mirrored their adult attach-
ment styles. Kuiken, Miall, and Shelley Sikora (2004) developed
the method of self-probed retrospection to elicit verbal commen-
taries by readers. he reader is invited to read a text and make
marginal marks whenever a passage seems striking or evocative;
the reader later returns to the marked passages and chooses (say)
ive on which to provide a commentary. Readers are readily able
to recover the thoughts and feelings that occurred during reading,
giving access to at least some of the mental processes that appear
to make literary reading distinctive.
A third set of studies is focused on the role of the narrator in
iction. Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon (2003) elaborate a
theoretical framework that accounts for the readers relation to
the narrator; in particular, they propose that readers treat the
narrator as a conversational participant and make inferences
about the narrators personality and values that inluence their
reading. he authors have examined the relationship with the
narrator both theoretically and empirically in a series of studies
involving aspects such as dialogue, plot, point of view, and char-
acterization. For instance, in studying the efects of free indirect
discourse (where the narrators voice represents the speech or
thought of a character without attribution), they found that this
style led readers to endow the narrator with the personality of the
character. Taking a story about a husband and wife, Rope, by
Katherine Ann Porter, that is related almost entirely in free indi-
rect discourse focused on the male character, they constructed
several other versions of the story in which the character roles
were reversed and the dialogue was rewritten as direct quoted
speech. After reading the story, readers were asked several ques-
tions about their impressions of the narrator and the characters.
It was found, for example, that the rationality of a character was
rated higher when it was associated with the narrator through
free indirect discourse. Judgments about the likely gender of the
narrator were also aligned with the gender of the character rep-
resented through free indirect discourse.
Prospects
Although studies of the kind just described are not yet well
known among literary scholars, they point to a basis for rethink-
ing the nature of literary studies and education. In contrast to
claims voiced by critics from I. A. Richards to E. D. Hirsch that
the responses of ordinary readers are ill-informed or whimsi-
cal, empirical studies demonstrate the presence of signiicant
regularities in readers responses, enabling signiicant conclu-
sions to be drawn about the efects of literary language and form.
Empirical studies also shift the focus away from the interpretative
issues that have largely preoccupied literary scholars onto the
experiential aspects of literary reading. In this respect, they invite
a reconsideration of the role of literature in human culture.
David S. Miall
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bortolussi, Marisa, and Peter Dixon. 2003. Psychonarratology: Foundations
for the Empirical Study of Literary Response. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. An integrated approach to narrative theory and
the empirical study of reading, including exemplary studies by the
authors.
Kuiken, Don, David S. Miall, and Shelley Sikora. 2004. Forms of self-im-
plication in literary reading. Poetics Today 25: 171203.
Larsen, Steen F., and Jnos Lszl. 1990. Cultural-historical knowl-
edge and personal experience in appreciation of literature. European
Journal of Social Psychology 20: 42540.
Lszl, Jnos, and Steen F. Larsen. 1991. Cultural and text variables in
processing personal experiences while reading literature. Empirical
Studies of the Arts 9: 2334.
Martindale, Colin. 1990. he Clockwork Muse: he Predictability of Artistic
Change. New York: Basic Books.
Miall, David S. 2006. Literary Reading: Empirical and heoretical Studies.
New York: Peter Lang. Chapter 3 in this book provides an introduction
to the methods of empirical study, while Chapter 7 surveys the princi-
pal research topics in empirical reception studies.
Miall, David S., and Don Kuiken. 1994. Foregrounding, defamiliariza-
tion, and afect: Response to literary stories. Poetics 22: 389407.
Oatley, Keith. 1999. Meetings of minds: Dialogue, sympathy, and identi-
ication, in reading iction. Poetics 26: 43954.
459
Logic and Language

Seilman, Ufe, and Steen F. Larsen. 1989. Personal resonance to litera- context, the latter sentences contain at least one logical connec-
ture. Poetics 18: 16577. tive. In standard approaches, the truth conditions for molecular
Shklovsky, Victor. [1917] 1965. Art as technique. In Russian Formalist sentences are given recursively, piggy-backing, as it were, on
Criticism: Four Essays, ed. and trans. L. T. Lemon and M. J. Reis, 324. the truth conditions for atomics. (An example follows.)
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
For present purposes, a language is a precise syntax (involv-
Steen, Gerard, and Dick Schram, eds. 2001. he Psychology and Sociology
ing, among other things, a precisely deined set of sentences,
of Literature: In Honour of Elrud Ibsch. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
A wide-ranging collection, mainly illustrating recent empirical studies
some of which are atomics, some molecular) coupled with truth
of literature. conditions, which, as noted, provide truth-in-a-case conditions
van Peer, Willie. 1986. Stylistics and Psychology: Investigations of for all sentences. So, in addition to specifying a syntax, ones
Foregrounding. London: Croom Helm. speciication of a language involves specifying a class of cases in
van Peer, Willie, ed. 2007. Foregrounding. Language and Literature 16.2 terms of which all sentences, provided by ones speciied syntax,
(Special Issue). A recent collection of contributions to foregrounding, enjoy truth-in-a-case conditions. (An example follows.)
including both theoretical and empirical studies.
van Peer, Willie, Frank Hakemulder, and Sonia Zyngier. 2007. Muses Logical Consequence Qua Truth Preservation
and Measures: Empirical Research Methods for the Humanities. he consequence relation of a language (or fragment thereof)
Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
is the chief concern of the ield of logic, broadly understood. In
Zwaan, Rolf. 1993. Aspects of Literary Comprehension: A Cognitive
efect, a consequence relation yields what follows from what,
Approach. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
what sentences of the language logically follow from what sen-
tences. Given a language, as understood here, we deine logical
LOGIC AND LANGUAGE consequence or validity (i.e., semantic validity) as follows, where
L is a language, and A and B sentences of L.
Every language, suitably understood, has a logic, suitably under-
stood. he suitable understanding is a common semantic con- Val. B is a consequence of A in L if and only if there is no case in
ception of logic and language. On this conception, the logic of which A is true but B untrue.
a language is the so-called consequence relation, which, on the
If B is a consequence of A in L, we say that the argument from
semantic conception, essentially involves truth preservation. he
A to B is (semantically) valid in L, that B logically follows from A
chief goal of this entry is to briely convey the basic and very
in L, that A (semantically) implies B, with all such terminology
common sense in which every language has a logic. (N.b.: for
being equivalent (for present purposes).
space and simplicity reasons, this essay privileges the so-called
(Val), in turn, may be generalized. We say that a set X of
semantic, or model-theoretic, approach to logic. Moreover, this
L-sentences is veriied-in-a-case just if every member of X is
essay again, for space reasons only aims to convey basic ideas;
true-in-that-case. In turn, we say that the argument from X to A
it doesnt aim to be a history or even survey of the semantic con-
is valid just if theres no case in which X is veriied but A untrue.
ception of logic and language.)
Similarly, we say that a sentence A is logically true in L just if there
is no case in which A is untrue.
Languages and Truth Conditions
In specifying the logic of a language (or some fragment thereof),
one seeks precision. Much as physics idealizes away from the
Sample Language and Logic
Consider an example of the foregoing ideas, in particular, a so-
messiness of physical reality, formal semanticists and logicians
called classical propositional language. (Such languages are ter-
(at least those concerned with natural languages) idealize away
ribly simple; they have no quantiiers. To simplify even more,
from the messiness of linguistic reality. One such idealization is the
our propositional language will contain no names or predicates!)
assumption that all (declarative) sentences of a language have so-
One motivation for the language is that we seem to have so-called
called truth conditions. (Another immediate idealization is that we
truth-functional connectives in English (and natural languages,
can easily, and precisely, specify the target declarative sentences,
generally), and one might be interested in clearly specifying the
the sentences that, in some sense, are used to make assertions. In
logic of that (truth-functional) fragment of our language. For
what follows, sentence will be short for declarative sentence.)
example, there seems to be a truth-functional usage of and, one
For present purposes, such truth conditions are best thought of as
in which and expresses conjunction, where a conjunction is true
truth-in-a-case conditions, that is, conditions that provide, for any
in a given case if and only if both conjuncts are true in the given
relevant case, what it takes for sentences to be true-in-that-case.
case. Similarly, a truth-functional usage of negation in English is
If one thinks of cases as possible worlds, then truth conditions
evident, one in which, for example, negation does no more nor
provide the conditions under which sentences are true-in-w, for
less than toggle truth values.
any possible world w. Similarly, if one thinks of cases as situa-
As noted, we irst need to precisely specify a language. We
tions, then truth conditions provide the conditions under which
need to specify a vocabulary (in efect, the building blocks
sentences are true-in-s, for any situation s. Moreover, if one thinks
of the language) and, in general, a full syntax, which contains a
of cases as Tarskian models, then truth conditions provide the con-
(precisely deined) set of sentences; we then give our truth con-
ditions under which sentences are true-in-M, for any model M.
ditions. We proceed to deine our language L as follows.
In addition to the assumption of truth conditions, another
idealization is that sentences may be cleanly, precisely carved (1) Vocabulary: p, q, and r, with or without subscripts
into the atomics and molecular sentences, where, in the present (numerals for natural numbers), are our atomics. In addition

460
Logic and Language
to the atomics, we have a set of punctuation marks, namely,
( and ). Furthermore, we have a set of connectives: & is a follows from what in the given language.
binary connective (takes two sentences to make a sentence),
and ~ is a unary connective (takes one sentence to make a
sentence). Our three given sets of symbols are disjoint.
(2) he set S of L-sentences is deined recursively as
follows.
a) All atomics are L-sentences.
b) If A and B are L-sentences, then so too are ~A and (A&B).
c) Nothing is an L-sentence unless its being so follows from
(2a) and (2b).
(3) L-cases are (total) functions c from S into V = {1,0}, where
V is our set of semantic values.
(4) Truth conditions: an L-sentence A is true in a case c if
c(A) = 1.
a) An atomic sentence A is true in a case c if c(A) = 1. (A is
false in c otherwise.)
b) A sentence of the form ~A is true in a case c if c(A) = 0.
c) A sentence of the form (A&B) is true in case c if c(A) = 1
= c(B).
With our language L so given, we can now see the sense in which
every language at least given suitable idealizations has a logic.
Applying (Val), we immediately see that, for any L-argument, it is
either truth preserving, in which case valid in L, or not (in which
case, invalid in L).
EXAMPLE. Consider the L-argument from premise (p&q) to
conclusion q. According to (Val), this argument is valid in L just
if theres no case in which (p&q) is true but q untrue. In L, vant) connectives in a language (fragment) while nonetheless
our cases are functions from the L-sentences into {1,0}. Is there a
case in which (p&q) is true but q not true? No. To see this, just disagreement that, in general, will show up in rival truth con-
consider the truth conditions on L-sentences. According to those
conditions, a sentence of the form (A&B) is true in a case just if
both A and B are true in the given case. So, for any case c, if c(p&q)
= 1, then c(p) = 1 and c(q) = 1, in which case c(q) = 1. Hence, there
is no case c in which (p&q) is true but q isnt true. theory of natural language (or fragments thereof). Problems
What one also notices or would notice, on relection about
L is familiar truth-functional behavior for negation. For exam-
ple, given the truth conditions in L, and given (Val), it is easy to
see that p is a consequence of ~~p, and vice versa. In other
words, the double negation of a sentence is logically equivalent
to the given sentence.
One may proceed (as an exercise) to record the other logical
forms that are valid in our artiicial language L. Once recorded,
one has a precise account of the logical behavior of & and ~ suitable further reading. From there, one might turn to textbooks
in L. In turn, one may evaluate whether such logical behavior
accurately captures the behavior of corresponding connectives
in ones natural language. In this respect, the artiicial L serves
the role of idealized models in natural sciences: It gives a clear
account of how the target phenomena (in this case, logical con-
nectives) behave. Rivalry among logical theories (more on which
follows) turns on the extent to which L is an accurate model.
Of course, L is but one example of a language (i.e., an ideal-
ized, artiicial language), and a very simple one at that. Still, it
is not hard to see that, provided languages come equipped with
precisely deined cases and each sentence enjoys truth-in-a-
case conditions, (Val) quickly yields a logic for the language a
Logical Form
consequence relation, which carries the information about what
Artiicial Versus Natural Languages
One might agree that every artiicial language, as understood
here, has a logic, that is, a consequence relation, speciied via
(Val). What, though, of natural languages?
he question is a good one, but very complex. Natural lan-
guages appear to have arguments that are truth preserving
in the strict sense of (Val) arguments such that theres no
case in which the premises are true but the conclusion untrue.
(Consider the limit example: the argument from A to A.) he
trouble, of course, concerns the relevant cases involved in nat-
ural languages truth conditions. Assuming (a not insigniicant
assumption) that all sentences of a natural language have truth
conditions in the relevant sense, it remains unclear what counts
as a relevant case in such truth conditions.
For present purposes, the right account of cases for natural
languages is not pressing. he pressing issue is whether, in the
end, natural languages are suiciently equipped with truth-in-a-
case conditions, whatever the cases may be. If so, the chief point
remains: Any such language, in virtue of (Val), enjoys a logic.
Logical Theories and Rivalry
A logical theory of a language (or fragment thereof) is a theory of
the consequence relation on that language (or fragment). One
way in which logical theories might disagree is on the choice
of logical connectives, but this is not necessary for disagree-
ment. Two logical theories might agree on the class of (rele-
disagreeing about the logical behavior of such connectives a
ditions for the given connectives. (Such disagreement over
truth conditions often centers on what counts as a case in the
relevant truth conditions.) Suice to say that rivalry currently
reigns in the ield of logic, at least concerning the right logical
of vagueness and consistency, truth, and paradox
are particularly fertile phenomena for contemporary rivalry
among logical theories.
J. C. Beall
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Any textbook on classical logic (of which there are many) will be
on nonclassical or so-called intensional logics (of which there
are many). As a irst step, one might proitably peruse entries
under logic in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited
by Edward N. Zalta, available online at: http://plato.stanford.
edu/.
LOGICAL FORM
he construction of systems in which valid inference can be char-
acterized has been the central concern of logic since its incep-
tion with the ancients. Beginning with Gottlob Freges seminal
insights of the late nineteenth century (Frege 1879, 1893), it has
461
Logical Form
been understood that accomplishing this goal in a manner suf-
iciently rigorous that the inferred proposition can be taken to
be proven requires strict attention to the structural properties
of propositions, to their logical form. What was crystalized by
Frege was that this form can be revealed only in a language that
difers in two key respects from the supericial form of natural
languages: i) he structure of propositions is function-argument,
not subject-predicate, and ii) expressions of generality, unlike
proper names, do not occur as arguments, but rather bind vari-
ables that do. Together, these two diferences aforded the irst
adequate account of multiple generalization; by distinguish-
ing xy(P(x,y)) from yx(P(x,y)) in terms of the scopes of then be regimented as instances of the schemata; a sentence
the universal and existential quantiiers, Frege was able to allay
one of the central problems that had plagued traditional logic.
(Cf. Kneale and Kneale 1962, 483f.)
Freges insight, that grammatical form does not reliably reveal
logical form, was taken up by Bertrand Russell, most notably in
the theory of descriptions (Russell 1905). Russell proposed that
deinite descriptions, as in he present King of France is bald,
is not to be understood in the manner of a proper name, that is,
standing as an argument, but rather as a complex term of gen-
erality. hus, the proper logical form is not B(k), but rather
x(K(x) & y(K(y) x = y)) & B(x); that is, there is one and only
one present King of France and he is bald. By taking this to be
the proper logical form, Russell argued that a number of logical
issues could be directly addressed. For example, the ambiguity of
he present King of France is not bald could be accounted for
by taking the negation as having scope either inside or outside
the existential quantiier; negation having broader scope brings
the case into conformance with the law of the excluded middle,
as Russell observed.
Both Frege and Russell realized not only that the insights
about logical form being surveyed clariied the formal nature of
inference, but that these aspects of form also allowed for seman-
tic elucidation, being directly related to an account of the con-
ditions for the truth of propositions. For instance, for Russell,
a substantial virtue of the account of descriptions was that the
intuition that he present King of France is bald is false can be
directly accommodated. But that we can proceed beyond intui-
tive elucidation to a formally and materially adequate deinition
of truth, based on the sort of conception of logical form pioneered
by Frege and Russell, is due to Alfred Tarski ([1936] 1956, 1944).
In the case at hand of quantiication, Tarskis semantic clauses
run as follows: With respect to a universe of objects U, x(P(x))
is true just in case every sequence of objects of U satisies P(x);
x(P(x)) is true if this is so for some sequence. (A sequence S
satisies an open formula P(x) if there is an assignment of a
value a of S to the variable x such that a is P.) Because Tarskis
method iterates, it extends to multiple generalization, distin-
guishing the truth conditions of xy(P(x,y)) from those of
yx(P(x,y)), thus providing semantic foundation for the syn-
tactical insights of Frege.
Central to the importance of Tarskis formalization of seman-
tics is that it paved the way to metalogic, the study of the prop-
erties of logical systems, centrally their consistency, soundness,
and completeness. Tarski was clear to maintain that the dei-
nition of truth could be reliably applied only to those systems
whose propositions have the requisite logical form; like his
462
predecessors, Tarski was skeptical that natural languages are
such systems. Indeed, his recommendation was that we eschew
anything other than formal languages when engaging in scien-
tiic discourse. A more moderate view emerged, however, which
tried to show that natural languages, at least to a certain extent,
could be rendered in the logical idiom. Most closely associ-
ated with W. V. O. Quine (1950), the idea was that logic is to
be understood as schematic. On this view, there are no logical
propositions, per se, but only propositional schema; valid infer-
ence is characterized with respect to such schemata, and holds
for any instantiation of the schema. Natural languages can
then has a certain logical form because it conforms to a prop-
ositional schema of a certain form. (A simple example: John
came and Mary left is an instance of the schema & , and
so has the logical form John came & Mary left, where & is
the logical symbol for conjunction.) Quines view nevertheless
is no departure from the tradition that distinguishes grammat-
ical from logical form; it does depart, however, in holding that
systematic associations can be established between grammat-
ical forms and logical forms, for signiicant aspects of natural
languages (1960).
Accepting the traditional separation of grammatical and log-
ical form is not universal; rejection of it has been central within
linguistic theory since the mid-1970s. On this latter view, the
derivation of a sentences logical form is an aspect of its syntac-
tic derivation, hence, an aspect of its grammatical form. Again,
the central case is quantiication; in pivotal work, Robert May
(1977) showed that the scope of quantiiers, including multi-
ple quantiiers, can be represented, as in the manner noted,
by assuming that there is a transformational rule that moves
quantiier phrases, leaving a trace, interpreted as a variable
bound by the moved phrase. By hypothesis, the formulation
of Mays rule QR requires theoretical resources no greater
than those independently needed within linguistic theory to
otherwise express transformational mappings, for instance,
wh-movement. he class of syntactic representations gener-
ated by transformational mappings, including those efected
by QR, is known as LF. hus, sentences with multiple quanti-
iers, such as Everyone loves someone will have two distinct
LF-representations, roughly:
[everyonei [someonej [ti loves tj]]]
and
[someonej [everyonei [ti loves tj]]]
which can be deined as representing the difering scope
orderings of the quantiiers, the traces of QR being interpreted
as variables bound by the quantiiers, so that in this regard,
LF-representations constitute logical forms. hat grammars
of natural languages have the rule QR is now a widely (if not
universally) accepted assumption within linguistics (Fiengo
and May 1994; Fox 2000; Hornstein 1984, 1995; Larson and
Segal 1995; May 1985; Reinhart 1997); among the most well-
known independent arguments are those from weak crossover
(Chomsky 1976) and anaphoric binding more generally, and
antecedent contained deletion (May 1985). It has also become
a commonly accepted assumption within recent thinking in
Logical Positivism
philosophy of language (King 2001; Neale 1990; Stanley 2000;
Ludlow 2002).
Robert May
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Chomsky, Noam. 1976. Conditions on rules of grammar. Linguistic
Analysis 2: 30351.
Fiengo, Robert, and Robert May. 1994. Indices and Identity. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Fox, Danny. 2000. Economy and Semantic Interpretation. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Frege, Gottlob. [1879] 1967. Begrifsschrift: A Formula Language Modeled
Upon hat of Aithmetic, for Pure hought. Trans. Stefan Bauer-
Mengelberg. In From Frege to Gdel, ed. Jean van Heijenoort, 582.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
. [1893] 1964. he Basic Laws of Arithmetic. Trans. Montgomery
Furth. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Hornstein, Norbert. 1984. Logic as Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
. 1995. Logical Form: From GB to Minimalism. Oxford: Blackwell.
King, Jefrey C. 2001. Complex Demonstratives: A Quantiicational
Account. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kneale, William, and Martha Kneale. 1962. he Development of Logic.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Larson, Richard, and Gabriel Segal. 1995. Knowledge of Meaning.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ludlow, Peter. 2002. LF and natural logic, In Logical Form and Language,
ed. Gerhard Preyer and Georg Peter. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
May, Robert. 1977. he Grammar of Quantiication. Ph.D. diss.,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
. 1985. Logical Form: Its Structure and Derivation. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
. 1999. Logical form in linguistics. In he MIT Encyclopedia of
the Cognitive Sciences, ed Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil, 4867.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Neale, Stephen. 1990. Descriptions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Quine, W. V. O. 1950. Methods of Logic. New York: Henry Holt.
. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: Technology Press.
Reinhart, Tanya. 1997. Quantiier scope: How labor is divided between
QR and choice functions. Linguistics and Philosophy 20: 399467.
Russell, Bertrand. 1905. On denoting, Mind 14: 47993.
Stanley, Jason. 2000. Context and logical form. Linguistics and
Philosophy 23: 391434.
Tarski, Alfred. [1936] 1956. he concept of truth in formalized lan-
guges. In Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics, trans. J. H. Woodger.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
. 1944. he semantic conception of truth. Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 4: 34175.
LOGICAL POSITIVISM
Also known as logical empiricism, logical positivism was an
important philosophical movement in the irst half of the twenti-
eth century that reached its peak in the interbellum period and is
associated with the Vienna Circle (Wiener Kreis) and the Berlin
Circle (Berliner Kreis). he most prominent members of the
former were Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, Hans
Hahn, and Friedrich Waismann; of the latter, Hans Reichenbach,
Kurt Grelling, Carl Gustav Hempel, and Richard von Mises.
On the standard account (see, e.g., Alfred Ayer 1936), logical
positivism is committed to the following principles:
Mapping
Firstly, formal logic as it has been developed by Gottlob Frege,
is seen both as an instrument for analysis and as an ideal language
wherein all scientiic knowledge is expressable. Many logical posi-
tivists also accepted Freges logicism, namely, the view that math-
ematics is reducible to logic. Hence, they endorsed the view that
mathematics is a language, not a science like, for example, physics.
Secondly, it follows that a clear distinction can be made
between analytic and synthetic sentences. he former consist
of logical and mathematical tautologies, whereas the latter can
be either true or false and are therefore dependent on the way
things are; that is, they are empirical.
hirdly, this leads to the principle of verifiability: If a sen-
tence is meaningful, then it should be possible to determine its
truth value.
Straightforward consequences of these principles are, irstly,
that metaphysical statements are neither analytic, as they are not
tautologies, nor synthetic, as they do not refer to the empirically
accessible world; hence, they are meaningless. And, secondly, if all
of the sciences can be expressed in one and the same language, that
is, the language of mathematics, all sciences can be uniied into a
single framework. Hence, the unity of science is a reachable goal.
It should be noted that although there are connections with
Ludwig Wittgensteins views, as expressed in the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus, and although Wittgenstein attended some
of the meetings of the Vienna Circle, it would not be correct to
label him a logical positivist.
On a more reined account, qualiication is needed. It suf-
ices to look at the original manifesto of the Vienna Circle, the
Wissenschaftliche Weltaufassung (the Scientiic Worldview), to
notice that the logical positivist program also included ethical-
societal views. In recent years, many authors have made a strong
case to have a second and historically more nuanced look at logi-
cal positivism (see, e.g., Michael Friedman 1999).
It is generally accepted that both Karl R. Popper, the found-
ing father of falsiicationism, and Willard Van Orman Quine, the
founding father of naturalized epistemology, have been the most
important critics of logical positivism. he former questioned
the veriiability theory; the latter rejected the analytic-synthetic
distinction.
Jean Paul Van Bendegem
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Ayer, Alfred. 1936. Language, Truth and Logic. London: Victor Gollancz.
Friedman, Michael. 1999. Reconsidering Logical Positivism.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Janik, Allan, and Stephen Toulmin. 1973. Wittgensteins Vienna. New
York: Simon and Schuster. his book outlines the cultural setting
wherein logical positivism could arise.
M
MAPPING
In what follows, mapping is used in the general mathematical
sense of a partial or total correspondence between elements,
relations, and/or structures in two sets.
463
Mapping
Much of the theoretical thinking in modern linguistics has
been strongly linked to the development since the 1950s of cog-
nitive science, artiicial intelligence, and neuroscience. he irst
wave of cognitive science looked upon the brain as a sophisti-
cated symbol-processing digital computer, and linguistic models
in the ifties and sixties took a largely algorithmic approach, with
a strong focus on syntax and logic.
In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a sharply diferent second
wave of thinking that launched a rigorous, empirically based
study of conceptual mappings: analogy, frames, meta-
phor, metonymy, grammatical constructions, and men-
tal space projections. his original and ambitious research
program revisited from a modern point of view some funda-
mental issues that have been known since antiquity. It drew
on a powerful multidisciplinary mix of psychology, linguistics,
computational modeling, and philosophy. Names associated
with pioneering eforts in the new ield of conceptual map-
pings include Douglas Hofstadter, Melanie Mitchell, Dedre
Gentner, and Keith Holyoak, for analogy; George Lakof, Mark
Johnson, and Mark Turner, for metaphor and image schemas;
Erving Gofman and Charles Fillmore, for frames and frame
semantics; Ronald Langacker, Charles Fillmore, and Adele
Goldberg, for cognitive and construction grammars; Gilles
Fauconnier, Eve Sweetser, and John Dinsmore, for mental space
projections; and Geofrey Nunberg for metonymic mappings
(pragmatic functions).
In the 1990s and up to the time of writing, there was substan-
tial further evolution of our thinking on these issues. he creative
dimension of conceptual mappings was explored through the
study of conceptual blending and compression (Fauconnier
and Turner 2002; Coulson 2001) and through the modeling of
emergent structure in analogy (Hofstadter 1995; Hummel and
Holyoak 1997). he role of primary metaphors was discovered by
Joe Grady (1997); constraints on mappings were proposed within
metaphor theory and within blending theory.
Metaphor was once commonly viewed as literary, igurative,
poetic something exotic that we add to ordinary language to
make it more colorful, vivid, and emotional. But since the incep-
tion of conceptual metaphor theory, it is widely acknowl-
edged that metaphor is, in fact, central to thought and language
and necessary for human language in its many forms. In order
to talk and think about some domains (target domains), we use
the structure of other domains (source domains) and the corre-
sponding vocabulary (see source and target). Some of these
mappings are used by all members of a culture, for instance, in
English, TIME as SPACE. We use structure from our everyday con-
ception of space and motion to organize our everyday conception
of time, as when we say Christmas is approaching, he weeks go
by, Summer is around the corner, he long day stretched out with
no end in sight. Rather remarkably, although the vocabulary often
makes the mapping transparent, we are typically not conscious of
the mapping during use unless it is pointed out to us. hough cog-
nitively active, such mappings are opaque: he projection of one
domain onto another is automatic. Metaphoric mappings may
also be set up locally, in context, in which case they are typically
perceived not to belong to the language but rather to be creative
and part of the ongoing reasoning and discourse construction.
464
Creative metaphors are often elaborations of conventional ones,
as in the following typical literary example:
Perhaps time is lowing faster up there in the attic. Perhaps the
accumulated mass of the past gathered there is pulling time out
of the future faster, like a weight on a line. (McDonald 1992,
8283)
hought and language are embodied. Conceptual structure
arises from our sensorimotor experience and the neural struc-
tures that give rise to it. he properties of grammars are the prop-
erties of humanly embodied neural systems. Inference inherently
built into a source domain will be transferred by projection to an
abstract domain. For example, the conventional metaphors of
SEEING as TOUCHING (e.g., I couldnt take my eyes of her) and
KNOWING as SEEING (e.g., I see what youre saying) combine
with one schema for the English preposition over to motivate
overlook: he line of sight travels over (i.e., above) the object;
hence, there is no contact; hence, it is not seen; hence, it is not
noticed or taken into account. In contrast, look over (she looked
over the draft) uses a related but diferent schema for over, a path
covering much of a surface, as in she wandered over the entire
ield. his sense combines with the same mappings to produce
a very diferent abstract meaning the object this time is seen
and noticed.
Metonymic mappings link two relevant domains, which may
be set up locally. hey typically correspond to two categories of
entities, which are mapped onto each other by a pragmatic func-
tion. For example, authors are matched with the books they write,
or hospital patients are matched with the illnesses for which they
are being treated. Metonymic mappings allow an entity to be
identiied in terms of its counterpart in the projection. So, when
a nurse says he gastric ulcer in room 12 would like some cofee,
he/she uses the illness (the gastric ulcer) to identify the patient
who has it. Metonymy allows information to be compressed. If
Jack is the patient and if the nurse is addressing a physician, his/
her statement simultaneously conveys that Jack wants cofee and
that he has a gastric ulcer, which could be further intended as a
question to ask if cofee is permitted under the circumstances.
Im in the phone book uses a metonymic mapping from people
to names. It says not only that my name is written in the phone
book but also that the number linked to my name is indeed my
phone number. So it really says something about me, not just
about my name: how to reach me, that I dont mind making my
number publicly available, and so on.
Metonymic and metaphoric mappings can combine to pro-
vide even greater compression, as in Martina is three points away
from the airport, said by a sports announcer of the tennis star
Martina Navratilova, who was about to lose a tournament match.
he points stand metonymically for the events of losing a point.
hree such events would lead to defeat. he events are on a met-
aphorical spatial scale to which the tennis player gets mapped.
On that scale, the player is metaphorically at a spatial distance
of three points from the end of the match which would mean
defeat. A metonymic chain takes us from the end of the match to
defeat, then to exclusion from the rest of the tournament, then
to returning home. he airport (a place) stands metonymically
for an event (lying home) that starts in that place. hrough the
Mapping
metonymic chaining, lying home links to leaving the tourna-
ment, which links in turn to losing the match, itself caused by
the three lost points. Strikingly, very little of this is indicated
by the linguistic structure itself. It is constructed by means of the
cognitive models that we have for games, tennis, tournaments,
and travel and by applying to them the appropriate mappings.
he same sentence can take on completely diferent meanings if
we bring in diferent cognitive models.
Mental space projections link elements and relations in con-
nected mental spaces. For instance, in saying Liz thinks her hus-
band is tired, we build a mental space for Lizs reported beliefs,
with a counterpart for her husband and properties within that
space (tired) that may or may not be satisied in connected
spaces: Liz thinks her husband is tired, but actually hes in great
shape. In saying Last year, Lizs husband was tired, we build a
mental space for last year, and in saying Liz thinks that last
year, her husband was tired, we build a space for last year embed-
ded in a belief space, itself embedded in a base space. presup-
positions (such as Lizs having a husband) can spread across
spaces: In the last example, we infer that Liz has a husband, that
she thinks she has a husband, and that last year, she also had
this husband. But any of these presuppositions can be prevented
from projecting by an explicit overriding entailment.
In mental space projection, the access principle allows a
description of an element to identify its counterpart in another
mental space. For example, if Liz got married to Bob yesterday,
we can say Last year, Lizs husband was tired, identifying Bob in
the mental space last year by means of his counterpart (Lizs
husband) in the mental space now.
Conceptual blending generalizes the notion of conceptual
mapping to arrays of multiple mental spaces with the creation
of new blended spaces and the emergence of novel structure.
Such arrays of connected spaces are called integration networks.
Partial mappings link the mental spaces in such networks, and
selective projection maps the spaces onto novel blended spaces.
he mappings are supported by a small number of vital rela-
tions, such as analogy, change, identity, rolevalue, causeefect.
Compression is systematic in integration networks: A vital rela-
tion in one part of the network can be compressed into a dif-
ferent (or a scaled-down) vital relation in another part of the
network. Take, for example, My tax bill gets longer every year. he
inputs are the mental spaces corresponding to diferent years. In
each one, there is a tax bill. hese input spaces are linked by the
vital relation of analogy: Each one is structured by the frame of
paying taxes in a particular year, and each tax-paying situation
is analogous to the others. he inputs are also linked by disanal-
ogy: Each tax bill is diferent (longer than the previous one).
he analogous input spaces are integrated into a single blended
space, in which all the tax bills are fused into one: Analogy is
compressed into identity. Disanalogy is compressed into change.
In the blended mental space, there is a single tax bill that changes
over time.
Metaphors typically result from double-scope integration
networks, whereas metonymy turns out to be the compression of
one vital relation into another.
Conceptual mappings are not prompted only by spoken or
signed language. hey are part of human thought, communi-
cation, and interaction quite generally; they are signaled through
multiple modalities (Alac 2006) and anchored by human cul-
tural artifacts as part of socially distributed cognition
(Hutchins 1995).
Biologically, it is currently widely assumed that mappings are
efected by means of neural binding (Shastri 1996). Computational
models of such binding have been proposed within the neural
theory of language (Feldman 2006). Experimental techniques to
show the psychological reality of various mappings have been
devised by Lera Boroditsky (2000), Ray Gibbs (Gibbs et al. 1997),
and Seana Coulson (2001), among others
Gilles Fauconnier
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Alac, Morana. 2006. How brain images reveal cognition: An ethno-
graphic study of meaning-making in brain mapping practice. Ph.D.
diss., University of California, San Diego.
Boroditsky, L. 2000. Metaphoric structuring: Understanding time
through spatial metaphors. Cognition 75.1: 128.
Coulson, Seana. 2001. Semantic Leaps. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Fauconnier, Gilles. [1985] 1994. Mental Spaces. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
. 1997. Mappings in hought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2002. he Way We hink. New
York: Basic Books.
. 2008. Rethinking metaphor. In Cambridge Handbook of
Metaphor and hought, ed. Ray Gibbs, 5366. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Feldman, Jerome. 2006. From Molecule to Metaphor. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Gentner, Dedre. 1983. Structure-mapping: A theoretical framework for
analogy. Cognitive Science 7: 15570.
Gentner, Dedre, Keith Holyoak, and Boicho Kokinov, eds. 2001. he
Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Gibbs, R., J. Bogdonovich, J. Sykes, and D. Barr. 1997. Metaphor in idiom
comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language 37: 14154.
Gofman, E. 1974. Frame Analysis. New York: Harper and Row.
Grady, J. 1997. Foundations of meaning: Primary metaphor and primary
scenes. Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley.
Hofstadter, Douglas. 1995. Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies.
New York: Basic Books.
Hummel, J., and K. Holyoak. 1997. Distributed representations of struc-
ture: A theory of analogical access and mapping. Psychological Review
104: 42766.
Hutchins, Edwin. 1995. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Lakof, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lakof, George, and Rafael Nez. 2000. Where Mathematics Comes
From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being.
New York: Basic Books.
Liddell, Scott K. 2003. Grammar, Gesture, and Meaning in American Sign
Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McDonald, Ian. 1992. King of Morning, Queen of Day. New York: Bantam
Books.
Mitchell, M. 1993. Analogy-Making as Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Nunberg, G. 1978. he Pragmatics of Reference. Bloomington: Indiana
University Linguistics Club.
465
Markedness
Nez, Rafael. 2005. Creating mathematical ininities: Metaphor, blend-
ing, and the beauty of transinite cardinals. Journal of Pragmatics
37: 171741.
Nez, Rafael, and Eve Sweetser. 2006. Looking ahead to the
past: Convergent evidence from Aymara language and gesture in the
crosslinguistic comparison of spatial construals of time. Cognitive
Science 30: 40150.
Shastri, Lokendra. 1996. Temporal synchrony, dynamic bindings, and
SHRUTI a representational but non-classical model of relexive rea-
soning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 19.2: 3317.
Sweetser, Eve. 1996. Reasoning, mappings, and meta-metaphorical
conditionals. In Essays in Semantics and Pragmatics, ed. Masayoshi
Shibatani and Sandra hompson, 22134. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Turner, Mark. 1991. Reading Minds. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Williams, Robert. 2005. Material anchors and conceptual blends in time-
telling. Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego.
MARKEDNESS
he original insight of markedness was that many linguistic phe-
nomena consist of polar opposed pairs for example, the phono-
logical feature unvoicedvoiced and the grammatical relation
activepassive and that typically there is an asymmetry, such that
one term is more general and thus unmarked (given irst in the
examples) and the other is more constrained and thus marked.
Markedness was irst developed in phonology as an explanation
for asymmetries in phonological systems based on cross-linguistic
comparisons, with evidence from typology and universals for
example, more (unmarked) oral consonants than marked nasal
ones: Unmarked consonants occur in places of nonconditioned
neutralization (e.g., only unmarked voiceless consonants in word-
inal position in Russian). Later, markedness was used to study
grammatical semantics (where the unmarked term has a larger
semantic range than the marked term), to explain the order of pho-
nological acquisition in child language (unmarked terms learned
before marked terms, e.g., stops before fricatives) and apha-
sia (marked terms lost before unmarked ones), and to identify
implicational universals, in which the presence of a marked
element implies the presence of the corresponding unmarked
element, but not vice versa (all of these in Jakobson 1990). Since
then, it has developed into an important (though controversial)
concept in other areas of linguistics, such as morphology, syn-
tax, lexical semantics, historical linguistics, second
language acquisition, stylistics, and so on.
Since about the 1960s, two substantially diferent approaches
to markedness have developed and with them diferent types of
evidence, and explanations, for markedness. he FUNCTIONAL-
(-typological) approaches (e.g., Givon 1990; Croft 2003), based
on earlier work in typology universals, depend on diagnostic
criteria, not only from linguistic systems but also from language
use, and these are related to functional criteria, communica-
tive needs, processing eiciency, learnability, memory, and so
on. Criteria include zero or simple expression for the unmarked
term (isomorphism) unmarked singular with zero expression as
in cat versus marked plural with the marker -s in cats; text (token)
frequency (unmarked term more frequent); contextual distribu-
tion (unmarked category has greater freedom of occurrence);
466
and leveling toward the unmarked term in pidgins/creoles,
dialects, informal speech, and so forth. A further outgrowth has
to do with markedness hierarchies that are scalar in nature, such
as the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy for relativiza-
tion (e.g., from less marked to more marked role of the relative
pronoun in the relative clause, subject > direct object > indirect
object > prepositional object).
he formal (generative) approaches, especially univer-
sal grammar (UG), the principles and parameters plus
minimalist approach to syntax (Chomsky 1995), and optimal-
ity theory in phonology (Prince and Smolensky, 2004), focus
on competence and reject criteria for markedness related to
use (performance). Using cross-linguistic details of grammar,
UG has been posited; UG determines a set of possible core gram-
mars for languages by setting parameters, so that systems that
fall within a core grammar constitute the unmarked phenomena
and more marked elements are found in the periphery (see core
and periphery) (Chomsky 1981). More recently, work has also
focused, for example, on expression of markedness relations by
constraints, on an explanation of markedness asymmetries
through constraint interaction, and the use of constraint forms
to express markedness hierarchies.
In both of these approaches, the unmarked category has also
at times been assimilated with the concept of naturalness, as in
natural phonology and natural morphology, as well as in optimal-
ity theory; some see it as overlapping with normality, regularity,
generality, and productivity; it has also been used, for example,
in studies of word order to deine the basic, dominant, or pre-
ferred WORD ORDER (e.g., subject-verb-object in English); and
it has certain elements in common with the notion of proto-
type. While not everyone uses the term markedness and some
linguists think that it is an unwieldy cover term with too wide a
range of application and no central deinition, others in both tra-
ditions see it as a major conceptual and explanatory tool that will
continue to be of interest and utility for understanding various
phenomena of language.
Linda Waugh
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Battistella, Edwin. 1990. Markedness: he Evaluative Superstructure of
Language. Albany: State University of New York Press. Battistellas two
books are the most accessible long treatments of the topic.
. 1996. he Logic of Markedness. New York: Oxford University Press.
Battistellas two books are the most accessible long treatments of the
topic.
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Markedness and core grammar. In heory of
Markedness in Core Grammar, ed. A. Belletti, L. Branmdi, and I. Riozzi,
12346. Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.
. 1995. he Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Croft, William. 2003. Typology and Universals. 2d ed.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Givon, Talmy. 1990. Syntax: A Functional-Typological Introduction, 2.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Jakobson, Roman. 1990. On Language. Ed., with an introduction by,
L. Waugh and M. Monville-Burston. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Prince, Alan, and Paul Smolensky. 2004. Optimality heory: Constraint
Interaction in Generative Grammar. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Market, Linguistic
Waugh, Linda, and Barbara Laford. 2000. Markedness. In
Morphology: An International Handbook on Inlection and Word-
Formation, I: 27281. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. An accessible treat-
ment of the topic.
MARKET, LINGUISTIC
Pierre Bourdieu deines a linguistic market as a system of rela-
tions of force which determine the price of linguistic products and
thus helps fashion linguistic production (1989, 47). If linguistic
habitus is the subjective element of habitus connected with
language use, linguistic market represents the objective field
relations. As always with Bourdieu, the two are in a constant state
of dynamic interrelationship, as well as evolving dynamically as
a part of the transformation of social structures.
In positing a concept such as linguistic market, Bourdieu is
targeting traditional linguistics. His quarrel is with all linguis-
tics going back to the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, which he
sees as treating language as an object of study rather than as a
practice. he concept thus constitutes language as logos rather
than praxis. Bourdieus critique extends to Noam Chomsky and
Chomskyan linguistics, with its discovery a of semibiological
language acquisition device, deep syntactical structure
(see underlying structure and surface structure),
and universal grammar. Bourdieu cannot accept the
Chomskyan precepts that linguistics should be concerned with
an ideal speaker-listener, a homogeneous speech community,
and perfect grammatical competence. Bourdieus alternative
can be summed up as follows:
In place of grammaticalness it puts the notion of acceptability,
or, to put it another way, in place of the language (langue), the
notion of legitimate language. In place of relations of communica-
tion (or symbolic interaction) it puts relations of symbolic power,
and it replaces the meaning of speech with the question of the
value and power of speech. Lastly, in place of speciically linguis-
tic competence, it puts symbolic capital, which is inseparable
from the speakers position in the social structure. (1977, 646;
italics in original)
In other words, Bourdieu is seeking to socialize, or at least soci-
ologicalize, all the major principles of traditional linguistics.
he linguistic market is, therefore, essentially an expression
of linguistic relations. However, like all markets, not everyone
to be found within it is equal, and linguistic knowledge is never
perfect. In reality, some are found to have greater practical mas-
tery (connaissance). his knowledge is itself deined not simply
in terms of use but as an expression of legitimate language. In
most social contexts, there is a dominant language form. his
is most evident at a national level where there is received pro-
nunciation and other standard language forms. However, it can
extend to sublevels and categories and ield microcosms. In each
case, there is a right way of using language. his rightness is
deined by social common assent or common acknowledg-
ment. he particularity of language is that while orthodox lan-
guage forms are maintained by this consensus and recognized
as such reconnaissance not all can use them. here can be a
mismatch between any one individuals connaissance and recon-
naissance, resulting from upbringing and proximity to legitimate
language forms. Moreover, this mismatch is itself recognized by
individuals, albeit implicitly or unconsciously, who understand
the symbolic value of language. Language is, therefore, another
form of cultural capital in that it is symbolic in the way it both
values and is valued in terms ultimately related to the structure
of the ield. For Bourdieu, the most predominant ield structures
are those of social class, which also express the distribution of
power in society.
here are relations of linguistic production and authorized
language within the linguistic market. Moreover, everyone
enters the market in order to compete as a way of gaining and
sanctioning social prestige, and, consequently, status and posi-
tion, through the acknowledgment of others in the market. Value
is ascribed to individuals; it is not within their own capacity to
give it to themselves. here is a kind of anticipation and actu-
alization of proits, much in the same way as in any market (see
Bourdieu [1982] 1991, 76 f). Bourdieu refers to many examples
where the power relation between two or more individuals is
expressed in the language they use with respect to one another.
For example, in the postcolonial context (see colonialism
and language), those in a position of dominance sometimes
abdicate their position of authority by linguistically reaching
down to the interlocutor. However, he sees this as simply a
strategy of condescension aimed at reasserting their domina-
tion. Normally, it is the opposite that applies: hose dominated
are forced to adopt the language of the dominant. Bourdieu also
contrasts the broken English of the black American vernacu-
lar with the air of naturalness of the English (1992, 143). For
Chomskyan linguistics, both are natural and unbroken since
they follow the same complex principles (e.g., binary merge
and wh-movement). he point is not only that power relations
are expressed in such linguistic exchanges but that the linguis-
tic market also deines what is and is not linguistically valued by
rewarding and sanctioning speciic forms of language. In the-
ory, everything is available to all in the market. However, some
already hold speciic forms of linguistic capital, which they have
obtained from family background, education, and professional
trajectory. Moreover, such symbolic value is not only expressed
in language forms but also structurally homologous to other
forms of cultural capital; indeed, it can be found in physical body
gestures, as well as other forms of self-presentation. For those
without this capital, it is almost impossible to catch up.
Ultimately, such relations are expressed in political relations,
where certain individuals and representatives are endowed with
the power to sanction. For Bourdieu, these are acts of quasi-
magic as, through this endowment, power is literally invested
in someone by a formal acknowledge of status a form of social
consecration. A most obvious form of this phenomenon is when a
title is bestowed on an individual: Head of Department, for exam-
ple. Some who write similarly of the linguistic variation between
individuals conclude with a deicit model of language, whereby
lack of language competence is addressed through complemen-
tary education. Ultimately, this leads to a form of linguistic
communism where all are linguistically equal (see Bourdieu
and Boltanski 1975). However, the logic of the linguistic market
is that such compensatory measures will always give rise to dis-
appointing results in terms of social inclusion since, ultimately,
they go against the logic of practice constituting the ield the
467
Marxism and Language
market in the irst place. Just as communist alternatives to capi-
talism eventually collapsed, leading to an embracing of liberal
economics and free-market principles, so linguistic communism
cannot work since it runs counter to the raison dtre of the lin-
guistic market, which, in terms of substantive cause and efect,
is social diferentiation. However, this should not be seen as a
form of poststructuralist nihilism; rather, Bourdieu is ofering a
metanoia, a new gaze or way of looking at the world through
his epistemological thinking tool (see Grenfell 2004, Chapter 7).
Michael Grenfell
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. he economics of linguistic exchanges. Social
Science Information 16.6: 64568.
. [1982] 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Trans. G. Raymond
and M. Adamson. Oxford: Polity Press.
, with Loc Wacquant. 1989. Towards a relexive sociology: A work-
shop with Pierre Bourdieu. Sociological heory 7.1: 2663.
, with Loc Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Relexive Sociology.
Trans. L. Wacquant. Oxford: Polity Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Luc Boltanski. 1975 Le ftichisme de la langue.
Actes de la recherch en sciences sociales 2: 95107.
Fehlen, Fernand. 2004 Pre-eminent role of linguistic capital in
the reproduction of the social space in Luxembourg. In Pierre
Bourdieu: Language, Culture and Education, ed. M. Grenfell and M.
Kelly, 6172. Bern: Peter Lang.
Grenfell, Michael. 1993. he linguistic market of Orlans. In France:
Nation and Regions, ed. M. Kelly and R. Bock, 7299. Southampton, UK:
ASM & CF.
. 2004. Agent Provocateur: Pierre Bourdieu. London: Continuum.
Snook, Ivan. 1990. Language, truth and power: Bourdieus Ministerium.
In An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu, ed. R. Harker,
C. Mahar, and C. Wilkes, 16079. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
MARXISM AND LANGUAGE
he aim of Marxism is to understand history and society accord-
ing to the precepts irst outlined in the works of Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, later developed by other thinkers in this tra-
dition, in order to efect revolutionary social change. Given the
fact that Marxism is in part a description of the determinants of
everyday life as a way of explaining the social order, it is some-
what surprising, therefore, to note that the Marxist contribution
to thinking about language has been limited. his omission has
been unfortunate both for Marxism and for those nonformal-
ist accounts of language that stress its historicity in a general
sense and its speciic and variable links to particular social
formations.
In he German Ideology, as part of their attack on philosophi-
cal idealism, Marx and Engels provide a sketch of their material-
ist conception of history. With regard to the nature and function
of language, they assert:
From the start the spirit [mind] is alicted with the curse of
being burdened with matter, which here makes its appear-
ance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, of
language. Language is as old as consciousness, language is prac-
tical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that
reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language,
468
like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of
intercourse with other men (Marx and Engels 1964, 42).
he stress on language as central to human activity, or praxis,
indicates the important role that Marx and Engels gave it in their
account of the distinctiveness of human life. Language forms an
essential part of the evolving process by which human beings in
social relationships create historical reality through the negotia-
tion of material needs and the requirement for self-reproduction.
It is important to note, however, that language was not viewed as
either primary or derivative; it was not the faculty that enabled
human beings to become social in the irst place, nor was it the
means by which they could express themselves once they had
been socialized. Instead, it was an aspect of the social, material
activity labor in its general, technical sense by which human
beings were constituted qua human beings and by which they
acted upon nature and other human beings in order to create
history.
Within the Marxist tradition, the stress on the constitutive
aspect of language as a form of labor material practice was
almost lost, as the term labor itself became narrowly conceived
simply to mean certain types of work. As a result, more atten-
tion was paid to other statements by Marx and less to his original
focus on language as social activity. hese comments included
his reference to the existence of a bourgeois form of language
(Marx and Engels 1964, 249), his assertion that ideas do not
exist separately from language (1973, 163), and his declaration
that the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling
ideas (1964, 60). Marxs remarks, which amount essentially to
the observations that the language in use is afected by the class
relations that hold in a given social formation and that ideology
is disseminated in language, were again rather narrowly inter-
preted within orthodox Marxism.
In the Soviet Union, in particular, a whole set of somewhat
fruitless debates ensued as to whether language belonged to the
base or superstructure of society. For N. S. Marr, for example,
languages were stratiied in such a way that between communi-
ties employing distinct languages, the speech of the same class
would be closer than the speech of diferent classes using the
same language. In this account, language belongs to the social
superstructure of society, which is simply determined by class;
the idea that the unity of a group not based on class (such as the
nation) could be explained by the idea of a common language
was dismissed. Marrs inluence, which was widespread in the
1930s and 1940s, was ended by Stalins equally dogmatic dec-
laration in Marxism and the problems of linguistics [1950]
1974) that languages did not have a class character but rather
a national character and were thus not part of the superstruc-
ture. Despite the title of Stalins piece, and though it was an
important correction to the misleading efect of Marrs theories,
it did not represent any sort of breakthrough in the Marxist treat-
ment of language.
In fact, precisely such an advance had been heralded in the
writings of a number of linguists in the Soviet Union primarily in
Vitebsk and Leningrad which, in efect, amounted to a school of
Marxist linguistics. Because of the terror exercised by Stalinism,
the exact membership of this group is unknown and the names
used for publishing may or may not be those of the authors of
Marxism and Language
the works. Nevertheless, the principal texts are recognized as
V. N. Voloinovs Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, pub-
lished in 1929 and translated in 1973; Mikhail Bakhtins Problems
in Dostoyevskys Poetics, published irst in 1929 and translated
from the second (1964) edition in 1984; and P. N. Medvedevs he
Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction
to Sociological Poetics, published in 1928 and translated in 1978.
Despite the fact that the work of Bakhtin is the best known to
readers in the West, the most signiicant contribution to a strictly
Marxist treatment of language was provided by Voloinovs pio-
neering text.
he radical thrust of Voloinovs work came in his opposition
to two key tendencies that he identiied in thinking about lan-
guage: individualistic subjectivism and abstract objectivism.
he irst, traced by Voloinov to the German idealist tradition and
articulated most clearly in the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt,
takes the individual human psyche as the most important site
of linguistic production and focuses on the individual creative
act of speech. Regarding speech as a type of aesthetic cre-
ativity, this approach rejects language, understood as a
ixed system, as simply the product of the abstract methods of
linguistics. he second tendency, abstract objectivism, is the
binary opposite of the irst and is typiied in the model proposed
by Ferdinand de Saussure and developed by structuralism.
In this approach, the static and apparently immutable linguistic
system is divorced from history, is distinguished rigorously from
individual instances of language use, and is considered to be
composed of nothing other than the normatively identical forms
of lexis, grammar, and phonetics. If the irst focuses on the
unceasing process (energeia) of individual linguistic creativity,
then the second treats language as a inished product (ergon),
open to the objective gaze of the science of linguistics.
For Voloinov, the concentration on individual conscious-
ness as the basis of an explanation of linguistic signiication
is a mistake. he individual consciousness cannot serve as the
foundation of linguistic analysis because it is itself in need of
explication from a social point of view: [C]onsciousness takes
shape and being in the material of signs created by an organized
group in the process of its social intercourse nurtured on signs,
it derives its growth from them; it relects their logic and laws
(Voloinov [1929] 1973, 13). his does not, however, mean that
the individual consciousness is formed by and in the normatively
identical signs of the abstract objectivist system. On the contrary,
Voloinovs point is that signs themselves, as dynamic com-
plexes of form and meaning, are not simply presented as given,
ixed elements of a system but are open products of the activ-
ity the material practice of language making between socially
organized individuals. Language, in this sense, is not the middle
term that unites the individual and the social, nor is it a medium
that relects a preexistent reality. Instead, it is an aspect of the
constitutive social activity labor, in Marxs original sense that
allows for the very possibility of the individual, the social,
and reality itself.
Despite the importance of semantic indeterminacy to post-
structuralist literary theory, and the stress on context in linguis-
tic pragmatics, the radical challenge of Voloinovs work has not
been taken up widely in twentieth-century thinking on language.
Even in the tradition of Western Marxism, few of the major
theorists concerned themselves directly with language, and
when they did, as in the case of Walter Benjamin or Jean-Paul
Sartre, it is diicult to see how the work qualiies as Marxist in
any recognizable sense. Yet a number of Marxist theorists, such
as Ferrucio Rossi-Landi (1983), Terry Eagleton (1982), and Jean-
Jacques Lecercle (2006), have produced interesting work based
on Voloinovs text. More signiicantly, it was the inspiration for
much of the later work of Raymond Williams, the major British
socialist critic of the twentieth century.
Williamss chapter on language in Marxism and Literature
(1977) stressed the importance of Voloinovs theory of signii-
cation, both in general and for his own original work on histori-
cal semiotics in Keywords (1976). Beginning with Voloinovs
argument that signs are neither expressive nor systematic in any
simple sense but, rather, communicative media deployed in the
social process of making history, Williams stressed that signs are
shaped by past use but are engaged at the same time in the cre-
ative making of the present (and are thus of necessity open to
the future). his idea of the historical variability of signs, which
Voloinov calls their mulitaccentuality, formed the basis of
Williamss investigation of the vocabulary of a number of discur-
sive ields, centrally those that involved discussion of culture and
society. In essence, what he provides in Keywords and Marxism
and Literature is a retrospective theoretical account of his work
in Culture and Society (1958), a text that efectively began the
debates that led to the appearance of cultural studies as an aca-
demic discipline. hough rarely acknowledged as such, it was an
historical materialist approach to language that lay at the base of
this important intellectual development.
Marxs comments on the existence of bourgeois language
and Voloinovs assertion that the sign becomes an arena of
the class struggle ([1929] 1973, 23) point to another ield of
research in which Marxist thought has been signiicant: the
politics of language, with particular regard to the historical
construction of national languages, the class-based hier-
archy of language within education, and the role of language
in imperialism and colonialism. Important work in this area
was conducted by Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist
Party intellectual and leader, who drew attention to the class
perspective in his discussion of the merits and demerits of the
use of dialect versus a national form of language in political
struggles in Italy. Other examples include Rene Balibars his-
torical research on the emergence of a standard language in
France in Les franais ictifs (1974) and Linstitution du franais
(1985), and Tony Crowleys related work in the British con-
text in he Politics of Discourse (1989). Writing from the post-
colonial conjuncture, the Kenyan writer Ngg Wa hiongo
used a Marxist approach to denounce the colonial linguistic
legacy in his Decolonising the Mind (1986). And in educa-
tional debates, Basil Bernsteins theory of restricted and
elaborated codes attempted to explain the diferential aca-
demic achievement of children from diferent social classes. In
Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, written with
Jean-Claude Passeron (1977), and Language and Symbolic
Power (1992), Pierre Bourdieu used a neo-Marxist framework
to account for the same phenomenon.
Tony Crowley
469
Meaning and Belief
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bakhtin, M. M. [1929] 1984. Problems in Dostoyevskys Poetics. Ed. and
trans. Caryl Emerson. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
Balibar, Rene. 1974. Les franais ictifs. Paris: Hachette.
. 1985. LInstitution du Franais. Paris: Presses Universitaires de between meaning and belief has been challenged from a num-
France.
Balibar, Rene, and Dominique Laporte. 1974. Le Franais National.
Paris: Hachette.
Bernstein, Basil. 1971. Class, Codes and Control. Vol. 1. London: Paladin.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1992. Language and Symbolic Power. Ed. John
hompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge,
UK: Polity.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1977. Reproduction in
Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage.
Crowley, Tony. 1989. he Politics of Discourse: he Standard Language
Question in British Cultural Debates. Houndmills: Macmillan.
Eagleton, Terry. 1982. Wittgensteins Friends. New Left Review
1.135: 6490.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1985. Selections from Cultural Writings. Ed. David
Forgacs and William Nowell-Smith, trans. William Boelhower.
London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. 2006. A Marxist Philosophy of Language.
Boston: Brill.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1964. he German Ideology.
Moscow: Progress Publishers.
. 1973. Grundrisse. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Medvedev, P. N. [1928] 1978. he Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A
Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics. Trans. Albert J. Wherle.
London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Ngg Wa hiongo. 1986. Decolonising the Mind: he Politics of Language
in African Literature. London: James Currey.
Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio. 1983. Language as Work and Trade. Trans.
Martha Adams. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey.
Stalin, Joseph. [1950] 1974. Marxism and the problems of linguistics.
In A Primer of Linguistics, ed. Anne Fremantle, 20318. New York:
St. Martins.
Voloinov, V. N. [1929] 1973. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.
Trans. L. Matejka and I. R. Titunik. London: Seminar Press.
Williams, Raymond. 1958. Culture and Society 17801950. London: Chatto
and Windus.
. 1976. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London:
Fontana.
. 1977. Marxism and Literature. London: Oxford University Press.
MEANING AND BELIEF
here is a commonsense view of the relation between meaning
and belief that has been tacitly presupposed in many philosophi-
cal, linguistic, and other treatments of these topics. It runs some-
thing like this. words refer to objects and have deinitions. he
deinitions represent properties of the objects, provide criteria
for using the words to refer to objects, and allow understanding
of such uses. hus man means, roughly, adult, human, male.
hat meaning picks out properties of some objects, isolating men
(rather than women, children, apes, and so on). In keeping with
this, the meaning allows us to use the term to refer to certain sets
of objects (men) or particular members of that set (individual
men) and to understand what other people refer to when they use
the term. Additionally, meanings allow us to express our beliefs
about members of sets of objects (generally or individually). In
470
sum, meaning and belief are diferent (the distinctness compo-
nent of the traditional view), and meaning allows the articulation
of belief (the expressive component).
In the last half-century or so, this picture of the relation
ber of perspectives. One important challenge concerns the
interaction of meaning and belief, addressing such questions as
whether meaning is a relatively neutral vehicle for expressing
belief or something that may afect belief. his is the challenge of
linguistic relativism. Another concerns the validity of the
division between meaning and belief. his is the critique of ana-
lyticity. he two challenges point in somewhat contradictory
directions. (hese are not by any means the only ways in which
meaning and belief have been discussed in recent years. For
example, Akeel Bilgrami [1992] addresses the issue of how to rec-
oncile meaning externalism with certain subjective aspects
of belief. Unfortunately, a short entry can only point to a couple of
key issues that have arisen in connection with this broad topic.)
As to linguistic relativism, a number of writers (most famously
Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf) have argued that mean-
ing is not simply a means for articulating belief, but a means
of shaping belief (as well as emotion, action, even perception).
A popular version of this view is developed in George Orwells
novel 1984, where the government seeks to control peoples
ideas by changing their language. he idea of any conceptual
scheme relativism is diicult to sustain in global terms, as writers
such as Donald Davidson (1984; see Chapter 13) have pointed
out. However, it is clear that we do not have at least some beliefs
before we have some categories, and commonly those categor-
ies go along with words and meanings. For example, small chil-
dren do not have beliefs about gravitation or terrorism because
they do not have the relevant concepts, and the concepts are
presumably something they acquire by learning the words and
their meanings. More importantly, it seems likely that peoples
beliefs about particular events are afected by the concepts (thus,
meanings) available to and salient for them. hus, without the
concept of terrorism, perhaps Americans would have under-
stood the events of September 11, 2001, as crimes. his would
have changed their beliefs about the nature of the event, proper
responses to the event (e.g., police investigation, extradition,
etc., rather than war), and so on.
his challenge to the expressive component of the common-
sense view seems to preserve the distinctness component. In
other words, it seems to rely on a presumption that meaning and
belief are diferent. After all, if meaning and belief are not dis-
tinct, then it is diicult to tell exactly how meaning could afect
belief. his division between meaning and belief is precisely what
is challenged by the critique of analyticity.
here are two clear ways in which the meaning/belief divi-
sion may be criticized. hey relate to two obvious ways in which
the division itself may be formulated. One way concerns revis-
ability. We might say that the belief component of our ideas
is revisable by reference to experience or facts. In contrast, the
meaning component is steady in the face of new experiences
or facts. However, W. V. Quine has argued famously that there
is no way of putting some truths into empirical quarantine and
judging the remainder free of infection. hus meaning and
sensory evidence are inextricably intertwined (1976, 139; see
Meaning and Belief
also 1981, 67, 712). his suggests a number of things about the
relation between meaning and belief. Perhaps most obviously,
it indicates that sentences are not true by their meanings alone.
More importantly for our purposes, it suggests that what we con-
sider meanings are open to empirical revision, precisely in the
manner of beliefs. For instance, a hundred years ago, one might
have thought that My father is a man was true analytically.
However, sex-change operations have shown us that the mean-
ing component male is revisable due to empirical information
about the objects to which father refers. If some idea about an
object or set of objects is revisable due to empirical information
about referents, then it would seem to count as a belief, not as a
meaning.
here are undoubtedly cases where we would ind it diicult
to imagine such revision. For example, I have no good idea for
how I could possibly revise my view that If Jones is currently a
man, then Jones is currently a male, adult, human. (Obviously,
there are scenarios where the meaning of man could change, but
that is not at issue.) However, it might be argued that this tells us
something about my imagination, not about the facts. Perhaps
it was impossible for people to imagine sex-change operations a
century ago. It may be that what we consider to be meaning is a
function of what we can imagine changing. But our imagination
could always be mistaken.
On the other hand, perhaps the obvious cases of revision are
not so obvious as they initially appear. For example, people did
imagine men changing into women and women changing into
men well before sex-change operations. If Tiresias had a child
as a man, then was transformed into a woman, his child could
truthfully say, My father is a woman. So perhaps male was
always only more limitedly part of the meaning of father, closer
to a belief than we recognize. In this way, it may be that the revis-
ability argument is not deinitive.
A more productive approach may still be Quinean in orien-
tation naturalizing our treatment of the topic, as Quine
often urged (1969; see Chapter 3) by turning to the natural sci-
ences. Here, we might consider two sorts of cognitive architec-
ture that are common in discussions of meaning today. (his,
of course, is not Quinean as it is mentalistic.) he irst is inten-
tional/representational; the second relies on neural networks,
either artiicial (see connectionism, language science,
and meaning ) or natural (see semantics, neurobiology
of ).
A standard intentional/representational account of lexical
semantics involves headings, some sort of meaning units con-
nected with the headings, and connections across headings.
he connections across headings establish lexical relations
of various sorts, including semantic fields. he semantic
units themselves are structured into complexes of relations
with default values and are typically hierarchized, such that
some units are more important than others. Consider, for
example, man. his entry is linked to woman for one domain
(adult human), to boy for another domain (male human),
and so on. It includes a range of information, comprising not
only deinitional components, but empirical components as
well. For example, 50 years ago, father included not only male,
adult, human, and progenitor of ego but probably hus- vated by ball, perhaps enough to make one think of hand-sized,
band of mother and breadwinner of the family or the like. In
other words, understanding father involves various schemas
that cluster information into relations. hese schemas have
default values (such as father is mothers husband), perhaps
along with speciied alternatives to defaults (such as father is
divorced from mother). his information is hierarchized in that
we generally consider items higher in the hierarchy to be more
criterial for application of the term than items lower in the hier-
archy. Put very simply, if we ind out that Peter is Sallys progeni-
tor but is not the breadwinner, we are more likely to count him
as Sallys father than if we ind out that he is the breadwinner but
not the progenitor. On the other hand, hierarchy efects are not
absolute. We may be more inclined to apply father to the bread-
winning, afectionate, live-in husband of Sallys mother than to
an unknown progenitor. (he last point, if developed further,
would lead us to the place of prototypes in lexical seman-
tics. However, the inclusion of prototypes or for that matter,
exemplars would not afect the main argument as it bears on
meaning and belief.)
Insofar as this model of meaning is accurate, it suggests,
irst of all, that there is no sharp meaning/belief division. here
does not seem to be any point at which the information associ-
ated with a given heading stops being semantic and starts being
empirical. On the other hand, it also suggests that the meaning/
belief division is not wholly pointless in that there does appear
to be a continuum from more deinition-like information to
more observation-like information. But this, too, is not all.
he hierarchical continuum is not determinative. We may think
of the hierarchy as a series of weighted properties and/or rela-
tions. Although those higher in the hierarchy are more heavily
weighted, they may be outweighed by a large enough number of
lower-level properties/relations. Alternatively, in connectionist
terms, a large number of weak connections may reach some acti-
vation threshold that is not reached by a small number of strong
connections. his last point suggests that despite the hierarchy,
all information associated with lexical items is in some ways
more akin to belief than to meaning (though perhaps neither
term is truly adequate here).
As the preceding reference to connectionism suggests, the
same conclusions hold for accounts of meaning that rely on neu-
ral networks. For example, neural accounts treat meaning as a
complex of circuits linking conigurations of neurons in difer-
ent areas of the brain insofar as these bear on the sound of the
relevant word, the appearance of the referent, our own actions
as they might bear on the referent, and so on (see, for example,
Chapter 4 of Pulvermller 2002). hese circuits are presumably
not fully ixed and identical across all uses. Rather, the precise
coniguration activated at any given moment will vary, depend-
ing on what other neural circuits are simultaneously activated.
For example, suppose I say squeeze. hat activates circuits that
include neuron populations that govern closing together the in-
gers of the dominant hand. Suppose I then say ball. he, so to
speak, resting circuit for ball includes a range of neuron popu-
lations, some of which bear on closing together the ingers of the
dominant hand. Since some part of the latter population was just
activated by squeeze, it should be more fully activated by ball. he
prior activation due to squeeze will slightly alter the circuit acti-
rubber balls.
471
Meaning and Stipulation
Of course, not everything is equally variable. here are some
connections in these networks that are stronger than others.
hese diferences in connection strengths should correspond
roughly with the hierarchy of properties/relations in the inten-
tional/representational account. Here too, then, we have reason
to believe that there is some sort of continuum. Not all of our
ideas about a set of objects are equally salient, expected, and so
forth. However, none seems precisely to qualify as a meaning, to
be distinguished from a belief and, once again, a greater degree
of activation bearing on initially weaker connections may have
greater efects than a weaker activation bearing on initially strong
connections. Here too, then, any correlates we may posit for the
neuronal circuits seem more like beliefs than like meanings.
In conclusion, we might return briely to linguistic relativ-
ism. If the preceding discussion of meaning/belief (non)distinct-
ness is accurate, then it seems that we cannot reasonably say
that meanings guide beliefs. We can only say that some beliefs
afect other beliefs. On the other hand, we also cannot say that
meanings simply allow us to express beliefs. Our ideas about the
world and our production and reception of language are, rather,
dynamic (neurocognitive) processes. hese processes do not trap
us in a prison house of language (as some writers have put it).
But they also do not allow us some simple freedom to describe
and evaluate the world in abstract removal from the perception,
memory, and other circuits that are already in place when we
come to formulate our descriptions and make our evaluations.
Patrick Colm Hogan
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bilgrami, Akeel. 1992. Belief and Meaning: he Unity and Locality of
Mental Content. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Davidson, Donald. 1984. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Pulvermller, Friedemann. 2002. he Neuroscience of Language: On Brain
Circuits of Words and Serial Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Quine, W. V. 1969. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New
York: Columbia University Press.
. 1976. he Ways of Paradox and Other Essays. Rev. ed. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
. 1981. heories and hings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
MEANING AND STIPULATION
Meaning is commonly understood as social, mentalistic, or
abstract. A social account views meaning as existing in social
groups. A mentalistic account places meaning in individual
minds. An abstract account locates meaning in a Platonic realm.
Discussions of meaning often involve debates about which
of these gives the real meaning of a term or utterance. For
example, in legal interpretation, there have been debates
between writers who view the Constitution as an ongoing prod-
uct of social developments and those who see it as ixed by the
Framers intent.
A stipulative account of meaning argues that such debates are
pointless. hey are, in efect, debates over the real meaning of
the word meaning. Formally, the meaning of any common noun
(such as meaning) involves a deinition and an extension or set
472
Meaning Externalism and Internalism
of items to which the noun refers (see intension and exten-
sion). One can only adjudicate the deinition of a term by refer-
ence to an extension. For example, consider a deinition of U.S.
state that involves the criterion of continuous land. One can
reject this deinition by pointing to Hawaii, which is part of the
extension of U.S. state. But one can only adjudicate an extension
by reference to a deinition. In other words, we rely on a deini-
tion of U.S. state to judge that Hawaii is a U. S. state. hus, one
cannot adjudicate a deinition and an extension simultaneously.
One of the two has to be established arbitrarily. By this argument,
there is no such thing as the real meaning of any term, includ-
ing meaning. Meaning may be social, intentional, or whatever,
as we choose in particular contexts. hus, whenever we engage
in an interpretive task, the type of meaning at issue should be
stipulated.
his argument disposes of one problem what meaning
really is. But it leads us to three other concerns.
he irst is ontological just what sorts of meaning actually
exist. We may, for example, stipulate Platonic meaning as our
object of hermeneutic interest (see philology and herme-
neutics). But we cannot actually interpret for Platonic mean-
ings if they do not exist.
he second concern takes up the demarcation of our stipula-
tive categories. hese need to be adequately precise. For exam-
ple, we might stipulate that we are concerned with intentional
meaning. But there are numerous sorts of intentional meaning
that should often be distinguished in the case of legal inter-
pretation, the self-conscious intent of the author who drafted a
piece of legislation, the intents of the legislators who passed it,
the intents of the judges who gave opinions on its constitutional-
ity, and so on.
he inal concern bears on the particular purposes for which
we are interpreting. For example, for any given term in a law,
there may be variable social meanings. Ordinary people may use
a term with one meaning; scientists may use it with a slightly dif-
ferent meaning. In particular cases of interpretation, the meaning
associated with one or the other group may be more signiicant.
Note that in these cases, we are not trying to determine the real
meaning of the law. Rather, we are acknowledging that there are
many sorts of meaning and we are trying to determine which is
the most important in the case at hand.
Patrick Colm Hogan
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bundgaard, Peer, and Frederik Stjernfelt. 2009. Patrick Hogan
[Interview]. In Signs and Meaning: 5 Questions , 7185. Copenhagen:
Automatic Press/VIP.
Hogan, Patrick Colm. [1996] 2008. On Interpretation: Meaning
and Inference in Law, Psychoanalysis, and Literature. 2d ed.
Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Levinson, Sanford, and Steven Mailloux. 1988. Interpreting Law and
Literature: A Hermeneutic Reader. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press.
MEANING EXTERNALISM AND INTERNALISM
Hilary Putnam (1975) argued for a view now known as mean-
ing (or semantic) externalism the view that there are terms
Meaning Externalism and Internalism
whose meanings are not determined by their users psycholog-
ical states. Meaning internalism is simply the denial of meaning
externalism.
Putnam qualiies his meaning externalism by explaining that
he intends psychological state to be understood in the nar-
row sense, according to which a psychological state implies the
existence of nothing but its possessor (1975, 21922). Another
equally signiicant qualiication is that the argument will show
that meanings just aint in the head, as Putnam memorably
puts it, only if a terms meaning is taken to be (at least) an inten-
sion, that is, a function from possible circumstances (or worlds)
to its extension, or the set of objects to which the term applies
(Putnam 1975, 227; see intension and extension, refer-
ence and extension, and possible worlds semantics).
Although there is a good deal of contemporary skepticism
about the existence of narrow psychological states (see the fol-
lowing), Putnam assumes that at least some psychological states
are narrow; beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and interior monologue
are all given as examples (1975, 224).
Putnam argues for meaning externalism with his famous
Twin Earth thought experiment (1975, 2237). Suppose that
somewhere in the galaxy there is a planet, Twin Earth, which is
just like Earth save one detail: he liquid that lows from Twin
Earthian faucets, falls from Twin Earthian skies, and ills Twin
Earthian oceans is not water. It is macroscopically identical to
water, but, unlike water, it is not the chemical compound H2O.
Instead, it is some other complicated chemical compound
that can be abbreviated XYZ. Twin Earthians speak a dialect of
English, and Earthians and Twin Earthians both use the term
water, but the extension of water in their respective dialects is
diferent. In English, water applies to all and only samples of
H2O. In Twin Earth English, water applies to all and only sam-
ples of XYZ.
Now consider two subjects, Oscar1, an Earthian, and Oscar2,
a Twin Earthian, both of whom have interacted with, and have
beliefs and other psychological attitudes concerning, the water-
like liquid native to their respective planets. Suppose both to be
living in 1750, before anyone on their planets knew anything
about the underlying chemistry of the liquids found thereupon.
Putnam claims that it is possible for Oscar1 and Oscar2 to be in
the same narrow psychological state (1975, 224). Since both are
chemically unsophisticated, neither has beliefs characterizable
with H2O or XYZ that could potentially distinguish their nar- sic properties (regardless of whether there are any intrinsic psy-
row psychologies. Furthermore, given the macroscopic identity
between H2O and XYZ, it seems plausible to suppose that all of
Oscar1s attitudes, feelings, and sensations about the liquid that
is in fact H2O on his planet could be matched by exactly simi-
lar attitudes, and so on, of Oscar2s toward the liquid that is in
fact XYZ on his planet. Indeed, as Putnam suggests, Oscar1 and
Oscar2 could well be molecule for molecule Doppelgngers,
thus, it would seem, guaranteeing their narrow psychological
identity (1975, 227).
When Oscar1 says Water is odorless, however, does he
mean what Oscar2 means when he says Water is odorless? It
seems not. For what Oscar1 says is true if and only if H2O is odor-
less, while what Oscar2 says is true if and only if XYZ is odorless.
If, however, Oscar1 and Oscar2 mean precisely the same thing
by their utterances, then those utterances would be true under
precisely the same conditions. So they do not mean the same
thing by their utterances, and this diference in meaning appears
traceable to the term water. Water in English has a diferent
extension from water in Twin Earth English. Hence, since mean-
ings are (at least) intensions, and intensions determine exten-
sions, water means something diferent in Oscar1s mouth than
it does in Oscar2s. Externalism vindicated.
As Colin McGinn (1977) and Tyler Burge (1979) have pointed
out, the same thought experiment can be used to challenge the
view that beliefs and other propositional attitudes are
narrow psychological states. When Oscar1 says Water is odor-
less, he is expressing one of his beliefs, but this belief is difer-
ent from the belief Oscar2 expresses via the same sentence. (he
two beliefs are true under diferent conditions; that, according to
most theorists, suices to distinguish them.) Similar points could
be made about the other propositional attitudes. If we continue
to assume that there are narrow psychological states and that the
narrow psychologies of Oscar1 and Oscar2 could be identical, it
will follow that at least some beliefs and other propositional atti-
tudes are not narrow.
Under the sway of Putnam (1975), McGinn (1977), and Burge
(1979), however, many theorists are now skeptical that there
are any narrow psychological states. Even sensations and other
phenomenally conscious psychological states narrow psycho-
logical states if any such there be have recently been argued
to be examples of wide psychological states. (See Dretske 1996;
Lycan 2001; and Tye 1995.) Putnam himself (1996) avows skep-
ticism about narrow psychological states. What becomes of the
thesis of meaning externalism if we suppose that narrow psy-
chological state is an empty term? If an ordinary human subject,
S, lacks narrow psychological states, then S's narrow psychol-
ogy determines the meanings of S's terms is true, but vacuously.
To avoid this hollow victory for internalism, it is perhaps best to
recast the distinction between meaning externalism and inter-
nalism in terms of a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic
properties: An intrinsic property is one that an object possesses
independently of its relations to other objects, whereas an extrin-
sic property is one that an object possesses in virtue of its rela-
tions to other objects.
Given the intrinsic/extrinsic properties distinction, we can
reformulate meaning externalism as the view that there are
terms whose meanings are not determined by their users intrin-
chological properties).
Max Deutsch
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Burge, Tyler. 1979. Individualism and the mental. Midwest Studies in
Philosophy 4: 73122.
Dretske, Fred. 1996. Phenomenal externalism. In Philosophical Issues.
Vol. 7. Ed. Enrique Villenueva, 14358. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview.
Lycan, William. 2001. he case for phenomenal externalism.
Philosophical Perspectives 15: 1735.
McGinn, Colin. 1977. Charity, interpretation, and belief. Journal of
Philosophy 74: 52135.
Putnam, H. 1975. he meaning of meaning. In Mind, Language,
and Reality: Philosophical Papers, II: 21571. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
473
Media of Communication
. 1996. Introduction. In he Twin Earth Chronicles: Twenty Years be lengthy, involving several stages and many revisions. And
of Relection on Hilary Putnams he Meaning of Meaning, ed. writing especially in printed or other permanent forms may
Andrew Pessin and Sanford Goldberg, xvxxii. London: M. E. Sharpe.
Tye, Michael. 1995. Ten Problems of Consciousness. Cambridge,
MA: Bradford Books, MIT Press.
MEDIA OF COMMUNICATION
his term refers to the means by which communication
takes place or the choice of substance for realizing a commu-
nicative act.
It has long been recognized that choosing between alterna-
tive means or media of communication can have consequences
for the linguistic form of the message. hus, the choice of writ-
ing instead of speech as a medium of communication may entail
particular grammatical, syntactic, or lexical preferences over
others. Indeed some work suggests that certain kinds of linguistic
patterning may be distinctive to particular media (Biber 1988).
From Ferdinand de Saussure (1912) onward, much work
has been devoted to specifying the diferences between speech
and writing. (See also oral composition; oral culture;
writing systems; writing, origin and history of).
One approach deals with speech and writing as alternative
expressions of the same underlying language system, realized
in difering ways depending on the medium adopted. hus,
the written medium is associated with greater lexical density,
a wider range of grammatical structures, a greater degree of
embedding, and more varied forms of connectivity between sen-
tences. Conversely, the spoken medium is associated with lexi-
cal repetition, low lexical density, vague or indeinite expressions
(thingymajig), high incidence of coordinated clauses linked by
common conjunctions (and, but), and selection of the active
rather than the passive voice. he character of these diferences
has led one author to characterize speech as a process and writ-
ing as a product (Halliday 1985).
A more radical view suggests that sentence grammars gener-
ally have been implicitly biased toward the study of writing, and
grammars would be quite diferent if they were formulated from
the outset to take account of speech phenomena. As David Brazil
observes, if any part of the outcome [of a grammar of speech]
looks like a sentence, this comes about as an interesting by-prod-
uct of the processes we are interested in, not as the planned out-
come to which these processes owe their deinition (1995, 39).
Certainly there is widespread agreement that the commu-
nicative potentialities of writing and speech are very diferent.
Speech typically takes place between interlocutors who are in
some way copresent to each other, and this enables them to
adjust their utterance in the light of the apparent reactions of
the other. he process of composing and planning speech goes
hand in hand with the act of speaking, and speaking, in turn,
goes hand in hand with the process of interpretation that must
keep pace with it. here is no time lag between production and
reception. Instead, speech is temporally bound, transient, and
dynamic, rooted in an unfolding context, with paralinguistic
behavior providing an important supplementary layer to com-
munication (see paralanguage). Conversely, writing as a
semipermanent product enables a gap across time and space to
open up between participants. he process of composition may
474
be received in quite diferent contexts from those in which it was
produced. he writer must anticipate how the efects of a dis-
placed or unknown context might guide interpretation or lead
to misinterpretation. And readers, of course, must typically rely
on the written text alone in arriving at its sense. Writing, conse-
quently, is forced to be less reliant on its immediate context for
its meaning.
Speech is often treated as the primary medium of communica-
tion and this for various reasons. In human evolutionary terms, it
is broadly universal and involves speciic biological adaptation
unlike writing, which emerges as the product of particular his-
torical societies and is not universal either within or across them.
Speech is acquired during a critical language-learning period
(see critical periods) very early in life. Writing is acquired
later and usually as the focus of explicit instruction. Nonetheless,
with the advent of a range of alternatives to speech and writing
as media of communication, it is diicult to insist upon a simple
dichotomy between oral, situated, face-to-face communication,
one the one hand, and visual, decontextualized, noninteractive
communication, on the other especially when technological
developments in communication media are considered.
We may distinguish broadly among three overlapping phases
in the development of alternatives to speech as media of commu-
nication: mechanical (writing, print), electrical (telegraphy and
wireless telegraphy, radio, and television) and digital (World
Wide Web and the Internet, cellular phones, and the convergence
or interaction between these and previous media of communica-
tion). Developments in communication at a distance for military
and commercial purposes using semaphore and other lag sig-
naling systems are particularly evident in Europe in the late eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth century. hese were forerunners of
the electric telegraph initially designed by Samuel Morse in the
1830s. he use of electrical impulses to make possible commu-
nication at a distance then underpins the development of the
telephone in the 1870s, and forms of wireless telegraphy in the
1890s, to be followed by radio and television broadcasting in
the irst and second half of the twentieth century. In most cases,
each technological development may be seen to favor particular
linguistic selections over others. he telegraph and subsequent
telegram, because of the cost of transmission and the premium
placed on time, tended to favor certain kinds of abbreviation
principally the deletion of grammatical function words, such as
articles, determiners, and verb auxiliaries.
he early electrical media of communication at a distance tend
to be dyadic and reciprocal, rather than one-way and noninterac-
tive. But many of the subsequent and most far-reaching develop-
ments in communication at a distance in the twentieth century
tend to be one-to-many rather than two-way. Broadcasting is
perhaps the best term for these developments which include,
preeminently, radio and television; and in one form or another
these have become ubiquitous forms of communication in the
modern era.
Despite the ubiquity of radio and television, it is diicult
to characterize the language of broadcasting in any distinctly
homogenous fashion. Instead, it is best understood as a medley
of distinct genres, including news interviews and reports, comic
Media of Communication
monologue, soap opera, various kinds of reality programing,
commercials, commentary on public events including sporting
occasions, argument, drama, talk shows, and phone-ins (several
of which have begun to attract systematic study; see Hutchby
2005; Tolson 2005). Although there may be generic antecedents
to these in the world of real-time, face-to-face communication,
certain properties seem to set broadcast genres apart from every-
day nonmediated communication. For one thing, the idealized
speaker and hearer of the canonical speech situation, recipro-
cally exchanging roles and utterances, no longer easily applies
except in grossly simpliied ways.
Instead, as Erving Gofman (1981) observes, broadcast com-
munication takes shape from complex production formats and
participation frameworks in which the discourse is sometimes
scripted, sometimes relatively spontaneous, sometimes spoken,
sometimes written, sometimes written to be spoken, sometimes
single authored, sometimes multiply authored, sometimes dia-
logue, and sometimes monologue. Indeed, Gofman suggests
replacing the term speaker with notions of author, animator,
and principal. he author is the one who has selected the sen-
timents that are being expressed and the words in which they are
encoded (Gofman 1981, 144). he animator is the one who gives
voice to the words that have been selected, sometimes by some-
one else. he principal is whoever is potentially held to account
for the sentiments expressed. In many situations, the three roles
coalesce, but in broadcast communication in news programs,
for instance the presenter who reads the news from the autocue
may merely be animating a script authored elsewhere, by the
editorial team, and the ultimately accountable source for the dis-
course the principal may be the organization itself. hus, in
the case of a BBC news bulletin, it may be the director general
or members of the board of trustees who resign their positions
should an item be called into question, not necessarily the news
editor, and certainly not the news presenter.
Just as various alignments are possible in terms of the produc-
tion of broadcast communication, important distinctions apply
in its reception, where the potential participation framework
is equally complex. As Gofman again observes, an utterance
does not carve up the world beyond the speaker into precisely
two parts, recipients and non-recipients, but rather opens up an
array of structurally diferentiated possibilities, establishing the
participation framework in which the speaker will be guiding
his delivery (1981, 137). Broadcast communication is quite fre-
quently oriented to two kinds of recipient. In studio interviews,
for instance, in chat shows or news programs, there is the imme-
diate recipient of the talk the interviewee or the interviewer
but beyond them is the overhearing audience numbering in size
from thousands to millions. In this way, in posing a question to
an interviewee, the discourse of the interviewer is bidirectional. It
is oriented in the irst instance to the interviewee, but the design
of the question will also be shaped by the assumed concerns of
the broadcast audience beyond. Talk for an overhearing mass
audience in this way assumes characteristics distinctive to the
medium that are diferent from ordinary talk or conversation.
It should be noted also that in the broadcast media, the
foundational distinction in considering media of communica-
tion between speech and writing becomes confounded. Within
a continuous stretch of discourse, a language user may switch
from reading a script to speaking ex tempore, from address to
the absent audience to address to a copresent interlocutor, from
script written to be read aloud as if unscripted to reading aloud
an e-mail from the audience.
In the movement from one phase to another in the devel-
opment of technologies of communication, there are shifts of
emphasis between one-to-one and one-to-many. he emergence
of writing and print allows communication of the one to the
many. he emergence of wireless telegraphy allows one-to-one
but over extreme distances. Broadcasting prioritizes one-to-
many and further collapses both temporal and spatial distances.
he recently launched digital phase that has followed in the wake
of broadcasting has allowed the most radical innovations regard-
ing the conigurations in time and space of participants to com-
munication: Instantaneity over distance is possible, and extreme
forms of both one-to-one and one-to-many communication can
become blended in a single message.
Text messaging (SMS) and e-mail, for instance, can be one-
to-one or forwarded to a larger audience; are primarily asyn-
chronous, but single messages can develop into an extended
dialogue; often assume a fast response, but this may be delayed
if the recipient is oline; and seem transient or ephemeral but
may be archived (sometimes in hard copy, in the case of e-mail)
for later use. he language style of such communication may
well include extreme abbreviation, slang, contractions, phonetic
spelling, erratic punctuation, and short forms, and it seems
to operate in an unstable and luctuating zone between speech
on the one hand and writing on the other. his might only be a
matter of linguistic curiosity except that variation between styles
of communication interact with questions of formality and the
quality of the social relationship. Many commentators have
pointed to growing informality in communication in the modern
era, using such terms to describe the shift as informalization
(Elias 1996), the democratisation (or conversationalisation) of
discourse (Fairclough 1992), intimacy at a distance and para-
social interaction (Horton and Wohl 1956), synthetic personal-
isation (Fairclough 2001), and broadcast sociability (Scannell
1996). he emphasis in these accounts varies between attention
to forms of the message and attention to forms of the relation-
ship aforded by the message, but what generally seems to be
at stake is a changing sense of what counts as public space and
what counts as the appropriate linguistic and social demeanor
for it. While larger processes of social change may well underpin
these shifts, the changing media of communication have clearly
contributed to them.
Martin Montgomery
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Aitchison, Jean, and D. Lewis. eds. 2003. New Media Language.
London: Routledge.
Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation across Speech and Writing.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brazil, David. 1995. A Grammar of Speech. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Crystal, David. 2001. Language and the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Elias, Norbert. 1996. he Germans. New York: Columbia University
Press.
475
Memes and Language
Fairclough, Norman.1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge,
UK: Polity.
. 1995. Media Discourse. London: Arnold.
. 2001. Language and Power. 2d ed. London: Pearson Education.
Gofman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood. 1985. Speech and Writing.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Horton, Donald, and R. Richard Wohl. 1956. Mass communication
and para-social interaction: Observations on intimacy at a distance.
Psychiatry 19: 21529.
Hutchby, Ian. 2005. Media Talk: Conversation Analysis and the Study of
Broadcasting. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1916. Cours de linguistique gnrale. Ed. C. Bally
and A. Sechehaye, with the collaboration of A. Riedlinger. Lausanne
and Paris: Payot.
Scannell, Paddy. 1996. Radio, Television and Modern Life. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
Tolson, Andrew. 2005. Media Talk: Spoken Discourse on TV and Radio.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
MEMES AND LANGUAGE
Memes are information patterns that are culturally transmittable
and undergo Darwinian evolution: Variation among meme types
is created when patterns are altered, recombined, or transmit-
ted imperfectly, and selection takes place when more stable or
more easily transmittable meme variants come to oust competi-
tors that are less it, that is, less stable or transmittable. As far as
their material implementation is concerned, memes are gener-
ally thought to exist in brains as constituents of human knowl-
edge. Whether human behavior and artifacts should be regarded
as external expressions of memes or as alternative ways in which
memetic information can be implemented is still disputed,
although the former view seems to be gaining ground.
he term meme was coined by the evolutionary biologist
Richard Dawkins (1976, 192) to denote cultural counterparts
of genes. Dawkins introduced the concept to support the argu-
ment that Darwinian evolution is not limited to the biological
domain but represents an algorithmic process that will afect
any patterns that are suiciently stable and copied in suicient
numbers with suicient idelity. While in the evolution of species
those patterns are genes, the historical development of human
cultures might relect the evolution of memes.
he concept of memes is linked to the idea that human cul-
ture is a Darwinian system that can be understood best on the
level of the elements on which selection operates. A memetic
view of culture regards humans as physiologically complex, yet
relatively passive meme hosts. heir instinctive inclination to
imitate one another turns them into meme vehicles with lim-
ited control over the memes they acquire, express in behavior,
or pass on to other humans. Of course, meme replication will
depend, to a considerable extent, on the physiological makeup,
the well-being, and the needs of their hosts, and memes that
inlict obvious harm on their human carriers are unlikely to
thrive. However, the ultimate reason why any Darwinian rep-
licator exists is its capacity to get itself transmitted before it
disintegrates. hus, a memetic approach to human behavior
challenges hermeneutic views (see philology and herme-
neutics ), which derive it from the irreducibly subjective per-
spectives of intentional agents.
476
In linguistics, the plausibility of meme-based approaches is
supported by the increasing productivity of Darwinian thought
in language studies, which has inspired new eforts to explain
the evolution of language (see Hurford 2006) and to understand
the historical development of languages in Darwinian terms
(e.g., Croft 2001). Although the Darwinian algorithm depends on
the existence of replicating units, the potential of meme-based
approaches to language remains largely to be explored.
Memetic theories of language need to address at least three
fundamental questions. First, linguistic memes, or replicat-
ing constituents of linguistic competence, need to be plausi-
bly conceptualized as material patterns with determinable and
empirically detectable structures. Second, the mechanics by
which memes are replicated need to be determined. hird, the
factors that determine the diferential replication of meme vari-
ants need to be identiied.
A study that adheres strictly to Dawkinss original pro-
posal is that of Nikolaus Ritt 2004. Following connectionist
approaches to competence modeling, he sees language memes
as patterns acquired by neural networks during language
acquisition. hus, a meme representing a phoneme contains
a) links to conigurations underlying articulatory gestures and
b) links to areas that are excited by speciic auditory impres-
sions, as well as c) links to representations of morphemes for
whose distinction the phone-meme is relevant. herefore,
phone-memes have both determinable internal structures (i.e.,
the links between auditory and articulatory conigurations) and
determinable positions within the larger networks that imple-
ment linguistic competence. Memetic constituents coding for
phonotactic regularities, rhythmic conigurations, morphs, or
syntactic categories and constructions are construed in sim-
ilar terms.
he replication of language memes involves communica-
tion, acquisition, and accommodation. Since a speakers com-
municative behavior is constrained by his or her competence,
utterances will automatically express the memetic constituents
by whose activation they are caused. hen, the mind-brains of
recipients and those of children in particular will attempt to
assume organizations by which they can emulate the utterance
behavior they are exposed to. hereby, copies of memes that are
expressed in utterances get created.
Among possible factors determining the diferential repli-
cation of meme variants, three types are distinguished. First,
meme replication must be constrained by physiological proper-
ties of their hosts. hus, meme variants that are easy to express in
articulation and whose expression is easy to perceive will be uni-
versally itter than more costly and less easily perceivable com-
petitors. Second, memes will be sensitive to such social factors
as power relations within and across groups. he more powerful
and prestigious that individuals or groups are perceived to be,
the more often will their behavior be imitated. hird, the repli-
cation of any meme will depend on other memes in the system.
Since utterances always express many memetic constituents
simultaneously, stable languages will contain mutually coad-
apted memes, which co-express with minimal distortion of one
anothers expressions.
While the predictions derived from physiological and social
constraints on meme selection seem to mirror those of speaker-
Memory and Language
based theories that derive the properties of languages from the
needs of their users, the co-adaptive pressures among memes
promise new explanations of long-term conspiracies in language
change, or the existence of typological classes. hus, most Old
and Middle English sound changes that altered the metrical
weight or the syllabic structure of lexemes produced outputs that
were more trochee-like than their inputs. From a memetic per-
spective, they can be explained as morphotactic adaptations of
lexemes to rules coding for foot isochrony.
Strictly memetic approaches to language are still a minor-
ity program. While adherents regard memes as essential to any
truly Darwinian theory of language, even some of the linguists
who pursue explicitly Darwinian agendas (e.g., Croft 2001) prefer
to think of selection as being performed on utterance constitu-
ents and to attribute more active roles to speakers as agents of
change. Skeptics (e.g., Aunger 2001) also emphasize the need to
formalize memetics, the missing evidence of neural replicators,
and the paucity of empirical studies demonstrating the explana-
tory potential of the approach.
Nikolaus Ritt
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Aunger, Robert. 2001. Conclusion. In Darwinizing Culture: he Status
of Memetics as a Science, ed. Robert Aunger, 20533. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Blackmore, Susan. 1999. he Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Croft, William. 2001. Explaining Language Change. London: Longman.
Dawkins, Richard. 1976. he Selish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Dennett, Daniel. 1995. Darwins Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the
Meanings of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Hurford, James R. 2006. Recent developments in the evolution of lan-
guage. Cognitive Systems 7 (November): 2332.
Ritt, Nikolaus. 2004. Selish Sounds and Linguistic Evolution.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
MEMORY AND LANGUAGE
he study of memory is concerned with the way that informa-
tion is represented and stored over time in the mind and how
it is retrieved and inluences behavior. Memory is essential for
all cognitive functions, including those that are intentional and
under conscious control and those that occur automatically
without conscious control. he dominant theoretical approach
postulates several separate memory systems that vary in the
nature of their encoding and retrieval, their duration, and their
neural substrates, as well as how they are afected by diferent
variables, such as the age of the person or the level of process-
ing during encoding (e.g., Tulving and Schacter 1990). For
example, semantic memory stores long-term conceptual
knowledge including linguistic knowledge, such as words used
to express concepts; procedural memory represents learned
skills and perceptual-motor routines that can be enacted with
little attentional control, for example, reading; working
memory represents the current content of consciousness and
enables manipulation of this information as when, for exam-
ple, a reader develops the meaning of a text; episodic memory
represents the occurrence of speciic events, for example, when
and where you last wrote a letter.
Despite the pervasiveness of memory in cognitive functions
such as language, historically memory systems have been inves-
tigated and theorized as separate and distinct from other cogni-
tive systems. his approach, however, can be diicult to sustain
because of the centrality of memory to cognitive functions,
especially language. Some current models postulate that rep-
resentations and processes used for memory and language
are inseparable and part of the same system at both a behavioral
and neural level (MacKay et al. 2007; see hippocampus). Here,
we review the relation between memory and language in behav-
ior and consider evidence relevant to whether they are distinct
systems.
Semantic Encoding in Memory and Language
A long-standing feature of models of language processing is that
perception of a word activates its lexical representation and that
activation automatically spreads to associated conceptual infor-
mation, including semantic properties of the word that consti-
tute its meaning (e.g., Rapp and Goldrick 2000; see spreading
activation). A clear demonstration of this feature is seen in the
Stroop task in which participants are instructed to ignore a word
and simply name its ink color. Despite instructions to ignore the
word, color naming latency is faster when the base word is the
same as the ink color than when it is a diferent color, for exam-
ple, the word blue written in red. his diference in latency can
occur only if the meaning of the base word is accessed, despite
instructions to ignore the word. his automatic semantic encod-
ing of a word is clearly a process that is an essential part of a pri-
mary language function, namely, language comprehension, as it
is essential to understanding the meaning of a word, sentence
and discourse (see discourse analysis [linguistic]).
his language process is also part of encoding in episodic
memory. For example, in a variant of the Stroop task, color nam-
ing latency was slower for taboo base words (e.g., whore) than
for neutral base words (e.g., wrist). In a subsequent surprise
recall test, memory was better for taboo than neutral base words
(MacKay et al. 2004; see emotion and language and emo-
tion words). his diference in the efects of taboo and neutral
base words demonstrates that the automatic semantic activation
that occurred during perception of the base word was the basis
not only for lexical comprehension (which slowed color nam-
ing latency for taboo base words) but also for the representation
involved in subsequent episodic memory recall. he strong inlu-
ence of meaning on memory indicates an overlap of comprehen-
sion and memory representations.
he degree of semantic activation during encoding also has
a strong efect on how well verbal material is remembered.
Participants remember more words in a surprise episodic
memory test after making judgments about word meaning
compared to judgments about phonology or physical form
(Craik and Tulving 1975). he idea that semantic processing is
a deeper level of processing that improves memory has been
criticized for being a circular explanation. Nevertheless, partici-
pants had no advance knowledge that memory would be tested
and thus they did not engage in mnemonic strategies, and so
the indings demonstrate that semantic processes involved in
477
Memory and Language
understanding language form the basis for representing speciic
occurrences of words in memory.
Semantic Activation and Memory Errors
Semantic activation during language comprehension is also the
basis for memory errors, especially constructive memory errors,
which occur when there is false memory for material that is con-
ceptually related to presented material but was not actually pre-
sented. For example, implications of sentences are commonly
remembered as having been presented when they were not. he
target sentence, he hungry python caught the mouse is likely to
be remembered as he hungry python ate the mouse (Harris and
Monaco 1978). he implication is encoded in memory as part
of the presented sentence because it is activated during com-
prehension. What is remembered is what is computed by com-
prehension processes, not what was actually presented. his
integration of language comprehension and memory makes it
extremely diicult for people to remember language verbatim
and makes memory for what people said or wrote notoriously
unreliable.
False memories based on semantic activation processes have
also been demonstrated in the Deese/Roediger-McDermott
(DRM) experimental paradigm (e.g., Roediger and McDermott
1995). In the DRM paradigm, participants are asked to remem-
ber a list of words (e.g., snooze, wake, dream, blanket, etc.) that
are associated with an unpresented critical word (e.g., sleep).
Participants falsely remember the unpresented critical word at
rates equivalent to the presented items; their conidence in their
memory accuracy is as high for critical words as for presented
words. he high rate of false memory for a critical word in this
paradigm has generally been explained by semantic activation
of the list words during their presentation that spread to and
summated at the representation for the critical word. he high
level of activation of the critical word at the test produces a feel-
ing of familiarity that leads to the false recognition. Consistent
with this explanation, increasing the number of related words on
the studied list increases the likelihood that the critical word is
falsely remembered (Robinson and Roediger 1997). here is also
evidence that semantic activation of the critical word may have
decayed before the test, but the critical word is reactivated at the
test because of its association with the list (Meade et al. 2007).
Memory Processes and Language
Frequency and recency of occurrence have strong efects on
memory. Classic forgetting curves show that the more recent the
presentation of material, the better the memory for it. Frequency
or repetition improves both episodic and procedural memory.
Parallel efects of frequency and recency are seen in language.
Words that are repeated frequently or more recently in natural
language are easier to perceive and to produce. he efect of
recency and frequency is demonstrated in a dramatic language
production failure known as the tip-of-the-tongue state (TOT) in
which a person is temporarily unable to produce a well-known
word. In the throes of a TOT, a person can produce semantic
information about the TOT target and sometimes partial infor-
mation about the phonology of the word, such as number of
syllables or irst phoneme, but the complete word remains
maddeningly out of reach. Alternate words related to the TOT
478
target word, especially in sound, sometimes persistently come to
mind, but these alternate words are a consequence, not a cause,
of the gap produced by the TOT (Burke et al. 1991).
TOTs are caused by a retrieval failure at the phonological
level of the representation of the word while semantic informa-
tion is available for retrieval. Low-frequency words are more vul-
nerable to TOTs than high-frequency words, and recent use of a
word makes it less vulnerable to TOT. Clearly, TOTs represent a
memory retrieval failure and demonstrate the interdependence
of memory and language processes. TOTs can be explained in
terms of impaired spreading activation from lexical to phono-
logical representations because of weak connections between
these representations, caused by disuse. Consistent with this
explanation, a TOT can be resolved by pronouncing phonolog-
ical segments of the word, which increases phonological activa-
tion (James and Burke 2000). Memory and language processes
are indistinct here because identical representations and pro-
cesses (spreading activation) are crucial for both memory and
language.
Language processes are also closely linked to working mem-
ory. heories of working memory include a storage component
and a controlled attention or central executive component that
maintains or computes information that is the focus of attention.
Working memory has a limited capacity that constrains the abil-
ity to perform complex mental computations, including seman-
tic and syntactic computations necessary for constructing
linguistic representations that are the basis for language compre-
hension and production (Just and Carpenter 1992; Caplan and
Waters 1999). For example, limited capacity causes reading time
to increase at points in a sentence where diicult syntactic com-
putations are required. Moreover, a persons language ability is
correlated with the capacity of their working memory: Language
comprehension and production are better for people with large
rather than small working memory spans.
he theory that working memory is a separate construct from
linguistic processes that constrains language functions has been
challenged recently by a connectionist approach to language.
his approach postulates that computational eiciency in lan-
guage processing is determined by the state of the network rep-
resenting linguistic knowledge, not by the capacity of a separate
working memory system (MacDonald and Christiansen 2002).
Knowledge and experience inluence the state of the representa-
tional network. For example, repetition strengthens connections
among representations so that they pass activation more quickly,
increasing processing eiciency. Consistent with this idea, lan-
guage that is more frequent at either a lexical or syntactic level
is easier to process. Within this approach, complex syntax slows
reading not because it requires more working memory capacity
but because such syntax is infrequent, which weakens connec-
tions among relevant representations. Similarly, because linguis-
tic experience increases the processing eiciency of the language
network, individuals with greater language experience are pre-
dicted to have larger verbal working memory spans than individ-
uals with less language experience. hat is, the observed relation
between language ability and working memory span is attributed
to a common cause: increased eiciency of the language network
because of increased language experience. his approach elimi-
nates the architectural and computational distinction between
Mental Models and Language
working memory and the language system. It views working
memory limitations as emerging from the architecture of the
language network, rather than from a ixed capacity.
Elizabeth R. Graham and Deborah M. Burke
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Burke, Deborah M., Donald G. MacKay, Joanna S. Worthley, and
Elizabeth Wade. 1991. On the tip of the tongue: What causes word
inding failures in young and older adults? Journal of Memory and
Language 30: 54279.
Caplan, David, and Gloria S. Waters. 1999. Verbal working memory and
sentence comprehension. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22: 77126.
Craik, Fergus I. M., and Endel Tulving. 1975. Depth of processing and
the retention of words in episodic memory. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: General 104: 26894.
Harris, Richard J., and Gregory E. Monaco. 1978. Psychology of prag-
matic implication: Information processing between the lines. Journal
of Experimental Psychology: General 107: 122.
James, Lori E., and Deborah M. Burke. 2000. Phonological priming
efects on word retrieval and tip-of-the-tongue experiences in young
and older adults. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory and Cognition 26: 137891.
Just, Marcel A., and Patricia A. Carpenter. 1992. A capacity theory of com-
prehension: Individual diferences in working memory. Psychological
Review 99: 12249.
MacDonald, Maryellen C., and Morten H. Christiansen. 2002. Reassessing
working memory: Comment on Just and Carpenter (1992) and Waters
and Caplan (1996). Psychological Review 109: 3554.
MacKay, Donald G., Lori E. James, Jennifer K. Taylor, and Diane E.
Marian. 2007. Amnesic H. M. exhibits parallel deicits and sparing
in language and memory: Systems versus binding theory accounts.
Language and Cognitive Processes 22: 377452.
MacKay, Donald G., Meredith Shafto, Jennifer K. Taylor, Diane E. Marian,
Lise Abrams, and Jennifer R. Dyer. 2004. Relations between emotion,
memory, and attention: Evidence from taboo Stroop, lexical decision,
and immediate memory tasks. Memory and Cognition 32: 47488.
Meade, Michelle L., Jason M. Watson, David A. Balota, and Henry L.
Roediger, III. 2007. he roles of spreading activation and retrieval
mode in producing false recognition in the DRM paradigm. Journal of
Memory and Language 56: 30520.
Rapp, Brenda, and Matthew Goldrick. 2000. Discreteness and interac-
tivity in spoken word production. Psychological Review 107: 46099.
Robinson, Kerry J., and Henry L. Roediger, III. 1997. Associative pro-
cesses in false recall and false recognition. Psychological Science
8: 2317.
Roediger, Henry L., III, and Kathleen B. McDermott. 1995. Creating
false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journal
of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
21: 80314.
Tulving, Endel, and Daniel L. Schacter. 1990. Priming and human mem-
ory systems. Science 247: 3016.
MENTAL MODELS AND LANGUAGE
How do we represent discourse, and how do we reason from
its contents? One answer to both questions is that we rely on
mental models of the situations that discourse describes. he
Scottish psychologist Kenneth Craik (1943, 61) wrote that if
we construct a small-scale model of the world, we can use it
to make sensible decisions about our actions. Several thinkers
anticipated him, and the nineteenth-century American
logician C.S. Peirce formulated an account of verbal reasoning
based on diagrams that were models of assertions (Peirce
193158, vol. 4). In the 1970s, cognitive scientists converged
again on the idea of mental models. hey argued that when we
understand discourse, we use sentence meaning and our
general knowledge in order to construct a mental model of the
situation under description (also known as a situation model).
Such a model is as iconic as possible; that is, its structure corre-
sponds to the structure of the situation it represents. Hence, the
model represents each referent with a single mental token, the
properties of referents with properties of the tokens, and the rela-
tions among referents with relations among the tokens (Johnson-
Laird 1983). he model captures what is common to the diferent
ways in which a possibility might occur, and so the theory is
analogous to possible worlds semantics and to discourse
representation theory (Kamp and Reyle 1993). However, these
approaches postulate that representations are logically correct,
whereas mental models have inbuilt shortcomings as a result of
the constraints of the human mind (see the following).
As an example of a model, consider a simple spatial descrip-
tion (see Byrne and Johnson-Laird 1989):
he oice door is on the left of the elevator. he exit door is on
the right of the elevator.
We can construct a mental model of the spatial layout, which is
analogous to this diagram:
oice-door elevator exit-door
he diagram is iconic in that its layout corresponds to a plan of
the three entities, but a mental model of the layout is likely to
represent the doors rather than to use verbal labels, which occur
in the diagram for simplicity.
Suppose that the discourse continues:
A man is standing in front of the oice door. A woman is
standing in front of the exit door.
We incorporate this information in our model:
oice-door elevator exit-door
man woman
It follows that the man is on the left of the elevator and the
woman is on the right of the elevator. No alternative model of
the discourse is a counterexample to this conclusion, and so it
is logically valid; that is, it must be true, given the truth of the
premises.
Mental models govern our memory for discourse. Suppose
that this discourse continues:
he man standing in front of the oice door was using a cell phone.
Later it states:
he man using the cell phone was wearing a suit.
Both assertions can be used to update our model. In an unex-
pected memory test, as Alan Garnham (1987) showed, we are not
likely to recall which of the following sentences occurred in the
discourse:
479
Mental Models and Language
he man standing in front of the oice door was wearing a suit.
he man using a cell phone was wearing a suit.
We forget the sentences and recall only the situation represented
in our model. Hence, given an assertion that follows at once from
our model, we are also prone to suppose that it too occurred in
the discourse (Bransford, Barclay, and Franks 1972).
Models of discourse can be abstract. hey can combine both
iconic elements and symbolic elements, such as negation. We
might translate negation into a set of alternative airmative pos-
sibilities (Schroyens, Schaeken, and dYdewalle 2001). We repre-
sent the proposition that the man isnt in front of the exit door as
a set of airmative possibilities: He is in front of the elevator, or
he is in front of the oice door, or But this representation calls
for a procedure that interprets a set of models as alternatives. As
Peirce realized, this machinery is not iconic but symbolic. And,
often, there are too many airmative possibilities to represent
negation in this way.
If we have a dynamic model of what happens in a story, then
changes in location should afect our ease of accessing referents.
Experiments have shown that if, say, the protagonist in a story
walks through a door into another room carrying an object, then
it is easier for us to access this object and the entities in the new
room than those in the room the protagonist has left. It takes us
longer to respond to questions or to a probe word; and these
efects occur for stories (e.g., Glenberg, Mayer, and Lindem
1987; Rinck and Bower 1995), movies (e.g., Magliano, Miller,
and Zwaan 2001), and virtual reality on a computer screen
(Radvansky and Copeland 2006). We therefore maintain a model
of discourse that has perceptual and spatial features that parallel
those in models that we construct from witnessing events, and
the model may rely on many of the same brain areas underlying
perception.
he principle of truth is an interpretative assumption gov-
erning mental models (Johnson-Laird 2006). It postulates that
they represent only what is true according to the discourse. As a
consequence, an assertion, such as
he man is wearing a suit or else the woman is wearing a suit,
but not both.
is represented in separate mental models of the two possibilities,
depicted here on separate lines:
man wears suit
woman wears suit
Again, these sentences stand in for mental models. What the
models do not represent, at least explicitly, is the falsity of the
woman is wearing a suit in the irst possibility and the falsity of
the man is wearing a suit in the second possibility. he principle
of truth reduces the load on our memory, and it seems innoc-
uous. Yet, it can lead us into the illusion that we understand a
description that, in fact, is beyond us.
A striking illusion of this sort occurs with the description:
If theres a king in the hand then theres an ace in the hand
or else theres an ace in the hand if there isnt a king in the hand.
here is a king in the hand.
480
he mental models of the irst assertion are:
king ace
not(king) ace
where not represents negation. he second assertion elimi-
nates the second of these possibilities, and so it seems that there
is an ace in the hand. However, the connective or else means that
at the very least, one of the propositions that it connects may be
false. Given, say, the falsity of if theres a king in the hand then
theres an ace in the hand, we realize that its possible that theres
a king in the hand without an ace. So, even though the second
assertion tells us that there is a king in the hand, no guarantee
exists that theres an ace, too. he inference is fallacious. his
analysis relies only on two well-attested facts about our under-
standing: 1) or else allows that one of the clauses it connects is
false, and 2) the falsity of a conditional allows that its if-clause
can be true and its then-clause false. A computer program imple-
menting the principle of truth led to the discovery of a variety of
illusions, and subsequent studies have corroborated their occur-
rence (Johnson-Laird 2006).
When you read the earlier description of the man and woman
standing in front of the doors, you might have formed a visual
image of the layout. Spatial relations are usually easy to visualize.
You might, therefore, assume that mental models are nothing
more than visual images. his assumption is wrong. Some rela-
tions, such as Pam is better than Viv, are impossible to visual-
ize. You can imagine, say, Pam as further up a ladder than Viv is,
but nothing in your image or in any possible image can make
explicit the meaning of better than. Not all relations are rooted in
a sensory modality or have a spatial interpretation. Some rela-
tions, such as the cat is cleaner than the dog, are easy to visualize
but do not invoke a spatial representation. Reasoning with these
visual relations, which elicit images rather than spatial models,
takes longer than reasoning with other sorts of relation, and it
activates a region of the brain underlying vision.
he hypothesis that we represent discourse in mental models is
uncontroversial in psycholinguistics, though not all accounts
stress the iconicity of models (cf. Kintsch 1988; and Gernsbacher,
1990). We make a dynamic representation of entities, their prop-
erties, and the relations among them. he heart of the problem
in building a mental model is to recover the appropriate referent
for each expression. Speakers refer back to entities that they have
already introduced in the discourse, and they can use diferent
noun phrases, demonstratives, or pronouns to do so. he correct
interpretation of such anaphora depends on many factors. Given
a sentence like he man confessed to the priest because he wanted
absolution, we understand that he refers to the man rather than
the priest. We make this attribution because we know the purpose
of confession, because we have a preference for locating the ante-
cedents of pronouns in the subjects of clauses, and because we also
have a preference for a parallel grammatical role of antecedent and
anaphor (Stevenson, Nelson, and Stenning 1995).
In computational linguistics, centering theory shows how the
focus on a local segment of discourse determines the anteced-
ents of anaphora, especially pronouns (e.g., Grosz, Joshi, and
Weinstein 1995; Webber et al. 2003) Another factor is the seman-
tic diference between antecedent and anaphor (Almor 1999).
he information load on interpretation increases when, unlike
Mental Models and Language
normal cases, the anaphor is more speciic than its antecedent,
for example, He had a beer, and the Guinness tasted good.
Within the framework of mental models, the most comprehen-
sive account of anaphora is that of Garnham and his colleagues
(cf. Cowles and Garnham 2005). his theory takes into account
all the preceding factors, but also postulates that a crucial factor
is the number of potential antecedents for an anaphor. In looking
backward, an anaphor should have enough content to pinpoint its
antecedent among the candidates. But the choice of a particular
anaphor also signals the future direction of the discourse subse-
quent content may provide the information needed to pinpoint
the antecedent. And the content in the anaphor may also signal
a shift in theme. So, the theory is Janus-faced, looking both back-
ward for antecedents and forward for thematic shifts. No current
theory, however, has led to a computer program that constructs
models for anything more than a fragment of the language.
P. N. Johnson-Laird
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Almor, Amit. 1999. Noun-phrase anaphora and focus: he informational
load hypothesis. Psychological Review 106: 74865.
Bransford, John D., J. R. Barclay, and J. J. Franks. 1972. Sentence
memory: A constructive versus an interpretive approach. Cognitive
Psychology 3: 193209.
Byrne, Ruth M. J., and P. N. Johnson-Laird. 1989. Spatial reasoning.
Journal of Memory and Language 28: 56475.
Cowles, Wind, and A. Garnham. 2005. Antecedent focus and conceptual
distance efects in category noun-phrase anaphora. Language and
Cognitive Processes 20: 72550.
Craik, Kenneth. 1943. he Nature of Explanation. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Garnham, Alan. 1987. Mental Models as Representations of Discourse and
Text. Chichester: Ellis Horwood.
. 2001. Mental Models and the Interpretation of Anaphora. Hove,
East Sussex: Psychology Press. A major statement of the theory of men-
tal models for discourse.
Gernsbacher, Morton A. 1990. Language Comprehension as Structure
Building. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Glenberg, Arthur M., M. Meyer, and K. Lindem. 1987. Mental models
contribute to foregrounding during text comprehension. Memory &
Language 26: 6983.
Grosz, Barbara, A. Joshi, and S. Weinstein. 1995. Centering: A frame-
work for modelling the local coherence of discourse. Computational
Linguistics 21: 20326.
Johnson-Laird, Philip N. 1983. Mental Models. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
. 2006. How We Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kamp, Hans, and U. Reyle. 1993. From Discourse to Logic. Dordrecht, the
Netherlands: Kluwer.
Kintsch, Walter. 1988. he role of knowledge in discourse compre-
hension: A construction-integration model. Psychological Review
95: 16382.
Magliano, Joseph P., J. Miller, and R. A. Zwaan. 2001. Indexing space and
time in ilm understanding. Applied Cognitive Psychology 15: 53345.
Peirce, Charles S. 193158. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce.
8 vols. Ed. C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, and A. Burks. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Radvansky, Gabriel A., and D. E. Copeland. 2006. Walking through
doorways causes forgetting: Situation models and experienced space.
Memory & Cognition 34: 11506.
Mental Space
Rinck, Mike, and G. Bower. 1995. Anaphor resolution and the focus of
attention in situation models. Memory & Language 34: 11031.
Schroyens, Walter, W. Schaeken, and G. dYdewalle. 2001. he process-
ing of negations in conditional reasoning: A meta-analytic case study
in mental model and/or mental logic theory. hinking & Reasoning
7: 12172.
Stevenson, Rosemary J., A. W. R. Nelson, and K. Stenning. 1995. he role
of parallelism in strategies of pronoun comprehension. Language and
Speech 38: 393418.
Webber, Bonnie, M. Stone, A. Joshi, and A Knott. 2003. Anaphora and
discourse structure. Computational Linguistics 29: 54587.
MENTAL SPACE
What Is a Mental Space?
Mental spaces are partial assemblies constructed as we think
and talk, for purposes of local understanding and action. hey
contain elements and are structured by frames and cognitive
models. Mental spaces are connected to long-term schematic
knowledge, such as the frame for walking along a path, and to
long-term speciic knowledge, such as a memory of the time you
climbed Mount Rainier in 2001. he mental space that includes
you, Mount Rainier, and your climbing the mountain can be acti-
vated in many diferent ways and for many diferent purposes.
You climbed Mount Rainier in 2001 sets up the mental space in
order to report a past event. If you had climbed Mount Rainier
sets up the same mental space in order to examine a counter-
factual situation and its consequences. Max believes that you
climbed Mount Rainier sets it up again, but now for the purpose
of stating what Max believes.
Mental spaces are constructed and modiied as thought and
discourse unfold and are connected to each other by mappings,
such as identity and analogy. It has been hypothesized that
at the neural level, mental spaces are sets of activated neuronal
assemblies and that the connections between elements cor-
respond to coactivation bindings. On this view, mental spaces
operate in working memory but are built up partly by activat-
ing structures available from long-term memory. Connections
link elements across spaces without implying that they have the
same features or properties. When I was six, I weighed ifty pounds
prompts us to build an identity connector between the adult and
the six-year-old despite the manifest and pervasive diferences.
Mental spaces are built up dynamically in working memory but
can become entrenched in long-term memory.
An expression that names or describes an element in one
mental space can be used to access a counterpart of that element
in another mental space (access principle).
Exploring Mental Spaces
In the 1970s, it became clear that grammatical and semantic
structure provide evidence for general features of human con-
ceptual systems and operations.
Logical phenomena, such as quantiier scope, anaphora,
opacity, and presupposition had been largely the province of
analytic philosophy. Bypassing the mind/brain, semantics was
framed in terms of an external theory of truth and reference.
cognitive linguistics embarked on a diferent course, plac-
ing mental constructs at the forefront of the study of language.
he initial motivation for mental space theory (Fauconnier
481
Mental Space
[1985] 1994, 1997) was that it provided simple, elegant, and gen-
eral solutions to problems such as referential opacity or pre-
supposition projection that had baled logicians and formal
linguists. Opacity results from the application of the access prin-
ciple across mental spaces as discourse unfolds. What emerged
was a uniied cognitively based approach to anaphora, presup-
position, conditionals, and counterfactuals. Additionally, the
gestural modality of signed languages revealed other ways in
which mental spaces could be set up and operated on cognitively
and physically.
Shortly thereafter, J. Dinsmore (1991) developed a powerful
approach to tense and aspect phenomena, based on mental
space connections. he approach was pursued and extended
in fundamental ways by M. Cutrer (1994), who made it possible
to understand the role of grammatical markers as prompts to
deploy vast networks of connected mental spaces. Further gen-
eralizations were achieved in areas exempliied by the diverse
contributions to Spaces, Worlds, and Grammar (Fauconnier and
Sweetser 1996). Sophisticated research continues to be done in
all of the areas where mental space theory was irst applied, in
particular on conditionals (see Dancygier 1998; Dancygier and
Sweetser 1996, 2005), scoping phenomena on locative and tem-
poral domains (see Huumo 1996), grammar of sign languages
(see Liddell 2003), discourse (see Epstein 2001), and frame shift-
ing (see Coulson 2001). But at the same time, there has been an
explosion of research triggered by the discovery of wide-ranging
phenomena whereby mental spaces are assembled, connected,
and constructed within networks of conceptual integration (see
conceptual blending). his area of research links linguis-
tic and nonlinguistic phenomena in systematic ways that begin
to explain how and why there can be imaginative emergent
structure in human thought in its everyday manifestations,
as well as in its most original and singular sparks of creativity.
Mental Spaces in Discourse: A Simple Example
Suppose the current president of our country is Nick, and that
someone says:
hirty years ago, the president was a baby.
he base mental space, B, corresponds to the time at which the
statement is made and contains an element a which ills the
role president in a political frame and has the name Nick. he
space-builder thirty years ago sets up a new space M relative to
the base (30 years before now); a in B has a counterpart a in
the new space M; the president identiies a in B, and can therefore
access its counterpart a in M. he property baby is assigned
to a in M. he sentence is interpreted as saying that Nick was a
baby 30 years ago.
he expression the president, however, can equally well be
construed as directly identifying an element b in M: It ills the
role president in the political frame for M. he property baby the derivation of the passive sentence (1a), where the underly-
is now assigned to b. he sentence is now interpreted as saying
that a baby was president 30 years ago.
It is an empirical fact that the example sentence does
indeed have the two interpretations, and this fact, like many
others, follows from the accessing principles of mental space
conigurations.
Gilles Fauconnier
482
Merge
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Coulson, Seana. 2001. Semantic leaps. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Cutrer, M. 1994. Time and tense in narratives and everyday language.
Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego.
Dancygier, Barbara. 1998. Conditionals and Prediction. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Dancygier, Barbara, and Eve Sweetser. 2005. Mental Spaces in
Grammar: Conditional Constructions. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Dinsmore, J. 1991. Partitioned Representations. Dordrecht, the
Netherlands: Kluwer.
Epstein, Richard. 2001 he deinite article, accessibility, and the con-
struction of discourse referents. Cognitive Linguistics 12: 33378.
Fauconnier, Gilles. [1985] 1994. Mental Spaces. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
. 1997. Mappings in hought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Fauconnier, Gilles, and Eve Sweetser. 1996. Spaces, Worlds, and
Grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2002. he Way we hink. New
York: Basic Books.
Huumo, Tuomas. 1996. A scoping hierarchy of locatives. Cognitive
Linguistics 7: 26599.
Liddell, Scott K. 2003. Grammar, Gesture, and Meaning in American Sign
Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Van Hoek, Karen. 1997. Anaphora and Conceptual Structure. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
MERGE
Merge is the primitive combinatorial operation in the most recent
version of transformational grammar known as minimal-
ism. In its most austere variety, merge is a generalized transforma-
tion that simply turns its input elements into a set with the input
elements as members (set-merge). Unlike the earlier government
and binding model of the principles and parameters the-
ory, Noam Chomskys (1995) minimalist model does not assume
a deep structure (see underlying structure) representation
as a starting point of the derivation; instead, syntactic computation
starts out from individual words. Merge combines words as well as
syntactic objects it has already formed in a recursive manner (see
recursion, iteration, and metarepresentation), gener-
ating an ininite array of discrete expressions with a hierarchical
constituent structure. In principle, merge can freely apply
to elements available to it, but its application is constrained by
principles of computational eiciency and by output conditions
imposed by external systems of sound/gesture and meaning.
movement is construed as merge of a syntactic object with a
syntactic object contained in it, whence the term internal merge
(vs. external merge; see Chomsky 2004). Consider, for instance,
ing object is moved to the subject position. Here the expression
(1b), constructed by recursive applications of merge, undergoes
merge with its subset {a, house}, yielding (1c). (2) is a tree dia-
gram representation of (1c).
(1) a. A house will be built
b. {will, {be, {built, {a, house}}}}
c. {{a, house}, {will, {be, {built, {a, house}}}}}
Merge
(2)
a house will
be
built
a house
he syntactic object {a, house} has two copies or occurrences, but
it is realized phonetically only as a member of the (largest) set in
(1c). Note that the two occurrences resulting from movement are
not distinct syntactic objects. Rather, the same syntactic object
is a member of two sets, where one set is properly contained in
the other.
While there is currently no agreement regarding restrictions
on merge, or how to deduce them, the mainstream view holds
that merge is binary, always taking exactly two input elements
(entailing strict binary branching in syntactic trees), and it can-
not alter set-membership relations that it has established before.
It is unresolved whether the output of merge should be enriched
to encode any asymmetry between its operands. On Chomskys
(1995) original deinition, merge forms a set with the following
two members: the set of the input elements and the word func-
tioning as the head of the constituent (also known as label),
thereby representing the asymmetry in the choice of the input
element that projects (see x-bar theory). Following this for-
mulation, (1c) can be rewritten as (3). he structure in (3) is rep-
resented by the labeled tree diagram in (4).
(3) {will, {{a, {a, house}}, {will, {will, {be, {be, {built, {built, {a, {a,
house}}}}}}}}}}
(4) will
a will
a house will be
be built
built a
a house
Another asymmetry is that between an adjunct (e.g., an adver-
bial) and the host it is adjoined to (e.g., a verb phrase). Chomsky
(2004) suggests that when an adjunct and its host undergo
merge, the result is an ordered pair Adjunct, Host (also known
as pair-merge).
Balzs Surnyi
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Chametzky, Robert A. 2000. Phrase Structure: From GB to Minimalism.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Chomsky, Noam. 1995. he Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Metaphor
. 2004. Beyond explanatory adequacy. In Structures and
Beyond: he Cartography of Syntactic Structures, ed. Belletti, 10431.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
METALANGUAGE
Languages may be used to talk about languages. In the irst sen-
tence of this entry, English is used to mention (or talk about) lan-
guages. (See use and mention.) In general, a language under
discussion, on a given occasion, is called the object language,
and the language being used in the discussion (to talk about the
object language) is the metalanguage.
Alfred Tarski proved that no classical language (language with
classical logic) can express its own truth predicate. Accordingly,
the semantics of a classical language (with standard syntax)
can only be done in a richer metalanguage.
J. C. Beall
SUGGESTION FOR FURTHER READING
Tarski, Alfred. 1990. Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics: Papers from
19231938. 2d ed. Ed. J. Corcoran. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
METAPHOR
his term derives from the Greek metapherein, indicating a
transfer of meaning from one linguistic expression to a second,
semantically diferent expression. According to standard dic-
tionary deinitions, a metaphor is a igure of speech in which a
word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to
designate another to which it is not literally applicable. hus,
in metaphor, there is an implicit comparison between unlike
things, as in the Shakespearean metaphor Juliet is the sun.
Employing the terminology introduced by I. A. Richards (1936),
the target concept (Juliet) is labeled the topic or tenor, the met-
aphoric source (sun) is the vehicle and the emergent meaning,
the ground (see also source and target). Despite this seem-
ingly simple deinition, the task of actually identifying metaphor
has proven to be a diicult enterprise because metaphors can be
implied (there is a vehicle but no speciied topic), dead (a usage
so conventionalized that the metaphoric transference is no lon-
ger actively recognized), mixed (the conlation of two distinct
metaphors), submerged (in which the vehicle is implied but not
stated), or extended (suggested throughout a text). his diiculty
has been especially apparent in recent attempts with computer
applications, such those based on the identiication of metaphor
in text corpora or in computer systems capable of generating
representations of metaphorical meaning.
Metaphor as a Linguistic Phenomenon
THE INFLUENCE OF ARISTOTLE. he classic approach, as presented
in the dictionary deinition, treats metaphor as a rhetorical
trope in which language is used in a way other than what may be
considered normal or literal. One can see in this approach the
inluence of Aristotle. As Umberto Eco put it, [O]f the thousands
and thousands of pages written about the metaphor, few added
anything of substance to the irst two or three fundamental con-
cepts stated by Aristotle (1984, 88). Whether or not one agrees
483
Metaphor
with Eco, it is clear that interpretations of Aristotelean thoughts
have inluenced much of the thinking on the topic for the past
several millennia, most notably a presumed distinction between
literal and nonliteral language and in framing the basic theo-
retical issues that have guided much of the subsequent schol-
arship: understanding the cognitive process that permits the
stretching of meaning from the literal to the metaphoric and in
determining the pragmatic reasons why metaphor would be
employed when literal counterparts could have been used.
In his Poetics and in Rhetoric, Aristotle situated metaphor
in the realm of language, a position that has been the basis for
subsequent theories but has been contested since 1980 by theo-
rists working within cognitive linguistics (described later).
Aristotles basic premise is that with metaphor, one word (or
expression) is substituted for another. He described several cat-
egories of substitution, though the forms most studied are what
we would call today nominal and predicative metaphor, the
former in which one noun is substituted for another and the lat-
ter in which the substitution is of verbs. Aristotle provided some
explanation of the process involved in metaphor comprehen-
sion, namely, an innate tendency to see likeness in objects and
events that are, on the face of it, dissimilar (or in which the sim-
ilarity is not transparent). Moreover, he provided some reasons
why metaphor might be employed, primarily, to serve a stylistic
and aesthetic function wherein the listener, forced to decode the
message, experiences a pleasurable reaction; and secondarily,
to serve the creative cognitive function of providing a name to
things that do not have proper names of their own. here has
been considerably elaboration of the seminal ideas of Aristotle in
the twentieth century, despite what some would consider a fatal
law in the logic of substitution as the basis for metaphor: If, for
example, with the nominal Shakespearean metaphor Juliet is
the sun the vehicle, sun is a substitution for another word that
falls within the same genus= as the topic, Juliet, what could
that word be?
TWENTIETH-CENTURY ELABORATIONS. Two interpretations con-
sistent with Aristotle have been most inluential. According to
the substitution position, the transfer from vehicle to topic is an
ornamental means of presenting some intended literal meaning,
so that when one states George is a wolf, it is merely an aesthetic
way of saying that George is ierce. he comparison approach is
less ornamental and closer to the second function described by
Aristotle in that, here, the listener must construct a way in which
properties of the vehicle are applicable to the topic. here have
been several variants of comparison theories proposed in the
literature over the past 50 years, but all include the notion that
the comprehension process involves the identiication of a rele-
vant set of preexisting features shared by topic and vehicle. hese
theories all have shortcomings, including the failure to encom-
pass the creation (and not mere identiication) of similarity, the
problem in identifying the mechanisms that would select the
features assumed to be important for interpretation, and the fail-
ure in such theories to explain the asymmetry in meaning that
occurs when the topic and vehicle are reversed, as occurs when
one contrasts my lawyer is a shark with my shark is a lawyer.
Max Black attempted to address at least some of these short-
comings by postulating an interactive theoretical perspective in
484
which the novel meaning of a metaphor is not based on identi-
fying a shared set of (possibly marginal) meanings of the words
being compared. Meaning, he argues, is generated by the inter-
action between a principal subject (the more literal usage of the
word, similar to the topic) and the complex of associations con-
nected with a subsidiary subject (analogous to the vehicle). he
process is interactive inasmuch as reciprocal action between the
principal and subsidiary subject selects, emphasizes, suppresses
and organizes features of the principal subject by implying state-
ments about it that normally apply to the subsidiary subject
(Black 1962, 46). he outcome is the creation of novel meaning
formed by a parallel implicational complex in which the topic
can be viewed in a radically diferent light and in which novel
emergent meanings can be created between words. Despite the
popularity of this general approach, it, too, has been subject to
various criticisms, notably regarding the ambiguity in deining
the theoretical terms employed and in determining which of the
terms is the principal and which is the subsidiary subject.
Subsequent psycholinguistic theories have attempted
to describe cognitive mechanisms that are consistent with
the interactive approach. Salience imbalance theory is a vari-
ant of traditional comparison models aimed at describing why
some statements are seen as literal and others as metaphoric by
assuming that the features shared by topic and vehicle difer in
relative level of salience: Literal statements are those in which
the shared features are salient to both terms, whereas with meta-
phor, they are salient to the vehicle but not the topic. Domain
interaction theory is an extension of a computational model of
analogy and assumes that metaphor involves the inding of
similarity both within and between the conceptual domains
evoked by words. hus, a metaphor such as George Bush is a
hawk would be comprehended by inding a spot in semantic
space that would be consistent with the analogy George Bush
is to world leaders as hawks are to birds. In this model, ease
of comprehension is a function of the ease of inding a shared
similarity (i.e., in determining ways in which Bush is similar to
a hawk), whereas a sense of metaphor aptness increases as
the distance between conceptual domains, such as leaders and
birds, becomes greater. Finally, structure-mapping theory, also
emerging from computational work in analogy, is based on iden-
tifying a system of shared relations between the target and source
domains and not by merely identifying a feature shared by topic
and vehicle. Although there are psycholinguistic studies that
support each theory, each is based ultimately on inding similar-
ity between the words presented as topic and vehicle and, conse-
quently, heir to all of the criticisms of such models (reviewed, for
instance, in Glucksberg 2001).
Sam Glucksberg proposes a novel solution that rejects simi-
larity as the basis for metaphor by arguing that in metaphor, one
does not look for a similarity between topic and vehicle (i.e., by
treating the comparison as an implicit simile). He avers, rather,
that metaphor should be understood as a class inclusion state-
ment analogous in how we treat such statements as my dog is a
collie. He argues, and has presented convincing evidence, that
with metaphor, the vehicle has dual reference (both as the lit-
eral object and as indicative of higher-order categories) and that,
in comprehension, one classiies the topic to the category sug-
gested by the vehicle. hat is, in a metaphor such as my lawyer is
Metaphor
a shark, the vehicle shark stands for or exempliies a category
to which lawyers could be assigned (such as aggressive, preda-
tory, tenacious entities). In more recent expansion of the theory,
he and his colleagues have indicated how the topic plays a role
in identifying the appropriate category for which categorization
is appropriate.
THE PROCESS OF METAPHOR COMPREHENSION. Much of the the-
ory and research described here is based on oline methodology.
Beginning in the late 1970s, researchers started to examine the
processing of metaphor online, measuring processes that were
happening during the act of comprehension. Most of the early
studies were based on the indexing of reading time or some other
measure of response latency; lately, studies have also employed
neurocognitive imaging techniques such as EEG and fMRI (see
neuroimaging). Much of the initial theorizing has been based
on speech-act theory, especially as espoused in the work of
John Searle. Following from the distinction between literal and
nonliteral language, the assumption has concerned the process-
ing priority of literal meaning. According to what is now called the
standard pragmatic model, the model would be that the default
processing of language would be to its literal meaning, and that
those inferential processes that seek an alternative, nonliteral
interpretations are only triggered if one fails to ind a context-
appropriate literal interpretation. hese assumptions have been
tested in psycholinguistic research that has concretized the stan-
dard model: It assumes that priority to a default literal meaning
would be demonstrated by more rapid reading (or other indices
of processing) of a metaphor in a discourse context that is consis-
tent with its literal sense than in a context that is consistent with
the nonliteral sense; it also assumes that one should not ind the
processing of metaphoric meaning in conditions in which the lit-
eral sense of an utterance is context appropriate.
More than 20 years of research have failed, in the main, to sup-
port the predictions arising from the standard pragmatic model,
instead showing that in appropriately elaborated contexts, one
can process the metaphoric sense as rapidly as the literal sense of
an utterance and that, using Stroop-like procedures and speed-
accuracy analyses, the initiation of metaphoric interpretation
does not depend on a failure to ind an appropriate literal inter-
pretation. hese indings, though sometimes complicated by the
level of conventionality of the metaphoric expression, have led
to a set of competing theories, all of which have some support,
including models based on the notion of resolving constraint
satisfaction and those that assume that the initial processing of
a word is at an underspeciied schematic level. An increasingly
popular processing model by Rachel Giora attempts to main-
tain processing priority but places the emphasis not on literal
meaning (as Searle had it) but on the saliency of a word (as con-
cretized by familiarity, conventionality, and frequency of use).
According to this theory, one is obligated to process the salient
sense of a word (or expression), regardless of context; contextual
constraints can boost the activation and meaning access of less
salient meanings but will not do so at a cost to the activation and
access of the more salient sense. he ultimate success and test of
these various theories are being contested, more often these days
with neuroimaging techniques that give a more ine-grained
analysis of online processing than available in the past.
CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS AND THE CONTEMPORARY THEORY OF
METAPHOR. he research described in the previous sections has
undercut the diference between literal and nonliteral language
(see also Gibbs 1994), a challenge extended most notably by
cognitive linguists, especially by George Lakof, starting with the
publication in 1980 of Metaphors We Live By, co-authored with
Mark Johnson. he main thrust of this theory is that metaphors
are matters of thought and not merely of language, thus distin-
guishing the basic mapping of a source conceptual domain to a
target conceptual domain (conceptual metaphor) from the
linguistic expression of this mapping. he true source of meta-
phor is at the conceptual level. According to this theory, con-
ceptual metaphors motivate and underlie understanding of the
world, such that most of what we call literal is, by this theory,
based on underlying metaphorical mappings. hus, conceptual
metaphors are the basis for understanding literal and nonlit-
eral, novel and conventional, poetic and mundane language
alike. Evidence for a conceptual metaphor, such as the mapping
between the conceptual domains of life and journeys (LIFE IS A
JOURNEY), is relected in a set of seemingly unrelated linguistic
expressions, such as His life is at an important crossroad and
She knows where she is going. Mappings elucidate the system-
atic set of correspondences that exist between constituent ele-
ments of the source and the target domain. For example, with
the LIFE IS A JOURNEY mapping, the person is analogous to a
traveler, purposes are destinations, means are routes, diiculties
are obstacles, achievements are landmarks, choices are cross-
roads, and so on, allowing for novel extensions of elements from
the source domain to elements of target concepts.
he theory has had widespread acceptance, and the task of
identifying the presence and force of underlying (and hence
unconscious) cognitive mappings has entered the debates of
linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy, literary theory, and
criticism, among other disciplines. Nonetheless, the claims in
the literature for an ever-increasing number of conceptual meta-
phors indicate looseness in the theory that may make it incapable
of being disprovable and, thus, an inadequate scientiic expla-
nation. Moreover, one testable prediction made by the theory,
namely, that conceptual metaphors are activated on line during
comprehension, has not been supported consistently, with the
strongest support coming from the examination of orientational
and temporal metaphors (e.g., Boroditsky 2000).
CONCEPTUAL BLENDING. A more recent framework, proposed by
Gilles Fauconnier and by Mark Turner, seeks to explain much
of the same linguistic data discussed in the conceptual meta-
phor literature and shares with that approach the assumption
that metaphor is a conceptual, not a linguistic, phenomenon. In
contrast with conceptual metaphor theory, however, concep-
tual blending theory is not limited to entrenched conceptual
relations or to the unidirectional mapping from source to target
or the mapping between only two mental domains. Rather, the
basic units are mental spaces representing particular scenarios
recruited from the knowledge of speciic domains constructed
while thinking or talking about situations. As such, the theory
emphasizes blending as an on-line process, which both instanti-
ates entrenched metaphors and can yield short-lived and novel
conceptualizations. his theory, too, has entered the literatures
485
Metaphor
of a number of diverse disciplines, and although the on-line pro-
cessing implications of the theory are still ongoing, the tests to
date have been encouraging, often employing brain neuroimag-
ing techniques such as event-related potential (ERP) measure-
ment (see Coulson 2001). Nonetheless, this theory has also been
subjected to criticisms that it, too, is incapable of being disproved
and that it is too indiscriminate, inasmuch as almost anything
that enters working memory can be considered a blend.
Evaluation
Treatments of metaphor as a linguistic and as a cognitive phe-
nomenon coexist today, in much the same way that two species
of hominid have coexisted in our evolutionary history. It remains
to be seen whether the ofspring of one approach will disap-
pear. Despite the diferences, there is a convergence between
approaches that should not be undervalued: his convergence
includes the undercutting of the distinction between literal and
nonliteral language; a recognition by both approaches of the
need to consider the richness of examples coming from liter-
ary or philosophical analysis, as well as the controlled rigor that
comes from experimental studies; an emphasis on the role of
cognition and pragmatics (see Carston 2002, for instance, for
an exposition from a relevance theory perspective); and
the growing sentiment (however conceptualized) that the con-
struction of metaphoric meaning is lexible and involves more
of an active on-line interpretive process and less of a mere
arousal of entrenched meaning and that, ultimately, the battle-
ground for theoretical supremacy (or for synthesis of the two
approaches) will depend on data generated and based in the
neurosciences.
Albert N. Katz
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTED FURTHER READINGS
Black, M. 1962. Models and Metaphor. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press.
Boroditsky, L. 2000. Metaphoric structuring: Understanding time
through spatial metaphors. Cognition 75: 128.
Carston, R. 2002. houghts and Utterances: he Pragmatics of Explicit
Communication. Oxford: Blackwell.
Coulson, S. 2001. Semantic Leaps. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Eco, U. 1984. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Fauconnier G. 1997. Mappings in hought and Language.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gibbs, R. 1994. he Poetics of Mind. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Giora, R. 2003. On Our Mind: Salience, Context and Figurative Language.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Giora, R., ed. 2001. Models of igurative language. Metaphor and
Symbol 16.3/4 (Special Issue): 145333.
Glucksberg, S. 2001. Understanding Figurative Language. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Katz, A., C. Cacciari, R. Gibbs, and M. Turner. 1998. Figurative Language
and hought. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lakof, G., and M. Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Ortony, A., ed. 1993. Metaphor and hought. 2d ed. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
486
Metaphor, Acquisition of
Richards, I. A. 1936. he Philosophy of Rhetoric. New York: Oxford
University Press.
METAPHOR, ACQUISITION OF
Metaphor is a pervasive aspect of human language (Lakof and
Johnson 1997). Metaphor also plays a central role in abstract
thought by structuring concepts (Gibbs 1994) and leading to
conceptual change (Gentner and Wolf 2000). As such, its rudi-
mentary manifestation at the early ages and its continued growth
over developmental time has been the focus of scientiic inquiry
for several decades. Research on the acquisition of metaphor
followed two main lines of inquiry, each bearing on a diferent
deinition of the term. One approach deined metaphor as a simi-
larity comparison between the perceptual features of objects or
actions, and explored how early children would understand and
produce these so-called perceptual metaphors (e.g., butterly is
(like) rainbow). Another approach deined metaphor as a con-
ceptual-linguistic mapping between the structural features of two
disparate knowledge domains a source domain, which serves
as the source of vocabulary and conceptual inferences, and a
target domain, to which vocabulary and inferences are extended
metaphorically, and it examined the age at which children begin
to develop an integrated understanding of such structural meta-
phors (e.g., time is motion along a path) as an amalgam of both
source and target domain meanings.
Following is a brief summary of the developmental changes
in childrens metaphorical ability, from the early onset of simple
perceptual metaphors to the later emergence of more complex
structural metaphors.
Metaphor as Similarity: Childrens Early Comprehension
and Production of Simple Perceptual Metaphors
Children can spontaneously produce a variety of perceptual
metaphors that highlight similarities between objects and events
during preschool years (~ages 2.05.0; e.g., Billow 1981; Gardner
et al. 1978; Winner, McCarthy, and Gardner 1980; Winner 1979).
For example, they hold up a half-peeled banana and call it a
lower (Elbers 1988), place a foot in the wastebasket and call
it a boot (Winner 1979), point to a mushroom and say like ice
cream cone (zalkan and Goldin-Meadow 2006), or describe
a ship sailing in the far distance as taking a bath (Chukovsky
1968). hese early perceptual metaphors typically arise in emerg-
ing symbolic play contexts, in which children irst engage in
imaginative object substitutions (e.g., using a banana as if it were
a phone), and later on, they express similarities between such
objects explicitly in speech (banana is like a phone; Gardner
et al. 1978; see also Sinclair and Stambak 1993 for more informa-
tion on early symbolic play).
Children can use perceptual similarity to sort objects into
categories as early as 18 months (e.g., boxes vs. balls; see Oakes
and Madole 2000 for a review). By preschool age, they can under-
stand and make comparisons between two categorically diferent
objects based on feature-based similarities (Billow 1975; Epstein
and Gamlin 1994; Gardner et al. 1975; Mendelsohn et al. 1984;
Vosniadou and Ortony 1983; Winner, McCarthy, and Gardner
1980) and between two events based on action-based similarities
(Dent 1984). For example, when asked to pick two objects that
Metaphor, Acquisition of
go together, children were more likely to group a cherry lollipop
with a toy stop sign, which was similar in shape and color, rather
than matching it with a dissimilar object in the same category
(Mendelsohn et al. 1984). Similarly, when presented with event
triads, children were more likely to pair two events that were
alike (ballerina spinningtop spinning) than to match two events
that were of diferent types (ballerina leapingtop spinning; Dent
1984).
Moreover, ive-year-old children could provide similarity-
based explanations when asked about metaphorical expressions
that involve comparisons between objects such as a butterly is a
lying rainbow, or a cloud is like a sponge (Gardner et al. 1975;
Gentner 1988; Billow 1975; Malgady 1977). For example, they
would explain the statement a cloud is like a sponge by say-
ing that both clouds and sponges are round and lufy (Gentner
1988), or they would complete the statement he looks as gigan-
tic as by selecting from among multiple choice alternatives
an ending that draws on a feature-based comparison: he looks
as gigantic as a double-decker cone in a babys hand (Gardner
et al. 1975).
hus, preschool children can both understand similarity
comparisons between two objects or events that are perceptu-
ally alike and spontaneously produce perceptual metaphors and
explanations based on such comparisons in their early com-
munications. his ability constitutes an important milestone in
childrens language development. he ability to express simi-
larities between objects and events based on shared perceptual
features is considered the earliest sign of metaphorical ability in
young children, and accordingly, children are believed to have a
rudimentary level of metaphorical ability as early as preschool
age (Billow 1981; Gardner et al. 1978; Vosniadou 1987; Winner
1979).
Metaphor as Conceptual-Linguistic Mapping: Childrens
Comprehension and Production of Complex Structural
Metaphors
Childrens early ability to produce feature-based similarity com-
parisons is considered the irst step in the development of more
complex metaphorical abilities, particularly those that involve
structural comparisons between disparate domains (Gardner
et al. 1978; Gentner 1988; Winner 1979). Not surprisingly, chil-
drens mastery of such structural metaphors takes several more
years, extending well into early adolescent years (Asch and
Nerlove 1960; Vosniadou 1987; Winner, Rosenstiel, and Gardner
1976), and diferent researchers propose diferent views con-
cerning how children make this transition.
Some researchers propose a developmental progression
from mappings based on feature-based similarities to map-
pings based on relational structure in childrens metaphorical
abilities (Billow 1975; Gentner 1988, Gentner and Rattermann
1991, Vosniadou and Ortony 1983). For example, in explaining
the metaphorical statement a cloud is like a sponge, ive-year-
old children typically rely on feature-based similarities between
the two objects (e.g., Both clouds and sponges are round and
lufy), while older children and adults opt for more relational
explanations (e.g., Both clouds and sponges contain water;
Gentner 1988). In this view, what drives development is the
shift in focus from feature-based commonalities to relational
commonalities: Children, at all ages, have no diiculty under-
standing feature-based similarities between objects, but it is with
increasing age that they begin to understand cross-domain map-
pings based on relational structure and, accordingly, produce
explanations that relect this understanding.
Others propose a developmental progression from an under-
standing of metaphor as involving only one domain to a con-
ceptualization of metaphor as involving two domains (Asch
and Nerlove 1960; Cicone, Gardner, and Winner 1981; Schecter
and Broughton 1991; Winner, Rosenstiel, and Gardner 1976).
hus, children initially focus only on the source domain of the
metaphorical mapping and gradually develop a more inte-
grated understanding of metaphor as involving both a source
and a target domain. For example, in explaining the metaphor-
ical statement the prison guard is a hard rock, children six
to eight years of age focused exclusively on the source domain
meaning of the mapping and provided literal interpretations for
metaphorical statements (e.g., he guard has hard muscles),
whereas older children and adults were able to consider both the
source and target domain meanings of the mapping, thus pro-
viding explanations that captured the metaphorical meaning
(e.g., he guard was mean and did not care about the feelings
of prisoners; Winner, Rosenstiel, and Gardner 1976). Similarly,
when asked to extend physical sensation terms onto psycholog-
ical traits (e.g., Can a person be warm/ sweet/ soft?), children
three to seven years of age focused only on the source domain
of the metaphorical mapping and provided literal explanations
for metaphorical statements (e.g., Mommy is sweet because she
cooks sweet things), whereas older children focused on both
domains simultaneously and provided explanations that treated
metaphorical meaning as a diferent but related extension of
the literal meaning (e.g., Hard things and hard people are both
unmanageable; Asch and Nerlove 1960).
Yet another group of researchers argue that the ability to
understand structural metaphors is not determined solely by a
childs age but by a host of other factors, such as the nature of
the source or the target domain (Keil 1986), and the familiarity
of the metaphorical mapping or the source domain (zalkan
2007). For example, ive-year-old children can correctly map
animate terms onto cars (e.g., the car is thirsty), but have dii-
culty understanding metaphors that involve mappings between
taste terms and people (e.g., she is a bitter person; Keil 1986).
Similarly, preschool children can both understand and explain
metaphors that are structured by motion (e.g., Time lies by,
Ideas cross my mind; zalkan 2005, 2007) a domain that
structures a wide range of abstract concepts across diferent lan-
guages of the world but have diiculty deciphering the mean-
ing of metaphors that involve extensions of object properties
(e.g., he prison guard is a hard rock; Winner, Rosenstiel, and
Gardner 1976). From this perspective, the development of meta-
phorical ability shows diferent trajectories for diferent con-
ceptual domains and metaphorical mappings, based on ones
knowledge of the source and/or the target domain and the famil-
iarity of the metaphorical mapping.
In summary, research on childrens metaphor comprehen-
sion and production shows that children can both understand
and spontaneously produce perceptual metaphors that involve
similarity comparisons by preschool age. However, the ability
487
Metaphor, Acquisition of
to understand and explain more complex metaphors, namely,
those that involve structural mappings between diferent knowl-
edge domains, emerges in late childhood, somewhere between
ages 11.0 to 14.0. Nevertheless, at the same time, childrens early
metaphorical ability is strongly inluenced by the familiarity of
the source and target domains of the metaphor, with more famil-
iar domains and metaphorical relations leading to earlier onset
of metaphor comprehension and production.
eyda zalkan
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Asch, S., and H. Nerlove. 1960. he development of double function
terms in children. In Perspectives in Psychological heory, ed. B. Kaplan
and S. Wapner, 4760). New York: International Universities Press.
Billow, R. M. 1975. A cognitive developmental study of metaphor com-
prehension. Developmental Psychology 11.4: 41523.
. 1981. Observing spontaneous metaphor in children. Journal of
Experimental Child Psychology 31: 43045.
Chukovsky, K. 1968. From Two to Five. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Cicone, M., H. Gardner, and E. Winner. 1981. Understanding the psy-
chology in psychological metaphors. Journal of Child Language
8: 21316.
Dent, C. H. 1984. he developmental importance of motion infor-
mation in perceiving and describing metaphoric similarity. Child
Development 55: 160713.
Elbers, L. 1988. New names from old words: Related aspects of chil-
drens metaphors and word compounds. Journal of Child Language
15: 591617.
Epstein, R. L., and P. J. Gamlin. 1994. Young childrens comprehension
of simple and complex metaphors presented in pictures and words.
Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 9.3: 17991.
Gardner, H., M. Kircher, E. Winner, and D. Perkins. 1975. Childrens
metaphoric productions and preferences. Journal of Child Language
2: 12541.
Gardner, H., E. Winner, R. Bechhofer, and D. Wolf. 1978. he develop-
ment of igurative language. In Childrens Language. Vol. 1. Ed. K.
Nelson, 138. New York: Gardner Press.
Gentner, D. 1988. Metaphor as structure mapping: he relational shift.
Child Development 59: 4759.
Gentner, D., and M. J. Rattermann. 1991. Language and the career of
similarity. In Perspectives on Language and hought: Interrelations
in Development, ed. S. A. Gelman and J. P. Byrnes, 22577. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Gentner, D., and P. Wolf. 2000. Metaphor and knowledge change. In
Cognitive Dynamics: Conceptual Change in Humans and Machines, ed.
E. Dietrick and A. Markman, 295342. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Gibbs, R. 1994. he Poetics of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Keil, F. C. 1986. Conceptual domains and the acquisition of metaphor.
Cognitive Development 1: 7396.
Lakof, G., and M. Johnson. 1997. Philosophy in the Flesh. New York: Basic
Books.
Malgady, R. G. 1977. Childrens interpretation and appreciation of simi-
les. Child Development 48: 17348.
Mendelsohn, E., S. Robinson, H. Gardner, and E. Winner. 1984. Are pre-
schoolers renamings intentional category violations? Developmental
Psychology 20.2: 18792.
Oakes, L. M., and K. L. Madole. 2000. he future of infant categoriza-
tion research: A process-oriented approach. Child Development
71.1: 11926.
488
Metaphor, Information Transfer in
zalkan, S. 2005. On learning to draw the distinction between physi-
cal and metaphorical motion: Is metaphor an early emerging cognitive
and linguistic capacity? Journal of Child Language 32.2: 128.
. 2007. Metaphors we move by: Childrens developing under-
standing of metaphorical motion in typologically distinct languages.
Metaphor and Symbol 22.2:14768.
zalkan, S., and S. Goldin-Meadow. 2006. X is like Y: he emer-
gence of similarity mappings in childrens early speech and gesture.
In Cognitive Linguistics: Foundations and Fields of Application, ed. G.
Kristianssen, M. Achard, R. Dirven, and F. Ruiz de Mendoza, 22962.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Schecter, B., and J. Broughton. 1991. Developmental relationships
between psychological metaphors and concepts of life and conscious-
ness. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 6.2: 11943.
Sinclair, M., and M. Stambak. 1993. Pretend play among three-year-olds.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Vosniadou, S. 1987. Children and metaphors. Child Development
58: 87085.
Vosniadou, S., and A. Ortony. 1983. he emergence of the literal-meta-
phorical anomolous distinction in young children. Child Development
54: 15461.
Winner, E. 1979. New names for old things: he emergence of meta-
phoric language. Journal of Child Language 6: 46991.
. 1997. he Point of Words: Childrens Understanding of Metaphor
and Irony. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Winner, E., M. McCarthy, and H. Gardner. 1980. he ontogenesis of met-
aphor. In Cognition and Figurative Language, ed. R. P. Honeck and
R. Hofman, 34161. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Winner, E., A. K. Rosenstiel, and H. Gardner. 1976. he development of
metaphoric understanding. Developmental Psychology 12: 28997.
METAPHOR, INFORMATION TRANSFER IN
he study of metaphor is currently dominated by concep-
tual metaphor theory. One alternative was put forth by Amos
Tversky, then further developed by Andrew Ortony and others.
his account begins with the idea that we understand metaphors
by scanning entries in our mental lexicon, transferring relevant
features from a source to a target (see source and target). In
some versions, the process is viewed as involving a wider range
of information and components of cognitive architecture
beyond semantic features.
Consider the following situation. Smith monopolizes dis-
cussion in a department meeting. Afterward, Doe asks Jones
what she thought of the debate. She replies, Smith is a braying
donkey. Using standard cognitive architecture, we might ana-
lyze this as follows: Jones and Doe both have lexical entries for
donkey, bray, and Smith. hey also have episodic memories of
the recent department meeting. he recent events are primed
or partially activated (see priming, semantic; spreading
activation). he mention of Smith serves to further activate
the episodic memories of Smith in the meeting. he lexical entry
for bray involves such elements as produce a sound using vocal
chords. his serves to further activate the episodic memories
of vocal chord sounds in the meeting. Speciically, in conjunc-
tion with Smith, it serves to strongly activate episodic memories
of Smith speaking. Following principles of conversational
implicature, Doe assumes that Jones is making some positive
contribution to the conversation. hus, Doe looks for new infor-
mation in Joness statement. here is no new information in what
Metaphor, Information Transfer in
we have isolated thus far that Smith used his vocal chords to
make a sound. he new information comes with distinctive fea-
tures of the metaphorical source. Speciically, braying does not
apply to every use of vocal chords. It applies only to a particu-
lar sort of nonlinguistic thus, meaningless and inarticulate
sound. Doe synthesizes this information in working memory.
He understands, roughly, that (in Joness view) Smiths speech
was meaningless and inarticulate.
hus far, however, the analysis does not distinguish the
understanding of metaphor from that of literal statements. In
both cases, there is a complex synthesis of lexical and episodic
information in working memory; this leads to contextually rel-
evant inference. What, then, is the diference between a meta-
phorical statement and a literal one?
One account begins by making metaphor a matter of inter-
pretation, rather than a matter of some intrinsic linguistic prop-
erty. Speciically, a speaker intends an utterance metaphorically
when he or she intends the addressee to interpret the utter-
ance metaphorically. What, then, constitutes metaphorical
interpretation?
Our mental lexicons are organized into clusters of infor-
mation bearing on particular objects and types of objects (see
schema, prototype ). his information is arranged hierar-
chically. here are certain things that we take to be more cru-
cial or deinitive features of a given type of object. For example,
being made from milk is a more important property of cheese
than being white or yellow. Moreover, a range of high-level
properties are default properties. If a default does not apply,
then we commonly have speciiable alternatives. hus, we
assume (as a default) that an unknown person say, Jones
has two arms. But if we learn that she does not, we assume that
she sufered some birth defect or is an amputee, these being the
standard alternatives.
When interpreting a statement literally, we assume that all
default information applies unless it is speciically contradicted.
Moreover, if a default is contradicted, we assume that one of the
standard alternatives applies. In contrast, when interpreting a
statement metaphorically, we do not assume that default infor-
mation applies. hat is the deinitive diference. In interpreting a
statement either metaphorically or literally, we scan lexical infor-
mation to glean what is most relevant to the topic at hand. But
when interpreting literally, we assume that unselected, default
information applies as well. We do not assume this when inter-
preting metaphorically.
he basic diference has several consequences. One is worth
mentioning. All interpretation involves drawing on a range of
associated information, not only that included in the lexical
entries for the source and target items. In metaphorical interpre-
tation, the loosening of hierarchical structures (e.g., through the
nonassumption of defaults) may encourage the incorporation
of more distant associations, including primed emotional asso-
ciations. For example, when Jones refers to Smith as a braying
donkey, she not only characterizes Smith but also expresses and
tries to communicate a certain feeling.
his account is similar to conceptual metaphor theory in
stressing cognition. However, it suggests that the cognitive
efects of metaphors need not be profound. Writers adopting this
account commonly view metaphor as operating more locally.
Metaphor, Neural Substrates of
Indeed, they see many conceptual metaphors as lexicalized. For
example, pass away just has die as one of its literal (lexical-
ized) meanings. It does not operate metaphorically.
One obvious advantage of this account is that it explains the
prominence of mixed metaphors. Consider a sentence such as I
tapped into the good life on the road to acing my degree. Some
elements are lexicalized here. Others are interpreted metaphori-
cally, but only to the extent required by context. In contrast,
conceptual metaphor theory might lead us to expect greater
consistency in the use of standard metaphorical mappings. he
present account does have more diiculty explaining consis-
tency when it does occur, as when someone says I followed the
straight and narrow path to the reach my destination a degree.
However, it may be possible to account for such consistency by
ordinary processes of priming, both current and historical (see
Hogan 2002).
One future task is to develop this account in terms of neural
substrates. Consistent with the preceding analysis, neurosci-
entiic research indicates that there is no sharp metaphorical/
literal division. Certain interpretive tasks demand greater activa-
tion of a broad range of meanings before selection. hese tasks
often involve metaphorical interpretation, but not invariably
(see metaphor, neural substrates of). Currently, we are
not in a position to examine semantic processing in a suiciently
ine-grained way to consider the processes posited here. We may
distinguish diferent categories of information (e.g., perception-
related versus motor-related; see semantics, neurobiology
of), but not precise features, defaults, and so on. Possibilities for
future research may be suggested by modeling these processes
in connectionist networks particularly the key diference
between assuming that defaults apply and assuming that they
do not.
Patrick Colm Hogan
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2002. A minimal, lexicalist/constituent transfer
account of metaphor. Style 36.3: 484502.
Ortony, Andrew. 1988. Are emotion metaphors conceptual or lexical?
Cognition and Emotion 2: 95104.
. 1993. he role of similarity in similes and metaphors. In
Metaphor and hought (2d ed.), ed. Andrew Ortony, 34256. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Tversky, Amos. 1977. Features of similarity. Psychological Review
84: 32752.
METAPHOR, NEURAL SUBSTRATES OF
he interest in how the brain processes metaphors traces its
origins back to a tradition that regarded igurative language as
poetic and, hence, the opposite of literal language. Despite its
ubiquity (Lakof and Johnson 1980), the underlying assumption
has been that this diference should be relected both in behav-
ioral (Grice 1975; Searle 1979) and brain mechanisms. In this
entry, we examine this and other long-standing assumptions,
suggesting that the interactions of linguistics with empirical,
neuropsychological, and neuroscientiic research have drawn
a far more complex and, arguably, fascinating picture, not only
about metaphor but also about the brain.
489
Metaphor, Neural Substrates of
Is Metaphor Really So Different?
Since the 1970s, the assumption that metaphors are processed
diferently from literals has come under close scrutiny. For
example, on the basis of psycholinguistic experiments, it has
been argued that in the presence of rich and supportive con-
text, metaphors and literals are processed along the same routes
(Gibbs 1994; Ortony et al. 1978).
Although some metaphoric and literal expressions require
similar processes (Glucksberg 2001), it has also become increas-
ingly evident that the categories used are in themselves heteroge-
neous. For instance, some literals (the ring was made of tin, with
a pebble instead of a gem) require more complex (metaphor-like)
conceptual mapping processes than others (hat stone we saw
in the natural history museum is a gem; Coulson and Van Petten
2002). Others (curl up and dye) are more appealing though harder
to process than metaphoric equivalents (curl up and die; Giora
2003). Metaphors are not all alike either; some are novel, hav-
ing nonsalient metaphoric interpretations that are usually more
appealing yet harder to process than those that are conventional
and salient (Giora et al. 2004). Furthermore, some metaphoric
stimuli, though relatively conventional, may still be more open-
ended than others and, when functioning as a context, give rise
to a wider range of associations (Stringaris et al. 2006).
In fact, recent indings indicate that notions such as degree
of salience, complexity, or open-endedness may be more suit-
able for describing the complexity of some of the phenomena
in question and span the metaphor-literal divide. Furthermore,
while these notions may, to an extent, overlap, none of them is
speciic to metaphor.
Is Metaphor Processed Differently in the Brain?
Consistent with the prevailing view of the right hemisphere
(RH) as being more adept at creativity than the left hemi-
sphere (LH), early lesion studies have been interpreted as
evidence that metaphors rely more heavily than their literal
counterparts on regions in the RH (Winner and Gardner 1977).
However, Ellen Winner and Howard Gardners study actually
reveals that patients with RH lesions were not insensitive to met-
aphor (1977, 725) when ofering verbal explications to igurative
stimuli, although they tended to erroneously select literal over
metaphoric interpretations in a picture-matching task. Similarly,
the results of the earliest imaging study in the ield (Bottini et al.
1994) were also seen as supporting a RH predominance for meta-
phor comprehension. However, alternative explanations may be
more appropriate, given that the linguistic items used also dif-
fered on categories other than sensu strictu metaphoricity.
Indeed, subsequent studies have challenged the purported
predominance of the RH by demonstrating that when conven-
tional metaphors compared to literals are processed, the LH is
more active (Ahrens et al. 2007; Lee and Dapretto 2006; Oliveri,
Romero, and Papageno 2004), perhaps relecting retrieval from
semantic stores. In fact, most recent research suggests that in
the absence of a rich biasing context, the hemispheres are insen-
sitive to igurativeness. Rather, the RH is more sensitive than the
LH to novel, nonsalient interpretations and poetic associations,
to complexity, and to open-endedness (Blasko and Kazmerski
2006; Giora 2007). his is corroborated by a recent fmri study
showing that failure to recruit RH areas when processing novel
490
metaphors distinguishes patients with schizophrenia from
healthy controls (Kircher et al. 2007).
Taken together, these indings suggest that lateralization
in the brains hemispheres is contingent upon such factors as
novelty, semantic and conceptual mapping complexity, and
evoked range of associations, all of which seem to act indepen-
dently of igurativeness, thus challenging as too simplistic the
notion of a preferential RH processing of stimuli solely by vir-
tue of their metaphoricity. hese factors, however, are in accor-
dance with an alternative account the inecoarse semantic
coding hypothesis (Beeman 1998; Jung-Beeman 2005) which
views the LH as adept at processing inely tuned semantic rela-
tions and the RH as specialized in processing distant semantic
relationships.
NOVELTY. Recent studies indicate that the degree of novelty of
an expression is an important determinant of neural process-
ing. For instance, lesion studies (Giora et al. 2000; Kaplan et
al. 1990) and studies of individuals with Alzheimers disease
(Amanzio et al. 2008), as well as functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) studies involving healthy participants (Eviatar
and Just 2006), demonstrated that processing non-salient
(ironic, metaphoric) interpretations relied more heavily
on the RH; processing conventional (metaphoric) meanings
involved the LH. Similarly, a series of fMRI, divided visual ield
(DVF), and event-related potential (ERP) studies demonstrated
increased activation of RH areas during processing of nonsa-
lient interpretations of novel metaphors (Arzouan, Goldstein,
and Faust 2007; Faust and Mashal 2007; Mashal and Faust 2008;
Mashal, Faust, and Hendler 2005; Mashal et al. 2007) and lit-
eral/compositional interpretations of idioms (Mashal et al.
2008). And while RH advantage was demonstrated in process-
ing nonsalient interpretations of novel metaphors during irst
exposure, repeated exposure beneited the LH (Mashal and
Faust 2009).
COMPLEXITY. hat RH recruitment increases with complex sen-
tences has been demonstrated by a number of studies (Jung-
Beeman 2005). his has also been seen as typifying conceptual
mapping complexity (Coulson and Van Petten 2002), thus intro-
ducing another parameter that may determine processing and
operate regardless of metaphoricity. Further work is awaited to
establish this view.
RANGE OF SEMANTIC ASSOCIATIONS. Range of semantic asso-
ciations, also termed degree of open-endedness, can be seen
as determined by the extent to which a stimulus evokes a wide
network of semantic associations (Black 1993). In a fMRI study,
Stringaris et al. (2006) showed that deciding that a given probe
was unrelated to a previous neutral context triggered activation
of frontal RH areas following open-ended (metaphoric) contexts
(Some answers are straight) but not following more restricted
(literal) contexts (Some answers are emotional). In the case of
the open-ended primes (see priming, semantic), both nega-
tive and positive decisions elicited the same neural responses.
Indeed, higher degree of open-endedness may lead to increased
RH activation, probably because of the evocation of remotely
related associations (Jung-Beeman 2005). As shown by Mashal
Metaphor, Neural Substrates of
et al. (in press), RH areas were uniquely involved when novel lit-
eral interpretations of familiar idioms (involving their familiar
idiomatic meanings as well) were deliberated on.
CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION. Contextual factors involved in
processing (such as biasing information, task, mood, or expe-
rience) further argue against a speciic and invariant brain
locus for metaphor (Kutas 2006). hey show that recruitment
of neural networks depends upon factors other than metapho-
ricity per se. For instance, in Coulson and Van Petten (2007),
RH advantage in processing novel metaphors disappears in
the presence of biasing information. In Kacinik and Chiarello
(2007), both hemispheres were activated by metaphors, but
only the LH-response was context sensitive, thereby restricting
the range of possible alternatives. Conversely, the response in
the RH indicated retention of alternatives available for process-
ing. Findings in Rapp et al. (2007) indicate that the type of task
is an additional determinant of processing. When participants
had to judge the emotional valence of connotations, meta-
phors elicited LH regions, despite their novelty. In Stringaris
et al. (2006), familiar metaphors activated RH areas when a
coherence judgment was required; however, when a meaning-
fulness judgment was required, same stimuli evoked LH areas
(Stringaris et al. 2007). In Blasko and Kazmerski (2006), it was
individual diferences in experience that mattered: Poets and
nonpoets difered as to which brain areas were recruited when
reading poetry.
In sum, recent research, involving a wide range of method-
ologies, does not provide support for the long-assumed special
status of metaphor in language. Instead, it shows that the pro-
cessing of metaphors in the brain depends on a great number of
factors beyond igurativeness.
Rachel Giora and Argyris K. Stringaris
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METAPHOR, UNIVERSALS OF
Universal Metaphors?
Native speakers of all languages use a large number of meta-
phors when they communicate about the world (Lakof and
Johnson 1980). Such metaphorically used words and expres-
sions may vary considerably across diferent languages. For
example, the idea that is expressed in English with the words
spending your time is expressed in Hungarian as illing your time.
he images that diferent languages and cultures employ to
code meanings can be extremely diverse. Given this diversity, it
is natural to ask: Are there any universal metaphors at all, if by
universal we mean those linguistic metaphors that occur in each
and every language? his question is diicult because it goes
against our everyday experiences and intuitions as regards meta-
phorical language in diverse cultures; it would also be extremely
diicult to study, given that there are 4,0006,000 languages spo-
ken around the world today.
If we go beyond looking at metaphorically used linguistic
expressions in diferent languages, however, and look at con-
ceptual metaphors instead of linguistic metaphors, we begin
to notice that many conceptual metaphors appear in a wide
range of languages. For example, Hoyt Alverson (1994) found
that the TIME IS SPACE conceptual metaphor can be found
in such diverse languages and cultures as English, Mandarin
Chinese, Hindi, and Sesotho. Many other researchers suggested
that the same conceptual metaphor is present in a large num-
ber of additional languages. Several other conceptual metaphors
appear in a large number of diferent languages. On the basis
of evidence from a number of linguists who are native speak-
ers of the respective languages, Zoltn Kvecses (2000) points
out that English, Japanese, Chinese, Hungarian, Wolof, Zulu,
Polish, and others possess the metaphor AN ANGRY PERSON
IS A PRESSURIZED CONTAINER, to various degrees. Ning Yus
(1995, 1998) work indicates that that the metaphor HAPPINESS
IS UP is also present not only in English but also in Chinese. he
system of metaphors called the event structure metaphor (Lakof
1993) includes such submetaphors as CAUSES ARE FORCES,
STATES ARE CONTAINERS, PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS,
ACTION IS MOTION, DIFFICULTIES ARE IMPEDIMENTS
(TO MOTION), and so forth. Remarkably, this set of submeta-
phors occurs in such widely diferent languages and cultures as
Chinese (Yu 1998) and Hungarian (Kvecses 2005), in addition
to English. Eve Sweetser (1990) noticed that the KNOWING IS
SEEING and the more general the MIND IS THE BODY meta-
phors can be found in many European languages and are prob-
ably good candidates for (near-)universal metaphors. As a inal
example, George Lakof and Mark Johnson (1999) describe the
metaphors used for ones inner life in English. It turns out that
metaphors such as SELF-CONTROL IS OBJECT POSSESSION,
SUBJECT AND SELF ARE ADVERSARIES, and THE SELF IS A
CHILD are shared by English, Japanese, and Hungarian. Given
that ones inner life is a highly elusive phenomenon and, hence,
would seem to be heavily culture and language dependent, one
would expect a great deal of signiicant cultural variation in such
a metaphor. All in all, then, we have a number of cases that con-
stitute near-universal or potentially universal conceptual meta-
phors, though not universal metaphors in the strong sense.
How Can We Have (Near-)Universal Metaphors?
How is it possible that such conceptual metaphors exist in diverse
languages and cultures? After all, the languages belong to very
diferent language families and represent very diferent cultures
of the world. Several answers to this question lend themselves
for consideration. First, we can suggest that by coincidence, all
these languages developed the same conceptual metaphors for
happiness, time, purpose, and so on. Second, we can consider
the possibility that languages borrowed the metaphors from
one another. hird, we can argue that there may be some uni-
versal basis for the same metaphors to develop in the diverse
languages.
Let us take as an example the HAPPINESS IS UP concep-
tual metaphor, irst discussed by Lakof and Johnson (1980) in
English. his conceptual metaphor can be seen in such linguis-
tic expressions as feeling up, being on cloud nine, being high, and
others. Yu (1995, 1998) noticed that the conceptual metaphor
can also be found in Chinese. And evidence shows that it also
exists in Hungarian. Following are some linguistic examples (Yu
used the grammatical abbreviations PRT = particle and ASP =
aspect marker):
Chinese:
happy is up
Ta hen gao-xing.
he very high-spirit
He is very high-spirited/happy.

492
Metaphor, Universals of
Ta xing congcong de.
he spirit rise-rise PRT
His spirits are rising and rising./Hes pleased and excited.
Zhe-xia tiqi le wo-de xingzhi.
this-moment raise ASP my mood
his time it lifted my mood/interest.
Hungarian:
happiness is up
Ez a ilm feldobott.
this the ilm up-threw-me
his ilm gave me a high.-his ilm made me happy.
Majd elszll a boldogsgtl.
almost away-lies-he/she the happiness-from
He/she is on cloud nine.
English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hungarian (a Finno-Ugric
language) belong to diferent language families, which
developed independently for much of their history. It is also
unlikely that the three languages had any signiicant impact on
one another in their recent history. his is not to say that such an
impact never shapes particular languages as regards their meta-
phors (e.g., the processes of globalization and the widespread
use of the Internet may popularize certain conceptual meta-
phors, such as TIME IS A COMMODITY), but only to suggest
that the particular HAPPINESS IS UP metaphor does not exist in
the three languages because, say, Hungarian borrowed it from
Chinese and English from Hungarian.
So how did the same conceptual metaphor emerge, then, in
these diverse languages? he best answer seems to be that there is
some universal bodily experience that led to its emergence. Lakof
and Johnson argued early that English has the metaphor because
when we are happy, we tend to be physically up, move around, be
active, jump up and down, smile (i.e., turn up the corners of the
mouth), rather than down, inactive, and static, and so forth. hese
are undoubtedly universal experiences associated with happiness
(or, more precisely, joy), and they are likely to produce potentially
universal (or near-universal) conceptual metaphors. he emer-
gence of a potentially universal conceptual metaphor does not,
of course, mean that the linguistic expressions themselves will be
the same in diferent languages that possess a particular concep-
tual metaphor (Barcelona 2000; Maalej 2004).
Kvecses (1990, 2000) proposed, furthermore, that the uni-
versal bodily experiences can be captured in the conceptual
metonymies associated with particular concepts. Speciically,
in the case of emotion concepts such as happiness, anger, love,
pride, and so forth, the metonymies correspond to various kinds
of physiological, behavioral, and expressive reactions. hese
reactions provide us with a proile of the bodily basis of emotion
concepts. hus, the metonymies give us a sense of the embodied
nature of concepts, and the embodiment of concepts may be
overlapping, that is, (near-)universal, across diferent languages
and language families. Such universal embodiment may lead to
the emergence of shared conceptual metaphors.
Joseph Grady (1997a, 1997b) developed the Lakof-Johnson
view further by proposing that we need to distinguish complex
metaphors from primary metaphors. His idea was that com-
plex metaphors (e.g., THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS) are com-
posed of primary metaphors (e.g., LOGICAL ORGANIZATION IS
PHYSICAL STRUCTURE). he primary metaphors consist of cor-
relations of a subjective experience with a physical experience.
As a matter of fact, it turned out that many of the conceptual
metaphors discussed in the cognitive linguistic literature
are primary metaphors in this sense. For instance, HAPPY IS UP
is best viewed as a primary metaphor, wherein being happy is a
subjective experience and being physically up is a physical one
that is repeatedly associated with it. Other primary metaphors
include MORE IS UP, PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS, and
INTIMACY IS CLOSENESS. On this view, it is the primary meta-
phors that are potentially universal.
Primary metaphors function at a fairly local and speciic level
of conceptualization, and, hence, in the brain. At the same time,
we can also assume the existence of much more global meta-
phors (see also generic- and specific-level metaphors).
For example, animals are commonly viewed as humans and
humans as animals; humans are commonly conceptualized as
objects and objects as humans, and so on. A famous example of
the objects as humans metaphor was described by Keith Basso
(1967), who showed that in the language of the Western Apache,
cars are metaphorically viewed in terms of the human body. In
addition, the work of Bernd Heine and his colleagues (Heine,
Claudi, and Hnnemeyer 1991; Heine 1995; Heine and Kuteva
2002) reveals other large-scale metaphorical processes that peo-
ple seem to employ nearly universally; for example, spatial rela-
tions are commonly understood as parts of the human body (e.g.,
the head means up and the feet mean down). hese conceptual
metaphors seem to be global design features of the brain/mind
of human beings.
It seems to be clear at this point that commonality in human
experience is a major force shaping the metaphors we have. It is
this force that gives us many of the metaphors that we can take
to be near-universal or potentially universal. But commonality
in human experience is not the only force that plays a role in
the process of establishing and using metaphors. here are also
countervailing forces that work against universality in metaphor
production.
Causes of Metaphor Variation
Heines work also shows that not even such global metaphors as
SPATIAL RELATIONS ARE PARTS OF THE BODY are universal in
an absolute sense. here are languages in which spatial relations
are conceptualized not as the human but as the animal body.
Heine points out that such languages function in societies where
animal husbandry is a main form of subsistence. his leads us
to the question: What causes our metaphors to vary as they do?
It is convenient to set up two large groups of causes: diferential
experience and diferential cognitive preferences. Diferential
experience involves diferences in the social-cultural context, in
social and personal history, and in what we can term social and
personal concern or interest (see Kvecses 2005).
One example of how the social-cultural context can shape
conceptual metaphors is provided by Dirk Geeraerts and Stephan
Grondelaers (1995). hey note that in the Euro-American tradi-
tion, it is the classical-medieval notion of the four humors from
493
Metaphor, Universals of
which the Euro-American conceptualization of anger (as well as
that of emotion in general) derived. he humoral view maintains
that the four luids (phlegm, black bile, yellow bile, and blood)
and the temperatures associated with them regulate the vital
processes of the human body. he humors were also believed to
determine personality types (such as sanguine, melancholy, etc.)
and account for a number of medical problems. he humoral
view exerted a major impact on the emergence of the European
conception of anger as a hot luid in a pressurized container. By
contrast, Brian King (1989) and Yu (1995 and 1998) suggest that
the Chinese concept of nu (corresponding to anger) is bound up
with the notion of qi, that is, the energy that lows through the
body. Qi in turn is embedded in not only the psychological (i.e.,
emotional) but also the philosophical and medical discourse of
Chinese culture and civilization. When qi rises in the body, there
is anger (nu). Without the concept of qi, it would be diicult to
imagine the view of anger in Chinese culture. hus, emotion
concepts, such as anger in English, dh in Hungarian (the two
representing European culture), and nu in Chinese, are in part
explained in the respective cultures by the culture-speciic con-
cepts of the four humors and qi, respectively. It appears that the
culture-speciic key concepts that operate in particular cultures
account for many of the speciic-level diferences among the vari-
ous anger-related concepts and the PRESSURIZED CONTAINER
metaphor.
As an example of how diferences in human concern can
create new metaphors, consider some well-known concep-
tual metaphors for sadness: SADNESS IS DOWN, SADNESS IS
A BURDEN, and SADNESS IS DARK. he counterpart of sad-
ness is depression in a clinical context. Linda McMullen and
John Conway (2002) studied the metaphors that people with
episodes of depression use and, with one exception, found the
same conceptual metaphors for depression that nondepressed
people use for sadness. hey identiied the unique metaphor as
DEPRESSION IS A CAPTOR. Why dont merely sad people talk expressions are much less frequent in Malay. It seems that, at
about sadness as being a captor? Most people do not normally
talk about being trapped by, wanting to be free of, or wanting
to break out of sadness, although these are ways of talking and
thinking about depression in a clinical context. It makes sense to
suggest that people with depression use this language and way of
thinking about their situation because it faithfully captures what
they experience and feel. heir deep concern is with their unique
experiences and feelings that set them apart from people who
do not have them. It is this concern that gives them the CAPTOR
metaphor for depression (see also emotion and language).
People can employ a variety of diferent cognitive operations
in their efort to make sense of experience. For example, what I
call experiential focus can have an impact on the speciic details
of the conceptual metaphors used, and what is conceptualized
metaphorically in one culture can predominantly be conceptu-
alized by means of metonymy in another (Kvecses 2005). he
universal bodily basis on which universal metaphors could be
built may not be utilized in the same way or to the same extent
in diferent languages. What experiential focus means is that
diferent peoples may be attuned to diferent aspects of their
bodily functioning in relation to a metaphorical target domain
(see source and target) or that they can ignore or downplay
certain aspects of their bodily functioning with respect to the
494
metaphorical conceptualization of a target domain. A case in
point is the conceptualization of anger in English and Chinese.
As studies of the physiology of anger across several unrelated
cultures show, increase in skin temperature and blood pres-
sure are universal physiological correlates of anger (Levenson
et al. 1992). his accounts for the ANGER IS HEAT metaphor in
English and in many other languages. However, Kings and Yus
work mentioned earlier suggest that the conceptualization of
anger in terms of heat is much less prevalent in Chinese than it
is in English. In Chinese, the major metaphors of anger seem to
be based on pressure not heat. his indicates that speakers of
Chinese have relied on a diferent aspect of their physiology in
the metaphorical conceptualization of anger than speakers of
English. he major point is that in many cases, the universality
of the experiential basis does not necessarily lead to universally
equivalent conceptualization at least not at the speciic level of
hot luids.
Are there any diferences in the way the cognitive processes
of metaphor versus metonymy are used in diferent languages
and cultures? Jonathan Charteris-Black (2003) examined in great
detail how and for what purpose three concepts mouth, tongue,
and lip are iguratively utilized in English and Malay. He found
similarities in metaphorical conceptualization. For example,
in both languages, the same underlying conceptual metaphor
(e.g., MANNER IS TASTE) accounts for expressions like honey-
tongued and lidah manis (tongue sweet), and in both languages
such expressions are used for the discourse function of evaluat-
ing (especially negatively) what a person says. However, he also
found that the igurative expressions involving the three concepts
tended to be metonymic in English and metaphoric in Malay. In
English, more than half of the expressions were metonyms, while
in Malay the vast majority of them showed evidence of metaphor
(often in combination with metonymy). For example, while met-
onymic expressions like tight-lipped abound in English, such
least in the domain of speech organs, the employment of these
concepts by means of igurative processes is partially culture
speciic.
In sum, metaphorical linguistic expressions may vary widely
cross-culturally, but many conceptual metaphors appear to be
potentially universal or near-universal. his happens because
people across the world share certain bodily experiences.
However, even such potentially universal metaphors may dis-
play variation in their speciic details because people do not
use their cognitive capacities in the same way from culture to
culture. Moreover, shared conceptual metaphors may vary
cross-culturally in the frequency of their use. Finally, many con-
ceptual metaphors are unique to particular (sub)cultures or sets
of cultures because of diferences in such factors as the social-
cultural context, history, or human concern that characterize
these cultures.
Zoltn Kvecses
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Alverson, Hoyt. 1994. Semantics and Experience: Universal Metaphors
of Time in English, Mandarin, Hindi, and Sesotho. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Metaphor, Universals of
Barcelona, Antonio. 2000. On the plausibility of claiming a metonymic
motivation for conceptual metaphor. In Metaphor and Metonymy at
the Crossroads, ed. A. Barcelona, 3158. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Basso, Keith H. 1967. Semantic aspects of linguistic acculturation.
American Anthropologist, n.s., 69.5: 4717.
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2003. Speaking with forked tongue: A com-
parative study of metaphor and metonymy in English and Malay
phraseology. Metaphor and Symbol 18.4: 289310.
Geeraerts, Dirk, and Stephan Grondelaers. 1995. Looking back at
anger: Cultural traditions and metaphorical patterns. In Language
and the Cognitive Construal of the World, ed. J. Taylor and R. MacLaury,
15379. Berlin: Gruyter.
Grady, Joseph. 1997a. Foundations of meaning: Primary metaphors and
primary scenes. Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley.
. 1997b. heories are buildings revisited. Cognitive Linguistics
8: 26790.
Haspelmath, Martin. 1997. From Space to Time: Temporal Adverbials in
the Worlds Languages. Munich and Newcastle: Lincom Europa.
Heine, Bernd. 1995. Conceptual grammaticalization and prediction. In
Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World, ed. J. Taylor and R.
MacLaury, 11935. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Heine, Bernd, Ulrike Claudi, and Friederike Hnnemeyer. 1991.
Grammaticalization: A Conceptual Framework. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Heine, Bernd, and Tania Kuteva. 2002. World Lexicon of
Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
King, Brian. 1989. he conceptual structure of emotional experience in
Chinese. Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University.
Kvecses, Zoltn. 1990. Emotion Concepts. Berlin and New York: Springer-
Verlag.
. 2000. Metaphor and Emotion. New York and Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
. 2005. Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Lakof, George. 1993. he contemporary theory of metaphor. In
Metaphor and hought, ed. A. Ortony, 20251. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lakof, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh. New York: Basic Books.
Levenson, R. W., P. Ekman, K. Heider, and W. V. Friesen. 1992. Emotion
and autonomic nervous system activity in the Minangkabau of West
Sumatra. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 62: 97288.
Maalej, Zouhair. 2004. Figurative language in anger expressions in
Tunisian Arabic: An extended view of embodiment. Metaphor and
Symbol 19.1: 5175.
McMullen, Linda, and John Conway. 2002. Conventional metaphors for
depression. In Verbal Communication of Emotion: Interdisciplinary
Perspectives, ed. S. Fussell, 16781. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum.
Mithen, Steven. 1996. he Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the Origin
of Art, Science and Religion. London and New York: hames and
Hudson.
. 1998. A creative explosion? heory of mind, language, and the
disembodied mind of the Upper Paleolithic. In Creativity in Human
Evolution and Prehistory, ed. S. Mithen, 16591. London and New
York: Routledge.
Sweetser, Eve. 1990. From Etymology to Pragmatics. Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Yu, Ning. 1995. Metaphorical expressions of anger and happiness in
English and Chinese. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 10: 5992.
. 1998. he Contemporary heory of Metaphor in Chinese: A
Perspective from Chinese. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Meter
METER
Verse is text that is divided into lines (verse lines). One of the
subtypes of verse is metrical verse. In metrical verse, the length
of the lines is controlled by a set of rules (indirectly, all metrical
rules count syllables). he lines in metrical verse are usually
subject to other restrictions as well, most commonly restrictions
on the rhythm of the line (based on stress, syllable weight,
or lexical tone), and/or on a requirement that a syllable in a
speciic line-internal location be word-initial or word-inal (a
caesura rule). Some meters also include rules about rhyme or
alliteration.
Although verse is probably a universal (see poetic form,
universals of), found in all oral or literary traditions, there are
poetic traditions without metrical verse, of which perhaps the
best known is the Hebrew poetry of the Old Testament, which
is based on syntactic parallelism rather than on counted syl-
lables. Metrical verse is found in European literatures (Greek,
English, the various Celtic, Germanic, Romance, and Slavic lit-
eratures, also Finnish), in Arabic and Islamic literatures (e.g.,
Persian, Urdu, Turkish, Hausa), and in literatures less clearly
inluenced by Arabic (such as Berber and Somali), in the litera-
tures of South Asia (e.g., Sanskrit, Pali, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil),
of Southeast Asia (e.g., hai, Burmese, Vietnamese), and of East
Asia (e.g., Chinese, Korean, Japanese). Metrical verse is reported
to be largely or completely absent in the poetry of ancient Semitic
literatures and of Australia, non-Islamic Africa, the Americas,
and New Guinea, but this may just be because researchers have
not been looking for it (ieldworkers far too rarely ask questions
about the poetics or poetic practice of a culture).
he variety of meters can be illustrated by some examples.
English iambic pentameter requires a 10- or 11-syllable line,
with even-numbered syllables tending to have stress. he French
alexandrin requires a line of 12 or 13 syllables, with the sixth syl-
lable both stressed and word-inal. Swahili shairi requires a line
of 16 syllables, with the eighth syllable word-inal (and no con-
trol over rhythm). Greek iambic trimeter requires a line of 12 syl-
lables, with even-numbered syllables heavy (containing a long
vowel or ending in two consonants), and the third, seventh and
eleventh syllables light (containing a short vowel ending in at
most one consonant). Arabic kamil requires a line of between 12
and 15 syllables with a complex rhythmic control (in the short-
est line the third, seventh and eleventh syllables are light and the
others heavy). Sanskrit sardulavikridita requires a line of 19 syl-
lables with the aperiodic rhythm heavy heavy heavy light light
heavy light heavy light light light heavy (word boundary) heavy
heavy light heavy heavy light heavy. Japanese meters require
lines of ive or seven light syllables (but permit a heavy syllable
to substitute for two light syllables). A genre of Vietnamese pairs
a six-syllable line with an eight-syllable line, in which the sec-
ond, and sixth (and eighth) syllables belong to one tonal class
and the fourth to another. Germanic alliterative meter requires
between two and four stressed syllables, at least two of which
must alliterate.
In literary studies, meter is usually discussed as an aid to
interpretation, and less attention has been paid to the the-
ory that underlies the meter than is desirable. he approach to
meter most common in such studies is the foot combination and
495
Meter
substitution approach. In this approach, a meter such as iambic
pentameter is a template made by combining ive iambic feet
each of which is composed of a sequence of an unmarked sylla-
ble followed by a syllable that is marked. he resulting template
is matched to a line whose syllables are unstressed or stressed,
so that stressed syllables occupy marked positions in the tem-
plate and unstressed syllables the unmarked positions. For
lines that are not fully periodic (e.g., in an iambic pentameter
line where the rhythm does not involve a uniform repetition of
unstressed-stressed throughout), the template itself is changed
by substituting a foot of a diferent kind (e.g., a spondee for an
iamb) to match the stress pattern of the variant part of the line.
his approach only describes the actual rhythm of the line, and
though it ofers a convenient vocabulary for the literary critic, it
tells us nothing about the organization of the meter of the line
or why some variations are possible in this meter and some not.
Most recent theoretical accounts express strong reservations or
total rejection of this approach.
Recent theoretical approaches to meter are based primarily
on linguistic theory, particularly on the theory of phonology,
following the foundational work of Morris Halle and Samuel Jay
Keyser (1971). For metrical purposes, most such theories adopt
mechanisms that are used in the theory of phonology, particu-
larly the theory of word stress. Following Mark Libermans (1975)
insight that stress is a matter of the relation between syllables, not
a feature of syllables, diferent approaches explored the use of
trees and grids as representations in accounts both of word stress
and of metrical poetry (Kiparsky 1977; Hayes 1983). he phono-
logical theory of optimality theory has also been adapted for
use in metrical verse (e.g., Golston and Riad 2005). Nigel Fabb
and Halle (2008) develop their account of poetic meter from a
formalism proposed for word stress by William Idsardi (1992); it
groups the syllables with the help of unpaired parentheses both
in phonology (word stress) and in lines (metrical verse). While in
most approaches the metrical representation is a template built
by special rules and then matched to the line, for Fabb and Halle
the metrical representation is generated from the line (much as
in generative syntax the syntactic representation is generated
from the terminal elements, such as words or morphemes).
In metrical verse, as noted, the length of the line is controlled.
In most cases, the basic unit of measurement is the syllable.
However, in many metrical traditions, some syllables are part of
the line but uncounted. In a common convention, a syllable end-
ing in a vowel precedes a syllable beginning in a vowel, but only
one of the two syllables is counted for metrical purposes (though
both are usually pronounced). he latter fact shows something
important; it shows that the grouping and counting of syllables
for metrical purposes is not directly dependent on the phonology
of the lines. It also poses evident problems for other approaches,
such as that of Kristin Hanson and Paul Kiparsky (1996), which
attempt to account for variation in number of syllables by refer-
ring to the speciic phonology of the language.
In Japanese, some Indian meters, and some other metrical
traditions, morae are counted, a heavy syllable counting as two
morae and a light syllable as one mora. It is often argued that
the heavy syllable actually consists phonologically of two morae,
but this is not necessary for an explanation of the meter, which
can refer just to the syllable as projecting one or two metrical
496
elements. In Sanskrit and later Indian meters, morae are thus
counted, but some meters count morae while also controlling
syllables: In the gana-counting meters, syllables form (typically)
four-mora groups that are respected in composing the line.
Some song meters (e.g., Tongan, Ugandan) also use mora count-
ing as an organizing principle, but this may be a secondary efect
in song traditions where heavy syllables match two beats, light
syllables match one, and the number of beats is musically con-
trolled. Here, a better understanding of the independent metri-
cal status of text and tune is required.
In addition to controlling the length of the line, metrical rules
also often control a pattern based on putting the syllables into
two classes, one marked and the other unmarked. It is of par-
ticular interest that metrical rules diferentiate two kinds of syl-
lable but apparently never three or more kinds, even though this
greater diferentiation is phonetically possible in many lan-
guages. For example, in English metrical verse, the only strictly
controlled syllables are those that carry main stress in a poly-
syllable; other syllables, whether stressed or not, are not strictly
controlled, and this is why English metrical verse is rhythmically
fairly variable (see the discussion in music, language and).
his means that as regards the strict regulation of syllable types
in English meters, the syllable carrying the main stress in a poly-
syllabic word is in one class, and all other syllables, whether
stressed or unstressed, are in the other class. Yet English distin-
guishes several degrees of stress in longer words, such as autobi-
ographical or onomatopoeic, and there is no question that in the
perception of the rhythm of the line, we perceive more than two
degrees of stress. In the quantitative meters of Greek, Sanskrit, or
Arabic, syllable placement depends on whether a syllable is light
or is heavy. In Vietnamese, there are phonologically six distinct
kinds of tone, but the six types of syllable are grouped into just
two tonal classes for metrical purposes. It is interesting in this
connection to consider alliterative meters, such as the meter of
Beowulf; in the normative line with four stressed syllables, the
third must alliterate with the irst and/or second but not with the
fourth. Here, stressed syllables are partitioned into two types
alliterating and not alliterating.
A patterned distribution based on two metrical classes of syl-
lable, such as the heavy and light syllables in Greek verse, is often
thought of as the basis of the rhythm of the line. A major way in
which theories of meter diverge is in their account of the relation
between rhythm and meter. For example, in English iambic pen-
tameter, there is a general tendency for odd-numbered syllables
to be unstressed and even-numbered syllables to be stressed,
but the actual pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables var-
ies constantly from line to line, thus, lines in the same meter can
vary in their rhythm. Some accounts of English meters attempt to
explain the full range of rhythmic variation by building statistical
tendencies into the metrical rules. In a diferent approach, Derek
Attridge (1982) incorporates rhythm fully into his account of
metrical verse, so that meter and rhythm are accounted for by a
single theory. In his account, the metrical template also includes
elements that match silences in the text (ofbeats), thus build-
ing temporal notions into the metrical theory. his and similar
accounts must cope with the fact that lines with the same met-
rical pattern can be realized with diferent rhythmic patterns,
and vice versa. If rhythm is not explained by the metrical rules,
Methodological Solipsism
several types of explanation are possible (and can be combined).
For example, Fabb (2002) argues that the perception of rhythmic
regularity involves pragmatic processes of pattern matching that
are distinct from metrical rules (which govern those aspects of
the line that are strictly controlled and, like other kinds of implicit
linguistic rules, are not directly perceived). It is also possible that
rhythmic patterns might be independently represented, per-
haps by grids similar to those found in metrical verse. he link
between the metrical form and the rhythmic form of the verse
then may fall under a theory of text-to-tune matching.
Nigel Fabb and Morris Halle
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Attridge, Derek. 1982. he Rhythms of English Poetry. Harlow,
UK: Longman.
Fabb, Nigel. 2002. Language and Literary Structure: he Linguistic
Analysis of Form in Verse and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Fabb, Nigel, and Morris Halle. 2008. Meter in Poetry: A New heory.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Golston, Chris, and Tomas Riad. 2005. he phonology of Greek lyric
meter. Journal of Linguistics 41: 77115.
Halle, Morris, and Samuel Jay Keyser. 1971. English Stress: Its Form, Its
Growth and Its Role in Verse. New York: Harper and Row.
Hanson, Kristin, and Paul Kiparsky. 1996. A parametric theory of poetic
meter. Language 72: 287335.
Hayes, Bruce. 1983. A grid-based theory of English meter. Linguistic
Inquiry 14: 35794.
Idsardi, William. 1992. he computation of stress. Ph.D. diss.,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Kiparsky, Paul. 1977. he rhythmic structure of English verse. Linguistic
Inquiry 8: 189247.
Liberman, Mark. 1975. he intonational system of English. Ph.D. diss.,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
METHODOLOGICAL SOLIPSISM
Methodological solipsism (MS) is the thesis that mental (or
psychological) states are to be individuated solely by referring
to their relationships with other mental states and the physical
state of someones brain, but not by referring to the physical
world outside the individual to whom those states are ascribed.
his phrase was coined by Hilary Putnam (1975a) in an essay
about meaning externalism and internalism, but its
main advocate (Putnam opposes the thesis) is Jerry Fodor, who
defends it as part of the representational and computational the-
ory of mind (Fodor 1980).
he main issue that MS is concerned with is the relation-
ship between mental states and the outside world or, rather, the
absence of such relationships so far as explanation in scientiic
psychology is concerned. In Putnams (1975a) Twin Earth
thought experiment, the question is whether Putnam and his
Twin are in the same mental state when thinking about water,
given that on Earth water is H2O, whereas on Twin Earth water
has the chemical formula XYZ (though it behaves otherwise iden-
tically to water on Earth). If mental states are to explain behavior,
Fodor argues, it needs to be the case that Putnam and his Twin
are in the same mental state when they are thinking I would like
to take a dive into the deep waters. In an externalist account of
Methodology
mental states, this is impossible because Putnams thought refers
to H2O whereas his Twins thought refers to XYZ. Fodors conclu-
sion from this argument is that mental states are to be construed
narrowly, without reference to the external state of the world.
Only the so-called narrow content and structure of a belief deter-
mines behavior, not whether the belief is about H2O or XYZ or
even whether its true or not.
In addition to mental states being internal, Fodor argues,
mental processes have to be computational, that is, work on the
formal, syntactical properties of mental states, rather than on
their semantical properties, which are forbidden in an inter-
nalist account. his is called the formality condition.
Fodors main argument for MS is a negative one: Adhering
to its counterpart renders psychology practically impossible
because it assumes the availability of a full description of the
relevant aspects of the world in physical terms, such being
necessary to individuate mental states. hat is, we would need
to have the physical description of water available to tell us
what a mental state containing water is about. However, such
physical descriptions are often unavailable. MS is diferent
from functionalism (as proposed by Putnam) in that it adds the
requirement that mental states are formal, symbolic entities on
which computational processes can work. Functionalism deines
mental states to be determined by their functional role, that is,
their place in a causal network of other mental states, sensory
inputs, and behavior resulting from them. Functionalism sets
apart mental states from their physical substratum, whereas MS
divorces mental states from their causal antecedents in the world
and proposes that mental states are to be treated as syntactical
rather than semantical entities.
Ingmar Visser
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Fodor, Jerry A. 1980. Methodological solipsism considered as a research
strategy in cognitive psychology. Behavioral and Brain Sciences
3: 63109.
Putnam, Hilary. 1975a. he meaning of meaning. In Mind, Language
and Reality: Philosophical Papers, II: 21571. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
. 1975b. he nature of mental states. In Mind, Language and
Reality: Philosophical Papers, II: 42940. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Tuomela, Raima. 1989. Methodological solipsism and explanation in
psychology. Philosophy of Science 56.1: 2347.
METHODOLOGY
he topic of methodology most generally involves exploring the
range of responses to the following questions that any researcher
in the language sciences must answer: What sort of empirical
data are you collecting, how are you collecting it, and how do
you hope it will bear on the research question(s) you are trying
to answer? Addressing these questions for a particular special-
ization within the language sciences falls under the purview
of its experts. My goal here is a more general examination of
issues that arise when language scientists assess alternative data
sources and means of data collection and seek to interpret their
data. hese high-level choices require more inesse in language
497
Methodology
sciences than in others, perhaps, because (for the purposes of
most researchers) humans are the only creatures that display the
target phenomenon, namely, language. his creates ubiquitous
challenges owing to the great complexity of the human organ-
ism (as compared, say, to a fruit ly) and to ethical considerations
that prevent us from carrying out potentially informative proce-
dures that are used with other species.
I structure the discussion around a taxonomy of the ways
in which data can be collected by language scientists. Practical
exigencies limit the discussion to data about (human) language,
though many language scientists need to gather other sorts of
data as well (e.g., computational linguists collect simulation
data, anthropological linguists collect cultural data, dialectolo-
gists collect geographical data, etc.). I further narrow the focus
to data collected for research purposes, leaving aside issues par-
ticular to clinical (see speech-language pathology), foren-
sic (see forensic linguistics), and other applications. I also
omit discussion of instrumental, statistical, or other formal treat-
ment of data: his is important, but ultimately futile if ones data
do not properly address the questions to be answered.
My taxonomic framework divides empirical methods along
two dimensions. One dimension along which data collection
can be characterized is by the population of speakers/hearers
(hereafter simply speakers, by which I mean also users of sign
languages) from whom one is collecting data: adult native
speakers of a particular language, children growing up in bilin-
gual households, a creole community, the last surviving
speaker of a dying language (see extinction of languages),
the unknown author(s) of an ancient text, the editorial board of a
dictionary, and so on. A second dimension, more or less orthog-
onal to the irst in principle, is how the language data get from
the speaker(s) to the researcher(s). Researchers may observe the
speaker while he or she is doing something involving language,
or they may gather data produced as the result of a prior event
involving language, via an artifact or another person.
As illustrations, I use hypothetical indings that should not
be taken as statements of fact. Because their importance here
lies in clarifying conceptual points, I have not restricted myself
to attested uncontroversial results, though I believe these hypo-
thetical results not to be wildly implausible.
Different Populations
INTRINSIC INTEREST IN SUBGROUPS. Obviously, if ones research
questions are about a particular population (e.g., the language
of autistic children [see autism and language], speakers of
tone languages), then this is an excellent reason for collecting
data from that population, but it is not the only possible reason,
as will be discussed presently. Research on any group other than
the default (healthy adult native speakers) is virtually always
comparative, if only implicitly: In order to know whether one is
really discovering properties of population X, rather than simply
heretofore unknown properties of human language in general,
X must be compared with population Y with regard to the same
properties. For example, inding that some group of bilinguals
has an average vocabulary size of n in their dominant language
would be most interesting in the context of knowing that an
otherwise-comparable group of monolinguals has an average
vocabulary size of, say, 1.75n. Determining what constitutes
498
an otherwise comparable population is one of the major chal-
lenges of research. For example, if you want to study specific
language impairment (SLI), you presumably want to com-
pare children with SLI to unafected children, but which ones?
If you use children of the same chronological age, you will surely
ind many diferences in their speech, but this will mainly con-
irm that a speech pathologist was correct in diagnosing the irst
group with SLI. More interesting would be to ind that younger
unafected children whose language is similar to that of the
children with SLI in some respects (e.g., mean length of utter-
ance) nonetheless is more advanced in others (e.g. correct use of
inlectional morphology).
here are numerous ways of classifying speakers into groups
that have seemed fruitful: age (see aging and language),
gender (see gender and language), handedness, education,
native versus non-native speaker, mono- versus bi-/multilingual
(see bilingualism and multilingualism), socioeconomic
status (see sociolinguistics), and many more. Interpreting
any correlations one inds between one of these variables and
some language phenomenon is rarely straightforward, how-
ever. For example, if we ind that increasing age correlates with
increasing frequency of tip-of-the-tongue states, does that impli-
cate a general decline in memory retrieval with age, or rather an
ability to partially retrieve words that younger people could not
retrieve at all, thanks to greater exposure to these words over the
course of a lifetime (Gollan and Brown 2006)?
RELEVANCE OF ATYPICAL SPEAKERS TO THE STUDY OF TYPICAL
SPEAKERS. A second reason for studying a particular population
is to allow us to learn things about typical language that typical
speakers do not. For example, it has been suggested that certain
language disorders represent an otherwise intact language sys-
tem from which one circumscribed grammatical mechanism has
been removed or rendered inoperative, as in Yosef Grodzinskys
1986 account of agrammatic aphasia, according to which
traces of movement are missing from otherwise normal syn-
tactic representations. No unafected speakers would provide us
with the opportunity to pose the question What does syntax
look like if you take out just the traces? Similarly, SLI in later
life could, on certain views, allow us to ask how an incompletely
developed morphosyntax behaves when coupled with adult-
sized open-class vocabulary and general cognitive capacities,
such as working memory (see working memory and lan-
guage processing) permitting us to test, for example, the
behavior of complex sentences in such circumstances. he
congnitive immaturity of (typically developing) children pre-
cludes this kind of test.
here is a major caveat when dealing with atypical popula-
tions, however particularly when analyzing them using theo-
ries based on typical populations or drawing conclusions about
such populations. We do not know how circumscribed their
deviation from the norm really is. For example, in the case of
focal brain damage, it is not an innocent assumption to posit that
the speakers subsequent use of language is simply the output of
an otherwise normal brain (as it was before the lesion occurred)
minus whatever function(s) used to be performed by the lost
neural structures. Rather, the speakers language use is the prod-
uct of a damaged brain that has recovered from injury in ways
Methodology
that we do not yet know how to ascertain. Some functions previ-
ously performed in the damaged area may have been taken over
by intact areas, which may in turn have lost some of their original
functionality; areas that were inhibited by the damaged area may
now be free to come into play; and so forth.
Another kind of atypical population includes the expert users
of language: authors, comedians, songwriters, journalists, poets,
playwrights, preachers, politicians, and so on. hey can be taken
as proof by example of what it is possible for humans to do with
language, but beyond that we know very little about how they
come by their expertise, and so it is hard to say how they might
inform the study of language in nonexpert speakers.
A special reason for choosing particular speakers to study is
because of their genetic relationship to other speakers. his is
most obvious for language disorders suspected to have a herita-
ble component, such as SLI. But genetic relationships, in partic-
ular between twins, can be used in language sciences (as in many
sciences) to approach issues concerning the possible contribu-
tions of the genotype to aspects of language in the phenotype.
he standard methodology is to compare monozygotic to dizy-
gotic twin pairs, whereby the former share (on average) twice as
much genetic material. Any phenomenon of language where the
monozygotic pairs are more similar is taken to be shaped more
heavily by prewired brain structures (cf. Ganger 1998).
Types of Data Collection: Immediate Versus Delayed
By immediate collection of language-relevant data I mean that
researchers obtain data from a speaker while he or she is engaged
in some language-related behavior (though this may not involve
any action or even any awareness of language on the speakers
part). By delayed data collection I mean that researchers
obtain language-related data after the fact, including by studying
artifactual records of previous language-related behaviors (e.g.
transcriptions, recordings, corpora [see corpus linguistics],
grammars, etc.). his distinction is crucial because it bears on
how much researchers can know about the original event. In
what follows I exemplify numerous approaches in each category
and suggest advantages and disadvantages.
KINDS OF IMMEDIATE DATA COLLECTION. here are really only two
sorts of data one can collect from speakers who are doing a lin-
guistic task (meant broadly, as shorthand for doing something
that involves language). One is to collect data on what they are
(deliberately) doing: for example, if they are talking, what they are
saying; if they are listening, when they are nodding, when they are
smiling, and so on. he other is to collect some other physical mea-
sure that will (one hopes) provide evidence about language inside
them. his can take the form of voluntary behavioral measures or
involuntary physiological or brain measures. (he data may be pre-
served for later analysis, e.g., on videotape. What is crucial in count-
ing it as immediate data is that it captures the speakers immediate
response. Even a questionnaire can fall into this category if speakers
report their immediate reactions, e.g., Yes/No or numeric ratings.)
In the category of involuntary responses, we ind such tech-
niques as measuring galvanic skin response, pupil diameter,
and eye movements, plus indicators of brain activity from neu-
roimaging positron emission tomography (PET), functional
magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI), event-related potential
(ERP), magnetoencephalography (MEG). Useful results have
been obtained on some measures without giving subjects any
task at all, simply by exposing them to language auditorily, but
depending on the technique, mental tasks or even ones involving
responses such as button pressing are possible. A serious meth-
odological issue arises when we want to interpret the resulting
data, however. For example, consider eye-tracking data from a
sentence reading task. he assumption has usually been that
the longer a reader spends looking at a particular word or group
of words, the harder they found those words to process or under-
stand. While that is true in many cases, one situation in which
people may spend a very short time looking at some word is
when it signals the need to reanalyze an earlier part of the sen-
tence and triggers an immediate regressive eye movement. his
clearly should not be taken to indicate ease of processing. Due
to challenges of this sort, there are now a half dozen or more
measures of ixation times commonly reported in eye-tracking
studies, but their interpretation is not agreed upon and may
well depend on the particulars of what is being read. Here, and
especially for brain measures, as data become richer they do not
necessarily become more informative until foundational results
establish how the basic response features are to be interpreted.
It is sometimes thought that we do not actually need to
understand these detailed properties of brain activity in order to
make productive use of these measures: So long as we can show
that stimulus Y patterns like stimulus X while stimulus Z pat-
terns diferently, then we have evidence that whatever manipu-
lation we used in creating the stimuli classiies X with Y to the
exclusion of Z. For example, someone might try to ask whether
binding theory (see also anaphora) is really part of syntax or
part of semantics by creating a sentence that violates a clearly
syntactic principle (X), one that violates a clearly semantic prin-
ciple (Z), and a binding violation (Y), and then seeing whether
Y patterns like X or like Z in ERPs (or neither, in which case
no conclusion can be drawn). But it is impossible to construct
sentences that are identical in all respects (phonology, mor-
phology, sequence of word classes, etc.) except for these vio-
lations, and so if we know nothing about what the observed brain
patterns actually mean, all that this kind of experiment can tell
us is that some property shared by X and Y is lighting up, and Z
does not share that property. (Although ERP researchers speak
of components sensitive to syntactic violations versus semantic
anomaly, the basis for this is a very small range of sentence types,
and semantic really refers to real-world implausibility, not vio-
lations of principles of formal semantics.)
Turning now to conscious reaction tasks, the most common
of course involve psychologys favorite technique, measuring
reaction time to press a button, say a word, and so on. Within
certain schools of linguistics, grammaticality judgments
are the most favored (increasingly encompassed by the broader
term well-formedness ratings, as they are also applied to individ-
ual words and are elicited on multipoint or open-ended scales).
In mentioning these two types of data collection side by side, my
intent is to emphasize their similarities. hey both involve col-
lecting behavioral measures in immediate response to some lin-
guistic stimulus. Grammaticality judgments can be recorded and
timed by computer. Contrariwise, experiments normally carried
out by computer can be done interview style, for example, with
499
Methodology
people who cannot read. Interviews lose ine-grained timing
information (experimenters should still note gross diferences
in response times) but gain elsewhere, including the allowance
for open-ended narrative responses and the possibility of asking
follow-up questions contingent thereon. It is important to note
that the presence/absence of a laboratory setting, electronic
equipment, statistical analysis, and so on has no bearing on the
conceptual/epistemological nature of the data collected.
Finally in this category are data from speakers who are actu-
ally using language with no extra task imposed on them. It is
surprising prima facie how little time most language scientists
spend actually observing just these events. he reason is largely
practical. Most research necessarily concentrates on a quite spe-
ciic aspect of some linguistic phenomenon; waiting for it to arise
by chance is too resource intensive. Nonetheless, it is important
to keep in mind that every step away from the real situations we
are interested in will introduce both random errors and system-
atic distortions for example, in the case of transcripts, due to
imperfect recording quality and the transcribers subconscious
assumptions about what is being said, respectively.
KINDS OF DELAYED DATA COLLECTION. I classify as a delayed data
situation one in which the object of the researchers measure-
ments, observations, and so on is not a person at a time when he
or she is engaging with language, but rather some indication of
what may have happened at such a time: an artifact produced by
that person, or a behavior observed by someone other than the
researcher. here are two major subclasses of such data.
One subtype comprises any instances of written language,
whether created by an original act of writing or representing an
attempt to transcribe or otherwise keep record of language that
was originally spoken. (Although this distinction is important,
all written material, including phonetic transcription, loses
much information found in spoken language.) his includes
documents from now-dead languages, dictionaries and gram-
mars, dialect atlases, poetry, song lyrics, scripts, and so on
(in some of which the writers intent may be to sound unlike
his own or anyone elses natural speech or prose writing), as
well as corpora amassed speciically for academic purposes.
Any text found on the World Wide Web falls into this category
as well. One can, of course, treat textual material as an object of
study unto itself, ignoring how it was created, but if one wants to
use it as evidence bearing on human language in general, then
considering the many diferences between writing and talking
becomes paramount. Most signiicant is the ability to edit writ-
ten material after initially producing it (in most situations). he
Web, increasingly used as a corpus because of its size, comes
with many special problems: It can be hard to ascertain who
actually wrote any given passage; it is usually impossible to
establish the native language(s), gender, age, and so on of the
author; the intended meaning and discourse function is often
unclear; and so forth.
he second subtype of delayed data is hearsay, that is, reports
given by someone about language phenomena witnessed, told
about, or engaged in personally. For example, elderly speak-
ers might report that their parents used to use some expression
but that they themselves never used it. his is information that
researchers have no way of independently verifying. Likewise, a
500
member of an isolated society that does not welcome outsiders
may report that its leader uses special vocabulary; if research-
ers are not members of this society, they must take the word of
someone else.
Evidently there are some situations in which the use of delayed
language data is unavoidable, for example, when studying dead
languages or when speakers are not accessible. Also, quantita-
tive measures such as word frequency could not practically be
calculated entirely from immediate interactions with individual
speakers. More generally, the use of delayed data afords us a
much larger sample of language material, hence, potential expo-
sure to rare phenomena that we might otherwise never become
aware of. However, it is misguided to think that the availability
of billions of words of computer-searchable text has eliminated
the need for explicit data-gathering tasks: For the vast majority of
the worlds languages, the quantity of existing written materials
(if there is a writing system at all) is many orders of magnitude
smaller than for the languages that dominate the information
age, and much of it is not on computer.
Conclusion
Part of what makes the study of language both fascinating and
frustrating is that language can never truly be studied in isola-
tion: It inexorably traces back to the bodies and brains of human
beings, which both are always doing myriad things. Rather than
trying to ignore this as an inconvenience, researchers would do
well to keep it in mind whenever they have methodological deci-
sions to make. Sometimes, as with twin studies and certain lan-
guage disorders, it can even be turned into an advantage.
Carson T. Schtze
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Botha, Rudolph P. 1981. he Conduct of Linguistic Inquiry: A Systematic
Introduction to the Methodology of Generative Grammar. he
Hague: Mouton.
Cowart, Wayne. 1997. Experimental Syntax: Applying Objective Methods
to Sentence Judgments. housand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Ganger, Jennifer B. 1998. Genes and environment in language acquisi-
tion: A study of early vocabulary and syntactic development in twins.
Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Gollan, Tamar H., and Alan S. Brown. 2006. From tip-of-the-tongue
(TOT) data to theoretical implications in two steps: When more TOTs
means better retrieval. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
135: 46283.
Grodzinsky, Yosef. 1986. Language deicits and the theory of syntax.
Brain and Language 27: 13559.
Labov, William. 1972. Some principles of linguistic methodology.
Language in Society 1: 97120.
Matthewson, Lisa. 2004. On the methodology of semantic ieldwork.
International Journal of American Linguistics 70: 369415.
Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1983. Grammatical heory, Its Limits and Its
Possibilities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Resnik, Philip, Aaron Elkiss, Ellen Lau, and Heather Taylor. 2006. he
Web in heoretical Linguistics Research: Two Case Studies Using the
Linguists Search Engine. In Proceedings of the 31st Annual Meeting of
the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 26576.
Schtze, Carson T. 1996. he Empirical Base of Linguistics: Grammaticality
Judgments and Linguistic Methodology. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Metonymy
. 2005. hinking about what we are asking speakers to do. In
Linguistic Evidence: Empirical, heoretical, and Computational
Perspectives, ed. Stephan Kepser and Marga Reis, 45784.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
METONYMY
Metonymy (Greek change of name) is one of the irst to know is interpreted as the efect of an intentional act to
major igures of speech recognized in classical rhetoric. he
Roman treatise Rhetorica ad Herennium deines metonymy as
a trope that takes its expression from near and close things by
which we can comprehend a word that is not denominated by
its proper word. his ancient characterization already points to
two criterial notions of metonymy, contiguity and substitution,
which still occur in most present-day deinitions of metonymy
as the substitution of one word for another with which it is
associated.
Recent studies in cognitive linguistics have shown that
metonymy is not just a matter of words and their substitution
but is part of human thinking and reasoning. he conceptual
nature of metonymy has been demonstrated by George Lakof
(1987). For example, the term mother makes many people think
of a housewife mother. he relationship between mothers and
housewives is metonymic and operates only on the conceptual
level: he category mother is metonymically associated with the
subcategory housewife mother as one of its members.
Various cognitive linguists have described the conceptual
basis of metonymy using the notion conceptual frame. Frames
are packages of knowledge about coherent segments of experi-
ence. he elements of a frame are conceptually contiguous: Any
element evokes the frame as a whole and, concomitantly, other
elements within the frame network. For example, the concept
author establishes a frame that includes literary works, a pub-
lisher, biographical information, etc. Since these elements are
conceptually contiguous, they may be exploited by metonymy.
hus, we may metonymically refer to a book by naming its author,
as in We are reading Shakespeare. Typically, a metonymic inter-
pretation is coerced when there is a conceptual conlict between
expressions belonging to the same frame. In the previous exam-
ple, the verb read requires an object that denotes a linguistically
coded content, such as a book or a letter. he conceptual conlict
is resolved by understanding Shakespeare as a reference point
that provides mental access to Shakespeares literary work
(Langacker 1993; Radden and Kvecses 1999).
Studies in metonymy have traditionally focused on words.
Standard examples on the synchronic level include he ket-
tle is boiling (container for content) and Jonathan is in the
phone book (person for name). Metonymic processes on the
diachronic level have been long noted by historical lin-
guists and amply demonstrated since the nineteenth century.
Metonymic shifts have been observed cross-linguistically in a
number of conceptual frames (Koch 1999). For example, in the
marriage frame, a preparatory status of being engaged may
stand for the state of being married. hus, the Latin word sponsus/
sponsa with the meaning ianc/iance shifted its meaning to
bride/bridegroom and ended up with the meaning husband/
wife, as in Spanish esposo/esposa, French poux/pouse, and
English spouse.
Like lexical metonymies, grammatical metonymies operate
both on the synchronic and diachronic levels. he coercive pro-
cess in metonymy is particularly striking in cases where gram-
matical meaning conlicts with lexical meaning. For example,
stative predicates, such as the verb be, may be used in construc-
tions that normally require action predicates, such as impera-
tives. hus, the slogan of the American news network CNN Be the
be carried out by the hearer: Do something [viz. watch CNN] so
that, as a result, you are the irst to know. he conceptual shift
at work here is based on the result for action metonymy. On
the diachronic level, metonymy plays a crucial role in gram-
maticalization processes. For example, the lexical item go (in
conjunction with the present progressive) in the phrase be going
to has grammaticalized into a future marker. Human motion is
typically directed toward a goal and, hence, is strongly associ-
ated with the intention of reaching the goal. Since the goal can
only be reached in the future, the intention to reach the goal may
stand for the future itself.
Looked at from a pragmatic point of view, metonymy can
be regarded as a matter of inferencing. We can distinguish the
following three types of metonymic inference: inferences about
a referential item (referential metonym), inferences about a
predicate (predicational metonymy), and inferences about the
speech-act meaning (illocutionary metonymy) (Panther
and hornburg 1998). Referential metonymy is a means of indi-
rect reference. For example, the use of subway in he subway is on
strike invites the inference that the subway personnel is meant.
Predicational metonymy is exempliied by utterances such as
he saxophone player had to leave early, which in many contexts
induces the metonymic inference that the saxophone player left
early. In this case, an obligation to leave is interpreted as an actu-
ally occurring action. Illocutionary metonymy is illustrated by
utterances such as Can you lend me ten dollars? he speaker liter-
ally poses a question about the hearers ability to lend the speaker
$10, but this question gives rise to the metonymic inference that
the hearer is being asked to lend $10 to the speaker; it is under-
stood as a request. Conventional indirect requests like these are
not just random substitute forms for the direct request Lend me
ten dollars. he literal meaning of the metonymic expression has
an important communicative function in this indirect request.
It addresses a potential obstacle: he hearer might be unable
to carry out the requested action because he or she needs the
money, too (Gibbs 1994). In fact, the example illustrates an
important general point: he literal meaning of a metonymy is
always relevant to the interpretation of metonymic expressions.
It thus provides strong evidence against the view that metonymy
is merely the substitution of one word for another.
Gnter Radden and Klaus-Uwe Panther
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr. 1994. he Poetics of Mind: Figurative hought,
Language, and Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Koch, Peter. 1999. Frame and contiguity: On the cognitive bases of
metonymy and certain types of word formation. In Panther and
Radden 1999, 13967.
501
Minimalism
Lakof, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous hings: What Categories
Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lakof, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press.
Langacker, Ronald. 1993. Reference-point constructions. Cognitive
Linguistics 4: 138.
Panther, Klaus-Uwe, and Gnter Radden, eds. 1999. Metonymy in
Language and hought. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Panther, Klaus-Uwe, and Linda L. hornburg. 1998. A cognitive approach
to inferencing in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 30: 75569.
Radden, Gnter, and Zoltn Kvecses. 1999. Towards a theory of meton- tion (in the sense of x-bar theory), V-bar. he DP the woman
ymy. In Panther and Radden 1999, 1759.
MINIMALISM
Minimalism, extending earlier work in transformational
grammar and generative grammar, conjectures that the
computational system central to human language is a per-
fect solution to the task of relating sound and meaning. Recent
research has investigated the complexities evident in earlier
models and attempted to eliminate them, or to show how they
are only apparent, following from deeper and simpler proper-
ties. Major examples of this work include the reduction of the
number of linguistic levels of representation in the model and
the deduction of certain constraints on syntactic derivations
from general considerations of economy and computational
simplicity.
Like earlier versions of generative grammar, the minimalist
program (MP) (Chomsky 1995b, 2000, 2004, 2005) maintains that
linguistic competence is a computational system creating and
manipulating structural representations. MP further proposes
that the derivations and representations conform to economy
criteria, demanding that they be minimal in a sense determined
by the language faculty (perhaps ultimately by general proper-
ties of organic systems): no extra steps in derivations, no extra
symbols in representations, and no representations beyond
those that are conceptually necessary.
Reduction of Levels
Minimalism developed out of the government and binding
(GB) or principles and parameters model (Chomsky 1981,
1982; Chomsky and Lasnik 1993). In that model, there are four
signiicant levels of representation, related by derivation:
(1) D(eep)-Structure
S(urface)-Structure
PF LF
(Phonetic Form) (Logical Form)
Given that a human language is a way of relating sound (or,
more generally, gesture, as in sign languages) and meaning,
the interface levels PF and LF were assumed to be ineliminable.
Minimalism begins with the hypothesis that there are no other
levels.
Structure Building
Minimalism, in a partial return to the apparatus of pre-1965
transformational theory (Chomsky 1955), has lexical items
502
inserted throughout the course of the syntactic derivation, via
generalized transformations, rather than all in one initial block.
he derivation proceeds bottom up with the most deeply
embedded structural unit created, then combined, via merge,
with the head of which it is the complement to create a larger
unit, and so on. Consider the derivation of he woman will see
the man: he noun (N) man is combined with the determiner (D)
the to form the determiner phrase (DP) the man. his DP then
combines with the verb see to produce an intermediate projec-
is created in the same fashion as the man, and is combined with
the V-bar to produce the VP. Next, this VP merges with the Inl
will producing I-bar. he DP the woman inally moves (leaving
a TRACE t) to the speciier position of I, yielding the full clausal
projection IP, schematically illustrated in (2) (by labeled bracket-
ing, a notational variant of tree representation):
(2) [IP he woman [I will [VP t [V see [DP the man]]]]]
In this model, there is no one representation following all lexi-
cal insertion and preceding all singulary transformations. hat
is, there is no D-structure.
Some Minimalist Goals
So far, S-structure persists: If there is a point where the deriva-
tion divides, branching toward LF on one path and toward PF on
the other, that point is S-structure. he more signiicant question
is whether there are any crucial conditions deined on it as in
the GB framework, for example, with respect to binding theory
(Chomsky 1981). One goal of the minimalist research program is
to establish that these further properties are actually properties
of LF, as suggested in the mid-1980s (Chomsky 1986), contrary to
previous arguments (Chomsky 1981).
Another goal is to reduce all constraints on representation to
bare output conditions, determined by the properties of the men-
tal systems that LF and PF must interface with. For instance, the
motor system determines that a phonetic representation must
be linearly ordered.
Internal to the computational system, the desideratum is
that constraints on transformational derivations be reduced to
general principles of economy. Derivations beginning from the
same choice of lexical items are compared in terms of number
of steps, length of movements, and so on, with the less economi-
cal ones being rejected. An example is the minimalist deduction
of the superiority condition, which demands that when multiple
items are available for wh-movement in a language, like English,
allowing only one to move, it is the highest one (one closest to
the root of the phrase structure tree) that will move:
(3) Who t will read what
(4) *What will who read t [* indicates ungrammaticality]
Economy, in the form of shortest move, selects (3) over (4) since
the subject is higher than the object, hence, closer to the sen-
tence initial target of wh-movement than the object is.
he simplifying developments in the theory leading toward
the minimalist approach generally led to greater breadth and
depth of understanding of both how human languages are orga-
nized (descriptive adequacy) and how they develop in childrens
Minimalism
minds (explanatory adequacy) (see descriptive, obser-
vational, and explanatory adequacy). his success
led Noam Chomsky to put forward the audaciously minimal-
ist conjecture that we are now in a position to go even beyond
explanatory adequacy: he human language faculty might be
a computationally perfect solution to the problem of relating
sound and meaning, the minimal computational system given
the boundary conditions provided by other modules of the mind.
his conjecture leads to a general minimalist critique of syntactic
theorizing, including Chomskys own earlier minimalist theo-
rizing. Consider irst the leading idea that multiple derivations
from the same initial set of lexical choices are compared. his
introduces considerable complexity into the computation, espe-
cially as the number of alternative derivations multiplies. It thus
becomes desirable to develop a model whereby all relevant deri-
vational decisions can be made in strictly Markovian fashion: At
each step, the very next successful step can be determined, and
determined easily. his arguably more tractable local economy
model was suggested by Chomsky (1995a) and developed in
detail by Chris Collins (1997).
The Last Resort Nature of Syntactic Movement
From its inception in the early 1990s, minimalism has insisted
on the last resort nature of movement: Movement must hap-
pen for a formal reason. he case ilter (see filters), which
was a central component of the GB system, was thought to pro-
vide one such driving force. A standard example involves subject
raising:
(5) John is certain [t to fail the exam]
(6) It is certain [that John will fail the exam]
In (5), as in (6), John is the understood subject of fail the exam.
his fact is captured by deriving (5) from an underlying structure
much like that of (6), except with an ininitival embedded sen-
tence instead of a inite one:
(7) __ is certain [John to fail the exam]
John in (7) is not in a position appropriate to any case. By raising
to the higher subject position (speciier of the higher Inl), it can
avoid a violation of the case ilter, since the raised position is one
where nominative case is licensed. But if the case requirement of
John provides the driving force for movement, the requirement
will not be satisied immediately upon the introduction of that
nominal expression into the structure, under the assumed bot-
tom-up derivation. Rather, satisfaction must wait until the next
cycle, when a higher layer of structure is built, or, in fact, until an
unlimited number of cycles later, as raising conigurations can
iterate:
(8) John seems [ to be certain [ to fail the exam]]
A minimalist perspective favors an alternative whereby
the driving force for movement can be satisied immediately.
Suppose that Inl has a feature that must be checked against
the NP. hen as soon as that head has been introduced into the
structure, it attracts the NP or DP that will check its feature.
Movement is then seen from the point of view of the target, rather
than the moving item itself. he case of the NP does get checked
as a result of the movement, but that is simply a beneicial side
efect of the satisfaction of the requirement of the attractor. he
earlier minimalist approach to the driving force of movement
was called Greed by Chomsky. his later one developed out of
what Howard Lasnik (1995) called Enlightened Self Interest.
The Syntactic Similarity of Languages
One recurrent theme in GB and minimalist theorizing, motivated
by the quest for explanatory adequacy, is that human languages
are syntactically very similar. he standard GB and early mini-
malist instantiation of this claim was the proposal that supericial
diferences result from potential derivational timing diferences
among languages, with the same transformation applying in
overt or covert syntax. Under both circumstances, LF relects the
results of the transformation. For example, the wh-movement
operative in English interrogative sentences is overt movement
to speciier of C(omplementizer). In many other languages,
including Chinese and Japanese, interrogative expressions seem
to remain in situ, unmoved, as seen in the contrast between (9)
and its English translation in (10):
(9) ni xihuan shei [Chinese]
you like who
(10) Who do you like
C.-T. Huang (1981/1982) argued that even in such languages
there is movement, by showing that well-established locality
constraints on wh-movement, such as those of John Robert Ross
(1967), also constrain the distribution and interpretation of cer-
tain seemingly unmoved wh-expressions in Chinese. his argu-
ment was widely inluential and laid the groundwork for much
GB and minimalist research.
Along related lines, Chomsky argued that V-raising, overt in
virtually all of the Romance languages, among others, operates
covertly in English, as in the following examples from English
and their translations into French:
(11) a. John often kisses Mary
b. *John kisses often Mary
(12) a. *Jean souvent embrasse Marie
b. Jean embrasse souvent Marie
he assumption is that the position of the verb vis--vis the adverb
indicates whether the verb has raised overtly. For V-raising, the
feature driving the movement is claimed to be one that resides
in Inl. he feature might be strong, forcing overt movement (as
in French), or weak. Similarly, the feature demanding overt wh-
movement in English is a strong feature of C. he principle pro-
crastinate disallows overt movement except when it is necessary
(i.e., for the satisfaction of a strong feature as in Chomsky 1993;
Lasnik 1999a).
Procrastinate invited a question. Why is delaying an operation
until LF more economical than performing it earlier? Further,
many of the hypothesized instances of covert movement do
not have the semantic efects (with respect to quantiier scope,
anaphora, etc.) that corresponding overt movements have, as
discussed by Lasnik (1999b, Chapters 6 and 8). To address these
questions, Chomsky (2000; 2001) argues for a process of agree-
ment (potentially at a substantial distance) that relates the two
503
Minimalism
items that need to be checked against each other. Many of the
phenomena that had been analyzed as involving covert move-
ment are reanalyzed as involving no movement at all, just the
operation Agree (though Huangs argument indicates that there
are at least some instances of covert movement). Overt phrasal
movement (such as subject raising) is then seen in a diferent
light: It is not driven by the need for case or agreement features
to be checked (since that could take place via Agree). Instead, it
takes place to satisfy the requirement of certain heads (includ-
ing Inl) that they have a speciier (in the X-bar theoretic sense).
Such a requirement was already formulated by Chomsky (1981),
and dubbed the extended projection principle (EPP) in Chomsky
(1982). To the extent that long distance A-movement (basically,
movement to a higher subject position) as in (8) proceeds suc-
cessive-cyclically through each intermediate subject position,
the EPP is motivated, since, as observed earlier, these intermedi-
ate positions are not case-checking positions.
An important question at this point is why language has the
seeming imperfection of movement processes at all. We can
distinguish two major types of movement, phrasal movement
and head movement. Chomsky conjectures that phrasal move-
ment is largely to convey topic-comment information (and pos-
sibly to make scope relations more transparent), and that the
EPP is the way the computational system formally implements
this. V-movement, on the other hand, is conjectured to have
PF motivation (guaranteeing that the Inl aix will ultimately
be attached to a proper host, V), and may even be a PF process.
Another possibility is that movement is simply a generalization
of the merge operation combining smaller structures into larger
ones. Given that merge is ineliminable, perhaps move is not an
imperfection after all.
Syntactic Interfaces
he connection between syntactic derivation and semantic and
phonological interfaces has long been a central research area. In
minimalism, interpretation could be distributed over many struc-
tures in the course of transformational cycles. Already decades
ago, Joan W. Bresnan (1971) argued that the rule responsible for
assigning English sentences their intonation contour applies
following each cycle of transformations, rather than at the end
of the syntactic derivation. Ray Jackendof (1972) put forward
similar proposals for semantic phenomena involving scope and
anaphora. Chomsky (2000, 2001) argues for a general instanti-
ation of this distributed approach, sometimes called Multiple
Spell-Out, based on Epstein (1999) and Uriagereka (1999).
At the end of each cycle (or phase in Chomskys more recent (1994), extends the impact of c-command to PF as well. Kayne
work), the syntactic structure thus far created can be encapsu-
lated and sent of to the interface components for phonological
and semantic interpretation. hus, even the levels of PF and LF
fade away. Samuel D. Epstein argues that such a move represents
a conceptual simpliication (in the same way that elimination of
D-structure and S-structure did), and both Juan Uriagereka and
Chomsky provide empirical justiication. he role of syntactic
derivation, always important in Chomskian theorizing, becomes
even more central on this view. Epstein reasons that the central-
ity of (asymmetric) c-command (as opposed to one of a whole
range of other conceivable geometric relations) in syntax is
predicted on this strongly derivational view, but not in a more
504
representational theory. As the derivation proceeds, always
merging together pairs of items, sisterhood and domination are
the only immediately available primitives. And X (asymetrically)
c-commands Y if and only if Y is dominated by the sister of X.
hese notions are illustrated in (13), where B and C are sisters as
are D and E, A dominates B, C, D, and E, and C dominates D and
E. B asymmetrically c-commands D and E.
(13) A
B C
D E
Multiple Spell-Out efectively deals with a range of reconstruc-
tion phenomena. For example, an anaphor normally requires an
antecedent that c-commands it:
(14) John criticized himself
(15) *Himself criticized John
But when the anaphor is fronted from a position c-commanded
by an antecedent to a position not in that structural relation, the
anaphoric connection is nonetheless possible:
(16) Himself, John criticized
his follows straightforwardly if anaphora can be interpreted
prior to movement.
Chomsky has also explored another kind of approach to
reconstruction, based on a condition that he calls Inclusiveness
Chomsky (1995a). his condition demands that a syntactic deri-
vation merely combine elements of the numeration. No new
entities can be created. Traces, as traditionally conceived, vio-
late this condition. Chomsky therefore concludes that a trace of
movement is actually a copy of the item that moved, rather than
a new sort of entity. his is yet another return to earlier genera-
tive approaches (wherein movement was seen as a compound of
copying and deletion). he copy left behind is normally deleted
in the phonological component (though Boskovic 2001 pres-
ents arguments that under certain circumstances, lower copies
are pronounced in order to rescue what would otherwise be
PF violations) but could persist for semantic purposes, such as
the licensing of anaphoric connection. Danny Fox (2000) pres-
ents an analysis of scope and anaphora reconstruction efects in
terms of the copy theory.
An inluential research line, initiated by Richard S. Kayne
hypothesizes that the linear order that is manifest in PF (as it must
be, given properties of the phonetic system) comes about via his
linear correspondence axiom (LCA), which states that asym-
metric c-command is mapped onto PF linear order. his has the
far-reaching consequence that structures must always be right-
branching. Subject-verb-object (SVO) languages like English are
broadly consistent with this requirement, but subject-object-verb
(SOV) languages like Japanese are not. Kaynes antisymmetry
approach reanalyzes SOV languages as underlyingly SVO (as all
languages must be by this hypothesis), with the SOV order derived
by (leftward) movement. One crucial unanswered question is the
source of the driving force for the required movements.
Minimalism
Conclusion
Chomsky constantly emphasizes that minimalism is as yet still
just an approach, a set of questions and a conjecture about
how human language works (perfectly), and a general program
for exploring the questions and developing the conjecture. he
descriptive and explanatory success attained thus far gives some
reason for optimism that the approach can be developed into an
articulated theory of human linguistic ability and of why it has
the exact properties it does.
Howard Lasnik
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Boeckx, Cedric. 2006. Linguistic Minimalism: Origins, Methods, Concepts,
and Aims. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Boskovic, Zeljko. 2001. On the Nature of the Syntax-Phonology
Interface: Cliticization and Related Phenomena. Amsterdam: Elsevier
Science.
Bresnan, Joan W. 1971. Sentence stress and syntactic transformations.
Language 47: 25781.
Chomsky, Noam. 1955. he logical structure of linguistic theory.
Manuscript, Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Revised 1956 version published in part by Plenum, New
York, 1975 and by University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1985.
. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht, the
Netherlands: Foris.
. 1982. Some Concepts and Consequences of the heory of Government
and Binding. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
. 1986. Knowledge of Language. New York: Praeger.
. 1993. A minimalist program for linguistic theory. In The View
from Building 20: Essays in Linguistics in Honor of Sylvain Bromberger,
ed. Kenneth Hale and Samuel J. Keyser, 152. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press. Repr. in Chomsky 1995b, 167217.
. 1995a. Categories and transformations. In he Minimalist
Program, 219394. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
. 1995b. he Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
. 2000. Minimalist Inquiries: the framework. In Step by Step: Essays
on Minimalist Syntax in Honor of Howard Lasnik, ed. Roger Martin,
David Michaels, and Juan Uriagereka, 89155. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
. 2001. Derivation by phase. In Ken Hale: A Life in Language, ed.
Michael Kenstowicz, 152. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
. 2004. Beyond explanatory adequacy. In Structures and Beyond
the Cartography of Syntactic Structure. Vol. 3. Ed. Adriana Belletti,
10431. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
. 2005. hree factors in language design. Linguistic Inquiry
36: 122.
Chomsky, Noam, and Howard Lasnik. 1993. he theory of principles and
parameters. In Syntax: An International Handbook of Contemporary
Research. Vol. 1. Ed. Joachim Jacobs, Arnim von Stechow, Wolfgang
Sternefeld, and heo Vennemann, 50669. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Reprinted in Chomsky 1995b, 13127.
Collins, Chris. 1997. Local Economy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Epstein, Samuel D. 1999. Un-principled syntax: he derivation of syn-
tactic relations. In Working Minimalism, ed. Samuel D. Epstein and
Norbert Hornstein, 31745. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fox, Danny. 2000. Economy and Semantic Interpretation. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Huang, C.-T. James. 1981/1982. Move wh in a language without wh-
movement. Linguistic Review 1: 369416.
Jackendof, Ray. 1972. Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mirror Systems, Imitation, and Language
Kayne, Richard S. 1994. he Antisymmetry of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Lasnik, Howard. 1995. Case and expletives revisited: On Greed and
other human failings. Linguistic Inquiry 26: 61533. Repr. in Lasnik
1999b, 7496.
. 1999a. On feature strength: hree minimalist approaches to overt
movement. Linguistic Inquiry 30: 197217. Repr. Howard Lasnik,
Minimalist Investigations in Linguistic heory (London; Routledge,
2003), 83102.
. 1999b. Minimalist Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lasnik, Howard, and Juan Uriagereka, with Cedric Boeckx. 2005. A Course
in Minimalist Syntax: Foundations and Prospects. Oxford: Blackwell.
Ross, John Robert. 1967. Constraints on Variables in Syntax. Ph.D. diss.,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Published as Ininite Syntax!
(Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1986).
Uriagereka, Juan. 1998. Rhyme and Reason: An Introduction to Minimalist
Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
. 1999. Multiple spell-out. In Working Minimalism, ed. Samuel
David Epstein and Norbert Hornstein, 25182. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
MIRROR SYSTEMS, IMITATION, AND LANGUAGE
Any normal child reared in human society will acquire lan-
guage. Some argue that basic structures of grammar are innate,
so that the child need simply hear a few sentences to set the
parameter for each key principle of the grammar of his or her
irst language (Baker 2001; Chomsky and Lasnik 1993). Others
have argued that the modern child receives rich language stimuli
within social interactions in learning these key principles. In any
case, the child must acquire the particular sounds (phonol-
ogy) of the language, an ever-increasing stock of words, and
constructions for arranging words to compound their meanings.
he infant acquiring maternal phonology does not imitate the
caregiver (Y. Yoshikawa and colleagues [2003] model how the
process may use associative learning), but learning how to put
sounds together to form a word that achieves the childs commu-
nicative goal seems to involve imitation. Imitation also lies at the
heart of the acquisition of syntax and semantics (see syntax,
acquisition of; semantics, acquisition of). Even within
the principles and parameters approach, the child must imitate
words and combinations, as well as set parameters, to come to
speak the language (see principles and parameters the-
ory and language acquisition).
Monkeys have little or no capacity for imitation, and apes
(chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos, orangutans) have a capac-
ity for simple imitation, whereas humans are the only primates
capable of complex imitation. We describe these forms of imita-
tion, then argue that increasing imitative skills, and the relation
of mirror neurons to these imitative skills, were at the heart of the
evolution of the language-ready brain.
Simple and Complex Imitation
M. Myowa-Yamakoshi and T. Matsuzawa (1999) observed that
chimpanzees took 12 or so trials to learn to imitate a behavior in
a laboratory setting, focusing on bringing an object into relation-
ship with another object or the body, rather than the actual move-
ments involved. R. W. Byrne and J. M. E. Byrne (1993) found that
gorillas learn complex feeding strategies but may take months to
do so. Consider eating nettle leaves. Skilled gorillas grasp the stem
505
Mirror Systems, Imitation, and Language
Monkey [Not to scale]
Frontal
Homology
Figure 1. A comparative side view of the monkey brain (left) and human brain (right), not to scale. The left view
emphasizes premotor area F5; the right view emphasizes Brocas area and Wernickes area, considered crucial for
language processing. F5 and Brocas area are considered homologous.
irmly, strip of leaves, remove petioles bimanually, fold leaves
over the thumb, pop the bundle into the mouth, and eat. Teaching
is virtually never observed in apes (Caro and Hauser 1992), and
the young seem to look at the food, not at the methods of acquisi-
tion (Corp and Byrne 2002). Moreover, chimpanzee mothers sel-
dom, if ever, correct and instruct their young (Tomasello 1999).
he challenge for acquiring such skills is compounded because
the sequence of atomic actions varies greatly from trial to trial.
Byrne (2003) implicates imitation by behavior parsing, a pro-
tracted form of statistical learning whereby certain subgoals (e.g.,
nettles folded over the thumb) become evident from repeated
observation as being common to most performances. Apparently,
the young ape, over many months, may acquire the skill by com-
ing to recognize the relevant subgoals and derive action strategies
for achieving subgoals by trial and error.
he ability to learn the overall structure of a speciic feeding
behavior over many, many observations, however, is very diferent
from the human ability to understand any sentence of an open-
ended set as it is heard and to generate another novel sentence
as an appropriate reply. In many cases, humans need just a few
trials to make sense of a relatively complex behavior and can then
repeat it under changing circumstances, if the constituent actions
are familiar and the subgoals these actions must achieve are read-
ily discernible. (he next section places this facility for complex
imitation in an evolutionary and neurological perspective.) It is
interesting to note that even newborn infants can perform certain
acts of imitation, but this capacity for neonatal imitation such
as poking out the tongue on seeing an adult poke out a tongue
(Meltzof and Moore 1977) is quantitatively diferent from that
for complex imitation (see communication, prelinguistic).
The Mirror System Hypothesis
he system of the macaque brain for visuomotor control of grasp-
ing has its premotor outpost in an area called F5 (Figure 1 left),
which contains a set of neurons, mirror neurons, such that each
one is active not only when the monkey executes a speciic grasp
but also when the monkey observes a human or other monkey
execute a more-or-less similar grasp (Rizzolatti et al. 1996). hus,
macaque F5 contains a mirror system for grasping that employs
a similar neural code for executed and observed manual actions.
he homologous region of the human brain is in or near Brocas
506
Parietal Lobe
Human
Wernickes
A rea Occipital
Lobe Lobe
Brocas
A rea
Temporal Lobe
area, traditionally thought of as a speech area but which has been
shown by brain imaging studies (see neuroimaging) to be active
when humans both execute and observe grasps. It is posited that
the mirror system for grasping was also present in the common
ancestor of humans and monkeys (perhaps 20 million years ago)
and that of humans and chimpanzees (perhaps 5 million years
ago). Moreover, the mirror neuron property accords well with the
parity requirement for language that what counts for the speaker
must count approximately the same for the hearer. In addition,
normal face-to-face speech involves manual and facial as well as
vocal gestures and, moreover, signed languages are fully devel-
oped human languages (see sign language). hese indings
ground the Mirror System Hypothesis (Arbib and Rizzolatti 1997;
Rizzolatti and Arbib 1998):
he parity requirement for language in humans is met because
Brocas area evolved atop the mirror system for grasping, which
provides the capacity to generate and recognize a set of actions.
Recent work (see Arbib 2005 for a review and commentaries
on current controversies) has elaborated the hypothesis, dein-
ing an evolutionary progression of seven stages, S1 through S7:
(S1) Cortical control of hand movements.
(S2) A mirror system for grasping, shared with the common
ancestor of human and monkey.
A mirror system does not provide imitation in itself. A monkey
with an action in its repertoire may have mirror neurons active
both when executing and observing that action. he monkey
does not repeat the observed action nor, crucially, does it use
observation of a novel action to add that action to its repertoire.
Nonetheless, the mirror system may serve the monkey well both
in providing feedback during close observation of handobject
relations during dextrous actions and in allowing its recognition
of others actions to inluence social behavior. In any case, the
data on primate imitation support the hypothesis that a monkey-
like mirror system becomes embedded in more powerful sys-
tems in the next two stages of evolution.
(S3) A simple imitation system for grasping, shared with
common ancestor of human and apes.
(S4) A complex imitation system for grasping.
Mirror Systems, Imitation, and Language
Each of these changes can be of evolutionary advantage in
supporting the transfer of novel skills among the members
of a community, though involving praxis rather than explicit
communication.
M. A. Arbib, K. Liebal, and S. Pika (2008) summarize data
suggesting that manual gestures have greater openness than
vocalizations in nonhuman primates. Monkey vocalizations are
innately speciied (though occasions for using a call may change
with experience), whereas a group of apes may communicate
with novel gestures. M. Tomasello and colleagues (1997) argue
that novel gestures may develop through ontogenetic ritualiza-
tion, wherein repeated interaction between two individuals
establishes a conventionalized form of an action as a signal for
the action for example, a beckoning movement may become
recognized as short for the physical action of pulling the other
toward oneself. hese gestures may then be propagated by social
learning. his supports the hypothesis that it was gesture rather
than primate vocalizations that created the opening for
greatly expanded gestural communication once complex imi-
tation had evolved for practical manual skills. R. M. Seyfarth,
D. L. Cheney, and T. J. Bergman (2005) advance the opposing
view, but the Mirror System Hypothesis postulates that evolution
proceeded via the next two stages:
(S5) Protosign, a manual-based communication system
breaking through the ixed repertoire of primate vocalizations
to yield an open repertoire.
(S6) Protolanguage as Protosign and Protospeech: an expand-
ing spiral of conventionalized manual, facial, and vocal com-
municative gestures.
he transition from complex imitation and the small reper-
toires of ape gestures (perhaps 10 or so novel gestures shared
by a group) to protosign involves pantomime, irst of grasp-
ing and manual praxic actions, then of nonmanual actions
(e.g., lapping the arms to mime the wings of a lying bird).
Pantomime transcends the slow accretion of manual gestures
by ontogenetic ritualization, providing an open semantics
for a large set of novel meanings (Stokoe 2001). However, such
pantomime is ineicient both in the time taken to produce it
and in the likelihood of misunderstanding. Conventionalized
signs extend and exploit more eiciently the semantic rich-
ness opened up by pantomime. Processes like ontogenetic
ritualization can convert elaborate pantomimes into a con-
ventionalized shorthand, just as they do for praxic actions.
his capability for protosign rather than elaborations intrin-
sic to the core vocalization systems may then have provided
the essential scafolding for protospeech and evolution of the
human language-ready brain.
(S7) Language: the development of syntax and composi-
tional semantics.
he inal stage the transition from protolanguage to lan-
guage may have rested primarily on biological evolution (Pinker
and Bloom 1990), but may instead result from cultural evolution
(historical change) alone (Arbib 2005; Kemmerer 2005). On the
former view, the brain might have innate biological mechanisms
for processing nouns and verbs, as well as principles and param-
eters for combining them with words and morphemes of other
categories. his is supported by the observation that nouns are often
marked for case, number, gender (see gender marking), size,
shape, deiniteness, and possession, while verbs are often marked
for tense, aspect, mood, modality, transitivity, and agree-
ment. On the latter view, once protolanguage was established, dif-
ferent peoples developed (and later shared) diferent strategies for
talking about things and actions and then developed these strat-
egies in diverse ways to talk about more and more of their world.
his view is based on the fact that there are further aspects of lan-
guage diversity hard to reconcile with natural selection of brain
mechanisms. Some languages, like Vietnamese, lack all inlection,
precluding the use of inlectional criteria for identifying grammati-
cal categories; other languages employ inlection in unusual ways.
For example, the language of the Makah of the northwestern coast
of the United States applies aspect and mood markers not only to
words for actions that are translated into English as verbs but also
to words for things and properties.
Complex imitation has two parts: i) the ability to perceive that
a novel action may be approximated by a composite of known
actions associated with appropriate subgoals, and ii) the abil-
ity to employ this perception to perform an approximation of
the observed action, which may then be reined through prac-
tice. Both parts come into play when the child is learning a lan-
guage; the former predominates in adult use of language as the
emphasis shifts from mastering novel words and constructions
to inding the appropriate way to continue a dialogue.
Michael A. Arbib
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Arbib, M. A. 2005. From monkey-like action recognition to human lan-
guage: An evolutionary framework for neurolinguistics (with com-
mentaries and authors response). Behavioral and Brain Sciences
28: 10567.
Arbib, M. A., K. Liebal, and S. Pika. 2008. Primate vocalization, ges-
ture, and the evolution of human language. Current Anthropology
59.6: 105376.
Arbib, M. A., and G. Rizzolatti. 1997. Neural expectations: A possible
evolutionary path from manual skills to language. Communication
and Cognition 29: 393424.
Baker, M. 2001. he Atoms of Language: he Minds Hidden Rules of
Grammar. New York: Basic Books.
Byrne, R. W. 2003. Imitation as behavior parsing. Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society of London (B) 358: 52936.
Byrne, R. W., and J . M. E. Byrne. 1993. Complex leaf-gathering skills of
mountain gorillas (Gorilla g. beringei): Variability and standardiza-
tion. American Journal of Primatology 31: 24161.
Caro, T. M., and M. D. Hauser. 1992. Is there teaching in nonhuman ani-
mals? Quarterly Review of Biology 67: 15174.
Chomsky, N., and H. Lasnik. 1993. he theory of principles and parame-
ters. In Syntax: An International Handbook of Contemporary Research,
I: 50669. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Corp, N., and R. W. Byrne. 2002. Ontogeny of manual skill in wild chim-
panzees: Evidence from feeding on the fruit of saba lorida. Behavior
139: 13768.
Kemmerer, D. 2005. Against innate grammatical categories. Behavioral
and Brain Sciences 28. Available online at: http://www.bbsonline.org/
Preprints/Arbib-0501 2002/Supplemental/.
Meltzof, A. N., and M. K. Moore. 1977. Imitation of facial and manual
gestures by human neonates. Science 198: 758.
507
Modality
Myowa-Yamakoshi, M., and T. Matsuzawa. 1999. Factors inluencing
imitation of manipulatory actions in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).
Journal of Comparative Psychology 113: 12836.
Pinker, S., and P. Bloom. 1990. Natural language and natural selection.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13: 70784.
Rizzolatti, G., and M. A. Arbib. 1998. Language within our grasp. Trends
in Neuroscience 21.5: 18894.
Rizzolatti, G., L. Fadiga, V. Gallese, and L. Fogassi. 1996. Premotor cor-
tex and the recognition of motor actions. Cognitive Brain Research
3: 13141.
Seyfarth, R. M., D. L. Cheney, and T. J. Bergman. 2005. Primate social
cognition and the origins of language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences
9.6: 2646.
Stokoe, W. C. 2001. Language in Hand: Why Sign Came Before Speech.
Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.
Tomasello, M. 1999. he human adaptation for culture. Annual Review
of Anthropology 28: 50929.
Tomasello, M., J. Call, J. Warren, T. Frost, M. Carpenter, and K. Nagell.
1997. he ontogeny of chimpanzee gestural signals. In Evolution
of Communication, ed. S. Wilcox, B. King, and L. Steels, 22459.
Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Yoshikawa, Y., M. Asada, K. Hosoda, and J. Koga. 2003. A constructivist
approach to infants vowel acquisition through mother-infant interac-
tion. Connection Science 15: 24558.
MODALITY
Deinition
In its broadest sense, this term encompasses all means by which
we can talk about hypothetical situations. he conception of
modality includes the following, plus more:
(1) Expressions of necessity and possibility, in any sense
of these terms (English examples: necessary, possible, must,
may).
(2) Expressions of knowledge, belief, desire, and so on (know,
believe, want, must).
(3) Expressions used to indicate how strongly the speaker is
committed to what he or she is saying (perhaps, might).
(4) Expressions used to say that some action is obligatory or
permissible (have [to], must, may, allowed, permit).
(5) Conditional sentences (If then ).
here is a range of narrower senses of the term, each used to
describe a grammatical category or set of related categories. For
example, English can express necessity, possibility, obligation,
permissibility, and ability (and other concepts) by means of a
grammatically special set of auxiliary verbs (must, may, should,
can, etc.). So, when studying English, it is reasonable to deine
modality as the range of meanings expressed by these verbs. But
other languages do not have this grammatical category, and so
its also reasonable to deine modality diferently when studying
these languages.
Semantic Theories
MODAL LOGIC. Much research on modality in natural language
has been inspired by modal logic (see Blackburn, de Rejke, and
Venema 2001 for a brief history). Modal logic typically has two
modal operators, (necessarily, must, or obligatory) and
(possibly, may, permissible), which attach to sentences.
508
he modern approach to the semantics of modal logic, devel-
oped by Saul Kripke and others, is a form of truth condi-
tional semantics based on possible worlds. For example,
a sentence of the form S is true, at a given world w, if S is
true at every accessible world v. Diferent meanings of and
are represented by establishing diferent sets of worlds as acces-
sible. For example, suppose we use to represent it is morally
required that; then, at any world w, the accessible worlds are
those that are ideal, from the point of view of morality in w:
(1) (the rich give money to the poor) is true at w if the rich give
money to the poor in every accessible world v.
A world v is accessible if and only if it is a perfect world, from
the point of view of the moral principles holding in w.
he semantics of is given by replacing every with some in (1).
LINGUISTIC THEORIES BASED ON POSSIBLE WORLDS. Most lin-
guistic theories of modal semantics are based on possible worlds.
For example, Angelika Kratzer (1981) reines the approach by
deining the set of accessible worlds in terms of two conversa-
tional backgrounds. According to Kratzer, the conversational
backgrounds for (2) are i) relevant facts and ii) moral principles.
Simplifying somewhat:
(2) he rich must give money to the poor is true at w if the rich
give money to the poor in every world v which is i) consis-
tent with the relevant facts in w and ii) as good as possible
from the point of view of relevant moral principles in w.
NON-TRUTH CONDITIONAL THEORIES. Many philosophers and
linguists have argued that epistemic modals (see the follow-
ing) lack truth conditions. Instead, they are said to indicate the
speakers level of commitment to what he or she is saying (e.g.,
Palmer 2001). Dynamic modal logic (Groenendijk, Stockhof, and
Veltman 1996) combines ideas from possible worlds semantics
with a non-truth conditional analysis of epistemic modality. he
fundamental semantic concept of dynamic logic is update poten-
tial, the capacity of a sentence to afect an information state (for
example, someones knowledge state or the information shared
in a conversation). Although the update potential of some sen-
tences can be deined in terms of truth conditions, that of an epi-
stemic sentence cannot be.
FUNCTIONAL THEORIES. functional linguistics has
made important contributions to our understanding of the
history (e.g., Traugott and Dasher 2002) and typology (e.g.,
Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994) of modality. cognitive
linguistics ofers a theory of modality based on metaphor
(e.g., Talmy 1988).
Varieties of Modality
SENTENTIAL MODALITY. Most linguists take as the central cases of
modality examples in which some expression combines with a
nonmodal sentence, making it modal. For example, English must
can be analyzed as: must + (the rich give money to the poor). here
are many distinct subtypes of sentential modality, including:
(1) Deontic modality: having to do with rules, including
morality and law (example: Criminals must be punished).
Modality
(2) Epistemic modality: having to do with knowledge (It
must be raining).
(3) Subjective modality: having to do with the speakers
point of view (overlapping with 1 and 2).
(4) Dynamic modality: having to do with ability or the laws of
the natural world (Ducks can swim).
Much work in syntax has studied the representation of sen-
tential modality. Two important issues are the extent to which
modality is represented in the same ways across languages and
whether diferent subtypes are realized in diferent grammatical
positions (e.g., Cinque 1999).
SUBSENTENTIAL MODALITY. Broad deinitions of modality will
include verbs and adjectives such as know and likely. hey will
also include mood, the category of expressions that relect the
presence of modal meaning in the sentence but that do not intro-
duce modal meaning themselves (for example, indicative and
subjunctive verb forms; e.g., Farkas 1985).
DISCOURSE MODALITY. Some varieties of modality operate at the
discourse level. evidentials are forms indicating the speakers
source or quality of information (e.g., Willett 1988). he concept
of illocutionary force is connected to modality as well
(e.g., imperative sentences direct the addressee to perform a
hypothetical action). Discourse modality overlaps with senten-
tial and subsentential modality. For example, in some languages
the subjunctive mood can operate as an imperative.
Paul Portner
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Blackburn, Patrick, Maarten de Rejke, and Yde Venema. 2001. Modal
Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bybee, Joan, Revere Perkins, and William Pagliuca. 1994. he Evolution of
Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and Functional Heads: A Cross-
Linguistic Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Farkas, Donka. 1985. Intensional Descriptions and the Romance
Subjunctive Mood. New York: Garland.
Garson, James. 2007. Modal logic. In The Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy (summer ed.), ed. Edward N. Zalta. Available
online at: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2007/entries/
logic-modal/.
Groenendijk, Jeroen, Martin Stockhof, and Frank Veltman. 1996.
Coreference and modality. In he Handbook of Contemporary
Semantic heory, ed. S. Lappin, 179213. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kratzer, Angelika. 1981. he notional category of modality. In Words,
Worlds, and Contexts, ed. H.-J. Eikmeyer and H. Rieser, 3874.
Berlin: de Gruyter.
Palmer, F. 2001. Mood and Modality. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Portner, P. 2009. Modality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Talmy, Leonard. 1988. Force dynamics in language and cognition.
Cognitive Science 12: 49100.
Traugott, Elizabeth, and Richard Dasher. 2002. Regularity in Semantic
Change. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Willett, homas. 1988. A cross-linguistic survey of the grammaticaliza-
tion of evidentiality. Studies in Language 12.1: 5197.
Modern World-System, Language and the
MODERN WORLD-SYSTEM, LANGUAGE AND THE
Ever since the modern world-system came into existence in the
long sixteenth century, language has been a primary political
concern and a locus of major political struggle. In particular,
the issue of the language or languages that one will require to be
learned and used has been a subject of decisions by states in
their constitutions, their legislation, and/or their executive poli-
cies (see language policy).
In the modern world-system, all included territory falls within
the jurisdiction of individual states. All states are linguistically
heterogeneous in the languages used within households, though
some much more so than others. Seeking to be a strong state,
most states have proclaimed an oicial language, meaning that
laws are written, governmental processes conducted, and edu-
cation ofered in the oicial language. Sometimes, but rarely,
it means that no other language may be used in public locales,
including in signage.
Some states have had more than one oicial language, and
some distinguish between the oicial language and one or more
national languages (which have some more restricted legal
rights). As an overall rule, almost every state has been pressed to
adopt a single oicial language. he usual argument, aside from
the convenience, is that a single language favors national inte-
gration, part of a process of turning a state into a nation-state.
Integration is particularly an issue when there are large immi-
grant groups who speak a diferent language.
In many states, speakers of so-called minority languages, in
the name of cultural rights, resist eforts to impose a single oi-
cial language. In particular, they demand the right to use other
languages in governmental business and schools. Whether
states yield to such demands is largely a question of the inter-
nal balance of power and demographic strength of the dominant
linguistic group, as well as the degree of support a minority lan-
guage may have from powerful neighboring states in which this
states minority language is the neighbors majority language. In
multilingual states, there is often social resistance by the users of
the language second in strength to learning well and using the
primary language.
he problem is compounded beyond the boundaries of a sin-
gle state. Strong regional powers favor the learning of their lan-
guage by states that they consider to fall within their orbit. hey
use direct political pressure, the beneits of economic ties, or
cultural liaison. Adoption of particular alphabetic or ideographic
systems also favors the dominant regional power. If a small state
breaks politically with a regional power and allies itself with
another world power, it often seeks to demonstrate and cement
the new ties by adopting a new secondary language or (if rele-
vant) changing the alphabetic system.
It is at the world or continental level that the issue becomes
most contentious. here are practical beneits in using as few lan-
guages as possible inancial costs, ease of communication, and
savings in the time and efort required for either translation or
interpretation. However, the political implications of eliminating
a particular language as a legitimate option in interstate commu-
nication are very large. he United Nations now has six oicial
languages. Two are working languages English and French.
he inclusion of French has been the result of continuing and
509
Modularity
very strong political pressure from France. he European Union
has decided that any oicial language of a member state may be
used. Since this number is very large, and the costs of translating,
for example, Maltese into Finnish are enormous, the result has
been a creeping usage of English as the de facto but not de jure
oicial language.
In the history of the modern world-system, as Latin fell out
of diplomatic usage, French took its place. Since 1945, given the
hegemony of the United States in the world-system, English has
displaced French. he story in international scientiic discourse
is diferent. In the nineteenth century, German was the favored
lingua franca. After 1918 and especially after 1945, because of
defeats on the battleield, it lost this status. Before 1939, at an
international scholarly congress, participants felt free to deliver
their papers in English, French, German, and usually Italian as
well. here was normally no translation, and it was assumed that
scholars could understand at least three of the four languages.
After 1945, international scholarly organizations dropped
German and Italian entirely. In the 50 years since then, the use of
French has declined but is still permitted, and Spanish has joined
French as a permitted but seldom-used language. he inclusion
of Spanish is the direct result of the fact that there are 19 states in
which it is an oicial language.
In commerce, there have always been lingua francas. Anyone
going to a local market in a major center of a country in the global
South will see merchants capable of conducting their business in
multiple relevant languages. If one looks at discussions among
personnel of large corporations, there has been an increasing
tendency to use English. Nonetheless, it is probably still the
case that the ability to use a widely spoken (oicial) language
other than English is an advantage to persons doing business in
countries outside the English linguistic zone. In commerce, the
decision on linguistic use is less a matter of coercion than of opti-
mizing the ability to engage in proitable business.
Finally, we should notice the consequences for the geocul-
ture of the world-system of the existence of dominant languages.
he widespread use of English in the twenty-irst century is very
advantageous for native English speakers. It is not merely conve-
nient but tends to turn English linguistic eyes into world linguis-
tic eyes. It also, however, has its negative side for native English
speakers. hey are often the only ones cut of from the internal
communications of other linguistic zones, as well as from the
possibilities of seeing the world through other linguistic eyes.
It is quite possible that the increasing role of the Internet
in communications of all kinds, along with the declining
power of the United States in the world-system, will lead to the
reemergence of a multipolar linguistic situation, with ive to
seven world languages that diplomats, scholars, and business
executives will feel the need to master and use.
Immanuel Wallerstein
MODULARITY
Modularity is the claim that human cognition is compartmental-
ized into a number of discrete components or modules poten-
tially including vision, audition, moral judgement, theory of
mind, and language. hese specialized modules contrast with
510
the central system responsible for problem solving and abstract
thought. Modularity is in most striking contrast with theories
such as connectionism that treat cognition as the emergent
product of an unstructured neural network.
heories of modularity come in a variety of lavors with some-
times incompatible properties, making evaluation of the general
hypothesis diicult. I begin with the best-known example Jerry
Fodors (1983) Modularity of Mind and then contrast it with
alternative views.
For Fodor, modules, or input systems, convert sensory
inputs into representations on which the central system of
the mind can operate. Incoming stimuli of a visual, auditory, tac-
tual, or other kind are converted into a form that, in conjunction
with knowledge drawn from memory, is adequate for problem
solving or the ixation of belief. Such beliefs are typically nei-
ther complex nor profound: Hearing a whining noise and seeing
a wagging tail may activate enough encyclopedic knowledge to
make you ix the belief that the dog wants to go out.
Fodor argued that input systems (corresponding to the
senses) all share a number of properties. Each has a speciic
domain of operation (vision, audition, and so on); they act fast
and mandatorily (you have no choice but to see a dog as a dog);
they are subserved by dedicated neural architecture and, hence,
are subject to idiosyncratic pathological breakdown (you can be
blind without being deaf, and vice versa); they are innately deter-
mined (hence, universal and uniform across the species); and,
most importantly, they are informationally encapsulated (that
is, the operation of the input systems proceeds independently
of information stored in memory). You may know that railway
lines dont really converge in the distance but your visual system
still makes them look as if they do. Fodor then suggested that any
system that shared the properties of the sensory input systems
was by deinition a module, with the result that language was
included as a module just like vision.
his claim highlights a radical distinction between Fodors
version of modularity and Noam Chomskys earlier one (1975)
that treats modules as knowledge structures, rather than as pro-
cessing systems. he language faculty is a system of knowledge
that can be accessed by both input and output systems: We pro-
duce as well as understand language. A further diference is that
Fodor is pessimistic about the possibility of saying anything inter-
esting about the structure of the inscrutable central system,
whereas Chomsky is more optimistic, suggesting that the central
system too is modular, with moral judgment, music, and other
faculties all having speciic (if not localized) areas of the mind
dedicated to them. On a point of terminology, it is also impor-
tant to note that Chomsky (and linguists more generally) use the
term module for the various subparts of the language faculty (the
lexicon and the computational system with components such as
binding, control, movement, etc.).
It is clear that even if they share some of the Fodorian prop-
erties such as innate speciication and domain speciicity, moral
judgment and the sense of smell are radically diferent. his
has led to the suggestion that we need a distinction between
(Fodorian) modules and quasi-modules, or modules of the cen-
tral system (Smith and Tsimpli 1995), where these are deined
in terms of the properties (such as informational encapsula-
tion) that they possess and the kind of vocabulary, perceptual or
Modularity
conceptual, over which they are deined. An extreme version of
this position is the claim (cf. Sperber 2002) that the mind is mas-
sively modular, with everything from individual concepts like
dog, to Fodorian modules like vision, to our general pragmatic
ability to interpret utterances being modules. It is unclear what
the identity criteria for a module are in such theories, and Fodor
himself is vehemently opposed to the claim (cf. Fodor 2000).
A rival view (e.g., Karmilof-Smith 1992) accepts that the
minds structure is modular but denies that it is innately deter-
mined, suggesting instead that the (adult) modular structure
arises as a result of a process of modularization on the basis
of interaction with the environment during development.
Connectionists (e.g., Elman et al. 1996) are more radical and
deny the validity of modularity and its use of rules and represen-
tations entirely, relying instead on the ability of neural networks
to simulate the properties of rule-based systems.
he major evidence for modularity in all its guises is (dou-
ble) dissociation. Although it is typically the case that abilities
and disabilities cut across domains (if youre good at one sub-
ject youre likely to be good at others, hence the possibility of
assigning people an intelligence quotient), the existence of dis-
sociations demonstrates the intrinsic separability and autonomy
of the various components of the mind. For instance, intelligence
and language may doubly dissociate. It is possible to combine
high intelligence and good language (you), low intelligence and
good language (linguistic savants like Christopher [Smith and
Tsimpli 1995]), high intelligence and poor (or nonexistent) lan-
guage, as in some kinds of aphasia, and low intelligence and poor
language (as in typical Down syndrome subjects).
Evidence for some version of innate modularity versus modu-
larization due to interaction with the environment comes from
the developmental trajectory of normal children. R. Plomin and
P. Dale (2000) demonstrate that when tested over time, children
typically start with diferent abilities in the verbal and nonver-
bal domains and then gradually converge so that their abilities
are similar across domains. his is exactly the opposite of what
one would expect on a modularization story. Similarly, connec-
tionist claims that modularity is unnecessary are undermined
by the implications of connectionisms uniform reliance on sta-
tistics. he mind exploits statistical regularities in the input dif-
ferently in diferent domains, and Neil Smith and I.-M. Tsimpli
(1995) demonstrate that connectionist models are undesirably
powerful in that they can infer statistical regularities that normal
humans cannot.
Modularity, of some kind, is still the most successful theory
of cognition there is. It has rivals and it has problems, but it is
indispensable.
Neil Smith
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Chomsky, N. 1975. Relections on Language. New York: Pantheon. A sem-
inal source for modularity.
Elman, J., E. Bates, M. Johnson, A. Karmilof-Smith, D. Parisi, and
K. Plunkett. 1996. Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective
on Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. A sustained alternative
to modularity.
Fodor, J. 1983. he Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. he
classic and best-known statement of the modularity thesis.
Montague Grammar
. 2000. he Mind Doesnt Work hat Way: he Scope and Limits of
Computational Psychology. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Karmilof-Smith, A. 1992. Beyond Modularity. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Plomin, R., and P. Dale 2000. Genetics and early language develop-
ment: A UK study of twins. In Speech and Language Impairments
in Children: Causes, Characteristics, Intervention and Outcome, ed.
D. Bishop and L. Leonard, 3551. Philadelphia: Psychology Press.
Smith, N. 2003. Dissociation and modularity: Relections on language
and mind. In Mind, Brain and Language, ed. M. Banich and M. Mack,
87111. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. his article treats in greater
depth many of the issues discussed here.
Smith, N., and I.-M. Tsimpli. 1995. he Mind of a Savant: Language-
Learning and Modularity. Oxford, Blackwell.
Sperber, D. 2002. In defense of massive modularity. In Language, Brain
and Cognitive Development: Essays in Honor of Jacques Mehler, ed.
E. Dupoux, 4757. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
MONTAGUE GRAMMAR
Montague grammar is a theory of semantics and the syntax-
semantics interface developed by the logician Richard Montague
(193071) and subsequently modiied and extended by linguists,
philosophers, and logicians. Classical Montague grammar
had its roots in logic and the philosophy of language; it quickly
became inluential in linguistics, and linguists played a large
role in its evolution into contemporary formal semantics.
he most constant features of the theory over time have been
the focus on truth conditional aspects of meaning (see truth
conditional semantics), a model-theoretic conception of
semantics, and the methodological centrality of the principle of
compositionality.
History
Montague was a student of Alfred Tarski (190283), a pioneer in
the model-theoretic semantics of logic. Montague developed an
intensional logic with a rich type theory and a model-theoretic
possible worlds semantics, incorporating certain aspects
of (formal) pragmatics, including the treatment of indexical
words and morphemes like I, you and the present tense. In the
late 1960s, Montague turned to the project of universal grammar,
which for him meant a theory of syntax and semantics encom-
passing both formal and natural languages.
Montagues idea that a natural language could be formally
described using logicians techniques was radical. Most logi-
cians considered natural languages too unruly for precise
formalization, while most linguists either had no awareness
of model-theoretic techniques in logic or doubted the appli-
cability of logicians methods to natural languages (Chomsky
1955).
At the time of Montagues work, generative grammar was
established, linguists were developing approaches to semantics,
and the relation of semantics to syntax had become central. he
linguistic wars between generative semantics and inter-
pretive semantics were in full swing (Harris 1993). In introdu-
cing Montagues work to linguists, Barbara Partee (1973, 1975)
and Richmond homason (1974) argued that Montagues work
ofered some of the best aspects of both warring approaches,
with added advantages of its own.
511
Montague Grammar
The Theory and Substance of Montague Grammar
It was the short but densely packed PTQ (he proper treatment
of quantiication in ordinary English, Montague 1973) that had
the most impact on linguists and on the development of formal
semantics. Montague grammar has often meant PTQ and its
extensions by linguists and philosophers in the 1970s and 1980s.
But it is the broader algebraic framework of UG (Universal
Grammar, Montague 1970) that constitutes Montagues theory
of grammar. Crucial features of that theory include the truth con-
ditional foundations of semantics, the algebraic interpretation of
the principle of compositionality, and the power of a higher-or-
der typed intensional logic.
Before Montague, semanticists focused on the explication of
ambiguity, anomaly, and semantic relatedness; data were often
subjective and controversial. he introduction of truth condi-
tions and entailment relations as core data profoundly afected
the adequacy criteria for semantics and led to a great expansion
of semantic research. While some cognitively oriented linguists
reject the relevance of truth conditions and entailment relations
to natural language semantics, many today seek a resolution of
meaning externalism and internalism by studying mind-
internal intuitions of mind-external relations, such as refer-
ence and truth conditions.
In UG, Montague formalized the Fregean principle of com-
positionality as the requirement of a homomorphism between a
syntactic algebra and a semantic algebra. he nature of the ele-
ments of both the syntactic and the semantic algebras is open to
variation; what is constrained by compositionality is the relation
of the semantics to the syntax, making compositionality as rel-
evant to representational and conceptual theories of meaning as
it is to model-theoretic semantics.
he richness of Montagues logic made possible a composi-
tional semantic interpretation of independently motivated syn-
tactic structure (see autonomy of syntax), which was key in
overcoming the problems that underlay the linguistic wars. his
was well illustrated in PTQ, where a typed higher-order logic with
lambda-abstraction made it possible to interpret noun phrases
(NPs) like every man, the man, a man uniformly as semantic
constituents (generalized quantiiers), an idea simultaneously
advocated by David Lewis (1970). PTQ also contained innovative
treatments of quantification and binding, intensional tran-
sitive verbs, phrasal conjunction, adverbial modiication, and
more. Montagues type theory introduced to linguists Freges
strategy of taking function-argument application as the basic
semantic glue for combining meanings, giving renewed sig-
niicance to categorial grammar.
Montagues logic was an intensional logic, developing
Gottlob Freges distinction between sense and reference
and Rudolf Carnaps distinction between intension and
extension, using possible world semantics to treat the phe-
nomenon of referential opacity, pervasive in propositional
attitude sentences and many other constructions (see
intentionality ).
Details of Montagues analyses have been superseded,
but in overall impact, PTQ was as profound for semantics as
Noam Chomskys Syntactic Structures was for syntax. Emmon
Bach (1989, 8) summed up their cumulative innovations
thus: Chomskys thesis was that English can be described as
512
Mood
a formal system; Montagues thesis was that English can be
described as an interpreted formal system.
Barbara H. Partee
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bach, Emmon. 1989. Informal Lectures on Formal Semantics. New
York: State University of New York Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 1955. Logical syntax and semantics: heir linguistic
relevance. Language 31: 3645.
Dowty, David, Robert E. Wall, and Stanley Peters, Jr. 1981. Introduction to
Montague Semantics. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Reidel. he classic
textbook on Montague grammar.
Gamut, L. T. F. 1991. Logic, Language, and Meaning. Vol. 2. Intensional
Logic and Logical Grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. A
good, rigorous introduction to Montague grammar and its logic.
Harris, Randy Allen. 1993. he Linguistics Wars. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Lewis, David. 1970. General semantics. Synthese 22: 1867.
Montague, Richard. 1970. Universal Grammar. heoria 36: 37398.
Repr. in Montague 1974, 22246.
. 1973. he proper treatment of quantiication in ordinary English.
In Approaches to Natural Language, ed. K. J. J. Hintikka et al., 22142.
Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Reidel. Repr. in Montague 1974, 24770.
. 1974. Formal Philosophy: Selected Papers of Richard Montague.
Ed. R. homason. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Partee, Barbara. 1973. Some transformational extensions of Montague
grammar. Journal of Philosophical Logic 2: 50934.
. 1975. Montague grammar and transformational grammar.
Linguistic Inquiry 6: 203300.
Partee, Barbara H., with Herman L. W. Hendriks. 1997. Montague gram-
mar. In Handbook of Logic and Language, ed. J. van Benthem and A.
ter Meulen, 591. Amsterdam and Cambridge, MA: Elsevier and MIT
Press. A fuller history and explication of Montague grammar and its
impact.
homason, Richmond. 1974. Introduction. In Formal
Philosophy: Selected Papers of Richard Montague, ed. R. homason,
169. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
MOOD
Mood forms part of the nonspatial setting of an event, alongside
modality, reality status, tense, aspect, and evidentiality.
Mood refers to a type of speech-act, with three basic choices.
Many languages have a special verb form marking commands,
which is known as imperative mood. In Latin, the second per-
son imperative dic means (you) say! and is diferent from the
statement dicis, you say. Declarative mood (sometimes called
indicative) is used in statements. Many more categories tend to
be expressed in declarative clauses than in either interrogative or
imperative. Interrogative mood occurs in questions as in West
Greenlandic where every question is marked with a special suix
on verbs (Fortescue 1984, 49, 28798).
In traditional uses, the notion of mood applied to sets of
inlectional verb forms. he Western classical tradition, based on
Greek and Latin, identiied three moods: indicative, subjunctive,
and imperative, which only partially correspond to the afore-
mentioned three speech-acts. Further meanings associated with
mood involve optative and dubitative (see Lyons 1977, 725848;
Sadock and Zwicky 1985). Some scholars consider conditional
modality which marks a clause in a conditional sentence and
Mood
subjunctive modality typically, a form expressing desire or
uncertainty on a par with moods. his is problematic since
the distinction between moods as speech-acts and clause types
(which include division between main and subordinate clauses,
where conditional forms would be used) is blurred. he intro-
duction of interrogative mood into the system is largely due to
the existence of languages that have an overtly marked verbal
paradigm used for the interrogative speech-act, as in a number
of languages of Amazonia. Further formal distinctions between
moods as clause types involve prosody and constituent order.
Both imperative and interrogative are characterized by a typi-
cal intonation contour. Imperatives often have fewer catego-
ries than corresponding declaratives. he English imperative is
perhaps the simplest form in the language: It consists of the base
form of the verb without any tense inlection, whose subject
typically, the addressee can be and often is omitted. In con-
trast, many languages of North and South America and Siberia
distinguish delayed versus immediate imperatives and proximal
versus distal imperatives. he universal property of imperatives
is having the second person as subject, of a transitive or intran-
sitive verb (Dixon 1994, 13142). A prototypical imperative is
agentive, and this is why in numerous languages imperative can-
not be formed on passive and stative verbs. Other moods do not
have such restrictions. Imperatives directed at the irst person
(e.g., Lets go!), also known as hortatives, are often expressed dif-
ferently from second person imperatives. Imperatives directed at
the third person (e.g., Long live the king!), also known as jussives,
may share similarities with irst person imperatives, or have
properties diferent from all other imperative forms. Further,
minor moods include exclamative (as in hats so tacky!) and
expressive types, such as imprecatives (or curses, often cast as
commands but without a command meaning).
Mood interacts with modality, understood as a means used
by the speaker to express his or her opinion or attitude towards
the proposition that the sentence expresses or the situation
that the proposition describes (Lyons 1977, 452). Expressions
of probability, possibility, and belief are epistemic modalities,
and expressions of obligation are deontic modalities. In English,
these meanings are conveyed by modal verbs, e.g., he might
come or he must have come (epistemic), he must come (deontic)
(see Palmer 1986, 51125; Jespersen 1924, 3201). Further modal
distinctions include desiderative (unachievable desire), optative
(achievable desire), conditional, hypothetical, potential, pur-
posive, and apprehensive (lest). Languages with a rich verbal
morphology may have special marking for each distinction.
An alternative (rare) cover term for both mood and modality is
mode (Chung and Timberlake 1985).
Some languages have an aix with a general meaning of
irrealis covering possibility, future, negative statements, and
commands. hese languages have the category of reality status,
the grammaticalized expression of an events location either in
the real world or in some hypothetical world (see Elliott 2000, for
its cross-linguistic validity). In Maung, an Australian language,
statements in the present, past, and future are marked with rea-
lis suixes. Potential meanings I can do X are expressed with
irrealis, as are commands. In Manam, an Oceanic language, irre-
alis covers future, probable, and counterfactual statements, pos-
itive commands, and habitual actions. But in Yuman languages
Morpheme
and in Caddo, from North America, realis marks statements and
commands, while irrealis expresses future, possibility, and con-
dition. his shows that the realisirrealis distinction is language
speciic and that it is distinct from mood (see Mithun 1999,
17880). Mood, modality, and reality status are distinct from evi-
dentiality (q.v.) whose primary meaning is information source.
Mood is often an obligatory inlectional category of the verb,
marked with aixes (suixes or preixes, rarely inixes); it is never
expressed derivationally. In languages of an isolating proile,
mood can be expressed through particles. Modalities are not
obligatory and, thus, do not constitute part of an inlectional par-
adigm. Modal verbs express modalities rather than moods (this
is the case in English and many other familiar Indo-European
languages).
Forms of mood marking can develop additional meanings
overlapping with modalities. Imperative forms can be used to
express optative and conditional, while indicative forms may
develop overtones of certainty (associated with epistemic modal-
ity). Indicative forms for instance, future can be used as com-
mand strategies, with diferences in illocutionary force.
Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Chung, Sandra, and Alan Timberlake. 1985. Tense, aspect and mood.
In Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Vol. 3: Grammatical
Categories and the Lexicon. Ed. Timothy Shopen, 20258.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dixon, R. M. W. 1994. Ergativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Elliott, Jennifer R. 2000. Realis and irrealis: Forms and concepts of the
grammaticalisation of reality. Linguistic Typology 4: 5590.
Fortescue, Michael. 1984. West-Greenlandic. Beckenham, UK: Croom
Helm.
Jespersen, Otto. 1924. he Philosophy of Grammar. London: George Allen
and Unwin.
Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Mithun, Marianne. 1999. he Languages of Native North America.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Palmer, F. R. 1986. Mood and Modality. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Sadock, Jerrold M., and Arnold M. Zwicky. 1985. Speech act distinctions in
syntax. In Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Vol. 1: Clause
Structure. Ed. Timothy Shopen, 15596. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
MORPHEME
his term has been used in two ways: In Leonard Bloomields
sense, a morpheme is a minimal meaningful form; in Zellig
Harriss and Charles F. Hocketts later usage, a morpheme is an
abstract unit of analysis realized by a morph (= minimal mean-
ingful form) or by a set of synonymous morphs in complemen-
tary distribution. In Bloomields sense, the plural suixes -s
and -en are distinct morphemes; in the latter sense, they are
distinct morphs realizing the same morpheme. he term is not
always used consistently in morpheme-based approaches to
513
Morphological Change

morphology. In paradigm-based approaches, no linguistic
principle is assumed to make essential reference to morphemes
as a uniied class of elements.
Gregory Stump
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bloomield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Henry Holt and Co.
Harris, Zellig S. 1942. Morpheme alternants in linguistic analysis.
Language 18: 16980.
Hockett, Charles F. 1947. Problems of morphemic analysis. Language
23: 32143.
MORPHOLOGICAL CHANGE
Morphological change involves alterations made by speakers over
time to the analysis of complex words, or to the relations between
a lexical base and its compounds and derivatives, or to the set
of inlected words that share a common lexical base. he main
mechanisms of morphological change are reanalysis (the reinter-
pretation of forms) and the extension of patterns to create new
forms. he impetus for reanalysis often comes from changes to
the semantics, phonology, or syntax of the afected forms.
Semantic shift may afect the function of a grammatical ele-
ment. hus, in various Australian languages, a subordinating
purposive suix (in order to VERB), typically -ku, came to be
used in independent clauses as a marker of intentional mood
(may VERB), then further shifted to express future tense (will
VERB). Functional shift in a grammatical aix also took place
in some Karnic (Australian) languages, in which a locative (at)
case suix -nga came to mark the dative (for) function. Meaning
changes may lead to the reinterpretation of compound words as
simple lexemes (e.g. hlford loaf + ward > lord, shep-herd
sheep+ herder > shepherd), or as a lexical stem plus a deriva-
tional aix (king-dom) with downgrading of a bound lexical form
-dom meaning condition to a derivational suix.
Sound changes often create new allomorphs: For example,
the earlier English plural suix -z split into three variants -z, -z,
-s, and the stem long developed a variant leng- in length with the
e conditioned by the following i in the former derivational suix
-ith. As the relationship between words becomes obscured by
the accumulation of sound changes, some phonological difer-
ences become morphologized, that is, reinterpreted as partial or
even sole signals of a morphological property. hus, the vowel e
in slep-t (vs. ee in sleep) helps to mark past tense, and ee in feet
(vs. oo in foot) alone marks plural. Even sound changes that
once operated between words can give rise to alternations with
morphological value; thus, the consonant mutations of Irish
Gaelic, such as b/v/m in ba:d, va:d, ma:d her, his, their
boat, respectively, result ultimately from the diferential efects
of former word-inal consonants of possessors *as, *a, *an on
word-initial b. he efects of sound changes, such as the erosion
of inal syllables whereby English singular and plural forms
oxe, oxene became ox, oxen, can lead to the reanalysis of internal
word structure so that -en is interpreted as a (new) plural suf-
ix. Loss of inal t in the pronunciation of French argent silver
caused argent-ier silversmith to be reinterpreted as argen-tier,
and allowed the new pattern to be extended to create derivatives
such as bijou-tier jeweler from bijou.
Syntax may supply the source of new morphology, as phrases
are reinterpreted as single words (by a process called univerbation).
Former clitics may be reanalyzed as aixes in a process often
described as a kind of grammaticalization with accompany-
ing functional changes. hus in Tocharian, new case suixes (with
meanings such as toward, through, with, from) were cre-
ated by fusing former postpositions with nouns in the oblique case.
Complex new inlectional markers can be created, such as French
aim-eras you will love, where the suix includes part of the Latin
ininitive suix, auxiliary verb have, second-singular (2sg) sub-
ject marker as the Romance future was grammaticalized from a
construction have to VERB. he univerbation of phrases can even
lead to word-internal inlection, with grammatical markers becom-
ing trapped between erstwhile lexical elements, for example, in the
slightly archaic English whomever and whose-ever, where ever was
once a separate word, or in Old Irish atotch sees you (vs. atch
sees), where ot continues an earlier pronoun that was positioned
between the two words that together meant see.
Much morphological change involves only rearrangements
within the morphology itself, within and across paradigms, and
involving either stems or aixes. In leveling, one variant of a
stem is extended to all cells in an inlectional paradigm; thus, in
Ancient Greek, the prehistoric kw of *leikw- leave developed by
regular sound change into t or p before diferent vowels, but the
leip- variant was later generalized to the whole paradigm. Stem
variants may be redistributed according to a pattern prevalent
in other paradigms by a process called analogical change (see
analogy; synchronic and diachronic). hus, in the early
modern German verb give the variant gib-, which arose by
sound change in all the singular forms, was later conined to the
second and third persons singular because many other verbs, for
example, sleep, had a pattern where only these two forms had
a diferent stem vowel. (See Table.)

Pre-Greek (Doric) Greek EMGerman ModGerman German

leave leave give give sleep
1Sg leip leip Gib geb-e schlafe
2Sg leiteis leipeis gib-st gib-st schlfst
3Sg leitei leipei gib-t gib-t schlft
1Pl leipomen leipomen geb-en geb-en schlafen
2Pl leitete leipete geb-t geb-t schlaft
3Pl leiponti leiponti geb-en geb-en schlafen

514
Morphological Typology
Where there are diferent inlectional classes, one class is
usually dominant and its inlectional pattern tends to inluence
the others. hus, in early Italic languages, noun stems in -, i-,
u- remodeled their former ablative singular forms on the pattern
of d in the dominant o-stem class, creating new endings in -d,
-d, -d, respectively. Words are often transferred from an irregu-
lar inlectional class to the dominant one: hus, English drag, a
former strong verb with past drug, changed to the weak class
with regular past inlection dragged.
Iconicity has been emphasized by Natural Morphologists
as one of the principles motivating morphological change.
Iconically organized paradigms code more complex grammati-
cal meanings by means of phonologically larger markers and
simpler meanings with smaller markers, and the most basic
meanings (singular number, nominative case, present tense,
third person agreement, etc.) by no marker at all. In some
Slavic languages, after sound changes created zero case-number
suixes in both the nominative singular and genitive plural of
o-stem nouns, the paradigm was repaired only in the genitive
plural (by substituting an overt suix -ov from another inlec-
tional class), whereas the iconic zero marking was retained in
the nominative singular. Iconicity in the syntagmatic dimension
is increased by changes that reorder a form like (Australian)
Arrernte me-k(e)-atye mother-to-my, where atye was origi-
nally an enclitic pronoun, to the sequence m(e)-atye-ke moth-
er-my-to, which better mirrors the semantic scopal relations
between the elements.
Harold Koch
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Anderson, Stephen R. 1992. Morphological change. In A-morphous
Morphology, 33672. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Joseph, Brian D. 1998. Diachronic morphology. In he Handbook
of Morphology, ed. Andrew Spencer and Arnold M. Zwicky, 35173.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Koch, Harold. 1996. Reconstruction in morphology. In he Comparative
Method Reviewed: Regularity and Irregularity in Language Change, ed.
Mark Durie and Malcolm Ross, 21863. New York: Oxford University
Press.
MORPHOLOGICAL TYPOLOGY
typology has its origins in nineteenth-century morphologi-
cal typology, a method of grouping languages not according
to genetic relatedness but to structural similarity, where the
structure was specifically word structure (see morphology ).
Traditionally, there are three possibilities for phonologically
expressing morphosyntactc (inflectional) and lexicosemantic
(derivational) properties at the level of the word. In an iso-
lating or analytical language, complex words are built from
existing words, free forms. Mandarin Chinese could be viewed
as an isolating language. Productive coining of new terms is
through compounding. The word for Internet is h-lin
wng with h inter + lin related + wng net. In agglu-
tinating languages, the pieces of a complex word map onto
specific meaning elements biuniquely, both at the lexical and
grammatical level. Turkish evlerimizden from our houses is
glossed as
Morphology
ev -ler- im - iz -den
house -PL -POSS. 1-PL -ABL
he third type of language expresses diferences in morphosyn-
tactic and lexicosemantic properties through contrasting modi-
ications, or inlections of a words stem. hese are inlectional
or fusional languages. he classical languages, Greek, Latin, and
Sanskrit, belong to this type. In Latin you (sg[singular]) loved
is expressed by various modiications of the root am- love to
yield amvist: stem formative -v to express perfect, and -ist to
express perfect (again) + 2d person + singular. Typically, proper-
ties are fused in one exponent: Here aspect, person and num-
ber agreement are expressed together. Equally, a property can
be expressed by more than one exponent: Here perfect is being
expressed twice.
here has been general unease among modern linguists with
the classical typology. One reason is that languages rarely fall
cleanly into one of these types. For example, Mandarin Chinese
productively uses what looks like a derivational suix to build
agentive nouns, the word q mechanism: sn-r q cooler,
jin-c q monitor, yng-shng q speaker; compare the
English -er/-or agentive suix (Hippisley, Cheng, and Ahmad
2005). More importantly, there is some doubt that the typology
ofers any theoretical insight, a point argued as far back as Sapir
(1921). Part of the reason is that morphological type is really a
function of other grammatical structures worthy of typologi-
cal investigation, and is, therefore, epiphenomenal (Anderson
1990).
A more promising approach is to focus on much more nar-
rowly deined word structures and to investigate how they
cross-cut languages that may or may not be genetically or typo-
logically related. he result is then a typology of narrowly deined
structures of words that answer the question What is a possible
word? his is the approach taken by Greville G. Corbett and col-
leagues, who look at unusual morphology such as suppletion,
deponency, and defectivenesss, recording such structures in a
large number of individual languages and inducing diachronic
and synchronic models of their appearance and use in syntax
(e.g. Corbett 2007; Baerman and Corbett 2007).
Andrew Hippisley
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Anderson, Steven. 1990. Sapirs approach to typology. In Contemporary
Morphology, ed. W. Dressler et al., 27795. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Baerman, Matthew, and Greville G. Corbett. 2007. Linguistic typol-
ogy: Morphology. Linguistic Typology 11: 11517.
Corbett, Greville G. 2007. Canonical typology, suppletion and possible
words. Language 83: 842.
Hippisley, Andrew, David Cheng, and Khurshid Ahmad. 2005. he
head modiier principle and multilingual term extraction. Natural
Language Engineering 11.2: 12957.
Sapir, Edward. 1921. Language. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.
MORPHOLOGY
Morphology and Words
While the lexicon of a language lists basic forms and their content
(meanings and grammatical properties), a languages complex
515
Morphology
words neednt be invariably listed, since their form and content
are often partially or wholly deducible from those of their parts
by means of regular principles. his system of principles is the
languages morphology.
In morphological theory, it is useful to distinguish three senses
of word. In one sense, the form come is the same word in (1) and
(2); in another sense, come in (1) is a diferent word from come
in (2). his apparent paradox arises because word can be used
to refer to either a phonological or a grammatical unit: In (1) and
(2), come represents the same phonological unit (phonetically
[km]) but two distinct grammatical units: the unmarked inini-
tive form of the verb come in (1) and the past participial form of
this verb in (2).
(1) Sandy should come home.
(2) Sandy has already come home.
hus, it is useful to distinguish phonological words such as [km]
from grammatical words such as the past participle of come.
Moreover, there is a third theoretically relevant interpretation
of word according to which go and gone are diferent forms of
the same word. Here, word refers neither to a phonological word
nor to a grammatical word but to the abstract lexical element of
which go and gone are both realizations; abstract elements of this
sort are referred to as lexemes.
hese three senses of word are related in the following
way: the pairing of a lexeme with an appropriate set of morpho-
syntactic properties deines a grammatical word, as in (3), and
the phonological realization of a grammatical word is a phono-
logical word, as in (4).
(3) Grammatical words (4) Phonological words
a.talk, {3sg present a.(3a)s realization: [tks]
indicative}
b.dog, {plural} b.(3b)s realization: [dgz]
c.good, {comparative} c.(3c)s realization: [b] phemes, which lack overt phonological realization but purport-
Correspondingly, a lexemes paradigm is the full set of grammat-
ical words associated with it; a morphosyntactic property sets
exponence is its phonological realization; and where G is a gram-
matical word in the paradigm of lexeme L, Ls root is the phono-
logical form (if such can be identiied) with which the exponence
of Gs property set combines in the phonological word realizing
G. hus, in the realization of the grammatical word (3b) in the
paradigm of the nominal lexeme dog, the exponence [z] of (3b)s
property set {plural} combines with dogs root [dg]. he dis-
tinction between a words exponence and its root is, of course,
sometimes diicult to draw, as in the realization of be, {1sg
[irst-singular] present indicative} as the portmanteau [m].
Branches of Morphology
A languages morphology comprises two systems. he inlectional
system deines the phonological realization of the grammati-
cal words in a lexemes paradigm; for instance, the inlectional
system of English speciies that the third-singular (3sg) present
indicative form of the lexeme talk is talks. By contrast, the sys-
tem of word formation (better: lexeme formation) deines com-
plex lexemes in terms of simpler lexemes. he latter system itself
516
comprises two subsystems. he derivational subsystem derives
one lexeme from another; for instance, the derivational subsys-
tem of English derives the verbal lexeme crystallize from the
nominal lexeme crystal. he compounding subsystem deines
complex lexemes through the combination of other lexemes;
thus, the compounding subsystem of English creates the com-
pound lexeme mountain lion from the lexemes mountain and
lion. A number of criteria have been adduced to distinguish
inlection from derivation and to distinguish compounds from
syntactic combinations; see Booij (2000) and Matthews (1991),
respectively.
Incremental and Realizational Approaches to Morphology
Structuralist approaches to morphology gave primacy to
morphemes (minimal pairings of form with meaning) as the basic
units of morphological analysis. hey were incremental in orienta-
tion, in that they presumed that the content of a word is the sum
of the content of its component morphemes. hese structuralist
assumptions have been very persistent in modern linguistic theory.
heir widespread acceptance has led many linguists to assume that
all morphological phenomena can be accounted for by indepen-
dently needed principles of syntax and phonology; thus, since the
advent of generative linguistics, morphological issues have often
been addressed as a part of syntax (Selkirk 1982; Lieber 1992) or as
a part of phonology (Kiparsky 1982).
Incrementalist theories of morphology are problematic, how-
ever (Stump 2001, 3 f). First, there are words whose content can-
not be factored into that of their component morphemes; that
is, the content of a words individual morphemes may underde-
termine that of the word itself. he aorist verb form krd-o-x I
stole in Bulgarian is unambiguous despite the fact that none of
its three component morphemes expresses irst-singular (1sg)
subject agreement; compare 2sg/3sg krde, 1pl krd-o-x-me,
2pl krd-o-x-te, and 3pl krdo-x-a. To account for such forms,
proponents of incrementalist theories must postulate zero mor-
edly supply the missing content.
Second, syncretism (the use of the same morphology to
express distinct content) is problematic for incrementalist theo-
ries. In Sanskrit, the accusative singular suix -m is also used as
a nominative singular suix in the paradigms of neuter a-stem
nouns: Compare the masculine noun horse (nom. sg. ava-,
acc. sg. ava-m) with the neuter noun gift (nom./acc. sg.
dna-m). Incrementalist theories must attribute syncretism to
homonymy (e.g., to the existence of two distinct -m suixes in
Sanskrit), but in doing so miss important generalizations (e.g.,
the fact that the nominative and accusative are always syncre-
tized in the paradigms of Sanskrit neuter nouns, regardless of
what the exponence of these cases might be).
Finally, incrementalist assumptions give no explanation for
the incidence of extended exponence (the appearance, within a
single word, of more than one morpheme expressing the same
content). In Nyanja (Niger-Congo; Malawi), adjectives exhibit
noun-class agreement with the noun they modify, and members
of one group of adjectives exhibit two agreement preixes, as in
the case of ci-pewa ca-ci-kulu large hat, where kulu large
agrees with the class 7 noun -pewa hat by means of two distinct
preixes. On incrementalist assumptions, the preix ci- in ca-ci-
Morphology
kulu should alone suice to mark this form for class 7 agree-
ment; the appearance of the additional preix ca- not only seems
unnecessary but actually violates the anti-redundancy principle
(Kiparsky 1982; 136 f) purported to prevent the suixation of plu-
ral -s to English men.
he alternative to an incrementalist theory is a realizational
theory, according to which a words content determines its mor-
phological form (Matthews 1972; Zwicky 1985; Anderson 1992).
In a realizational theory, the paradigm of the verbal lexeme talk
includes the grammatical word in (3a), and the phonological
word that realizes this grammatical word arises from talks root
through the application of any rules associated with the mor-
phosyntactic property set in (3a); there is one such rule, which
realizes the property set {3sg present indicative} through the suf-
ixation of s.
In a realizational theory, the fact that a words form may
underdetermine its content is unproblematic, since content is
not deduced from form in any event. hus, the fact that the irst-
singular aorist form krd-o-x I stole in Bulgarian has no expo- a lexeme has a paradigm of grammatical words a set of pairings
nent of irst-singular subject agreement is simply the efect of a
kind of poverty in the languages verb morpology: It happens not
to have any means of expressing the property 1sg in the reali-
zation of the grammatical word steal, {1sg aorist}. Syncretism
is likewise unproblematic: One need only assume that the reali-
zation of one word in a lexemes paradigm may pattern after the
realization of a diferent word in that paradigm. Rules of referral
(Zwicky 1985; Stump 1993) express this kind of relation between
cells in a paradigm; thus, in Sanskrit, a rule of referral speciies
that the realization of a neuter nouns nominative singular cell is
the same as that of its accusative singular cell. Finally, extended
exponence is unproblematic in a realizational theory; in the case
of Nyanja ca-ci-kulu large [class 7], one need only assume that
more than one rule of preixation participates in the realization
of the grammatical word large, {class 7}.
Current Theories of Morphology
Two approaches to morphology dominate the theoretical land-
scape: the morpheme-based approach and the paradigm-based
approach. Distributed morphology (DM) is the main embodi-
ment of the morpheme-based approach (Halle and Marantz
1993). DM maintains the structuralist focus on morphemes as
the central unit of morphological analysis, but difers from ear-
lier morpheme-based approaches in its assumption that mor-
phemes are inserted into abstract grammatical structures in a
realizational fashion. (Here and throughout, I use morpheme in
the Bloomieldian sense of minimal form-meaning pairing.)
he verb in hey talked instantiates the abstract grammatical
structure V-past-pl through the insertion of the verbal mor-
pheme talk and the past tense morpheme -ed; the property of
third-plural agreement goes unrealized because there is no non-
zero morpheme available to realize it. (DM therefore accom-
modates cases of underdetermination such as that of krd-o-x I
stole.) From earlier incrementalist approaches, DM inherits the
assumption that morphological structures such as V-past-pl
are deined by rules of syntax. his assumption presents prob-
lems that have never been convincingly resolved in the some-
what hermetic DM literature: In rejecting rules that (like rules
of referral) are deined over paradigms, DM is left without any
general account of such essentially paradigmatic phenomena as
syncretism (the relation among paradigm cells that are identi-
cal in their realization), deponency (the realization of one cell by
means of morphology appropriate to a diferent cell), heterocli-
sis (the realization of distinct cells within a paradigm according
to contrasting conjugational/declensional patterns), and defec-
tiveness (the existence of unrealized cells within a paradigm). For
discussion of these phenomena in paradigm-based frameworks,
see Baerman (2004), Baerman, Brown, and Corbett (2005), and
Stump (2001, 2006).
he alternative, paradigm-based approach is instantiated
by such realizational theories as A-morphous morphology
(Anderson 1992), network morphology (Corbett and Fraser 1993;
Brown and Hippisley in press), and paradigm function morphol-
ogy (Stump 2001). hese theories take paradigms rather than
morphemes as the primary object of morphological inquiry and
formulate morphology as an autonomous grammatical compo-
nent. Despite diferences of detail, they are alike in assuming that
such as those in (3) whose phonological realization is deter-
mined by a system of deductive rules, for example, the rule of
exponence in (5a) and the rule of referral in (5b).
(5) a. Where lexeme L has root R, L, {inite past } is realized
as Red.
b. L, {past participle} has the same realization as L, {inite
past }.
By (5a), the lexeme walk has the past tense form walked; by
(5b), this lexeme also has walked as its past participle. A cen-
tral assumption in paradigm-based theories is that rules act as
defaults and are therefore subject to override; in the inlection
of verbal lexemes such as sing, the rules in (5) are overridden
by those in (6). An important concern in such theories is that of
establishing general principles regulating the default/override
relations among rules of morphology. In network morphology,
these relations are regulated by their position in default-inher-
itance hierarchies; in paradigm function morphology, they are
regulated by the Pinian determinism hypothesis (Stump 2001,
23), according to which Rule A overrides Rule B if and only if A is
narrower in application than B.
(6) Where L belongs to the sing class and has root R,
a. L, {inite past } is realized through the substitution of
[] for [] in R.
b. L, {past participle} is realized through the substitution of
[] for [] in R.
Because they deine complex words by means of deductive
rules such as those in (5)/(6), paradigm-based theories aford
a parsimonious account of interactions between concatenative
and nonconcatenative morphology: he fact that (5a) fails to
apply in the deinition of sings past tense form can be directly
attributed to the override relation between (6a) and (5a).
In DM, by contrast, the absence of -ed in sang must instead be
attributed to an overriding, phonologically empty suix whose
presence triggers a rule of [] [] ablaut. his account of the
sing/sang (*singed) alternation implies a parallel account of sing/
sung (*have singed), mouse/mice (*mouses), thief/thieve (*thieize,
cf. burglarize), and other alternations: In each case, a default aix
517
Morphology
must be seen as being overridden by a null aix, which by stip-
ulation triggers a rule of internal modiication. What emerges is
a widely recurrent coincidence that is never explained: Again
and again, a zero aix is stipulated as the unoverridden over-
ride among a set of competing morphemes; over and over, this
unoverridden override by stipulation triggers a rule of internal
modiication. here is, of course, no overt class of phonologically
identical aixes in any language that ever shows the kind of syn-
tagmatic and paradigmatic distribution that DM must stipulate
for the artifactual class of phonologically null aixes upon which
this approach depends.
Current Issues in Morphology
he diferences between morpheme-based theories and par-
adigm-based theories have been most clearly articulated with
reference to inlectional phenomena. But the question naturally
arises whether the principles of lexeme formation are morpheme
based or instead favor a paradigm-based approach. Signiicantly,
derivational morphology exhibits the same sort of default/over-
ride relations as inlectional morphology: In much the same way
as the lexeme sing possesses an inlectional paradigm in which
the appearance of the past tense form sang blocks that of *singed,
the lexeme strong seems to possess a derivational paradigm
in which the appearance of the nominal derivative strength
blocks that of *strongness. For discussion of the evidence for
derivational paradigms, see Bauer (1997), Booij (1997).
he nature of the interface between morphology and syntax
also requires further scrutiny. One question subsumed by this
broad issue is whether a languages periphrases are deined by its
morphology or by its syntax. A periphrase is a multiword realiza-
tion for a grammatical word; thus, while the grammatical word
smart, {comparative} has the synthetic realization smarter,
the grammatical word intelligent, {comparative} has the
periphrastic realization more intelligent (*intelligenter). For dis-
cussion of the evidence in favor of a morphological approach to
periphrasis, see Kersti Brjars, Vincent, and Chapman (1997) and
Ackerman and Stump (2004); the grammatical consequences of
this conclusion remain to be worked out in detail.
Another controversial aspect of the morphology/syntax inter-
face is the phenomenon of clisis. Because their morphology
resembles that of aixes while their syntax is wordlike, clitics
raise very speciic questions about the division of labor between
the components of morphology and syntax. Although recent
years have seen a vast amount of research into the properties of
clitics, there is, as yet, little consensus as regards their precise
theoretical status. Particularly urgent are the need to understand
the diferences between clitics and aixes (Zwicky and Pullum
1983) and the need to reconcile these diferences with the com-
plex interactions between clisis and aixation (Spencer and Lus
2005).
he principles of the morphology/semantics interface also
urgently require clariication. Phenomena such as syncretism,
deponency, extended exponence, and morphological underde-
termination are apparently incompatible with the assumption
(characteristic of morpheme-based theories) that a words mor-
phology is isomorphic to its semantic structure. Research in par-
adigm-based theories has tended to assume (often tacitly) that
the morphosyntactic properties associated with grammatical
518
words are invariant in their semantic interpretation; yet there
are instances in which the semantics associated with a particular
morphosyntactic property is sensitive to its paradigmatic context
(Stump 2007).
A inal area of current interest is that of implicative theories
of morphology. Like realizational theories, implicative theories
depend on the postulation of paradigms, but unlike them, they
assume that the forms realizing a paradigms cells are deined
by implicative relations among these cells (Blevins 2005, 2006).
hus, in an implicative theory, certain words in a paradigm have
a privileged status because they serve as the basis for deducing
the paradigms other words. If a small number of such privi-
leged forms uniquely determine the entire paradigm (as the
forms laud, laudre, laudv, and laudtum suice to deter-
mine the paradigm of praise in Latin), they may be charac-
terized as principal parts; but even words that arent principal
parts may carry speciic implications for the formation of cer-
tain other members of their paradigm. Reference to these rela-
tions among a paradigms cells seems central for an account
of the processes of morphological deduction upon which the
acquisition and use of language depend; moreover, implicative
relations among the cells in lexemes paradigms are a signii-
cant domain of typological contrast among languages (Finkel
and Stump 2009).
Gregory Stump
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Ackerman, Farrell, and Gregory Stump. 2004. Paradigms and periphras-
tic expression: A study in realization-based lexicalism. In Projecting
Morphology, ed. Louisa Sadler and Andrew Spencer, 11157. Stanford,
CA: CSLI Publications.
Anderson, Stephen R. 1992. A-morphous Morphology. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Aronof, Mark. 1994. Morphology by Itself: Stems and Inlectional Classes.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Baerman, Matthew. 2004. Directionality and (un)natural classes in syn-
cretism. Language 80: 80727.
Baerman, Matthew, Dunstan Brown, and Greville G. Corbett.
2005. he Syntax-Morphology Interface: A Study of Syncretism.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bauer, Laurie. 1997. Derivational paradigms. In Yearbook of
Morphology 1996, ed. Geert Booij and J. van Marle, 24356. Dordrecht,
the Netherlands: Kluwer.
Blevins, James P. 2005. Word-based declensions in Estonian. In
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MORPHOLOGY, ACQUISITION OF
he acquisition of morphology has played a central role in
exploring both the acquisition of syntax (see syntax, acquisi-
tion of) and lexical acquisition. he study of acquisition
of morphology can be distinguished by research in irst language
acquisition (FLA) and second language acquisition (SLA)
and by research into inlectional or derivational morphology.
Little research has attempted to link acquisition of inlectional
and derivational morphology. here has been some inluence
of work in FLA on that in SLA, in particular in debates about
the order of acquisition of morphemes for second language
learners.
he acquisition of inlection is often examined as the acqui-
sition of morphosyntax, that is, structures that are governed by
both morphological and syntactic rules such as subject-verb
agreement. he majority of literature focuses on children under
the age of seven, as inlectional morphology is acquired during
early childhood. he acquisition of derivational morphology, on
the other hand, is concerned with the formation of new words and
is thus related to school-age language learning and reading.
Jean Berkos classic 1958 study found that children ive to
seven years of age are able to apply both inlectional and deri-
vational suixes to novel stems (e.g., the plural wugs from wug,
or the adjective quirky from the noun quirks). hese results were
interpreted at the time as evidence against the predictions from
the prevailing theories of Behaviorism (Skinner 1957) and sup-
ported the cognitive revolution in psychology and linguistics.
his study has been replicated with children as young as two
in English and other languages (e.g., Kopcke 1998; Akhtar and
Tomasello 1997). Together with work examining childrens natu-
ral productions of morphology, this experimental work has been
taken as evidence that young children use morphological rules
to inlect and to form parts of speech.
Inlectional Morphology
FIRST LANGUAGE. One major set of works investigating the
acquisition of morphemes examined the order of acquisition of
inlectional morphemes (Cazden 1968; Brown 1973; de Villiers
and de Villiers 1973), focusing on English. his work found a
consistent (though not identical) order of acquisition among
children. Cross-linguistic work demonstrated that there was no
universal order of morpheme acquisition between languages,
that the order and speed of acquisition depends on the target
language and the morphemes themselves (Slobin 1985; Clark
1998). Work on other languages has also found consistent, but
inluence the order of acquisition, including perceptual salience,
complexity of the morpheme either semantically (how many
concepts it encodes) or formally (how variable the aix is, how
many parts it contains), and frequency in the input. Eve V. Clark
(1993) suggested that several principles transparency (how
easily the meaning is derived from the parts), simplicity (how
variable the forms are), and productivity govern the order of
acquisition of both inlectional and derivational morphemes.
Morphemes that are consistent in form (have few allomorphs)
and semantically encode a single feature, such as plural or pro-
gressive -ing, tend to be acquired earlier than morphemes that
show more allophonic variation, such as with regular past tense
-ed, and/or encode multiple features, such as third person
singular -s (Brown 1973; Clark 1993). his preference to encode
single features/forms with a single morpheme holds across lan-
guages and even for children acquiring more than one language.
For example, Melanija Mikes (1967) discussed the acquisition of
locatives for bilingual Hungarian-Serbo-Croatian children. he
Hungarian locative suix, which is relatively transparent, was
acquired earlier than the semantically equivalent structure in
Serbo-Croatian, which required locative prepositions + agree-
ment, which varied by gender.
Inlected forms appear early, from the earliest word use, espe-
cially in highly or consistently inlected languages (Slobin 1985).
Languages such as English, with fewer inlected forms, have bare
forms appearing irst and inlected forms appearing later, often
concurrently with irst word combinations. In English, childrens
production of inlectional morphology begins with an initial
period of some variability, gradually becoming more consistent
519
Morphology, Acquisition of
over time. Across languages, some morphemes (such as plurals)
are consistently produced accurately by the age of three or four,
whereas others, such as conditional marking of verbs, are often
not mastered until ages seven or eight. While little research has
been done on inlectional preixes, it has been suggested that
inlectional preixes are more diicult and are acquired later
than suixes (Slobin 1982; Clark 1998).
In all languages, children often go through a period during
which they overregularize irregular forms in their grammar,
for example, breaked or mans. Irregular forms are often acquired
early (broke/men) and then when regular forms are acquired,
overregularized forms coexist with irregular forms (breaked/
broke) for a time until the irregular forms and exceptions are
mastered (Marcus et al. 1992).
he majority of research on inlectional morphology has
focused on the verbal and nominal domains, with relatively
little work on adjectives or adverbs. According to Clark (1998),
the earliest verb forms across languages tend to be imperative,
ininitive verb forms, and third person singular; singular forms
tend to be acquired before plural forms. he characteristics of
individual languages determine which agreement markers
are learned earliest in any given language. In terms of tense
and aspect, present/nonpresent is the irst distinction children
make, and distinctions between past, present and future appear
to be in place by age three. In languages that distinguish aspect,
aspect also appears to be acquired around age three. However,
early aspect marking is also associated with the semantic char-
acteristics of the verb. For example, Li and Shirai (2000) argue
that early use of perfective aspect is more likely to occur with
telic (e.g., walked) or resultative verbs (e.g., smashed) than other
types of verbs. Compound or periphrastic tenses such as present
perfect are acquired later, and may not be in place until age ive
or older.
Within the nominal domain, number marking occurs early
in nouns and is one of the earliest nominal morphemes to be
seen. gender marking also appears early, just after the irst
nouns. Early gender/noun class marking appears to be based
primarily on the phonological shape of the noun and later
becomes associated with individual lexical items. Noun class
marking appears by age three, but adultlike acquisition of gen-
der or noun class marking, which requires attention to both
phonological form and semantics, does not appear until age
four or ive in many languages (Demuth 2003). In languages
with classiier systems, such Chinese, Japanese or hai, general
classiier patterns appear early, and more ine-grained seman-
tic distinctions appear gradually. Case marking occurs early as
well, just after irst nouns are learned. In nominative-accusa-
tive languages, the irst distinction to be acquired appears to
be between nominative and accusative. Dative case is next,
followed by other oblique cases. here is also evidence from
ergative languages that the major case distinctions in these lan-
guages are acquired early as well. Languages in which case var-
ies by gender (e.g., Russian) take longer for contrasts to appear
than in languages that simply mark for case (e.g., Hungarian,
or Turkish).
Inlectional morphology is generally mastered by the early
school years for all but the most infrequent or irregular construc-
tions across languages.
520
SECOND LANGUAGE. Early research in second language acquisi-
tion of inlectional morphology investigated whether there was
a consistent order of acquisition of morphemes. Initial studies
reported consistent orders of acquisition across both adult and
child second language learners of English (e.g., Dulay and Burt
1974). Later research, however, criticized these early studies for
their methodology, and found variability among learners of dif-
ferent backgrounds that seemed to belie a single order of acqui-
sition for second language learners (e.g., Hakuta 1974; Rosansky
1976). he present consensus seems to be that morpheme lan-
guage studies provide strong evidence that ILs [interlanguages,
developing grammars] exhibit common accuracy/acquisition
orders (Larsen-Freeman and Long 1991, 92). After this intense
period of debate about the acquisition order of morphemes, later
research in SLA has focused on one of several areas: research on
speciic structures such as tense or aspect, the role of context in
the acquisition of morphology, and the implications of missing
morphology for the developing grammars of second language
learners. Research has begun to look again at order of acquisition
in SLA, considering how models of acquisition and/or the func-
tor morphemes themselves can explain the order (Goldschneider
and DeKeyser 2001). Here again, the discussion parallels that of
irst language acquisition, with perceptual salience, morphopho-
nological regularity, semantic complexity, and frequency being
posited as factors contributing to the order of acquisition.
Derivational Morphology
FIRST LANGUAGE. Because derived forms are often used to ill
semantic gaps within a lexicon, the acquisition of derivational
morphology is studied within the domain of vocabulary learn-
ing. Derivational morphology is acquired somewhat later, and
with a less clear order of development, than inlectional mor-
phology. Highly inlected languages such as Turkish or Finnish
show evidence of early derivational morphology. Studies indi-
cate that the earliest derivations are zero-stem alternations (e.g.,
the noun knife used as a verb) and compounding (e.g., dog-book)
for languages where these processes are productive (Clark 1993).
Agentive suixes (-er in particular) and diminutives (dogg-y) are
also acquired between ages two and three across many languages.
However, the bulk of derivational morphology is acquired during
middle childhood and adolescence (Tyler and Nagy 1989).
As with inlectional morphology, the course of develop-
ment for derivational morphology varies from language to lan-
guage and depends on both the patterns within the language
and the properties of the derivations themselves. For example,
Hebrew-speaking children derive verbs from nouns as young as
age three, while derived nominals are acquired later, after age
eight and continuing into adolescence (Berman 2003; Ravid
and Avidor 1998). Awareness of and ability to decode deriva-
tional morphology continues to develop throughout the school
years. Comprehension of derivational morphology is correlated
with reading skills in a number of languages, including English,
Hebrew and Chinese (Tyler and Nagy 1990; Levin, Ravid, and
Rapaport 2001; Kuo and Anderson 2006). As with inlectional
morphology, acquisition appears to be best explained by the
transparency of the morpheme, complexity (semantic and for-
mal), and productivity (Clark 1998). Later-learned morphemes
such as -tion have more allomorphs, make more changes to the
Morphology, Acquisition of
stem they attach to, encode more concepts, and/or are less pro-
ductive than early learned morphemes such as -er.
SECOND LANGUAGE. As with irst language (L1) acquisition, sec-
ond language acquisition of derivational morphology has been
studied together with general vocabulary growth and knowl-
edge of the lexical semantics of the language (Redouane 2004;
Montrul 2001; Lardiere 1997). Little research has examined this
area of second language acquisition in detail. he research that
exists suggests that beginning learners tend to ill lexical gaps
with word formation strategies from their L1 or by extending
existing second language vocabulary. More advanced learn-
ers are more likely to use derivational morphology found in the
target language, although they are still likely to use non-target
forms. Evidence also suggests that derivational morphology pat-
terns that are substantially diferent from the L1 present consid-
erable problems to second language learners and are learned
only gradually through time.
Current Debates
Major areas of debate in the acquisition of morphology include
the status of missing inlectional morphemes in learners gram-
mars, whether productive use of morphemes relects rules and
an innate capacity for rule formation, and whether regular and
irregular forms are acquired and represented similarly.
For irst language acquisition, one area of strong debate has
been the status of missing or omitted morphology by children.
Within a general nativist framework, explanations range from
maturation of grammatical structures, to prosodic and/or pho-
nological learning, to language-speciic lexical learning (e.g.,
Peters and Stromqvist 1996; Santelmann, Berk, and Lust 2000).
More empiricist approaches point to such issues as frequency
of morphemes, vocabulary size, and transparency of the mor-
phemes themselves to explain the course of acquisition (e.g.,
Rowland et al. 2003).
Parallel debates have taken place within the literature on
second language acquisition. Within the search for a consistent
order of morpheme acquisition, debates have focused on the
possible reasons for such an order: Is it due to an underlying uni-
versal grammar (Dulay and Burt 1974), characteristics of the
input, or general learning and characteristics of the morphemes
themselves (Goldschneider and DeKeyser 2001). In addition, the
issue concerning why adult learners, unlike child learners, con-
tinue to make mistakes with inlectional morphology even after
years of exposure to a language has been a source of signiicant
debate. Explanations for this phenomenon range from a lack of
access to universal grammar for adult learners to issues with pro-
sodic diferences between languages, diferences in proiciency,
or other factors.
Within the domains of both inlectional and derivational
morphology, another major theoretical debate concerns the
nature of rules. Do children and adults learn rules, or do they
simply extract regularities from the speech stream? his debate
has been particularly strong in the area of regular versus irregu-
lar verbs. One side of the debate argues that children use rules for
regular verbs, and thus have distinct processes for forming and
representing past tense with regular versus irregular forms (e.g.
Marcus 1996). his view argues that irregular forms are stored as
words, while regular forms are concatenated via rules (Pinker
and Ullman 2002). he other approach, from those mainly work-
ing within connectionism, claims that learners are extracting
statistical regularities and patterns, without positing a mental
rule (e.g., Plunkett and Marchman 1993). hese researchers sug-
gest that there is a single, associationist mechanism for forming
past tense for all verbs, regular or irregular, and thus the rep-
resentations of regular and irregular forms do not difer. While
rule-based accounts appear to have underestimated the human
ability to track statistical information about morphology, con-
nectionist models may not be able to generalize regular forms
based on the typical frequencies of those forms in the input
(Marcus 1995). hus, the extent to which these networks can
model human language acquisition is unclear.
Summary
he acquisition of morphology is central to both morphosyntac-
tic development and lexical development for irst and second
language learners. While the acquisition of inlectional mor-
phology is largely complete for children by the time they enter
school, it is often problematic for adult learners of a language.
Derivational morphology, on the other hand, is an ongoing, life-
long process for both irst and second language learners. Little
research has attempted to link the two types of morphological
acquisition. More research on both derivational and inlectional
morphology is needed on a wider variety of languages or varying
typologies, in particular on non-Indo-European languages. his
is particularly the case for SLA, where the bulk of the research
has focused on European languages.
Lynn Santelmann
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Akhtar, N., and M. Tomasello. 1997. Young childrens productivity
with word order and verb morphology. Developmental Psychology
33.6: 95265.
Berko, Jean. 1958. he childs learning of English morphology. Word
14: 15077.
Berman, Ruth A. 2003. Childrens lexical innovations: Developmental
perspectives on Hebrew verb structure. In Language Processing and
Acquisition in Languages of Semitic, Root-Based, Morphology, ed.
J. Shimron. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Brown, Roger W. 1973. A First Language: he Early Stages.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Cazden, Courtney B. 1968. he acquisition of noun and verb inlections.
Child Development 39: 43348.
Clark, Eve V. 1993. he Lexicon in Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
. 1998. Morphology in language acquisition. In he Handbook of
Morphology, ed. A. Spencer and A. Zwicky. Oxford: Blackwell.
Demuth, K. 2003. he acquisition of the Bantu languages. In he Bantu
Languages, ed. D. Nurse and G. Phillipson. Surrey : Curzon.
de Villiers, Jill G., and Peter A. de Villiers. 1973. A crosssectional study of
the acquisition of grammatical morphemes. Journal of Psycholinguistic
Research 2: 26778.
Dulay, Heidi, and Marina Burt. 1974. Natural sequences in child second
language acquisition. Language Learning 24: 3753.
Goldschneider, Julie M., and Robert M. DeKeyser. 2001. Explaining
the natural order of L2 morpheme acquisition. Language Learning
51: 150.
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Hakuta, Kenji. 1974. A preliminary report on the development of gram-
matical morphemes in a Japanese girl learning English as a second lan-
guage. Working Papers on Bilingualism 3: 1838.
Kopcke, K. M. 1998. he acquisition of plural marking in English and
German revisited: Schemata versus rules. Journal of Child Language
25.2: 293319.
Kuo, Li-jen, and Richard C. Anderson. 2006. Morphological awareness
and learning to read: A Cross-language perspective. Educational
Psychologist 41.3: 16180.
Lardiere, Donna. 1997. On the transfer of morphological parameter
values in L2 acquisition. Proceedings of the Annual Boston University
Conference on Language Development, 1997 21.2: 36677.
Larsen-Freeman, Diane, and Michael H. Long. 1991. An Introduction to
Second Language Acquisition Research. New York: Longman.
Levin, Iris, Dorit Ravid, and Sharon Rapaport. 2001. Morphology and
spelling among Hebrew-speaking children: From kindergarten to irst
grade. Journal of Child Language 28.3: 74172.
Li, P. and Y. Shirai. 2000. he Acquisition of Lexical and Grammatical
Aspect . Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Marcus, Gary F. 1995. he acquisition of the English past tense in children
and multilayered connectionist networks. Cognition 56.3: 2719.
. 1996. Why do children say breaked? Current Directions in that certain aspects of language are as they are for physical or
Psychological Science 5.3: 815.
Marcus, Gary F., Steven Pinker, Michael Ullman, Michelle Hollander, T.
John Rosen, and Fei Xu. 1992. Overregularization in language acqui-
sition. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development
57.4: v164.
Mikes, Melanija. 1967. Acquisition des categories grammaticales dans
le langue de lenfant [Acquisition of grammatical categories in the lan-
guage of the child]. Enfance 3/4: 28998.
Montrul, Silvina. 2001. he acquisition of causative/inchoative verbs in
L2 Turkish. Language Acquisition 9.1: 158.
Peters, Ann M., and Sven Stromqvist. 1996. he role of prosody
in the acquisition of grammatical morphemes. In Signal to
Syntax: Bootstrapping from Speech to Grammar in Early Acquisition,
ed. J. Morgan and K. Demuth. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Pinker, Steven, and M. T. Ullman. 2002. he past and future of the past
tense. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6: 45663.
Plunkett, Kim, and Virginia A. Marchman. 1993. From rote learning to
system building: Acquiring verb morphology in children and connec-
tionist nets. Cognition 48.1: 2169.
Ravid, Dorit, and Avraham Avidor. 1998. Acquisition of derived nomi-
nals in Hebrew: Developmental and linguistic principles. Journal of
Child Language 25.2: 22966.
Redouane, Rabia. 2004. he acquisition of MSA word formation pro-
cesses: A case study of English-speaking L2 learners and native speak-
ers. ITL, Review of Applied Linguistics, 145/146: 181217.
Rosansky, E. 1976. Methods and morphemes in second language acqui-
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Rowland, Caroline F., Julian M. Pine, Elena V. Lieven, and Anna L.
heakston. 2003. Determinants of acquisition order in wh-ques-
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Language 30.3: 60935.
Santelmann, Lynn, Stephanie Berk, and Barbara Lust. 2000. Assessing
the strong continuity hypothesis in the development of English
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19: 43952.
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Tyler, Andrea, and William Nagy. 1989. he acquisition of English
derivational morphology. Journal of Memory and Language
28.6: 64967.
MORPHOLOGY, EVOLUTION AND
For some aspects of language, possible evolutionary explana-
tions are not hard to imagine, even if establishing the truth of
any of them may be diicult or impossible. For example, the
fact that utterances can be segmented into individual meaning-
ful elements (words or morphemes) has a clear functional
advantage in that combinations of these elements can be used
to express a huge range of complex meanings an advantage
exploitable in natural selection. Likewise, it is advantageous
to have a syntax, that is, a set of traic rules for combining
words or morphemes into larger units that can be interpreted
reliably. Less immediately obvious but nevertheless vigorously
defended by some scholars in recent years is the possibility
mathematical, rather than biological, reasons. he hexagonal
shape of honeycomb cells is not due to a hexagonal-cell gene
inherited by bees but is a self-organizing outcome of cell con-
struction under particular spatial constraints. Conceivably,
nonbiological self-organizing factors inluence language,
too.
For the existence of morphology, however, no such expla-
nations seem immediately plausible. What functional advan-
tage is there in the availability of not one but two patterns of
grammatical organization for complex expressions: syntactic,
as in the French phrase tasse th (literally cup to tea) and
the English sentence hey were being bitten, and nonsyn-
tactic, as in the English compound word teacup and the Latin
one-word sentence Mordebantur? More puzzling still, what
functional advantage is there in the fact that the plural of pan is
pans while the plural of man is men or that the past tense forms
of bring, sting, and sing are brought, stung, and sang, respec-
tively? he irst question concerns the relationship between
morphology and syntax, while the second concerns allomor-
phic variation. Wouldnt languages, in general, function better
if there were just one set of traic rules, not two, to guide the
interpretation of complex expressions? And wouldnt English
function better if plurality and pastness were expressed in a
uniform fashion, as in the Newspeak of George Orwells 1984
or as in an artificial language such as Esperanto? Should
we then look for a physical or quasi-mathematical explanation
instead? Yet these phenomena do not display the sort of hon-
eycomb-like elegance that renders them obvious candidates
for that explanation.
For possible solutions to these puzzles, it is natural to con-
sult hypotheses speciically concerning the evolutionary origin
of morphology as a component of grammar. Hypotheses of that
kind so far published are sketchy. Nevertheless, four trends can
be distinguished:
(a) an appeal to uninterpretable features in Noam
Chomskys minimalist syntax (one type of appeal to self-
organization);
Morphology, Evolution and
(b) the projection into prehistory of grammaticalization
processes such as are observed in historical linguistic
change;
(c) an appeal to phonological consequences of the fact
that the speech signal is continuous, not segmentable into dis-
crete chunks with clear boundaries (and gesture likewise, if
we suppose that language originated in that medium);
(d) a variant of (c) that also invokes the special circumstances
of our huntergatherer ancestors.
Chomskyan Minimalism explores rationales for apparent
imperfections in language. One such apparent imperfection
is syntactic displacement: for example, the kind of noun phrase
fronting exhibited in Beans I like and Who did you see? and per-
haps even in a simple clause such as John kissed Mary, if one
assumes that syntactic subjects originate internally to the verb
phrase. Such displacement may serve communicative purposes
(topicalization, for example). It still counts as a grammati-
cal imperfection, however, if there is nothing within grammar
itself to drive it. his is where morphology may come in (it is
claimed). Let us suppose that some constituents have fea-
tures that are uninterpretable and thus need to be erased phonologically full ones.
by moving those constituents to a location where these features
can be matched (Chomsky 2000, 2004). So far as grammar is
concerned, this matching helps to ensure that all of the syntactic
requirements of the vocabulary items in the sentence are met,
while so far as purposes of language that lie outside grammar
are concerned (such as communication), it may aid their
fulillment by (for example) moving shared information to the
start of utterance. he apparent imperfection thus disappears.
If, incidentally, some of the features that drive displacement
manifest themselves in overt morphology (for example, as case
inlections), that is hardly surprising; it may facilitate the acqui-
sition of grammar, for example. hus, the existence of morphol-
ogy helps to resolve tensions between the way that the grammar
is ideally structured and the extragrammatical uses to which
language is put.
his line of argument has at least three weaknesses, however.
Firstly, it says nothing about the allomorphy exhibited in pans
and men or in brought, lung, and sang. Secondly, it says noth-
ing about why derivational morphology exists (for example, why
we say writer and artist rather than, say, person write or person
art). hirdly, it relies too much on the intellectual appeal that
paradoxes can exert. Consider the orbits of the planets around
the sun. hese orbits are not circular, which may be seen as an
imperfection, but the imperfection disappears in a paradoxical
yet satisfying way (one may think) in that, even though an orbit
is elliptical, the planets position on its orbit is correlated with
its speed, as Johannes Kepler demonstrated. But the enjoyment
of paradox can go too far. I carry a puncture repair kit when I go
cycling, which is an apparent imperfection because it adds to
the weight of my equipment. Am I then entitled to claim that this
imperfection disappears whenever I get a puncture because my
repair kit enables me to get on the road again? And can I even
argue that getting a puncture is paradoxically a positive event
because it justiies my carrying the repair kit? Flat tires thus con-
tribute to perfect cycling! his style of argument is strange, to
say the least. Yet it is uncomfortably close to a style of argument
used by some minimalist theorists to explain the existence of
morphology.
Grammaticalization theory concerns itself with the process
whereby in language change, what were once free forms
with concrete, lexical meanings can change in three ways: gram-
matically, so as to become bound rather than free (as the free
form full has developed into a suix in helpful); semantically,
so as to contribute grammatical rather than lexical information
(as the verb will in English has shifted from desire to future
tense); and phonologically, so as to merge with a neighboring
phonological word (as in Ill come, derived from I will come)
(Heine and Kuteva 2002). All three changes can be observed in
the history of Swedish, where what was once a free pronoun sik
meaning himself/herself has developed into a suix -s with a
habitual passive meaning. Bernard Comrie (1992) has suggested
that not only individual aixes but also morphology overall origi-
nated this way. At an earlier, simpler stage of language, there was
syntax but no morphology. Subsequently, phonological reduc-
tion and meaning change in frequently occurring collocations
brought into being a new kind of structure, with bound items
alongside free ones, and phonologically reduced items alongside
A drawback with this approach is that it privileges syntax over
morphology in an arbitrary way. Granted, all languages have
syntax while some languages today make little or no use of mor-
phology. hat does not, however, constitute evidence that syntax
evolved earlier than morphology did. Implicitly, this approach
posits a sort of prehistoric linguistic Golden Age when forms
and meanings were neatly paired one-to-one, and when lan-
guage did indeed have only one set of grammatical traic rules.
However, such a Golden Age would have no parallel elsewhere
in evolutionary biology; there is no reason to think that func-
tionality as an outcome of natural selection was more pervasive
at some time in the past than it is now.
Is there any reason to think, then, that the anomalies of mor-
phology have been around for as long as modern-style syntax
has, or even longer? Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy (2010) argues
just this. Individual meaningful units (morphemes), whether
spoken or signed, are not diamond-hard discrete entities, unaf-
fected in their shape by neighboring units. his would have been
just as true before fully modern syntax had evolved as subse-
quently. hus, there would already then have been in existence
phonological processes that would give rise to allomorphy, and,
just as now, historical changes would sometimes have deprived
this allomorphy of its phonological motivation (just as the voic-
ing of the [v] in wives, plural as wife, now lacks the phonological
motivation it had in Old English and has thus acquired a gram-
matical function, as an exponent of plural). Let us assume
that this allomorphy was coupled with an expectation that for-
mal diferences should always be accompanied by diferences
in information content. One has already the seeds of a kind of
grammar in which the same item can be viewed as having more
than one form, provided that these forms are diferentiated
somehow. he diferentiation could be semantic (e.g., rise versus
raise), grammatical (e.g., sang versus sing), or in terms of phono-
logical environment (e.g., in Italian udire to hear, the stem is
od- when stressed and ud- when unstressed). (Grammatical dif-
ferentiation in this hypothetical stage of development would ex
523
Morphology, Evolution and
hypothesi not involve syntax, but could conceivably involve sys-
tematic expression of categories such as number, tense, or dei-
niteness.) And, where formal diferences involved extra segments
at the beginning or the end of an item, the seeds were sown for
what we now call aixes, arising by a process quite distinct from
grammaticalization.
A variant of Carstairs-McCarthys approach has been devel-
oped by Dieter Wunderlich (2006a, 2006b), linking grammatical
evolution with cultural and economic change. he sort of syntax
that many modern languages have, with lavish opportunities for
long-distance syntactic movement, would not have had signii-
cant evolutionary advantages (Wunderlich suggests) until after
the emergence of large speech communities whose members
did not all know one another, that is, until the Neolithic period.
Until then, he suggests, that is, as long as all humans were hunt-
ergatherers living in small groups, elaborate morphology would
have preponderated over syntax.
It will be seen that, as regards morphological evolution,
widely divergent suggestions have been made about the balance
between cultural and noncultural factors. Carstairs-McCarthys
and Chomskys approaches, though diferent in many ways,
agree in emphasizing noncultural reasons for the existence of
morphology as a component of grammar. For Comrie, on the
other hand, cultural change is at least as important as biological
or self-organizational factors, while Wunderlich revives the view
that fully modern syntax came late as a cultural by-product of
population expansion and the transition to agriculture, with the
added twist that an elaborate morphological component was
already in existence early. Time will tell which viewpoint pre-
vails or which combination of viewpoints.
Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew. 2010. he Evolution of Morphology. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 2000. New Horizons in the Study of Language and
Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 1 is especially
relevant.
. 2004. Language and mind: Current thoughts on ancient prob-
lems. In Variations and Universals in Biolinguistics, ed. L. Jenkins,
379405. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Comrie, Bernard. 1992. Before complexity. In he Evolution of Human
Languages, ed. J. Hawkins and M. Gell-Mann, 193211. Reading,
MA: Addison-Wesley.
Heine, Bernd, and Tania Kuteva. 2002. World Lexicon of
Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hinzen, Wolfram. 2006. Mind Design and Minimal Syntax. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. his book confronts frankly, from a Chomskyan per-
spective, some of the diiculties that morphology poses for the min-
imalist program.
Wunderlich, Dieter. 2006a. What forced syntax to emerge? In Between
40 and 60 Puzzles for Krifka, ed. Hans-Martin Grtner, Sigrid Beck,
Regine Eckardt, Renate Musan, and Barbara Stiebels. Berlin: Zentrum
fr Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft. Available online at: http://www.
zas.gwz-berlin.de/fileadmin/material/40 60-puzzles-for-krifka/
index.html.
. 2006b. Why is there morphology? Abstract of paper presented at
Workshop on heoretical Morphology, Leipzig, June. Available online
at: http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~jungslav/rmag/Wunderlich.pdf.
524
Morphology, Neurobiology of
MORPHOLOGY, NEUROBIOLOGY OF
he nature of word formation and word storage has long been
prominent in the disparate ields of linguistics, psychology, and
neurobiology, and recently the neurobiology of morphology has
emerged as its own distinct subield of study.
Two prevalent issues in formal linguistic and psycholinguistic
approaches to morphology are the distinctions drawn between
inlectional versus derivational morphology and between regular
versus irregular morphology. Another line of inquiry has sought
to identify the formal structure of basic morphological represen-
tations (i.e., words, stems, aixes) and to determine the extent
to which complex words are either composed by a grammati-
cal process or stored as unanalyzed wholes. he issue of com-
positionality interacts with inlectional/derivational status and
with regularity; for example, various theorists have proposed
that irregular inlection is not compositional (1a), that familiar
inlected forms are not compositional (2a), or that derivational
morphology is not compositional (3a) in the way that they are
stored or processed.
Noncompositional Compositional
(1) a. ran = [ran] b. ran = [run]+[past]
(2) a. walked = [walked] b. walked = [walk]+[past]
(3) a. hopeless = [hopeless] b. hopeless = [hope]+[less]
For these issues, there is an immense and contradictory body
of linguistic evidence. As a consequence, some linguists have
looked to new methods, such as neuropsychology and neuroim-
aging, as alternative sources of evidence.
Psychological research in the lexicon and morphology has
largely focused on the roles of frequency, familiarity, and simi-
larity in word storage and identiication. A critical inding in
this tradition concerns the efect of lexical frequency. Words
that occur more frequently are more quickly and successfully
recalled in a wide range of experimental settings. his inding
has enabled psychologists to pose deeper questions about the
nature of lexical representations in terms of which aspects of
those representations are crucial to the frequency efect. he
fact that processing morphologically complex words may be
afected by the frequency of the entire form has led some to
argue that familiar aixed words, including regularly inlected
forms like walked, are stored as wholes in the mental lexicon
(e.g., Baayen, Dijkstra and Schreuder 1997). In essence, this
whole-word approach to representation and processing treats
regular forms like walked and irregular forms like ran as equiv-
alent: Both are past tense forms, and, by hypothesis, access to
that inlectional information is mediated in both cases by the
whole-word recognition.
Neurobiological methods irst made an impact on our under-
standing of morphology through studies of individuals with
acquired impairments to their morphological systems. hese
studies typically tried to establish the loci of morphological func-
tions in the brain (in either anatomical structures or functional
architectures). he progenitors of these studies are the works of
French neurologist Paul Pierre Broca and German neurologist
Karl Wernicke during the late nineteenth century. Broca reported
on a patient whose production abilities were severely impaired
Morphology, Neurobiology of
due to a lesion in the inferior frontal gyrus of the frontal lobe,
a lesion/deicit pattern now know as Brocas aphasia. Wernicke
reported that patients with lesions in the left posterior section
of the superior temporal gyrus sufered from a severe compre-
hension deicit; their speech was luid and natural sounding but
their word selection seemed divorced from meaning. Numerous
researchers have since argued that lexical storage and retrieval
functions are located in wernickes area, and that morpho-
logical grammar functions are housed in brocas area.
A quite diferent approach to the study of morphology, but one
that is also grounded in neurobiology, is connectionist mod-
eling. Work in connectionist modeling has called into question
some of the most fundamental tenets of morphological theory.
D. E. Rumelhart and J. L. McClelland (1986) presented argu-
ments from modeling against the distinction between regular and
irregular morphology. M. S. Seidenberg and L. M. Gonnerman
(2000) challenged the very existence of morphological represen-
tations, arguing instead that what linguists call morphemes are
merely the points of convergence between sound and meaning
codes, and are not a distinct type of entity of their own. hese
studies have drawn ierce criticism, stimulated vigorous debate,
and played a major role in shifting the standards of mainstream
morphology to a consideration of brains and simulated brains as
viable data sources.
In each of the disciplines concerned with the neurobiology
of morphology, many central issues remain unresolved and
hotly debated. Furthermore, there had been little occasion until
recently for these methodologically distinct disciplines to com-
municate, despite their concern with fundamentally the same
topic. However, recent technological advances have provided
each of these disciplinary perspectives with new methods of
study, and thus new insights into perennial questions. hese
advances, combined with shifting disciplinary boundaries, have
enabled the neurobiology of morphology to become a largely
coherent line of inquiry into the neural underpinnings of word
storage and processing. We may divide recent approaches into
neuropsychological, hemodynamic, and neurophysiological
methods.
Neuropsychological Methods
Patients with brain damage and resulting impairments have
long been a valuable source of evidence about the neurobiology
of morphology. Modern neuropsychological studies of morphol-
ogy evaluate patients who sufer impairments that selectively
afect (or selectively spare) morphological functions as the
result of brain damage. Typically, the rationale of these studies
is to identify dissociations between patterns of impaired and
preserved capacities in order to establish whether certain mor-
phological functions are distinct from other components of the
lexical system.
One such dissociation is a morphological deicit that disrupts
the processing of inlectional morphology in the context of a
relatively spared ability to process derivational morphology. he
Italian-speaking patient FS reported in Miceli and Caramazza
(1988) presented with one of the clearest instances of this per-
formance pattern. In spontaneous speech, FS made frequent
errors of agreement between nouns and attributive modiiers
(e.g., the target phrase il mio studio [det.Ms my.Ms oice.Ms] was
produced as *la mia studia [det.Fs my.Fs oice.Fs]) and between
subjects and verbs (io vivo solo [I live.1s alone.Ms] was produced
as *io vive solo [I live.3s alone]). In repetition tasks, FS was 98 per-
cent correct in repeating derived words with their derivational
morphology intact, but only 40 percent correct in repeating the
inlection.
One issue not expressly examined in the case of this patient
was whether the diiculty that FS had in repeating inlected
forms was modulated by the regularity of their morphology.
he relevance of this point relates to the importance of identi-
fying the particular level of morphological representation that is
implicated in the deicit. In some cases of acquired morpholog-
ical deicit, performance on regular and irregular morphology
dissociates. For example, patient SJD presented with a deicit
that disrupted the production (but not the comprehension) of
regularly inlected forms like walked (which was read as walk
and as walking on diferent occasions), as well as morphologi-
cally derived words like publisher (which she read as publishing)
(Badecker and Caramazza 1991). In comparison, that patients
performance on irregularly inlected words was equal to her rel-
atively intact production of uninlected forms. A complementary
dissociation of regular versus irregular inlection has also been
reported. For example, patient AW exhibited poor performance
for irregularly inlected forms in comparison to nearly intact per-
formance with regularly inlected words (Miozzo 2003; see also
cases reported in Laiacona and Caramazza 2004; Shapiro and
Caramazza 2003).
Some single-case studies have reported patients who present
with impaired comprehension and production for both regular
and irregular inlection in both spoken and written modalities
though not always in equal proportion. his deicit has been
construed as resulting from an abstract, morphosyntactic level
of deicit (i.e., one where walked and ran are both represented as
morphologically complex) (Badecker 1997).
Most often, the method of neuropsychological studies is to
establish dissociations between distinct morphological subsys-
tems, but sometimes the content of patients errors themselves
provides insight into the nature of morphological grammar. For
example, patient SJDs aix selection errors were not always
grammatically licensed (e.g., she read poorest as poorless,
along with an elaborative comment that indicated comprehen-
sion of the superlative aix: the most poorless Indians have
very little money). hese performance features suggest that the
mechanisms for producing productively aixed words exploit
compositional procedures (Badecker and Caramazza 1991).
Hemodynamic Methods
In contrast to neuropsychological methods, hemodynamic
neuroimaging methods have made it possible to directly observe
areas of the brain involved in normal (intact) morphological
processing. hese methods include positron emission tomography
(PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). hese
methods compare levels of blood low and blood oxygenation in
diferent areas of the brain as subjects perform cognitive tasks.
One of the few PET studies focused narrowly on morphology
sought to identify a neural correlate of the use of overt inlec-
tional verbal morphology in German (Gnther et al. 2001).
his study contrasted German verbs with and without overt
525
Morphology, Neurobiology of
inlectional suixes, revealing a diference in activation in and
around Brocas area. he researchers interpret these results as
evidence that Brocas area subserves morphological and/or
morphosyntactic functions.
Increasingly, fMRI is the preferred method for hemodynamic
investigations of morphology. Numerous fMRI studies have
pursued a functional localization for morphology by contrast-
ing conditions with and without aixes, but they have often
returned inconclusive results (see, e.g., Davis, Meunier, and
Marslen-Wilson 2004).
A few fMRI studies of morphology and the lexicon, however,
have taken on more reined questions, producing more robust
results. One such study is the investigation by A. Beretta and col-
leagues (2003) of German regular and irregular inlection. hey
ind signiicant overall diferences in neural activation between
the processing of regularly inlected and irregularly inlected
nouns and verbs. hey interpret this as evidence that regular and
irregular morphological functions are subserved by distinct neu-
ral systems, though their indings do not address where irregulars
are processed or where regulars are processed, if such distinct
locations were to exist.
Neurophysiological Methods
In order to examine how speciic types of morphologically com-
plex words are processed (e.g., regularly vs. irregularly inlected
words) over the time course of lexical processing, researchers
have increasingly turned to neurophysical recording techniques
whose temporal resolution is well suited to the rapid changes in
brain response to linguistic materials. hese imaging methods
include electroencephalography (EEG) also known as event-
related brain potentials (ERPs) which measures electrical cur-
rents caused by neural activity, and magnetoencephalography
(MEG), which measures the magnetic ields that result from this
neuroelectrical activity.
For the most part, neurophysical studies of morphology
exploit well-studied event-related response components under
a variety of stimulus conditions (including lexical priming,
manipulations of lexical properties such as surface or stem fre-
quency, and contextual it). In EEG/ERP studies, there are two
response components that have been exploited to some advan-
tage: the N400 a negative delection peaking around 400 ms
that increases in amplitude after a novel or unexpected lexi-
cal stimulus and the P600 a positive current shift following
syntactic anomalies (Kutas and Hilyard 1980; Osterhout and
Holcomb 1992; Osterhout and Nicol 1999). In MEG, most mor-
phology studies have focused on the M350 response compo-
nent believed to relect some of the currents underlying the
N400 ERP which peaks approximately 350 ms after the presen-
tation of a word stimulus and is sensitive to stimulus factors such
as lexical frequency (Embick et al. 2001).
Several MEG studies have engaged the connectionist litera-
ture on morphology, addressing the issue of whether there exists
a distinctly morphological level of representation, one that dif-
fers from the representation of meaning and spoken/written
form. In a MEG priming study, L. Stockall and A. Marantz (2006)
found that genuine morphological relatives (e.g., givegave,
teachtaught) pattern diferently at the M350 response than
morphologically nonrelated word pairs that are merely similar at
526
the orthographical and semantic levels (e.g., boilbroil, screech-
scream). he former pairs exhibit a facilitatory priming efect on
the M350 latency, while the latter pairs do not. However, as in
many MEG studies, efects that were visible in the M350 peak
latency were obscured in the behavioral response latency, pre-
sumably by a diferent and opposite efect that arose later in the
time course of processing.
Many other neurophysical studies have found convergent evi-
dence that morphological constituents are actively recognized
in the early stages of lexical processing. Repetition priming has
been found to attenuate the N400 response component to iso-
lated words in lexical decision tasks (Rugg 1985). his efect on
ERP has also been observed with priming by morphological rela-
tives: Regularly inlected primes elicit a weaker N400 response
for uninlected verb targets in comparison to unrelated primes,
whereas irregularly inlected primes do not produce a compa-
rable reduction (Mnte et al. 1999). hese contrasting priming
efects have been taken as evidence for morphological parsing
of regularly inlected forms. Other studies have found evidence
that the recognition of regularly inlected words is supported by
morphological decomposition in brain responses to morpho-
logically illegal combinations like bringed (Morris and Holcomb
2005; Lck, Hahne, and Clahsen 2006; see also McKinnon, Allen,
and Osterhout 2003 for evidence of bound-stem parsing).
Evidence for decomposition is also observed in the efects
of regularity and lexical frequency on the P600 response to
inlected words that are ungrammatical for their context. In
a study that manipulated lexical frequency, morphological
regularity, and grammatical it, high-frequency irregularly
inlected verbs in ungrammatical contexts (e.g., the boy couldnt
*ran / *walked fast enough) showed an earlier onset of the P600
response than did low-frequency irregularly inlected verbs,
in comparison to their grammatical counterparts (e.g., the boy
couldnt run / walk fast enough); but the onset of this response
was unafected by lexical frequency for regularly inlected verbs
(Allen, Badecker, and Osterhout 2003). he pattern suggests
that for irregular verbs, surface frequency afects the speed with
which lexical recognition mechanisms can gain access to (and
exploit) inlectional content, but that this is not so for regularly
inlected forms.
Recent studies have used MEG to explore how morphology
shapes the recognition and interpretation of compounds and
morphologically derived words (Fiorentino and Poeppel 2007;
Pylkknen et al. 2004). hese studies provide further support for
the view that the detection and exploitation of morphological
structure play a major part in the early and subsequent stages of
lexical recognition.
Neural methods provide a distinctive and potentially compel-
ling source of data for the study of morphology. Still, the set of
compelling neural studies of morphology remains quite small,
relative to other research methods, and the coherence among
these studies remains low. his is due in part to the limited avail-
ability of costly neuroimaging equipment and to the limited num-
ber of scholars who have expertise in both the technical issues of
morphology and the technical methods of cognitive neurosci-
ence. However, as the equipment proliferates and the methods
gain a stronger foothold in the ield, we can expect that more rig-
orous methodological conventions will develop, and that studies
Morphology, Neurobiology of
in this emerging area will have an even greater impact on our
understanding of language and morphology.
Ehren Reilly and William Badecker
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Allen, M., and W. Badecker. 2000. Morphology: he internal struc-
ture of words. In What Deicits Reveal about the Human Mind/
Brain: Handbook of Cognitive Neuropsychology, ed. B. Rapp, 21132.
London: Psychology Press.
Allen, M., W. Badecker, and L. Osterhout. 2003. Morphological analy-
sis in sentence processing: An ERP study. Language and Cognitive
Processes 18: 40530.
Baayen, R. H., T. Dijkstra, and R. Schreuder. 1997. Singulars and plurals
in Dutch: Evidence for a parallel dual-route model. Journal of Memory
and Language 37: 94117.
Badecker, W. 1997. Levels of morphological deicit: Indications from
inlectional regularity. Brain and Language 60: 36080.
Badecker, W., and A. Caramazza. 1991. Morphological composition in
the lexical output system. Cognitive Neuropsychology 8: 33567.
Beretta, A., C. Campbell, T. H. Carr, J. Huang, L. M. Schmitt,
K. Christianson, and Y. Cao. 2003. An ER-fMRI investigation of morpho-
logical inlection in German reveals that the brain makes a distinction
between regular and irregular forms. Brain and Language 85: 6792.
Davis, M., F. Meunier, and W. Marslen-Wilson. 2004. Neural responses to
morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties of single words: An
fMRI study. Brain and Language 89: 43949.
Embick, D., M. Hackl, J. Schaefer, M. Kelepir, and A. Marant z. 2001. A
magnetoencephalographic component whose latency relects lexical
frequency. Cognitive Brain Research 10: 3458.
Fiorentino, R., and D. Poeppel. 2007. Compound words and structure in
the lexicon. Language and Cognitive Processes 22.7: 9531000.
Gnther, T., F. Longoni, O. Sabri, L. Sturz, K. Setani, and W. Huber.
2001. PET study of basic syntax and verb morphology. NeuroImage
13: 538.
Kutas, M., and S. A. Hillyard. 1980. Reading senseless sentences: Brain
potentials relect semantic incongruity. Science 207: 2035.
Laiacona, M., and A. Caramazza. 2004. he noun/verb dissociation in
language production: Varieties of causes. Cognitive Neuropsychology
21: 10323.
Lck, M., A. Hahne, and H. Clahsen. 2006. Brain potentials to morpholog-
ically complex words during listening. Brain Research 1077: 14452.
McKinnon, R., M. Allen, and L. Osterhout. 2003. Morphological decom-
position involving non-productive morphemes: ERP evidence.
NeuroReport 14: 8836.
Miceli, G., and A. Caramazza. 1988. Dissociation of inlectional and deri-
vational morphology. Brain and Language 35: 2465.
Miozzo, M. 2003. On the processing of regular and irregular forms of verbs
and nouns: Evidence from neuropsychology. Cognition 87: 10127.
Morris, J., and P. Holcomb. 2005. Event-related potentials to violations
of inlectional verb morphology in English. Cognitive Brain Research
25: 96381.
Mnte, T., S. Tessa, H. Clahsen, K. Schlitz, and M. Kutas. 1999.
Decomposition of morphologically complex words in
English: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Cognitive
Brain Research 7: 24153.
Osterhout, L., and P. J. Holcomb. 1992. Event-related brain potentials
elicited by syntactic anomaly. Journal of Memory and Language
31: 785806.
Osterhout, L., and J. Nicol. 1999. On the distinctiveness, independence,
and time course of brain responses to syntactic and semantic anomal-
ies. Language and Cognitive Processes 14: 283317.
Pinker, S., and M. Ullman. 2002. he past-tense debate: he past and
future of the past tense. Trends in Cognitive Science 6: 45663.
Morphology, Universals of
Pylkknen, L., S. Feintuch, E. Hopkins, and A. Marantz. 2004. Neural
correlates of the efects of morphological family frequency and family
size: An MEG study. Cognition 91: B3545.
Pylkknen, L., and A. Marantz. 2003. Tracking the time course of word
recognition with MEG. Trends in Cognitive Science 7: 1879.
Pylkknen, L., A. Stringfellow, and A. Marantz. 2002. Neuromagnetic
evidence for the timing of lexical activation: An MEG component sen-
sitive to phonotactic probability but not to neighborhood density.
Brain and Language 81: 66678.
Rugg, M. D. 1985. he efects of semantic priming and word repetition
on event-related potentials. Psychophysiology 22: 6427.
Rumelhart, D. E., and J. L. McClelland. 1986. On learning the past tenses
of English verbs. In Parallel Distributed Processing:Explorations in the
Microstructure of Cognition, ed. D. E. Rumelhart, J. L. McClelland, and
the PDP Research Group, 21671. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Seidenberg, M. S., and L. M. Gonnerman. 2000. Explaining derivational
morphology as the convergence of codes. Trends in Cognitive Sciences
4: 35361.
Shapiro, K., and A. Caramazza. 2003. Grammatical processing of nouns
and verbs in the left frontal cortex? Neuropsychologia 41: 118998.
Stockall, L., and A. Marantz. 2006. A single route, full decomposition
model of morphological complexity. Mental Lexicon 1: 85123.
MORPHOLOGY, UNIVERSALS OF
he topic of universals has not been as prominent in the area of
morphology as it has been in some other areas of linguistics.
Many linguists share the impression that morphology is pre-
dominantly a domain of the language particular, rather than the
general and universal. Whereas all languages compose words to
make sentences in one way or another (syntax), it is not cer-
tain that all languages compose morphemes to make words.
he Chinese languages, for example, have almost no morphol-
ogy apart from the possibility of compounding two roots to make
a word.
While it is probably too strong to say that some languages have
no morphological system at all, at least it seems clear that there
are no universal morphological categories notions that are
expressed by morphological means in all languages. For exam-
ple, English requires that past tense be expressed as a suix on
verbs (stun vs. stunned) and that plural number be expressed as
a suix on nouns (box vs. boxes), but there are many languages
in which these notions are not expressed morphologically (e.g.,
Yoruba); they are either expressed by syntactic constructions or
not expressed at all. Moreover, morphology is a notorious reposi-
tory of many historical relics, irregularities, exceptions, and idio-
syncrasies. For example, the plural of box in English is boxes, but
the plural of ox is oxen; similarly, the past tense of stun is stunned
but the past tense of run is ran. Irregularities of this sort are tol-
erated in morphology in a way that they may not be (or not as
much) in other linguistic domains. What universals we can hope
to ind in morphology, then, are statistical and implicational
universals, rather than absolute universals (see absolute and
statistical universals).
Despite the inherent noisiness of morphology, some uni-
versals of these sorts are discernable. Perhaps the best known
and best understood are universals of markedness. hese uni-
versals have the form of statements saying that no language will
have an aix that expresses a marked category Y unless it also
has an aix that expresses a less marked category X within the
527
Morphology, Universals of
same semantic domain. For example, many languages (includ-
ing English) have a plural form for nouns but no dual form that
means exactly two, whereas there are few or no languages that
have morphological marking for the category dual without also
marking the category plural. Similarly, verbs in a given language
do not express the distinction between inclusive irst person
plural (we including you) and exclusive irst person plural (we
not including you) without also expressing the more basic dis-
tinction between irst person and second person (we versus
you). Along the same lines, languages do not have special aixes
for remote past and remote future without also having aixes
for simple past and simple future, and if a language makes any
aspect distinctions in its verbal morphology, it will make a dis-
tinction between imperfective aspect and perfective aspect.
A plausible reason why universals of this sort hold has to do
with the logic of features. It is assumed that more marked, seman-
tically complex categories are built up out of simpler categories.
For example, the category dual shares a semantic feature [Group]
with the category plural but adds a feature such as [Minimal],
which it shares with singular (Harley and Ritter 2002). It stands
to reason, then, that a language will not have morphemes that
realize a more complex feature bundle like [Group, Minimal]
(dual) without also having morphemes that realize the simpler
feature bundles [Group] (plural) and [Minimal] (singular) that
this bundle properly contains. It seems likely that this vision can
be extended to the full range of nominal and verbal inlectional
categories, although many details remain to be worked out.
One of the most general universals of morphology is that the
order of morphemes in a complex word is almost always rigidly
ixed. Almost all languages allow the words of a sentence to be
rearranged to some degree for stylistic or pragmatic efect.
his is particularly true of a language such as Mohawk, in which
any word order is usually possible. In contrast, no language
allows the morphemes in a complex word to be freely rearranged
in this way. For example, the following Mohawk word consists
of 11 distinct morphemes, but any other ordering of these mor-
phemes is ungrammatical:
(1) Wa-sha-ko-t-yat-awi-tsher-ahetkv-t-v
FACT-he-her-self-body-put.on-NOML-be.ugly-make-for-
PUNC
He made the thing you put on the torso [i.e., a shirt or dress]
ugly for her.
here are occasional examples that might seem like exceptions to
this rule, when two aixes can come in diferent orders to express
diferent semantic scopes (as will be seen), or when a morpheme
is displaced from its expected position in order to respect con-
ditions of phonological well-formedness. But even such devia-
tions, which are strongly motivated by semantic or phonological
concerns, stand out as being rather unusual. A striking univer-
sal of morphology, then, is that morpheme order is ixed for a
language, and is not permitted to vary for pragmatic or stylistic
reasons. structuralist linguists and descriptive linguists
commonly capitalize on this property of morphology by using
the device of a template to describe the morphological structure
of words in a given language: A set number of morphological slots
(position classes) are identiied for each word class, and every
528
aix of the language is indexed as being able to appear (ideally)
in one and only one of these slots.
Another putative universal of morphology is that inlectional
morphology can only appear outside of (further from the root
than) derivational morphology. Roughly speaking, derivational
morphology creates new words by adding aixes to existing
stems, whereas inlectional morphology creates the forms of a
word that a speciic syntactic context might require. Examples
of derivational aixes in English include -ize (crystalcrystallize),
-ship (friendfriendship), -less (carecareless), -able (liftliftable),
and -ing (clipclipping). Examples of inlectional aixes in
English include the plural aix that attaches to nouns (crystal-
crystals, friendfriends) and the past tense aix that attaches to
verbs (liftlifted, clipclipped). Now, there is no problem adding
inlectional morphology to the output of derivational morphol-
ogy: Words like fossil-ize-d, friend-ship-s, and clip-ping-s are per-
fectly possible. But the reverse order is not allowed: he process
of having a solution turn into more than one crystal is not to
*crystal-s-ize and the state of having many friends is not *friend-s-
ship, nor is a *clip-ped-ing something that was clipped out in the
past. Also bad are words like *lift-ed-able and *care-s-ful (having
many cares). A similar constraint says that inlectional morphol-
ogy cannot be found inside a compound word: One can have
doghouse but not *dogshouse (a large house intended for more
than one dog); one can have a pickpocket but not a *pick-ed-
pocket (a thief who has already done his dirty work). One can cal-
culate what these words should mean, and in some cases one can
imagine uses for the word; nevertheless, the examples are at best
highly marked and unlikely to be used. Similar restrictions can
be observed in many other languages, although a limited range
of counterexamples has occasionally been pointed out. here are
also some unresolved questions about how exactly to deine the
diference between derivational and inlectional morphology,
which need to be clariied to make this generalization meaning-
ful and applicable in all cases (see, for example, Anderson 1982).
Nevertheless, there is little doubt that an important universal
characteristic of morphological systems lurks here.
Some iner-grained universal restrictions have been discov-
ered. One idea, supported in many studies, is that the order of
morphemes in a complex word relects the scope of those mor-
phemes the order in which they were composed for syntax and
semantics (Baker 1985, 1988; Bybee 1985; Cinque 1999; Rice
2000). An example from derivational morphology is the follow-
ing pair from Quechua (Baker 1988):
(2) a. Mikhu-naya-chi-wa-n.
eat-want-make-1sO-3sS
It makes me feel like eating.
b. Mikhu-chi-naya-wa-n.
eat-make-want-1sO-3sS
I feel like making someone eat.
he suixes chi to make and naya to want can attach to a verb
stem in either order, but there is a systematic diference in mean-
ing. If make attaches before want, the combination means
to want to make someone eat, whereas if want attaches
before make, the combination means to make someone want
to eat. he order in which the aixes attach in Quechua matches
the order in which the words are combined syntactically in the
Morphology, Universals of
corresponding English paraphrases, and this in turn relects how
the meanings are composed semantically in both languages. Not
all languages that have similar aixes allow both of the orders
shown in (2), but it is generally true that the orders that are used
correspond systematically to the order of interpretation for pur-
poses of syntax and semantics.
Compositional ordering efects of this kind are rather wide-
spread and apply to diferent types of morphology. One can see
something similar in English in the domain of compounding. For
example, ethics committee proposal refers to a proposal by or for
the ethics committee, whereas ethics proposal committee refers
to a committee in charge of formulating an ethics proposal. As in
Quechua, the diferent morpheme orders relect diferent orders
of semantic composition. he only diference between the two
cases is that chi and naya are bound aixes that must attach to
verb roots, whereas proposal and committee are roots that can be
used as words in their own right in English. he observation that
morpheme orders must directly relect the order of syntactic/
semantic composition is sometimes called the mirror principle
(Baker 1985); Bybee (1985) refers to a similar idea as the principle
of relevance.
Much the same constraint seems to hold of inlectional mor-
phology as well, except that in this domain, there are very few
cases in which the order of morphemes can be reversed to give a
semantic efect. For example, Joseph Greenberg (1963) showed
that when both number marking and case marking are attached
to a noun root, the number marking almost always attaches
before the case marker does:
(3) a. adam-lar-a (man-PL-DAT) to the men (Turkish)
b. *adam-a-lar
he reason is presumably because the plural operator is deined
semantically over the meaning of the noun itself, whereas the
function of the case marker is to relate the noun phrase as a
whole to the rest of the sentence in which it appears. hus, in
(3a) the order of the aixes relects the natural order of the
semantic composition, just as in the examples in (2). In contrast,
(3b) is bad because the relevant semantic operators do not
combine that way. he morphological universal in (3) can thus
be related to the fact that in languages like English, the plural
marker must attach directly to the noun, not to the prepositional
phrase that contains the noun (to the boy+s, not *to+s the boy).
Joan Bybee (1985) applies the same kind of reasoning to verbs
(see also Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994). When verbs bear
multiple inlectional aixes, they almost always come in a ixed
order: An aspect marker attaches irst, a tense marker attaches
outside an aspect marker, mood markers attach outside both
tense and aspect, and subject agreement markers attach last of
all (though the position of agreement is a bit more variable than
the others). Example (4) thus shows a typical morpheme order;
other orders are rare or nonexistent.
(4) aku-wye-a-y-mi. (Mapudungun)
arrive-PERF(aspect)-FUT(tense)-IND(mood)-2sS(agreement)
You will have arrived.
Notice that the English auxiliary verbs appear in essentially the
same relative order, suggesting that this, too, can be attributed
to domain-general facts about semantic composition. Guglielmo
Cinque (1999) presents a more ine-grained approach of this
kind, in which some 30 distinct inlectional categories are identi-
ied, each of which is shown to attach to a verb in a set order rel-
ative to all the others. (It is possible that the ban on inlectional
morphology coming inside of derivational morphology is a spe-
cial case of this mirror principle/relevance principle, though that
is not obvious in all cases.)
In some of the more recent literature, however, there have
been hints that the ixedness of morpheme order might be even
more restricted than one would expect, given considerations of
semantic compositionality alone. For example, Larry Hyman
(2003) discusses examples like (5) from Chichewa:
(5) Alenj a-ku-tks-its-il-a mkz mthko. (*a-ku-tks-il-its-a)
Hunters 3.PL-PROG-stir-make-APPL-FV woman spoon
he hunters are making the woman stir with a spoon.
At issue here are the suixes its causative and il applicative,
which (in this case) adds the meaning of doing an action with
a particular instrument. From the semantic point of view, one
would think that these aixes should be able to attach to the verb
in either order, giving diferent compositional meanings. One
could start with the base verb stir, add the applicative aix il to
get stir with a spoon, and then add the causative to get make
someone [stir with a spoon]. Alternatively, one could add the
causative aix to the base verb irst to get a causative action
make someone stir and then add the applicative aix to create
[make someone stir] with a spoon. In the irst case, it would be
the woman who is using the spoon to stir; in the second case, it
would be the hunters who are using the spoon to impose their
will on the woman. Yet only the second aix order is possible,
and this form is ambiguous (or perhaps vague) concerning
the two imaginable meanings.
Hyman himself points to a historical explanation of the
absence of a second form in (5). He shows that the same restricted
ordering holds true for a wide range of Bantu languages spoken
in sub-Saharan Africa and that it is a special case of a more far-
reaching template, which stipulates not only that applicative
must follow causative but also that the reciprocal suix can only
follow both of these, and the passive suix can only follow all of
the others. He claims that this particular template was inherited
from Proto-Bantu by most of the descendant languages. But this
sort of historical explanation might not be general enough. First,
it begs the question of why the relevant aixes had to attach in
this particular order in the ancestor language. Second, it turns
out that most non-Bantu languages also allow the causative aix
to attach before applicative but not vice versa as well. Example
(6) shows that this is true for classical Nahuatl (spoken in Mexico
[Launey 1981, 197]); it also holds for Mohawk (northeastern
United States), Hiaki (southwestern United States), Shipibo
(Peru), Mapudungun (Chile), and many others.
(6) Ti-ne:ch-in-tlacua-l-ti:-li-a in no-pil-hua:ntoto:n.
2sS-1sO-PL-eat-caus-appl the my-chidren
You made my children eat for me. (*Ti-ne:ch-in-tlacua-li-tia)
Something more general seems to be at work here.
In a similar vein, Gabriella Caballero and her colleagues
(2006) have recently argued that the morpheme order noun-
verb is universally preferred to the order verb-noun whenever a
529
Morphology, Universals of
noun and a verb combine to form a single verb. his holds true
regardless of the speciic mode of combination, whether it is
the result of syntactic noun incorporation, productive morpho-
logical compounding, or idiosyncratic lexical combination. he
order of morphemes in the Mohawk example in (7) is thus typical
in this respect:
(7) Wa-ke-nakt-a-hninu- (not: hninu-nakt buy-bed)
Fact-I-bed-0-buy-PUNC
I bought a bed.
his universal order is occasionally overridden by syntactic
ordering principles in particular languages (like Mapudungun).
But noun-verb order is always preferred by the morphology, and
it emerges more strongly in the more lexicalized, purely morpho-
logical constructions, where contamination from syntactic fac-
tors is minimal.
Taken together, studies like these hint that there might be a
universal morphological template, roughly of the form noun-
verb-causative-applicative-passive. his template appears to be
a force (though not an irresistible one) that is at work inluencing
the morpheme orders of all languages. Moreover, this order does
not seem to reduce to historical factors or semantic composition.
Why this should be is unknown at this point. However, it seems
likely that more morphological universals of this sort will be dis-
covered in the future as linguists recover from their impression
that morphology is primarily the domain of the idiosyncratic and
the language particular.
Mark C. Baker
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Anderson, Stephen. 1982. Wheres morphology? Linguistic Inquiry
13: 571612.
Baker, Mark. 1985. he mirror principle and morphosyntactic explan-
ation. Linguistic Inquiry 16: 373415.
. 1988. Incorporation: A heory of Grammatical Function Changing.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bybee, Joan. 1985. Morphology: A Study of the Relation Between Meaning
and Form. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bybee, Joan, R. Perkins, and W. Pagliuca. 1994. he Evolution of
Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Caballero, Gabriella, Michael Houser, Nicole Marcus, Teresa
McFarland, Anne Pycha, Maziar Toosarvandani, Suzanne Wilhite,
and Johanna Nichols. 2006. Nonsyntactic ordering efects in syn-
tactic noun incorporation. Manuscript, University of California at
Berkeley.
Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and Functional Heads: A Cross-
Linguistic Perspective. New York: Oxford.
Greenberg, Joseph. 1963. Universals of Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Harley, Heidi, and Elizabeth Ritter. 2002. A feature-geometric analysis of
person and number. Language 78: 482526.
Hyman, Larry. 2003. Suix ordering in Bantu: A morphocentric
approach. In Yearbook of Morphology 2002, ed. Geert Booij and Jaap
van Marle, 24582. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic
Publishers.
Launey, Michel. 1981. Introduction la Langue et la Littrature
Azteques. Vol. 1. Paris: LHarmattan.
Rice, Keren. 2000. Morpheme Order and Semantic Scope. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
530
Motif
MOTIF
Motif is a unit of measurement and content analysis. It is applied
to expressive culture, especially literatures and certain branches
of the arts, such as painting, sculpture, and music. he system-
atic application of the term was established in the early 1900s
through the work of the Finnish School and its attempts to use
an international folktales history (time) and dispersal in social
and physical space (geography) to reconstruct the tales orig-
inal form (urform, archetype), place of birth, and other related
matters of diffusion. his approach is also known as the his-
toric-geographic method for its reliance on objective veriiable
criteria, rather than speculative hypotheses. For the Finnish
School, two key concepts became indispensable research instru-
ments: tale-type, a problematic term signifying a full folktale
known cross-culturally, and motif, a smaller unit designating a
detail contributing to the formation of the plot. Motif complex/
cluster/sequence and episode are other related measurement
units. hough arising from the works of the Finnish School,
perceived by many as useful only in comparative studies, and
shackled by problems of name interpretation and linkage to the
currently unfashionable quest for origins, the usefulness of these
terms as tools of data identiication and objective analysis tran-
scends these limitations (El-Shamy 1997, 235).
he most salient attributes of a motif are its endurance (con-
tinuity in time) and recurrence within a community (continuity
in space). Continuity in time and space are basic requirements
for traditionality. In 1925, Arthur Christensen argued that a motif
persists in tradition according to a psychological law which is
not easily explicable. his empirical characteristic was left unex-
plained (Bdker 1965, 2013). From the perspective of the bearer
of lore and the author or composer of elite art, certain traditional
themes possess cognitive salience (impressiveness) that make
them stand out and grab a persons attention. his salience (log-
ical or afective) may be due to frequency of occurrence (repeti-
tion), meaningfulness, structure, uniqueness, ego involvement,
and so on, properties that make such themes easily perceived,
learned, retained, and recalled (El-Shamy 1997).
he concept of motif is a close parallel to that of theme. he
two terms are often used interchangeably. However, theme has
dominated in the study of elite literature, whereas motif has
been more common in the study of folklore. Research in literary
themes has commonly been pursued because of its interpret-
ive potentialities and its intrinsic congruency with the history
of ideas (Jost 1988, xv). Additionally, literary authorities have
considered it an eicient counteragent against primarily aes-
thetic movements, such as progressive Universalpoesie. It is
also argued that the motif is intellectual by nature. It expresses
a process of reasoning about mens conduct of life and, as a con-
sequence, does not concern itself with the analysis of individual
characters or extraordinary happenings (Jost 1988, xvii).
he viewpoint outlined here addressing elite literature stands
at some variance with the folkloristic usage of the term motif and
the perceived scope of its applicability. Introducing his Motif-
Index, Stith hompson explained that his system is built around
the interest of students of the traditional narrative and would
address a certain type of character, action, as well as atten-
dant circumstances of the action (1955, I.11). (See, respectively,
Motif
for examples: W10, Kindness; T72.2.1, Prince marries scorn-
ful girl and punishes her; R216, Escape from ship while captors
quarrel).
Inluenced by anthropology, hompsons system may be
compared to the analytical-classiicatory devices of culture ele-
ment, culture complex, and culture institution with culture ele-
ment being the smallest identiiable component of culture. In
congruence with his companions in the Historic-Geographical
School, hompson saw folk literature (especially narratives) as
analyzable in terms of motifs, episodes (or motif complexes/
sequences), and full narrative plots constituting tale-types. A
motif, though considerably more intricate, is comparable to
culture element; culture complex is comparable to episode; and
culture institution is comparable to tale-type. For hompson,
motifs are those details out of which full-ledged narratives are
composed (1955, I.10).
Explaining the rationale for his motif system and its main
objective, hompson declares that it emulates what the sci-
entists have done with the worldwide phenomena of biology
(1955, I.1011). In this respect, the underlying principle for
motif identiication and indexing is comparable to that devised
by anthropologists at Yale for categorizing culture materials
in terms of 78 macrounits (1088) and 629 subdivisions thereof
used to establish he Human Relations Area Files (HRAF);
these iles, begun almost contemporaneously with the irst pub-
lication in the 1930s of hompsons Motif-Index, may be viewed
as an unprinted index. Twenty-three divisions make up the spec-
trum of sociocultural materials covered in hompsons Motif-
Index, each treated in an independent chapter (e.g., B. ANIMALS;
C. TABU; F. MARVELS; X. HUMOR). hese cardinal themes are
divided into 1,730 subdivisions (El-Shamy 1995).
Because hompsons Motif-Index seeks global coverage,
numerous geographic regions and national entities did not
receive adequate attention. Consequently, signiicant ields of
human experience are missing or sketchily presented. Major
expansions are ofered in ensuing works, for example (note: the
sign indicates addition to hompsons system): F70, Ascent
to other planets (worlds) by space ship (lying saucer); J70,
Teaching (training) by cruel example; P610, Homosociality
[]; P770, Markets: buying, selling, trading; X580, Humor
concerning misers and miserliness (El-Shamy 1995; cf. Birkhan,
Lichtblau, and Tuczay 2005).
An ofshoot of the motif system is the concept of motifeme,
a hybrid of folklore and linguistics modeled after morphological
analyses of folktales. In this system, an abstract unit of action or
state is labeled motifeme, and its manifestations are motifs. he
variety in which a given motifeme is manifested is termed allo-
motif (Dundes 1964).
Hasan El-Shamy
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTED FURTHER READING
Birkhan, Helmut, Karin Lichtblau, and Christa Tuczay. 2005. Motif-Index
of German Secular Narratives from the Beginning to 1400. 6 vols. Berlin
and New York: W. de Gruyter.
Bdker, Laurits. 1965. Folk Literature (Germanic). Vol. 2 of International
Dictionary of Regional European Ethnology and Folklore.
Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger.
Movement
Dundes, Alan. 1964. he Morphology of North American Indian Folktales.
Folklore Fellows Communications, no. 195. Helsinki: Academia
Scientiarum Fennica.
El-Shamy, Hasan. 1995. Folk Traditions of the Arab World: A Guide to
Motif Classiication. 2 vols. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
. 1997. Psychologically-based Criteria for Classiication by Motif
and Tale-Type. Journal of Folklore Research 34.3: 23343.
Garry, Jane, and Hasan El-Shamy, eds. 2005. Archetypes and Motifs in
Folklore and Literature: A Handbook, Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
Jost, Franois. 1988. Introduction. In Dictionary of Literary hemes
and Motifs, ed. Jean-Charles Seigneuret, xv-xxiii. Westport,
CT: Greenwood.
Murdock, G. P., Clelland S. Ford, and Alfred E. Hudson. 1938. Outline of
Cultural Materials. New Haven, CT: Institute of Human Relations, Yale
University.
Sperber, Hans, and Leo Spitzer. 1918. Motiv und Wort, Studien zur
Literatur-und Sprachpsychologie. Leipzig: O. R. Reisland.
hompson, Stith. 19558. MotifIndex of Folk Literature. 6 vols. Revised
ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
MOVEMENT
Movement is an operation posited in theoretical syntax, in which
words, phrases, and perhaps also morphemes are relocated from
one part of a sentence to another. Movement is generally invoked
in cases in which a phrase has a combination of properties asso-
ciated with distinct positions in the sentence. Consider (1):
(1) Whom did you see?
Approaches to syntax that posit movement typically claim that
the word whom in (1) has moved from the end of the sentence,
where the direct object would ordinarily be, to the beginning.
his explains why, for instance, whom bears the accusative case;
whom has properties associated with direct objects, because it
has occupied the direct objects position.
One type of argument for movement tries to establish that
an apparently empty position must be illed, and that the logical
iller is a moved phrase. For example, a verb like ix must take a
direct object, which is typically in immediately postverbal posi-
tion in English:
(2) a. You ixed the car.
b.*You ixed.
c.*You ixed yesterday the car.
However, a question like (3a) is well formed (unlike (3b):
(3) a. What did you ix?
b. *When did you ix?
he ill-formedness of (3b) shows that the required transitivity of
ix is not suspended in questions; ix must have a direct object in
(3a). he contrast in (3) suggests that the direct object is what,
since what is present just in the well-formed (3a). Example (2c)
shows that the direct object in English must typically be imme-
diately postverbal; we can preserve this generalization in (3a)
by positing movement of what from postverbal position to the
beginning of the sentence.
Other arguments for movement try to show that a moved
phrase has occupied positions in the sentence that it no longer
occupies. For instance, James McCloskey (2000) discusses a
531
Movement
West Ulster dialect of English in which the questions in (4a) and
(4b) are synonymous:
(4) a. What all did you buy?
b. What did you buy all?
c. *What did all you buy?
The position of all is not completely free in this dialect, as
the ill-formed (4c) shows. In fact, all can only appear in posi-
tions that what has occupied. In (4b), all appears in the direct
object position; this is the position that what occupies before
moving to the beginning of the sentence. Theories that posit
movement can account for the distribution of all in this dia-
lect; the phrase what all can leave the word all behind when
it moves.
Another argument for movement is based on the phenom-
enon of reconstruction, in which moved phrases are treated by
certain semantic dependencies as though they had not moved.
Space constraints prevent further discussion here (cf. Romero
1997; Fox 2000).
Syntacticians distinguish several subtypes of movement. he
examples thus far have all involved wh-movement, which forms
questions by moving certain phrases to the beginning of the
clause. Another type, head-movement, derives (5b) from (5a), via
movement of is:
(5) a. He is leaving.
b. Is he ___ leaving?
A third type is sometimes called NP-movement; examples
include movement of John in (6a) (compare the roughly syn-
onymous [6b]), and movement of Mary from object to subject
position in (7):
(6) a. John seems __ to be happy.
b. It seems that John is happy.
(7) Mary was promoted __.
Other types of movement are more diicult to detect. For
instance, much work argues that wh-movement in (8) is not a
single move from the end of the sentence to the beginning, but
stops in at least one intermediate landing site (successive-cyclic
movement):
(8) What did he say that he wanted __?
One argument for this type of movement comes from West Ulster
English. We saw that this dialect allows all to be stranded in posi-
tions formerly occupied by a wh-moved phrase. he all-strand-
ing facts for this dialect in (9) show that wh-movement has an
intermediate landing site:
532
(9) a. What did he say that he wanted all?
b. What did he say all that he wanted?
c. What all did he say that he wanted?
he examples in (9) difer with respect to how far all travels with
what: not at all (9a), only to the intermediate site (9b), or to the
beginning of the clause (9c).
Another controversial type of movement is involved in the
Chinese and Japanese wh-questions in (10a) and (10b), both of
which have the same meaning as the English (10c):
(10) a. John mai-le sheme?
John buy Perf what
b. John-wa nani-o kaimasita ka?
John TOP what ACC bought Q
c. What did John buy?
In English, what is moved to the beginning of the clause, but in
Japanese and Chinese, the corresponding words can appear in
noninitial positions, just where they would be if they were not
wh-phrases (wh-in-situ). On one approach to these data, Chinese
sheme and Japanese nani, like their English translation what,
undergo wh-movement to the beginning of the clause; unlike
what, however, these words move in a way that does not afect
where they are pronounced (covert movement).
Some arguments for covert movement center on the inter-
action of wh-in-situ with established constraints on movement
(cf. Huang 1982; Richards 2009). For instance, wh-movement
in many languages is unable to pass out of an embedded inter-
rogative clause; we say that interrogative clauses are islands for
wh-movement. hus, (11a) is well-formed, but (11b), with wh-
movement out of an interrogative clause, is not:
(11) a. What does Mary think that John bought __ ?
b. *What does Mary wonder [who bought __ ]?
Japanese wh-in-situ exhibits a similar constraint; the sentences
in (11) have the Japanese translations in (12) with a similar con-
trast in grammaticality:
(12) a. Mary-wa John-ga nani-o katta to omoimasu ka?
Mary TOP John NOM what ACC bought that thinks Q
b. * Mary-wa [dare-ga nani-o katta ka] siritagattei-
masu ka?
Mary TOP who NOM what ACC bought Q wonders Q
Norvin Richards
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Fox, Danny. 2000. Economy and Semantic Interpretation. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Huang, James. 1982. Logical relations in Chinese and the theory of
grammar. Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
McCloskey, James. 2000. Quantiier loat and wh-movement in an Irish
English. Linguistic Inquiry 31: 5784.
Richards, Norvin. 2009. Wh-questions. In he Oxford Handbook
of Japanese Linguistics, ed. Shigeru Miyagawa and Mamoru Saito.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Music, Language and
Romero, Maribel. 1997. he correlation between scope reconstruc-
tion and connectivity efects. In Proceedings of WCCFL 16, 35166.
Stanford, CA: CSLI.
MUSIC, LANGUAGE AND
Connections between music and language have been a peren-
nial concern of scholars, poets, music and literary theorists, and
musicians going back to antiquity. he basis of this interest lies
in certain commonalities that are intuitively understood to lie at
the heart of the two capacities, but which become complex and
problematic when one attempts to elucidate their precise nature.
Confusion on the question of the interaction of music and lan-
guage is not surprising since the underlying basis of music and
language as independent objects has been poorly understood
until recently. Nor is it surprising, given traditional disciplin-
ary divisions, that scholars have tended to focus on developing
descriptive and explanatory frameworks (see descriptive,
observational, and explanatory adequacy) for each,
which take for granted their status as independent rather
than common faculties. With the exception of Jean-Jacques
Rousseaus ([1763] 1997) Essai sur lorigine des langues, which
claims an ancestral proto-language from which language and
music both derive, most attempts at engaging the question have
stressed that music and language not only serve distinct ends,
one mainly aesthetic and the other mainly communicative, but
also access distinct underlying psychological means.
he umbrella of cognitive science has provided the context
for a renewed discussion of some of these points of comparison.
Perhaps most striking is the reemergence of arguments for an
evolutionary precursor in the form of what Stephen Brown (2000)
refers to as musilanguage whose essential characteristics are
identiied in Stephen Mithen (2005) by the acronym hmmmm
(holistic, manipulative, multimodal, musical, and mimetic).
hese approaches are somewhat controversial not only in their
endorsement of what might be called a neo-Rousseauvian per-
spective but also in their assumption of a signiicant overlap in
some of the cognitive structures that underlie both music and
language. he best-known explorations of the common ground,
Leonard Bernsteins he Unanswered Question, Deryk Cookes
he Language of Music, and Joseph Swains Musical Languages
have not suggested any speciic shared mechanisms. Rather,
they and others have applied certain aspects of the descriptive
apparatus and general methodologies of linguistic theory to
yield, as Brown notes, analogies between music and language,
helpful and suggestive analogies, to be sure, but which do not
constitute arguments for a shared cognitive basis.
Musicalist Representation of Linguistic Structure
he studies just alluded to are representative of recent scholar-
ship in that they attempt to ground subjective judgments with
respect to musical structure on the hard foundation provided by
linguistic science. While this has been the prevailing direction
of inluence, it has at times extended in the opposite direction.
Most notably, musical notation for several centuries constituted
the only efective means for visually representing the structure
of audible sound. Among the acoustical phenomena rendered
visible and thereby amenable to a structural analysis were speech
sounds of English carefully transcribed into a modiied form of
musical notation by Joshua Steele in his 1775 Essay Towards
Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech.
In a recent review of the work, Jamie Kassler (2005) credits
Steele as being among the irst to identify linguistic supraseg-
mentals the tier of linguistic structure computed indepen-
dently of and mapped onto phonemic segments. tone, the
hierarchically related sequence of pitch locations assigned to
voiced segments, is one such suprasegmental and is relatively
naturally represented in musical notation. Steele also recog-
nized that unlike musical pitch, which tends to be discrete, the
target pitches of speech are consistently connected by contin-
uous glissandi or slides, represented in his scores by diagonal
line segments of various types attached to note stems, shown in
Figure 1.
he other linguistic suprasegmental identiied by Steele,
stress, emerges somewhat obliquely from his transcriptions.
One of Steeles important insights was to have recognized that a
particular type of musical accent, the metrical accent, is associ-
ated with linguistic stress. hus, for example, the initial beat of
the musical measure is metrically strong, and the most stressed
syllables of a text assigned to a tune (generally the stressed
syllables of polysyllabic words Peter, going, mistake, and coming
in Figure 1) are assigned to what he refers to as the ictus position.
Finally, and most signiicantly, Steele recognized that metrical
accent is not an objective feature of the musical event but is a
psychological attribute inherited from its temporal location. A
strong position will be perceived as such regardless of whether the
event occupying the position is objectively accented in the form
of higher pitch, amplitude, or length. Indeed, it may be heard as
strong even when it is vacant occupied by a rest. Metrical accent
Figure 1.
533
Music, Language and
Figure 2.
* level 3
* level 2
** * level 1
** ** * level 0 actual musical events (i.e., notes) but, rather, temporal loca-
Ticonderoga
Figure 3.
is therefore, in Steeles words, a subjective mental sensation
deriving from a sense of pulsation giv[ing] the mind an idea
of emphasis independent of any actual increment of sound or
even of any sound at all (1775, 117). In recognizing the abstract
character of meter, he anticipated twentieth-century cognitiv-
ist approaches that view linguistic stress, along with most other
salient characteristics of language, as mental constructs, pho-
nological rather than phonetic, psychologically real but
only obliquely related to the acoustical or physiological surface
form.
The Grid Representation
he measure of speech referred to in Steeles title the pat-
terned occurrence of strong and weak metrical positions is
represented in his transcriptions by a three-level hierarchy
appearing below the staf in example 1: Heavy, light, and light-
est locations within each measure are assigned a triangle, three
dots, and two dots, respectively. his would be the irst, and for
many years one of the few, attempts to make explicit the under-
lying form corresponding to the way that meter is mentally con-
structed by listeners. When this objective would be reinitiated
in the 1970s, most notably within the generative theory of Ray
Jackendof and Fred Lerdahl (1983), the representation would
take the form of the metrical grid shown in example 2 from
Mozarts Symphony 40 (Figure 2). It will be noticed that this
example omits the conventional notational means for indicat-
ing the metrical hierarchy barlines, the beaming of eighth notes,
and the time signature. It can do so since these are indicated
with greater precision by the grid, which identiies the relative
prominence of particular locations by their inclusion at suc-
cessive horizontal tiers, referred to as higher levels of the grid.
Relatively strong positions at the measure, half note, and quar-
ter notes are represented by columns appearing above these
locations, while weak positions at the eighth-note level appear
only at the lowest level of the grid.
hat metrical structure is a fundamental component of
music or, to put it informally, that music frequently has a
beat is, of course, self-evident to most listeners. hat normal
linguistic utterances are rhythmic in anything like the same
sense is less apparent and remains a subject of some controversy
within linguistics. For this reason, it might appear surprising
that as phonologists confronted a range of data provided by a
cross section of the worlds languages, it became apparent that
534
the same representation, namely, the grid, would emerge as the
optimal means for representing linguistics stress. Indeed, met-
rical stress theory, the dominant explanatory framework within
the generativist paradigm would be deined by the grid represen-
tation, one variant of which is shown in example 3 (from Halle
and Vergnaud 1987) (Figure 3).
A comparison of the grids in examples 2 and 3 reveals two
essential diferences between linguistic and musical structure.
First, while the stress grid projects syllables onto higher metri-
cal levels, the bottom level of the musical grid indicates not
tions. As a consequence, empty metrical locations, such as those
in example 2, which are a necessary component of any reason-
able description of musical meter, are excluded from the stress
grid. Secondly, as Jackendof and Lerdahl (1983) show, musical
structure imposes strict requirements on the geometric form
that grids may assume, limited to what they refer to as a small
class of well-formed structures. In contrast, there are no a priori
constraints on the form taken by the stress grid. he successive
positions projected onto line 1 of example 3 would be ruled out
as a potential metrical structure in music, where strong positions
need to be separated by at least one position on level 0. his vio-
lation of musicalist well-formedness does not, however, prevent
example 3 from accurately characterizing the pattern of second-
ary and primary stress for the word in question.
he asymmetries in the two forms of representation are, it
would seem, necessary for a description of the output of each
system: As mentioned, the projection of musical meter requires
an underlying temporal periodicity that is neither intuitively
obvious nor empirically demonstrable in language except as a
statistical regularity (see Patel and Daniele 2003 for discussion).
In addition, the asymmetry relects essential diferences in the
character of the basic elements of musical versus linguistic struc-
ture. he assignment of stress is a formal computation efected
on syllables from the rich phonemic inventory of particular
languages. In contrast, the computation of musical meter what
is known in the music perception literature as beat induction
can be efected on a highly impoverished musical input. As has
been shown repeatedly, a listener will unproblematically assign
a metrical structure, even when the events to which it is assigned
appear as series of pitchless claps, clicks, or drumbeats. he sorts
of subtle variation in timbre and pitch characteristic of the pho-
nemic repertoire may tip the balance between competing met-
rical interpretations when these appear in a musical context;
however, they are in themselves insuicient for the inference of
meter.
Rhythmic Structure in Language and Music
It is worth noting that the uncoupling of a musicalist interpre-
tation from metrical grids in their application in most variants
of metrical stress theory is, in some respects, inconsistent with
the grid notation as it was proposed in work by Mark Liberman
([1975] 1979), undertaken concurrently with Jackendof and
Lerdahl (1983). Here, the intention was explicitly musicalist,
namely, to relate the metrical structure of simple childrens
songs and chants to the syntactic and phonological structure
of the words and phrases assigned to them. In contrast to most
approaches, cognitivist and traditional, which view musical and
Music, Language and
L (2)
L (1)
L (0)
a) * Thirteen men
L (2)
L (1)
L (0)
b) Thirteen men
Figure 4.
linguistic computations as independent and self-contained,
Libermans objective was to establish an equivalence between
the underlying representation of song and speech, a connection
that was understood by Liberman to be in some ways a very
deep one (1975, 81). his hypothesis, whatever its ultimate heu-
ristic or conceptual value, has not been inluential within the
ield of linguistics or in music theory.
Two partial exceptions should, however, be mentioned.
While word-level stress provides evidence for the disassociation
of metrical structure in language and music, higher levels of lin-
guistic structure provide some evidence for a musicalist inter-
pretation of linguistic performance. In particular, phrasal stress,
unlike word stress, is not phonologically austere and requires
for its computation, in addition to morphological, syntac-
tic and pragmatic factors, the quasi-musical considerations
of what is referred to as phrasal euphony. Most conspicuous
among these is the stress clash resulting from stressed syllables
from two words appearing adjacent to each other within the
same phrase. he unacceptable form in a) triggers the applica-
tion of the rhythm rule, which achieves euphony by retracting
leftward the irst of the two syllables involved in the stress clash
to produce the acceptable form b). While not a validation of the
musicalist view, the terminology that is adopted by linguists, as
well as the mechanisms by which this particular phenomenon is
explained, is suggestive of a shared basis underlying the compu-
tation of phrasal stress and the assignment of musical meter.
A second point of contact, as noted by Jamie Kassler (2005),
is the musicalist interpretation of metrical structure incor-
porated into certain approaches to formal prosody and in its
transformational variant, generative metrics. he stated goal
of these approaches is to deine the abstract structure of lines
of texts composed in a poetic meter. But even here, the adop-
tion of a musicalist view as representing a signiicant aspect of
the relevant empirical domain remains controversial. Although
poets routinely invoke the music of poetry and the rhythms
of verse and appeal to explicitly musical terms such as phras-
ing, staccato, harmony, and so on, it remains an open question
whether poetic rhythm has any relationship to musical rhythm
as musicians understand as the term. he reaction to Derek
Attridges Rhythms of English Poetry (1982) sheds some light on
these questions. Attridge posits a scansion that assigns syllables
to alternating beat and ofbeat positions (indicated by b and o,
respectively), some of which can remain vacant, most notably at
the end of lines (see verse line). he general approach and the
representation of empty positions, in particular, is criticized by
Marina Tarlinskaya for failing to recognize that though music
and language used to be intertwined, they parted ways long ago.
Musical meter and meter of verse texts cannot be equated; musi-
cal theories of meter need no resurrection (2002, 39).
Tarlinskaya probably represents a consensus position among
scholars of metrics in doubting that there is signiicant evidence
for the inluence of musicalist rhythm on the structure of literary
verse. An ofshoot of generative metrics has been able to avoid
this problem by taking as its primary empirical domain texts
that are unambiguously intended as functioning with a musical
context, namely, lyrics of familiar strophic song forms. he basis
of this work is the recognition that average listeners encounter-
ing unfamiliar texts for a familiar strophic song will sometimes
efect considerable modiications in the structure of the original
to accommodate the text. hus, as noted in Halle and Lerdahl
(1993), those minimally competent in the relevant linguistic and
musical idiom will delete 3 of the original 10 notes of the song
he Drunken Sailor when they encounter the 7-syllable text
Keel haul him til hes sober, while augmenting the original
melody with 3 additional notes when confronted with the 13 syl-
lables Scrape the hail of his chest with a hoop iron razor. hese
strikingly uniform intuitions constitute the core data of what
Bruce Hayes (in press) designates as the textsetting problem,
for which he proposes an optimality theoretic solution. It
remains to be seen whether this work will validate Liebermans
initial insight of the deep connection between linguistic and
musical structure, or whether the relevant intuitions will apply
solely to the narrow artistic domain with which these analyses
are concerned.
Conclusion: An Internalist Perspective on Language
and Music
One possible explanation for the discrepancies in the forms
taken by linguistic and musical representations, even when they
are supericially similar, is that this discontinuity simply relects
the fact of the matter. hat is, no signiicant overlap in the empir-
ical domains of music and language exists beyond the fact that
both are, in an important sense, products of our minds, which
make use of our psychological capacities for structuring the
external world. But it should be recognized that however close or
distant the ultimate relationship, granting a signiicant psycho-
logical basis to musical structure is itself testimony to the inlu-
ence of linguistics, namely, the recognition by modern linguists
of the status of language as grounded not in the external reality of
speech its acoustic and physiological structure (E-language)
but in the underlying psychological mechanisms that give rise to
linguistic behavior (i-language).
In contrast, musical scholarship has remained largely a
structuralist enterprise, devoted primarily to describing
the external tokens of music, most commonly musical scores.
Approaches that take as primary the unconscious knowledge
that listeners (and composers in their capacity as listeners)
access in making sense of what they hear and compose are decid-
edly peripheral within the ield. Consequently, confusions as to
what a theory of music is a theory of arise more or less routinely.
Insofar as traditional structuralist theories are seen as ofering
the only empirically sound and intellectually satisfying accounts
of musical form, then linguistic and musical scholarship, aside
from occasional points of convergence, are likely to continue on
535
Narrative, Grammar and
their separate paths. If, on the other hand, the posing of interest-
ing questions and a viable theoretical framework relies crucially
on viewing musical works as psychologically based natural
objects in the Chomskyan sense, then in this respect, what we
understand about language has a great deal to ofer our under-
standing of music.
John Halle
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Attridge, Derek. 1982. he Rhythms of English Poetry. New York:
Longman.
Bernstein, Leonard. 1976. he Unanswered Question: Six Talks at
Harvard. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Brown, Stephen. 2000. he musilanguage model of music evolution.
In he Origins of Music, ed. N. L. Wallin, B. Merker, and S. Brown,
271300. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cooke, Deryk. 1959. he Language of Music. Oxford: Clarendon.
Halle, John, and Fred Lerdahl. 1993. A generative textsetting model.
Current Musicology 55: 326.
Halle, Morris, and Jean-Roget Vergnaud. 1987. An Essay on Stress.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hayes, Bruce. Textsetting as constraint conlict. In Toward a
Typology of Poetic Forms, ed. Jean-Louis Aroui and Andy Arleo.
Amsterdam: Elsevier. In press.
Jackendof, Ray, and Fred Lerdahl. 1983. A Generative heory of Tonal
Music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kassler, Jamie. 2005. Representing speech through musical notation.
Journal of Musicological Research 24: 22739.
Liberman, Mark. [1975] 1979. The Intonational System of English.
New York and London: Garland.
Mithen, Stephen. 2005. he Singing Neanderthals: he Origins of Music,
Language, Mind and Body. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Patel, A. D., and J. R. Daniele. 2003. An empirical comparison of rhythm
in language and music. Cognition 87: B35B45
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. [1763] 1997. Essai sur lorigine des langues.
Paris: H. Champion. Reproduction of the Neuchtel manuscript.
Steele, Joshua. 1775. An Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and
Measure of Speech to Be Expressed and Perpetuated by Peculiar Symbols.
London: J. Almon.
Swain, Joseph. 1997. Musical Languages. New York: Norton.
Tarlinskaya, Marina. 2002. Verse text: Its meter and its oral rendition.
In Meter, Rhythm, and Performance, ed. C. Kueper, 3955. Frankfurt
am Main: Peter Lang.
N on narrative, in part because of critiques of the story grammar
NARRATIVE, GRAMMAR AND
Analysts of stories have developed two broad strategies for
studying the relations between narrative and grammar. he irst
emphasizes grammar of narrative, and the second grammar in
narrative.
Drawing on deinitions of grammar as a model of the catego-
ries and processes underlying intuitive knowledge of (or com-
petence in) a language, theorists working in ields such as
cognitive psychology, artiicial intelligence research, and nar-
ratology have proposed story grammars, that is, gram-
mars of narrative. (A key question is whether this work involves
536
a principled extension or, rather, a more or less metaphorical
extrapolation of concepts of grammar developed within the
language sciences.) Such higher-order grammars take the form
of rule systems designed to capture the basic units of narrative
and specify their distributional patterns in a more or less clearly
deined corpus of narrative texts (see corpus linguistics).
his tradition of research can be traced back to the early prece-
dent set by Vladimir Propp ([1928] 1968), who analyzed a corpus
of 100 folktales into a inite number of structural constituents
that he termed functions (or character actions deined in terms
of their sequential position within an unfolding plot) and identi-
ied rules for their patterning in the corpus he studied.
In the 1970s and 1980s, spurred by the (re)discovery of Propp
by structuralist narratologists, as well as by the attempt to develop
automated systems for story understanding and story generation,
theorists tried to create story grammars with the widest possible
scope. Gerald Prince (1973) drew on Chomskyean transforma-
tional generative grammar in an efort to develop a grammar of
stories with greater descriptive adequacy than the one pre-
sented by Tzvetan Todorov in a 1969 book entitled Grammaire
du Dcamron. Another narratologist, homas G. Pavel (1985),
proposed a move grammar that drew not on Chomskyean the-
ory but rather on Propps foundational work, analyzing narra-
tives into problems and moves performed by characters seeking
to bring about their solution. Meanwhile, in a contribution to the
cognitive-psychological strand of story grammar research, J. M.
Mandler (1984, 22) argued that stories have an underlying, or
base, structure that remains relatively invariant in spite of gross
diferences in content from story to story. his structure consists
of a number of ordered constituents that include a setting and
an episode, which is in turn decomposable into a beginning that
causes a development that causes an ending.
Given that another entry in this encyclopedia covers story
grammars in greater detail, the remainder of the present dis-
cussion will focus on the second broad approach to studying
the relations between narrative and grammar. he aim of this
approach is to provide not a grammar of stories but, rather, a
principled account of how stories exploit grammatical resources
in narrative-pertinent (or even narrative-speciic) ways. Here,
the emphasis shifts from a grammar of narrative to the functions
of grammar in narrative or, put another way, to narrative uses
of grammatical structures. his second approach is arguably
the predominant one in current linguistically oriented research
enterprise by theorists such as P. N. Johnson-Laird (1983), who
contends that settings, reactions, moves, and other basic units
posited by story grammarians are not speciied clearly enough
to be construed as elements of a grammar, strictly deined. hey
are, rather, heuristic constructs based on a prior, unstated gloss
or interpretation of the narrative.
Grard Genettes ([1972] 1980) tripartite model of narrative
structure, which encompasses 1) the story (= the basic sequence
of states, actions, and events recounted), 2) the text on the basis
of which interpreters reconstruct that story, and 3) the act of nar-
ration that produces the text, provides a framework for study-
ing grammar and narrative. Speciically, analysts can focus on
the role of grammar in narrative viewed under proiles 2 and
3 story grammars being a perhaps quixotic attempt to model
Narrative, Grammar and
proile 1 via grammatical paradigms. Studied as both textual
structure and narrational process, narrative can be analyzed as a
discourse genre that draws in distinctive ways on the same stock
of grammatical resources used diferently in other forms of dis-
course, such as lists, scientiic descriptions, lyric poems, and so
on. Although a range of grammatical resources from lexical
relations and phrase structure to discourse anaphora,
gapping (see ellipsis), and topicalization are all poten-
tially relevant for the study of grammar in narrative, in this brief
discussion I focus on just two elements of morphosyntax verbs
and deictic expressions (see deixis) and map out some of
their narrative functions at both the level of text and the level of
narration.
Functions of Verbs in Narrative
Verbs perform crucial functions in narratively organized dis-
course. At the level of narration, the selection of a particular
tense for the primary or matrix narrative can be used to indi-
cate the relation between event time and narration time, as
when past tense verbs are used to signal retrospective narra-
tion. Further, shifts in verb tense can be used to mark especially
salient episodes, as when (in English-language narratives) sto-
rytellers engage in shifts between the simple past tense and the
conversational historical present as a strategy for underlining the
signiicance of the events being recounted (Wolfson 1982). he
selection of particular verbal moods can also be used to posi-
tion a tellers account on the continuum stretching between the
realis and irrealis modalities. At issue is a scale that ranges
from expressions indicating a speakers full commitment to the
truth of a proposition about the narrated world to more or less
hedged expressions, which indicate varying degrees of noncom-
mitment. In a foundational contribution to the study of stories
told in face-to-face communicative interaction, William Labov
(1972) argued that one of the identifying features of properly nar-
rative clauses (i.e., clauses that cannot be reordered in discourse
without changing the original semantic interpretation of the
narrative that they convey) is their reliance on past tense indica-
tive verbs. By contrast, subjunctive and other nonindicative ver-
bal moods are used by storytellers to evaluate (signal the point
of) the narrated events. In a series of studies, however, David
Herman found that tellers of supernatural tales in face-to-face
interaction regularly use nonindicative verbal moods (not went,
but would go or used to go) to accomplish fuzzy or strategically
inexact reference to the spatiotemporal positions and behavior
of ghosts (cf. Herman 2002, 335).
Meanwhile, at the level of text, verbs play a key role in the pro-
cess that can be characterized as storyworld (re)construction
that is, the use of textual cues to encode or interpret the special
class of mental models that support narrative understanding
(Herman 2002). For one thing, both conversational narratives
and more complex literary narratives rely on verbs like come
and go (and cognate forms) to map characters paths of motion
through space and time in a process sometimes correlated with
patterns of alliance or conlict, as well as with internal or psy-
chological growth, as in the classical Bildungsroman, or novel of
development. Verbs and verb phrases also express Aktionsarten,
or aspectual values, including states (I was a hiker), activities
(I hiked), and accomplishments (I hiked up the mountain).
Diferent distributions of verb types in texts cue interpreters to
reconstruct storyworlds in which these aspectual values may play
a more or less prominent role. Contrast the emphasis on accom-
plishments in sports broadcasts and hard-boiled detective ictions
with the emphasis on mental states in the modernist novel of con-
sciousness or narratives of the self told in therapeutic settings.
What is more, in ways that M. A. K. Hallidays (1994) func-
tional grammar helps illuminate, patterns of verb selection
assign more or less static or dynamic roles to participants in sto-
ryworlds. From a functionalist perspective, and in parallel with
cognitive linguistic research on how grammar relects
underlying perceptual and conceptual processes used to make
sense of the world (see also cognitive grammar ), verbs
encode construals of experience in terms of processes of vari-
ous types; in turn, each such process type speciies preferences
for assigning roles to the participants involved. For example, the
material process type, encoded in verbs like put or get, assigns
the roles of actor and goal to participants: e.g., She [actor] kicked
the ball [goal]. By contrast, the mental process type, encoded
in verbs like saw, felt, and thought, assigns to participants the
roles of senser and phenomenon: e.g., He [senser] saw the sunrise
[phenomenon]. Although the functionalist approach originally
focused on process types and participant roles at the level of
the clause, aspects of the approach can be scaled up to account
for discourse-level patterning in narrative. hus, Herman
(2002) suggests that storytelling genres can be characterized
as preference rule systems in which variable preference
rankings obtain for diferent kinds of process types, yielding,
in turn, preferred and dispreferred role assignments. Whereas
epics preferentially rely on material processes, with participants
slotted in the roles of actor and goal, psychological novels prefer
mental over material processes, and with them the participant
roles of senser and experiencer.
Deixis in Narrative
Deictic expressions such as I, here, and now that is, expressions
with interpretations that depend on who utters them to whom
in what communicative circumstances (see pragmatics)
are another part of the grammatical system exploited by nar-
ratives in distinctive ways. At the text level, deictic expressions
serve to locate narrators and characters in time and space vis-
-vis objects, events, and situations in the storyworld, whose
space-time coordinates often do not match those of the current
moment of narration.
Consider, for example, the irst two sentences of Ernest
Hemingways 1927 story Hills Like White Elephants: he hills
across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side
there was no shade and no trees and the station was between
two lines of rails in the sun. he preposition across in the irst
sentence and the demonstrative pronoun this in the second sen-
tence must both be interpreted in light of the assumed position
of the vantage point from which events are being narrated a
vantage point that here overlaps with that of the characters.
David A. Zubin and Lynne E. Hewitt (1995) propose the notion
of deictic shift to account for such displaced or transposed
modes of deictic reference, which must be anchored in the sto-
ryworld evoked by the text, rather than in the world(s) that the
text producer or the text interpreter occupies when producing or
537
Narrative, Grammar and
decoding these textual signals. his model builds on a number
of prior theoretical frameworks, including Karl Bhlers account
of Deixis am Phantasma (= imaginary relocation to the alterna-
tive sets of space-time coordinates implied by utterances about
ictional or imaginary situations) and Kte Hamburgers argu-
ment that only ictional narrative can provide direct access to the
consciousness or I-originarity of another to felt, experien-
tial knowledge of the world as presented via someone elses van-
tage point on events.
In natural-language narratives told in contexts of face-to-
face communication, deictic expressions can serve other func-
tions as well. In particular, when stories are told on-site, that
is, where the events being recounted are purported to have
taken place, deictic references can cue recipients to map fea-
tures of the here-and-now circumstances of narration onto the
space-time environment evoked by the narrative text. hus, in
the narrative discussed in Herman (2007), Monicas use of per-
son deixis her references to I and we create a referential link
between Monica as the teller in the here and now and Monica
as the coexperiencer (with her friend Renee) of the supernatu-
ral encounter she tells about. More than this, however, Monica
refers deictically to spatial features of the current communica-
tive context, as indicated by the items in bold in the following
partial transcript:
Because she is telling her story on-site, Mary can use deictic
expressions to recruit from features of the current environment
Monica: we walkin up the hill,
this way, coming up through here.
[]
And Im like on this side and Renees right here.
and thereby orient her interlocutors vis--vis the storyworld;
those features provide spatiotemporal coordinates for the situa-
tions and events of which Mary is giving an account.
More generally, on the basis of fundamental cognitive abili-
ties studied in research on conceptual blending, storytellers
like Mary exploit aspects of grammar to build complex mapping
relationships between two mentally projected worlds: the world
evoked by the narrative text and world in which the act of narra-
tion unfolds.
David Herman
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Genette, Grard. [1972] 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method.
Trans. Jane E. Lewin, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Halliday, M. A. K. 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 2d ed.
London: Edward Arnold.
Herman, David. 2002. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
. 2007. Storytelling and the sciences of the mind: Cognitive nar-
ratology, discursive psychology, and narratives in face-to-face interac-
tion. Narrative 15: 30634.
Johnson-Laird, P.N. 1983. Mental Models. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Labov, William. 1972. he transformation of experience in narrative syn-
tax. In Language in the Inner City, 35496. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
538
Narrative, Neurobiology of
Mandler, J. M. 1984. Stories, Scripts, and Scenes. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum.
Pavel, homas G. 1985. he Poetics of Plot. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Prince, Gerald. 1973. A Grammar of Stories. he Hague: Mouton.
Propp, Vladimir. [1928] 1968. Morphology of the Folktale. Trans. Laurence
Scott, rev. Louis A. Wagner. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Wolfson, Nessa. 1982. he Conversational Historical Present in American
English Narrative. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Foris.
Zubin, David A., and Lynne E. Hewitt. 1995. he deictic center: A the-
ory of deixis in narrative. In Deixis in Narrative: A Cognitive Science
Perspective, ed. Judith F. Duchan, Gail A. Bruder, and Lynne E. Hewitt,
12955. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
NARRATIVE, NEUROBIOLOGY OF
Despite cognitive neurosciences long-standing interest in the
processing of individual words and sentences, most neuro-
biological enquiry into the comprehension and production of
more holistic and contextual forms of narrative discourse has
come only recently. Chief among the obstacles to such studies
has been a tension between scientiic control and ecological
validity: Experimental control demands repeatable and rather
predictable stimuli and constrained responses, whereas free-
ranging narrative discourse eschews these properties. In addi-
tion, an analytical focus on mapping individual brain regions
to individual phonological, morphological, and local
contextual properties has upstaged examination of the ways in
which the construction of meaning may be subserved by network
interactions among many brain regions. With newly broadened
experimental paradigms, though, and with novel analytical meth-
ods addressing functional interactions, neuroscience promises
to add a biological dimension to cognitive psychological theories
of narrative discourse.
Central to cognitive neuropsychological explorations of nar-
rative has been the realization of shared structure between the
explicit narratives of literature and the implicit narratives of
everyday mental representations: Information processing
in both these spheres depends on the representational power
conferred by narrative abstraction. In the everyday world no
less than the literary, disconnected percepts gain meaning and
separability from time, place, and action insofar as they become
transformed into representative mental texts, stories whose dis-
tinct scenes contain recognizable characters that act in coherent
plots and evince meaningful themes. A neurobiological perspec-
tive only reinforces these observations from human thought and
behavior: Neurophysiological study of brain dynamics reveals
that human cognitive architecture may be engineered to
represent its processing in series of discrete frames somewhat
analogous to those of cinema (Freeman 2006), and cognitive
neuroimaging has begun to reinforce a neuropsychological
view of thought as an activity of constructing blended spaces
between narrative schemata. he central role of narrative
scripting in cognition was explored in connection with early
eforts at constructing symbolic systems capable of artiicial
intelligence, and was latent in literary criticism even before the
cognitive revolution of the late twentieth century. What is
new about this connection between thought and narrative is its
Narrative, Neurobiology of
explicit elaboration in light of cognitive neuroscience, connect-
ing literature and philosophy with psychobiological information
and constraint.
Neuropsychologically, comprehension has been studied more
completely than production, and this entry focuses on compre-
hension. Narrative organization is implemented by interacting
and not entirely separable processes of perceptual organization,
attention, and memory. Perceptual organization is the process
that binds separate physical stimuli into coherent higher-order
objects within a scene, replacing, for example, a horizontal plane
and four perpendicular posts with the single entity of a table.
Attention, a group of many subprocesses, focuses processing
on those parts of a scene deemed relevant to the current script
or story schema. Memory encoding, maintenance, and
retrieval, by holding in mind the higher-order representations
of what one has seen before and what one expects to see next,
inform attention and perceptual organization with the context of
this story (Gerrig and McKoon 2001). Although much is known
about the neural substrates of these processes individually, their
signiicance in narrative processing lies in their interactions. An
understanding of these interactions subserving the comprehen-
sion or production of narrative discourse might best begin at the
beginning, with a discussion of contextual integration at the level
of individual words.
he principal physiological index of a words integration into
its context is the N400 (Kutas and Federmeier 2000), a negative
voltage produced by the brain in response to a word, and maxi-
mal about 400 milliseconds after the word is presented. he N400
relects a truly textual process largely independent of the partic-
ular sensory mode of representation: Although there are some
more subtle efects of sensory modality, the N400 arises no mat-
ter whether the word is read from a page or heard from a speaker.
he N400 is thought to relect a process or processes of contex-
tual integration since its amplitude varies parametrically with a
words predictability; the canonical method of evoking a large
N400 is to present a word whose semantics violate contextual
expectation, for instance, At breakfast we ate toast with sand.
he initial words in this sentence, and the syntax into which
theyre arranged, prime activations for appropriate breakfast
foods. he ongoing construction of meaning is then challenged
by the non sequitur sand, eliciting a large N400 response. he
N400 arises no matter whether the conlicting context is estab-
lished by a surrounding sentence, as in this brief example, or
simply by a single adjacent word, or by an entire discourse. For
instance, the following discursive context reduces the N400 in
the example above: We camped on the beach. A stif wind blew
of the dunes into all our supplies. At breakfast we ate toast with
sand. hus, words that are semantically related to their sur-
roundings or are otherwise contextually expected evoke small
N400s, whereas words that cannot be predicted from context
and which, by inference, supply new information with which the
context must be updated evoke large N400s.
Anatomically, electromagnetic source localization and func-
tional neuroimaging place the generators of the N400 primarily
in the superior temporal lobe and temporo-parietal junc-
tion (Van Petten and Luka 2006). hese sources are mainly in the
left hemisphere but have some contribution from the right.
Across the period of the N400 response, they proceed posteriorly
to anteriorly, progressing toward the anterior medial temporal
lobe and its memory-related structures. hese physiological
results in normal volunteers agree very well with the locations of
lesions that impair comprehension in aphasia patients.
An important question is whether the N400 relects the com-
parison of new information against the context maintained in
working memory, or the encoding and integration of this
information into the context, or both these processes in combi-
nation. In addition to these associations with working memory,
N400 amplitude seems correlated with the diiculty of retriev-
ing related information from long-term memory: Words that
are used rarely, for instance, evoke greater N400s than do com-
mon words, and semantic incongruities that introduce unre-
lated categories (buttersand) evoke greater N400s than
within-category violations of congruity (butteroil). N400
amplitude may thus relect the complexity of constructing
blended spaces between the semantic space signiied or evoked
by a term and the space established by its context. It remains an
open question as to what extent similar processes may under-
lie the construction of more complex and temporally extended
blends during the comprehension of complex discourses. It is
interesting to note that negative voltages with timing similar
to the N400 are evoked by all manner of nonlinguistic stimuli,
such as pictures and drawings, suggesting that all forms of
semantic evaluation may involve processes akin to those active
during narrative comprehension or, more abstractly, that the
computations involved in all forms of cognition may have nar-
rative character.
he stronger N400 in the left hemisphere seems more driven
by category structure and afected by the retrieval of informa-
tion from long-term semantic memory, whereas the right
hemisphere may be more driven by broader contextual inte-
gration and afected by the retrieval and/or updating of working
memory. he left hemisphere is, therefore, most afected by the
sense of a word considered individually or in relation to its local
context, and the right hemisphere by the broader context of the
narrative (Gernsbacher and Kaschak 2003). his computational
distinction of more local semantic evaluation by the left hemi-
sphere and more extended contextual evaluation by the right
hemisphere may map fairly directly onto an anatomical dis-
tinction of small and more isolated dendritic arbors in the left
hemisphere and larger and more overlapping dendritic arbors in
the right (Jung-Beeman 2005), although evoked potentials sug-
gest that this relation may be more a product of left hemisphere
specialization for local processing than of any complementary
right hemisphere specialization for broader context (Coulson
and Van Petten 2007). Cognitively, the pattern is relected in the
right hemispheres involvement in strongly context-dependent
constructions, for instance, those involving frame shifts, such as
metaphor or humor (see verbal humor, neurobiology
of). Activation of the right hemisphere strengthens as one pro-
ceeds from the level of individual words to sentences to entire
discourses and as a narratives contextual complexity builds
from its beginning to its resolution (Xu et al. 2005).
In addition, in comparison to words and sentences, discourse
uniquely activates medial prefrontal cortex, the temporo-parietal
junction, and the precuneus (at the junction of posterior parietal
and anterior occipital lobes), as well as subcortical regions
539
Narrative, Neurobiology of
Figure 1.
(caudate nucleus and dorsomedial thalamus) that communicate
with prefrontal cortex (Xu et al. 2005). (See Figure 1.) he involve-
ment of these regions likely relects discourses demands to imag-
ine scenes perceptually and especially visually, to place scenes and
events in spatial relation and temporal sequence, to take up and to
shift between spatial perspectives and personal points of view,
and to emote and empathize. In particular, the precuneus seems
associated with visual spatial perception and attention, medial
prefrontal cortex and its linked subcortical nuclei with perception
of events in sequence and context, the temporo-parietal junction
with theory of mind, and medial temporal lobe structures with
emotion and memory. Narrative representation can be viewed as
an emergent property of interactions among these and other struc-
tures subserving a broad array of cognitive processes.
One of the most discussed capacities involved in narrative
comprehension and production is theory of mind. heory of
mind was irst characterized as the general ability to understand
or to model the thoughts and beliefs of other people. However,
more recent neuroscientiic results show that a great deal of
such social attribution can be accomplished using principally
perceptual mechanisms. hese social perceptual capacities are
computationally and developmentally prior to theory of mind
and include specialized representations for qualities that typify
agency, such as autonomous movement and direction of gaze.
Such perceptual qualities underlie the attribution of volitional
mental states (she/he/it wants or she/he/it wants to) and ciically to autisms impairments in social communication, as
perceptual mental states (she/he/it sees) attributions that evidence for a modular dysfunction of theory of mind. However,
form a ubiquitous shorthand in narrative descriptions even in
the case of plainly mechanical and nonsubjective entities (for
example, the computer doesnt see the network, or the printer autism seems consistent with a more general deicit in automati-
wants attention). heory of mind in its most speciic sense is
essential only for the attribution of belief (she/he/it thinks/
believes/knows), is associated with activation of brain regions
distinct from those subserving more elementary forms of social
attribution, and is distinguished from these more elementary
forms by its appearance at a later stage in child development,
at or near four years of age. his developmental connection
is signiicant: heory of mind seems to arise from simpler pro-
cesses that deal in sensory and especially visual data. Although
early studies associated theory of mind most strongly with the
medial frontal cortex, later work has suggested that this medial
540
frontal activation relects a more general association with com-
plex social narratives perhaps related to contextual selection of
details that build coherence within a narrative and that engage a
works suggestion structure to make it relevant to personal
experience and self-representation (Ferstl and von Cramon
2002). Such contextual selection may instantiate the prefrontal
cortexs more general involvement in the inhibition of responses
deemed inappropriate to the current behavioral and cognitive
context. In contrast, an experimentally based argument has been
made for a more selective association of temporo-parietal junc-
tion with the late-developing, belief-oriented variety of theory of
mind (Saxe and Powell 2006).
It remains an open question in evolutionary psychol-
ogy as to what extent theory of mind may be a modular cogni-
tive capacity independent of other aspects of cognition, versus to
what extent it may depend on developmental specialization aris-
ing in the interaction of earlier-maturing, more general capaci-
ties for social perception and executive function; recent views
on genes and language suggest that human cognitive adap-
tation for narrative discourse may combine these modular and
generalist perspectives, perhaps by putting to novel uses a large
collection of small modules specialized for cognitive processes
that are applicable to language but not necessarily restricted to
language (Bookheimer 2002). Proponents of the modular view
have often pointed to autism and language, or more spe-
many people with autism pass theory of mind tests; the dys-
function of medial prefrontal cortex found in imaging studies of
cally engaging contextual evaluation and self-representation,
and in any case, such abnormalities within speciic regions in the
autistic brain may be relections of a more fundamental disrup-
tion in the information transfer and integration between regions.
Behaviorally observed deicits in theory of mind may thus stem
from a more general perturbation of narrative processing, and
may appear especially prominent only because theory of mind is
so frequently applied in everyday social interaction.
In addition to those regions uniquely activated by discourse
processing, most other brain regions involved in language
or higher-order cognition become more heavily recruited by
Narrative, Neurobiology of
discourse than by individual sentences or words. In particu-
lar, the middle frontal gyrus, on the dorsolateral surface of the
prefrontal cortex, seems involved in placing sentential or other
discursive elements in temporal, causal, or logical sequence
(Gernsbacher and Kaschak 2003; Mar 2004). his prefron-
tal sequencing and coordination of ideas seems analogous to
the more concrete executive sequencing and coordination of
body movements implemented in more posterior regions of
the frontal cortex. In a computational sense, therefore, narra-
tive comprehension can be viewed as an elaboration of motor
control or, conversely, motor control itself can be said to
have narrative character, in the sense that it fundamentally
involves sequencing and relating actions in contexts. his rela-
tion between language and action gives crucial context to evo-
lutionary biologys eforts to explain the phylogenesis of such
an abstract cognitive capacity, in that the roots of this capacity
may rest in the very concrete domain of motor control. Along
the same lines, the anterior inferior frontal gyrus seems distin-
guished from neighboring cortex by an involvement in selecting
semantic relations in communication with semantic retrieval
processes in the temporal lobe, whereas posterior regions of the
inferior frontal gyrus are more immediately bound up with the
more concrete, sequencing-related details of syntax and pho-
nology (Bookheimer 2002; Jung-Beeman 2005).
In general, the neural implementation of narrative compre-
hension seems to take advantage of individual capacities for
movement, sensory perception, and emotion, activating these
systems in an internal simulation of the events evoked by the
narrative. he neural implementation of narrative understanding
thus depends crucially on embodiment. At the most concrete
level, that of simulating movements, this process of comprehen-
sion engages the mirror neuron system (see mirror systems,
imitation, and language) in the ventrolateral frontal lobe
and the supplementary motor area in the dorsomedial frontal
lobe (Wilson, Molnar-Szakacs, and Iacoboni 2008).
Cognitively, narrative understanding seems to emerge from
the interaction of many specialized subsystems. Neurally, there-
fore, a full description of narrative processing must encompass not
only the individual brain regions engaged, but also the dynamics
with which these regions connect and interact over a wide vari-
ety of narrative processes and subprocesses. hese analyses of
functional connectivity are just beginning (Karunanayaka et al.
2007) via techniques including structural equation modeling,
dynamic causal modeling, and model-free multivariate meth-
ods such as partial least squares and independent components
analysis and initial work has demonstrated information low
from regions of the temporal lobe adjoining the auditory cortex
(often described as wernickes area, though the anatomical
deinition of this term has never been precise) to higher-order
processing in the inferior frontal lobe (brocas area) and near
the temporo-parietal junction. From these areas, the network of
interactions becomes more complex, with the inferior frontal lobe
projecting to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, temporo-parietal
junction, and medial frontal cortex, implementing wide-rang-
ing efects of core language processing on complex semantics,
sequencing and coordination of ideas, and social attribution.
he data now in hand suggest functional specialization and
subdivision of brain regions beyond the anatomical resolution
that, has thus far been realized in multisubject functional neu-
roimaging. Contributing to this limited resolution is a potentially
high degree of variation in detailed functional anatomy across
individual subjects. A further challenge is an intersubject vari-
ability in information transfer between brain areas that actually
relects individual diferences in cognitive style: For instance, dif-
ferent individuals may make more or less use of working mem-
ory in comprehending and producing narrative, and there are
indications that these diferences may be relected in functional
connectivity with cooperating structures in the medial temporal
lobe related to long-term memory.
his connectivity frame holds out the potential for a rap-
prochement between connectionism and explicitly represen-
tational, modularist views of language and narrative processing,
since modular functions may reside not so much in any par-
ticular anatomical locus as in the incoming and outgoing links
among these loci: In this sense, the more closely the localization
problem is examined, the more ill-posed it may become. he
aforementioned characterizations in terms of regional functional
mapping may, therefore, be understood as a irst approach to a
description in terms of regional functional interaction. It is in this
sense that the new neuroscientiic study of discourse processing
is approaching an understanding of narrative connectivity in
terms of neural connectivity.
his entry is current as of 15 August 2007.
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bookheimer, Susan. 2002. Functional MRI of language: New approaches
to understanding the cortical organization of semantic processing.
Annual Review of Neuroscience 25: 15188.
Coulson, Seanna, and Cyma Van Petten. 2007. A special role for the right
hemisphere in metaphor comprehension? ERP evidence from hemi-
ield presentation. Brain Research 1146: 12845.
Ferstl, Evelyn C., and D. Yves von Cramon. 2002. What does the fronto-
median cortex contribute to language processing: Coherence or theory
of mind? NeuroImage 17.3: 15991612.
Freeman, Walter J. 2006. A cinematographic hypothesis of cortical
dynamics in perception. International Journal of Psychophysiology
60.2: 14961.
Gernsbacher, Morton Ann, and Michael P. Kaschak. 2003. Neuroimaging
studies of language production and comprehension. Annual Review
of Psychology 54: 91114.
Gerrig, Richard J., and Gail McKoon. 2001. Memory processes and
experiential continuity. Psychological Science 12.1: 815.
Jung-Beeman, Mark. 2005. Bilateral brain processes for comprehending
natural language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9: 51218.
Karunanayaka, Prasanna R., Scott K. Holland, Vincent J. Schmithorst,
Ana Solodkin, E. Elinor Chen, Jerzy P. Szalarski, and Elena Plante.
2007. Age-related connectivity changes in fMRI data from children
listening to stories. NeuroImage 34.1: 34960.
Kutas, Marta, and Kara D. Federmeier. 2000. Electrophysiology reveals
semantic memory use in language comprehension. Trends in
Cognitive Sciences 4: 46370.
Mar, Raymond A. 2004. he neuropsychology of narrative: Story compre-
hension, story production, and their interrelation. Neuropsychologia
42: 141432.
Saxe, Rebecca, and Lindsey J. Powell. 2006. Its the thought that
counts: Speciic brain regions for one component of theory of mind.
Psychological Science 17: 6929.
541
Narrative, Scientiic Approaches to
Van Petten, Cyma, and Barbara J. Luka. 2006. Neural localization of
semantic context efects in electromagnetic and hemodynamic stud-
ies. Brain and Language 97.3: 27993.
Wilson, Stephen M., Istvan Molnar-Szakacs, and Marco Iacoboni. 2008.
Beyond superior temporal cortex: Intersubject correlations in narra-
tive speech comprehension. Cerebral Cortex 18.1: 23042.
Xu, Jiang, Stefan Kemeny, Grace Park, Carol Frattali, and Allen Braun.
2005. Language in context: Emergent features of word, sentence, and
narrative comprehension. NeuroImage 25.3: 100215.
NARRATIVE, SCIENTIFIC APPROACHES TO
Knowledge is acquired in many ways and may exhibit many
degrees of generality, certitude, and power one can use to pre-
dict the future. It can be the product of direct observation and
a small number of general assumptions, or the result of a very
elaborate and long chain of hypotheses and deductions. It can
possess a rich factual content or be almost devoid of it, but it
must always lead back to factual observations. Knowledge, in its
most developed form, called science, rests on the basic assump-
tion that the whole universe is structured and functions accord-
ing to laws that hold without exceptions, in a precise way, and
throughout all time. Sciences main tool is mathematics, which
is as universal as science but is not itself a science; it is sciences
language (or logic). In its turn, science (and sometimes its lan-
guage, mathematics) is used as a tool by many intellectual activi-
ties and ields of study that do not have the status of a science.
Such is the case of narrative, a cognitive endeavor wherein the
methods used and the classiications arrived at are still far from
yielding scientiic (factual) observations and scientiic (factual)
predictions. Classiications are an important step in science; sci-
entists generally proceed by identifying and isolating a group of
phenomena that seem related, formulating hypotheses about
their main characteristics, and trying to connect them by means
of a theory. When they succeed, a branch of science becomes
established.
he study of narrative as such has not followed this path far
enough to become a scientiic discipline. But during the last 15
years, more and more scholars have specialized in the study of
narrative have been using indings from neurobiology, cogni-
tive science, and evolutionary psychology to enlarge our under-
standing of narrative and to ground it in the architecture of the
human brain.
The first attempts to establish narrative as an autonomous
scientific discipline took place in Russia just before the 1917
Revolution and continued until about 1930, when they were
stopped by Stalins regime in the Soviet Union. The Russian
Formalists, as the researchers were called, made salient con-
tributions to their field such as the search for literariness,
or the formal properties defining the literary text; the dis-
tinction between plot (syuzhet) and story (fabula); the con-
cept of ostraniene, translated into English by the neologism
estrangement; the notion that a literary text is a system, as
is literature itself; and the setting of boundaries between the
study of a text itself and the scientifically irrelevant study of
its production or its reception. These contributions were con-
ceived within a research program that acknowledges the fact
that narratives are infinite in subject and presentation, but
542
their formal devices are limited in number while also being
universal in nature. In a way, the Russian Formalists took up
where Aristotle had left off in his Poetics and his Rhetoric on
the study of the architecture of narrative. But their work, as in
the case of Aristotle, did not go beyond the boundaries of clas-
sification and typology.
he research program developed by the French Structuralists
in the 1960s and 1970s in the guise of a narratology draws on the
work of the Russian Formalists and that of Vladimir Propp con-
cerning the structural analysis of fairy tales (a group included
in the Aarne-hompson Index of folktale types). he program
also consists mainly in a taxonomy, but its clariication of con-
cepts and criteria of classiication is much more advanced and
sophisticated.
he deinition of narrative proposed by H. Porter Abbott is
simple, capacious, and suiciently precise for our purpose here.
Abbott says: Narrative is the representation of an event or a series
of events (2002, 13). And he explains: he diference between
events and their representation is the diference between story
(the event or sequence of events) and narrative discourse (how
the story is conveyed) (2002, 15). From this point of view, narra-
tive can be studied without regard to the medium through which
the event or events are represented. Because of this property,
narrative in texts, in ilms, in comic books, and so on can be stud-
ied by the means furnished by narratology, with a small amount
of adjustments in each case. As the most fundamental taxonomy,
narratology deals with formal universals, and in that capacity it
is indispensable for a research program seeking to establish the
scientiic study of narrative.
Since the mid-1990s there has been a renewed interest in the-
matics and its empirical study with the purpose of determining
how narratives relate to human universals. he multidisciplinary
research by Max Louwerse, Willie van Peer, and Donald Kuiken
should be mentioned here, as well as the imaginative and solid
research program being developed by Patrick Colm Hogan on the
basis of his identiication of three narrative universal structures
or genres (romantic, heroic, and sacriicial tragicomedic) gener-
ated by emotion prototypes. Another group of approaches con-
cerns the study of the universal features of the relation between
reader or audience and narrative. Here, empirical work, such as
that being realized by David Miall and Kuiken, as well as Deirdre
Wison and Dan Sperber, to name but a few once again, is also
contributing to a scientiic approach to very complex relations.
Evolutionary psychology and cognitive science are tools used by
these researchers in the wake of Joseph Carroll and Robert Storey.
And with respect to the universal features of rhythm, metered
speech, onomatopaeia, and prosody, the long and patient work
of Reuven Tsur has led to many fruitful results. he same is true
of the much more recent research relating music, neurobiology,
and the emotions.
Indeed, a common experiential link among these groups
of approaches is the emotions. Recent neuroscience has given
solid evidence to the hypothesis that emotions, too, are univer-
sal. his is a very important inding, since emotions are a central
concern in the study of narrative. he discovery of a mirror neu-
ron system in humans (after its discovery in macaque monkeys
in 1996) has opened the way to a multitude of new explorations
concerning the brain and our social behavior, including the
Narrative, Scientiic Approaches to
production and reception of narrative. he mirror neuron sys-
tem in humans has been consistently reported as being related
to imitation, action observation, intention understanding, and
understanding of the emotional states of others, to mention a
few of the human faculties that are essential for the right percep-
tion of ictional narratives and, of course, for the survival and
evolution of the human race. And there seems to be even more
to it. In 2004, Vittorio Gallese, Christian Keysers, and Giacomo
Rizzolatti published a paper in which they explore the possibil-
ity that the mirror neuron system, by providing us with an expe-
riential (precognitive) insight into other minds, could provide
the irst unifying perspective of the neural basis of social cogni-
tion (2004, 401). he mirror neuron system is apparently the
basic mechanism that allows us to grasp the intentions of others
and to experience similar emotions (empathy). As these authors
say in their article, A crucial element of social cognition is the
brains capacity to directly link the irst- and third-person expe-
riences of these phenomena (i.e., link < I do and I feel > with < he
does and he feels >) (ibid., 396).
he question arises: Would all art then be nothing but a spe-
ciic and specialized activity aimed at iring the mirror neurons
in a certain direction? Would the will to style displayed by
authors, composers, ilm directors, and so on be nothing but the
deliberate use of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and phonemics
to trigger the mirror neuron system in speciic and predeter-
mined ways in order to elicit speciic and predetermined insights
and emotions in the reader and the audience?
Frederick Aldama
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Abbott, H. Porter. 2002. he Cambridge Introduction to Narrative.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Aristotle. 1984. he Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle. Trans. Rhys Roberts
and Ingram Bywater. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Carroll, Joseph. 2004. Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature,
and Literature. New York: Routledge.
Gallese, Vittorio, Christian Keysers, and Giacomo Rizzolatti. 2004. A uni-
fying view of the basis of social cognition. Trends in Cognitive Science
8.9: 396403.
Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2003. he Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals
and Human Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Louwerse, Max, and Don Kuiken, eds. 2004. he Efects of Personal
Involvement in Narrative Discourse Processes. Philadelphia: Lawrence
Erlbaum.
Louwerse, Max, and Willie van Peer, eds. 2002. hematics: Interdisciplinary
Studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Miall, David. 2006. Literary Reading: Empirical and heoretical Studies.
New York: Peter Lang.
Miall, David, and Donald Kuiken. 1994. Foregrounding, defamiliariza-
tion, and afect response to literary stories. Poetics 22: 389407.
Propp, Vladimir. 1968. Morphology of the Folk Tale. Austin: University of
Texas Press.
Rizzolati, Giacomo, Vittorio Gallese, Leonardo Fogassi, and Luciano Fadiga.
1996. Action recognition in the premotor cortex. Brain 119: 593609.
Storey, Robert. 1996. Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic
Foundations of Literary Representation. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press.
Tsur, Reuven. 1997. Poetic rhythm: Performance patterns and their
acoustic correlates. Versiication 1: 1997. his electronic journal of
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literary prosody is available online at: http://www.arsversiicandi.net/
backissues/vol1/essays/tsur.html.
Wilson, Deirdre, and Dan Sperber. 2006. Relevance theory. In
Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. Gregory Ward and Laurence R. Horn,
60732. Oxford: Blackwell.
NARRATIVE UNIVERSALS
In one Arawak story, a tiger sees a great hunter in the forest,
changes herself into a woman, and marries him. he two have a
happy married life until the good wife suggests that they visit the
hunters family. She warns him that he must not reveal her ori-
gin to anyone. he hunter, however, tells his mother the secret.
Feeling ashamed in front of the community, the woman changes
back into a tiger and returns to the forest. he poor husband
would often go into the bush and call his wife, but there never,
never came a reply (Roth 1915, 2034).
At irst glance, the story might seem strange and clearly not
universal. A man marries a tiger and must keep it a secret from
his mother? Claude Lvi-Strauss analyzes the story in relation
to a complex of South American myths (see homologies and
transformation sets) that recount the decline from a golden
age. He also connects the tale with cannibalism (1973, 259). Lvi-
Strausss analysis does implicitly link the tale with other tradi-
tions, simply by referring to a decline from a golden age, for this
topic is found in diferent cultures. In the Judeo-Christian tradi-
tion, the story of the Fall is a case in point. However, in some ways,
this link only makes the story more alien. Pairing Adam and Eve
with a hunter and a tiger seems to highlight cultural diference
and pairing the eating of an apple with cannibalism seems to put
the Arawak at quite a distance from anything Western.
On the other hand, there is something deeply familiar about
the story. It tells of a couple joined by attachment (witness the
husbands pathetic search at the end of the story), sufering con-
lict due to the husbands divided loyalties to his mother and his
wife; it treats shared secrets, feelings of betrayal and shame, and a
concern about social origins. Moreover, there is nothing in the tale
itself that suggests cannibalism, despite Lvi-Strausss analysis.
In short, it is a story that seems both strange and familiar, both
culturally particular and imbued with cross-cultural concerns.
Cultural Construction, Universality, and Narrative
here is a common view in cultural studies the interdisciplinary
area of the humanities and social sciences devoted to analyzing
culture that practices, dispositions, artifacts, communicative
actions are socially constructed. his is to say that they are
not innate or biologically determined but result from cultural
developments. In this view, anything from individual emotions
to political structures might not be analyzed in terms of rela-
tively constant human predispositions, but rather in terms of the
historically contingent organizations and imperatives of social
practice or performance. Additionally, writers in cultural studies
commonly understand social construction as widely variable. In
the most extreme versions, this variation may be seen as limited
by little beyond the laws of physics.
An alternative view, often associated with evolutionary
approaches to culture, takes a wide range of social practices to
be very narrowly constrained by genetic propensities. hese
543
Narrative Universals
propensities are thought to have resulted from adaptations that
are speciically social. While writers in cultural studies tend to see
social practices as quite variable, writers adopting this approach
tend to see societies as manifesting a wide range of univer-
sals. Language study has been one area in which universalism
has been prominent, though there has been some disagreement
as to the precise evolutionary origins of language (see
biolinguistics).
narratology has incorporated both tendencies. A com-
mon view in cultural studies is that narrative is socially con-
structed and can vary widely from culture to culture. In contrast,
some researchers drawing on models from linguistics and psy-
chology have argued that there are remarkably consistent nar-
rative patterns across cultures. here are, however, diferences
between the study of narrative and the sorts of study that have
occupied linguists for example, the study of syntax. While
writers in cognitive linguistics have viewed syntactic prin-
ciples as resulting from general cognitive structures and pro-
cesses, a common view within the ield is that there are some
aspects of cognitive architecture that are specially devoted to
syntactic processing (see autonomy of syntax). he case for
an autonomy of narrative is much weaker. It seems much more
likely that narrative results from the interaction of various cog-
nitive structures and processes that are not specially devoted to
narrative. As such, narrative is a less likely candidate for simple
evolutionary analysis. Put diferently, if narrative results from
our cognitive abilities to draw causal inferences, to attribute
intentions, to imagine counterfactual or hypothetical situations,
to adopt varying physical points of view, to simulate experiences,
and so on, then it is less likely that there is any single adaptive
function for cross-cultural narrative patterns (comparable to the
commonly posited communicative function for language).
he point is consequential for a number of reasons, relating
to narrative and to other areas of study in the language sciences.
Speciically, if narrative patterns are unlikely to be genetically
coded in any detail, one of two conclusions may be drawn: One
may simply see this as further evidence for the culturalist posi-
tion, further reason to believe that narrative may vary across
cultures with few limitations. However, the existence or nonex-
istence of universals is an empirical issue. It cannot be decided
a priori. If one believes that the evidence supports conclusions
of universality, then one is likely to draw a diferent conclusion
from the indirectness of the relation between narrative and
adaptation. Certainly, some universal patterns will derive more
or less directly from aspects of cognitive architecture (e.g., causal
attribution) that are deined by genetic programs resulting from
selective pressure. Others will derive from commonalities in the
physical environment. But that is not all.
Sticking close to biology, we may note that some cross-cul-
tural patterns are likely to derive from the fact that adaptations
are mechanisms, not functions which means that there are
cases where the mechanism fails. More exactly, the genetic pre-
dispositions that serve us so well in daily life do so because they
set out relatively simple procedures that approximate advanta-
geous functions. For example, although evolutionary psy-
chologists often refer to our ability to read minds, we do not
directly know other peoples intentions. Rather, we engage in
complex processes of simulating and inferring those intentions.
544
hese processes have adaptive value because they approximate
the function of giving us access to other peoples states of mind.
However, since they are mere approximative mechanisms, they
are fallible a point that is highly consequential both in life and
in stories. Consider narratives that focus particular attention on
the relative opacity of others intentions (e.g., between lovers in
cases of misguided jealousy). If these recur cross-culturally (as
they do), they do so not because adaptive mechanisms succeed
but because they fail in certain systematic ways.
nongenetic universals may also arise due to patterns in
childhood development that are not genetically programmed.
For example, we seem to have innate predispositions to emo-
tional attachment. However, our attachment responses are not
wholly hardwired. hey are shaped in some crucial ways by
childhood experiences, as a number of writers have stressed fol-
lowing John Bowlby. here appear to be some crucial parameters
in our early childhood experiences that have lasting efects on
the quality and durability of our attachments in later life. While
cultures may vary in the degree to which one or another parent-
ing/attachment style predominates, it is inevitably the case that
every society has variation in parenting/attachment styles. hus,
insofar as narratives cross-culturally focus attention on social
emotion, we would expect to ind cross-cultural expression of
the same basic attachment styles.
he preceding example indicates that there are two prob-
lems with the usual framing of the division between those who
claim that there are cross-cultural universals and those who
deny that claim. First, universality does not entail innateness. A
pattern may be universal without being genetically determined.
Second, social construction does not entail cultural diference.
hough they include a genetic component, attachment styles are
socially constructed in that they result from the childs experi-
ence of parenting. Yet it seems likely that similar divisions of, for
example, secure and insecure attachment will recur everywhere,
even if they do so in diferent proportions. hese considerations
suggest that common dichotomies regarding universality and
cultural construction are false. he point has consequences for
our understanding of universality in a range of areas, not only
narrative.
Indeed, the point goes further. Research in group dynamics
and elsewhere (see network theory; self-organizing
systems; pragmatics, universals in) suggests that many
patterns may arise through convergent development (independ-
ent processes in diferent societies that give rise to parallel prac-
tices) for example, patterns in the ways social networks operate
to deine in-groups and out-groups, intragroup inequality, inter-
acting subgroups, and so on. Given the importance of group
antagonism, social hierarchy, and subgroup divisions for any
society and, thus, their importance for the lives of individual
agents we might expect narratives to emplot these relations fre-
quently. Insofar as these relations derive from group dynamics,
cross-cultural patterns of such emplotment would not result
from genetic predispositions per se but from convergent social
developments.
With these points in mind, we might return to the story of
the tiger woman or jaguar woman, in Lvi-Strausss version.
It is, as it turns out, framed by attachment (along with sexuality)
and group opposition. Moreover, there are hints that the group
Narrative Universals
opposition may point either toward in-group hierarchy or toward
in-group/out-group antagonism. Alexandra Aikhenvald reports
that at least among some Arawaks, members of one low-prestige
subgroup are referred to as people of jaguar (2006, 12). Walter
Roth cites an Arawak proverb that identiies tigers with enemies
(1915, 367). Moreover, the story relies on, indeed elaborates on,
the failure of mind reading, which is precisely what allows the
secret and the issue of spousal loyalty to arise in the irst place.
So there is certainly commonality here, commonality that makes
cognitive sense. But is that all there is to it? After all, we knew that
there was some commonality already. Is there any greater univer-
sality to this story or to narrative patterns more broadly?
Attachment combined with sexual desire (as in pair bonding
or marriage) points toward a set of stories that recur across cul-
tures. Perhaps we will get a better understanding of the issues if
we consider some other stories of this sort, particularly paradig-
matic works from other traditions. (In a brief entry, we cannot
consider many stories, or other evidence for narrative universals.
For a range of cases, and for references to other accounts of nar-
rative universality, see Hogan 2004.)
Four Romances
To begin, lets consider what is almost certainly the paradigm of
romantic narrative in the English-speaking world Romeo and
Juliet. Romeo and Juliet fall in love. However, they are prevented
from uniting by the group antagonism of their parents. With the
help of a friar, they are briely united, but then Romeo is exiled
and Juliet is conined to the home. Juliet is to be married to a
rival by her father. She fakes her death to escape this fate. Romeo
returns, kills his rival, then commits suicide just at the moment
when he might have been united with Juliet. Juliet, too, kills her-
self, but after their deaths, the families are reunited.
Now consider the Romance of the Western Chamber, Chinas
most popular love comedy, both on stage and in print, begin-
ning in the twelfth century (Idema 2001, 800). Chang and Ying-
Ying fall in love. Chang goes of to take the imperial exams.
Meanwhile, a rival comes to marry Ying-Ying with her mothers
approval. Chang succeeds in the examination and returns to
elope with Ying-Ying. He is successful due to the help of a monk.
he rival commits suicide (see Idema 2001, 798800).
he Recognition of akuntal, the most revered work of
Sanskrit drama, begins when Duyanta and akuntal fall in
love. Duyanta worries that they cannot marry due to caste
(thus, an internal group hierarchy). akuntal worries that they
cannot marry due to her fathers disapproval. Both turn out to
be mistaken. hey are united. However, akuntal violates her
obligations to a holy man, who curses her with separation from
Duyanta. In consequence, akuntal is exiled, while Duyanta
remains at home, sufering conlict with the demands of an earl-
ier wife (thus, a rival). Duyanta defeats an army of demons
in battle and is subsequently reunited with akuntal and
their son.
In the Arab and Muslim world, few stories have been as popu-
lar and inluential as that of Layla and Majnun. Layla and Majnun
fall in love, but Laylas father refuses the marriage. Majnuns
father tries to cure Majnun of his love madness through religion,
but Majnun only calls on God to make him worship Layla more.
Majnun wanders the desert, eventually trying to win Layla by
force of arms. However, Layla is married to another man. When
Layla and Majnun die, they are reunited in paradise.
Romance and Prototypes
Although this is only a tiny selection of narratives, it is signiicant
in part due to their prominence in distinct narrative traditions.
(On complications of establishing this distinctness in literary
study, see areal distinctness and literature.) We may
already begin to see the ways in which these narratives may
share certain prototypical characteristics. I say prototypi-
cal characteristics because these examples do not suggest a set
of necessary and sufficient conditions but a gradient of
more or less standard cases. Speciically, one common sort of
narrative that recurs cross-culturally tends toward a prototype
involving the following elements.
We begin with two lovers. heir mutual interest combines
sexuality and attachment. However, they face inhibition.
hat inhibition is frequently a matter of conlict with author-
ity usually parental or religious or group division, or both.
(he priming of religious igures due to the prototype may
explain their surprising presence as helpers in some stories.)
he group division is itself regularly one of in-group hierarchy
or in-group/out-group antagonism. Works that do not involve
such a conlict commonly suggest it, as in akuntal. After a
brief union, the lovers are separated often, one is conined
to home while the other is sent away. In tragic versions, one or
both die. In comic versions, the separation may be associated
with death. During this separation, one lover proves himself
(or, less often, herself) worthy of the beloved, sometimes by
defeating the rival (who may ultimately die). his demonstra-
tion may overturn the disapproval of the parents or society. In
the end, the lovers are reunited and the conlicting families are
reconciled.
Of course, individual stories must vary this pattern. However,
as a standard case, it appears to be remarkably consistent across
cultures and across time. he Arawak story varies the pattern
more than the others we have considered. But it remains rec-
ognizable. he diferences are largely a matter of order. he
hunter proves himself worthy of the beloved through his suc-
cessful hunting right at the outset (the point is related to Arawak
cultural practices in which potential bridegrooms must prove
themselves; see Roth 1915, 31516). he conlict occurs after
marriage, rather than before, and it is in part the fault of the
man for violating the trust of his wife and preferring his mothers
interests over hers, no matter how briely. Is there a reason for
these diferences? he comic form of the romantic plot involves
suggestions of death or unending separation of the lovers
prior to their ultimate reunion in part because this intensiies
the inal joy of their union. he point is a simple matter of the
psychology of emotion the joy of an outcome is intensiied by
the diiculty of achieving the outcome (see Ortony, Clore, and
Collins 1988, 73) and by the gradient of change from a previous
emotional state. he same point holds for the Arawak story, but
in reverse. Here, the atypically early union, the apparently hap-
pily ever after condition of the couples married life, and the
hunters subsequent tragic error serve to intensify the pathos of
the conclusion.
545
Narrative Universals
Understanding Narrative Universals
Perhaps surprisingly, the explanation of the Arawak storys dif-
ference from the cross-cultural prototype begins to suggest why
there is a cross-cultural prototype to begin with. Cross-culturally,
there are two common purposes of narrative verbal art the
communication of emotionally satisfying experiences (roughly,
a psychological purpose) and the treatment of thematically sig-
niicant issues, often ethical or political (roughly, a social pur-
pose). he explanation of narrative universals bears importantly
on these two elements.
Narratives involve sequences of action engaged in by inten-
tional agents pursuing goals that we share and that engage
us emotionally. One thing that cross-cultural patterns sug-
gest is that these narrative goals are much more limited, and
much more cross-culturally widespread, than one might have
imagined. For example, they include union with a partner in
an enduring relationship that is both sexual and founded in
attachment thus, romantic love (on other happiness goals, the
related emotions, and the associated narrative structures, see
Hogan 2004). he precise development of narratives results in
part from the means necessary to intensify emotional experi-
ences such as creating a relatively sharp change from separa-
tion anxiety to reunion, enhancing conlict by involving people
who themselves have attachment bonds (e.g., parents and chil-
dren), and so on.
Again, the development of romantic narratives also crucially
includes real social concerns. Most obviously, these involve in-
group/out-group divisions and group hierarchies, which pre-
sumably result from group dynamics. But group organization
does not delimit the entire social world. Individual biological
endowments, developmental idiosyncrasies, and experiential
accidents in later life guide personal ailiations. here is, in con-
sequence, no way of guaranteeing that personal ailiations will
conform to the principles of group hierarchization or in-group/
out-group antagonism. Societies are, then, condemned to face
conlicts between interpersonal attachments and the segrega-
tions imposed by social organization. Romantic plots tell the
story of that conlict.
In sum, there seem to be signiicant narrative universals
(many, of course, statistical; others absolute). hese uni-
versals arise from a complex interaction of factors, including
biological endowment (e.g., in basic emotional responses), pat-
terns in childhood development, and convergent developments
arising through group dynamics. In this way, narrative univer-
sals are in part derived from biological adaptations. However,
they are no less derived from social constructions, which are
themselves universal. An understanding of narrative universals
is important for at least three reasons: 1) Narratives are a cen-
tral part of human life everywhere. Understanding narratives is
therefore crucial to understanding the human mind and human
experience. 2) he precise narrative universals we discover tell
us some surprising things about human society. For example,
it is striking that most romantic plots develop our sympathy for
the lovers, not for the society. his suggests not only that certain
sorts of conlict are inevitable in society but also that we share
a deep sympathy with individuals or couples working against
social hierarchization and group antagonism a surprising and
in many ways hopeful fact. Finally, 3) the complex nature of
546
Narratives of Personal Experience
narrative universals would seem to have consequences for our
understanding of universals elsewhere and for our understand-
ing of the place of both biology and social construction in an
account of universals.
Patrick Colm Hogan
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Aikhenvald, Alexandra. 2006. A Grammar of Tariana. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Bowlby, John. 1982. Attachment and Loss. New York: Basic Books
Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2004. he Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals
and Human Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. Afective Narratology: he Emotional Structure of Stories.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. In press.
Idema, Wilt. 2001. Traditional dramatic literature. In he Columbia
History of Chinese Literature, ed. Victor Mair, 785847. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Lvi-Strauss, Claude. 1973. From Honey to Ashes (Introduction to a
Science of Mythology: 2). Trans. John and Doreen Weightman. New
York: Harper & Row.
Ortony, Andrew, Gerald Clore, and Allan Collins. 1988. he Cognitive
Structure of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Roth, Walter. 1915. An Inquiry into the Animism and Folk-Lore of the
Guiana Indians: hirtieth Annual Report of the Bureau of American
Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution: 19081909.
Washington, DC: Government Printing Oice, 103453.
NARRATIVES OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
he study of narrative extends over a broad range of human
activities: novels, short stories, poetic and prose epic, ilm, folk-
tale, interviews, oral memoirs, chronicles, histories, comic strips,
graphic novels, and other visual media. hese forms of commu-
nication may draw upon the fundamental human capacity to
transfer experience from one person to another through oral
narratives of personal experience.
A focus on spontaneous recounting of experience was greatly
stimulated by the development of sociolinguistic research in
the 1960s, designed to capture the closest approximation to
the vernacular of unmonitored speech. Narratives of personal
experience were found to reduce the efects of observation to a
minimum (Labov 2001). Since then it has appeared that such
narratives are delivered with a similar organization in a wide vari-
ety of societies and cultures as, for example, in the Portuguese of
ishermen in northeastern Brazil (Maranho 1984). he follow-
ing discussion of oral narratives is based on the initial analysis of
William Labov and Joshua Waletzky (1967), as developed further
in the suggested reading.
he discussion irst treats the structural organization of nar-
rative (temporal organization, orientation, coda), then turns to
the evaluative component and inally to the construction of nar-
rative as a folk theory of causality instrumental to the assignment
of praise and blame.
Structural Organization
A narrative is deined here as one way of recounting past events,
in which the order of narrative clauses matches the order of
events as they occurred. Example (1) is a minimal narrative orga-
nized in this way:
Narratives of Personal Experience
(1) a. Well, this man had a little too much to drink
b. and he attacked me
c. and a friend came in
d. and she stopped it.
he same events could have been reported in the non-narrative
order c,d,a,b as in (2), which employs a variety of grammatical
devices within a single clause.
(2) A friend of mine came in just in time to stop this person who
had had a little too much to drink from attacking me.
Narrative structure is established by the existence of temporal
juncture between two independent clauses. Temporal juncture
is said to exist between two such clauses when a change in the
order of the clauses produces a change in the interpretation of
the order of the referenced events in past time. hese are nar-
rative clauses. Narrative clauses respond to a potential question
what happened then? and form the complicating action of the
narrative.
A narrative normally begins with an orientation, introduc-
ing and identifying the participants in the action: the time, the
place, and the initial behavior. The orientation section pro-
vides answers to the potential questions who? when? where?
what were they doing? In the minimal narrative (1), the first
clause (a) is the orientation. More information is usually
provided:
(3) a. my son has awell, it was a fairly new one then.
b. Its a 60 cc Yamaha.
c. and it could move pretty good.
d. his fella and I were going down the road together
he end of a narrative is frequently signaled by a coda, a state-
ment that returns the temporal setting to the present, precluding
the question and what happened then?
(4) a. And you know the man who picked me out of the water?
b. Hes a detective in Union City,
c. and I see him every now and again.
Evaluation
Most adult narratives are more than a simple reporting of events.
A variety of evaluative devices are used to establish the evalua-
tive point of the story (Polanyi 1989). hus, we ind that narra-
tives, which are basically an account of events that happened,
frequently contain irrealis clauses negatives, conditionals,
futures which refer to events that did not happen or might have
happened or had not yet happened:
(5) And the doctor just says Just that much more, he says, and
youd a been dead.
(6) Ill tell you if I had ever walloped that dog Id have felt some
bad.
(7) a. And he didnt come back.
b. And he didnt come back.
Irrealis clauses serve to evaluate the events that actually did
occur in the narrative by comparing them with an alternate
stream of reality: potential events or outcomes that were not in
fact realized. Frequently, such evaluative clauses are concen-
trated in an evaluation section, suspending the action before
a critical event and establishing that event as the point of the
narrative.
Evaluative clauses vary along a dimension of objectivity. At
one extreme, narrators may interrupt the narrative subjectively
by describing how they felt at the time:
(8) a. I couldnt handle any of it
b. I was hysterical for about an hour and a half
In a more objective direction, narrators may quote themselves
(I said to myself his is it), or with more credibility, cite a third
party witness, as in (5). At the other extreme, objective events
speak for themselves, as in the account of a plane developing
motor trouble over Mexico City:
(9) And you could hear the prayer beads going in the back of the
plane.
Evaluation provides justiication for the narratives claim on
a greater portion of conversational time than most turns of talk,
requiring an extended return of speakership to the narrator until
it is inished (Sacks 1992). Evaluation thus provides a response
to the potential question So what? (Spanish Y que?; French Et
alors?).
Narratives of personal experience normally show great vari-
ation in the length of time covered by the clauses in the orien-
tation, complicating the action and evaluation sections, ranging
from decades to minutes to seconds. Sequences of clauses of
equal duration may be termed chronicles; these are not designed
to report and evaluate personal experience.
Reportability and Credibility
A reportable event is one that itself justiies the delivery of the
narrative and the claim on social attention needed to deliver it.
Some events are more reportable than others. he concept of
reportability or tellability (Norrick 2005) is relative to the situation
and the relations of the narrator with the audience. At one end of
the scale, death and the danger of death are highly reportable in
almost every situation. At the other end, the fact that a person ate
a banana for lunch might be reportable only in the most relaxed
family setting. Most narratives are focused on a most reportable
event. Yet reporting this event alone does not make a narrative; it
only forms the abstract of a narrative.
For a narrative to be successful, it cannot report only the most
reportable event. It must also be credible if the narrative is not
to be rejected as a whole by the listener. here is an inverse rela-
tionship between reportability and credibility: he more report-
able, the less credible. Narrators have available many resources
to enhance credibility. In general, the more objective the evalua-
tion, the more credible the event.
Narrative Preconstruction
When a narrator has made the decision to tell a narrative, he or
she must solve the fundamental and universal problem: Where
should I begin? he most reportable event, which will be desig-
nated henceforth as e0, is most salient, but one cannot begin with
it. Given the marked reportability of e0 and the need to estab-
lish its credibility, the narrator must answer the question How
547
Narratives of Personal Experience
did this (remarkable) event come about? he answer requires a
shift of focus backwards in time to a precursor event e-1, which is
linked to e0 in the causal network in which events are represented
in memory (Trabasso and van den Broek 1985). In traversing this
network in reverse, the causal links found may be event-to-goal,
goal-to-attempt, or attempt-to-outcome. he process will con-
tinue recursively to e-2, e-3, and so on. until an ordinary, mun-
dane event e-n is reached, for which the question Why did you
do that? is absurd, since en is exactly what we would expect the
person to do in the situation described. he event en is, of course,
the orientation. hus, a narrator telling of a time he was on shore
leave in Buenos Aires begins,
(10) a. Oh, I was settin at a table drinkin.
TRIGGERING EVENTS. Given the mundane and nonreportable
character of the orientation, it follows that the irst link in the
causal chain is a triggering event, which drives the narrative
along the chain toward the most reportable event. hus, (10) is
followed by (11):
(11) b. an this Norwegian sailor come over
c. an kep givin me a bunch o junk about how I was sittin
with his woman.
How ordinary situations like (10) can give rise to the report-
able and violent events that followed is a mystery that narrative
analysis can only contemplate, since they are part and parcel of
the contingent character of history.
The Transformation of Experience
he participants in many narratives include protagonist,
antagonist, and third-party, witnesses, of which the irst is the
most complex. Elaborating on Gofman (1981, 1445), one can
identify many egos present: the self as original author of the
narrative and its immediate animator; the self as actor; the self
as generalized other (normally as you); the anti-self as seen
by others; and the principal, the self in whose interest the story
is told. hat interest is normally advanced through a variety
of techniques that do not require any alteration in the truth-
fulness of the events reported. he re-creation of the causal
network involves the assignment of praise and blame for the
critical events and their outcomes. Most narratives of conlict
involve linguistic devices that contribute to the polarization
of protagonist and antagonist, though within the family, other
linguistic forms lead to the integration of participants. he
devices used to adjust praise and blame include most promi-
nently the deletion of events, an operation that can often be
detected by close reading. Key elements in further manipula-
tion are the grammatical features of voice: active versus pas-
sive, but also zero causatives that assign agency (He drove
through town with a chaufeur) or verbs that imply the exer-
tion of authority and resistance to it (My dad let me go with
him). Other narrative devices function to increase the impres-
sion of agency: pseudoevents that may not correspond to any
physical event (I turned to him and, I took this girl and, I ual narrative messages supported by an underlying semiotic
started to hit him but).
Narrative analysis can show how the prima facie case is built
to further the interests of the principal. his involves detecting
548
Narratology
insertions of pseudoevents and removing them, detecting dele-
tions and replacing them, and exchanging excuses for the action
excused. It is then possible to approximate the original chain of
events on which the narrative is based. A useful exercise is to
develop a complementary sub rosa case in the interests of the
antagonist. he comparison of these two constructions deepens
our understanding of how narrative skills are enlisted to trans-
form the social meaning of events without violating our commit-
ment to a faithful rendering of the past.
William Labov
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Gofman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Oxford: Blackwell.
Labov, William. 2001. he Social Stratiication of English in New York City.
2d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 2003. Uncovering the event structure of narrative. Georgetown
University Round Table 2001. Ed. Deborah Tannen and James Alatis,
6383. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. his article
develops the search for the events underlying the narrative.
. 2004. Ordinary events. In Sociolinguistic Variation: Critical
Relections. ed. C. Fought, 3143. Oxford: Oxford University Press. An
exploration of the evaluative efect of inserting ordinary events into
narrative.
. 2006. Narrative preconstruction. Narrative Inquiry 16: 3745. A
fuller development of this topic.
Labov, William, and Joshua Waletzky. 1967. Narrative analysis. In Essays
on the Verbal and Visual Arts, ed. J. Helm, 1244. Seattle: University
of Washington Press. Repr. Journal of Narrative and Life History 7
(1997): 338.
Maranho, Tulio. 1984. he force of reportive narratives. Papers in
Linguistics 17 (3): 23565.
Norrick, Neal R. 2005. he dark side of tellability. Narrative Inquiry
15: 32344.
Polanyi, Livia. 1989. Telling the American Story. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Sacks, Harvey. 1992. Lectures on Conversation. Vols. 1 and 2. Ed. Gail
Jeferson. Oxford: Blackwell.
Trabasso, T., and P. van den Broek. 1985. Causal thinking and the
representation of narrative events. Journal of Memory and Language
27: 122.
NARRATOLOGY
he French term narratologie (formed in parallel with biology,
sociology, etc. to denote the study of narrative) was coined by
Tzvetan Todorov in his 1969 book Grammaire du Dcamron.
he early narratologists participated in a broader structuralist
revolution that sought to use Saussurean linguistics as a pilot
science for studying diverse forms of cultural expression, which
structuralist theorists characterized as rule-governed signifying
practices or languages in their own right (see structuralism;
Culler 1975). Likewise, narratologists such as Todorov, Roland
Barthes, Claude Bremond, Grard Genette, and Algirdas Julien
Greimas, adapted Ferdinand de Saussures distinction between
la parole and la langue to construe particular stories as individ-
code (see semiotics). And just as Saussurean linguistics privi-
leged code over message, focusing on the structural constituents
and combinatory principles of the semiotic system of language,
Narratology
rather than on situated uses of that system, structuralist narratol-
ogists privileged narrative in general over individual narratives,
emphasizing the general semiotic principles according to which
basic structural units (characters, states, events, actions, etc.) are
combined and transformed to yield speciic narrative texts.
In this brief overview, I trace in further detail some of the
developments from which structuralist narratology took rise
and outline key contributions by early theorists. I also review
limitations of the structuralist approach to narrative inquiry
limitations that manifested themselves as story analysts began
to engage more fully with recent research in the language sci-
ences, among other areas of study. To map the evolution of the
ield, I draw a distinction between classical and postclassical
approaches to narratological analysis (cf. Herman 1999). Classical
narratology encompasses the tradition of research, rooted in
Russian Formalist literary theory as well as earlier precedents,
that was extended by structuralist narratologists starting in the
mid-1960s and reined and systematized up through the early
1980s by scholars such as Mieke Bal, Seymour Chatman, Wallace
Martin, Gerald Prince, and others. he Anglo-American tradition
of scholarship on ictional narrative can also be included under
the rubric of classical approaches, though for reasons of space,
this discussion focuses mainly on the Formalist-structuralist tra-
dition. Postclassical narratology, meanwhile, designates frame-
works for narrative research that build on this classical tradition
but supplement it with concepts and methods that were unavail-
able to story analysts during the heyday of structuralism. In
developing postclassical approaches, which not only expose the
limits but also exploit the possibilities of older models, theorists
of narrative have drawn on a range of ields, from gender theory,
philosophical ethics, and comparative media studies to socio-
linguistics, the philosophy of language, and cognitive science.
Given the focus of the present encyclopedia, I concentrate here
on productive synergies between postclassical narratology and
research in the language sciences.
The (Recent) Prehistory of Narratology
he Russian Formalists authored a number of pathbreaking
studies that served as foundations for narratological research.
Crucially, the Formalists sought to create a stylistics suit-
able for larger verbal structures found in prose narratives of all
sorts, from Leo Tolstois historically panoramic novels to tightly
plotted detective novels to (Russian) fairy tales. his widened
investigative focus would prove to be a decisive development
in the history of modern-day narratology. he new focus helped
uncouple theories of narrative from theories of the novel, shifting
scholarly attention from a particular genre of literary writing to
all discourse or, in a broader interpretation, all semiotic activities
that can be construed as narratively organized. he Formalists
thus set a precedent for the transgeneric and indeed transmedial
aspirations of French structuralist theorists such as Bremond
and Barthes, who came later.
Not only was the general orientation of Formalist research
narratologically productive; more than this, speciic Formalist
concepts were taken over more or less directly by structuralist
story analysts. For example, in distinguishing between bound
(or plot-relevant) and free (or non-plot-relevant) motifs,
Boris Tomashevskii provided the basis for Barthess distinction
between nuclei and catalyzers in his 1966 Introduction to the
Structural Analysis of Narratives (Barthes [1966] 1977). Renamed
kernels and satellites by Chatman (1978), these terms refer to core
and peripheral elements of story content, respectively. Delete or
add to the kernel events of a story and you no longer have the
same story; delete or add to the satellites and you have the same
story told in a diferent way. Related to Tomashevskiis work on
free versus bound motifs, Viktor Shklovskiis early work on plot
as a structuring device established one of the grounding assump-
tions of structuralist narratology: namely, the fabula-sjuzhet or
story-discourse distinction (see story and discourse), that
is, the distinction between the what and the how, or what is being
told versus the manner in which it is told.
Another important precedent was furnished by Vladimir
Propps Morphology of the Folktale ([1928] 1968), whose irst
English translation appeared in 1958. Propp distinguished
between variable and invariant components of higher-order nar-
rative structures more speciically, between changing dramatis
personae and the unvarying plot functions performed by them
(e.g., act of villainy, punishment of the villain, etc.). In all, Propp
abstracted 31 functions, or character actions deined in terms of
their signiicance for the plot, from the corpus of Russian folktales
that he used as his data set; he also speciied rules for their distri-
bution in a given tale. His approach constituted the basis for later
accounts of narrative structure. For instance, extrapolating from
what Propp had termed spheres of action, Greimas ([1966]
1983) sought to create a typology of general behavioral roles to
which particularized actors in narratives could be reduced. He
initially identiied a total of six roles (which he termed actants)
underlying individual narrative actors: subject, object, sender,
receiver, helper, and opponent.
Establishing the Field: Structuralist Narratology
I have already begun to discuss how the structuralist narratolo-
gists built on Russian Formalist ideas to help consolidate what I
am referring to as the classical tradition of research on narrative.
As originally conceived (cf. Barthes [1966] 1977), the new science
of narratology aimed to be not a school or method of literary crit-
icism that is, not a way of interpreting novels or other specii-
cally literary narratives but, rather, a transmedial investigation
of stories of all kinds, naturally occurring as well as artistically
elaborated, verbal (spoken or written) as well as image based,
painted as well as ilmed. It also aimed to be transcultural and
transgeneric, investigating everything from legends and fables
to epics and tragedies. Ethnographic and sociological impulses,
relecting the linguistic, anthropological, and folkloristic bases
for structuralist analysis of narrative, reveal themselves, when
Barthes writes: All classes, all human groups, have their narra-
tives, enjoyment of which is very often shared by men with difer-
ent, even opposing, cultural backgrounds ([1966] 1977, 79).
Narratologys grounding assumption is that a common, more
or less implicit model of narrative explains peoples ability to
recognize and interpret many diverse productions and types
of artifacts as stories; the same model allows them to compare
an anecdote with a novel or an opera with an epic. In turn, the
raison dtre of narratological analysis is to develop an explicit
characterization of the model underlying peoples intuitive
knowledge about stories, in efect providing an account of what
549
Narratology
constitutes humans narrative COMPETENCE. Hence, having
conferred on linguistics the status of a founding model ([1966]
1977, 82), Barthes identiies for the narratologist the same object
of inquiry that (mutatis mutandis) Saussure had speciied for the
linguist: the code or system from which the ininity of narrative
messages derives and on the basis of which they can be under-
stood as stories in the irst place.
Narratologists like the early Barthes used structuralist linguis-
tics not just to identify their object of analysis but also to elabo-
rate their method of inquiry. In this connection, the adaptation of
structuralist-linguistic concepts and methods was to prove both
enabling and constraining. On the positive side, the example of
linguistics did provide narratology with a productive vantage
point on stories, afording terms and categories that generated
signiicant new research questions. For example, the linguistic
paradigm furnished Barthes with what he characterized as the
decisive concept of the level of description (Barthes [1966] has underscored that certain features of the linguistic system
1977: 8588). Imported from grammatical theory, this idea sug-
gests that a narrative is not merely a simple sum of propositions
but, rather, a complex structure that can be analyzed into hierar-
chical levels in the same way that a natural-language utterance
can be analyzed at the level of its syntactic, its morphological,
or its phonological representation. Barthes himself distin-
guishes three levels of description. At the lowest or most gran-
ular level are basic meaning-bearing elements that he termed
functions, which can be mapped out both distributionally and
in terms of paradigmatic classes; then come characters actions
that collocate to form narrative sequences; and inally there is
the level of narration, or the proile that narrative assumes when
viewed as a communicative process.
Likewise, Genette ([1972] 1980) drew on a broadly gram-
matical paradigm in using the categories of tense, mood, and
voice to characterize the relations among the story (= the basic
sequence of states, actions, and events recounted), the text on
the basis of which interpreters reconstruct that story, and the
act of narration that produces the text. Indeed, Genettes work
in the area of narrative temporality constitutes one of the truly
outstanding achievements in the ield. Developing distinctions
that bear an interesting resemblance to Hans Reichenbachs
(1947) discriminations among event time, reference time, and
speech time, Genette focuses on two kinds of temporal rela-
tionships: 1) that between between narration and story and
2) that between text and story. In connection with the irst,
Genette distinguishes between simultaneous, retrospective,
prospective, and intercalated modes of narration; in connec-
tion with the second, he develops the categories of duration,
order, and frequency. Duration can be computed as a ratio
between the length of time that events take to unfold in the
world of the story and the amount of text devoted to their nar-
ration, with speeds ranging from descriptive pause to scene to
summary to ellipsis. Order can be analyzed by matching the
sequence in which events are narrated against the sequence
in which they can be assumed to have occurred, yielding
chronological narration, analepses or lashbacks, and pro-
lepses or lashforwards, together with various subcategories
of these nonchronological modes. Finally, frequency can be
calculated by measuring how many times an event is narrated
against how many times it can be assumed to have occurred in
550
the storyworld. In singulative narration, there is a one-to-one
correspondence between these frequency rates; in repetitive
narration, events are recounted more often than they occur;
and in iterative narration, events that happen more than once
are recounted fewer times than the frequency with which they
actually occur.
For all the gains it achieved by drawing on linguistics as a pilot
science (or, rather, as a metaphor for disciplinary practice), how-
ever, structuralist narratology was also limited by the linguistic
theories it treated as exemplary. Barthes unintentionally reveals
the limits of structuralist narratology when he remarks that a
narrative is a long sentence, just as every constative sentence is in
a way the rough outline of a short narrative, suggesting that one
inds in narrative, expanded and transformed proportionately,
the principal verbal categories: tenses, aspects, moods, persons
([1966] 1977, 84). By contrast, post-Saussurean language theory
conversational implicatures, discourse anaphora, pro-
tocols for turn-taking in conversation (see adjacency pair),
and so on emerge only at the level beyond the sentence. In
other words, attempting to bring to bear on narrative texts a
code-centered linguistics that ignores distinctive features of lan-
guage in use, the early narratologists lacked crucial resources for
the analysis of stories. he problem, then, is not with the origi-
nal intuition of the narratologists namely, that linguistics can
serve as a pilot science for narratological research. he problem,
rather, is with the particular linguistic concepts they used to lesh
out that intuition.
Beyond Structuralism: Postclassical Narratology and the
Sciences of Language
Ironically, the narratologists embraced Saussures structural-
ist linguistics as their point of reference just when its deicien-
cies were becoming apparent in the domain of linguistic inquiry
itself. he limitations of the Saussurean paradigm were thrown
into relief, on the one hand, by emergent formal (e.g., genera-
tive-grammatical) models for analyzing language structure
(see generative grammar). On the other hand, powerful
tools were being developed in the wake of Ludwig Wittgenstein,
J. L. Austin, H. P. Grice, John Searle, and other post-Saussurean
language theorists interested in how contexts of language use
bear on the production and interpretation of socially situated
utterances. heorists working in this tradition began to question
what they viewed as counterproductive modes of abstraction and
idealization in both structuralist linguistics and the Chomskyan
paradigm that displaced it. Indeed, the attempt by later narrative
scholars to incorporate ideas about language and communica-
tion that postdate structuralist research has been a major factor
in the advent of postclassical models for research on stories and
storytelling. To put the same point another way, one reason for
the shift from classical to postclassical narratology has been an
ongoing efort to move from using linguistics as a metaphor for
narrative research to using linguistic models in the actual prac-
tice of narratological inquiry.
he following are just some of the domains of narratological
research in which theorists have begun to import concepts and
methods from the modern-day sciences of language, in an efort
to build models with greater descriptive and explanatory power
Narratology
than those developed by the classical narratologists. In each of
these domains, story analysts are working to adopt more narra-
tive-appropriate tools from the language sciences that is, tools
that can throw light on how narrative, as a distinctive kind of lan-
guage use, constitutes a cognitive and communicative resource
by means of which human beings make sense of themselves, one
another, and the world.
Narrative Comprehension: To explore aspects of narrative
processing, story analysts have drawn on a range of theoreti-
cal frameworks that were unavailable to the structuralist nar-
ratologists, including artiicial intelligence research (work on
knowledge representations), accounts of mental models,
cognitive linguistics, and research on text processing.
For example, Catherine Emmott (1997) presents a powerfully
integrative theory of narrative comprehension as a process of
using textual cues to build and update complex mental rep-
resentations that she terms contextual frames, which contain
information about narrative agents, their situation in time
and space, and their relationships with one another. Mark
Turner (2003), meanwhile, relates story comprehension to
more general cognitive processes that involve conceptual
blending.
Speech and hought Representation: Narratologists have
drawn on ields ranging from dialectology, pragmatics,
discourse analysis (linguistic), and historical
linguistics to study aspects of speech representation in
narrative, including dialect representations and ictional
portrayals of scenes of conversational interaction. Likewise,
to study representations of characters mental function-
ing, analysts have begun to work toward a rapprochement
between narratological theory and ideas from cognitive and
social psychology, research on emotion, cognitive linguistics,
and other frameworks for inquiry.
Focalization heory: Initially given impetus by Genettes
([1972] 1980) attempt to reformulate theories of narrative
perspective or point of view in more rigorous terms, focal-
ization theory has in recent years taken on an increasingly
interdisciplinary proile. Manfred Jahn (1996) has drawn on
the cognitive science of vision to propose a powerful account
of the perspective-marking features of narrative. Meanwhile,
David Herman (2009) uses ideas from cognitive grammar
to propose reinements to Genettes theory.
Quantitative, Corpus-Based Research: Story analysts have
begun to work with large text corpora (see corpus lin-
guistics ) to study whether the distributional facts support
accounts proposed by earlier narratologists on the basis of
their own readerly intuitions. On the one hand, hypothesis-
driven approaches to corpus study use a top-down method,
attempting to map assumed categories of structure onto spe-
ciic texts or corpora to test the validity of prior theories. On
the other hand, bottom-up approaches, seeking to reduce
theoretical presuppositions to a minimum, work to induce
categories and models from surface features that can be
identiied through automated analysis of narrative corpora.
It is not just that narratologists have begun to engage more fully
with concepts and methods from the language sciences, how-
ever; more than this, the ield is currently being revolutionized by
a greater awareness that narratology is itself one of the sciences
of language speciically, the domain of inquiry whose focal con-
cern is narratively organized sign systems across all media and
communicative settings. Once a subdomain of literary study,
narratology is now coming into its own as the comprehensive
science of narrative-pertinent phenomena originally envisioned
by the structuralist narratologists.
Evidence of this reconiguration of the ield can be found in
narratologists reengagement with natural-language narratives
told in contexts of face-to-face interaction. Although William
Labov and Joshua Waletzky (1967) developed their model for the
analysis of narratives told in contexts of face-to-face communica-
tion just as structuralist narratologists were proposing their key
ideas, and although the Labovian model has been extraordinarily
inluential in social-scientiic research for some four decades, ini-
tially there was little interaction between sociolinguistic research
on storytelling and other traditions of narrative scholarship. But
now there is increasing interest in building an integrative theory
that can accommodate both the study of written, literary narra-
tives and the analysis of everyday storytelling (Fludernik 1996;
Herman 2002). At the same time, among researchers concerned
with face-to-face narrative communication, there has been a shift
analogous to the one I have characterized as a transition from
classical to postclassical approaches. Precipitating this shift is
the recognition that the Labovian model captures one important
subtype of natural-language narratives namely, stories elicited
during interviews but does not necessarily apply equally well
to other storytelling situations, such as informal conversations
between peers, he-said-she-said gossip, conversations among
family members at the dinner table, or, for that matter, written,
literary texts (see conversation analysis).
his convergence of sociolinguistic, discourse-analytic, and
narratological research suggests that narratology is now coming
into its own as a bona ide member of the language sciences. As
such, its chief aim is to enhance our understanding of stories not
only as a means of artistic expression or a resource for communi-
cation but also as a fundamental human endowment.
David Herman
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Barthes, Roland. [1966] 1977. Introduction to the structural analysis
of narratives. In Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath, 79124.
New York: Hill and Wang.
Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in
Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Culler, Jonathan. 1975. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics,
and the Study of Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Emmott, Catherine. 1997. Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse
Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a Natural Narratology. London:
Routledge.
Genette, Grard. [1972] 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method.
Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Greimas, Algirdas-Julien. [1966] 1983. Structural Semantics: An Attempt
at a Method. Trans. Danielle McDowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan
Velie. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Herman, David. 1999. Introduction. In Narratologies: New Perspectives
on Narrative Analysis, ed. David Herman, 130. Columbus: Ohio State
University Press.
551
Nationalism and Language

. 2002. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. whole set of ethnolinguistic nationalisms in Europe immedi-
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ately afterwards. hough the historical diferences between the
. 2009. Cognitive approaches to narrative analysis. In Cognitive various social movements cannot be elided, they were inspired
Poetics: Goals, Gains, and Gaps, ed. Geert Brne and Jeroen Vandaele, by a number of German post-Kantian idealist thinkers. J. G.
79118. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Herders assertion in 1768 that each national language forms
Jahn, Manfred. 1996. Windows of focalization: Deconstructing and
itself in accordance with the ethics and manner of thought of
reconstructing a narratological concept. Style 30.3: 24167.
Labov, William, and Joshua Waletzky. 1967. Narrative analysis: Oral ver-
its people (2002, 50) was an important articulation of the link
sions of personal experience. In Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts, between language and nation; by the time that William von
ed. June Helm, 1244. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Humboldt gave his deinition of a nation in 1836 (a body of men
Propp, Vladimir. [1928] 1968. Morphology of the Folktale. Trans. Laurence who form language in a particular way [1988, 153]), the connec-
Scott, rev. Louis A. Wagner. Austin: University of Texas Press. tion appeared almost axiomatic. In 1808, J. G. Fichte spelled out
Reichenbach, Hans. 1947. Elements of Symbolic Logic. New the political signiicance of linguistic nationalism by arguing that
York: Macmillan. wherever a separate language is found, there a separate nation
Turner, Mark. 2003. Double-scope stories. In Narrative heory and the exists, which has the right to take charge of its independent
Cognitive Sciences, ed. David Herman, 11742. Stanford, CA: CSLI. afairs and to govern itself (1968, 49). he implications of the
doctrine were realized in the role that it played in national inde-
NATIONALISM AND LANGUAGE pendence campaigns conducted by Greeks, Czechs, Hungarians,
Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Finns, Norwegians, Afrikaners, and
While the link between language and nationality is often pre-
the Irish. Some postcolonial activists today, the Kenyan writer
sented as though it developed at some primordial point in the
Ngg wa hiongo, for example, use the same model of linguistic
past, its appearance is, in fact, quite recent. his is hardly surpris-
nationalism in their contemporary struggle, not so much against
ing inasmuch as the conception of the nation itself is relatively
colonialism but in order to counter the legacy of colonial rule.
modern. hus, the idea that language is the medium by which
Andersons account of the nation as an imagined commu-
nationality is established, that language is the key to the nation,
nity drew attention to the constructedness of the concept by
has to be traced historically. Two distinct but related contexts
pointing to its precise historical origins. Yet the role of language
may serve as examples concerning how and why the connection
in the imagining of the community of the nation is also one that
was made.
arises at particular moments in history and serves speciic func-
In the sixteenth century, the Tudor monarchy sought to exer-
tions; it is neither transhistorical nor general. It is also worth
cise its dominion over Ireland, a colony which had been nomi-
noting that the conception of language underpinning this act of
nally under English rule since 1169 but which had never quite
imagination is one that has been criticized. hus, M. M. Bakhtin,
been successfully subjugated. Part of its centralizing project was
in the important essay Discourse in the Novel, points to the fact
the imposition of English upon the whole of the island of Ireland
that national languages are produced by various types of insti-
on the ground that the use of the native language, Gaelic, along
tutional forces intellectual (linguistic theorizing), educational
with other cultural factors such as behavior and dress, led the
(grammars and dictionaries), political (legislation) which act
Irish to think of themselves as being of sundry sorts, or rather of
centripetally in order to create a determinate, ixed, and know-
sundry countries (Statutes 1786, 28H8.cxv) rather than as mem-
able form. As part of this process, the realities of heteroglossia
bers of one polity united under the English crown. his stress on
(see dialogism and heteroglossia) social diference
the signiicance of linguistic diference, embodied in the Act for
inscribed in language by means of variation past and present
the English Order, Habit and Language (1537), formed the basis
have to be banished. Historians, such as E. J. Hobsbawm (1990),
of the English policy of linguistic colonialism in Ireland, but, of
have noted the historical signiicance of such linguistic selection
equal importance, it heralded the connection between language
and ranking, while linguistic anthropologists have drawn atten-
and national identity. In his 1617 Itinerary, Fynes Moryson,
tion to the fact that the homogeneous language of nationalism is
an English adventurer in Ireland, articulated the lesson that the
as imaginary as the community that accompanies it (Irvine and
colonialists learned from their struggle to impose English lan-
Gal 2000).
guage and order: [C]ommunion or diference of language hath
he extent to which such insights will have an impact in
always been observed a special motive to unite or alienate the
political and linguistic thought remains to be seen. It is certainly
minds of all nations. And in general all nations have thought
the case, however, that the postulated relationship between lan-
nothing more powerful to unite minds than the community of
guage and nation is now treated much more skeptically. At the
language (Moryson [1617] 1903, 213). Under speciic historical
reactionary edge of forms of linguistic nationalism, there are still
conditions the clash between an early modern nation-state and
those who argue for the purity of language as a way of guar-
one of its colonies linguistic diference came to signify national
anteeing the integrity of the nation. But the very fact that the
diference through the operation of military and discursive
vast majority of nations past and present have been multilingual
power. he link established in this context served as a portent
communities including a number of those whose very entrance
of a more general connection that appeared later in Europe and
into history depended on an emphasis on their supposed mono-
beyond.
lingualism radically undermines the ideological case for lin-
Although his seminal account of nationalism identiies its ori-
guistic nationalism.
gins in the New World in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, Benedict Anderson also discusses the appearance of a Tony Crowley

552
Natural Kind Terms
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Relections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. he Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael
Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University
of Texas Press.
Barbour, Stephen, and Cathie Carmichael, eds. 2002. Language and
Nationalism in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fichte, J. G. [1808] 1968. Addresses to the German People. Ed. G. Armstrong
Kelly. New York: Harper.
Herder, J. G. [1768] 2002. Philosophical Writings. Ed. and trans. Michael
N. Forster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hobsbawm, E. J. 1990. Nations and Nationalisms since 1780.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Humboldt, William von. [1836] 1988. On Language: On the Diversity
of Human Language Construction and Its Inluence on the Mental
Development of the Human Species. Ed. Michael Losonsky, trans. Peter
Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Irvine, Judith T., and Susan Gal. 2000. Language ideology and linguis-
tic diferentiation. In Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities and
Identities, ed. Paul Kroskrity, 3583. Oxford, UK: James Currey.
Joseph, John. 2004. Language and Identity: National, Ethnic, Religious.
London: Palgrave.
Moryson, Fynes. [1617] 1903. Shakespeares Europe: Unpublished
Chapters of Fynes Morysons Itinerary. Ed. C. Hughes. London: Sherratt
and Hughes.
Ngg Wa hiongo. 1986. Decolonising the Mind: he Politics of Language
in African Literature. London: James Currey.
he Statutes at Large Passed in the Parliaments Held in Ireland. 1786
1801. 20 vols. Dublin.
NATURAL KIND TERMS
Natural kind terms (NKTs) are, to use Platos ancient metaphor,
those terms that carve Nature at her joints; they are the terms
that correspond to unities and diversities in nature (Phaedrus,
265e266b). hey therefore enable lawlike generalizations,
descriptions of natural patterns, and explanations of natural
phenomena.
From this characterization of NKTs it is clear that science
strives to use such terms in its classiication and explanation
of nature. It is also clear that, as a rule, NKTs are developed
together with the growth of our knowledge of nature, and they
both result from a better understanding of phenomena and
advance that understanding. For instance, the biblical classiica-
tion of plants into grass, the herb yielding seed and fruit tree
yielding fruit whose seed is in itself (Genesis 1:11) is no longer
used in botany, which classiies some trees together with some
grass as angiosperms, the lowering plants, in contrast to some
other trees, which are gymnosperms. he same point is illus-
trated by the recent scientiic controversy over the deinition of
planet: Scientists aimed at forming a concept that would relect
and allow a better understanding of the diferent characteristics
and origins of bodies orbiting the sun.
he most common examples of NKTs are names of sub-
stances. Gold, water, alcohol, and metal are names of natural
kinds of matter; Homo sapiens sapiens, primates, mammals, ani-
mals, and eukaryotes are names of natural kinds of organisms.
But often enough one inds names of natural phenomena, such
as heat or pain, counted among these terms as well.
Various terms and phrases can be cited as examples of
non-natural kind terms. Student with a long nose who visited
Malaysia denotes a kind whose deining properties are not
related together in any lawlike regularity, and is, therefore, of
no use for the understanding of nature. A term like nonhuman
designates a group that is too heterogeneous. Another example
often cited is that of artiicial kind terms, such as pencil or apart-
ment. But this is perhaps problematic: It seems to presuppose
that humans, with their artifacts, constitute a kingdom within
a kingdom. But if Homo sapiens sapiens is a natural kind, and
as such part of nature, then terms useful for describing its life
and behavior for example, apartment should perhaps count
as NKTs.
Recent philosophical discussion has concentrated on the
meaning of NKTs. Until the 1960s, philosophers spoke of these
terms as if they were synonymous with a group of identifying
descriptions of the kinds. he statement that some liquid is water,
say, would then be synonymous with the statement that it has (at
least most of) the properties that would be used, for instance, in a
good, scientiically informed dictionary to characterize water.
his description theory of NKTs is problematic. According to
it, if a scientist asks a child for a glass of water, what the scien-
tist means by water is very diferent from what the child means
by it, and the latter cannot even understand the former. But
this is unacceptable, for luent communication is a criterion for
understanding.
he most inluential theory of the meaning of NKTs nowa-
days, essentialism, was developed during the 1970s by Saul
Kripke (1980) and Hilary Putnam (1975). Both claimed that the
meaning of an NKT is determined not by descriptions but by
ostensive reference to samples. Natural kinds are assumed to
have essential properties, and the NKT means something having
the same essential properties as (most of) these samples, although,
as a rule, when introducing an NKT, people would be ignorant of
these essential properties.
Kripke also claimed that NKTs are rigid, but this seems con-
fused. First, an NKT say, tiger is not rigid in the sense of des-
ignating the same particulars in every possible world, since
in diferent possible worlds there exist diferent tigers. Secondly,
it is not rigid in the sense that if it designates a particular in one
possible world, it designates it in every possible world in which it
exists: he queen bee is presumably a natural kind, but whether
larvae develop into queen bees depends on how they are fed. So
an insect that is a queen bee might not have been one, and queen
bee designates it only in some of the possible worlds in which it
exists. Lastly, and perhaps more importantly, if what was meant
in calling NKTs rigid is that they preserve their meaning across
possible worlds, then this is true of non-NKTs as well, such as
student with a long nose who visited Malaysia, and it would
trivialize the meaning of rigidity (cf. Schwartz 2002).
A hypothetical example supporting essentialism that many
found convincing was developed by Putnam. He asks us to imag-
ine a remote planet identical to ours (Twin Earth), apart from
the fact that instead of water, that is, H2O, it contains a super-
icially identical liquid of an entirely diferent composition, say
XYZ. (Let us ignore the fact that such a liquid would not quench
our thirst, and so wouldnt even be supericially like H2O.) Since
Twin Earths liquid is supericially indistinguishable from water,
553
Necessary and Suficient Conditions
we would mistake it for water; but then, the argument continues,
because of its diferent essential properties (composition, in this
case), it is not water. And thus we are supposed to conclude that
the essential properties, even if unknown to us, determine the
meaning of our NKTs.
Nonetheless, this example is problematic. Ever since the
composition of water was discovered, it is among waters known
and deining properties. Accordingly, after this discovery, we
wouldnt consider XYZ water because we would know it isnt, and
so this case does not support the claim that essential unknown
properties are sometimes involved in NKTs meanings. On the
other hand, no case has been made for the claim that we would
have been mistaken if, before that discovery, we had considered
XYZ water. We would have been mistaken had we then claimed
that Twin Earths liquid has the same unknown composition as
Earths water; but the moot point is whether the claim that it is
water would then have implicitly involved such an additional
claim. Examination of actual similar cases does not support
Putnams contention; moreover, essentialism has been shown to
be problematic in additional respects as well (cf. Ben-Yami 2001,
and additional references there). So despite its current popular-
ity, essentialism remains far from established.
Hanoch Ben-Yami
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Ben-Yami, H. 2001. he semantics of kind terms. Philosophical Studies
102: 15584.
Kripke, S. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Oxford: Blackwell.
Putnam, H. 1975. he meaning of meaning. In Mind, Language and
Reality: Philosophical Papers, II: 21571. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Schwartz, S. P. 2002. Kinds, general terms, and rigidity. Philosophical
Studies 109: 26577.
NECESSARY AND SUFFICIENT CONDITIONS
If we take two conditions, A and B, and we take A to be a nec-
essary and suicient condition (or set, thereof) for B, then con-
dition B cannot hold in the absence of condition A. However, if
A is merely a necessary condition (or set, thereof) for condition
B, then the presence of condition A does not entail condition B.
Further, if A is merely a suicient condition (or set, thereof) for B,
then it is possible that condition B holds in the absence of condi-
tion A.
In the philosophy of language, necessary and suicient con-
ditions have been employed by some philosophers in response
to the question: What are the conditions for the correct applica-
tion of a word?
Take our employment of the words fear and afraid. To say of
a person that he or she is afraid, we want to know how we might
judge whether that application is correct. We are here asking for
the truth conditions: hat is, what needs to hold such that our
predication of Taitu-as-afraid is true? One answer might be that
Taitu must hold a belief such that she is subject to a threat and a
consequent desire to act in a way that will diminish that threat.
Alternatively, one might argue that predicating of Taitu that she
is afraid is conditional upon a particular sensation, or patterned
change in the autonomic nervous system, being elicited in Taitu.
554
Negation and Negative Polarity
his debate can be understood as being about the necessary
and suicient conditions for the correct predication of Taitu-
as-afraid. While some claim that a particular coniguration of
changes in the autonomic nervous system are both necessary
and suicient for predicating of Taitu that she is afraid, others
respond that while such changes might be necessary conditions
they do not amount to suicient conditions, for such changes can
be brought about by the administration of drugs. hus, the truth
conditions for the predication of Taitu-as-afraid must involve
more than the existence of these bodily changes, for example,
Taitu also holding the belief such that she is subject to a threat and
the desire to act in a way that diminishes or absents that threat.
Furthermore, some might (and do) hold that conditions such as
patterned changes in the autonomic nervous system might be
suicient for a particular token, such as Taitu being afraid on
this occasion, but not for all applications the term afraid. his
latter claim might then draw on Ludwig Wittgensteins discus-
sion of family resemblance and hold that all correct appli-
cations of a term are not necessarily conditional on something
being common to all.
Phil Hutchinson
NEGATION AND NEGATIVE POLARITY
Negation is a linguistic, cognitive, and intellectual phenomenon.
Ubiquitous and richly diverse in its manifestations, negation is
fundamentally important to all human thought. As Laurence R.
Horn and Yasuhiko Kato put it:
Negative utterances are a core feature of every system of human
communication and of no system of animal communication.
Negation and its correlates truth-values, false messages, contra-
diction, and irony can thus be seen as deining characteristics of
the human species. (2000, 1)
Cognitively, negation is elementary of-line thinking; it involves
some comparison between a real situation lacking some partic-
ular element and an imaginal situation that does not lack it. he
particular element in focus anchors and contextualizes the nega-
tive element (which, being constrained by grammar, frequently
doesnt provide enough information for a listener to determine
what its focus is intended to be). here are many diferent con-
versational and written strategies for indicating and interpreting
focus elements, and even more for modulating them.
Formally (see logic and language), a functor called by
logicians negation is the only signiicant monadic functor; its
behavior is described by the most basic axiom of logic, the Law
of Contradiction ( (pp), NKpNp, also known as he Law of
Non-Contradiction), which asserts that no proposition is both
true and not true. Pragmatically (see pragmatics), negation
provides, among many other concepts, the basic cancelation test
for presupposition, as well as the fundamental observations that
underlie theories of politeness.
In natural language, negation functions as an operator,
along with quantiiers (see quantification ) and modals
(see modality ); operators are more basic and have more
properties than ordinary predicates or functors. In particu-
lar, operators have a scope; that is, there is always some other
Negation and Negative Polarity
element either assumed or verbally present in the discourse
to which a negative, modal, or quantiier refers. hat linked ele-
ment is said to be the focus or to be in the scope of the negative
(or modal; quantiiers are said to bind rather than focus on
another element).
Negation produces signiicant complexities and occasional
ambiguities when it interacts with other scope operators, because
the scopes can get twisted about. Every boy didnt leave is ambig-
uous, depending on the relative scope of the negative didnt and
the quantiier every (rather like Every boy read some book, where
two diferent quantiiers produce ambiguity). Negation com-
bines in idiosyncratic ways with modals; for example, in You
may not go, and thats inal! the deontic may not means not
possible, but in his may not be the place, the epistemic may
not means possibly not.
Every language develops its own idiomatic sets of negative
elements, and its own rules for using them. English negative phe-
nomena are by far the best studied; examples include syntactic
constructions (his is it, isnt it? Not any big ones, he didnt), vari-
ation (so didnt I; aint got none), morphology (nt, -free, un-),
(morpho)phonology (do/dont), intonations (Riight), and lex-
emes sporting negation overt (never), incorporated (doubt, lack),
calculated (few), entailed (prohibit), or presupposed (only).
Included also is a large, complex, and diverse system of nega-
tive polarity items (NPIs like ever in He didnt ever see it), which
felicitously occur only in the scope of some negative element
(*He ever saw it). he details of what scope actually is, and of how
and which and why NPIs can occur within it, vary among speciic
negative and NPI elements.
Negative polarity is a variety of negative concord (e.g., French
Je ne regrette rien; literally I dont regret nothing; Yiddish Ix
hob nit kin gelt; literally I dont have no money), but instead
of negative concord, which uses negative elements in the focus
of another negative, negative polarity uses other, non-negative
elements, which can sometimes pick up negativity by association
and occur without overt negative (could care less < couldnt care
less). An interesting typological question is whether languages
like English that lack signiicant negative concord develop more
negative polarity phenomena to compensate.
NPI is a term applied to lexical items, ixed phrases, or syn-
tactic construction types that demonstrate unusual behavior
around negation. NPIs might be words or phrases that occur
only in negative-polarity contexts (fathom, in weeks) or have an
idiomatic sense in such contexts (not too bright, drink a drop);
or they might have a lexical afordance that only functions in
such contexts (need/dare (not) reply); or a speciic syntactic rule
might be sensitive to negation, like subject-verb inversion with
adverb fronting in Never/*Ever/*Frequently have I seen such a
thing.
he grammatical occurrence of NPIs in an utterance is prima
facie evidence that it contains some sort of negation, and this
allows NPIs to function as indicators for various types of seman-
tic opposition and syntactic structure. his has turned out to be a
sensitive tool in other research areas of linguistics, and linguists
using NPIs have discovered many covert negative phenomena;
for instance, NPIs can also occur in questions (Have you ever
been there?), hypothetical clauses (Tell me if he ever arrives), and
comparatives (Hes better than we ever expected).
Network Theory
Besides NPIs, English also has positive-polarity items
(would rather, sorta) that dont occur in negative polarity con-
texts; possible polarity items (tell time) that can occur only
within the scope of a possible-type modal; and combinations,
like the impossible polarity item fathom that require both nega-
tive scope and a modal.
John M. Lawler
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Atlas, Jay D. 1996. Only noun phrases, pseudo-negative generalized
quantiiers, negative polarity items, and monotonicity. Journal of
Semantics 13.4: 265328. Negative polarity iniltrates logic.
Baker, C. L. 1970. Double negatives. Linguistic Inquiry 1: 16986.
Horn, Laurence R. 1969. A presuppositional analysis of only and even.
Chicago Linguistics Society: CLS 5: 97108.
. 1989. A Natural History of Negation. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press. Horns revision and extension of his 1972 dissertation.
he classical neo-Gricean analysis.
Horn, Laurence R., and Yasuhiko Kato. 2000. Introduction: Negation and
polarity at the millennium. In Studies in Negation and Polarity, ed.
Laurence R. Horn and Yasuhiko Kato, 119. Oxford: Oxford University
Press. An excellent survey.
Israel, Michael. 2004. he pragmatics of polarity. In he Handbook of
Pragmatics, ed. L. Horn and G. Ward, 70123. Oxford: Blackwell.
Klima, Edward S. 1964. Negation in English. In he Structure of
Language, ed. J. Fodor and J. Katz, 246323. Englewood Clifs,
NJ: Prentice Hall. he irst modern syntactic/semantic study.
Ladusaw, William A. 1980. Polarity Sensitivity as Inherent Scope Relations.
New York: Garland. he origins of the downward-entailment theory,
using visual metaphors like scope and focus.
Lakof, Robin. 1970. Some reasons why there cant be any some-any
rule. Language 45: 60815.
Lawler, John M. 1974. Ample negatives. Chicago Linguistics Society: CLS
10: 35777. After Klima, negative polarity was developed extensively in
the generative semantics tradition (Horn, Lakof, Ross, Lawler,
and many others), largely using a negative polarity ield metaphor,
along with negative triggers and secondary triggering.
Linebarger, Marcia. 1981. he grammar of negative polarity. Ph.D. diss.,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A then-orthodox generative
treatment, using rule-based metaphors like NPIs being licensed.
. 1991. Negative polarity as linguistic evidence. Papers from the
Parasession on Negation. Chicago Linguistic Society: CLS 27: 16588.
McCawley, James D. 1993. Everything hat Linguists Have Always Wanted
to Know About Logic (But Were Ashamed to Ask). Chicago: University
of Chicago Press. Oxford: Blackwell. McCawleys modern generative
semantic analysis; for example, In natural language, negation is not
truth-functional.
Ross, John R. 1973. Negginess. Paper delivered to the Winter Meeting of
the Linguistic Society of America, San Diego.
van der Wouden, Ton. 1996. Negative Contexts: Collocation, Polarity
and Multiple Negation. London and New York: Routledge. A useful
University of Groningen dissertation.
Zeijlstra, Hedde, and Jan-Philipp Soehn, eds. 2007. Proceedings of the
Workshop on Negation and Polarity. Tbingen: University Collaborative
Research Center. Recent evidence of polarity research expansion into
other languages.
NETWORK THEORY
Network theory concerns itself with the study of elements, called
vertices (e.g., words), and their connections, called edges or links
555
Network Theory
(e.g., two words are connected if one word has been elicited by
the other in a word association experiment; see Figure 1). his
theory has many applications in language sciences and is the
outcome of intersecting work of mathematicians and physicists,
who usually call it graph theory (Bollobs 1998) or complex
network theory (Newman 2003), respectively.
One of the major contributions of physicists has been to
unravel the statistical properties of real networks (Newman
2003), for example, the World Wide Web or protein interaction
networks. Firstly, physicists discovered that practically all real
networks exhibited the small world phenomenon. he term
small world comes from the observation that everyone in the
world can be reached through a short chain of social acquain-
tances, although the number of people in the whole social net-
work is huge. In the word association network, partially shown
in Figure 1, volcano is reached from ache through a chain of at
least four links, while only one link separates ire from volcano.
Secondly, physicists found that many real networks had a het-
erogeneous degree distribution. Loosely speaking, this property
means that there are vertices (words) with a disproportionately
large number of connections (the so-called hubs). For instance,
in the network partially shown in Figure 1, the ive words with the
highest degrees are food, money, water, car, and good (Steyvers
and Tenenbaum 2005). Finally, another fundamental property of
real networks is clustering; that is, roughly speaking, if two verti-
ces are connected to the same vertex they are likely to be directly
connected as well.
Network theory has contributed to the study of language in
three ways: a) by characterizing the statistical properties of lin-
guistic networks, such as networks of word association (Steyvers
and Tenenbaum 2005), thesauri (Sigman and Cecchi 2002),
and syntactic dependencies (Ferrer i Cancho, Sol, and Khler
2004); b) by modeling the properties of these networks (Steyvers
and Tenenbaum 2005; Motter et al. 2002); and c) by proposing
abstract models that provide a further understanding of the fac-
ulty of language (Ferrer i Cancho, Riordan, and Bollobs 2005).
Although the systematic application of network theory to lan-
guage is a young ield (starting in the early twenty-irst century)
within quantitative linguistics, it can be concluded that
556
Figure 1. A subset of a word association network appearing in
Steyvers and Tenebaum (2005, 50). Links go from the stimu-
lus to the response word. Reproduced by permission of the
Cognitive Society, Inc., copyright 2005.
the small world phenomenon, high clustering, and heteroge-
neous degree distribution are common properties of linguistic
networks (Mehler 2008). Most models are based on the prefer-
ential attachment principle proposed by Albert Lszl Barabsi
and Rka Albert (1999): Vertices with many connections are
more likely to become more connected in the future than those
with few connections (Steyvers and Tenenbaum 2001, 2005;
Dorogovtsev and Mendes 2001; Motter et al. 2002).
he challenges of the application of network theory are to
explain the properties of these networks (most studies are merely
descriptive); to incorporate deeper statistical techniques, for
example, degree correlation analysis (Serrano et al. 2007); and
to extend the studies to more languages (most studies are in
English). For these reasons, it is too early to argue that the het-
erogeneous degree distributions and other statistical patterns
constitute laws of language in the sense of absolute and
statistical universals. When applied to syntactic networks,
network theory has helped to explain the origins of the properties
of the syntactic dependency structure of sentences, for example,
the exceptionality of syntactic dependency crossings (Ferrer
i Cancho 2006) and has provided new tracks for understand-
ing syntax at the large scale of syntactic organization (Ferrer i
Cancho, Sol, and Khler 2004), above the traditional sentence
level (see syntax, universals of).
In their pioneering application of network theory, Mark
Steyvers and Joshua B. Tenenbaum (2001, 2005) studied the
large-scale organization of various kinds of semantic networks
(e.g., word association networks, as in Figure 1) and proposed
a simple model for explaining the small-worldness, high clus-
tering and a heterogeneous degree distribution of semantic
networks. Over time, new vertices (e.g. words) are added and
attached to existing vertices according to two principles: a)
Barabsi and Alberts preferential attachment and b) diferentia-
tion. Diferentiation means that a new vertex tends to mimic the
connectivity pattern of an existing vertex.
Network theory has shed new light on the evolution of lan-
guage by deining the necessary conditions for the existence of
language (e.g., word ambiguity) and also by suggesting the
possibility that language could have appeared for free as a side
Neurochemistry and Language
efect of communication principles (Ferrer i Cancho, Riordan,
and Bollobs 2005).
Ramon Ferrer i Cancho
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bibliography on linguistic and cognitive networks. Available
online at: http://www.lsi.upc.edu/~rferrericancho/linguistic_and_
cognitive_networks.html.
Bollobs, Bla. 1998. Modern Graph heory. New York: Springer. A help-
ful introduction to graph theory.
Barabsi, Albert Lszl, and Rka Albert. 1999. Emergence of scaling in
random networks Science 286: 50912.
Dorogovtsev, Sergey, and Jos Fernando Mendes. 2001. Language as an
evolving word web. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series
B, Biological Sciences 268: 26036.
Ferrer i Cancho, Ramon. 2006. Why do syntactic links not cross?
Europhysics Letters 76: 122834.
Ferrer i Cancho, Ramon, Oliver Riordan, and Bla Bollobs. 2005.
he consequences of Zipfs law for syntax and symbolic reference.
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B 272: 5615.
Ferrer i Cancho, Ramon, Ricard V. Sol, and Reinhard Khler. 2004.
Patterns in syntactic dependency networks. Physical Review E
69: 051915.
Mehler, Alexander. 2008. Large text networks as an object of corpus lin-
guistic studies. In Corpus Linguistics: An International Handbook of
the Science of Language and Society, ed. Anke Ldeling and Merja Kyt,
32882. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
Motter, Adilson E., Alessandro P. S. de Moura, Ying-Cheng Lai, and
Partha Dasgupta. 2002. Topology of the conceptual network of lan-
guage. Physical Review E 65: 065102.
Newman, Mark. 2003. he structure and function of complex networks.
SIAM Review 45.2: 167256. A helpful introduction to complex network
theory.
Serrano, Mari ngeles, Marian Bogu, Romualdo Pastor-Satorras,
Alessandro Vespignani. 2007. Correlations in complex networks.
In Large Scale Structure and Dynamics of Complex Networks: From
Information Technology to Finance and Natural Science, ed. Guido
Caldarelli and Alessandro Vespignani, 3565. Singapore: World
Scientiic.
Sigman, Mariano, and Guillermo A. Cecchi. 2002. Global organization of
the Wordnet lexicon. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
USA 99: 17427.
Steyvers, Mark, and Joshua B. Tenenbaum. 2001. he large-scale struc-
ture of semantic networks: Statistical analyses and a model of seman-
tic growth. Available online at: http://arxiv.org/ftp/cond-mat/
papers/0110/0110012.pdf. his is the irst version of their 2005 journal
article.
. 2005. he large-scale structure of semantic networks: Statistical
analyses and a model for semantic growth. Cognitive Science
29.1: 4178.
NEUROCHEMISTRY AND LANGUAGE
Why study a potential neurochemistry of language? here are
two reasons, one practical, the other theoretical. First, pharma-
cologic treatments of various speech and language disorders
depend on, and will be enhanced by, an understanding of how
selective neurochemical networks facilitate, inhibit, or mediate
language functions. Second, understanding the adaptive func-
tion of a given trait requires detailed knowledge of the design
speciications that mediate or implement the trait in question.
Design complexity is one of the hallmarks of adaptive function
and, thus, inquiry into the brain systems that support the lan-
guage faculty is mandatory if one wishes to understand the evo-
lutionary history and potential adaptive functions of language.
Neurochemical, neurophysiological, and neuroanatomical
studies deine a widely distributed neural network that supports
speech and language functions. his network includes the motor
and supplementary motor area (SMA) of the prefrontal lobes;
brocas area in the dorsal prefrontal region; wernickes
area in the medial temporal lobe; the anterior cingulate
gyrus and the subcortical basal ganglia; and the periaqeduc-
tal gray matter (PAG). he anterior cingulate gyrus sends efer-
ents directly onto the PAG central gray and appears to inluence
the initiation and voluntary control of vocalization. Destruction
of the central gray substance at the subcortical level or the SMA at
the cortical level can cause mutism. Patients with bilateral lesions
within the cingulate area often undergo a period of mutism, fol-
lowed by slow recovery during which speech is aprosodic and
initiation of speech is rare. he anterior cingulate gyrus receives
eferents from the dopamine-rich supplementary motor area in
the cortex and sends aferents, along with other dopaminergic
ibers coming from the basal ganglia, up and into the prefrontal
regions. hus, all of these language-related areas are intercon-
nected via dopaminergic ibers and the prefrontal cortex.
he prefrontal cortex (PFC) constitutes approximately one-
third of the human cortex and is the last part of the human
brain to become fully myelineated in ontogeny, with maturation
occurring in late childhood/early adolescence (Huttenlocher
and Dabholkar 1997). he PFC receives projections from the
mediodorsal nucleus and encompasses primary motor cortex,
as well as premotor, supplementary motor, and the dorsal and
orbital sectors of the prefrontal (proper) lobes. All of these PFC
areas are addressed by mesocortical dopaminergic projections
and play a role in language functions.
Dopamine (DA) is manufactured in the pigmented neurons of
the substantia nigra (SN) and the ventral tegmental area (VTA).
here are three major ascending dopaminergic systems: the stri-
ato-nigral tract, which ascends from the SN to the corpus stria-
tum; the mesolimbic system, which ascends from the SN and
medial VTA to limbic sites, including the cingulate gyrus; and the
mesocortical system, which ascends from the anteromedial teg-
mentum and VTA to neocortical sites, including supplementary
motor area and prefrontal cortex (Nieoullon 2002; Girault and
Greengard 2004). Important language regions are linked directly
to these dopaminergic frontal lobe structures. Brocas area, for
example, is in the frontal lobes, as is the SMA. Posterior
language sites, such as Wernickes area, the angular gyrus, and
the inferior and superior parietal lobules, are densely intercon-
nected via the superior and inferior longitudinal fasiculi, with
meso-prefrontal dopaminergic systems.
Language-related semantic and working memory net-
works in humans can be modulated by dopaminergic stimulation
(Williams and Goldman-Rakic 1995; Kischka et al. 1996; Luciana
and Collins 1997; Jay 2003; Angwin et al. 2004). Dopaminergic
activation may even support key components of the sentence
comprehension system in patients with Parkinsons disease
(PD) (Grossman et al. 2001). Dopaminergic agents may be efect-
ive treatment for nonluent aphasia. M. Albert and colleagues
557
Neurochemistry and Language
(1988), using an on/of design, reported improved luency
and naming scores in a patient with nonluent aphasia treated
with bromocriptine (a drug that stimulates selected dopamine
receptors in the brain). Fluency and naming scores returned to
baseline after the drug was discontinued. S. R. Gupta and A. G.
Mlcoch (1992) replicated the efect of improved luency scores
after bromocriptine in two aphasic patients, but L. Sabe and
colleagues (1995) and D. L. MacLennan and colleagues (1991)
could not document any improvement in speech and language
scores in nonluent aphasics who were treated with bromocrip-
tine late in the recovery process. Y. Tanaka and D. L. Bachman
(2000) conducted a double-blind, crossover study with bromo-
criptine. hey administered the drug (57.5 mg/day for four
weeks) to 10 patients with a Broca-type aphasia. Statistically sig-
niicant improvement (pre- to posttreatment) on naming and
luency scores was documented in the mild aphasics, but not
in the severely impaired aphasics. M. Bragoni and colleagues
(2000) used a double-blind, placebo-controlled design focused
only on chronic nonluent aphasics at a dosage of 30 mg/day,
with participants maintained at that dosage for three months.
While signiicant gains in verbal luency were evidenced with
bromocriptine, these indings are based on the performance of
only ive participants. Consistent, however, with the claim of
positive dopaminergic efects on luency is the fact that the dopa-
minergic drug levodopa (LD) has also demonstrated beneicial
efects on speech luency in midstage patients with Parkinsons
disease (McNamara and Durso 2000). S. Knecht and colleagues
(2004) showed that healthy volunteers given 100 mg of LD per
day exhibited more rapid and more accurate learning of verbal-
visual associations than a group of controls given a placebo.
Learning efects in this carefully controlled study could not be
attributed to changes in arousal, autonomic function, motor
response times, afect, or response biases.
Acetylcholine, one of the neurotransmitters that interacts
with dopaminergic systems at the level of the cortex, has also
been implicated in language functions. Tanaka, M. Miyazaki,
and Albert (1997) documented naming and comprehension
improvement in luent aphasics using the cholinergic agent bife-
melane. hey built on the work of L. Moscowitch, P. McNamara,
and Albert (1991) who reported that an anticholinesterase agent
(which boosts cholinergic activity) improved language perform-
ance in eight luent semantic aphasics. Albert (2000) provides
an in-depth discussion of both dopaminergic inluences on
nonluent aphasia and cholinergic inluences on luent aphasia.
His conclusion is that there appears to be a strong and consist-
ent efect of dopaminergic agents on verbal luency and mild
efects of cholinergic agents on naming and semantic memory.
Dopaminergic efects, however, are better documented than
cholinergic efects.
One of the major regulatory genes that control dopamines
metabolic pathways in the prefrontal cortex is the gene that
codes for the enzyme catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT).
Signiicant associations between COMT variations with varia-
tions in prefrontal cognitive function have been identiied (Egan
et al. 2001; Joober et al. 2002). Studies in rats, knockout mice,
and monkeys suggest that COMT is of particular importance
with respect to intrasynaptic dopamine regulation in the pre-
frontal cortex, where an alternative route of dopamine removal
558
(i.e., dopamine transporter reuptake, as in the striatum) is largely
nonexistent. In humans, the COMT gene contains a highly func-
tional and common variation in its coding sequence that appears
to be a unique human mutation because it has not been found
in great apes. his uniquely human change in dopaminergic
functional capacity in the prefrontal cortex suggests that it may
have been a factor in the evolution of the human prefrontal cor-
tex and thereby of human speech and language functions more
generally.
An inherited deicit in spoken grammatical language among
several members of a family (family KE) in England has been
associated with a mutation in the forkhead box P2 (FOXP2) gene
on chromosome 7 (see genes and language). Persons with
the FOXP2 mutation evidence underactivity in dopaminergic
neural networks linking subcortical striatal networks with pre-
frontal cortical sites, including Brocas area during word-genera-
tion tasks. FOXP2 is subject to the efects of genomic imprinting,
with relatively high expression from the paternal chromosome
(Feuk et al. 2006). Such a pattern of gene expression evolves
in the context of evolutionary conlict due to paternity uncer-
tainty in polygynous mating systems, as is the case with most
mammals including humans. Genetic conlict occurs between
asymmetrically related kin (i.e., between mothers and ofspring,
and between siblings in the context of paternity uncertainty),
with genes that are paternally expressed in ofspring promoting
behaviors in ofspring that are designed to monopolize resources
from the mother and exclude resources going to siblings. he
FOXP2-related defect implies that some aspects of spoken lan-
guage may have evolved under pressures of genetic conlict.
his conlict view of the evolution of language is consistent
with recent indings linking handedness and cognitive/language
deicits of schizophrenics (another disorder involving dopamin-
ergic dysfunction) to the parent of origin efects (Francks et al.
2003), as well as other evidence identifying potential imprinting
efects on genes that regulate dopaminergic systems of the lan-
guage-related areas of the prefrontal cortex. In short, investiga-
tion of dopaminergic inluences on language functions leads us
into two seemingly disparate realms of inquiry: 1) the develop-
ment of rational pharmacotherapeutic strategies for treatment
of language disorders (e.g., dopaminergic drugs for luency
disorders), and 2) reconstruction of the evolutionary conlicts
that led to the emergence of speech and language functions
themselves.
Patrick McNamara
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Bragoni, M., M. Altieri, V. Di Piero, A. Padovani, C. Mostardini, and
G. L. Lenzi. 2000. Bromocriptine and speech therapy in non-luent
chronic aphasia after stroke. Neuroscience 21.1: 1922.
Egan, M. F., T. E. Goldberg, B. S. Kolachana, J. H. Callicott,
C. M. Mazzanti, R. E. Straub, D. Goldman,and D. R. Weinberger. 2001.
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B. Finucane, D. Hartung, M. Innes, B. Kerem, M. J. Nowaczyk,
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J. B. Vincent, S. Zeesman, L. R. Osborne, J. O. Cardy, J. Kere, S. W.
Scherer, and K. Hannula-Jouppi. 2006. Absence of a paternally
inherited FOXP2 gene in developmental verbal dyspraxia. American
Journal of Human Genetics 79: 96572.
Francks, C., L. E. DeLisi, S. H. Shaw, S. E. Fisher, A. J. Richardson,
J. F. Stein, and A. P. Monaco. 2003. Parent-of-origin efects on hand-
edness and schizophrenia susceptibility on chromosome 2p12-q11.
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telencephalic dopamine ibers: Physiology and pharmacology.
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Girault, J. A., and P. Greengard. 2004. he neurobiology of dopamine
signaling. Archives of Neurology 61: 6414.
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for aphasia following stroke. Cochrane Database Systematic Reviews
4: CD000424.
Gupta, S. R., and A. G. Mlcoch. 1992. Bromocriptine treatment of non-
luent aphasia. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation
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Grossman, M., G. Glosser, J. Kalmanson, J. M. Morris, M. B. Stern,
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synaptogenesis in human cerebral cortex. Journal of Comparative
Neurology 387.2: 16778.
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word learning in normal humans. Annals of Neurology 56.1: 206.
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memory for spatial but not object cues in normal humans. Journal of
Cognitive Neuroscience 9: 33047.
MacLennan, D. L., L. E. Nicholas, G. K. Morley, and R. H. Brookshire.
1991. he efects of bromocriptine on speech and language function
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NEUROIMAGING
Neuroimaging technologies provide a major source of new data
about how the language system is organized in the brain. In par-
ticular, activation imaging approaches, in which brain activity is
monitored while subjects perform some language task, allow us
to visualize various aspects of language processing in the normal
brain and test hypotheses about component language functions
or systems. Among the imaging techniques most commonly in
use for understanding language in the brain are structural mag-
netic resonance imaging (MRI), functional MRI (fMRI), positron
emission tomography (PET), electroencephalography (EEG),
and magnetoencephalography (MEG).
Structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging
he lesion deicit model, where one deduces the function of
a brain region by observing what it cannot do when damaged,
marks the basis of our understanding of language organization
in the brain, originating with Paul Brocas work. Whereas Broca
had to wait until his patients death to determine where the
lesion was located, structural or conventional MRI scanning
allows lesion-behavior correlation in vivo.
he MRI scanner is essentially composed of a large, high ield
magnet that delivers magnetic pulses and records small changes
in the magnetized atoms in your brain or body. hese signals are
picked up by an antenna and, through several transformations, are
translated into pictures of the brain. By altering the direction, fre-
quency, and readout times of these magnetic perturbations, difer-
ent MRI pulse sequences produce variations in the signals generated
by each tissue type. he diference between these signals is referred
to as contrast, and using these variations, the radiologist can deter-
mine what is normal brain tissue, what looks like a clot of blood or a
fatty tumor, what tissue has had a disruption in the normal difusion
of water molecules, and so on. MRI has excellent spatial resolution,
which refers to the precision with which one can see details. Typical
MRI scans resolve 1 mm; thus, it is easy to locate even small brain
lesions that might explain a particular abnormality.
In the past few years, the sophistication of structural MRI
techniques has increased markedly, ofering new approaches
for identifying structure-function correlations in the language
559
Neuroimaging
system. One approach involves warping scans from diferent
patients together, showing areas, for example, where lesions
overlap among patients with the same language impairment. An
illustrative study comes from Bates et al. (2003). Here, the authors
used a technique called voxel based morphometry. For each voxel
(a three-dimensional pixel) in the brain, a t-test compares the
extent to which patients with a lesion encompassing that voxel
difer signiicantly from subjects whose lesions do not encom-
pass that area on a language task. E. Bates and colleagues (2003)
correlated lesion location with verbal luency (Color Plate 5).
he areas of the brain showing the most signiicant diferences
between groups are depicted in red, indicate the brain area that
is most likely responsible for the deicit observed. Contrary to
Brocas report, reduced verbal luency was associated not pri-
marily with brocas area lesions but, rather, with lesions of
the insula and underlying white matter. Indeed, a recent MRI
study of Brocas patient conirmed involvement of these struc-
tures (see Figure 1).
Another approach in MRI analysis compares aspects of brain
structure, such as gray matter thickness or sulcal position, to per-
formance on language tasks using voxel-based correlations. For
instance, L. Lu and colleagues (2007) examined the relationship
between the thickness of the cortex in the left inferior frontal
region and ability on a phonological processing task in children.
he development of gray matter changes in this area correlated
with improving scores on phonology tasks, indicating a dynamic
relationship between emerging brain growth and language
development (Color Plate 6).
A third structural MRI approach examines the integrity of the
white matter underlying the cortical ribbon. Difusion tensor
imaging is an MRI approach that measures the difusion of water
molecules in the brain. White matter (WM) ibers tend to be bun-
dled together, lined up in parallel sheaths. Because water is more
likely to difuse in parallel to these white matter tracts as opposed
to crossing them on the perpendicular, imaging techniques that
track difusion will tend to emphasize the direction of these iber
tracts. Image-processing techniques can identify the unifor-
mity of these iber directions in each voxel in the brain, indicat-
ing whether the WM is intact. Color Plate 7 shows an example
560
Figure 1. Top left: Original drawing by Broca.
Bottom left: preserved whole brain of Brocas
patient. Right: axial MRI slice through Brocas area
showing damage to insula, striatum, and underlying
white matter (Dronkers et al. 2007).
of tractography, where the WM tracts in and out of a language
area have been mapped. his approach can identify inputs and
outputs to language regions, indicating possible mechanisms for
distal efects of local lesions through disruption on the connect-
ing pathways.
Activation Imaging and Neurovascular Coupling
Several brain imaging technologies take advantage of neuro-
vascular coupling in identifying brain regions associated with
language performance. Neurovascular coupling refers to the
fact that when neurons increase their iring rate (because that
brain area is working harder), blood low increases to that
region. Typically, the correlation between blood low and neu-
ronal activity is extremely high, although the blood low increase
is delayed in onset by several seconds and falls of gradually in
comparison to neuronal activity (Buxton et al. 2004). In several
clinical conditions it may be decoupled, such as in acute stroke.
Both PET and fMRI take advantage of neurovascular coupling to
identify brain activity.
POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY. PET scanning is an imag-
ing tool in which a radioactively labeled compound is injected
into the body and taken up in the brain. Compounds such as
glucose or water are labeled with positrons that rapidly decay;
during the decay process the positrons hit other nuclei and are
annihilated, which causes the emission of two photons that
shoot of in opposite directions simultaneously. he PET scan-
ner is composed of a ring of detectors that detect these simul-
taneous photons, and software reconstructs their originating
positions, revealing where the compound traveled. he resulting
PET image is a blurry picture showing the amount of radioactive
substance reaching every pixel in the brain. Diferent radioactive
compounds measure various brain processes, each with a char-
acteristic half-life. For instance, 18-luorodeoxyglucose (18FDG)
has a half-life of about 45 minutes and measures glucose metab-
olism. More useful for language research is the compound H215O,
radioactive water. Because of its short half-life (about 2 minutes),
H215O scans can be repeated after a delay of 1012 minutes, up to
between 6 and 10 scans. For this reason, H215O has been used for
Neuroimaging
language activation studies, where subjects might receive sev-
eral injections while performing one or more language tasks and
during control tasks (Color Plate 8).
One of the irst PET studies to visualize language areas in vivo
was that of S. E. Petersen and colleagues (1988). In this study,
normal volunteers performed a series of language tasks ordered
hierarchically: viewing a crosshair on a screen; seeing printed
words on a screen or hearing words over headphones, reading or
repeating heard words, or generating an action verb correspond-
ing to a visually or auditorally presented noun. By subtracting
lower-level tasks from higher-order language tasks, the authors
isolated areas of the brain involved in word generation, while
removing unwanted efects of sensory stimulation. his sub-
tractive logic forms the basis of activation imaging experiments.
While there are theoretical diiculties with assumptions of hier-
archical organization, cognitive subtraction models remain the
mainstay of activation imaging research.
An important disadvantage of PET is the need to expose sub-
jects to radioactivity; a second disadvantage is that subjects must
perform the same task for several minutes continuously to obtain
a single brain image. Also, PET is a relatively noisy methodol-
ogy, and the signal-to-noise ratio is low enough that scans must
be averaged over a group of subjects. Finally, the spatial resolu-
tion of PET is low, usually about 6 mm, so that individual brain
structures cannot be resolved and the areas of signiicant acti-
vation are not easily localized to a speciic brain structure. Most
investigators solve this problem by performing an MRI scan for
each subject, mathematically moving or registering the brain
images so they are in the same space, then overlaying the PET
activation regions onto the corresponding MRI scans to localize
the regions of activity.
FUNCTIONAL MRI. In the early 1990s, two groups independently
discovered that blood low increases during neural activity
could be measured directly with MRI (Kwong et al. 1992; Ogawa
et al. 1992). his is due to the accident that oxygenated blood and
deoxygenated blood have slightly diferent magnetic properties.
During increased brain activity, an increase in blood low is not
matched by an increase in oxygen consumption; consequently,
more oxygenated blood spills over to the venous side of the cap-
illary bed. Scans of the brain taken during this state of increased
oxyhemoglobin concentration have slightly higher MRI signals
than those taken in the resting state. hus, fMRI measures this
blood-oxygen-level dependent, or BOLD, signal when compar-
ing scans taken in diferent cognitive states. hanks to the discov-
ery of ultrafast MRI scanning, typically using an approach called
echo-planar imaging or EPI, fMRI takes a complete picture of the
brain as quickly as once per second. By taking complete brain
volumes every few seconds over a period of several minutes or
more, fMRI can track those magnetic changes that correlate with
blood low during experimental and control tasks that can be
varied with tremendous experimental complexity. Because fMRI
has signiicantly greater spatial and temporal resolution than
PET, it is often possible to see signiicant language-related brain
activity within a single individual in a matter of minutes.
he study of language organization in the brain has been
revolutionized by fMRI. Because these studies are relatively easy
and inexpensive to conduct, it is possible to examine language
processes of nearly any complexity, resulting in many important
indings. For instance, in the reading system, years of controversy
about whether reading involves a single system versus parallel
systems have been largely resolved. he physical presence of two
anatomically distinct pathways diferentially engaged by difer-
ent reading demands and subject groups lends strong credence
to the dual-route hypothesis (Pugh et al. 1996). Another interest-
ing set of indings explores the role of the right hemisphere
in many aspects of language processing, including afective
prosody, metaphor analysis, and contextual processing (see
Bookheimer 2002 for a review). Within the frontal lobe there
appear to be separate regions for processing aspects of expres-
sive language, including phonological processing, syntax, and
semantic integration. hus, fMRI appears to have resolved an
ongoing debate over whether part of Brocas area is specialized
for syntax, as opposed to secondary to increased working mem-
ory demands of complex syntactic structures, with a recent study
indicating syntax speciicity in this region (Santi and Grodzinsky,
2007). In general, language research from fMRI indicates a level
of organization that is far more complex, detailed, and speciic
than envisioned on the basis of lesion-deicit studies. Color Plate
9 shows an fMRI exam during a series of language tasks. Even
within a single subject, clear evidence for at least nine diferent
brain regions contributing to language can be observed.
EEG and MEG. While fMRI ofers a tremendous advantage in
both spatial and temporal resolution over PET, the fMRI response
is extremely sluggish in comparison to neural activity measured
directly. Two other technologies ofer vastly improved temporal
resolution. Electroencephalography measures the combined
electrical activity of a wide area of the brain. Because electrical
activity directly measures neural iring, EEG runs very close to
real-time activity of neurons. It also has several major disadvan-
tages. he spatial resolution is poor: Electrical signals represent
an average over many centimeters of activity, and results are gen-
erally conined to entire lobes. Further, the signals come mostly
from surface brain structures. Finally, data must be averaged over
many trials to yield an averaged electrical response to a class of
stimuli. Nonetheless, EEG is the method of choice for high tem-
poral resolution work, and for young children or infants.
Years of EEG research reveal expected patterns of electri-
cal responses to certain classes of stimuli. Averaged electrical
responses to a class of stimuli are referred to as event- related
potentials or ERPs. An example is the N400 response, meaning
a negatively directed signal occurring 400 milliseconds after
the stimulus. he N400 is found when the subject experiences
an anomalous or unexpected event. For instance, A. Hahne,
K. Eckstein, and A. Friederici (2004) examined ERPs in response
to semantic and syntactic violations embedded within sen-
tences. When there was a syntactic violation, the authors found a
component in anterior brain regions, termed the ELAN (early left
anterior negativity). his was followed by a late positive response
(P600). Semantic violations produced the N400 response. In a
second experiment, instructions to ignore the syntactic viola-
tions and focus on the semantic task could not override the brain
response to syntactic violations. hese data indicate that syn-
tactic processing is mandatory and not under efortful control.
While EEG cannot locate the brain structures that generate these
561
Neuroimaging
signals, the high temporal resolution of EEG makes it possible
to analyze on-line processing of language, addressing questions
that difer fundamentally from those tapped by fMRI.
Magnetoencephalography bears many similarities to EEG
while ofering improved spatial resolution. MEG measures mag-
netic moments created by electrical activity in the brain that are
picked up by a large magneto-detector sensitive to very small
changes in magnetic ields. hese ields are closely related to neu-
ral activity and can be tracked over temporal intervals efectively in
real time. Localizing the source of MEG signals remains a signii-
cant diiculty with this technique, and sources generated close to
the brain surface are easier to detect than those from deep struc-
tures. Nonetheless, source localization appears to be far more
precise than with EEG, while temporal resolution is equivalent.
MEG is more technically challenging than EEG and fMRI and is
also less widely available. Nonetheless, signiicant contributions
to the ield of language continue to emerge from MEG studies.
For example, MEG studies have indicated that letter-string rec-
ognition occurs 150 msec after presentation of a word, whereas
children with dyslexia show a weaker response (Tarkiainen et al.
1999). A corresponding delayed response in superior temporal
regions may relect an earlier-level dysfunction in letter-string
recognition areas (Salmelin, Helenius, and Service 2000).
Both EEG and MEG are limited to event-related designs that
measure the temporal dynamics of evoked responses to a brief
duration stimulus. In some cases, however, temporal resolution
isnt necessary. For instance, studying mood or drug states or
observing a cognitive strategy that evolves over time may require
longer time intervals to measure, favoring fMRI or PET.
Susan Bookheimer
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British Medical Bulletin 65: 95119.
NUMBER
Number is a grammatical feature that quantiies the denotation
of a linguistic element. It can refer to entities or events, and in
language we ind both nominal number (very common, dis-
cussed in the following) and verbal number (less common, real-
ized on the verb to indicate the number of events or the number
of participants; also called pluractionality).
Languages vary with regard to the part of their nominal inven-
tory that is involved in the number system. In diferent languages,
the split into nominals that do and do not express number may
occur at diferent points of the animacy hierarchy: speaker (irst
person pronouns) > addressee (second person pronouns) > third
person pronouns > kin > rational > human > animate > inanimate.
Furthermore, not all nouns are number diferentiable. Two types of
noun are traditionally distinguished: count nouns and mass nouns,
the latter regarded as lacking the number distinction. At the level of
semantics, the countmass distinction can be captured with two
semantic features boundedness and internal structure (Jackendof
1991), which corresponds to the distinction between temporally
bounded and unbounded events in verbal semantics. But count-
ability is really a characteristic of nominal phrases (Allan 1980),
since many nouns can appear in both count and mass syntactic
contexts, for example, Would you like a cake/some cake? We need a
bigger table/ here is not enough table for everyone to sit at.
When nominal number is found expressed on the noun or the
noun phrase as such, it is considered inherent. When found on other
elements of the noun phrase or on the verb, it is contextual. he
Occipital Lobe
expressions of nominal number can involve special number words
(of diferent syntactic status); syntactic means (i.e., agreement,
found most commonly on demonstratives and verbs but also on
articles, adjectives, pronouns, nouns in possessive constructions,
adverbs, adpositions, and complementizers); a variety of mor-
phological means (inlections, stem changes, zero expressions,
clitics); and lexical means (e.g., suppletion). Number is often
marked in more than one way within one language.
All nominal number systems are built on the primary opposi-
tion between singular (expressing the quantity one) and plural
(more than one). Other attested number values are dual (two),
trial (three), and paucal (a few). here may be further divisions
into paucal and greater paucal, plural and greater plural (the last
value may imply an excessive number, or all possible instances of
the referent). No genuine quadrals (four) have been found. he
largest number systems involve ive values. In many languages,
the absence of plural marking does not necessarily imply the sin-
gular, but the form may be outside the number opposition and
express general number, that is, the meaning of the noun without
reference to number.
Associatives, distributives, and collectives all sometimes
listed as additional values of number are better analyzed as
independent features. Associativity expresses the meaning X
and the group associated with X; distributives indicate that
entities (whether count or mass ones), events, qualities, or loca-
tions are to be construed as distinct in space, sort, or time; and
collectives indicate that the members of a group are to be con-
strued together as a unit. Many languages have markers for these
categories in addition to various number markers.
Anna Kibort
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Allan, Keith. 1980. Nouns and countability. Language 56: 54167.
Corbett, Greville G. 2000. Number. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Jackendof, Ray. 1991. Parts and boundaries. Cognition 41: 945.
O 1. Topographical Organization. Topographic mapping can
OCCIPITAL LOBE
Alcmaeon of Croton, probably the irst person to suggest that the
mind is located in the brain and not the heart, also suggested that
the optic nerves are light-bearing paths to the brain. His revo-
lutionary ideas, formulated about 2,500 years ago, were ignored
by Egyptian and Greek scholars alike (most notably by Aristotle).
We now know that visual information is delivered to the occipi-
tal lobe mainly via the thalamus. he occipital lobe is the most
posterior of the four lobes of the brain (named after the four skull
bones beneath which they lie).
Even until very recently, it was believed that the occipital lobe
was involved only in the processing of visual information per
se. Language was considered to take place in dedicated areas,
mainly in the frontal and temporal cortex. hus the relevance of
the occipital lobe to language processing and language research
was only indirect in the sense that its role was limited to provid-
ing visual input processed later on by language centers in other
brain regions that contribute to certain aspects of language (such
as reading).
New data are now challenging this view of the occipital lobe
as solely processing visual information. First, several key studies
on the blind have shown the involvement of the occipital lobe
in processing other sensory modalities. In particular, there is
a clear link between occipital lobe processing in the blind and
language and verbal memory functions, where this pattern of
activation is attributed to massive reorganization of the occipi-
tal lobe in cases of blindness. Further, the involvement of the
occipital lobe in nonvisual processing has clearly been demon-
strated in the sighted (i.e., under normal development of the
occipital lobe), and much of todays research is exploring the
extent to which the occipital lobe is involved in language pro-
cessing under normal development. hese topics are covered in
the following sections.
The Occipital Lobe and Vision
We live in a culture that relies heavily on vision and, accord-
ingly, vision research has motivated and dominated neurosci-
ence research. he discovery and analysis of cortical visual areas
using electrophysiological and anatomical techniques was one
of the major milestones in visual neuroscience (e.g., Hubel and
Wiesel 1963, 1965; Zeki 1978). On the basis of the vast amount
of anatomical studies in the primate, we now have a picture of
a highly diverse and hierarchically structured system (Felleman
and Van Essen 1991). his hierarchical organization originates
in the geniculostriate pathway from visual area 1 (V1, primary
visual cortex) and beyond to an array of visual areas. Along this
hierarchical organization there is an increase both in the recep-
tive ield size and in the complexity of the optimal stimulus neu-
rons in each area. Converging evidence suggests that the visual
cortex is structured according to several principles of organi-
zation and functional neuroanatomical schemes. Following
are descriptions of some of the most important organizing
principles:
chart an orderly and gradual change in some functional prop-
erty of cortical neurons laid along the cortical surface. he most
fundamental transformation in vision is retinotopy. his involves
the transformation from a Euclidean coordinate system in the
retina to polar coordinates in the visual cortex. In this transfor-
mation, each of the early visual areas maps the visual ield along
two orthogonal axes: the polar angle (points that lie on a spe-
ciic radius whose origin is at the fovea have an identical polar
angle) and eccentricity (the eccentricity distance from the fovea,
the center of the visual ield). Areas in the left central vision area
are projected to the back of the right occipital lobe, whereas the
more peripheral areas are projected more anteriorly. he retinal
points on such radii are mapped onto parallel bands across cor-
tical areas. he sequential layout of these bands reverses when
crossing from one visual area to another, providing a way for an
accurate delineation of the borders of these retinotopic areas
(Sereno et al. 1995). here is evidence that higher-order object-
related areas are also topographically organized, but the basis for
563
Occipital Lobe
this organization is still subject to debate (for a review, see Grill-
Spector and Malach 2004 and the following).
2. Visual Pathways. Lesion studies in primates and human
fMRI studies both suggest that there are two processing streams
between early, retinotopic visual areas in the occipital cortex
and higher-order processing centers in the occipito-temporal
and occipito-parietal lobes. hese two streams are referred to
as the dorsal and ventral streams, respectively (Ungerleider
and Haxby 1994). Because the dorsal stream is also involved
in visuo-motor transformations, a diferentiation is made
between vision for action (dorsal stream) and vision for per-
ception (ventral stream) (Goodale and Milner 1992). he ven-
tral stream contains structures devolved to the ine analysis of
a visual scene such as form and color. hus, it is also known
as the what pathway. It consists of areas V1V4 in the occipital
lobe and several regions that belong to the lateral and ventral
temporal lobe.
3. Functional Specialization. his principle of division of
labor, which leads to a specialization of function in the vari-
ous cortical areas, was originally suggested for the visual sys-
tem (Zeki 1978). Electrophysiological studies in nonhuman
primates have identiied organizing principles in addition
to retinotopy, such as selectivity for simple features like spa-
tial orientation in V1 and selectivity for categories of complex
stimuli like faces for spatial layouts in inferior temporal (IT)
cortex. In the last decade or so, the use of noninvasive func-
tional imaging, particularly fMRI, has dramatically increased
our knowledge of the functional organization of the human
visual cortex and its relation to vision, due to its ability to pro-
vide a large-scale neuro-anatomical perspective (e.g. Martin
and Chao 2001). An active debate is ongoing about the actual
organization of the ventral stream (Grill-Spector and Malach
2004). One area in the lateral occipital cortex, the lateral occipi-
tal complex (LOC; Malach et al. 1995) responds strongly to
pictures of intact objects by contrast to scrambled objects or
nonobject textures. In the ventral occipito-temporal cortex,
specialized areas for faces (fusiform face area, FFA; Kanwisher,
McDermott, and Chun 1997), scenes (Epstein and Kanwisher
1998), and human body parts (Downing et al. 2001) have been
described, as well as for visual word forms (visual word form
area, VWFA; McCandliss, Cohen, and Dehaene 2003) which
has direct implications for the discussion here. Developing a
theoretical framework that captures these specialized regions
continues to be problematic, although the notion of widely
distributed and overlapping cortical object representations
remains a likely principle of organization (Haxby et al. 2001).
he efects of perceptual expertise for certain object categories
(Gauthier et al. 2000) and, more recently, diferent category-
related resolution needs (Grill-Spector and Malach 2004) have
also been put forward as candidate organizational principles of
the human ventral stream.
The Occipital Lobe, Multisensory Integration,
and Nonvisual Processing
he perception of objects and the perception of space are cogni-
tive functions of prime importance. In everyday life, these func-
tions beneit from the coordinated interplay of vision, audition,
and touch. A central theme in sensory neurophysiology is that
564
information processing in the primary and secondary sensory
areas is strictly modality-speciic. According to this view, the
occipital cortex processes vision, and integration of the difer-
ent senses occurs only in higher-level areas. Recent evidence
suggests that the occipital cortex does in fact process nonvi-
sual functions. We focus later on object recognition and object
naming, although similar results were obtained in the dorsal
stream (e.g., for visuo-tactile orientation, see Zangaladze et al.
1999).
Recognition of an object can involve a wide range of cues,
for example, a characteristic color, a unique texture, or a typical
sound. However, shape is a particularly fundamental feature for
recognizing and naming objects. Surprisingly, recent neuroim-
aging studies have found that visual and tactile object-related
information (both contribute to shape information) converges
in a lateral occipito-temporal ventral visual stream area (LOtv;
Amedi et al. 2001). A later study found that shape and not sen-
sory modality is indeed the crucial factor in activating these
regions. he study used visual-to-auditory sensory substitution
devices (Bach-y-Rita and Kercel 2003) in which visual images
are captured by a camera and then transformed by a predeter-
mined algorithm into soundscapes that preserve shape infor-
mation. he study found that recognizing objects by their typical
sounds or learning to associate speciic soundscapes with spe-
ciic objects do not activate this region. Critically, soundscapes
synthesized to preserve shape information did activate LOtv
robustly. his suggests that LOtv is driven by the presence of
shape information, rather than by the sensory modality that
provides this information (Amedi et al. 2007). It is interesting to
note that a similar phenomenon of a modal representation in
occipito-temporal cortex was found for word recognition. he
study showed that the left basal occipito-temporal area shows
speciicity to word processing, regardless of the sensory modal-
ity used. his area showed selective activation to words versus
non-word letter strings when subjects read using vision or when
blind individuals read Braille using touch (Buchel, Price, and
Friston 1998).
Another example of cross-modal interactions is the case of
integration of heard and seen speech (letter-sound associa-
tion), which is another crucial function for normal development
of language abilities. his function, however, was shown to
be mediated primarily by the temporal lobe (especially in the
superior temporal sulcus and gyrus, STS and STG, respectively).
For instance, a recent fMRI study (van Atteveldt et al. 2004)
showed that bilateral STS/STG responded more strongly to
bimodal matching of letter-sound pairs than to their respective
unimodal components. Note that correspondences between
speech sounds and mouth movements are learned implicitly
and early in development by exposure to heard speech together
with the sight of the speaker. In contrast, the visual representa-
tion of spoken language by written language is a cultural arti-
fact. herefore, associations between letters and speech sounds
are not learned automatically but require explicit instruction.
It is interesting that the learning of new letter-sound mappings
involves the occipital cortex, whereas the auditory association
cortex is active during the processing of previously acquired
matching letter-sound combinations (Hashimoto and Sakai
2004).
Occipital Lobe
Language and Verbal Processing in the Occipital Lobe
READING AND DYSLEXIA; NAMING AND ALEXIA. Reading words
and naming visual objects involves the association of visual stim-
uli with phonological and semantic knowledge. Damage to
the left occipital lobe can result in pure alexia: the inability to read
without losing the ability to write or the loss of any other major
language-related function (Damasio and Damasio 1983). More
recent neuroimaging studies support this view by showing cor-
relations between the left occipito-temporal cortex with linguis-
tic aspects of reading and object naming based on visual input
in normal subjects. No less informative is the study of abnormal
patterns of activation in this part of the brain in subjects with
developmental dyslexia (Schlaggar and McCandliss 2007).
VISUAL WORD FORM IN THE SIGHTED AND TACTILE BRAILLE IN THE
BLIND. An interesting example of such language-related pro-
cessing in the occipital lobe is the case of visual word form in the
sighted. Related to this is the case of occipital activation during
Braille reading in the blind. In both cases, activation was found
for both words and letter strings. he speciics and signiicance of
these two examples are discussed in this section.
One of the most hotly debated topics in the context of modu-
lar versus general architecture organization in the occipital lobe
is the existence of the human visual word form area, which is
dedicated to the construction of visual words and thus is a key
player in our ability to read. Like other language-related areas
in the prefrontal and parietal cortex, this area also has a strong
hemispheric dominance located in the left occipito-temporal
sulcus bordering the fusiform gyrus (McCandliss, Cohen, and
Dehaene 2003). Other methodologies, such as recording ield
potentials in awake humans, showed selectivity to words and
letters strings in similar parts of the left occipital cortex (Nobre,
Allison, and McCarthy 1994). Recently, a causal link between
lesions in VWFA and acquired alexia without agraphia was dem-
onstrated in a patient who had a patch of his cortex removed in
surgery, causing activation in VWFA to disappear (Gaillard et al.
2006; Martin 2006).
As in the case of the fusiform face area, some investigators
have suggested that there is no reason to label VWFA as a sepa-
rate modular brain area purely because of the possible lack of
speciicity of a ventral occipito-temporal lesion to cause pure
alexia, and since the reading disorder might not be limited to
words or could be a manifestation of a more general visual pro-
cessing deicit (Price and Devlin 2003).
What happens when early blind subjects read using a difer-
ent sensory modality? Recent neuroimaging studies in the blind
have demonstrated robust occipital cortex activation during
Braille reading (see blindness and language). In this case,
activation is not limited to occipito-temporal areas but stretches
all the way to the primary visual cortex (Sadato et al. 1996), and
interference in processing in the occipital cortex using tran-
scranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) increases the error rate in
Braille reading (Cohen et al. 1997).
OCCIPITAL LOBE AND PLASTICITY IN LANGUAGE AND VERBAL
MEMORY FUNCTIONS. Recent neuroimaging studies in the blind
have demonstrated robust occipital cortex activation during
a wide variety of linguistic and speciically semantic judgment
tasks and during speech processing (See Burton, Diamond, and
McDermott 2003; Amedi et al. 2003; Pascual-Leone et al. 2005;
Roder et al. 2002).
For instance, robust plasticity in the left occipital areas of
the blind is evident during verbalmemory tasks requiring the
retrieval of abstract words from long-term memory in early
blind individuals (Amedi et al. 2003). In this case, the observed
occipital activation occurred without introducing any tactile or
auditory sensory input. Notably, blind subjects showed superior
verbal memory capabilities, compared not only to age-matched,
sighted controls but also with reported population averages.
Furthermore, in the blind group only, a strong positive correla-
tion was found between the magnitude of V1 activation and the
verbal memory capabilities of individual subjects.
More directly related to language processing, several stud-
ies have used a verb-generation task, in which both blind and
sighted subjects were instructed to generate a verb in response
to a noun cue. he sighted group showed activation in typical
language-related areas (e.g., brocas area in the prefrontal
cortex, which was activated as well in the blind), but no occipi-
tal activation. he blind group, however, showed additional
robust activation in the occipital cortex (Burton, Diamond, and
McDermott 2003; Amedi et al. 2003). Furthermore, as research
in bilingual subjects has demonstrated, the convergence of
two languages in prefrontal cortex during semantic tasks (e.g.
Crinion et al. 2006), performed by bilingual blind subjects,
shows additional convergence of the two languages in the poste-
rior occipital cortex, including in the primary visual cortex (Ofan
and Zohary 2006). In addition, fMRI studies have shown that
efective connectivity between the prefrontal and occipital cor-
tex is increased in blind individuals during semantic processing.
Both early blind and sighted subjects activate a left-lateralized
fronto-temporal core semantic retrieval system. However, blind
subjects activate additional extra-striate regions, which are cou-
pled with frontal and temporal semantic regions (Noppeney,
Friston, and Price 2003; Liu et al. 2007).
Finally, it should be pointed out that neuroimaging, at best,
establishes an association between brain activity and task per-
formance. A causal link between occipital areas and semantic
processing was reported in a recent transcranial magnetic stimu-
lation study. TMS targeted over the left V1 or left occipito-tempo-
ral cortex led to a disruption and an increase in the error rate in a
similar verb-generation task in blind but not in sighted subjects
(Amedi et al. 2004). An analysis of error types revealed that the
most common error produced by the TMS was semantic (e.g.,
apple would lead to the verb jump), whereas phonological errors
and interference with motor execution or articulation were rare.
hese results suggest that processing language and verbal
memory in the blind incorporates a widespread network that
encompasses occipital visual brain areas, and that this type of
reorganization of language and memory is relevant to behavior.
It is clear, for example, that the functional and structural iden-
tity of the occipital cortex may switch from processing visual
information to processing information related to another sen-
sory modality or even diferent language functions. However,
is this a unique consequence of early blindness? As shown here
in some examples, the occipital cortex may inherently possess
the computational machinery needed for nonvisual information
565
Occipital Lobe
processing. Under speciic conditions, this potential may be
materialized. If so, visual deprivation may simply allow for the
emergence of the true potential of certain brain regions. his
hypothesis also suggests that careful task choice and experimen-
tal design (e.g., blindfolding sighted subjects for several days)
may reveal additional nonvisual, linguistic roles in the occipital
cortex in the sighted (Pascual-Leone et al. 2005).
Amir Amedi
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OPTIMALITY THEORY
Optimality heory (OT; Prince and Smolensky [1993] 2004) is a
formal theory of constraint interaction in grammar that seeks
to explain how and to what extent natural languages may vary.
In addition to this central question of generative grammar,
research in OT addresses questions of the grammars use in per-
formance, its acquisition, and its neural realization.
Optimality Theory
OT in Theoretical Linguistics
Characterizing the set of possible natural languages minimally
requires specifying i) the mental representations that are char-
acteristic of language, ii) the constraints that distinguish possible
from impossible linguistic systems, and iii) the formal mode of
interaction among these constraints. Concerning mental rep-
resentations, OT imposes no restrictions beyond requiring that
speciications of phonological, syntactic, or semantic structure
be explicit in the sense of generative grammar. his makes OT
compatible with alternative substantive theories of particu-
lar grammar components; in syntax, for example, OT versions
of government and binding (Grimshaw 1997; Legendre,
Smolensky, and Wilson 1998), lexical-functional gram-
mar (Bresnan 2000), and the minimalist program (Mller
1997) are lourishing. OTs main contribution concerns con-
straint interaction (iii) and, as a consequence, the proper formal
characterization of the constraints themselves (ii). Hence, OT
is best characterized as a meta-theory of grammatical structure
compatible with any explicit theory of linguistic representation.
It is therefore applicable to all linguistic levels, and has been
applied to phonology (McCarthy and Prince 1993; Prince and
Smolensky [1993] 2004), syntax (Legendre, Grimshaw and
Vikner 2001), semantics (Hendriks and de Hoop 2001), and
pragmatics (Blutner and Zeevat 2004; Blutner, De Hoop, and
Hendriks 2006).
According to OT, all grammatical constraints are universal
and violable (or soft) a claim that represents a major depar-
ture from previous approaches to the characterization of phono-
logical and syntactic knowledge via language-particular rewrite
rules written in a universal notation, or as universal, inviolable
constraints supplemented by additional principles subject to
language-particular parameterization.
ARCHITECTURE. An OT grammar maps an input speciication
onto an output structure. In phonology, the input is typically
an underlying form and the output the corresponding surface
form. In syntax the input is a proposition and the output is the
grammatical form that expresses that meaning (excepting inef-
fability: see the section on Faithfulness). Gen (generator) is a
mechanism for producing candidate outputs for any input and
freely generates all of the types of structures that are present
in any of the worlds languages (McCarthy and Prince 1993).
Pruning this enormous set down to the grammatical forms is the
job of H-Eval (harmony evaluator), a procedure for evaluating
the relative well-formedness (or harmony) of candidate struc-
tural descriptions. H-Eval depends on a set of universal well-
formedness constraints Con.
COMPETITION AND CONFLICT. he fact that well-formedness con-
straints are violable in OT means that two constraints often con-
lict: Satisfying one requires violating the other. Grammaticality
is therefore not equated with satisfaction of all grammatical
constraints. Grammatical structures are simply structures that
sufer less severe constraint violations than their ungrammatical
counterparts. his means that the evaluation of grammaticality is
inherently comparative. At any level of description (phonological,
syntactic, etc.) the universal set of possible structural descrip-
tions of an input I, Gen(I), forms a candidate set, a collection of
competitors only the most harmonic of which are grammatical.
he competition (via H-Eval) evaluates each pair of candidates
against the universal constraint set Con, which is ordered into a
language-particular domination hierarchy or ranking; C1 >> C2
means that constraint C1 dominates constraint C2. In OT, con-
straint domination is strict: One violation of any constraint C is
always worse than violating constraints ranked lower than C
regardless of how many lower-ranked constraints are violated
and regardless of how severe the violations are of those lower-
ranked constraints. Given two candidate structural descriptions
p and q for an input I, p has higher harmony (p
q) if p is pre-
ferred by the highest-ranked constraint that does not evaluate p
and q as equal. A candidate p is optimal if there is no other candi-
date q with higher harmony. If p is optimal, then p cannot violate
any constraint C unless every competing candidate that is pre-
ferred to p by C is dispreferred to p by a constraint higher ranked
than C. In this sense, violations incurred by an optimal candidate
structure are minimal. In sum, for every input I, harmony opti-
mization over the candidates in Gen(I) determines (at least) one
optimal, though not necessarily perfect, structural description of
I, which is ipso facto declared to be a grammatical output for that
input.
he only cross-linguistically varying property of the grammar
is the relative ranking of the universal constraints in Con: the
set of all possible grammars then is exactly the set of all rank-
ings of this ixed set of constraints. Typically, any given empirical
pattern that is predicted to be part of the universal typology is
generated by many diferent (but typologically equivalent) rank-
ings, and the number of predicted possible typological patterns
is vastly smaller than the number of all possible rankings (e.g.,
13 patterns vs. 40,320 rankings in Smolensky and Legendre 2006,
Chapter 15).
Employing violable, conlicting constraints often means that
the universal constraints can be more simply stated: Complexity
emerges primarily from the interaction of simple constraints;
this reduces the need for hedges or disjunctive principles arising
when universal constraints are construed as inviolable (Speas
1997). Constraint ranking naturally captures the common situ-
ation in which some phenomenon widely observed in other
languages is seen in one context only in language L (e.g., null
subjects in main clauses only as in Old French). Stipulating the
limited distribution is unnecessary: In L, a lower-ranked con-
straint C (e.g., against null elements) often violated in gram-
matical forms of L makes itself felt in those special contexts
where dominating constraints do not contravene. In other lan-
guages, where C is more highly ranked, the phenomenon is seen
widely.
FAITHFULNESS. he most familiar grammatical constraints are
markedness constraints, which demand that the output struc-
ture meet some well-formedness condition (e.g., a subject must
be an agent; Smolensky and Legendre 2006, Chapter 15). In an
optimizing grammar, unless there is pressure for the output to
contain all and only the elements contained in the input, the
optimizing system would always simply return the best of all
structures (under the given ranking). Grammars must therefore
include (inputoutput) faithfulness constraints, which require
minimal structural distance between the output and the input.
567
Optimality Theory
Faithfulness constraints, unique to OT, have been shown to
operate at all levels of linguistic description. In syntax, faithful-
ness constraints play a crucial role in accounting for language-
particular inefability, that is, syntactic structures that are simply
impossible in certain languages, for example, multiple wh-ques-
tions in Irish (Legendre, Smolensky, and Wilson 1998; Legendre
2009). In most languages, faithfulness to question operators in a
semantic input force the optimal syntactic output to contain mul-
tiple wh-phrases. In languages like Irish, however, such faithful-
ness is ranked below the syntactic constraints violated by clauses
containing multiple wh-phrases, and thus no optimal syntactic
structure contains multiple wh-phrases. Multiple wh-questions
are therefore inexpressible (in a single clause).
VARIATION. OT is naturally extensible to unstable states of lan-
guage, such as free variation (Anttila 1998), dialectal variation,
and diachronic change (Nagy and Reynolds 1997). Relaxing the
requirement of a complete ranking of the universal constraints, a
language L may be characterized by a single partial ranking P; L
is generated by the set of grammars S full rankings consistent
with P. hese generate a set of outputs for each input. According
to Joan Bresnan, Ashwini Deo, and Devyani Sharma (2007),
intraspeaker variation in the British paradigm for be arises from
a partial ranking P among faithfulness constraints, requiring an
output to express input agreement features and markedness
constraints penalizing all features in the output. A total ranking
consistent with P having more highly ranked faithfulness yields a
more highly inlected paradigm.
FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS. OT is an evolving theory; major devel-
opments include the following. Faithfulness: Output-output
faithfulness requires identity of a morphemes exponent across
its paradigm (Burzio 1994; Benua 1995); output-output anti-faith-
fulness constraints achieve morphophonological alternations by
demanding nonidentical surface forms for distinct underlying
forms (Alderete 2001); sympathy theory demands faithfulness
to suboptimal candidates (McCarthy 1999b). Harmonic evalu-
ation: Comparative markedness evaluation distinguishes con-
straint violations that are shared with the most faithful output
from those that are not (McCarthy 2003); targeted constraints
only compare candidates that difer only in a speciied way
(Wilson 2001b). Architecture: Stratal OT assumes difering rank-
ings in a series of lexical levels (Kiparsky 2006); harmonic serial-
ism derives the surface form from a series of small alterations,
each optimal at its point in the derivation (Prince and Smolensky
[1993] 2004; McCarthy 1999a); candidate chain theory evalu-
ates entire derivations (McCarthy 2007); bidirectional optimi-
zation adds competition of interpretations/underlying forms to
the competition of expressions/surface forms that is standard in
OT (Smolensky 1996; Blutner 2000; Wilson 2001a). Probabilistic
formulations: In stochastic OT (Boersma 1998), each optimiza-
tion ranks the constraints according to relative numerical val-
ues randomly selected for that optimization from a probability
distribution for each constraint, with a mean value determined
by that constraints strength in the grammar. In the maximum
entropy formulation of OT (Hayes and Wilson 2008), harmony is
numerical: Each constraint has a numerical strength determin-
ing the size of the penalties it assesses to violating candidates; the
568
probability of a candidate is proportional to the exponential of its
harmony. Gaja Jarosz 2006 deines a version of OT phonology,
maximum likelihood learning of lexicons and grammars (MLG),
in which underlying forms as well as rankings have probability
distributions, deining a lexicon + grammar. he relative prob-
ability of a form has been used to model its gradient acceptability
(Boersma and Hayes 2001; Hayes and Wilson 2008).
OT and Grammar Use
OT is well suited for theories of performance. With no additional
machinery, standard OT grammars assign a structural descrip-
tion to all inputs, including loanword inputs violating the pho-
notactics of the borrowing language (Yip 1993; Davidson, Jusczyk,
and Smolensky 2006) or the initial fragment of a sentence being
processed word by word (Gibson and Broihier 1998; Stevenson
and Smolensky 2006). In the latter case, processing diiculty is
predicted to occur if the optimal parse of the initial portion of
a sentence changes substantially when a new word arrives. On
a formal level, the computational complexity of the problem
of computing optimal outputs is well studied (e.g., Tesar 1996;
J. Eisner 1997; Frank and Satta 1998; Idsardi 2006)
OT and Grammar Acquisition
OTs account of variation and change provides a natural extension
to the analysis of acquisition of phonology and syntax (Legendre
et al. 2002; Kager, Pater, and Zonneveld 2004; Legendre et al.
2004). In early child syntax, for example, a childs competence
may be characterized by a partial ranking P between faithful-
ness constraints and constraints penalizing syntactic structure
(Legendre et al. 2002). In some of the full rankings consistent
with P, higher-ranked faithfulness constraints lead to optimal
clauses with functional projections; in other rankings consistent
with P, lower ranking of these faithfulness constraints entail that
optimal outputs lack some or all functional projections. he vari-
ation in child production of tense and agreement marking is thus
given a principled grammatical account.
Formal and computational studies of the problem of learning
OT grammars have been extensive, including constraint learn-
ing (Hayes and Wilson 2008), ranking learning (Tesar 1998; Tesar
and Smolensky 1998; Jason Eisner 2000; Boersma and Hayes
2001; Hayes 2004; Prince and Tesar 2004), simultaneous learning
of a probabilistic phonological lexicon and a ranking by maxi-
mum likelihood estimation (Jarosz 2006), and the mathematical
logic of OT learning (Prince 2002, 2006).
OTs Neural Realization
OT has historical roots in debates (Pinker and Prince
1988; Smolensky 1988) concerning neural network (or
connectionist) cognitive models (Rumelhart, McClelland,
and the PDP Research Group 1986). In these models, networks
of abstract model neurons excite and inhibit one another as acti-
vation spreads from input neurons to output neurons. Formal
analysis of a class of networks reveals that they perform optimi-
zation: hey compute mental representations (activation pat-
terns) that maximize a numerical measure of self-consistency
or well-formedness: harmony (Smolensky 1986). Mathematical
analysis makes precise the following general picture: At a
lower level of description, spreading activation among abstract
Optimality Theory
neurons maximizes numerical harmony; at a higher level of
description, the same system computes the symbolic structural
description of the input that optimizes the harmony of an OT
grammar. Construed in these terms, the study of grammar is
fully integrated into the contemporary science of the mind/brain
(Smolensky and Legendre 2006).
Geraldine Legendre and Paul Smolensky
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ORAL COMPOSITION
Oral composition broadly refers to the creation of organized ver-
bal formulations without reliance on writing. hough in essence
a familiar process in everyday speech, it has become a quasi-
technical and debated term, applied especially to bringing into
being relatively sustained examples of entextualized verbal art,
both ancient and recent. It has thus been of interest to linguists,
anthropologists, folklorists, psychologists, historians, and spe-
cialists in speciic languages and cultures, also linking to work
on oral culture, performance, story, literacy, and
memory.
he central issues have been, irst and most directly, how
lengthy oral poems, narratives, and other sustained verbal forms
570
can come into being without writing a puzzle for those steeped
in literate traditions that assume the centrality of the written
word; and second, how this relates to performance (for perfor-
mance is arguably how an oral creation exists).
Earlier approaches focused largely on nonliterate settings,
especially those characterized as primitive or traditional. One
model was of spontaneous improvization by the unself-con-
scious child of nature, unfettered (and unhelped) by recog-
nized artistic conventions. Another was of unchanging tradition
from the far-distant past, not composed by living creators but
stored in the communal tribal memory.
hese models were largely superseded by the inluential oral-
formulaic approach (also known as the oral theory) which came
to the fore in the mid-twentieth century. he concept of oral
composition acquired a speciic meaning and became a key term
of analysis and explanation. Its classic statement in Albert Lords
seminal he Singer of Tales (1960) used ieldwork in the 1930s in
Yugoslavia to demonstrate how lengthy oral poems were com-
posed during performance: he singers drew on a traditional
store of formulaic phrases and themes, which enabled them,
without writing or verbatim memorization, to pour forth long
epic songs in uninterrupted low. Variations around such formu-
laic phrases as, for example, By Allah, he said, and mounted his
white horse recur throughout the poems, providing a parallel to
the Homeric epithets like leet-footed Achilles found in early,
putatively oral, Greek epics. his special technique of composi-
tion (Lord 1960, 17) relied not on preplanned, memorized texts
but on composition-in-performance. Contrary to literate expec-
tations, there was no ixed correct version: each performance was
authentic in its own right, a unique product composed and per-
formed on one occasion. Oral-formulaic composing was linked
to a traditional, oral mindset incompatible with literacy and the
literate mind, and once singers became literate, it was posited,
they lost the power to compose orally.
he oral-formulaic theory was enormously inluential
throughout much of the later twentieth century and across a
wide span of disciplines, providing, as it apparently did, an
answer to the puzzle of verbal composition without writing.
Examples of comparable formulaic expression and hence, it
seemed, of oral composition were identiied throughout the
globe, from early Greek epic, Old English texts, or the Bible to
living examples recorded from the ield, soon also extending to
the full range of poetic genres and to prose-like forms, such as
sermons or storytelling.
hough still regarded as a classic approach, oral-formulaic
theory has been both modiied and challenged, especially dur-
ing the last two decades. First, it has become apparent that not
all genres of unwritten verbal art follow the oral-formulaic com-
position-in-performance mode, nor, as implied by the classic
oral-formulaic analysts, is oral composition a single identiiable
process. heir often somewhat generalized conclusions have not
been fully supported by the empirical evidence, for oral forms
turn out to be created in diverse ways. Some are composed before
and separated from performance. Some do, after all, involve
memorization. One much-quoted case is of the Somali poets
who spend hours, sometimes days, composing elaborate genres
of oral poetry, later delivered word for word either by themselves
or by reciters who are able to memorize poems and, without
Oral Composition
writing, store large and exactly reproducible repertoires in their
memory over many years. Elsewhere, too, prior composition is
sometimes a long-drawn-out and carefully considered proce-
dure, in some cases involving multiple authors and/or rehears-
als before being performed. Certain womens personal songs in
mid-twentieth-century Zambia, for example, were thought out
by one woman, elaborated with her friends, worked over for days
by an expert composer, then rehearsed and memorized before
inal performance. In other cases, a composer may speak aloud
words of rapid inspiration designed for later performance, to
be captured by listeners on the spot through memorizing, tape
recording, or writing (further details and discussion in Finnegan
1992, 5287; 2007, 96113, 179200). Contrary to the classic oral-
formulaic model, oral composing varies in diferent cultures,
genres, and circumstances.
Second, the assumption that literacy and orality are mutually
incompatible has been extensively challenged. By now, many
empirical examples of their interaction in both historical and
more recent times have been noted and investigated. At a more
theoretical level, there are also the current transdisciplinary cri-
tiques of the West-centered binary dichotomizing between primi-
tive/civilized, non-Western/Western, traditional/modern, and,
alongside these, oral/literate, together with parallel challenges
to the arguably ethnocentric and ideological presuppositions of
a simple and necessary link between literacy and modernity. In
practice, it appears, there are multiple forms of literacy, interact-
ing, therefore, in multiple ways with oral modes.
Despite challenges to some of its central presuppositions, the
legacy of the oral-formulaic school lives on. It rightly unsettled
the (literate) concept of ixed correct text, highlighted the signif-
icance of performance and audience, and, if in the (arguably)
somewhat elusive terminology of formulae, pointed up the
importance for composition of conventionalized verbal formu-
lations in generic settings. Scholars identifying themselves with
that tradition have continued their (largely textual) examina-
tions of oral and oral-derived texts while also reconiguring and opportunities for the creative low of language, not only
their approaches by attention to the speciicities of aesthetic and
cultural traditions, interacting fruitfully with trends elsewhere to
produce sophisticated analyses of the complex interrelations of
oral with written composition (Amodio 2005; Foley 2002).
Although there is currently no one dominant approach to
complement the earlier oral theory, the topic of composition
without writing (or anyway, without central reliance on writing)
has continued to attract interdisciplinary interest. he focus is
now less on attempting to delineate oral composition as a single
process, or as pertaining to some special kind of culture or men-
tality, and more on complexity and plurality.
Oral composition is thus no longer conceptualized as primar-
ily conined to traditional, historic, or non-Western settings
but as also including such examples as contemporary popular
songs or the spoken oratory of modern statesmen and publi-
cists. It has also been noted how readily some long-established
oral genres are exploited in new settings, like the South African
praise poems now composed for Nelson Mandela, the national
football team, or university graduation ceremonies, and circu-
lated not only in live performance but in writing and on radio,
CD-ROMs, and the Web. he relation between oral and literate is
now more often envisaged as continuum than as opposition or,
better, as a multifaceted spectrum of overlaps, interpenetrations,
and diversities. he now-inluential concepts of entextualization
and of dialogism, here applied in particular by linguistic and
literary anthropologists, have also bridged the once-accepted
chasm between oral and literate and illumined the multiple ways
in which people construct, assemble, and interact with texts
(Barber 2007; Silverstein and Urban 1996).
he meaning of oral itself has also been enlarged and prob-
lematized. Most oral compositions, it is now increasingly noted,
are realized not just through words but through a constellation
of multimodal resources. he act of performance may include,
for example, movement, bodily enactment, visual devices, and
the variegated arts of the voice (volume, intonation, speed,
silence, timbre, atmosphere, and much else): A musical element
is essential in certain genres, an aspect often neglected in Western
scholars propensity to privilege the verbal component. Although
music and words are in some cultures and genres taken as dis-
tinct, composed by diferent people, this is not always so, and
some scholars argue that language and music form a continuum
rather than a dichotomy (see Banti and Giannatasio 2004). he
substantial recent work on gesture (McNeill 2000; Kendon
2004) has also elucidated the integral relation between gesturing
and speaking. Even if below our explicit consciousness, gesture,
it seems, is a planned and patterned activity, a dimension there-
fore that, like music, must arguably enter into a full understand-
ing of oral composition and performance.
Recent approaches to memory are also relevant. Historians,
anthropologists, and psychologists have drawn attention to the
frames within which remembering is actively recreated and
to the diverse social mechanisms for organizing and manipu-
lating memory. Some cultures or genres prioritize word-for-
word memorization and organize formal or informal training
in this skill; in others, diferent arts are emphasized, including
improvization. Generic conventions themselves provide sche-
mas for organizing and activating memory, ofering constraints
through larger frames such as narrative, praising, or lamenting
but also by memory-enhancing devices like imageries, rhythm,
and audience (and chorus) participation and by sound-pattern
repetitions and sequences, such as rhyme, alliteration,
parallelism, or melody. In some contexts, memory is seen as
itself an aspect of creativity, eroding its apparent opposition
to composition (see further Rubin 1995; Carruthers 1990).
he upshot is that oral composition has somewhat dissolved
as a distinctive topic for analysis. It no longer stands out as some-
thing self-evidently special or puzzling but as an aspect of pro-
cesses being studied from other viewpoints and as taking place
in many diferent forms, settings, and modalities from lengthy
art genres to the creativity of everyday conversation; from long
preplanned and rehearsed performances to extemporized
speeches; from live delivery to multimedia enactments. It is now
tied less to theories of the primitive, traditional, or, indeed, the
oral as such as to ongoing issues related to language or creativ-
ity more generally, analyzed both comparatively and in cultural
speciicities.
While in one way this has undermined the idea of oral com-
position as a subject for direct scrutiny in its own right, in another
way this broader cross-cultural approach and the empirical
571
Oral Culture
investigations it has stimulated have enabled a irmer grasp on
the complexity of the processes by which, without much or any
direct recourse to writing, people can and do produce verbal
formulations both lengthy and short, aesthetically marked and
everyday. Further, all of this has helped to challenge traditional
models of language as realized preeminently either, on the one
hand, in stable written texts or, on the other, in relatively uncon-
strained and perhaps trivial everyday speech. A consideration of
oral composing highlights the sustained and creative marshal-
ing of language in situations where writing does not necessarily
lie at the core: verbal genres that are by no means outdated or
peculiar but have had a wide spread in the world, both yesterday
and today.
Ruth Finnegan
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Amodio, Mark C., ed. 2005. New Directions in Oral heory. Tempe: Arizona
Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
Banti, G., and F. Giannatasio. 2004. Poetry. In A Companion to Linguistic
Anthropology, ed. Alessandro Duranti, 290320. Oxford: Blackwell.
Barber, Karin. 2007. Texts, Persons and Publics in Africa and Beyond.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carruthers, Mary. 1990. he Book of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Finnegan, Ruth. 1992. Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Signiicance and Social
Context. 2d ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
. 2007. he Oral and Beyond: Doing hings with Words in Africa.
Oxford: James Currey. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Foley, John Miles. 1988. he heory of Oral Composition: History and
Methodology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
. 2002. How to Read an Oral Poem. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press.
Kendon, Adam. 2004 Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lord, Albert B. 1960. he Singer of Tales. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
McNeill, David, ed. 2000. Language and Gesture. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Rubin, David C. 1995. Memory in Oral Traditions: he Cognitive
Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-Out Rhymes. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Silverstein, Michael, and Greg Urban, eds. 1996. Natural Histories of
Discourse. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
ORAL CULTURE
Oral culture is a conceptual construct associated primarily with
the work of Walter J. Ong, S.J., Marshall McLuhan, and Eric A.
Havelock, whereas the term oral tradition, which they also use,
is more often associated with the work of Milman Parry, Albert B.
Lord, and their many followers (see Foley 1985). Ong, McLuhan,
and Havelock use the term oral culture to refer primarily to pre-
literate cultures but also to characterize the thought and expres-
sion that carry over into manuscript culture and even into print
culture. Moreover, oral culture, which Ong also refers to as
primary oral culture, endures in the sense that people continue
to talk with one another. he later subsequent cultural devel-
opments in manuscript culture and print culture may be seen
as cultural overlays that inluence and transform the base oral
572
culture to certain degrees, but without ever eliminating it or
totally superseding it. In the world today, an estimated one bil-
lion people do not know how to read or write any language, and
so they live in a residual form of primary oral culture. In addi-
tion, certain cultures in the world today remain highly oral, just
as Western culture did for centuries before print culture helped
usher in what is commonly referred to as modern culture and
modernity modern science, modern capitalism, modern
democracy, the Industrial Revolution, and the Romantic move-
ment. he common distinction between modern culture, promi-
nent in the West, and premodern cultures in many other areas
of the world (e.g., Turner 1969) can be understood in terms of
Ongs account of Western cultural history. Premodern cultures
are examples of what Ong has referred to as primary oral cultures
and as residual forms of primary oral cultures.
When alphabetic writing was introduced, Ong claims (and so
do McLuhan and Havelock), it did not change everything over-
night. As a result, early writing such as most of the Bible (except
for the prologue to the Gospel of John) and the Homeric epics
can be seen as providing transcripts of primary oral thought
and expression. But distinctively literate forms of thought and
expression emerged in the pre-Socratics and Plato, as Havelock
explains in detail (1963, 1978, 1982). Perhaps more than anything
else, Ong sees the formal study of logic initiated by Aristotle as
involving distinctively literate thought; Ong has traced the his-
tory of the formal study of logic in his 1958 masterwork Ramus,
Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to
the Art of Reason (3d ed. 2004). Within the Aristotelian tradition
of medieval logic, Ong notes, new developments emerged that he
styles the quantiication of thought (see esp. [1958] 2004, 5391).
In a subsequent essay, he points out how these new develop-
ments contributed to the emergence of a new state of mind as
found in modern science (Ong 1962, 72). Neither this new state
of mind nor modern science emerged in oral culture, just as the
formal study of logic developed by Aristotle has no counterpart
in oral culture.
In Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, Ong also calls
attention to the visualist tendencies of Western philosophic
thought, which were advanced further by the development of
printed books. he visualist tendencies of ancient Greek philo-
sophic thought have been further ampliied recently by Andrea
Nightingale (2004). But such visualist tendencies do not charac-
terize oral culture. Ong ([1969] 1995) also describes oral culture
as based on an oral-aural sense of the world as event, which he
contrasts with the visual sense of the world as something seen
(as in the expression worldview). In World as Event: Aspects of
Chipewyan Ontology (1997), anthropologist David M. Smith
borrows Ongs expression world as event to help elucidate cer-
tain aspects of Chipewyan thought.
Ong associates oral culture with the cyclic forms of thought
that Mircea Eliade describes in he Myth of the Eternal Return
([1949] 2005). Lynne Ballew describes further examples of cyclic
thought in Straight and Circular: A Study of Imagery in Greek
Philosophy (1979). Ong sees the recycling of souls in the story
of Er recounted by Socrates in Platos Republic as an instance
of cyclic thought in Greek philosophy, which is to say a residual
form of oral thought in Greek philosophic thought. Conversely,
Ong (see, for example, 1967a, 6182, 8398, 99126) associates
Oral Culture
the linear accounts of time in the Bible with literacy; he likes
to style linear conceptions of history as evolutionary thought,
thereby rooting later forms of evolutionary thought in Darwin
and others within the biblical cultural tradition in Western tra-
dition. Independently of Ong, Donald L. Fixico, who is himself
of American Indian descent, works comfortably with these con-
trasts in he American Indian Mind in a Linear World: American
Indian Studies and Traditional Knowledge (2003; also see Lee
1987, 10520).
In Manliness, Harvey C. Mansield does not happen to refer
explicitly to oral culture, but he refers to Achilles frequently to
illustrate certain points regarding manliness (2006, 558, 601),
an ambivalent quality that he sees as needing to be disciplined
toward socially constructive ends. Male puberty rites, for exam-
ple, have long been used in oral cultures to help discipline and
orient young men in socially constructive ways (see van Gennep
1960; Ong 1971, 11341). he kind of socially constructive war-
rior manliness that Achilles and Agamemnon and Hector and
Odysseus represent is a necessity in oral cultures: he entire
enterprise of modernity, however, could be understood as a proj-
ect to keep manliness unemployed (Mansield 2006, 230). In
David Riesmans terminology, oral culture is tradition directed,
whereas modernity is dominated by inner-directedness (1950).
(For further recent studies of the historical development of inner-
directedness, see Williams 1993; Brakke 2006; Cary 2000; van t
Spijker 2004; Renevey 2001; Low 2003; Connor 2006; Bloom 1998;
Kahler 1973). In Honor and the Epic Hero, Maurice B. McNamee
(1960) shows that concepts about heroic and great-spirited per-
sons have shifted from time to time. Even though the concepts of
a heroic and magnanimous person in oral culture no longer work
for modernity, we do need to formulate some concepts of heroic
and magnanimous persons that will work for modernity.
Before concluding, we should note the critique that some
authors have made of Ongs work and related work regarding
oral culture. he critique alleges that Ong has set forth a great
divide theory in which there is a great divide with oral culture
when literacy emerges (see, for example, Daniell 1986; but also
see Ongs 1987 letter about her article). Beth Daniell and others
who advance this critique do not accurately summarize what
Ong has said, and so their supposed critique amounts to little
more than knocking down a straw man named by them Ong.
(For a more detailed response to this alleged line of critique, see
Farrell 2000, 1626, 2004).
In conclusion, in oral culture, people are culturally condi-
tioned so that they tend to favor cyclic patterns of thought and
expression, to have a world-as-event sense of life, to put manli-
ness to work in socially constructive ways, to use oral stories of
heroes as ways to help orient and put manliness to work, and to
use ritual process very efectively to promote and support socially
constructive behavior.
homas J. Farrell
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Ballew, Lynne. 1979. Straight and Circular: A Study of Imagery in Greek
Philosophy. Assen, the Netherlands: Van Gorcum.
Bloom, Harold. 1998. Shakespeare: he Invention of the Human. New
York: Riverhead Books.
Brakke, David. 2006. Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual
Combat in Early Christianity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Cary, Phillip. 2000. Augustines Invention of the Inner Self: he Legacy of a
Christian Platonist. New York: Oxford University Press.
Connor, James L. 2006. The Dynamism of Desire: Bernard J. F.
Lonergan, S.J., on The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola.
St. Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources.
Daniell, Beth. 1986. Against the great leap theory of literacy. Pre/Text
7.3/4: 18193. Also see Ong 1987.
Draper, Jonathan A. 2004. Orality, Literacy, and Colonialism in Antiquity.
Leiden: Brill.
Draper, Jonathan A., ed. 2003. Orality, Literacy, and Colonialism in
Southern Africa. Leiden: Brill.
Eliade, Mircea. [1949] 2005. he Myth of the Eternal Return. 2d ed. Trans.
Willard R. Trask, new introduction by Jonathan Z. Smith. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Farrell, homas J. 2000. Walter Ongs Contributions to Cultural
Studies: he Phenomenology of the Word and I-hou Communication.
Cresskill, NJ: Hampton.
Fixico, Donald L. 2003. he American Indian Mind in a Linear
World: American Indian Studies and Traditional Knowledge. New
York: Routledge.
Foley, John Miles. 1999. Homers Traditional Art. University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Foley, John Miles, ed. 1985. Oral-Formulaic heory and Research: An
Introduction and Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland.
Havelock, Eric A. 1963. Preface to Plato. Cambridge: Belknap Press/
Harvard University Press.
. 1978. he Greek Concept of Justice: From Its Shadow in Homer to Its
Substance in Plato. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
. 1982. he Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural
Consequences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Horsley, Richard A., Jonathan A. Draper, and John Miles Foley, eds.
2006. Performing the Gospel: Orality, Memory, and Mark. Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress.
Jousse, Marcel. 1990. he Oral Style. Trans. Edgard Sienaert and Richard
Whitaker. New York: Garland.
Kahler, Erich. 1973. he Inward Turn of Narrative. Trans. Richard
Winston and Clara Winston, foreword by Joseph Frank. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kelber, Werner H. 1997. he Oral and the Written Gospel: he Hermeneutics
of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition: Mark, Paul, and Q.
2d ed. Foreword by Walter J. Ong, S.J., new introduction by Werner H.
Kelber. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Lee, Dorothy. 1987. Freedom and Culture. Prospect Heights,
IL: Waveland.
Lord, Albert B. 1960. he Singer of Tales. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Low, Anthony. 2003. Aspects of Subjectivity: Society and Individuality from
the Middle Ages to Shakespeare and Milton. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne
University Press.
Mansield, Harvey C. 2006. Manliness. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1962. he Gutenberg Galaxy: he Making of
Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
McNamee, Maurice B. 1960. Honor and the Epic Hero: A Study of the
Shifting Concept of Magnanimity in Philosophy and Epic Poetry.
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Morris, Jan, and Barry Powell, eds. 1997. A New Companion to Homer.
Leiden: Brill.
Nightingale, Andrea. 2004. Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek
Philosophy: heoria in Its Cultural Context. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
573
Ordinary Language Philosophy
Ong, Walter J. [1958] 2004. Ramus, Method, and the Decay of
Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason. 3d ed. New
foreword by Adrian Johns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
.1962. he Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies.
New York: Macmillan.
. 1967a. In the Human Grain: Further Explorations of Contemporary
Culture. New York: Macmillan.
. 1967b. he Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural
and Religious History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
. [1969] 1995. World as view and world as event. In Faith and
Contexts, III: 6990. Atlanta: Scholars Press.Originally printed in
American Anthropologist 71 (August): 63447.
. 1971. Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction
of Expression and Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
. 1977. Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of
Consciousness and Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
. 1981. Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
. 1986. Hopkins, the Self, and God. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press.
. 1987. Letter to the Editor. Pre/Text 8.1/2: 155. Comments on
Daniell 1986.
. 199299. Faith and Contexts. 4 vols. Ed. homas J. Farrell and
Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Volumes now distributed by
Rowman & Littleield.
. 2002a. An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry. Ed. homas
J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton.
. 2002b. Orality and Literacy: he Technologizing of the Word. 2d ed.
New York: Routledge.
Opland, Jef. 1983. Xhosa Oral Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Parry, Milman. 1971. he Making of Homeric Verse: he Collected Papers
of Milman Parry. Ed. Adam Parry. New York: Oxford University Press.
Renevey, Denis. 2001. Language, Self, and Love: Hermeneutics in the
Writings of Richard Rolle and the Commentaries on the Song of Songs.
Cardif: University of Wales Press.
Riesman, David, with Rueul Denny and Nathan Glazer. 1950. he Lonely
Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press.
Scholes, Robert, and Robert Kellogg, with a chapter by James Phelan.
2006. he Nature of Narrative. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Smith, David M. 1997. World as event: Aspects of Chipewyan ontology.
In Circumpolar Animism and Shamanism, ed. Takako Yamada and
Takashi Irimoto, 6791. Sapporo, Japan: Hokkaido University Press.
Turner, Victor. 1969. he Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure.
Chicago: Aldine.
van Gennep, Arnold. 1960. he Rites of Passage. Trans. Monika B.
Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Cafee, introduction by Solon T. Kimball.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
van t Spijker, Ineke. 2004. Fictions of the Inner Life: Religious Literature
and Formation of the Self in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries.
Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols.
Walker, Jefrey. 2000. Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Williams, Bernard. 1993. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press.
ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY
Within the analytic tradition of contemporary Anglophone phi-
losophy, ordinary language philosophy is set in contrast to the
view that the prescriptions of formal logic provide the means
574
necessary for the elimination of the confusing ambiguities of
ordinary language. Advocates of the ordinary language approach
may recognize the power, the frequent utility, and the intellec-
tually admirable parsimony of the formalist, but they also insist
that ordinary linguistic practice as it stands is generally appro-
priate for our use without any preemptory need for a compre-
hensive and indispensable reform, and, moreover, that ordinary
usage contains helpful distinctions and nuances that would be
hurtfully eliminated if the rigors of a formalist system were to be
imposed as the ultimate standard. Peter Strawson, J. L. Austin,
and John Searle have been, in varied ways, advocates of an ordi-
nary language approach, and undoubtedly Ludwig Wittgensteins
move from the rigors of the Tractatus to the complexities of the
Philosophical Investigations is seminal to the entire movement.
A short entry cannot survey all the philosophers and topics
of importance in this ordinary language approach, but as prime
examples this entry will focus on one philosopher, Peter Strawson,
and on one topic, reference. We will consider the way in which
Strawson makes reference his starting point, how this single topic is
embedded in contemporary debates within the philosophies of lan-
guage and logic, Strawsons own signiicant contributions to those
debates, and some replies he makes to his critics. Also noted will be
Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein as prime movers in Strawsons
thought and W. V. O. Quine as a stern and characteristic critic.
he best known of all Strawsons writings is probably his early
article On referring (1950) in which he addresses the issue of
singular reference and predication and their objects, a matter with
which he was concerned throughout his working life. his article
was written in response to Bertrand Russells theory of deinite
descriptions contained in On denoting (1905). For Strawson,
we use a variety of expressions to refer to some individual person,
object, or event. We use singular descriptive pronouns (this and
that), proper names (Winston Churchill), and singular pronouns
(I, you, it), and for what are called deinite descriptions, we use
the deinite article followed by a noun in the singular, e.g., the
king of France. Suppose someone at present utters the sentence
he king of France is wise (S). For Bertrand Russell, S is signii-
cant; that is, it may be true or false. But he claims that to show the
true logical form of S, it needs to be rewritten as
(1) here is a king of France.
(2) here is not more than one king of France.
(3) here is nothing that is the king of France and is not
wise.
hus, someone uttering S today would be saying something
signiicant but false. For Russell, we must distinguish deinite
descriptions such as the king of France from logically proper
names, for example, Winston Churchill. he latter alone can be
subjects of sentences of a genuine subject-predicate form and
have some single object for which they stand.
Strawson thinks that Russell is wrong in this, since his account
of sentences 13 is neither completely nor even partially correct.
A correct account must begin by distinguishing among
a sentence
a use of a sentence
an utterance of a sentence
Ordinary Language Philosophy
he sentence he king of France is wise can be uttered at
various times and for various purposes. We cannot say that the
sentence is true or false, only that it may be used to make a true
or false assertion. At the heart of Strawsons position is the claim
that referring is not something that an expression such as the
king of France does. Referring is, instead, characteristic of the
use of an expression. Meaning is a function of the sentence or
expression, but mentioning and referring and truth and falsity
are functions of the use of the sentence or expression.
Russells claim is that someone at present uttering he king
of France is wise (S) would a) be making a true or false state-
ment, and b) be asserting that there exists at present one and
only one king of France. Strawson inds Russell wrong on both
counts. For Strawson, the sentence is signiicant, since it could
be true or false, and it could refer to a particular person. But that
does not mean that any particular use of the sentence must be
either true or false. Ordinarily, a person uttering S presupposes
the existence of the king, and his uttering S neither asserts nor
entails the kings existence. hus, presupposition must be care-
fully distinguished from both assertion and entailment.
here is, moreover, a need to distinguish rules for referring
from rules for ascribing and attributing. hat distinction roughly
corresponds to the grammatical distinction between subject and
predicate. For Strawson, that irreducible distinction has been
blurred by logicians in their desire to reduce or to eliminate
altogether the referring use. He inds a prime example of that
attempted elimination in Gottfried Leibnizs efort to establish
individual identity through the use of complete individual con-
cepts done in exclusively general terms. Strawson thinks that
Russell also strives to make logic in a narrow sense adequate for
referring to individuals.
It is particularly noteworthy that Strawsons fundamental dis-
tinctions between sentence and utterance, and between referring
and describing, are a challenge to the votaries of modern logic.
Consider such nonuniquely referring expressions as all, no, some,
and some are not, that is, the four types of standard form cat-
egorical propositions: A, E, I, and O. For the modern, only I and O
propositions have existential import. In consequence, the mod-
ern must deny some traditional doctrines, such as the square of
opposition and the validity of some forms of the syllogism. he
moderns dilemma is for Strawson a bogus one. We may sim-
ply say that the question of whether or not the quantiicational
expressions are being used to make true or false statements just
do not arise except that when the existential conditional is ful-
illed for the subject term, then all of the laws of traditional logic
hold good. If we ask a literal-minded and childless man if all of
his children are asleep, he will not answer either yes or no cian would eliminate this complexity and clutter and impose a
because the question simply does not arise.
For Strawson, neither Aristotelian nor Russellian rules give
the exact language of any expression of ordinary language, since
ordinary language has no exact logic.
In light of On referring, Strawson sets out in Introduction
to Logical heory (1952) to remedy the failures of modern logi-
cians to address adequately the relationships between formal
logic and the logical features of ordinary language. He begins by
noting diferences among the various ways we make judgments
about what someone says. To say that a statement is logical is
ordinarily a commendation. here is a further and more complex
distinction when we say that a statement is untrue or that it is
inconsistent. If a deductive argument is valid, if the premises are
true, then the conclusion is judged necessarily true under pain of
inconsistency or self-contradiction. But in all of this we must also
consider the context of statements that are made. Asked if the
results of the recent election pleased me, I may signiicantly reply
that they did and they didnt. Words such as vehicle and enter-
tainment have only approximate boundaries for their appropri-
ate use. he uses and therefore the meanings of various words
and expressions are subject to expansion and contraction.
hus, as in On referring, logical appraisal is properly applied
to statements, not sentences. We need, therefore, to approach
the relation between formal logic and ordinary language with
caution. In formal logic, a formula is an expression such that by
substituting words or phrases for the variables we can obtain
sentences that could be used to make statements. In the formula
x is a younger son, to substitute Tom for x would yield a
sentence that would have meaning, while to substitute he
square root of 2 would not. hus, some variables would yield
sentences, but not signiicant statements. We can talk about the
range of admissible values for a variable, but, unlike formal logic,
in ordinary language there are no precise rules for what is admis-
sible. Once again, statements have a contextual component, and
that goes beyond the reach of formal logic.
he limits of formal logic are also manifest in its use of sym-
bols for truth- functional connectors. Consider particularly the
logical symbol . Consider If it rains, the party will be a failure.
hat suggests conditions that are neither logical nor linguis-
tic, but are instead discovered in our experience of the world.
Compare the function of the connector in that sentence with the
function of the same connector in If he is a younger son, then he
has a brother. Similar limitations are evident in the use of other
connectors. Consider the question of the connector that is the
appropriate one for unless.
Again, when logicians choose the pattern for their represen-
tative rules, they employ common uses drawn from ordinary lan-
guage, and then proceed to make standard what is common. In
this way, a rigidity is imposed that is foreign to the uses of ordi-
nary language.
he logician is not a lexicographer but is concerned only with
general principles that are indiferent to subject matter. he dif-
iculty here is that sometimes diferent expressions may have the
same uses; all, the, and a may have the same use in describing
the basic move of the pawn in chess. Similarly, the same expres-
sion may have diferent uses; not and not may be used as a
double negation, to emphasize, or to show necessity. he logi-
systems rules to cure the perceived deiciencies of ordinary lan-
guage. he logician is content with all, some, and no but has no
use for most or few, despite the usefulness and common employ-
ment of those terms in our ordinary reasoning.
here are further challenges to any claim for a sovereignty of
formal logic over the workings of ordinary language. Consider
the notion of logical form as a sort of verbal skeleton that remains
when all expressions, except the selected logical constants, are
eliminated from a sentence that might be used as a statement
and are replaced by variables. For Strawson, this notion of logi-
cal form is viable, but it may lead us to the mistaken conclusions
575
Ordinary Language Philosophy
that a statement must have just one logical form, or that logical
form makes the work of the lexicographer superluous, or that
logical features need not take into account the relevant subject
matter, or that validity depends upon form, rather than the other
way about.
he claim may be made that appropriate caution will enable
us to avoid such mistakes, and that the relation between ordin-
ary language and formal logic might be seen minimally as peace-
ful coexistence, and more truly as a separation of powers that is
necessary and useful to both sides. For Strawson, the ongoing
diiculty here is that the logician is not content with being con-
sistent but seeks the completeness of a system. hat ideal is com-
promised by the fact that the typical truth-functional connectors
defy a single ordinary use, and the attendant complexities run
counter to a mathematical model taken as the paradigm for the
whole of logic. hat paradigm appeals, but its seduction mis-
leads, with profound consequences for the study of metaphysics
and epistemology.
Of all of the identiications between the truth-functional con-
nectors of formal logic and ordinary words, Strawson inds con-
junction and negation least troublesome, but even here there are
limitations. By the laws of formal logic, pq and qp are equiva-
lent, but in ordinary language, the order may be essential to the
meaning. Most troublesome in the identiication of logical con-
nectors and ordinary words is . he falsity of the antecedent
suices in material implication for the truth of the statement, but
not in the corresponding hypothetical statement.
he workings of the class system of modern quantiicational
logic further compound these diiculties about the relation
between ordinary language and truth-functional logic. Modern
orthodoxy claims that once the older Aristotelian system is
cleaned up, it is simply a small part of todays quantiicational
logic. Conversely, Strawson contends that with only a few res-
ervations, the traditional rules dating from Aristotle conform to
the use of words in ordinary language, and indeed avoid some
of the incongruities of the moderns practice. Standard criticism
of tradition rests on the question of existential import, that is, for
the four moods A (all), E (no), I (some) and O (some are not ),
whether there is a commitment in the tradition to the actual
existence of the members of the terms. he moderns assump-
tion is that only I and O have such import. But consider some-
ones saying All Johns children are asleep. Again, if John is have a common name. here is no single element they all share.
fatherless, the existential import question simply does not come
up. he existence of those children is a necessary precondition of
the statement being either true or false. he modern goes wrong
in failing to distinguish sentence from statement. he sentence
may be true or false, that is, meaningful, but in its use as a state-
ment, the question of existential import is determined by the
context.
In sum, for Strawson there are two kinds of logic, the entail-
ment rules of formal logic, which abstract from the time and
place of utterance, and the referring rules, which lay down the
contextual requirements of what a sentence presupposes. In the
study of those referring rules, we do not ind the elegance and
system of formal logic, but Strawson does ind a ield of intellec-
tual study unsurpassed in richness, complexity, and the power
to absorb. he two kinds of logic are interrelated, and both are
necessary in human communication.
576
Not all have agreed. Quine is notable for his long-standing
disagreement on the issue of singular terms and reference, the
issue which is central in Strawsons On referring and perva-
sive in all of his later writings. For Quine, singular terms are at
best superluous, to be eliminated without loss; to be is to be the
value of a variable (1972, 234). Here is the great divide that, on
Strawsons account, separates him from both Quine and Russell.
Quines concern that singular terms are ambiguous in their ref-
erence is set aside by Strawson on the ground that such terms do
not refer at all; they are, instead, used by persons to make refer-
ence. If the reference is ambiguous, the responsibility rests with
the statement maker, not the term. For that matter, ambiguity
has its own uses and, indeed, its own occasional sweetness in the
ordinary language of daily life.
Strawson found strong support for his views on ordinary lan-
guage in Wittgensteins transition from his positions in Tractatus
to those in the Philosophical Investigations. his is manifest in
Strawsons review of the latter work in Mind (1954). In sections
38137 of the Investigations, Strawson inds an evident rejection
of the logical atomism that characterizes the Tractatus. In that
earlier work, Wittgenstein had been concerned with the idea of
the genuine names of a language, and with the idea of the simple
indestructible elements of reality that are only to be named, not
described or deined, and which are the meanings of those genu-
ine names. hese primary elements are Russells individuals,
and the objects of the Tractatus. hose elements are connected
to the belief that the clariication of ordinary language depends
on an analysis in which ambiguous sentences are replaced by
ones that relect exactly the logical form of the fact under con-
sideration. Logic then seems to be pure, exact, and general, the
essence of the thoughts that mirror the structure of the empirical
world. hat leads us to the illusion that this process of analysis
is inite, that there is a single completely resolved form for every
expression.
For Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations, and for
Strawson, the cure for this illusion is to give up the search for the
very essence of language and to direct our attention, instead, to
the various ways in which language actually functions, In a well-
known example, Wittgenstein asks us what is common to all of
the proceedings we call games. We cannot say that they must all
have something in common, an essence, simply because they
here are only family resemblances, a network of overlappings
and crisscrosses.
What is true of games is true of linguistic activity; there is no
single use, only family resemblances. here is no exact bound-
ary of use, although a ixed boundary could be set to serve some
particular purpose. A word or a linguistic practice need not be
exact in order to be understood and acted upon; stand roughly
here may be serviceable enough. To say in dispraise that it is
inexact misses the mark. he demand for absolute and ixed
meanings is senseless. Whether or not there is enough preci-
sion is determined by whether the concept is used with general
agreement.
he consequence is that we are not to provide ordinary lan-
guage with a necessary revision and reduction; we are simply to
describe the ways it works. If we do so, we eliminate the puzzles
that arise when language goes on holiday, when we consider
Origins of Language
words and sentences in abstraction from their ordinary uses. For
Wittgenstein, philosophys proper task is simply the assembling
of a series of reminders of actual uses, with the purpose of dispel-
ling confusions that arise in speciic contexts.
hat conception of philosophy is one that Strawson shares up
to a point, but he also inds that an appropriate philosophy of lan-
guage provides the basis for a descriptive metaphysics, one that
is content to give an account of the actual structure of the world
of our experience. his is set in contrast to a revisionary meta-
physics that vainly strives to do better. Descartes, Leibniz, and
George Berkeley are revisionary; Kant and Aristotle are descrip-
tive. hat contrast in many ways mirrors the distinction between
ordinary language philosophy and those formalist attempts that
only mar whats well.
Cliford Brown
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Austin, J. L. 1962 . How to Do hings with Words. Oxford: Clarendon.
Brown, C. 2006. Peter Strawson. Montreal: McGill-Queens University
Press.
Quine, W. V. O. 1972. Methods of Logic. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston.
Russell, B. 1905. On denoting. Mind 14.4: 47993.
Strawson, P. 1950. On referring. Mind 59: 2152.
. 1952. Introduction to Logical heory. London: Methuen.
. 1954. Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations. Mind, n.s., tics). Alternatively, a mutation or the modiication of some prior
63.249: 7099.
. 1974. Subjects and Predicates in Logic and Grammar. London:
Methuen.
ORIGINS OF LANGUAGE
his term and language evolution are sometimes used inter-
changeably. Here, origins of language will mean the earliest
emergence of a system structurally distinct from the communi-
cation systems of other animals and having at least some of the
attributes of human language; the term will not include further
evolutionary developments leading to the emergence of fully
modern language or the subsequent diversiication of human
languages (see historical linguistics). Although the topic
is one that has engaged the human imagination throughout his-
tory, an orgy of armchair speculation following Darwin caused
it to fall into disrepute. However, now that advances in a vari-
ety of sciences have made possible more informed (if still inevi-
tably speculative) approaches, the attention devoted to it has
increased annually, with perhaps an overly ebullient prolifera-
tion of theories.
he issues may be more sharply deined by considering sepa-
rately three major questions to which the topic gives rise:
(1) Was language directly selected for, or an emergent prod-
uct of other faculties?
(2) If it was selected for, what pressure(s) selected for it?
(3) What form did its earliest emergence take?
Other issues involve the timing of language emergence, the
modality it originally employed, and whether or not language
evolved directly from prior means of animal communication.
Direct Versus Indirect Selection
he notion that language constituted an evolutionary adaptation
sensu stricto in other words, that it arose through some selec-
tive pressure acting directly upon pre-existing genetic material
had been around since Darwin but is most cogently expressed
by Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom (1990). Arguing against the
suggestion, made by Stephen Jay Gould among others, that lan-
guage could be a spandrel an accidental by-product of other
evolutionary developments these authors pointed out that the
intimate interconnections among the various parts of language
parallel a similar interconnectivity in the eye, an object univer-
sally agreed to have evolved through natural selection. Although
their approach entailed a gradual process of evolution, they did
not address the initial stage of that process nor discuss in detail
possible adaptive pressures (beyond suggesting that competi-
tion among humans was probably more inluential than envi-
ronmental factors).
While few if any scholars would deny that selective pressures
have played a role in the development of many prerequisites for
language, some still suggest that the emergence of language itself
was not speciically selected for. he notion that language was an
invention by human ancestors with expanded brains is still held
by some (e.g., Donald 1991). Others propose that laws of form
afecting brain structure and growth played a more signiicant
role than natural selection (Jenkins 2000; see also biolinguis-
nonlinguistic faculty might have yielded recursion, the capac-
ity to generate ininite structures from inite materials (Hauser,
Chomsky, and Fitch 2002), and recursion added to prehuman
conceptual structure might have suiced to produce language.
hese last two proposals imply that language emerged in more
or less its current form, without any intermediate stage between
animal communication and true language. Approaches of
this type would be strengthened if the required laws of form,
mutations, or changes of function could be precisely speciied;
this has not yet been done.
Selective Pressures
Among those who see language as an adaptation, explanations
for the selective pressure involved have changed over time. Until
the 1980s, it was widely assumed that language arose for pur-
poses of tool making and/or cooperative hunting. However, eco-
logical studies revealed complex cooperative hunting patterns in
nonhuman species, while anthropological studies showed that
preliterate peoples made tools and taught tool making largely
without using words. Moreover, ethological studies of ape spe-
cies showed highly complex societies in which individuals com-
peted with and sought to deceive and outwit one another (Byrne
and Whiten 1992). An inluential essay (Humphrey 1976) had
already suggested that higher cognitive faculties, including lan-
guage, had most likely been generated through intense within-
group competition.
he view that language arose from social intelligence is
nowadays shared by a majority, but it has problems. Social
competitiveness is far from unique to humans; so why has no
form of language, however rudimentary, evolved in other pri-
mate species? A unique adaptation suggests a unique pres-
sure. Furthermore, there must surely have been a stage when
577
Origins of Language
language was limited to a handful of symbols with which it
would have been impossible to express any socially signiicant
meaning. What, in such a situation, would have reinforced lan-
guage use?
Advocates of some form of social adaptive pressure whether
for gossip (see grooming, gossip, and language), sexual
display, or social manipulation have so far failed to address
such problems adequately. An alternative proposal is that some
primitive form of language developed for exchanging informa-
tion about food sources among small groups of extractive for-
agers (Bickerton 2002). Carcasses of megafauna, in particular,
would have required the rapid recruitment of signiicant num-
bers for eicient exploitation. Nobody doubts that language,
once it had emerged, would have been used for a variety of social
functions; such functions, in turn, would have expanded lan-
guage. he real, and still unanswered, question is exactly what
led to its initial emergence.
he issue is rendered still more problematic by the fact that
words are cheap tokens (Zahavi 1975). Since they take so little
efort to produce, and since primate species constantly engage in
deception, why would anyone have believed them, and if no one
believed them, who would have persevered in their use?
Initial Structure
While some (as noted) believe that language has always pos-
sessed its present structure, most researchers would probably
agree that some simpler form developed irst a stage generally
termed protolanguage (Bickerton 1990) and subsequently grew
more complex. Until recently, it was assumed that protolanguage,
like early-stage pidgins, consisted of a small quantity of units
(roughly equivalent in semantic coverage to modern words)
that could be concatenated, without any consistent grammatical
structure, to form brief propositions; in other words, proto-
language was compositional. his view is now challenged by
the proposal that protolanguage was synthetic, with holophrastic
units (like the units of animal communication systems) roughly
the semantic equivalents of complete propositions and not divis-
ible into smaller meaningful units the whole thing means the
whole thing (Wray 2002, 118).
Defenders of a synthetic system note that (in contrast with
a compositional system) there would nowhere be any break in
continuity between language and the prelinguistic communica-
tion system of hominids (assumed to be similar to those of other
primates; see primate vocalizations), which it would at irst
resemble except for productivity (holophrastic units could be
multiplied indeinitely). At a subsequent stage, chance phonetic
similarities between portions of holophrases would cause the lat-
ter to be reanalyzed into wordlike segments; these could then be
recombined to form a modern, compositional language.
It is claimed that a synthetic protolanguage would be less sub-
ject to ambiguities than a compositional one and would be bet-
ter adapted for manipulation of other group members. Support
has come from computational linguists, many of whose
simulations of language evolution begin with units that repre-
sent propositional rather than lexical units (Briscoe 2002). hose
who, following Darwin and Otto Jespersen, assume a common
origin for language and music are more or less obliged to adopt
some form of the synthetic hypothesis.
578
A synthetic protolanguage faces many diiculties, however
(Tallerman 2007). Whereas a compositional protolanguage
enables basic functions of language, such as creating new infor-
mation, asking questions, and negating statements, a synthetic
protolanguage allows for none of these. Predication and dis-
placement are equally impossible. Other problems arise at the
stage of reanalysis into a compositional system. For instance,
unless a given holophrase is equivalent to just one sentence in a
compositional language, no two people would necessarily agree
as to the meanings of its analyzed segments; yet if such equiva-
lence exists, a compositional language must already exist, at least
mind-internally so why is a holophrastic stage necessary? he
precise nature of protolanguage has been, and will doubtless
continue to be, hotly debated, a debate to which experimental
evidence will hopefully contribute (Bowie 2006).
Other Issues
A further controversy revolves around whether language was orig-
inally spoken or signed. Given that sign languages develop as
naturally among the deaf as do spoken ones among the hearing,
and that the hands of our closest primate relatives are more agile
and under more volitional control than their vocal organs, the
notion of a signed protolanguage is not unreasonable and has
been vigorously defended (Corballis 2002). However, even if the
original modality could be determined (and for all we know, pro-
tolanguage could originally have mixed signs and vocalizations
indiscriminately), this would not answer the questions discussed
here or tell us how language came to acquire the properties that
distinguish it from other modes of communication.
Another unresolved issue concerns the timing of emergence.
None of the evidence from the fossil record is unambiguous.
Endocasts of Homo habilis suggest a developed brocas area,
and this has been taken to indicate an early (~2.5 million years
ago) beginning for language. But since, even today, Brocas area
subserves both linguistic and nonlinguistic functions, we can-
not know what functions it performed in antecedent species.
Symbolic artifacts are sometimes used to date language origins,
but while these indicate that language already existed, they can-
not tell how long before their appearance it began. Absent reli-
able evidence, estimates of when language originated tend to
be determined by researchers positions on other issues. For
instance, those who believe that language emerged abruptly
more or less in its present state favor a recent date coinciden-
tal with the emergence of anatomically modern humans (~140
thousand years ago), or even later. Conversely, those who take
an adaptationist approach argue for a much earlier date, any-
thing up to a few million years ago. he origin of language is
probably associated with some speciation event, but this issue,
like most others, is unlikely to be resolved without new sources
of evidence.
he question of continuity with prelinguistic systems is
somewhat clearer. hat language evolved from some prior com-
municative system was, to Darwin, an article of faith, and some
subsequent authors have assumed that a commitment to grad-
ual evolution entails such continuity, discounting the possible
capacity of mutations, changes in function, and interactions
between diferent faculties to produce evolutionary novelties.
But the only plausible continuist scenario is the holophrastic,
Overregularizations
synthetic model of Wray, discussed previously. If objections to
this are overcome, the case for continuity could be maintained;
otherwise, the diferences between language or even protolan-
guage and any nonlinguistic system suggest a sharp discontinu-
ity between the two.
Derek Bickerton
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bickerton, Derek. 1990. Language and Species. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
. 2002. Foraging versus social intelligence in the evolution of pro-
tolanguage. In he Transition to Language, ed. Alison Wray, 20726.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bowie, Jill. 2006. he evolution of meaningful combinatoriality. Paper
presented at the Sixth International Conference on the Evolution of
Language, Rome.
Briscoe, Ted, ed. 2002. Linguistic Evolution through Language
Acquisition: Formal and Computational Models. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Byrne, Frank, and Andrew Whiten. 1992. Cognitive evolution in pri-
mates. Man 27: 60927.
Corballis, Michael. 2002. From Hand to Mouth: he Origins of Language.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Donald, Merlin. 1991. Origins of the Modern Mind. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Hauser, Marc, Noam Chomsky, and Tecumseh Fitch. 2002. he fac-
ulty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science
298: 156979.
Humphrey, Nicholas K. 1976. he social function of intellect. In
Growing Points in Ethology, ed. P. P. G. Bateson and R. A. Hinde,
30317. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jenkins, Lyle. 2000. Biolinguistics: Exploring the Biology of Language.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kirby, Simon, and Morton H. Christiansen, eds. 2003. Language Evolution.
Oxford: Oxford University Press. A collection of position papers by
leading scholars in the ield.
Pinker, Steven, and Paul Bloom. 1990. Natural language and natural
selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13: 70726.
Tallerman, Maggie. 2007. Did our ancestors speak a holistic protolan-
guage? Lingua 117: 579604.
Wray, Alison. 2002. Dual processing in protolanguage: Performance
without competence. In he Transition to Language, ed. A. Wray,
11337. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zahavi, Amotz. 1975. Mate selection a selection for a handicap.
Journal of heoretical Biology 53: 20514.
OVERREGULARIZATIONS
Overregularizations like runned and mans have played a major
role in the language development literature for more than 40 years
(see also childrens grammatical errors; morphology,
acquisition of; syntax, acquisition of). Once brought
into focus, overregularizations comprised prime examples of
the way in which childrens use of general grammatical rule
knowledge (the regular past tense rule of adding -ed) could pro-
ductively overwhelm the word-speciic knowledge they gained
form actual input, a prime example of using rules to go beyond
the input. Less attention was paid to the way in which children
would get rid of overregularizations, but results indicated that
there is a verb-by-verb competition between the regular rule and
the irregular form, and that experience eventually settles in favor
of the irregular form.
In a crucial 1986 paper, however, D. E. Rumelhart and J. L.
McClelland showed that newly developed connectionist
networks could simulate the rise and decline of overregulariza-
tions in childrens speech without the use of general rules or syn-
tactic symbols like verb. Briely stated, connectionist networks
hypothesize connective paths between the constituent features
of present and past forms. hrough feedback about correctness,
eventually the right feature-to-feature connections get sorted
out. With skillful design, such networks can simulate the tem-
poral courses through which children pass without ever using
any general rule statement at all. In such a model, there is an
implicit competition between irregular and past forms, but the
competition is really among connections of features. here is no
general rule, no general reference to verb as a category. Irregular
and regular forms are produced by a single overall network pro-
cess. So these are called single process models versus dual process
(general rule vs. individual lexical entry).
Rumelhart and McClellands paper instigated a series of
simulations, arguments, criticisms, and new simulations that
continue to this day (e.g., McClelland and Patterson 2002;
Plunkett and Marchman 1991, 1993; Pinker 1999). Perhaps the
most prominent empirical data were introduced by G. Marcus
and colleagues (1992), who analyzed longitudinal studies of four
children and cross-sectional studies of hundreds more. hey
argued that in any competition account, one would expect that
overregularizations would originally occur at a high rate before
experience wore them down. But in their analysis of the longitu-
dinal and cross-sectional subjects, they found that overall pre-
school year rates seemed very low, around .04 to .06 (or .02 to .10,
depending on the method).
his means, they argue, that in actuality, children probably
know the irregular form is correct as soon as they learn it. his
knowledge is available because an innate general heuristic
called blocking tells children that if two forms are possible but
only one is heard, choose the heard one. he actually heard
irregular form thus has an innate heuristic preferred status.
Overregularizations only occur if the child does not know the
irregular form, or if the child temporarily cannot remember the
irregular form and the regular rule intrudes itself. Such retrieval
errors are posited to be inherently rare, for some unstated
reason.
he blocking hypothesis requires a general reference to alter-
native rules and, in practice, to regular rule versus irregular indi-
vidual lexical patterns. So blocking contradicts connectionist
formulations in many ways. If there is no competition, connec-
tionist models cannot be correct, as they presuppose competi-
tion of some sort. If blocking in particular is correct, it requires
statement at general symbolic and rule levels, and so network
formulations are inadequate.
M. Maratsos (2000), however, has argued against the empir-
ical conclusions of Marcus and colleagues (1992). Using sam-
pling arguments, he notes that for frequent irregular verbs,
which dominate overall tabulations, even in a competition
model children would probably hear hundreds of correct inputs
within a week or few weeks after the competition started, and
so overregularizations would fall to near zero very quickly; the
579
Overregularizations
result would be an overall rate of near zero in a sample of two to
three years. Our samples are so small (usually an hour a week)
that they would fail to catch these occurrences. Only less fre-
quent verbs, discounted by Marcus and colleagues, might show
evidence of strong overregularization. In fact, that they do was
shown for R. Browns two low-overregularizing subjects Adam
and Sarah (see, e.g., 1973). For Adam, for example, the average
overregularization rate was a strong 55 percent for his 21 lower-
frequency verbs. he same rate was found even in samples after
the child irst produced the correct irregular form of a verb.
Arguments from sampling considerations indicated that such
overregularizations were still persisting after tens or even hun-
dreds of uses. Recent work from a more intensively recorded
subject, Peter (Maslen et al. 2004), has strongly supported these
analyses and extended them to noun plurals. hese data indi-
cate that overregularizations do often appear frequently after
the irregular past is known, contrary to blocking. Our samples
restrictions just make it diicult to capture them for the more
frequent irregular verbs whose numbers dominate overall
rates.
Suppose these analyses do indeed indicate that the low-rate
blocking account is incorrect. Do they also show that the connec-
tionist account is therefore correct? Actually, they only indicate
that a competition process of some sort is involved. As noted,
older rule-based models also assumed a competition between
regular rule and individual entry. he current association of
competition with connectionism and with non-rule models thus
relects current disputes, not the basic analytic problem. he
conlict between connectionist and rule-based approaches will
thus have to be resolved ultimately, if it can be, using other data
and arguments.
Michael Maratsos
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Brown, R. 1973. A First Language: he Early Stages. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Maratsos, M. 2000. More overregularizations after all: New data and dis-
cussion on Marcus, Pinker, Ullman, Hollander, Rosen & Xu. Journal
of Child Language 27: 183212.
Marchman, V., and E. Bates. 1994. Continuity in lexical and morpho-
logical development: A test of the critical mass hypothesis. Journal of
Child Language 21: 31718.
Marcus, G., S. Pinker, M. Ullman, M. Hollander, T. Rosen, and F. Xu.
1992. Overregularizations in language acquisition. Monographs of
the Society for Research in Child Development 57, serial no. 228.
Maslen, R. J., A. L. heakston, E. V. Lieven, and M. Tomasello. 2004.
A dense corpus study of past tense and plural overregulariza-
tion in English. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
47: 131933.
McClelland, James, and Karalyn Patterson. 2002. Rules or connections
in past-tense inlection: What does the evidence rule out? Trends in
Cognitive Science 6: 46572.
Pinker, S. 1999. Words and Rules: he Ingredients of Language. New
York: Basic Books.
Plunkett, K., and B. Marchman. 1991. U-shaped learning and frequency
efects in a multi-layered perceptron: Implications for language acqui-
sition. Cognition 28: 73193.
. 1993. From rote learning to system building: Acquiring verb mor-
phology in children and connectionist nets. Cognition 48: 3559.
580
Parable
Rumelhart, D. E., and J. L. McClelland. 1986. On learning the past tenses
of English verbs. In Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in
the Microstructure of Cognition. Vol. 2: Psychological and Biological
Models. Ed. J. L. McClelland, D. E. Rumelhart, and the PDP Research
Group, 21671. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.
P
PARABLE
Standard deinitions, such as the one given in the Oxford English
Dictionary, conceive of parable as a literary term; it is said to be
the expression of one story through another. Literary historians
have modiied this conception by placing limits on the kind of
story that counts as parable, attempting to distinguish it from, for
example, fable or allegory.
here are, however, even among literary scholars, some who
see parable as a much larger phenomenon, belonging not merely
to expression and not exclusively to historical genres but, rather,
as C. S. Lewis (1936, 44) observed, to mind in general. (See also
Louis MacNeices discussion of literary critical perspectives on
parable in MacNiece [1963] 1965, 5.)
For the language sciences, parable is not only, or even chiely,
a kind of story; it is not an expression at all but, rather, a men-
tal faculty that allows the human mind to integrate two concep-
tual stories or narratives into a third story, thereby creating a
conceptual blending network that has emergent meaning.
Straight history, or the observation of human interaction,
often can serve as the material for such parabolic blending. For
example, Sun Tzus he Art of War treats 13 aspects of warfare.
It has been studied in the West by military strategists since the
eighteenth century. Written in the sixth century b.c. in China, it
precedes by a couple of millennia the origin of modern business
management. But in the 1980s, it underwent extensive para-
bolic rendering in numerous books and articles for the purpose
of ofering guidance to twentieth-century graduate students of
business and investment on how to conduct their professional
lives.
Parable frequently blends two stories that have strong con-
licts in their content. It is a scientiic riddle why human beings
should be able to activate two conlicting stories simultaneously,
given the evident risks of mental confusion, distraction, and
error. Yet, uniquely among species, human beings can evidently
not only activate fundamentally conlicting stories simultane-
ously and construct connections between them but also blend
them to create emergent meaning. his ability to blend two con-
ceptual arrays with strong conlicts in their framing structure is
central to higher-order human cognition and is a hallmark of the
cognitively modern human mind. It is known as double-scope
blending (Fauconnier and Turner 2002).
Consider a parable from the Fourth Gospel. In John 10:1118,
Jesus presents Himself as the good shepherd, who lays down
His life for the sheep, in contrast to the hired hand, who does
not care for the sheep and lees in the face of the wolf. He says
the Father loves Him because He lays down his life and that no
one takes it from Him. Rather, He has the power to lay it down
Parable
and take it up again. he clash between the story of the shep-
herd and the blend Jesus proposes is astonishing. It is quite
implausible that a shepherd would choose to die defending the
sheep, because then the sheep would be without a defender.
Yet this consequence is not projected to the blend: he actual
shepherd cannot return after being killed to look out for the
lock, but in Jesuss blend, He can. he emergent struc-
ture in the blend is crucial: Jesuss narrative blends dying
with physical manipulation of an object. (Physical manipula-
tion is at the root of human understanding. See Chapter 4 of
Turner 1996, Actors Are Movers and Manipulators.) In the
story of manipulation, we can lay down an object and pick it
back up. Blending manipulation of a physical object with the
state of being alive or dead, Jesus achieves the remarkable
ability of self-revival.
As discussed in Chapter 4 (Analogy) of Cognitive Dimensions
of Social Science (Turner 2001), almost all the mental achieve-
ments analyzed by analogy theorists as analogy involve con-
siderable unrecognized blending. In general, analogy involves
dynamic forging of mental spaces, construction of connec-
tions between them, and blending of the mental spaces to create
a conceptual integration network of spreading coherence, whose
inal version contains a set of what are recognized, after the fact
in the rearview mirror, as systematic, even obvious analogical
connections. But those analogical connections are more often
the outcome of conceptual blending than its preconditions. Put
diferently, what is commonly discussed as analogy manifests
the faculty for parable.
It is also important to recognize that a parable is not, in gen-
eral, a conceptual metaphor for understanding one con-
ceptual domain in terms of another. Consider 2 Samuel 12. he
prophet Nathan creates an elaborate blend in which a rich man
is blended with King David, a poor man is blended with Uriah
the Hittite, Uriahs wife Bathsheba is blended with a favored ewe
lamb, and there is a traveler who comes to dinner. he point of
the complex blend is that David has done wrong. he source
and target are complicated, drawing on many conceptual
domains, and the principal connection is that in both of them,
one man abuses another and deserves punishment. No general
conceptual metaphor provides this set of cross-space connec-
tions. Most of them are not metaphoric.
Parable as a form of literary expression might be of interest
to historians, anthropologists, and critics. But parable as a spe-
cies-speciic mental faculty that can activate, connect, and blend
sharply conlicting stories to produce new emergent meaning is
a far larger and more fundamental topic, posing one of the cen-
tral riddles of the cognitive and language sciences.
Mark Turner
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2002. he Way We hink: Conceptual
Blending and the Minds Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic
Books.
Lewis, C. S. 1936. he Allegory of Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
MacNeice, Louis. [1963] 1965. he Varieties of Parable [he Clark
Lectures]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Turner, Mark. 1996. he Literary Mind: he Origins of hought and
Language. New York: Oxford University Press.
Paralanguage
. 2001. Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science: he Way We hink
About Politics, Economics, Law, and Society. New York: Oxford
University Press.
PARALANGUAGE
Nuances, connotations, and innuendos, which are integral char-
acteristics of verbal communication, are given the vague term
paralanguage. hese meanings arise from sources both within
and outside of standard linguistic structure. Linguistic elements
words, word order, semantics, grammar can be utilized
for paralinguistic communication. hese combine with variations
of speech melody in ways that often defy structural description.
Paralanguage (as the term implies) both draws on and lies over
the known and describable ortholinguistic levels of phonetics,
phonology, morphology and lexicon, syntax, and seman-
tics. All of these elements can be harnessed for paralinguistic
communication, as is well known from baby talk, from connota-
tional meaning diferences in terms such as skinny, slim, slender,
and from word-order choices such as Herman Melvilles hat
inscrutable thing is chiely what I hate. In addition, emotion,
attitude, intention, mood, psychological state, personality,
and personal identity can be communicated without referring
to words. Because of the power of the intonational contribu-
tion to paralanguage, the notion of two channels in the speech
signal has been invoked, but their intimate interplay has been
emphasized (Bolinger 1964). Words can communicate emotions,
but when prosody does so using a diferent channel, the paralin-
guistic intent overrides the ortholinguistic content, as in Im not
angry! spoken with increased pitch, amplitude, and rate.
Much of paralanguage is carried over longer stretches of
utterance than the phonetic element or the single word. Lexical
and syntactic choices may interact with intonational features
with a cumulative efect. Formulaic and nonliteral expressions
may be called into play. It has come to my attention that your
stonewalling is holding up the works contains conventional and
metaphoric utterances that build to a message more fraught
with paralinguistic content than Ive learned that your hesita-
tion is contributing to a delay. Although subtle contrasts can be
conveyed on short utterances (see Nine ways of saying yes in
Crystal 1995), paralanguage prefers a larger canvas. Repetition of
words (Shakespeares a little, little grave) may have a powerful
paralinguistic efect. Movement from low to high pitch across an
intonational unit displays surprise or amazement; temporal units
are stretched to express sadness or disappointment; increased
intensity signals aggression or thematic emphasis; voice quality
becomes creaky to communicate victimization or breathy to
signal excitement.
Prosody, a major vehicle of paralanguage, can be decom-
posed into measurable elements: timing, pitch, amplitude, and
voice quality. hese measures combine into complex patterns,
such that associating acoustic cues with paralinguistic meanings
is far from straightforward. John didnt drive the car can be
intoned with sadness, happiness, fear, or disgust, and may enfold
attitudes such as incredulity, relief, perplexity, or amusement.
Contradiction or denial, and conversational presumptions, such
as sincerity and truthfulness, are carried by phrasal intonation.
Take a common paralinguistic trope, sarcasm (see irony), in
581
Paralanguage Parameters

hat was a good efort. We know sarcasm when we hear it, but PARAMETERS
exactly what in the signal conveys that the speaker is intending
he term parameter is used in linguistics on analogy with its
to communicate the opposite of the usual lexical meanings is dif-
usage in mathematics and engineering. In mathematics, the
icult to specify. In one version, the sarcastic utterance utilizes
parameters of a function are those aspects of the function that
higher pitch and greater amplitude on the irst word followed
are held constant when deining a particular function, but which
by falling intonation, pharyngeal voice quality, tensed vocal
can vary in a larger context so as to characterize a family of sim-
tract, and spread lips. While morphological, lexical, and syntac-
ilar functions. For example, the function for a line in analytic
tic meanings can be structurally analyzed using units, features,
geometry is f(x) = mx + b, with x the variable and m and b param-
and rules, paralinguistic meanings constitute a brew of unstable,
eters of the function (the slope and the y-intercept). In the dei-
leeting, and subjective qualities. hese paralinguistic qualities
nition of any one line, the parameters m and b are held constant,
shade into one another, and they impinge on purely linguistic
while the value of x varies, giving the diferent points on the same
uses of prosodic contrasts, as in question and statement intona-
line. In a broader context, however, the parameters m and b can
tion. he auditory-acoustic cues that comprise paralanguage are
vary so as to deine a family of similar functions: the set of all
graded, in that they are not perceptually allocated by the listener
lines. In the same way, parameters in linguistics are properties
into discrete, contrastive categories as are the acoustic signals
of a grammatical system that are held constant when character-
for phonetic and lexical elements. Using deft combinations and
izing one particular human language, but which are allowed to
placements of prosodic cues, a speaker can communicate more
take diferent values in a broader context so as to characterize
or less fear, gradations of perplexity, and degrees of denial.
a whole family of possible human languages. he idea that the
he development of the pragmatics of communication,
observed variation in human languages can be understood as
a branch of linguistics that studies language use in conversation
the ixing of certain parameters within an otherwise innate and
(see conversation analysis), jokes (see verbal humor),
invariant system of principles (universal grammar) is most
and storytelling, has advanced understanding of paralanguage.
commonly associated with the Chomskyan approach to formal
Communicative elements such as turn-taking, inference, and
generative linguistics (see generative grammar). As a result,
theme (topic of the discourse), and how they are signaled by the
this approach is sometimes called the principles and param-
speaker and comprehended by the listener, are investigated. he
eters theory. he idea is, however, a very general one, and it
ields of prosody and pragmatics have provided another valuable
can also be used in the context of other views about the nature of
impetus for the productive study of paralanguage: investigation
the human language faculty.
of the communicative competence of right hemisphere lan-
his notion of linguistic parameters was introduced into lin-
guage processing in humans. While it has long been known
guistic theory by Chomsky (1981) and Rizzi (1982), during the
that the left hemisphere modulates language processing,
government and binding period. he paradigmatic case
studies of pragmatics and prosody indicate involvement of the
was the pro-drop parameter (or null subject parameter). It was
right hemisphere in processing emotions and attitudes, infer-
observed that languages like Spanish and Italian difer from
ence and theme. he notion of two channels, ortholinguistic and
French and English in several ways that appear to be interre-
paralinguistic, is supported by the model that allocates process-
lated. First, Spanish and Italian allow the subject pronoun of a
ing to left and right hemispheres, respectively. Paralinguistic
inite clause to be omitted, whereas French and English do not:
nuances are intimately woven into the propositional message, so
much so that synthesized speech is often judged as unpleasant. (1) a. Verr. (Italian: He/she will come)
A goal of speech synthesis is to produce more natural-sounding b. *Came. (English)
speech, which means infusing paralanguage, a challenging but
Second, Spanish and Italian allow the subject to come after the
worthy goal.
verb as well as before it, whereas French and English generally
Diana Van Lancker Sidtis do not:

WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bolinger, Dwight. 1964. Around the edge of language: Intonation. In
Intonation, ed. D. Bolinger. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books.
Crystal, David. 1995. Nine ways of saying yes. he Cambridge
Encyclopedia of the English Language, ed. David Crystal, 248.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kreiman, Jody, Diana Van Lancker Sidtis, and Bruce Gerratt. 2005.
Perception of voice quality. In Handbook of Speech Perception, ed.
David Pisoni and Robert Remez, 33862. Maldon, MA: Blackwell.
Van Lancker Sidtis, Diana. 2007. he relation of human language to
human emotion. In Handbook of the Neuroscience of Language,
ed. Brigitte Stemmer and Harry Whitaker. San Diego, CA: Academic
Press.
Williams, C., and K. Stevens. 1972. Emotions and speech: Some
acoustical correlates. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
52.4B: 123850.
(2) a. Verr Gianni (Italian, Will-come Gianni)
b. *Came John (English)
hird, the subject of an embedded sentence in Spanish and
Italian can be moved to the beginning of the sentence as a whole,
even when there is an overt complementizer, whereas in French
and English some sort of accommodation is needed in sentences
like these:
(3) a. Chi credi che verr? (Italian)
Who you-think that will-come
b. *Who do you think that came? (English)
Although these are clearly three distinct properties of the lan-
guages in question, they have a common theme: Informally put,
French and English require that there be an overt noun phrase
in the canonical subject position immediately before the inite

582
Parameters
verb, whereas Spanish and Italian do not. his diference in the
syntax of subjects was also related to a morphological dif-
ference: he agreement morphology on the inite verb is rich
enough to uniquely identify which pronoun would be in the
subject position in Spanish and Italian, whereas in French and
English it is not. he universal syntactic condition, then, is that
inite clauses require subjects (the extended projection prin-
ciple); the parameter concerns exactly what kind of subject is
necessary to fulill this condition. In Italian and Spanish, the rich
agreement on the verb means that null or displaced subjects are
permissible because (roughly) much of the information con-
cerning the sort of subject it was is locally available on the inite
verb. In French and English, the agreement on the verb is of little
help, and so an overt subject in the canonical subject position
is required. A parameter, then, is a way of attributing a uniied
theoretical account of the systematic diferences that distinguish
one class of languages from another.
While the pro-drop parameter was the irst important param-
eter to be proposed, it is by now not considered the best case. A
look at a wider range of languages both nonstandard dialects guages, in which a large part of the expressive burden is placed
of the Romance languages and languages from other families
quickly showed that the properties in (1)(3) do not correlate
with one another as closely as was thought (Jaeggli and Sair
1989). his implies that the pro-drop parameter as it was origin-
ally conceived is either false or highly oversimpliied.
hat does not mean that the idea of a parameter was ill-con-
ceived, however. he current paradigmatic example is what is
sometimes called the head directionality parameter (terminolo-
gies vary). his can be stated as an open factor in the principles
of phrase structure (see x-bar theory). Roughly put,
when a word-level category x merges with a phrase Y to create
a phrase of type X, there are two ways that the elements can be
ordered: he order can be X-Y within XP, or it can be Y-X. Setting
the parameter in the irst way gives head-initial languages like
English, in which complementizers come before embedded
clauses, tense particles come before verb phrases, verbs come
before their objects, prepositions come before their objects, and
so on:
(4) John will think that Mary showed a picture to Sue.
Setting the parameter in the second way gives head-inal lan-
guages like Japanese, in which complementizers come after
embedded clauses, tense particles come after verb phrases, verbs
come after their objects, prepositions come after their objects,
and so on:
(5) Taroo-ga Hiro-ga Hanako-ni syasin-o miseta to omotte iru.
Taro SUBJ Hiro SUBJ Hanako to picture OBJ show that think-
ing be
Taro is thinking that Hiro showed a picture to Hanako.
In this way, a parametric theory can account for many of the
most robust Greenbergian universals (Greenberg 1963; Dryer
1992) concerning word order in an elegant way. hese two
very common and stable language types fall out of a simple and
unity choice that is made in the precise formulation of a univer-
sal principle of language.
Parameters vary widely in the range and scope of the efects
that they are supposed to capture. Some theorists have proposed
parameters that are intended to account for the large-scale dif-
ferences among the major classes of languages discovered by
typology. he head directionality parameter is a parameter of
this sort. Another early example was Ken Hales (1983) noncon-
igurationality parameter, which was designed to explain why
Australian languages like Warlpiri tolerate free word order and
discontinuous phrases, whereas languages like English do not.
Similarly, parameters have been proposed to capture the difer-
ence between ergative languages (like Basque and Eskimo), in
which the object of a transitive clause is treated in some respects
like the subject of an intransitive clause, and accusative lan-
guages (like English and most Indo-European languages), in
which all subjects are treated similarly. hese proposals range
from radical diferences in how syntactic structure is initially
constructed (Marantz 1984) to relatively minor diferences in
how case and agreement morphology are assigned in a simple
sentence (Bittner and Hale 1996). Mark Baker (1996) proposes
a polysynthesis parameter that attempts to give a uniied charac-
terization of the diference between many native American lan-
on verbal morphology, and languages like English, in which the
primary expressive burden is borne by syntactic combination.
Taken together, some set of parameters such as these might
characterize the major linguistic types we observe.
Other parameters operate on a smaller scale, deining the dif-
ferences between historically-related languages or dialects.
he pro-drop parameter was a parameter of this sort, distinguish-
ing French from Italian. Another example is the parameter that
determines whether the subject of a clause moves from its origi-
nal position inside the verb phrase to the highest position in the
clause or not; this accounts for the diference between English,
which has subject-inite verb-object word order, and Celtic lan-
guages like Welsh, which have inite verb-subject-object word
order (Koopman and Sportiche 1991). Jean-Yves Pollock (1989)
argues that there is a parameter that says that verbs move to a
higher position in French than they do in English; this accounts
for a cluster of subtle word-order diferences having to do with the
placement of verbs, negation, and adverbs in the two languages
(e.g., John kisses often Mary is normal French but bad English).
A third example is Jonathan Bobaljik and Dianne Jonass (1996)
proposal that some Germanic languages have an extra posi-
tion available for subjects that other Germanic languages dont
have; this makes sentences like here have some trolls eaten
Christmas pudding possible in some Germanic languages but
not others, among other things. (See Baker 2001 for a general
overview of these parameters and several others.)
In the early days of parametric theory, it was thought that
virtually any syntactic principle could be parametrized, and
parameters were proposed that were relevant not only to X-bar
theory but also to movement, the theory of binding, and even
the projection principle. On that view, there would be a mod-
est number of parameters (dozens or perhaps hundreds), each
of which would have a relatively large impact on the language
generated. But this view has been questioned in more recent
work. Hagit Borer (1984) proposed almost immediately that the
syntactic principles themselves are invariant, and what is param-
eterized is the features associated with individual lexical items.
Rather than saying that the syntax of French is diferent from
583
Parameters
the syntax of English in that verbs raise to the tense/inl node in
French, this view says that the lexicon of French is diferent from
the lexicon of English in that French has tenses that require the
verb to move into them, whereas English does not.
Borers view has the conceptual advantage that it largely
reduces the learning of syntax to the learning of individual lexical
items. It also suggests that there might be thousands of param-
eters, rather than dozens, because each distinct lexical item is
a possible locus of parametric variation (see especially Kayne
2005). Each individual parameter, however, will afect only a
relatively narrow part of the grammar since it is limited to those
structures in which a particular item appears. his view is com-
patible with the fragmentation of the pro-drop parameter, which
is now seen as a cluster of small-scale distinctions, each of which
can vary independently of the others, giving one the lexibility to
describe the various intermediate patterns found in the dialects
of southern France and northern Italy. As a result, Borers view
has been championed by Richard Kayne (2005) as the one that
is supported by his methodology of comparing closely related
dialects.
Baker (1996, 2008), however, argues that there may also be
syntactic parameters in more or less the original sense, in addi-
tion to the ine-grained lexical parameters. Taken strictly, Borers
view does not really account for the unity of the head directional-
ity parameter. Even the smaller-scale parameters do not seem to
vary lexical item by lexical item. For example, it is not the case
that some tenses trigger verb-adverb-object order in French and
others do not; rather, all the diferent tenses trigger that order in
French, whereas none of the English tenses do. Perhaps, then, the
proper locus of much parameterization is neither the individual
lexical item nor the syntactic principle, but rather a natural class
of lexical items. How to state this and what its implications are
continue to be topics of discussion.
Mark C. Baker
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Baker, Mark. 1996. he Polysynthesis Parameter. New York: Oxford
University Press.
. 2001. he Atoms of Language. New York: Basic Books. A broad
overview of the notion of a parameter in linguistic theory, written for
a general audience.
. 2008. he macroparameter in a microparametric world. In
he Limits of Syntactic Variation, ed. heresa Biberauer, 35174.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Provides an overview and argument for
large-scale parameters.
Bittner, Maria, and Kenneth Hale. 1996. Ergativity: Toward a theory of a
heterogeneous class. Linguistic Inquiry 27: 531604.
Bobaljik, Jonathan, and Dianne Jonas. 1996. Subject positions and the
roles of TP. Linguistic Inquiry 27: 195236.
Borer, Hagit. 1984. Parametric Syntax: Case Studies in Semitic and
Romance Languages. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Foris.
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht,
the Netherlands: Foris. he reference that started it all.
Dryer, Matthew. 1992. he Greenbergian word order correlations.
Language 68: 81138.
Greenberg, Joseph. 1963. Universals of Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Hale, Kenneth. 1983. Warlpiri and the grammar of nonconigurational
languages. Natural Language and Linguistic heory 1: 549.
584
Parietal Lobe
Jaeggli, Osvaldo, and Kenneth Sair. 1989. he null subject parameter
and parametric theory. In he Null Subject Parameter, ed. Osvaldo
Jaeggli and Kenneth Sair, 144. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer.
Kayne, Richard. 2005. Some notes on comparative syntax, with spe-
cial reference to English and French. In he Oxford Handbook of
Comparative Syntax, ed. Guglielmo Cinque and Richard Kayne, 369.
New York: Oxford University Press. A detailed discussion of general
considerations and very small-scale parameters.
Koopman, Hilda, and Dominique Sportiche. 1991. he position of sub-
jects. Lingua 85: 21158.
Marantz, Alec. 1984. On the Nature of Grammatical Relations. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Pollock, Jean-Yves. 1989. Verb movement, universal grammar, and the
structure of IP. Linguistic Inquiry 20: 365424.
Rizzi, Luigi. 1982. Issues in Italian Syntax. Dordrecht, the
Netherlands: Foris.
PARIETAL LOBE
Anatomy
he parietal lobe is situated superior to the occipital lobe and
posterior to the frontal lobe. More speciically, it extends from the
central sulcus anteriorly, to the imaginary boundary of the pari-
etal-occipital issure posteriorly, to the sylvian issure (peri-
sylvian cortex) inferiorly. he parietal lobe(s) can be further
subdivided into three main areas. hese include: 1) the soma-
tosensory strip, also known as the postcentral gyrus (Brodmanns
area [BA] 1, 2, 3, 43), 2) the superior parietal lobule (BA 5), and 3)
inferior parietal lobule (includes BA 39-angular gyrus and 40-su-
pramarginal gyrus). he latter two areas are separated by the
intraparietal sulcus (see Figure 1). Medially, the parietal lobe(s)
comprises the postcentral gyrus extension of the paracentral lob-
ule, the precuneus, and part of the cingulate gyrus (see Figure 2).
Physiology
here are two parietal lobes, one in each hemisphere, which are
divided functionally on the basis of dominance. he dominant
lobe is typically the left one and the nondominant the right.
here are many diferent non-language functions performed
by the parietal lobe, for example, perception and localization of
touch, pressure, pain, and temperature on the opposite side of
the body, and visuospatial processing. he variety of language-
related functions associated with the parietal lobe will be espe-
cially highlighted in the context of non-language functions.
he dominant parietal lobe is involved primarily in integrat-
ing sensory information to create a particular perception. he
inferior portion of this lobe, particularly the supramarginal gyrus
and angular gyrus, is involved in structuring information for
reading and writing (see writing and reading, neurobiol-
ogy of), performing mathematical calculations, and perceiving
objects normally.
Damage to the dominant lobe can result in apraxia (motor
planning deicit) aphasia (language disorder), agnosia (abnormal
perception of objects), and sensory impairment (e.g., touch, pain).
Lesions to the inferior portion of the dominant lobe involving the
angular gyrus can result in Gerstmanns syndrome, which is char-
acterized by leftright confusion, diiculty pointing to named
ingers (inger agnosia), impaired writing ability (agraphia), and
inability to perform mathematical calculations (acalculia).
Parietal Lobe
he nondominant parietal lobe, however, is involved in a dif-
ferent set of functions that are mostly non-language related. In
particular, this region is responsible for visuospatial functions as
it receives and integrates input from the visual system (occipital
lobe) to make sense of the spatial order of the world around us.
M. A. Eckert and colleagues (2005) found that Williams syndrome,
whose phenotype (visuospatial deicits) and genotype (deletion
on chromosome 7) are well characterized, is linked to superior
parietal impairment. Williams syndrome, thus, may provide a
valuable system for understanding parietal lobe function.
Damage to the right parietal lobe can result in a constellation
of deicits involving spatial and body relations. Bilateral lesions
may result in Balints syndrome, which afects both visual atten-
tion and motor skills. If both the parietal and temporal lobes are
damaged, memory impairments and personality changes may
result. Speciically, if this damage occurs on the dominant (left)
side, it may result in verbal memory deicits and diiculty in the
retrieval of strings of numbers. If the damage is on the right side,
it will afect nonverbal memory functions and will signiicantly
impair personality.
History
For more than a century, the exact role of the parietal lobe has
been debated by neuroanatomists and psychologists, with much
Figure 1.
Figure 2.
of the research involving humans with brain damage and animal
studies using rhesus monkeys. Sir William Turner (1873) is con-
sidered the irst to describe in detail the intraparietal sulcus (BA
40). Before being scientiically discredited, phrenologists pro-
posed that damage or disease to the parietal lobe(s) was a major
cause of melancholia (depression), and parietal eminence was
believed to relate to cautiousness (Hollander 1902). Due to the
wide variety of symptoms reported from brain damage studies,
the parietal lobes were accurately but vaguely thought to be a
general association area combining all the information from
various functions, speciically visuospatial and attention; how-
ever, details as to how this function occurred physiologically
were lacking until modern times.
Josef Gerstmann ([1924] 1971) irst described inger agnosia
in a patient with a left parietal stroke, and the efects of various
lesions on the parietal cortex were identiied and cataloged in
detail by John McFie and Oliver L. Zangwill (1960). Much of the
early parietal research was pioneered by scientists Macdonald
Critchley and later Juhani Hyvarinen in their respective works
he Parietal Lobes (1953) and he Parietal Cortex of Man and
Monkey (1982).
A great deal of neurological investigation has been conducted
on rhesus monkeys, and there appears to be signiicant overlap
between the human and monkey parietal lobe in both function
585
Parietal Lobe
and form, though it is noteworthy that diferences have been
identiied, such as larger parietal cortex, asymmetry of the lobes,
and more neural subdivisions in humans (Kolb and Whishaw
1990).
Language
Continuing the classical connectionist tradition of Hugo
Liepmann, Norman Geschwind (1965) championed the simpli-
ied yet controversial position that the parietal lobe acts as the
association area of association areas. Neural tissue damage to
this area often results in the classical disconnection syndromes,
for example, apraxia and others.
Aleksandr Romanovich Luria (1973) considered the parietal
cortex one piece in his two-part model of mental activity, stat-
ing that it was important for understanding reception, analysis,
and storage of information. Lesions to the left parietal lobe were
understood to result in aferent motor aphasias (diiculty in
inding the correct articulatory positions for speciic phonemes),
particularly lesioned primary and secondary sensory areas
afecting speech motor control and lesioned tertiary sensory
area resulting in aphasia (the loss of speech production and/or
comprehension).
Recent research, such as that of Gregory Hickok (2000), sug-
gests that the inferior parietal lobe serves as the connection
between phonological representations and motor control for
those representations, that is, the auditory-motor interface,
which is part of a larger network of interfaces and systems
subserving language function. Marco Catani, D. Jones, and
H. Dominic (2005) in a signiicant paper, conirm the analysis
that includes the inferior parietal lobe in the use and possibly
the acquisition of language via a new circuit connecting the
traditional language areas of broca and wernicke. It has
been labeled Geschwinds territory in honor of Geschwinds
original proposal that the parietal lobe is critical to language
function.
In sum, the left parietal cortex has particular areas that are
responsible for various linguistic functions. However, there are
other extralinguistic processes that the parietal lobe is known for
as well.
Extralinguistic Processes
ATTENTION. he function of the parietal lobe in attention mecha-
nisms has been discussed over a period of time. Michael Posner
and Steven E. Peterson (1990) outlined the diferent subsystems
of attention: a) orientation to sensory events (not conscious), b)
signal detection for focal processing (conscious), and c) main-
tenance of a vigilant state (conscious). From the available neu-
rocognitve evidence, the researchers assert that the posterior
parietal lobe plays an important role in attention mechanisms,
speciically in orientation and signal detection that are essential
for linguistic processing. Earlier, Luria (1973) identiied this par-
ietal region that mediates attention as an involuntary orienting
system. However the posterior parietal attentional mechanisms
are greatly impacted by the frontal regions that subserve alerting
mechanisms as well.
MEMORY. Traditionally, episodic memory, or declarative mem-
ory, has been attributed to the medial temporal lobe (MTL);
586
however, recent evidence (Wagner et al. 2005) suggests that the
parietal lobes may have a role to play in it as well. he role of
declarative memory in language has been attributed to word
learning or vocabulary storage. Wagner and his colleagues sug-
gest three theories explaining the contributions of the parietal
lobe in episodic memory retrieval. hey highlight that, indeed,
the parietal lobe does not play an independent role in this
retrieval; rather, it mediates the major pathways in which the
MTL subserves episodic memory.
In sum, a number of neurolinguistic positions have been
taken from available neuropsychological and brain-mapping
data (Stein 1989). hese include the parietal lobe as a) a senso-
rimotor association area such that the posterior parietal cortex
(PPC) becomes a junction of somaesthetic and visual informa-
tion that interacts in a complex fashion, b) a sensorimotor inte-
gration area, which is very similar to the previous theory except
for the addition of an actual integral function, and c) a com-
mand apparatus that is actually able to initiate a motor activity
from the accumulated sensory information. he authors propose
that although it is possible that the parietal lobe is involved in
some motor processes, it is more likely that the process is one
of maintenance than of initiation and is d) a region for directing
attention to stimuli of interest. Here, the PPC and the pathways
it receives are postulated to direct attentional focus to the tar-
get stimulus while coordinating and communicating with the
inferotemporal cortex. J. Stein advocates that the PPC does not
have a single narrow neurocognitive focus; nevertheless, it could
have a common underlying function that integrates its multifac-
eted involvement in cognitive as well as automatic linguistic and
extralinguistic processes.
Overall, the parietal lobe is crucial for several language func-
tions, most importantly, naming, semantic processing, and
phonological shaping of words, as well as reading and writing.
In addition, it mediates attention and memory, both essential at
diferent levels of language processing.
Yael Neumann, Hia Datta and Daniel P. Rubino
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Baddeley, Alan, Susan Gathercole, and Costanza Papagno. 1998. he
phonological loop as a language learning device. Psychological Review
105: 15873.
Catani, Marco, Derek K. Jones, and H. Dominic. 2005. Perisylvian lan-
guage networks of the human brain. Annals of Neurology 57: 816.
Critchley, Macdonald. 1953. he Parietal Lobes. London: Edward Arnold.
Eckert, M. A., B. S. Hu, S. Eliez, U. Bellugi, A. Galaburda, J. Korenberg, D.
Mills, and A. L. Reiss. 2005. Evidence for superior parietal impairment
in Williams syndrome. Neurology 64: 1523.
Gerstmann, Josef. [1924] 1971. Fingeragnosie: Eine umschriebene
Strung der Orientierung am eigenen Krper. Wiener Klinische
Wochenschrift 37: 101012. Trans. in Archives of Neurology
24: 4756.
Geschwind, Norman. 1965. Disconnection syndromes in animals and
man. Brain 88: 23794.
Hickok, Gregory. 2000. Speech perception, conduction aphasia, and
the functional neuroanatomy of language. In Language and the
Brain: Representation and Processing, ed. Y. Grodzinsky, L. Shapiro,
and D. Swinney, 87104. San Diego, CA: Academic Press
Hollander, Bernard. 1902. Scientiic Phrenology. London: Grant
Richards.
Parsing, Human Parsing, Machine

Kandel, Eric R., James H. Schwartz, and homas M. Jessell. 1991. WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Principles of Neural Science, 3d ed. New York: Elsevier.
Battison, Robbin. 1978. Lexical Borrowing in American Sign Language.
Kolb, Bryan, and Ian Q. Whishaw. 1990. Fundamentals of Human
Silver Spring, MD: Linstok.
Neuropsychology. New York: Freeman.
Bresnan, Joan. 1982. he Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations.
Joseph, Rhawn. 2000. Neuropsychiatry, Neuropsychology, Clinical
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Neuroscience. New York: Academic Press.
Browman, Catherine P., and Louis Goldstein. 1990. Articulatory gestures
Juhani Hyvarinen. 1982. he Parietal Cortex of Monkey and Man: Studies
as phonological units. Phonology 6: 20151.
of Brain Function. Berlin: Springer Verlag.
Charniak, Eugene. 1993. Statistical Language Learning. Cambridge,
Luria, Aleksandr Romanovich. 1973. he Working Brain: An Introduction
MA: MIT Press.
to Neuropsychology. New York: Basic Books.
Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the heory of Syntax. Cambridge,
McFie John, and Oliver L. Zangwill. 1960. Visual-constructive disabili-
MA: MIT Press.
ties associated with lesions of the left cerebral hemisphere. Brain
Fowler, Carol A., and Julie M. Brown. 2000. Perceptual parsing of acous-
83: 24360.
tic consequences of velum lowering from information for vowels.
Posner, Michael, and Steven E. Peterson. 1990. Attention system of the
Perception and Psychophysics 62: 2132.
human brain. Annual Review of Neuroscience 13: 2542.
Frazier, Lyn. 1987. Sentence processing: A tutorial review. In Attention
Stein, J. F. 1989. Representation of egocentric space in the posterior pari-
and Performance. Vol. 12: he Psychology of Reading. Ed. M. Coltheart,
etal cortex. Experimental Physiology 74: 583606.
55986. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Turner, William. 1873. he Convolutions of the Brain in Relation to
Frazier, Lyn, and Janet Dean Fodor. 1978. he sausage machine: A new
Intelligence. Yorkshire: he West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical
two-stage parsing model. Cognition 6: 291325.
Reports.
Hale, John. 2006. Uncertainty about the rest of sentences. Cognitive
Wagner, Anthony D., Benjamin J. Shannon, Itamar Kahn, and Randy
Science 40: 64372.
L. Buckner. 2005. Parietal lobe contributions to episodic memory
Jurafsky, Daniel, and James H. Martin. 2000. Speech and Language
retrieval. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9.9: 44553.
Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing,
Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition. Upper Saddle
River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
PARSING, HUMAN McClelland, James, and Mark St. John. 1989. Sentence comprehen-
In general, parsing refers to breaking something into its sion: A PDP approach. Language and Cognitive Processes 4: 287336.
constituent parts. hus, machines (see parsing, machine) and Steedman, M. 1999. Connectionist sentence processing in perspective.
Cognitive Science 23: 61534.
humans can decompose a message (such as print or spoken lan-
Tabor, W., and M. Tanenhaus. 1998. Dynamical models of sentence pro-
guage) into phrases, words, and morphemes. Most commonly
cessing. Cognition 23: 491515.
human parsing has been considered in the context of sentence
processing, particularly its syntactic and semantic aspects.
Language spoken, written, and signed can also be described PARSING, MACHINE
in terms of smaller functional units, including syllables, pho-
he query Over which strait in North Wales did homas Telford
nemes, features, and gestures.
build a suspension bridge? illustrates the fact that natural lan-
An understanding of grammatical constraints has guided the
guages have complex syntactic structures. Comparison of the
development of descriptive representations (e.g., sentence dia-
question with the answer He built a suspension bridge over the
grams) and formal systems of language structure and use. Parsing
Menai Strait reveals that the phrases including strait, occur in
models also have been inluenced by linguistic, psycholinguistic,
diferent positions in the two utterances, and that the verb posi-
and cognitive theory and by techniques used in computational
tions are quite diferent, leading linguists to propose a constit-
linguistics, natural language processing, and speech recogni-
uent structure like (1) for the question:
tion (Chomsky 1965; Bresnan 1982; Jurafsky and Martin 2000).
Representative approaches include linguistic, statistical, connec- (1) [[over/Preposition [which/Determiner [strait/Noun [in/
tionist, and dynamical systems models (Charniak 1993; Hale Preposition [North/Noun Wales/Noun ]NN ]PP ]N1 ]NP ]
2006; McClelland and St. John 1989; Steedman 1999; Tabor and PP [did/Vaux homas_Telford/NP [build/Verb [a/
Tanenhaus 1998; see also self-organizing systems). Determiner [suspension/Noun bridge/Noun ]Noun ]
he scale at which we can break the signal into pieces depends NP t/PP ]VP ]Sinv ]Sq
upon both our attention to detail and to our descriptive goals, as
A parser is a program that analyzes sentences in order to igure
can be seen in numerous psychological studies that range from
out their structure, using a list of rules describing the structure of
ambiguity resolution (Frazier and Fodor 1978; Frazier 1987) to
the language, such as:
assessment of our ability to perceive, produce, and use informa-
tion at various levels of description. Parsing linguistic information (2) S NP VP
is not restricted to sound and print but can include a consider- Sq PP Sinv
ation of the gestures underlying the production of language by Sinv Vaux NP PP
voice (the coordinated movement of speech articulators, such as PP Preposition NP
the tongue body, tongue tip, jaw, and lips; see speech produc- NP Determiner N1
tion) and sign (manual, facial, and body orientation) (Battison etc.
1978; Browman and Goldstein 1990; Fowler and Brown 2000).
Most parsers begin by determining the part of speech of each
Philip Rubin word (see word classes). A bottom-up parser then attempts to

587
Passing Theories
group the words into phrases and phrases into clauses, according
to the grammar rules, keeping track of multiple possible analyses
because of the extensive ambiguity of natural languages. Top-
down parsers, though perhaps less intuitive, are more frequently
used: hey essentially work by attempting to generate the input
sentence.
Standard parsing algorithms for analyzing any artificial
language (such as programming languages) have been devel-
oped and can be used with any context-free grammar. hus,
linguists can write the grammar rules: hey do not need to be
programmers. But linguists grammars of natural languages
often make use of additional devices, such as agreement or
subcategory features (as with Sinv and Vaux in (1) and (2), denot-
ing inverted sentences and auxiliary verbs). generative
grammars, therefore, usually augment constituent structure
with additional information: here may be labels to uniquely
identify individuals or additional levels of information, such as
meanings. Work on feature-based frameworks such as lexical-
functional grammar and head-driven phrase struc-
ture grammar has gone hand in hand with the development
of complementary parsing methods.
John Coleman
SUGGESTION FOR FURTHER READING
Jurafsky, Daniel, and James H. Martin. 2000. Speech and Language
Processing. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
PASSING THEORIES
Passing theories are utterance-speciic formal semantic theo-
ries; they specify the correct interpretation, or literal meaning,
of particular linguistic utterances: sentences uttered by par-
ticular speakers at particular times. he expression passing
theory was coined by Donald Davidson in his 1986 paper A
Nice Derangement of Epitaphs, which was part of his attack on
accounts of linguistic communication essentially involving con-
ventionally determined, shared meanings ([1986] 2005).
According to Davidson, expressions like language, meaning,
or sentence are theoretical terms used for describing, or explain-
ing, successful linguistic communication (cf. [1992] 2001, 108f).
For communicative success, regular or conventional use of
words is not necessary; what is necessary is only that the hearer
understand what the speaker intends to mean. For instance, if by
the words a nice derangement of epitaphs the speaker intends
to mean a nice arrangement of epithets and the hearer under-
stands that, we have a case of successful linguistic communica-
tion. Davidson suggests characterizing communicative success
in terms of the semantic intentions of the speaker. hese he con-
strues as intentions to be interpreted in a particular way on a par-
ticular occasion and by a particular hearer. Moreover, they are of
a Gricean, self-referential form (see communicative inten-
tion): A semantic intention is an intention to achieve the end
of being interpreted in a certain way by means of the intentions
being recognized by the hearer (Davidson [1986] 2005, 92 f).
Any utterance is made with a number of intentions that can be
ordered in terms of means to ends; the irst intention in such
a sequence (as ordered by in order to) speciies its literal, or
588
irst, meaning. A nice derangement of epitaphs thus literally
means a nice arrangement of epithets if uttered with the relevant
semantic intention and understood accordingly. According to
Davidson, this does not obliterate the distinction between lit-
eral meaning and speakers meaning; speakers meaning for
instance, metaphorical meaning always comes later in the
order of intentions.
According to Davidson, Tarski-style theories of truth
(T-theories) can be used as formal semantic theories. To spe-
cify the literal meaning of any utterance, be it ever so idiosyn-
cratic, a full T-theory is required. In the case of malapropisms
and other novel or idiosyncratic use, these theories will be of a
transient, passing character; they might not hold for more than
a single utterance. If they hold for a certain utterance, Davidson
speaks of speaker and hearer sharing a passing theory (for
that utterance). Prior theories, on the other hand, specify the
interpretations speakers expect hearers to make, and hearers are
prepared to make, prior to actual utterances (cf. Davidson [1986]
2005, 101f).
Davidson then uses the terminology of prior and passing
theories to renew his argument against any account of linguistic
competence essentially involving the prior mastery of a system
of shared semantic and syntactic conventions or rules: [S]har-
ing such a previously mastered ability [is] neither necessary nor
suicient for successful linguistic communication (Davidson
[1994] 2005, 110; cf. also [1982] 1984). To model successful lin-
guistic communication, systematic semantic theories of pass-
ing and prior nature are required, but sharing of prior theories
is not suicient for successful linguistic communication. Even if
speaker and hearer share a prior theory, the ability to interpret
in accordance with that theory does not account for those cases
of successful communication where words are used in novel or
idiosyncratic ways. Nor is a shared prior theory necessary for
communication to succeed all that is necessary is that the pass-
ing theory be shared. Sharing passing theories, however, does
not amount to sharing a previously mastered ability: In conclu-
sion, then, I want to urge that linguistic communication does not
require, though it very often makes use of, rule-governed rep-
etition; and in that case, convention does not help explain what
is basic to linguistic communication, though it may describe a
usual, though contingent feature (Davidson [1982] 1984, 280).
Davidsons 1986 paper has been heavily criticized, among
others by Michael Dummett. Part of the criticism is due to the
provocative formulation Davidson gives there to his conclu-
sion: [T]here is no such thing as a language, not if a language
is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have sup-
posed ([1986] 2005, 107). A controversy between Davidson and
Dummett ensued regarding the questions of whether the notion
of an idiolect is to be explained in terms of a communal language
or the other way around, and whether meaning is essentially nor-
mative or prescriptive. Davidson argues that any obligation we
owe to conformity is contingent on the desire to be understood
([1994] 2005, 118), and he explicitly opposes those forms of social
meaning externalism (such as Tyler Burges), according to
which the literal meaning of words is essentially a matter of the
linguistic practices of the community surrounding the speaker
(Davidson [1994] 2005, 119). Just as for Gricean accounts of
meaning, there are also issues of psychological realism that arise
Performance
for Davidsons account of successful linguistic communication
in terms of the complicated semantic intentions of the speaker.
Kathrin Gler
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bar-On, Dorit, and M. Risjord. 1992. Is there such a thing as a language?
Canadian Journal of Philosophy 22: 16390.
Davidson, Donald. [1982] 1984. Communication and convention.
Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 26580. Oxford: Clarendon.
. [1986] 2005. A nice derangement of epitaphs. In Truth, Language,
and History, 89108. Oxford: Clarendon.
. [1992] 2001. he second person. In Subjective, Intersubjective,
Objective: 10722. Oxford: Clarendon.
. [1994] 2005. he social aspect of language. In Truth, Language,
and History, 10926. Oxford: Clarendon.
Dummett, Michael. A nice derangement of epitaphs: Some comments
on Davidson and Hacking. In Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives
on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. E. Lepore, 45976.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Gler, Kathrin. 2001. Dreams and nightmares: Conventions, Norms,
and Meaning in Davidsons Philosophy of Language. In Interpreting
Davidson, ed. P. Kotatko, P. Pagin, and G. Segal, 5374. Stanford,
CA: CSLI.
Pietroski, Paul. 1994. A defense of derangement. Canadian Journal of
Philosophy 24: 95118.
PERFORMANCE
he study of performance investigates communicative practices
in their sociocultural contexts from three perspectives. First, it
foregrounds the performativity of communicative forms and
practices as modes of action or means of accomplishing social
ends. Second, it directs attention to the poetics of communica-
tive practice or to the forms of verbal artistry through which com-
municative acts are crafted and communicative skill is displayed.
hird, it focuses attention on performances as a special class of
events, such as rituals, spectacles, festivals, or fairs, in which a
societys symbols and values are publicly displayed, interpreted,
and transformed. Within language study, the irst and second
perspectives have been foregrounded.
he contemporary focus on the poetics and performance of
communicative practice emerged in the subdiscipline of linguis-
tic anthropology from a line of inquiry called the ethnography of
speaking. Developed by Dell Hymes and his students during the
1960s and 1970s, the ethnography of speaking highlights perfor-
mance in two linked ways: as speaking practice and as artfully
marked ways of speaking (Bauman and Sherzer 1975). Its cen-
terpiece is what Hymes called the speech event or communica-
tive event, a framework that allowed scholars to analyze multiple
components of language in use, including setting, participants,
ends (goals, purposes), act sequences, key (tone, tenor), instru-
mentalities (channel, code), norms, and genres (the SPEAKING
acronym provides a mnemonic) (Hymes 1967). he interest was
not simply in cataloging these components but, rather, in under-
standing how speakers use language within the conduct of social
life. In highlighting the emergent and creative nature of speech
performance, the ethnography of speaking focused attention
on linguistic forms as resources for living, in Kenneth Burkes
([1941] 1973) sense. Further, it proposed a new unit of study, the
speech community, deined as an organization of diversity that
had to be constituted and managed via performances, rather
than as a preexisting homogeneous entity.
In his concern with how language functions in society,
Hymes was inspired by the work of the prewar Prague School
(192938) and, in particular, by Roman Jakobson (18961982).
Working against Russian Formalisms emphasis on the inner
laws and formal structure of text without regard for context,
the Prague School focused attention on the multifunctionality
of language. Jakobson (1960), building on work by Karl Bhler
and Jan Mukaovsk, identiied six constitutive factors of a com-
municative event and postulated that each factor was associated
with a particular language function. Jakobsons constitutive fac-
tors include addresser, addressee, context, message, contact,
and code; he termed their associated functions expressive (or
emotive), conative, referential, poetic, phatic, and metalingual.
hus, for instance, an utterance (such as eee-gads!) that directs
attention to the addresser (speaker) would be associated with
the expressive function, and so on. his model provided a basis
from which scholars could investigate the relationships among
form, function, and meaning.
In attending to speaking as a social accomplishment, the eth-
nography of speaking opened the way for studies of language
as an arena for the performance of social identities (see iden-
tity, language and). Earlier studies tended to focus on the
organization of communicative life in small, often face-to-face
communities, highlighting the diferential distribution of lin-
guistic resources by age, gender, ethnicity, or other status
markers (see Bauman and Sherzer 1974). Later works consider
how particular linguistic performances are both embedded in
and help to shape wider political or cultural formations, such
as race relations, subcultural or national identities, multicul-
turalism, secularism, and the like. Linguistic anthropologys
historical emphasis on ways of speaking, strategies of voicing,
participation structures, and orientation to audiences made the
ield especially amenable to the approach of the Russian liter-
ary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), whose work on dialogism
and heteroglossia inspired studies in areas including lan-
guage ideology, genre, and intertextuality (Silverstein
and Urban 1996).
By foregrounding speaking as a social performance, the eth-
nography of speaking countered an alternative use of the term
performance proposed by Noam Chomsky (1965). Drawing
on a distinction made by Ferdinand de Saussure ([1907] 1959)
between language (langue) and speech (parole), Chomsky
deined performance as the incomplete and imperfect realization
of language by particular speakers. He opposed performance to
competence, an internalized set of general rules that constitute
ones knowledge of a language, abstracted from particularities of
performance. In contrast, theorists of performance, along with
many linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists, empha-
size communicative competence, understood not as a hypothet-
ical capacity for language but as the contextually grounded and
culturally acquired ability to speak in socially appropriate ways
(Bauman 1977, 11). Here, speaking is understood as a creative
and emergent act through which social life is accomplished. As
such, speaking is inherently risky; it involves skill and account-
ability and is subject to critical evaluation.
589
Performance
Richard Bauman highlights the dimensions of risk, respon-
sibility, and accountability in what has become a classic deini-
tion of performance: Performance as a mode of spoken verbal
communication consists in the assumption of responsibility to
an audience for a display of communicative competence (1977,
11). Inspired by Hymes, Bauman has been particularly inter-
ested in the forms of verbal artistry through which communica-
tive skill is put on display. His work generated a pivotal shift in
folklore studies from a classiicatory concern with texts indepen-
dent of their contexts of use to an interest in the performance of
verbal art as a constitutive ingredient of social life. Performance
in this sense may range from sustained, full performance to a
leeting breakthrough into performance, with hedged or negoti-
ated performance lying somewhere in between (Bauman 2004,
110; the phrase breakthrough into performance comes from
Hymes 1981). Both Bauman and the interactional sociologist
Erving Gofman have been interested in how performances are
framed or keyed, but whereas Gofmans approach is dramatur-
gical, highlighting how social actors move from back stage
regions to perform the face work associated with an array of
social roles (Gofman 1959), Baumans interest lies in poetics,
voice, and genre as verbal resources for the accomplishment of
social ends.
hus far, performance has been considered from two related
vantage points, each grounded in particular disciplinary per-
spectives: Performance as speaking practice has been a focus
of linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics; performance
as verbal art has been highlighted in folkloristics and linguistic
anthropology. A third approach views performance as a special
class of marked events in which a societys symbols are dis-
played for commentary, interpretation, or transformation. his
approach, pioneered by Victor Turner (1967, 1969), is less con-
cerned with language per se. hrough its focus on collective rep-
resentations, cultural symbolism, and collective efervescence,
or communitas, it is located in a Durkheimian paradigm, with
inspiration from Arnold Van Genneps work on rites of passage.
Increasingly, however, scholars are drawing on aspects of all
three approaches. One example of how the three approaches
may be productively considered together is Jane Goodmans
analysis of a childrens performance in the Kabyle Berber region
of Algeria (2005).
he performance in question took place at a wedding,
understood as a festive occasion in which villagers suspended
interpersonal or political conlicts and came together to collec-
tively celebrate the new union. he wedding was set apart from
everyday life by various formal markers: location (an outdoor
public square), timing (late evening), dress, music (traditional
band), and activities (dance). Special forms of verbal art also
marked the occasion: A hired poet recited a poem after henna
was applied to the grooms hand; older village women sang
traditional songs to mark transitions. Wedding guests danced
to show support for the new couple. In this village, men and
women shared the same dancing space but typically danced
sequentially rather than concurrently; in no case did they
dance as couples. One summer, however, village youth active
in the national Berber Cultural Movement formed a mixed-
gender childrens chorus as a way of changing gender relations
in the community and, more broadly, fostering a commitment
590
to forms of social relationship aligned with the democratic
aspirations of their movement (the Berber Cultural Movement
was a minority ethnolinguistic, subnational, and secular
opposition movement in a majority Arabo-Islamist nation).
A chorus ofered a way of teaching children new gender roles
while displaying new modes of gender interaction to the wider
community. To accomplish this, the young men created a new,
highly marked event within the already marked wedding: hey
mounted a stage, rented microphones, hung lights, and thus
conigured an entirely new relationship between performers
and audience, placing the guests in an unfamiliar spectator
role. he children sang political songs that, while well known,
were not typically associated with weddings. his repertoire
provided the backdrop for yet a third performance: An ado-
lescent girl recited a poem on gender relations written by her
brother (the chorus director) a novel form of verbal art that
until then had no possibility of public performance in the vil-
lage. Yet the girl appeared to be only partially invested in serv-
ing as a spokesperson for her brothers text (she animated the
text, in Gofmans sense); at one point, she stumbled over the
words, and her brother prompted her, mouthing the words
from the sidelines. he event culminated in a rousing dance in
which the children spontaneously organized themselves into
malefemale couples, a transformation of gender roles in dance
that galvanized the audience for nearly an hour.
his multilayered performance highlights the use of verbal
art (songs, poems) alongside other performance modes to efect
a transformation of the social relations of gender. It also illus-
trates diferential relations to linguistic resources and linguis-
tic authority (a concern of the ethnography of speaking): he
childrens chorus had access to political repertoires but not to
womens traditional songs or henna poems. A young man could
fashion himself as the author of a poem; a young woman could
only animate it, and was subjected to her brothers corrective
voicing from the sidelines. Further, it shows how the participant
structure (irst made salient in Hymess SPEAKING model) was
both creatively altered for political ends and amenable to mul-
tiple interpretations. Putting girls on a public stage constituted
a display of political commitment to democracy for the young
men; for the girls, in contrast, their appearance on stage was a
highly controversial and far more ambivalent deviation from the
social norms of female performance. Beyond gender consider-
ations, this performance clearly reoriented what was typically
framed as a purely local event to wider ethnolinguistic and sub-
national concerns. Yet embedding this political orientation into
the already sanctioned frame of the wedding entailed less risk
(and ensured greater audience) than mounting a stand-alone
political event might have done.
In sum, the study of performance provides a point of entry
for research into social life as it is constituted, critiqued, and
transformed through communicative practices. It highlights the
emergent, creative, and transformative nature of language use in
a sociocultural context. Finally, performance ofers a compelling
vantage point on the mutually constitutive relationship between
seemingly microlevel practices and wider processes, ideologies,
and political formations.
Jane E. Goodman
Performative and Constative
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Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. he Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist,
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Bauman, Richard. 1977. Verbal Art as Performance. Prospect Heights,
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Intertextuality. Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell.
Bauman, Richard, and Joel Sherzer, eds. 1974. Explorations in the
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Burke, Kenneth. [1941] 1973. he Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in
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Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the heory of Syntax. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Hymes, Dell. 1967. Models of the interaction of language and social set-
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Gofman, Erving. 1959. he Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New
York: Doubleday.
Goodman, Jane. 2005. Berber Culture on the World Stage: From Village to
Video. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Gumperz, John J., and Dell Hymes, eds. 1986. Directions in
Sociolinguistics: he Ethnography of Communication. Oxford and New
York: Blackwell.
Jakobson, Roman. 1960. Concluding statement: Linguistics and poetics.
In Style in Language, ed. T. A. Sebeok, 35077. Cambridge, MA: MIT
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Burston. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. [1907] 1959. Course in General Linguistics.
Ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin. New
York: Philosophical Library.
Silverstein, Michael, and Greg Urban. 1996. Natural Histories of Discourse.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Turner, Victor. 1967. he Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
. 1969. he Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure.
Chicago: Aldine.
PERFORMATIVE AND CONSTATIVE
he distinction between performative and constative utterances
was irst introduced by J. L. Austin, and is illustrative of a reaction
within language philosophy to the doctrine of logical posi-
tivism: his paradigm holds that sentence meaning can be
captured in terms of truth conditions (see truth conditional
semantics) and logical relations, and that sentences that can-
not be thus veriied are essentially meaningless. In contrast,
ordinary language philosophy, as conceived by philoso-
phers such as J. L. Austin, Peter Strawson, and H. P. Grice (see
cooperative principle), examines language in use, and thus
lies at the basis of the development of modern pragmatics.
Austin observes that there are utterances, such as I (hereby)
bequeath my watch to my brother, for which any evaluation in
terms of truth and falsity is irrelevant; this type of utterance he
labeled (at least at the outset) performatives, or utterances that
perform an action, as opposed to constatives, which describe a
state of afairs.
he seminal source for this distinction is Austin (1962), pub-
lished posthumously as a written record of lectures delivered in
1955 (and based on earlier, largely unpublished ideas). his is
important for two reasons. First of all, much of Austins thinking
is actually contemporary with (though probably largely uninlu-
enced by) Ludwig Wittgensteins ideas on language-games.
Secondly, the 1962 monograph records an evolution in Austins
thinking, in which he starts from a distinction between two utter-
ance classes and ends up drawing the conclusion that this dis-
tinction is untenable and that all utterances perform. In order
to understand this major shift, it is necessary to trace the evolu-
tion in his model in some detail.
Constatives are deined as utterances that have truth condi-
tions, the prototype case being desciptions of states of afairs
(e.g., he sun comes up in the East). In contrast, Austins origi-
nal performatives do not have truth conditions, in that they do
not commit the speakers beliefs to the proposition expressed.
Utterances such as I hereby baptize this child John Doe do
things: hey perform actions, in that they change reality from
one in which a child named John Doe does not exist to one in
which such a child does exist. Performatives do not have truth
conditions but, rather, felicity conditions; that is, they are
only performed successfully (or happily, to use Austins term) in
speciic circumstances. For instance, baptizing is only performed
happily if the speaker has the proper authority to perform the
procedure (e.g., a priest), if the procedure is carried out correctly
and completely (using the appropriate verbal format), and if the
parties involved carry out any necessary subsequent conduct.
he question arises whether performatives and constat-
ives have any formal identifying features, such as grammatical
or lexical devices, that provide cues for the hearer about their
pragmatic status. Austin originally thought that so-called per-
formative verbs might be a good candidate; in an utterance like
I (hereby) promise Ill inish the essay on time, the matrix verb
promise marks the performance of the action of promising.
Constatives appear to lack such a marker. Since performative
verbs are easily identiied (they are irst person present tense
indicative, they collocate with hereby, etc), they may function as
powerful cues and can be said (following Searle 1969) to function
as illocutionary force indicating devices (or IFIDs).
he assumption that performatives must have performative
verbs proves untenable, however. A slightly variant formula-
tion of the aforementioned promise, such as Ill inish the essay
on time, is functionally very similar, if not identical, to the ver-
sion with promise. he problem is that the second version does
not contain a performative verb; therefore, if one assumes that
both versions perform the same action, it must necessarily follow
that performative utterances do not need to have explicit perfor-
mative verbs. his leads Austin to posit a distinction between
explicit and implicit (or, as he called them, primary performa-
tives) performatives.
We have now lost any kind of formal marking of performatives
since both constatives and implicit performatives lack overt per-
formative verbs. In fact, once one posits the existence of implicit
performatives, the possibility is raised that a constative such as
he sun rises in the East is, in fact, an implicit version of the more
591
Performative and Constative
explicit I (hereby) state that the sun rises in the East (since state
here has all the characteristics of a performative verb). What is
more, one could claim that statements also have felicity condi-
tions in the sense that they are only uttered happily if the speaker
is reasonably sure about the truth of the proposition expressed.
Conversely, many performatives need to bear some relation to
actual facts and, thus, have at least some propositional content.
he question thus arises whether constatives are similar to per-
formatives in that they also perform an action. Austin admits
that they do, namely, the action of committing the speaker to the
truth of the propososition: Once we realize that what we have
to study is not the sentence but the issuing of an utterance in a
speech situation, there can hardly be any longer a possibility of
not seeing that stating is performing an act (Austin 1962, 139).
he performativeconstative distinction thus becomes unten-
able, and one can only conclude that all utterances are actions.
Austins original two utterance classes are then merely sub-
classes of acts performed through language, or speech-acts,
which consist of three distinct types of act: locution, illocution,
and perlocution.
he locutionary act can be more or less equated to the
semantic meaning of the utterance and is roughly equivalent
to uttering a certain sentence with a certain sense and refer-
ence (Austin 1962, 109). Illocutionary acts are utterances
which have a certain (conventional) force (1962, 109), such
as baptizing, promising, and all of Austins original performa-
tives, but also former constatives such as informing and stating.
Perlocutionary acts, inally, are what we bring about or achieve
by saying something (1962, 109), that is, the consequences that
utterances trigger (which may, but need not be verbal), such as
convincing, deterring, or frightening. In short, all utterances per-
form three diferent acts: the act of saying something (locution),
what the speakers intention is in saying something (illocution),
and what its consequences are by saying something (perlocu-
tion). In much of the subsequent literature, the term speech-act
has become virtually synonymous with the illocutionary force of
the utterance, but it is important to stress that, for Austin, per-
forming a speech-act involves performing all three kinds of act
simultaneously.
Since all utterances are now considered to be performative
speech-acts, the question is raised as to how many diferent
classes of speech-acts can be distinguished on linguistic grounds.
Out of the three acts involved, locution does not provide any use-
ful distinguishing criteria since the same propositional content
can be employed for creating various speech-acts; neither does
perlocution since the perlocutionary efect of a speech-act is dif-
icult to predict. However, utterances do difer systematically
with regard to their illocutionary force and, thus, presumably
have diferent felicity conditions. It should, therefore, be possible
to develop a new taxonomy of illocutionary acts based on these
felicity conditions or the linguistic realizations thereof.
Austin did, in fact, develop a rudimentary taxonomy, but it
was left to his pupil J. R. Searle to come up with a more systematic
classiication (see Searle 1979). Searle distinguishes ive major
classes of illocutionary act:
(i) Representatives (e.g., stating, describing, concluding),
which commit the speaker to the truth of the expressed
proposition;
592
(ii) Directives (e.g., requests, suggestions, commands),
which consist of attempts by the speaker to get the hearer to
do something;
(iii) Commissives (e.g., promising, threatening, ofering),
which commit the speaker to some future course of action;
(iv) Expressives (e.g., apologizing, congratulating, thanking),
which express a psychological state;
(v) Declarations (e.g., declaring war, baptizing, chisten-
ing), which efect immediate changes in some institutional
state of afairs, typically relying on elaborate extralinguistic
institutions.
his classiication, despite having been hugely inluential,
raises some serious problems. First of all, some speech-acts seem
to belong to more than one category: A complaint such as Im
upset that you forgot to put the trash out presumably expresses the
speakers psychological state (expressive) but might also be inter-
preted as an attempt to get the hearer to take the trash out (direc-
tive). Secondly, illocutionary acts relect the communicative
intention of the speaker, who hopes that this intention will be
recognized and interpreted accurately by the hearer. Again, this
raises the question as to how hearers are able to do so. Searles
answer is the performative hypothesis, whereby every utterance U
has an underlying format of the form I (hereby) Vp you (that) U,
Vp representing the (explicit or implicit) performative verb. his
still begs the question how hearers know that, for instance, he
door is standing wide open is the implicit version of I apologize for
leaving the door open, rather than of I am complaining that you
left the door open (or, for that matter, an indirect version of the
request Could you close the door?) he three traditional sentence
types (declarative, interrogative, imperative) potentially ofer
some help by functioning as IFIDs, as may some lexical relexes
associated with certain illocutionary acts (e.g., please appears to
co-occur exclusively with directives). However, the fact remains
that most speech-act realizations contain neither a performative
verb nor any other IFID. Such utterances, which exhibit no overt
structural marking of their speech-act status (as in he door is
standing wide open when intended as a request), Searle labels
indirect speech-acts. However, since most usages of speech-acts
appear to be indirect rather than direct, it remains unexplained
how hearers are capable of computing the speakers intended
illocutionary force in the absence of structural signals. A possible
explanation is that people rely on contextual cues, working out
the implicit meaning by relying on Grices cooperative principle
through conversational implicatures.
he fact remains that Searles classiication ofers little help in
assigning speech-act status to stretches of verbal interaction in
ethnographic data. Ultimately, it could be argued, the interpreta-
tion of an utterance will depend on the speech event in which it
occurs, that is, the culturally recognized social activity in which
language plays a speciic, and often rather specialized, role
(Levinson 1983, 279). In classroom interactions, for instance,
teacher questions regularly violate Searles sincerity condition
since the speaker already knows the answer and is thus not sin-
cere in trying to obtain a missing piece of information.
A radically diferent approach to the interpretation prob-
lem (i.e., how the speakers communicative intention is rec-
ognized in the absence of linguistic cues) is ofered by the
Perisylvian Cortex
ethnomethodological paradigm of conversation analysis.
Consider the following exchange:
S: Another glass of wine would hit the spot.
H: I dont think so mate, youve had enough.
Ss utterance, despite being a declarative, is clearly not inter-
preted as simply stating a fact by H; rather, Hs response (a
refusal to comply) shows that it was interpreted as a request
for another glass of wine. he basis for interpretation here lies
in the conversational sequencing of the two contributions: hey
are conditionally reliant upon each other, by virtue of being two
parts of a request-refusal adjacency pair. he question as to
the intended illocutionary force of Ss turn becomes moot in this
approach; what matters is that H has clearly interpreted it as
request-like, having provided an appropriate second part to the
adjacency pair. Of course, H might provide an incorrect interpre-
tation, but if this is the case, it will become appararent in the sub-
sequent interaction. Such an inductive approach avoids some of
the pitfalls inherent in attempts to classify speech-acts according
to the nonobservable, and therefore unfalsiiable, intentions of
the speaker.
Ronald Geluykens
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do hings with Words. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Levinson, S. C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Searle, J. R. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 1979. Expression and Meaning: Studies in the heory of Speech Acts.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
PERISYLVIAN CORTEX
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the application of dei-
cit-lesion correlations based on autopsy material to the problem
of the regional specialization of the brain for language yielded
the fact that human language requires parts of the association
cortex in the lateral portion of one cerebral hemisphere (Broca
Inferior parietal lobe
Brocas area
Wernickes area
1861; Wernicke [1874] 1969), usually the left in right-handed
individuals (Broca 1865). his cortex surrounds the sylvian is-
sure and runs from the pars triangularis and opercularis of the
inferior frontal gyrus (Brodmans areas [BA] 45, 44: Brocas area),
through the angular and supramarginal gyri (BA 39 and 40) into
the superior temporal gyrus (BA 22: Wernickes area) in the dom-
inant hemisphere (Figure 1).
Classical Clinical Models of the Functional Neuroanatomy
of Perisylvian Cortex for Language
he irst theories of the functional neuroanatomy of language
pertained to this cortical region. he pioneers of aphasiology
Paul Broca, Karl Wernicke, John Hughlings Jackson, and other
neurologists described patients with lesions in the left inferior
frontal lobe whose speech was hesitant and poorly articu-
lated, and other patients with lesions more posteriorly, in the
superior temporal lobe, who had disturbances of compre-
hension and luent speech with sound and word substitutions
(see aphasia). hese correlations led to the theory that lan-
guage comprehension went on in unimodal auditory association
cortex (wernickes area, BA 22) adjacent to the primary audi-
tory cortex (Heschls gyrus, BA 41), and motor speech planning
went on in unimodal motor association cortex in brocas area
(BA 44 and 45) adjacent to the primary motor cortex (BA 4).
hese theories incorporated the only principle that has ever been
articulated regarding the localization of a language operation.
According to this principle, language operations are localized in
relation to their sensory-motor requirements. Speech planning
goes on in Brocas area because Brocas is immediately adjacent
to the motor area responsible for movement of the articulators,
and Wernickes area is involved in comprehension because it
is immediately adjacent to the primary auditory cortex. hese
ideas and models were extended by Norman Geschwind and his
colleagues in the 1960s and 1970s. Geschwind (1965) added the
hypothesis that word meaning was localized in the inferior
parietal lobe (BA 39 and 40) because word meanings consist
of associations between sounds and properties of objects, and
the inferior parietal lobe is an area of multimodal association
cortex to which ibers from unimodal association cortex related
to audition, vision, and somasthesis project.
Figure 1. A depiction of the left hemisphere of the brain
showing the main language areas.
593
Perisylvian Cortex
Despite its widespread clinical use, however, this model has
serious limitations. It deals only with words, not other levels of
the language code. From a linguistic and psycholinguistic
point of view, the syndromes are all composed of many process-
ing deicits, which are diferent in diferent patients. he syn-
dromes themselves do not provide a guide to the localization of
more speciic components of the language processing system.
As reviewed in the following, Geschwinds critical contribu-
tion regarding the role of the parietal lobe receives no empirical
support.
Linguistically Oriented Models of the Functional
Neuroanatomy of the Perisylvian Cortex for Language
Since approximately 1975, psychologists and linguists have
approached language disorders and their neural basis in a more
systematic fashion, informed by models of language structure
and function. I briely review two areas of work that relate these
models to the functional neuroanatomy of the persiylvian cortex
and other brain regions.
LEXICAL SEMANTIC PROCESSING. As noted, traditional neu-
rological models of the neural basis for word meaning main-
tained that the meanings of words consist of sets of neural
correlates of the physical properties that are associated with a
heard word (Wernicke [1874] 1969), all converging in the infe-
rior parietal lobe (Geschwind 1965). It is now known that most
lesions in the inferior parietal lobe do not afect word meaning
(Hart and Gordon 1990), and functional neuroimaging stud-
ies designed to activate word meanings do not tend to activate
this region (see the following). A. Damasio (1989), therefore,
modiied this model, suggesting that the meanings of words
included retroactivation of neural patterns in unimodal
association primary sensory cortex. Evidence for this comes
from functional neuroimaging results that reveal activation
for diferent classes of words in diferent areas, each related
to the sensory-motor associations of the word (frontal cortex
for verbs and manipulable objects; inferior temporal cortex for
concrete nouns) (see Caramazza and Mahon 2006, for review).
However, it is not clear that these activations relect the mean-
ing of words, rather than properties commonly associated with
words. Word meanings include much more than sensory and
motor associations; the essence of word meaning is itself quite
mysterious (Fodor 1998). In any event, word meanings are part
of a network that relates a word to a complex set of concepts
and contexts (Tulving 1972).
here is evidence that a critical part of this semantic network
is located outside the perisylvian cortex, in the anterior inferior
temporal lobes. Patients with semantic dementia, a degenera-
tive disease that afects the anterior inferior temporal lobe, and
herpes encephalitis, with somewhat more posterior lesions, have
initially selective and ongoing major problems with many aspects
of semantic memory (Davies et al. 2005; Gorno-Tempini et al.
2004; Warrington and Shallice 1984). Activation studies have
implicated the inferior temporal cortex in representing concepts
and word meanings (Caramazza and Mahon 2006). Some stud-
ies of the neural generators for the N400 event-related potential
(ERP) wave, which relects some aspect of semantic processing
(Kutas and Hillyard 1980; Holcomb and Neville 1990), present
594
evidence that this wave originates in the inferior temporal lobe
(Nobre and McCarthy 1995), though perhaps more posteriorly
than the lesion studies would suggest. Other brain areas that
have been suggested as loci for semantic processing (the infe-
rior frontal lobe: Petersen et al. 1988; Dapretto and Bookheimer
1999) are much less clearly related to this function.
In the past two decades, studies of impairments of word
meaning and functional neuroimaging have suggested a iner-
grained set of distinctions within the class of objects. Both dei-
cits and functional activation studies have suggested that there
are unique neural loci for the representation of categories such
as tools (frontal association cortex), animals and foods (lateral
inferior temporal lobe), and faces (medial inferior temporal lobe)
(see Caramazza and Mahon 2006, for review). Debate continues
as to whether such divisions and localizations relect diferent
co-occurrences of properties of objects within these classes or
innate, neurally localized human capacities to divide the world
along these lines.
SYNTACTIC PROCESSING. Most researchers also subscribe to
localizationist views regarding aspects of syntactic process-
ing. A well-known hypothesis is the trace deletion hypothesis
(Grodzinsky 2000), which claims that patients with lesions in
Brocas area have deicits afecting certain moved constituents
(traces in Chomskys theory). he evidence supporting these
models is based on correlating deicits in syntactic comprehen-
sion to lesions. However, there are two issues that such data must
face. First, it is often not clear whether a patient has a deicit in
a particular parsing operation or a reduction in the resources
available to accomplish syntactically based comprehension.
Second, there is virtually no consistency in an individual patients
performance across tasks, raising questions about whether a
patient who fails on a particular structure has a parsing deicit
(Caplan, DeDe, and Michaud 2006 and Caplan, Waters, Dede, et
al. 2007).
Assuming that patients performances relect deicits in
particular parsing operations, the relation of these deicits to
lesions does not support invariant localization models. We have
recently reported the most detailed study of patients with lesions
whose syntactic comprehension has been assessed (Caplan,
Waters, Kennedy, et al. 2007). Lesion size in multiple, cytoarchi-
tectonically diferent small areas of cortex both within and out-
side the perisylvian and non-perisylvian area, not connected by
major iber tracts, predicted performance, ruling out invariant
localization as the mode of neural organization for the opera-
tions supporting this function that were assessed. At the same
time, patients who performed at similar levels behaviorally had
lesions of very diferent sizes in larger areas of the brain (such
as the perisylvian association cortex, or the entire left hemi-
spheric cortex) in which it has been suggested that syntactic
processing might be distributed, and patients with equivalent
lesion sizes in these larger areas varied greatly in their level of
performance, arguing that syntactic processing in comprehen-
sion is not distributed in these areas. he data are consistent
with a model in which the neural tissue that is responsible for
the operations underlying sentence comprehension and syntac-
tic processing is localized in diferent neural regions in diferent
individuals.
Perisylvian Cortex
Functional neuroimaging studies have been said to provide
evidence for the localization of speciic parsing and interpretive
operations in Brocas area (Ben-Shachar et al. 2003; Ben-Shachar,
Palti, and Grodzinsky 2004; Bornkessel, Fiebach, and Friederici
2005; Fiebach, Schlesewsky, and Lohmann 2005). However,
most neuroimaging studies actually show multiple cortical areas
of activation in tasks that involve syntactic processing, and dif-
ferent areas have been activated in diferent tasks. Overall, these
data also suggest variation in the localization of the areas that
are suicient to support syntactic processing within the language
area across the adult population, although invariant localization
models are not ruled out (Caplan, Chen, and Waters 2008).
Overview
he left perisylvian association cortex appears to be the most
important brain region supporting human language. However,
it is not the sole area involved in these abilities. How this area
and other brain regions act to support particular language oper-
ations is not yet understood. here is evidence for both locali-
zation of some functions in subparts of this region and other
brain areas, and for either multifocal or distributed involve-
ment of brain areas in other language functions. It may be that
some higher-level principles are operative in this domain. For
instance, content-addressable activation and associative opera-
tions such as those that underlie phoneme recognition, lexical
access, and lexical semantic activation, may be invariantly
localized, while combinatorial computational operations such
as those that constitute the syntax of natural language may not
be. However, many aspects of these topics remain to be studied
with tools of modern cognitive neuroscience.
David Caplan
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Ben-Shachar, M., T. Hendler, I. Kahn, D. Ben-Bashat, and Y. Grodzinsky.
2003. he neural reality of syntactic transformations: Evidence from
fMRI. Psychology Science 14: 43340.
Ben-Shachar M., D. Palti, and Y. Grodzinsky. 2004. he neural correlates
of syntactic movement: Converging evidence from two fMRI experi-
ments. Neuroimage 21: 132036.
Bornkessel I., C. Fiebach, and A. Friederici. 2005. On the cost of syntactic
ambiguity in human language comprehension: An individual difer-
ences approach. Cognitive Brain Research 21: 1121.
Broca, P. 1861. Remarques sur le sige de la facult du parole articul,
suivis dune observation daphmie (perte de parole). Bulletin de l
Socit dAnatomie (Paris) 36: 33057.
Broca P. 1865. Sur le sige de la facult du langage articul. Bulletin de
la Socit danthropologie 6: 33793.
Caplan, D., E. Chen, and G. Waters. 2008. Task-dependent and task-
independent neurovascular responses to syntactic processing. Cortex
44: 25775.
Caplan, D., G. DeDe, and J. Michaud. 2006. Task-independent and task-
speciic syntactic deicits in aphasic comprehension. Aphasiology
20: 893920.
Caplan, D., G. Waters, G. DeDe, J. Michaud, and A. Reddy. 2007. A study
of syntactic processing in Aphasia I: Behavioral (psycholinguistic)
aspects. Brain and Language 101: 10350.
Caplan, D., G. Waters, D. Kennedy, N. Alpert, N. Makris, G. DeDe,
J. Michaud, and A. Reddy. 2007. A study of syntactic processing in
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Perlocution
Caramazza, A. and B. Mahon. 2006. he organization of conceptual
knowledge in the brain: he futures past and some future directions.
Cognitive Neuropsychology 23: 1338.
Damasio, A. 1989. Time-locked multiregional retroactivation: A sys-
tems-level proposal for the neural substrates of recall and recogni-
tion. Cognition 33: 2562.
Dapretto, M., and S. Y. Bookheimer. 1999. Form and con-
tent: Dissociating syntax and semantics in sentence comprehension.
Neuron 24: 42732.
Davies, R. R., J. R. Hodges, J. R. Kril, K. Patterson, G. M. Halliday, and J.
H. Xuereb. 2005. he pathological basis of semantic dementia. Brain
128: 198495.
Fiebach, C. J., M. Schlesewsky, and G. Lohmann. 2005. Revisiting the
role of Brocas area in sentence processing: Syntactic integration ver-
sus syntactic working memory. Human Brain Mapping 24: 7991.
Fodor, J. A. 1998. Concepts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Geschwind, N. 1965. Disconnection syndromes in animals and man.
Brain 88: 23794, 585644.
Gorno-Tempini, M. L., N. F. Dronkers, K. P. Rankin, J. M. Ogar,
L. Phengrasamy, H. J. Rosen, J. K. Johnson, M. W. Weiner, and B. L.
Miller. 2004. Cognition and anatomy in three variants of primary pro-
gressive aphasia. Annals of Neurology 55: 33546.
Grodzinsky, Y. 2000. he neurology of syntax: Language use without
Brocaa area. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23: 47117.
Hart, J., Jr., and B. Gordon. 1990. Delineation of single-word seman-
tic comprehension deicits in aphasia, with anatomical correlation.
Annals of Neurology 27: 22633.
Holcomb, P. J., and H. J. Neville. 1990. Auditory and visual semantic
priming in lexical decision: A comparison using event-related brain
potentials. Language and Cognitive Processes 5.4: 281312.
Kutas, M., and S. A. Hillyard. 1980. Reading senseless sentences: Brain
potentials relect semantic incongruity. Science 207: 2034.
Nobre, A. C., and G. McCarthy. 1995. Language-related ield poten-
tials in the anterior-medial temporal lobe: II. Efects of word type and
semantic priming. Journal of Neuroscience 15: 10908.
Petersen, S. E., P. T. Fox, M. Posner, M. Minton, and M. Raichle. 1988.
Positron emission tomographic studies of the cortical anatomy of
single-word processing. Nature 331: 5859.
Tulving, E. 1972. Episodic and semantic memory. In Organization
of Memory, ed. E. Tulving and W. Donaldson, 381403. New
York: Academic Press.
Warrington, E., and T. Shallice. 1984. Category speciic semantic impair-
ments. Brain 107: 82953.
Wernicke, K. [1874] 1969. he aphasic symptom complex: A psychologi-
cal study on a neurological basis. Breslau: Kohn and Wegert. Repr. in
Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Vol. 4. Ed. R. S. Cohen and
M. W. Wartofsky, 3497. Boston: Reidel.
PERLOCUTION
In pragmatics, perlocution refers to the efect speech-acts
have on the hearer (H). J. L. Austin (1962) distinguishes three
types of act that utterances perform simultaneously: locution
(roughly equivalent to the meaning in a propositional sense),
illocution (the intended force of the speech-act), and perlocu-
tion. Austin characterizes perlocution as follows: Saying some-
thing will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential
efects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions or actions of the
audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons: and it may be
done with the design, intention, or purpose of producing them
(1962, 101). Hs reaction to an illocutionary act might be verbal
(e.g., asking a question might prompt an answer), or nonverbal
595
Person
(e.g., an insult may result in a slap in the face), but also an internal
psychological or emotional state (e.g., a threat might result in H
being frightened or angry).
Although Austin intended perlocution to be an integral part
of a speech-act, later developments of speech-act theory have
focused almost exclusively on illocution, that is, the speakers
mental state or intention (e.g., Searle 1969). As a result, the term
speech-act has become virtually synonomous with illocution-
ary force. his is perhaps unsurprising, given that perlocutions
do not always consist of observable behavior (and might therefore
be argued to fall outside a linguistic theory of pragmatics; but see
Gu 1993). Moreover, perlocutions are hard to classify: Not only
do certain illocutions allow for a range of possible perlocutions
(a request, for instance, may result in either compliance or rejec-
tion by the hearer); there is often no way of knowing whether the
achieved perlocution is actually the one the speaker (S) intended
to achieve (a warning, say, may be intended to make the hearer
(H) take evasive action but may only result in frightening him/
her). Nevertheless, it is easy to demonstrate that perlocutions are
intrinsic parts of speech-acts since their successful performance
often depends on them. As Austin points out, an utterance such
as I bet you 10 dollars the Knicks will win by 5 points is felicitous
only if it receives uptake, that is, if H acknowledges and accepts
the bet (see felicity conditions).
conversation analysis (Sacks 1992) ofers a potential
alternative, inductive approach to (verbal) perlocutions based on
local sequential organization. Consider the following exchange:
S: Have a cookie
H: ehm no thanks Ive just had dinner
In this exchange, Ss contribution can be labeled an ofer by vir-
tue of its being the irst part of an ofer-refusal (or ofer-accep-
tance) adjacency pair. If H recognizes Ss utterance as such,
he/she will have to provide a sequentially appropriate response
(or perlocution). he second part is thus conditionally reliant on
the irst part.
Ronald Geluykens
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do hings with Words. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Gu, Yueguo. 1993. he impasse of perlocution. Journal of Pragmatics
20: 40532.
Sacks, Harvey. 1992. Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Blackwell.
Searle, J. R. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
PERSON
Person is a morphosyntactic property of nominal phrases (nouns
and pronouns) used to indicate the discourse role of their ref-
erent. English personal pronouns show three person distinc-
tions: irst person, indicating speakers (I, we); second person,
indicating addressees (you); and third person, indicating dis-
course nonparticipants (he, she, it, they). Some languages also
distinguish inclusive and exclusive we: Ojibwa has kiinawint for
groups including speakers and addressees, and niinawint for
596
groups including speakers but excluding addressees. Further
divisions include an impersonal category and a sentient/non-
sentient third person opposition. Like number and gender
marking, person can also be indicated on agreeing elements,
particularly inite verbs. Present tense English verbs show only
third person singular agreement (walk-s), while agreement
on Italian indicative verbs distinguishes three persons in both
singular (parl-o I speak, parl-i you speak, parl-a he/she/it
speaks) and plural.
Linguistic phenomena related to person include morpho-
logical categories of pronouns and agreement; partial mor-
phological syncretisms among person categories, in pronouns
or agreement; interactions of person with the ordering of pro-
nominal clitics; interactions of person with case, agreement,
or structural position; and surprising restrictions on person com-
binations, usually involving direct and indirect objects (the *me
lui efect, or Person Case Constraint). Such phenomena form the
empirical basis of morphosyntactic theories of person.
here are three principal theoretical approaches to person. A
traditional insight represents person categories within a hierar-
chy of nominals inluencing pronoun morphosyntax, for exam-
ple, case and agreement marking in transitive clauses (Dixon
1994, 85). Cross-linguistically, third person is the least marked,
ranking below irst and second. For example, in Georgian, irst
and second person objects are indexed by verbal morphology,
while verbs with third person objects resemble intransitives. In
Dyirbal, irst and second person pronouns have nominative/
accusative case marking, while third person pronouns, proper
names, and common nouns show an ergative/absolutive oppo-
sition. Some scholars rank irst person highest (Zwicky 1977),
while others regard the ranking of irst and second person as
variable.
Another approach seeks to derive morphosyntactic efects by
representing person as a complex category built from elemental
features. One such feature analysis locates person features
such as [participant], [speaker], and [addressee] within a univer-
sal geometry of privative pronominal features, in which the avail-
ability of one feature may depend on the presence of another.
An inluential paper by Heidi Harley and Elizabeth Ritter (2002)
outlines this approach. Another type of analysis treats person
features as binary rather than privative; this allows the grammar
to refer to negative values, such as [speaker]. Robert Rolf Noyer
(1997) makes a signiicant case for the binary-feature analysis.
A third approach, potentially compatible with the second,
associates diferent persons with diferent syntactic representa-
tions (Ritter 1995; Dchaine and Wiltschko 2002; Bejar 2003).
Within the featural approach, most commentators assume
the existence of features corresponding to irst and second per-
son. However, third person is widely treated as simply lacking
such features (Zwicky 1977; Noyer 1997). his analysis correctly
predicts certain limits on the typology of person categories
(Greenberg 1966). As noted, some languages have separate cat-
egories for inclusive and exclusive we, whose use depends on
whether addressees are included. hus, [addressee] is a distinc-
tive feature; inclusive ([speaker, addressee]) has it, while irst
person ([speaker]) does not. However, there is no parallel con-
trast between categories whose use depends on whether nonpar-
ticipants are included. For example, no known languages have
Person
separate categories for inclusive and exclusive plural you, whose
use depends on whether nonparticipants are included. Such
observations imply that there is no third person feature, there-
fore no categories such as [speaker, addressee, nonparticipant],
[speaker, nonparticipant], or [addressee, nonparticipant]. hird
person pronouns thus refer to nonparticipants by default, lack-
ing the features that allow reference to discourse participants.
Nevertheless, some phenomena seem to require reference to
nonparticipants, for example, syncretism in Mam pronominal
enclitics (Noyer 1997) or the Spanish spurious se rule (Bonet
1991). An obvious solution is to permit limited reference to nega-
tive values, such as [speaker, addressee]. he success of the
privative approach depends on identifying plausible alternative
analyses for such cases.
Although the [speaker] and [addressee] features are sui-
cient to generate the four main person categories attested cross-
linguistically, there is evidence for an additional [participant]
feature, shared by irst and second person (Farkas 1990; Noyer
1997; Halle 1997). For example, while Winnebago agreement dis-
tinguishes irst and second person, free personal pronouns only
distinguish participants from nonparticipants (nee, I or you,
ee he/she).
he argument against a [nonparticipant] feature also applies
to the [addressee] feature in languages without an inclusive cat-
egory (McGinnis 2005). Such languages treat the inclusive as irst
person, not second (Zwicky 1977; Noyer 1997). hus, in such
languages, [addressee] is non-distinctive: here can only be an
opposition between [speaker] and non[speaker] participants,
not between [addressee] and non-[addressee] participants. If
[nonparticipant] is nonexistent because it is never distinctive,
then [addressee] is likewise nonexistent in languages without
an inclusive category. his suggests that the morphosyntactic
contrast between irst and second person is suicient to activate
[speaker], while [addressee] can be activated only by an addi-
tional contrast between inclusive and irst person. In such cases,
[addressee] is indeed necessary to capture widespread (and non-
default) syncretisms between inclusive and second person
most famously identiied in Algonquian languages but common
among languages with an inclusive category. For example, the
inclusive pronoun in Ojibwa (kiinawint) shows syncretism with
both second person (kiin, plural kiinawaa) and irst (niin, plural
niinawint), but not with third (wiin, plural wiinawaa).
Martha McGinnis
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bejar, Susana. 2003. Phi-syntax: A theory of agreement. Ph.D. diss.,
University of Toronto.
Bonet, Eullia. 1991. Morphology after syntax: Pronominal clitics in
Romance. Ph.D diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dchaine, Rose-Marie, and Martina Wiltschko. 2002. Decomposing
pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 33: 40942.
Dixon, R. M. W. 1994. Ergativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Farkas, Donka. 1990. Two cases of underspeciication in morphology.
Linguistic Inquiry 21: 53950.
Greenberg, Joseph. 1966. Universals of Language. he Hague: Mouton.
Halle, Morris. 1997. Distributed morphology: Impoverishment
and ission. In MITWPL 30: Papers at the Interface, ed. Benjamin
Philology and Hermeneutics
Bruening, Yoonjung Kang, and Martha McGinnis, 42549. Cambridge,
MA: MITWPL.
Harley, Heidi, and Elizabeth Ritter. 2002. Person and number in pro-
nouns: A feature-geometric analysis. Language 78: 482526.
McGinnis, Martha. 2005. On markedness asymmetries in person and
number. Language 81: 699718.
Noyer, Robert Rolf. 1997. Features, Positions, and Aixes in Autonomous
Morphological Structure. New York: Garland.
Ritter, Elizabeth. 1995. On the syntactic category of pronouns and agree-
ment. Natural Language and Linguistic heory 13: 40543.
Zwicky, Arnold M. 1977. Hierarchies of person. Chicago Linguistic
Society 13: 71433.
PHILOLOGY AND HERMENEUTICS
his entry briely outlines some aspects of the study of linguistics
leading up to the twentieth century. As two of the earliest, most
thoroughgoing attempts in the West to understand written texts
and spoken discourse, philology and hermeneutics represent
vital precursors of todays language science. Still synonymous
with classical studies and historical linguistics, philol-
ogy as both word and practice can be traced to ancient Greece
and Rome. While it is likewise based on a Greek word and while
the problem of interpretation engaged many ancient thinkers,
hermeneutics is often narrowly associated with vigorous philo-
sophical debates centered in late eighteenth-century Germany
and originating in Reformation treatises on the right interpreta-
tion of scripture. Today, the heritage of philology and hermeneu-
tics persists in the modern organization of university disciplines,
as well as in many indispensable scholarly monuments, such as
he Oxford English Dictionary.
Philology implies love of language and once stood for lin-
guistics. Hermeneutics can be deined more speciically as the
art (or science) of interpretation. he progress from amateur art
to professional science marks the history of both. In their hey-
days, philology and hermeneutics were deemed central to all dis-
ciplines, whether scientiic or humanistic; at other times, either
discipline could also be reduced to trivial pedantry. Among their
more prescient discoveries are Sir William Joness hypothesis of a
common genetic origin for the evolution of all Indo-European
languages nearly a century before Charles Darwins On the
Origin of Species and the hermeneutic circle, the feedback-like
cycle of interpretation formulated by Friedrich Ast almost 150
years before the birth of cybernetics.
he historical survey to follow highlights the respective ori-
gins, development, and interrelations of philology and her-
meneutics and is singularly appropriate, given the historical
predilection of both ields. Because of the limitations of space, the
focus remains on the European intellectual tradition. However,
the theme emphasized here, that early investigations of language
sometimes uncannily anticipated modern scientiic paradigms,
applies equally to non-Western traditions. In South Asia, for
instance, the classical Sanskrit grammar of Panini (ca. sixth to
ifth cent. b.c.) strongly preigures generative grammar.
Interest in the nature and origins of human language goes back
to the earliest Western literature, such as the Tower of Babel in
Genesis. here is also a fascinating folktale retold by Herodotus,
in which an Egyptian pharaoh isolates two children from birth
in order to see what language they will speak presumably the
597
Philology and Hermeneutics
worlds oldest. Nevertheless, although both philology and her-
meneutics have Greek roots, neither was avowed as a primary
concern of leading classical philosophers such as Plato and
Aristotle. In classical Greek, the keyword logos signiied dis-
course in many diverse senses, including speech (both lan-
guage and oration), argument (a single proposition or an division of parts of speech and the treatment of Greek nominal
entire line of reasoning), prose, story, history, reason, and verbal systems, still appears in twentieth-century textbooks.
and thought. Eventually, philologia, like philomatheia, would
imply studiousness, love of learning in general, since all learn-
ing at that time revolved around gaining written (and mathe-
matical) literacy, but Socrates could be called a philologos in the
more original sense of fond of speaking he famously refused
to write down his ideas. Plato, on the other hand, had fewer com-
punctions about writing. (In order to elevate written dialogue to
full-blown dialectic, Plato may himself have coined philosophia
philosophy as a more rigorous alternative.) he irst classi-
cal igure to embrace the title philologos was Eratosthenes, the
second Plato, who was one of the librarians of Alexandria and
a true philomath: He wrote on such diverse ields as geometry,
history, philosophy, poetry, and literary criticism.
In the classical era, hermeneia interpretation (sometimes
in the sense of translation) was a secondary philosophi-
cal concern, recalling the subsidiary status of the messenger
god Hermes (Roman Mercury). Today, readers of Aristotles
On Interpretation (probably not Aristotles title) may be disap-
pointed to ind that this short treatise deals exclusively with the
logic of propositions. Similarly, Platos dialogue Cratylus is mired
in a shortsighted attempt to show that the names of things may
be both conventional and natural, as if individual letters could
somehow coherently imitate reality. (Socrates commitment to
sound symbolism is satirized in Aristophanes comedy Clouds.)
Nevertheless, the ancient world made great strides in one par-
ticular area, namely, grammar (grammatike), which ranged
from the teaching of literacy (including to non-native speakers),
to scholarly description and cataloging of word forms, to literary
and textual criticism, to more rariied philosophical concerns.
Like philology, grammar could entail a very wide disciplinary
spectrum. In addition to the question of whether language was
a product of nature (physis) or convention (nomos), an equally
central and ultimately more fruitful debate among grammar-
ians revolved around whether language should be understood
in terms of analogy or anomaly: Analogia implied that lan-
guage was ultimately patterned and governed by regularity,
and anomalia that language was irreparably disorganized and
marred by exceptions. To analogy can be traced the systematicity
that still dominates language science (to say nothing of the leg-
acy of prescriptivist correctness in language use), and anomaly
can be thanked for introducing an honestly empirical dimension
to linguistic studies.
In the century after Plato, Stoic philosophers elevated the
study of language to a separate philosophical concern, but
their treatises have largely been lost. Under the Ptolemies, the
Hellenistic librarians of Alexandria reined and advanced all
earlier knowledge of language in their quest to amass, catalog,
and edit as many texts in as many ields of knowledge as pos-
sible. his included gathering descriptive word lists of various
Greek dialects, as well as making detailed analyses of orthogra-
phy, parts of speech (see word classes), morphology, and
598
verbal tense and aspect. All these advances were authorita-
tively compiled by Dionysius hrax in his Treatise on Grammar
(ca. 100 b.c.), which was so inluential that it was often called
simply he Manual (and thereby probably subject to extensive
later revision by others). Some of this work, such as the eightfold
In Rome, the Greek grammatical heritage was appropriated by
writers from Varro (On the Latin Language, irst cent. b.c., only
partially preserved) down to Priscian (ifth to sixth cent. a.d.),
whose exhaustive Principles of Grammar (ca. 500), fortuitously
designed to assist the Greek speakers of the longer-lived eastern
Roman empire, would become the ultimate authority for learn-
ing Latin throughout medieval Europe. Although (as is so often
the case) much Latin grammatical theory slavishly followed
Greek models, it was impossible to ignore obvious diferences
between the two languages (e.g., Latins lack of an article, one
past tense fewer, and one additional case).
Since the dominant unit of linguistic analysis of the time was
the word, and less so the sentence, the primary achievements
of classical language science lay in its descriptive and pragmatic
dimensions, particularly in linguistic pedagogy and the accurate
preservation, understanding, and annotation of written texts. For
instance, we have the Hellenistic era to thank for the invention of
such scholarly staples as footnotes, commentaries, critical edi-
tions, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and library catalogs. On the
other hand, investigations of phonetics and syntax, though
found in some early classical theorists, remained rudimentary.
And sadly, despite the story of King Mithridates of Pontus (or
Mithradates VI, 12063 b.c.), who was luent in all 22 languages
of his subjects, there was almost no formal ethnographic study
of the many other now-extinct languages of the Mediterranean
region; non-Greek speakers were simply barbarians (bar-
baroi, babblers). Lexicographical work was driven by the need
to translate Greek and Latin, as well as to comprehend archaic
texts (e.g., Homer), and many word lists have been preserved as
hermeneumata translations and lists of glosses (glossaries,
from glossai, unfamiliar words). Although prodigious efort
from Socrates on was invested in etymology (the pursuit of a
words etymon, truth), this was almost a complete failure since
ancient philologists did not yet grasp how important phonol-
ogy and rules of sound change are for tracing the historical roots
of words. he results ranged from the fanciful to the ridiculous.
hus, Latin lignum wood hid potential ignis ire; lepus hare
was light-foot (compounding levis + pes); and words could
stem from their opposites: bellum war was so named for being
not at all bellum beautiful. Much of this dubious heritage was
compiled by Isidore of Seville (sixth to seventh cent. a.d.), whose
Etymologiae remained inluential throughout the medieval
period. Many such classical and medieval compilations remain
secondarily valuable, however, because they often preserve the
sole remaining fragments of hundreds of ancient texts.
As a time of consolidation and preservation of the Greco-
Roman heritage, the Middle Ages made relatively few signiicant
contributions to the study of language, as for many centuries
the Latin culture of Europe lagged behind the Greek learning of
the eastern Roman or Byzantine empire and the Arabic schol-
arship of Moorish Spain. Based on Varros lost writings on the
Philology and Hermeneutics
disciplines, Martianus Capellas Marriage of Philology and
Mercury (ifth cent. a.d.) formalized the division of the seven lib-
eral arts (the lettered trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric,
and the numeric quadrivium of geometry, arithmetic, music,
and astronomy), cementing the philological basis of Western
education for more than a millennium. Capella personiied phi-
lology as the mother of the liberal arts (from Latin ars, better
translated today as science), and the irst art was grammar, the
learning of literacy through the close study and imitation of clas-
sic texts. he advent of Christianity did not entirely displace the
pagan past, but instead brought new urgency to the problem of
how to comprehend this legacy in the context of the new world-
view. One result was the famous multileveled system of allegory,
a hermeneutics that invited medieval thinkers to integrate three
competing cultural systems: the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish
religion; Greco-Roman mythology, literature, and history; and
orthodox Latin Christianity. Also known as typology, allegori-
cal interpretation was not limited to biblical texts but could be
extended to read types (emblems, characters) everywhere in
Gods creation, including the natural world (the second book
after the Bible).
Although it foreshadows modern linguistic procedures,
medieval allegory now seems as empty as classical etymologiz-
ing. It is not overly unfair to the philology of the Latin Middle
Ages to say that it is bracketed by its two greatest authors, its irst
and its last: Augustine and Dante. Certainly, there were import-
ant contributions to the understanding of language in between
these landmarks, such as the brilliant attempt at orthographical
reform via phonetic analysis by the so-called First Grammarian
of twelfth-century Iceland, but it seems typical that this work was
forgotten until the nineteenth century. And there were the scho-
lastic authors of speculative grammars (often under the rubric
of modi signiicandi, the means of signifying) who began the
ongoing search for universal principles in language. Yet long
before, around the ifth-century fall of Rome, Augustine bril-
liantly anticipated modern semiotics in On Christian Doctrine,
and he was the irst ever to consider the problem of childhood
language acquisition in the autobiographical Confessions.
Augustine also helped Christianize Capellas seven pagan lib-
eral arts. Meanwhile, the Latin language itself was undergoing
change, and Augustine could no longer hear the vowel quantities
that underlaid Virgils poetic meter: the Romance languages
were slowly diferentiating across Europe. A millennium later,
Dante (who also took the theory and practice of medieval alle-
gory to new heights in his Divine Comedy and elsewhere) wrote
a milestone work on language entitled On the Eloquence of the
Vernacular (ca. 1305). hough necessarily and paradoxically
written in Latin, this uninished treatise argued for the propriety
of using vernacular languages like Italian in literature, and is the
earliest mapping of European languages based on diferences
that seem to have evolved over time. It was the irst articulation
of the problem of language change.
he fact that Johannes Gutenberg worked simultaneously
on printing his famous Bible alongside an edition of the still-
ubiquitous Latin grammar of Donatus (fourth cent. a.d.) reveals
how the classical world still dominated the early Renaissance.
Soon, the rediscovery and promulgation of less-digested ancient
texts and ideas caused a surge in textual criticism and the study
of languages. In 1440, Lorenzo Valla used historical-linguistic
evidence to demonstrate that he Donation of Constantine, a
lucrative grant to the church, was a forgery, thereby founding the
forensic philology of diplomatics. he Renaissance humanists
also revived the learning of Greek, along with Arabic and Hebrew
(considered the original human language), and in the wake of
Dante, various vernacular languages of Europe and even some
languages of foreign lands received grammars of their own. he
languages of the world began to be surveyed, and Joseph Justus
Scaliger sharpened Dantes analysis of the language families of
Europe (Diatriba de Europaeorum Linguis, 1599). Meanwhile, the
fundamentals of human thought explored by Ren Descartes and
John Locke also inspired such works as the Port-Royal General
and Rational Grammar (1660) and utopian attempts at invent-
ing universal communication systems, such as John Wilkinss
Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language
(1668). he Italian rhetorician Giambattista Vico argued for what
he called he New Science (1725; revised 1744), an ambitious
philological recreation of the history of human mental and cul-
tural development via a succession of master tropes embodied
in ancient language, laws, and other social institutions. In short,
the Enlightenment brought a return to Eratosthenes multidis-
ciplinary philology: he famous French Encyclopdie of Denis
Diderot and others (17512) cites philologie as a universal disci-
pline bridging the sciences and the humanities.
he year 1768 is justly remembered as a watershed in the his-
tory of linguistics: It is the date of the famous paper of the legal
scholar William Jones to the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta.
Assigned as a colonial judge in the subcontinent, Jones had set
about learning Sanskrit, the ancient language in which Indias
religious and legal texts are preserved, much as Latin had done
for Europe. After only a few months of study, Joness brilliant
surmise was that certain obvious similarities among Sanskrit,
Latin, Greek, and other European languages implied a common
ancestor, which, crucially, might no longer survive. Such group-
ings had been noticed before, as by Dante and J. J. Scaliger, but
had been explained by the mechanisms of borrowing or decay,
rather than by the process of gradual and divergent evolution
from a now-dead proto-language. he modern discipline of
historical and comparative linguistics had been born, and the
Enlightenments passionate but efete search for language ori-
gins was given a fresh scientiic direction: the problem of proto-
linguistic reconstruction.
he year 1768 also marked the birth of Friedrich
Schleiermacher, so inluential in the ield of hermeneutics. Since
the Reformation, increasing philological concern had been
brought to bear on the text of the Bible. hough a philological
monument in its own right, Jeromes Latin Vulgate (trans. ca.
380405) was no longer suicient for the new commentaries and
vernacular translations desired by the Reformers who knew the
original Hebrew and Greek. his biblical hermeneutics would
develop into the inluential higher criticism, one of the trou-
bling scientiic advances that precipitated the Victorian crisis
of faith. Higher criticism described scripture not as an inspired
and inerrant document but as a layered tissue of competing
sources that had been edited together at some intermediate
time. Stemming from the patterns of stylistic diferences in bibli-
cal accounts (e.g., the varying names for God) irst noticed by
599
Philology and Hermeneutics
Reformation commentators, the documentary hypothesis sug-
gests that the canonical ive books of Moses (the Pentateuch)
are carefully patched together from a number of distinct source
texts.
Just as Dante had thought it to apply sacred allegory to his
own secular literary production, so did Enlightenment students
of the Bible acknowledge that no special method of interpreta-
tion should be required for the word of God. As hermeneutic
theorist Johann August Ernesti put it in 1761, the verbal sense of
Scripture must be determined in the same way in which we ascer-
tain that of other books (quoted in Palmer 1969, 38). he paral-
lel development of secular higher criticism was also underway.
In his Introduction to the Correct Interpretation of Reasonable
Discourses and Books (1742), Johann Martin Chladensius became
the irst hermeneuticist to argue for the importance of point of
view (Sehe-Punckt) in interpreting historical texts. Similarly, the
classical scholar Friedrich August Wolf, who famously insisted
on taking his doctoral degree in philology, rather than philoso-
phy, published his Prolegomena to Homer (1795), which asked the
still-vexed Homeric question: Was there really a single author
behind the Iliad and Odyssey? he concept of the linguistic fam-
ily tree of William Jones also found application in secular textual
editing, as Karl Lachmann (17931851) perfected the method of
stemmatics to posit nonextant archetypes from which various
groups of manuscripts descended and thus to help eliminate a
texts accumulated errors.
While Wolf and others developed Altertumswissenschaft
(classical scholarship) and biblical critics analyzed scripture,
Schleiermacher, who himself published on both classical and bib-
lical philology, elevated hermeneutics to a general practice that
would ultimately bring it far away from traditional philological
concerns. (he primary source for Schleiermachers general her-
meneutics are detailed outlines he prepared for his university
lectures, notes partly published in 1819). Hermeneutics followed
this philosophical direction throughout the nineteenth cen-
tury; Wilhelm Dilthey, for example, located hermeneutics as the
supporting discipline for the universitys Geisteswissenshaften
(human sciences, literally sciences of the spirit). Following
the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, the hermeneutic pro-
ject was furthered by Martin Heidegger and has continued down
to the present in a debate between Hans-Georg Gadamer and
Jrgen Habermas, with wider theoretical ripples still being felt in
the French and Anglo-American discourses of modernism and
postmodernism. General hermeneutics grew to be concerned
not only with interpretation per se but also with the very nature
of understanding, being, and reality itself. Today, hermeneut-
ics has grown more at home with the purer varieties of literary
theory and aesthetics than with traditional philologys lower
criticism.
Philology became an increasingly technical mode of histori-
cal linguistics during the nineteenth century. Comparative phi-
lologists such as Rasmus Rask, Jacob Grimm, and Franz Bopp
assembled exhaustive phonological and morphological data on
modern and ancient global languages in order to trace their devel-
opment and interrelationships (sometimes with a troublingly
Orientalist attitude; see Boeckh [1886] 1968, 10, 44). Eventually,
philologys scientiic hypertrophy drove the foundation of sepa-
rate humanistic departments devoted to texts as literature.
600
Phonetics
Another great paradigm split was marked by the publication
of the one-time philologist Ferdinand de Saussures Course in
General Linguistics (1916). Perhaps a victim of its own success,
diachronic philology, which so carefully traced the evolution of
parole, eventually yielded its disciplinary headship of language
study to Saussures synchronic langue (see synchrony and
diachonry and structuralism).
Presently partitioned among various university disciplines,
philology and hermeneutics still govern the ields of medieval
and classical studies, historical linguistics, literary theory and
criticism, textual editing, lexicography, prosody and metrics,
and many others (see Cerquiglini [1989] 1999; Gumbrecht 2003).
Today, though the normal science of language emphasizes
such synchronic contexts as society, psychology, and the brain,
there is little doubt that philology and hermeneutics will persist
and reappear, like Hermes and Mercury, in many new guises in
the future.
Christopher M. Kuipers
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Boeckh, August. [1886] 1968. On Interpretation and Criticism. Ed. and
trans. John Paul Pritchard. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Cerquiglini, Bernard. [1989] 1999. In Praise of the Variant: A Critical
History of Philology. Trans. Betsy Wing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 2003. he Powers of Philology: Dynamics of
Textual Scholarship. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Mueller-Volmer, Kurt, ed. 1985. he Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the
German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present. New York:
Continuum.
Ormiston, Gayle L., and Alan D. Shrift, eds. 1990. he Hermeneutic
Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur. Albany: State University of New York
Press.
Palmer, Richard E. 1969. Hermeneutics: Interpretation heory in
Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press. Still the standard introduction.
Robins, R. H. 1997. A Short History of Linguistics. 4th ed. London:
Longman.
PHONEME
he phoneme is the smallest unit of speech that discriminates
one word from another in a particular language. Phonemes
are represented by symbols between slashes thus /p/ or /b/.
Phonemes may have alternate forms, called allophones. For
example, in English, the same phoneme /p/ is produced difer-
ently in pit and spit. Minimal pairs are used to determine whether
two speech sounds are allophones or separate phonemes. For
example, in English, the phonemes /p/ and /b/ distinguish the
word pull from bull, and /t/ and /d/ distinguish the word bat
from bad.
Miwako Hisagi
PHONETICS
What Is Phonetics?
Phonetics is the area of language science research that studies
the articulation, acoustic properties, and auditory perception of
Phonetics
speech units (see speech production, acoustic phonet-
ics, articulatory phonetics , and speech perception ,
respectively). More speciically, phonetics can be understood
as linguistically informed speech science, and research phone-
ticians are generally trained linguists who bring to bear their
knowledge of the structural properties of language. Rather than
focusing only on one particular language or on universal ana-
tomical properties of hearing or articulation, a phonetician
has a special interest in understanding the full range of dis-
tinct possibilities in human speech or signed communication.
Because of the important role that linguistics plays in phonetic
study, most often phonetics inds itself housed academically
as a linguistic discipline, though sometimes it inds its home
in engineering, psychology, or in a language-speciic setting.
he most prominent textbook used in educating phoneticians
is P. Ladefogeds A Course in Phonetics (2006), now in its ifth
edition.
Within linguistics, phonetics is related to the ield of
phonology, another area of theoretical linguistic research.
Linguists vary in their opinions regarding the degree of dis-
tinctness and areas of overlap between the phenomena con-
sidered to be the objects of phonetic versus phonological
research. Both are concerned with the component speech units
or building blocks into which words can be divided. However,
the general view is that phonetics investigates measurable,
physical properties of these speech units, such as the precise
articulation of speech units, their detailed and contextually
dependent acoustic properties, and cross-linguistic variation
in these physical properties. Phonology, in contrast, is gener-
ally concerned with how these speech units are combined or
organized into acceptable word forms within a language (e.g.,
allowable sequences) and with the underlying principles of
organization shared across languages (see phonology, uni-
versals of ). On analogy to chemistry, phonetics investigates
subatomic structure, and phonology studies the formation of
molecules out of basic atoms. Traditionally, the phonological
structure has been viewed as cognitive or grammatical, while
the phonetic structure has been viewed as purely physical and
implementational. However, the dividing line between cogni-
tive and physical has blurred or dissolved over the years (e.g.,
Browman and Goldstein 1995).
Well-Known Theoretical Puzzles in Phonetics
here are a number of well-known puzzles in the area of pho-
netics whose empirical and theoretical consideration has helped
lead to our current understanding of some fundamental aspects
of the linguistic speech system. As one example, phoneticians
have an abiding interest in understanding how to reconcile a
linguistic view of speech as being composed of concatenated
symbolic units with its physical realization in articulation and
acoustics in which there are no silences, separations, or obvious
criteria for segmentation between these units. We can refer to
this puzzle as lack of segmentability. It is famously acknowledged
in Charles Francis Hocketts (1955) Easter egg analogy, which
describes the phonetic speech production processes as making a
smeared mess out of neat Easter eggs moving through a wringer.
Gradually, however, the ield has come to understand that rather
than a mess, the speech produced by humans is governed by
lawful, albeit complex, physical properties. A second puzzle that
has been much discussed in phonetic research is the puzzle of
lack of invariance. his refers to the diiculty of reconciling the
linguists view that language calls on a small ixed set of pho-
nological (or contrastive) units in organizing its words with the
observation that there are no invariant properties of these units
in the speech signal. Indeed, experiments using sinewave syn-
thesis have shown that even signals completely lacking nor-
mal speech cues can nevertheless be perceived as speech and
understood. One, but not the only, source of lack of segment-
ability and lack of invariance is the phenomenon of coarticula-
tion. his refers to the fact that neighboring speech sounds are, in
fact, articulatorily coproduced in time and thus interact with one
another and mutually shape the speech signal. Consequently,
phonological units in natural speech are realized in a highly vari-
able, context-dependent fashion.
Speech perception research in both children and adults
probes, in part, how human listeners are able to recover pho-
nological units from the speech signal (see, e.g., speech per-
ception in infants) and engage in lexical access (word
identiication; see word recognition, auditory) (Pisoni
and Remez 2005). his involves understanding how listeners deal
with variability in phonetic form and how prior speech and lan-
guage experience shapes these processes. Investigation of these
puzzles has informed phoneticians theoretical views regarding
the fundamental nature of speech units.
Ways of Doing Phonetic Research
here are a number of areas of inquiry in the ield of phonetics,
and these generally fall under the purview of articulatory pho-
netics, acoustic phonetics, or speech perception. We encounter
some issues related to each of these areas in the following, but
irst, it is worthwhile to consider the two general approaches to
phonetic research. he irst focuses on the description, classii-
cation, and transcription of speech sounds, the second on exper-
imental phonetics.
Traditionally, the irst approach was done by ear, thanks to
the carefully trained abilities of phoneticians, often trained in
a direct line of descent from one practitioner to another. he
International Phonetic Association is a more than century-old
organization whose aim is to promote the scientiic study of
phonetics and its practical applications. he association has
provided, with regular updates over the years, a consensus
International Phonetic Alphabet (referred to as the IPA, as is
the association itself) that serves as a notational standard for the
phonetic transcription of all sounds known to exist contrastively
in the worlds languages (and many noncontrastive variations of
these sounds) (IPA 1999). he latest version of the IPA was pub-
lished in 2005 and is displayed in Figure 1.
his transcription system is a standard reference in the ield
of phonetics and has been an important tool for description and
classiication. Phoneticians doing work of this sort must deter-
mine what the linguistically relevant speech categories are that
is, what counts as linguistically the same and diferent and what
principled (or idiosyncratic) variation is observed among these
speech units. As can be seen from the IPA chart, phoneticians
have identiied important dimensions of variation, in particular,
for consonants:
601
Phonetics
Figure 1. The IPA Chart. Reprinted with permission from the International Phonetic Association. Copyright 2005 by
International Phonetic Association.
place in the vocal tract at which a consonant is articulated or
creates its constriction;
manner of articulation, which refers generally to the type of
constriction: complete closure for stops, narrow closure for
fricatives, constrictions having nasal or lateral airlow; and
voicing, whether the vocal folds are vibrating or not.
For vowels, the variations are captured in a continuous plane
whose dimensions can be identiied with auditory properties
called:
602
height [high-mid-low], related to the lowest resonant fre-
quency (the irst formant) of the vowel; and
backness [front-central-back], related to the distance between
the irst and second resonant frequencies (formants) of a
vowel.
Rounding or lip protrusion or compression is also encoded in
the symbol choice itself.
In addition, in order to adequately describe speech units, the
mechanism by which the air moves in the vocal tract must be
Phonetics
6000
5000
Frequency (Hz)
4000
3000
2000
1000
0 1450
Time (ms)
identiied. All languages use pulmonic sounds with air lowing
out from the lungs, but some languages also move air by laryn-
geal (glottalic) or tongue (velaric) maneuvers. Other important
linguistic properties of speech units can include distinctions
in the tone (i.e., placement in and/or movement through the
speakers pitch range), phonation type (i.e., the mode or quality
of vocal fold vibration and amount of laryngeal airlow), and VOT
(voice onset time: the temporal coordination of an oral constric-
tion with a laryngeal event).
Much of the most important phonetic work of this sort has
been done in the ield by phoneticians working with native
speakers of languages (Ladefoged 2003), often languages that
are poorly documented or possibly endangered. he most
authoritative description of the consonants and vowels of the
worlds languages can be found in he Sounds of the Worlds
Languages (Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996). In addition to
describing the range of possible variation in the units used to
build human speech, phoneticians also address the question of
universal properties of human speech systems. Finally, descrip-
tive phonetics can also address variation within a language, such
as geographical dialect variation. his is one type of socio-
phonetics (other types include investigations of gender, age, or
class, for example.) For English, an impressive example of this
type of phonetic investigation can be found in the Atlas of North
American English (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006).
Whereas descriptive phonetics was traditionally done by ear,
a wide variety of current instrumental techniques is brought
to bear as well. Instrumental phonetics might utilize acoustic
analysis such as digitized waveforms, and spectrograms (see
Figure 2); pitch and formant tracking; articulatory analysis, such
as provided by laryngoscopy, palatography, magnetometry,
ultrasound, and MRI; and perceptual information such as that
provided by discrimination and categorization experiments and
even eye-tracking and neuroimaging.
Work on the other general type of phonetic research, exper-
imental phonetics, also utilizes a wide variety of instrumen-
tal approaches, but in this case, the data characterize human
behavior in the processes of producing and perceiving speech,
or relect quantitative rather than purely qualitative prop-
erties of speech. Experimental phonetics often investigates
how linguistic variables, such as segmental context, sylla-
ble structure, or prosody, inluence the detailed properties
of speech, such as its timing, articulation, spectral character-
istics, or intonation. Alternatively, it might examine how
Figure 2. A spectrogram of the sentence There are
no silences here. In a spectrogram, time is displayed
on the x-axis, frequency (in Hz) on the y-axis, and
amplitude in grayscale darkness.
nonlinguistic variables, such as age, gender, speaking rate and
style, afect, or language background, inluence these detailed
speech properties.
In experimental phonetics, the development of speech syn-
thesis played a critical role in researchers ability to design and
execute speech perception experiments by allowing for stimuli
with well-controlled acoustic properties. his ushered in a new
era of experimental speech perception research that examines
how humans utilize all of the myriad informational cues pres-
ent in the acoustic signal. Another particular body of experimen-
tal work called laboratory phonology seeks to inform questions
of linguistic representation and processes in phonology via
experimental phonetic data. his work generally takes a cogni-
tive science perspective and has been archived in the multivol-
ume Papers in Laboratory Phonology collection (arising from a
regular Conference on Laboratory Phonology, which has met
every other year since 1987). Browman and Goldstein (1991) and
Beckman and Edwards (1994) provide classic examples of this
type of phonetics.
Other Areas of Phonetic Inquiry
Other important areas of inquiry in the ield of phonetics include
investigation of the biomechanics or functional behavior and
coordination of the moving vocal tract (Saltzman and Munhall
1989; Guenther 1995), the role of audition and auditory processing
in speech communication (e.g., psychophysics of speech),
and the vocal tract as a sound-producing device, often charac-
terized in terms of source-ilter theory (Stevens 1998; Fant 1960).
Source-ilter theory has provided a sophisticated mathematical
understanding of how noise sources at the larynx and along the
vocal tract are shaped by the geometry of the vocal tract and its
particular resonance properties to yield the output speech. he
nonlinear properties of the articulatory-acoustic mapping have
been argued to be important in understanding constraints on
the sound inventories of languages (Stevens 1989). Other pho-
neticians focus on listener-oriented motivations, such as maxi-
mizing auditory distinctions in shaping sound systems, rather
than speaker-generated inluences. Clearly, speech systems are
adaptive to communicative and situational demands (Lindblom
1990). Speakerlistener interactions may give rise to change in
word forms over time, that is, diachronically (see phonology,
evolution of; syncrhony and diachrony), and they may
give rise to synchronic adjustments speciic to the interlocutors
and the situation.
603
Phonetics
Connections to Other Fields
Phonetics is an interdisciplinary area of linguistics; for exam-
ple, we have sketched its connection to phonology. It also can
closely tie into other areas of experimental linguistics, particu-
larly psycholinguistic research on spoken language pro-
duction and processing and neurolinguistic research on brain
function. Knowledge of the phonetic properties of languages
and of the characteristics of the speech signal is critical to the
design of experimental linguistic and neurolinguistic research
programs that examine speech production and processing (see
phonetics and phonology, neurobiology of; brain
and language). Such speech-related work might address lexi-
cal access, speech production planning, neural localization of
various functions related to speaking and speech understanding
(see lexical processing, neurobiology of), the integra-
tion of visuofacial and auditory information, and the relation of
action and perception (see mirror systems, imitation, and
language).
Furthermore, there are many ields outside of linguistics
on which phonetics has a direct bearing. In the area of speech
technology, linguistic phonetic knowledge can contribute
sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly to machine speech
synthesis and recognition (see voice interaction design).
And conversely, much early work in acoustic phonetics grew
out of the eforts of speech engineers, for example, at Bell
Laboratories, Haskins Laboratories, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, the Joint Speech Research Unit in England, the
Speech Transmission Laboratory in Sweden, and the Advanced
Telecommunications Research (ATR) Institute International
in Japan. Currently, in the ield of speech engineering, there is
interest in capturing linguistic knowledge in ways that will allow
better system performance with conversational interfaces and
with audiovisual speech.
Phonetic science also has utility in forensics, and forensic
phonetics is a recognized area of applied science (see forensic
linguistics). Forensic experts bring both instrumental and
expertlistening techniques to the determination of whether a
suspects voice is a likely or unlikely match to forensic evidence
that investigators have in hand. It should be noted, however, that
there is no unique identiier in the voice of an individual that is
analogous to a ingerprint. Phoneticians are frequently called on
in such speaker-identiication cases to provide expert knowledge
and testimony as to the many subtle properties that may distin-
guish one individuals speech from that of another.
Another ield outside of linguistics is often, in fact, an indi-
viduals irst contact with phonetics second language pedagogy
(see bilingual education). An accurate understanding of
how a languages speech sounds are articulated proves helpful
in pronunciation instruction. Instrumental techniques for dis-
playing feedback on articulation, speech acoustics, or linguistic
categorization can also help in training production and percep-
tion of non-native linguistic contrasts.
he paramount area of the inluence of theoretical phonol-
ogy and phonetics on pedagogy is in the teaching of reading
(see teaching reading). Linguists from diverse backgrounds
and groups have taken a leadership position in emphasizing
the importance of phonemic awareness (see phonologi-
cal awareness) for the acquisition of reading skills and for
604
understanding dyslexia. It is critical for educational success
that reading teachers are made aware of the importance of
characteristic diferences between speech and reading, of how
speech knowledge can be leveraged in the teaching of reading,
and of how interference from the phonetic properties of native
languages can inluence the acquisition of reading in non-native
languages (Rayner et al. 2002).
A synergistic relationship exists between phonetics and the
ield of biomedical imaging. Advances in imaging of the vocal
tract and larynx have greatly illuminated our understanding of
speech production. In turn, new techniques for upper airway
and laryngeal imaging and image analysis have been developed
by phoneticians. hese techniques can be incorporated into the
ield of clinical phonetics and speech pathology. Traditional
types of descriptive and instrumental phonetics have also
found utility in the understanding of clinical challenges such
as apraxia, stuttering, phonological disorders, and voice dis-
orders. Indeed, the National Institute on Deafness and Other
Communication Disorders is one of the largest funding sources
for phonetic research. Currently, there is enormous interest in
making cochlear implants as successful as possible for their user
populations. Knowledge of the acoustic properties of speech and
of methods for assessing perception adds to the broad body of
technological, engineering, and audiological knowledge cur-
rently contributing to this efort.
Phonetics is one of the foundational areas of linguistic research
and language science. It focuses on the descriptive, quantitative,
and behavioral aspects of speech production, transmission, and
perception. Phonetic knowledge helps guide our understanding
of the phonological representations and patterning observed in
human language. Phonetics also makes interdisciplinary con-
tact with speech technology, biomedical imaging, forensics, and
pedagogical and clinical ields.
Dani Byrd
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Beckman, Mary E., and Jan Edwards. 1994. Articulatory evidence for dif-
ferentiating stress categories. In Phonological Structure and Phonetic
Form: Papers in Laboratory Phonology. Vol 3. Ed. Patricia A. Keating,
733. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Browman, C. P., and L. Goldstein. 1991. Tiers in articulatory phonology,
with some implications for casual speech. In Papers in Laboratory
Phonology. Vol. 1: Between the Grammar and the Physics of Speech.
Ed. J. Kingston and M. E. Beckman, 34176. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
. 1995. Dynamics and articulatory phonology. In Mind as
Motion: Explorations in the Dynamics of Cognition, ed. Robert F. Port
and Timothy Van Gelder, 17593. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fant, Gunnar. 1960. Acoustic heory of Speech Production. he
Hague: Mouton.
Guenther, F. H. 1995. Speech sound acquisition, coarticulation, and rate
efects in a neural network model of speech production. Psychological
Review 102: 594621.
Hardcastle, William J., and John Laver. 1997, eds. he Handbook of
Phonetic Sciences. Oxford: Blackwell.
Haskins Laboratories. A speech and reading laboratory in New Haven,
CT, that maintains a Web site at http://www.haskins.yale.edu.
Hockett, Charles Francis. 1955. A Manual of Phonology.
Baltimore: Waverly.
Phonetics and Phonology, Neurobiology of
IPA (International Phonetic Association). 1999. Handbook of the
International Phonetic Association: A Guide to the Use of the
International Phonetic Alphabet. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. he association maintains a Web site at http://www.arts.gla.
ac.uk/IPA/ipa.html.
Johnson, Keith. 2003. Acoustic and Auditory Phonetics. 2d ed.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Labov, W., Ash, S., and C. Boberg. 2006. Atlas of North American
English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change. Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter. Available online at: http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/.
Ladefoged, P. 2003. Phonetic Data Analysis: An Introduction to
Instrumental Phonetic Fieldwork. Oxford: Blackwell.
. 2006. A Course in Phonetics, 5th ed. Boston: homson
Wadsworth.
Ladefoged, Peter, and Ian Maddieson. 1996. he Sounds of the Worlds
Languages. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lindblom, B. 1990. Explaining phonetic variation: A sketch of the H&H
theory. In Speech Production and Speech Modeling, ed. W. Hardcastle
and A. Marchal, 40339, Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer.
Miller, J., ed. 1991. Papers in Speech Communication. A three-volume ser-
ies published by the Acoustical Society of America (New York) through
the American Institute of Physics.
Pisoni, D. , and R. Remez, eds. 2005. Handbook of Speech Perception.
Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Rayner, K., B. R. Foorman, C. A. Perfetti, D. Pesetsky, and M. Seidenberg.
2002. How should reading be taught? Scientiic American
286: 8491.
Saltzman, E. L., and K. G. Munhall. 1989. A dynamical approach to
gestural patterning in speech production. Ecological Psychology
1: 33382.
Stevens, K. 1989. On the quantal nature of speech. Journal of Phonetics
17: 345
Stevens, K. 1998. Acoustic Phonetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY, NEUROBIOLOGY OF
he study of the neurobiology of phonetics and phonol-
ogy focuses on the brain mechanisms that support percep-
tion and production of linguistic phonological forms. his entry
describes the neural structures and processes underlying pho-
netic and phonological processing and briely discusses four
current theoretical controversies that neurophysiological data
can help address. First, are there invariant relationships between
acoustic properties and phonological categories? Second,
does speech have some special status apart from other acoustic
information? hird, is there a critical period for language-
speciic learning? Fourth, to what degree does biology constrain
the nature of phonological systems?
Neurobiological Underpinnings
he physiology (or function) of phonological processing is
described in terms of the structures (anatomy) activated in
processing and the function of these structures. A compre-
hensive understanding of the physiology requires explication
at the micro- and macrolevels of processing. he microlevel
describes the microstructures and their processing (neuron,
axon, synaptic potential) and are general to brain function,
whereas the macrolevel focuses on larger-scale structures and
processes speciic to a particular motor, sensory, or cognitive
process (e.g., phonetic processing). Several points concerning
the microlevel are necessary for understanding how neurobio-
logical methods are used to examine phonetics and phonology
(see Kandel, Schwartz, and Jessell 2000; Shafer and Garrido-
Nag 2007, for greater detail).
First, brain function is in terms of electrochemical mes-
sages between neurons. neuroimaging methods index dif-
ferent aspects of these processes and the metabolic processes
that support these. Electrophysiological methods (electroen-
cephalogram [EEG], magnetoencephalogram [MEG]) record
changes in electrical potential at the scalp. hese changes are the
result of the synchronous iring of large assemblies of neurons.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron
emission tomography (PET) measure changes in the metabo-
lism of oxygen, and PET can also measure changes in the chemi-
cal aspect of the electrochemical signals sent between neurons.
hese changes in electrochemical and metabolic measures are
used to make inferences about timing and localization of neural
activity related to some stimulus or event.
A second point is that diferent brain regions have distinctive
structure in terms of neurons and connectivity and that these
distinctions are the basis of Korbinian Brodmanns classiication
system. For example, primary auditory cortex (Brodmanns area
[BA] 41) has a thick layer of neurons specialized to receive infor-
mation from the peripheral auditory system. hese neurons then
send signals to other cortical regions but not directly back to the
periphery for motor responses. Ultimately, phonological func-
tioning will need to be described in terms of connectivity at this
neural level for a complete understanding of the brainbehavior
relationship.
At the macrolevel, neurobiology of phonetics/phonology is
described in terms of the activated brain regions and the timing
of activation of these regions in perception or production (see
speech perception and speech production). hese brain
regions are referred to by Brodmanns areas, by names describing
function (e.g., primary auditory cortex), by the scientist involved
in identifying the regions (e.g., brocas area), or by some term
describing an attribute of the regions (e.g., Greek hippocampus
for a region that is shaped like a seahorse).
he principal brain structures involved in phonetic/phono-
logical perception are found in the perisylvian cortex and
include primary (BA 41) and secondary (BA 42) auditory cortex
for processing the acoustic-phonetic aspects of speech (Scott and
Wise 2004) (see Color Plate 10). Sound in general (e.g., noise)
activates bilateral regions of the dorsal plane of the superior
temporal gyrus (STG) and regions of the lateral STG. In contrast
with noise, temporally complex signals, including speech, more
strongly activate the dorsal region of STG, and the lateral STG
activation extends more ventrally. Auditory information identi-
ied as speech compared to non-speech leads to increased acti-
vation of regions of the STG and superior temporal sulcus (STS)
that are more anterior and ventral (inferior). he left STS appears
to be active in mapping speech onto lexical-semantic repre-
sentation. In contrast, the right STS shows sensitivity to melodic
features. he left planum temporale (PT, in superior posterior
temporal cortex) is believed to have a special role in phonetic/
phonological processing and appears to support a motor/sen-
sory interface for acoustic information. A left-greater-than-right
asymmetry is generally stronger for speech than non-speech (see
605
Phonetics and Phonology, Neurobiology of
left hemisphere and right hemisphere). Anterior regions
are also activated in speech perception. he left prefrontal cor-
tex (BA 46) is activated in phonological processing in access-
ing, sequencing, and monitoring phonemes and processing
transitions from consonants to vowels or vowels to consonants.
Articulation of phonetic information is supported by motor (BA
4) and premotor/Brocas area cortex (BA 6, BA 44/BA 45).
Recent models have organized these observations into a sim-
ple framework in which the more dorsal regions (i.e., posterior
and superior) are active in auditory-motor integration during
speech perception and the more ventral regions (anterior and
inferior) are more involved in the speech-meaning interface.
his indicates that the phonetic aspects of processing, which
are independent of meaning, will be carried out in more dorsal
regions of the auditory and motor cortex, whereas the phonolog-
ical aspects, which are the basis of meaningful distinctions, are
processed in more ventral areas of the auditory cortex. he exact
roles of STG, STS, and the two hemispheres in phonetic and pho-
nological processing have not been deinitively established yet,
but it is known that these areas are all important in speech pro-
cessing (Poeppel and Hickok 2004).
Anterior and posterior brain regions involved in phonetic
and phonological processing communicate directly via bundles
of ibers (axons), such as the arcuate fasciculus, but also via more
indirect routes, including the basal ganglia, thalamus, and
cerebellum. hese additional structures are involved in gen-
eral functions related to information processing, motor plan-
ning, and coordination and will not be discussed further here.
he timing of activation of levels of phonetic and phonological
processing has largely been provided by EEG and MEG mea-
sures. he timing of auditory processes can be roughly related
to levels of processing in the primary and secondary auditory
cortex and to the timing of more basic (e.g., signal detection)
versus higher-level cognitive processes (phonological discrimin-
ation). he principal method used to investigate these processes
is event-related potentials (ERPs). he EEG/MEG is time-locked
to a stimulus of interest (e.g., ba), and this stimulus is deliv-
ered multiple times (anywhere from 20 to 10,000, depending on
the ERP component of interest). he portion of the EEG/MEG
time-locked to the stimulus is averaged to remove noise (i.e.,
activity produced by unrelated processes).
ERPs are described in terms of the latency, polarity, and
topography of peaks that vary with some stimulus property or
cognitive process. hese identiied peaks are often referred to as
components. he P and N in a component label refer to positive
and negative polarity, respectively, and the number indicates
the approximate peak latency (e.g., N400) or the position in a
sequence (e.g., N2).
Studies of auditory processing have shown that auditory
information enters primary cortical regions between 10 and 50
ms following contact with the outer ear and that a frontocentral
positivity peaking around 50 ms (P1 component) and negativ-
ity peaking around 100 ms (N1 component) index activity in the
primary and secondary auditory cortex. Neurobiological studies
with animals suggest that P1 indexes input from the periphery
into the superior temporal plane of the auditory cortex and that
N1 relects activity of neurons in the secondary auditory cortex
receiving information from other cortical regions. P1 and N1
606
appear to index acoustic levels of processing. To date, there is
no clear evidence that language experience at the phonological
level directly afects processing in the time range of the P1 and
N1 components.
ERP components occurring later in time are related to higher-
level cognitive processes. hose showing modulation by phono-
logical experience include mismatch negativity (MMN), N2b,
P3b, and N400 (Ntnen 2001; Kujala et al. 2004). Listeners
show more robust MMNs (peaking between 100 and 300 ms and
indicating preattentive, automatic processing) in discriminating
pairs of sounds with which they have had experience (Ntnen
2001). Speciically, the MMN is smaller or later to a contrast in
speech sounds if the speech sounds are assimilated into one pho-
nological category for listeners (e.g., Japanese listeners percep-
tion of English [l] vs. [r]) or if the speech sounds are assimilated
into two categories, but one or both sounds are poor exemplars
of these categories (e.g., English listeners perception of Hindi
retrolex [Da] versus [ba]; Shafer, Schwartz, and Kurtzberg 2004).
he later components, N2b, P3b, and N400, are observed when
a participant is asked to actively discriminate a speech contrast.
No discernible N2b, P3b, or N400 is observed if discrimination
is very diicult (chance performance). If discrimination is bet-
ter than chance but more diicult than for native listeners, then
these components are later and larger than those found for the
native group. For example, English speakers showed reasonably
good discrimination of Japanese (JP) vowel duration (taado
versus tado), but a later and larger P3b component compared
to native Japanese listeners (Hisagi 2007).
Integrating the knowledge of location obtained from fMRI/
PET and timing obtained from EEG/MEG indicates that acoustic-
phonetic processing occurs in primary and secondary auditory
cortical regions between 10 and 100 ms, followed by phonolog-
ical aspects of processing, presumably in more ventral regions,
between 100 and 400 ms. his model is supported by studies
localizing the sources of N1 and the phonologically elicited N400
(Kujala et al. 2004).
Lack of Invariance Problem
A major theoretical debate in speech perception over the past 40
years has been the relationship between acoustic and phonolog-
ical properties. Speech with similar acoustic properties may be
assigned to diferent phonological categories, and, conversely,
speech with diferent acoustic properties is sometimes assigned
to the same phonological category. Much research focused on
discovering invariant properties of speech sound categories that
would allow for precise categorization has failed to do so.
A recent model can be used to illustrate how neurophysi-
ological data can address the lack of invariance issue. In this
model, speech is categorized and identiied by an active pro-
cess of hypothesis testing (e.g., Magnuson and Nusbaum 2007).
Diferent types of information are used with regards to the type
and amount of sensory and lexical information available. For
example, clear auditory-speech information and knowledge
of the possible phoneme categories of a language lead to reli-
ance on auditory information in categorization. More ambigu-
ous auditory-speech information can lead to greater reliance on
visual information (e.g., lip closure for [p] but not [t]). In other
words, there are many routes to phonological categorization.
Phonetics and Phonology, Neurobiology of
If this model is viable, then neurophysiological data will show
whether diferent sensory and motor cortex are activated when
speech is more versus less clear and when other information
(e.g., visual) is available. Several recent studies have shown more
involvement of the motor cortex and visual sensory areas for
ambiguous acoustic speech information when facial informa-
tion is available, and less activation of these regions when only
the speech signal is available (e.g., Skipper, Nusbaum, and Small
2006).
In summary, this example illustrates the importance of
neurophysiological data for addressing long-standing theoret-
ical controversies.
Does Speech Have Some Special Status Apart from Other
Acoustic Information?
Over the past forty years, there has been a debate regarding
whether speech requires a special type of auditory processing
speciic to humans. Behavioral studies have delivered mixed
answers to this question. For example, studies have shown that
speech (in particular, consonants) is perceived categorically,
rather than continuously, and used this to argue for special sta-
tus. On the other hand, other species (e.g., chinchillas) are shown
to perceive speech categorically, and complex non-speech audi-
tory sounds can be categorically perceived.
Neurophysiological data can help examine this question by
determining whether the same structures and processes sup-
port processing of speech and non-speech. he current available
data suggest that in one sense, speech and non-speech are simi-
lar. he same auditory cortical regions are activated in process-
ing speech and non-speech, as described previously (also see
Dehaene-Lambertz and Gigla 2004). Furthermore, the sensory-
motor links found for speech are similar to those seen for other
sensory-motor links (e.g., tool manipulation using visual and
motor regions) and seen in other species (see Skipper, Nusbaum,
and Small 2006).
In another sense, the neurophysiological data suggest
that the processing of speech difers from that of non-speech.
Speciically, as described previously, more ventral areas (lateral
and anterior superior temporal gyrus) become involved in pho-
nological processing of speech sounds because these sounds
are relevant for making meaning contrasts. It is possible that
humans are the only species that fractionate sound symbols into
subcomponents (phonemes) that can be manipulated to create
novel symbols, and, in this way, speech is special.
Is There a Critical Period for Language-Speciic Learning?
Researchers have long noted that learning a second language
late in life typically results in a stronger non-native accent and
poorer speech perception in the second language (see Strange
and Shafer 8; see also second language acquisition). One
explanation for this pattern is that there is a critical or sensi-
tive period in which phonological information must be learned
in order to lead to native-like performance (see phonology,
acquisition of). Some research suggests a gradual loss of abil-
ity to alter phonological categories up to puberty.
he reason for this change in ability is unknown. It could be
that the auditory cortex is altered at an early level so that it loses
the ability (or resolution) to respond to non-native contrasts.
Alternatively, listeners may have diiculty refocusing their atten-
tion to the relevant cues needed for rapid processing of the sec-
ond language (Strange and Shafer 2008).
Neurophysiological data can address this question by
examining where in the nervous system diferences in process-
ing are found for irst and second language learners. he cur-
rent research has not shown diferences earlier than the MMN
response. Furthermore, a recent study from our laboratory sug-
gests that attention plays a role in loss of ability to learn novel
categories. Speciically, listeners learn to automatically attend to
relevant cues in their irst language and can only overcome these
weightings with great attentional efort. his result suggests that
the loss of sensitivity in adjusting to novel phonological catego-
ries by second language learners is not directly due to a closure
of a critical period for changing the sensitivity or resolution of the
primary and auditory cortex; rather, it is due, at least in part, to
attentional issues (Hisagi 2007).
hese indings do not answer all the questions regarding
critical and sensitive periods for setting up phonetic and pho-
nological categories since second language learners acquired
categories for a irst language early in life. Recent research exam-
ining the neurophysiological and behavioral consequences of
deprivation of hearing, which is reversed by cochlear implants,
will have much to contribute for addressing this question. Recent
advances have led to implantation at earlier ages, which is allow-
ing researchers to compare the quality of phonological process-
ing across diferent ages of irst exposure to speech information.
Improvements in these implanted devices will also allow exami-
nation of how the quality of auditory-speech input impacts pho-
netic and phonological systems. his emerging area of research
is likely to provide less ambiguous evidence regarding a critical
or sensitive period for speech.
To What Degree Does Biology Constrain the Nature of
Phonological Systems?
A classic debate in linguistics concerns the extent to which lan-
guage is innate. A more useful way to ask this question is what
biological constraints are placed on the nature of phonological
systems and how environmental input contributes to construct-
ing these systems. Across languages, there are common patterns.
For example, all languages contrast /i/ (heep), /u/ (hoop), and
/a/ (hop) (although there can be slight variations in the actual
production of these sounds), and some languages only contrast
these three vowels. However, there is no existing language that
only contrasts i (in bead), I (in bid), and e (in bed) without
also contrasting /i/, /u/, and /a/. It is possible that these univer-
sal patterns are due to biological constraints. On the other hand,
they may be attributed to environmental factors. Examination of
the evidence suggests that the system is constrained by an inter-
action of biological and environmental constraints. For example,
/i/, /u/, and /a/ are perceptually more distinct than i (in bead),
I (in bid), and e (in bed), and this is a property of the auditory
system; the environment (input) leads to less salient distinctions
included in some languages, but many possible distinctions are
never found in languages.
Neurobiological data will aid in further elucidating how devel-
opment of phonological systems is constrained by instructions
from the genetic code and emerges from patterns in the input. In
607
Phonetics and Phonology, Neurobiology of
particular, examination of the way that genetic variation afects
the development of speech processing and its neurophysiologi-
cal substrate will help us understand the contributions of biology
and the environment. For example, studies of congenitally deaf
populations have revealed that some brain regions that are typi-
cally specialized for audition (e.g., regions of secondary auditory
cortex) are used in visual processing and thus are highly sensi-
tive to input. In contrast, more primary regions specialized for
audition (primary auditory cortex and subcortical areas) do not
reorganize to take on nonauditory functions and are thus less
sensitive to input. An understanding of the relationship among
the genetic code, neural connectivity, and plasticity of auditory
and language-association brain regions will help to create real-
istic models of phonetic/phonological development and pro-
cessing, which in turn will help to answer how biology and the
environment contribute to the development of this system.
Conclusion
his entry illustrated the importance of neurobiological data in
addressing signiicant questions concerning phonetic and pho-
nological processing. In particular, an understanding of the neu-
robiology supporting phonetic and phonological processing will
allow researchers to construct better models of processing and to
address questions related to irst and second language learning
and disorders (such as dyslexia and aphasia) attributable to
deicits in phonological processing.
Valerie Shafer
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Dehaene-Lambertz, G., and T. Gigla. 2004. Common neural basis for
phoneme processing in infants and adults. Journal of Cognitive
Neuroscience 16: 137587.
Hisagi, M. 2007. Perception of Japanese temporally-cued phonetic con-
trasts by Japanese and American English listeners: Behavioral and elec-
trophysiological measures. Ph.D. diss., City University of New York.
Kandel, E. , J. Schwartz, and T. Jessell. 2000. Principles of Neural Science.
New York: William Heinemann and Harvard University Press.
Kujala, A., K. Alho, E. Service, R. J. Ilmoniemi, and J. F. Connolly. 2004.
Activation in the anterior left auditory cortex associated with pho-
nological analysis of speech input: Localization of the phonological
mismatch negativity response with MEG. Cognitive Brain Research
21: 10613.
Magnuson, J. S., and H. C. Nusbaum. 2007. Acoustic diferences, lis-
tener expectations, and the perceptual accommodation of talker vari-
ability. Journal of Experimental Psychology, Human Perception and
Performance 33: 391409.
Ntnen, Risto 2001. he perception of speech sounds by the human
brain as relected by the mismatch negativity (MMN) and its magnetic
equivalent (MMNm). Psychophysiology 38: 121.
Poeppel, David, and Gregory Hickok. 2004. Towards a new functional
anatomy of language. Cognition 92: 112.
Scott, S., and R. Wise. 2004. he functional neuroanatomy of prelexical
processing in speech perception. Cognition 92: 1345.
Shafer, V. L., and K. Garrido-Nag. 2007. he neurodevelopmental bases
of language. In he Handbook of Language Development, ed. M. Shatz
and E. Hof, 2145. Oxford: Blackwell.
Shafer, V. L., R. G. Schwartz, and D. Kurtzberg. 2004, Language-speciic
memory traces of consonants in the brain. Cognitive Brain Research
18: 24254.
608
Phonological Awareness
Skipper, Jeremy I., Howard C. Nusbaum, and Steven L. Small. 2006.
Lending a helping hand to hearing: Another motor theory of speech
perception. In Action to Language via the Mirror Neuron System, ed.
Michael A. Arbib, 25084. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Strange, W., and V. L. Shafer. 2008. Speech perception in second language
learners: he re-education of selective perception. In Phonology and
Second Language Acquisition, ed. M. Zampini and J. Hansen, 15392.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS
Phonological awareness encompasses the broad class of abili-
ties that enable one to attend to, isolate, identify, and manipulate
the speech sounds in spoken words. he domain of phonologi-
cal awareness abilities can be subdivided into two levels. he
irst, phonological sensitivity, pertains to conscious aware-
ness of larger, more salient sound structures within words,
including rhymes and syllable structures (i.e., syllables and
subsyllabic units) (Scarborough and Brady 2002). (Rhymes,
deined at the word level, consist of the stressed vowel and
what follows [e.g., be/we; feather/weather]; subsyllabic units
include onsets, i.e., the portion of each syllable preceding the
vowel [e.g., be; spot; magnet], and rimes, i.e., the remaining por-
tion [e.g., be; spot; magnet]). he second level of phonological
awareness, phoneme awareness, refers to explicit awareness of
the individual phonemes making up words. Generally, children
acquire at least some degree of phonological sensitivity prior
to phoneme awareness (see phonology, acquisition of ).
However, questions remain as to whether attainment of pho-
nological sensitivity is a necessary prerequisite for the devel-
opment of phoneme awareness (Gillon 2005). When children
begin to acquire phoneme awareness, they usually irst are able
to isolate and identify the external phonemes (i.e., the begin-
ning and/or inal phonemes in words). Ultimately, proiciency
in phoneme awareness entails the ability to segment, identify,
and blend all of the individual phonemes, including those
within consonant clusters (e.g., in words such as blast).
he signiicance of phoneme awareness stems from its role
in reading acquisition (see writing and reading, acqui-
sition of). Understanding that spoken words are made up of
individual speech sounds provides a conceptual foundation for
understanding the alphabetic principle (i.e., that letters cor-
respond with phonemes). his awareness, in turn, facilitates
learning to read and spell. he relationship between phoneme
awareness and literacy development is reciprocal: With
some emergent awareness of phonemes, the student can start
to acquire lettersound knowledge. In turn, awareness of pho-
nemes is heightened by experience with print.
Since the concept of phoneme awareness was established in
the 1970s (e.g., Liberman 1971), evidence for the signiicance of
phoneme awareness for reading achievement has accrued from
correlational, prediction, and training studies. At all ages, includ-
ing adulthood, less-skilled readers demonstrate weaker perfor-
mance on phoneme awareness measures than better-reading
peers, whether the same age or younger reading-age controls.
Prediction studies with kindergarten students document that
phoneme awareness performance is one of the strongest pre-
dictors of their subsequent reading achievement, particularly
for decoding and word recognition skills, but also for reading
Phonology
comprehension (see teaching reading). Most compelling,
intervention studies conirm a causal link between instruction in
phoneme awareness and increased success at learning to read,
with greater beneits when discovery of phonemes is linked with
letter knowledge (Ehri et al. 2001).
Susan A. Brady
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Ehri, L. C., S. R. Nunes, D. M. Willows, B. Schuster, Z. Yaghoub-Zadeh,
and T. Shanahan. 2001. Phonemic awareness instruction helps
children learn to read: Evidence from the National Reading Panels
meta-analysis. Reading Research Quarterly 36.3: 25087.
Gillon, G. 2005. Phonological Awareness: From Research to Practice.
New York: Guilford.
Liberman, I. Y. 1971. Basic research in speech and lateralization of
language: Some implications for reading disability. Bulletin of the
Orton Society 21: 7187.
Scarborough, H. S., and S. A. Brady. 2002. Toward a common terminol-
ogy for talking about speech and reading: A glossary of the phon words
and some related terms. Journal of Literacy Research 34: 299334.
PHONOLOGY
As opposed to phonetics, which deals with the properties
of sounds from a language-independent point of view, pho-
nology constitutes the study of the sound structure of units
(morphemes, words, phrases, utterances) within individual
languages. Its goal is to elucidate the system of distinctions in
sound that diferentiate such units within a particular language,
and the range of realizations of a given units sound structure as
a function of the shape of other units in its context. hese two
goals the study of invariants of sound structure and of the vari-
ation shown by these elements in combination are obviously
closely related, but attention has tended to shift between them
over time.
Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century study of sound
structure focused on the details of sound production. As these
studies (in both articulatory phonetics and acoustic
phonetics) became more sophisticated, however, it was
increasingly apparent that the resulting explosion of data about
sound properties was obscuring, rather than enhancing, schol-
ars understanding of the way sound is organized for linguistic
purposes. Much that is measurable in the speech signal is pre-
dictable, internal to the system of a given language, even though
exactly comparable properties may serve to distinguish items
from one another in a diferent language.
Vowels in English, for example, are relatively longer before
certain consonants than before others, but the diference in the
vowels of, for example, cod and cot is entirely predictable from
this principle alone. By contrast, an exactly parallel diference
between the vowels of kaade dip and kade envious in Finnish
serves as the sole diference between these words. A focus on
phonetic features alone fails to reveal the role played by sound
properties within a language.
he result of this insight was the development within vari-
ous theories of structuralism of attempts (Anderson 1985)
to deine the phoneme, a presumed minimal unit of contrast
within the sound system of a single language. While there is
considerable diversity among these views, it is fair to say that
by and large, they focused on the elucidation of the contrastive
properties of elements of surface phonetic form to the exclusion
of other aspects of sound structure.
The Development of Modern Phonology
Poststructuralist theories fall broadly within the tradition of gen-
erative phonology, associated in its origins with Noam Chomsky
and Morris Halle (1968). he distinguishing character of this
view was its attention not simply to surface contrasts but also to
patterns of alternation in shape, and its positing of an abstract
underlying representation (where contrasts among elements
are characterized) that is related to surface phonetic form by a
system of rewriting rules. Each of these rules represents a single
generalization about the realization of phonological elements
(e.g., Vowels are long before voiced obstruents). Much of the
theoretical discussion in the 1960s and early 1970s concerned
the role of an explicit formalism for these rules.
he rules were presumed to apply in a sequence, with each
applying to the result of all previous rules. As a consequence,
some of the generalizations represented by individual rules may
only be valid at an abstract level and not true of all surface forms
to the extent subsequent changes obscure the conditioning fac-
tors of a rule or its efects, leading to the opacity of the rule in
question. For example, in many varieties of American English,
the medial consonants of words like ladder and latter are both
pronounced as the same voiced lap [D]. he vowels of the ini-
tial syllables of such words continue to difer in length, however,
relecting the abstract diference in voicing between /d/ and /t/,
even though that diference is obscured by the (subsequent)
application of a rule of lapping that renders the vowel-length
rule opaque. Much attention was paid in this period to the theo-
ries of rule ordering necessary for describing such phenomena.
In the years immediately following the publication of Chomsky
and Halle (1968), a number of scholars reacted strongly to the
perceived abstractness of the underlying phonological repre-
sentations to which it appeared to lead. Various proposals that
intended to restrain this aspect of the theory appeared, some of
them based on the idea that if the rules themselves could be con-
strained so as to permit only highly natural ones, drawn from
some substantively constrained universal set, the underlying
representations would thereby be forced to be closer to surface
forms. Others proposed to constrain the relation between pho-
nological and phonetic representation directly (again, often in
the name of naturalness).
In general, these attempts to limit the power of phonological
systems by iat ran into apparent counterexamples that deprived
them of their appeal. Other developments in phonological the-
orizing shifted scholars attention away from this issue while also
leading (as somewhat unintentional by-products) to a general
reduction in the degree of abstractness of representation. Some
of these elaborations and reorientations of the program of gen-
erative phonology are sketched here.
AUTOSEGMENTAL PHONOLOGY. he bulk of research during the
classical period of generative phonology was concerned with
segmental phenomena (although the main goal of Chomsky
and Halle 1968 was an account of English stress). In the early
609
Phonology
1970s, attempts to describe the phonology of tonal systems led
to important changes in assumptions about representations and
a concurrent shift of attention on the part of phonologists.
he classical theory had assumed that phonological (and
phonetic) representations were given in the form of a simple
matrix, where each row represented a phonological distinctive
feature and the columns represented successive segments. Such
a representation is based on the assumption that there is a one-
to-one relation between the speciications for any given feature
and those for all other features, since each column contains
exactly one speciication for each feature.
Tonal phenomena, however, made it clear that features need
not be synchronized in this way: A given feature speciication
might take as its scope either more or less than a single segment.
A classic example of this, ofered by W. Leben, is found in Mende,
where each word bears one of a limited set of tonal patterns,
regardless of the number of syllables on which this pattern is
realized. hus, the tone pattern high-low appears on a single
syllable in mb (and thus the low has scope over only the last half
of the vowel), on two in ngl, and on three in flm (where the hypothetical alternative. Attention focused on such problems of
single low of the pattern takes scope over two vowels). his led
to the development of autosegmental representations, in which
feature speciications were linked by lines of association (subject
to speciic constraints), rather than all being aligned into seg-
ments. he extension of this insight to other phenomena, and its
consolidation, essentially displaced the earlier concerns of rule
notation and ordering in phonologists attention.
METRICAL PHONOLOGY. A similar development took place in
the analysis of stress and the study of the syllable. he analysis
in Chomsky and Halle (1968) treated stress as simply one more
phonological feature, with a value assigned to some (but not all)
of the segments in the representation of a word. his account was
forced to attribute a number of basic properties to the feature
[Stress], however, that had no obvious correlates in the behavior
of other features.
It became possible to rationalize these properties by viewing
stress not as a segmental feature but as a relational property of
the organization of syllables into larger structures. his, in turn,
required the recognition of syllables as signiicant structural
units: a notion that was explicitly rejected in the earlier theory
in favor of an attempt to reformulate all apparent syllable-based
generalizations in terms of segmental structure alone. he orga-
nization of segments into syllables and these, in turn, into larger
units called feet, which themselves are organized into phonologi-
cal words (and phrases, etc.), allows for the elimination of the
anomalous character of segmentalized stress. he study within
metrical phonology of these units, their internal organization,
and their relation to one another completed the enrichment of
the notion of phonological representation begun within autoseg-
mental phonology.
FEATURE GEOMETRY. A standard theme of classical generative
phonology was that of natural classes of phonological segments,
groups of segments that function in some parallel fashion in pho-
nological rules to the exclusion of others. It was originally hoped
that the analysis of segments into distinctive features would pro-
vide the solution to this issue: Segments sharing a feature (or set
610
of features) were thereby characterized as similar to one another,
and thus predicted to behave in the same way in rules.
It soon became apparent, however, that feature analysis
by itself does not exhaust this matter. When nasal consonants
assimilate in place of articulation to a following obstruent, for
instance, each individual place is speciied by a distinct feature
(or set of features), and the overall unity of the process as one
applying exactly to all and only nasals, regardless of their place
of articulation, is not expressed. Nothing in the notation, that is,
makes it clear that a rule assimilating labiality, coronality, and
velarity is more coherent in some sense than one assimilating
labiality, voicing, and nasality.
he response to this problem was a program to treat the
features themselves as organized into a hierarchy, such that all
place-of-articulation features (for example), and no others, are
daughters of a unitary node [Place]. On that approach, place
assimilation could be viewed as a unitary association of the
[Place] node itself, rather than individually to each of its vari-
ous possible values, while no such single unit corresponds to the
the internal geometry of the feature system generally led to the
assumption that the way to approach them was to assume that
the theory of rules should be limited to a very simple set of reas-
sociations and deletions within the autosegmental structure of
an utterance, and that a single, universal feature hierarchy could
be speciied on the basis of which all observed natural rules
(and no unnatural ones) could be formulated. Arguments
for and against speciic proposals about such a hierarchy have
drawn considerable attention, though it is perhaps notable that
the theoretical assumptions underlying the program have been
much less discussed.
LEXICAL PHONOLOGY. In classical generative phonology, the
interface between word structure and sound structure is quite
simple. morphological elements are combined into words
in the syntax, these elements are provided with phonological
(underlying) forms, and the resulting syntactically organized
labeled, bracketed structure serves as the input to the phonology.
At least some of the phonological rules were assumed to apply
according to the principle of the cycle, based on this structure,
in a uniform way. To the extent that morphological elements dis-
play diferent phonological properties in their combinations with
others, this was represented as diferences within an inventory of
boundary elements separating them from adjacent items.
Originating from the apparent generalization that elements
with the same phonological behavior (hence, associated with the
same boundary type) tend to appear adjacent to one another,
the theory of lexical phonology proposed a substantial revision to
this architecture. Instead of constructing the entire representa-
tion once and for all and then submitting it to the phonology for
realization, this view proposed that the lexicon of morphological
elements is divided into multiple strata or levels. Basic roots can
combine with elements of the irst stratum; after each such mor-
phological addition, the resulting form is subject to adjustment
by the rules of a corresponding level of the phonology, and the
output is then eligible to serve as the input to further morpho-
logical elaboration. At some point, addition of elements from the
irst stratum is replaced by use of the morphology and phonology
Phonology
of the next, and, from then on, no further elements from the ini-
tial stratum can be added. his process continues (perhaps vacu-
ously) through all of the strata of the lexicon, yielding a potential
surface word. All of the words in a given syntactic structure are
then subject to adjustment by another set of postlexical phono-
logical processes.
here are a number of further points that characterize this
view, including proposed diferences in the properties of lexical
and postlexical rules and the relations between rules on one level
and those on the others. he central point for a broader theory
of grammar, however, is probably the replacement of a syntax-
based (but purely phonological) notion of cyclic rule application
by a repeated cycle of morphological addition and phonologi-
cal adjustment. his results, for example, in the possibility that
a phonologically derived property (on one cycle) can be relevant
to the conditioning of a morphological operation (on a following
cycle), a possibility that has been shown to be quite real.
OPTIMALITY THEORY. In the early 1990s, a much more radical
challenge to the classical model was presented by the develop-
ment of optimality theory (OT), a view of phonology based
on a system of ranked, violable constraints on surface shape,
as opposed to a system of ordered rules deriving the phonetics
from an underlying phonological representation. hese con-
straints govern (in the standard formulation) a one-step relation
between underlying and surface representations (cf. underly-
ing structure and surface structure), with no interme-
diate stages of the sort produced in a rule-based description. he
constraints can be divided into general classes: a) markedness
constraints, which express universally preferred conigurations,
and b) faithfulness constraints, requiring that contrasts present
in the phonological representation be preserved in the surface
form. In general, these are in conlict, and the ranking of the con-
straints governs the resolution of those conlicts, in conformity
with general principles of grammar.
Initially, OT seemed to ofer its greatest promise in the analy-
sis of stress, syllable structure, and related phenomena, but sub-
sequent development has encompassed a full range of segmental
and other facts. Descriptions in constraint-based terms are at
least supericially very diferent from those couched in terms of
traditional rules, and theoretical discussion in phonology since
their introduction has been largely dominated by comparisons
of the two frameworks.
Current Approaches to Phonology
he central issues in phonology in the irst decade of the twen-
ty-irst century concern the comparative merits of OT and
rule-based descriptions. On the one hand, constraint-based
formulations seem much better equipped to describe global
properties of phonological systems. It was noted in work from
the classical period of generative phonology that multiple dis-
tinct processes in an individual language may all have the efect
of ensuring (or avoiding) a single characteristic property of sur-
face form, but no satisfactory account of the unity displayed by
these conspiracies was ever achieved. OT, in contrast, provides
a very direct description of such facts.
In some ways, the surface constraint approach goes beyond
anything available in principle to the rule-based theory. For
example, when languages accommodate loan words to the sur-
face patterns of other words of the language, the adjustments
needed to achieve this may include changes that do not corre-
spond to any rule of the phonology of native forms. Constraints
accomplish this directly and without further stipulation, whereas
a system of rules may have to be arbitrarily extended to account
for loanword adaptation.
On the other hand, some of the same issues that rule-based
phonology dealt with (and at least largely resolved) have resur-
faced as serious challenges to the architecture of grammar gen-
erally assumed in constraint-based theories. Most important
among these is the problem of opaque generalizations. he
standard model of OT assumes that its constraints apply directly
to surface forms and govern a single-stage mapping between
these and underlying phonological representations, and so
has no place for generalizations that crucially apply to any sort
of intermediate level. Nonetheless, a number of compelling
examples of such phenomena have been demonstrated, and
some sort of accommodation of these facts must be provided by
an adequate phonological theory.
Some responses to this challenge have attempted to maintain
the standard OT model by introducing new sorts of constraints.
Mechanisms such as output-output constraints or sympathy the-
ory, however, have not generally succeeded in dealing with all of
the relevant phenomena and have been shown to produce new
diiculties of their own.
One approach that seems promising is that of stratal OT,
an architecture that grafts a constraint-based account onto the
standard model of lexical phonology. he result is a framework
in which the phonological mapping at each stage is a one-step
process governed by a constraint system. Since the model is
built on a cyclic interaction of phonology and morphology, how-
ever, it also provides for multiple successive stages in the overall
derivation, thus accommodating opacity to the extent it can be
related to morphological structure (as in the best-established
examples).
Examples also seem to exist in which the speciic changes
through which a language achieves conformity with a gen-
eral constraint on surface forms do not follow directly from
the content of the constraint (together with other interacting
generalizations). In such a case, something like a rewriting
rule might be necessary, as a supplement to the constraint
system a notion that is clearly antithetical to the basic phi-
losophy of OT.
A quite diferent problem concerns the very nature of the
universals of phonological structure (see phonology, uni-
versals of). Phonological theorizing has generally accepted
the premise that generalizations that are true of phonological
systems in general result from the cognitive organization of the
human language faculty and, thus, must be incorporated in some
way into the architecture of phonological theory. Recently, how-
ever, it has been argued that at least some such typological regu-
larities result not from the content of a universal grammar
constraining synchronic systems but, rather, from the universals
of language change (see language change, universals of)
governing the diachronic developments resulting in the systems
we observe. To the extent that this is true, it requires investiga-
tors to examine closely the arguments for incorporating any
611
Phonology, Acquisition of
particular regularity into phonological theory per se, as opposed
to seeking its basis elsewhere.
Conclusion
While there have, of course, been other trends not covered here,
it seems fair to say that the bulk of the theoretical discussion in
phonology from the 1960s to the present has been devoted to
the elaboration and reinement of the generative program of
Chomsky and Halle (1968). he most recent developments in
that tradition, involving the wholesale replacement of rules by
constraints as the mechanism for expressing regularities of a lan-
guages sound pattern, have shown great promise but cannot yet
be considered wholly consolidated. Apparently, some appropri-
ate synthesis of the classical and OT models remains to be found,
and it is that search that dominates discussion today.
Stephen R. Anderson
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Anderson, Stephen R. 1985. Phonology in the Twentieth Century: heories
of Rules and heories of Representations. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. Describes the development of phonological theory, from its ori-
gins through the classical period of generative phonology.
Chomsky, Noam, and Morris Halle. 1968. he Sound Pattern of English.
New York: Harper and Row.
Gussenhovern, Carlos, and Haike Jacobs, 2005. Understanding Phonology.
2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Lucid elementary introduc-
tion to current phonology.
Kager, Ren 1999. Optimality heory: A Textbook. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. Introduces the main ideas of optimality theory in
phonology and their implementation.
Kenstowicz, Michael 1994. Phonology in Generative Grammar.
Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Provides a comprehensive description of
the principal themes in phonology up to the introduction of optimality
theory.
PHONOLOGY, ACQUISITION OF
A diversity of issues informs work in the ield of phonological
acquisition, as it encompasses both irst (L1) and second (L2)
language acquisition examined by researchers in linguistics,
psychology, speechlanguage pathology, and language edu-
cation. In L1, there are questions such as how the acquisition
of phonology interfaces with perceptual and motor develop-
ment (Locke 1993), and how an examination of disordered
development can illuminate the normally developing gram-
mar (Bernhardt and Stemberger 1998; Dinnsen 1999). In L2,
there are questions as to whether the acquisition process is
fundamentally like L1 acquisition (Flege 1995), or whether L2
grammars are in some sense impaired due to, for example, L1
constraints that impede native-like attainment (see Brown 1998
on perception).
Due to space constraints, this entry focuses on L1, although
many of the same issues arise for L2. he acquisition of phonol-
ogy is examined from the perspective of generative grammar;
thus, a principal theme is to examine how acquisition research
has used linguistic theory to inform development. his theme
considers the starting hypothesis to be that childrens produc-
tions are largely system driven: Acquisition research strives to
612
understand the system that relates childrens stored representa-
tions to their productions, and to formalize the developmental
paths that children follow.
Childrens Grammars as Possible Grammars
he focus of research on phonological acquisition is on the shapes
of early grammars in the segmental and prosodic domains; thus,
it parallels research on end-state (adult) grammars. (Segmental
phonology is concerned with individual speech sounds, prosodic
phonology with larger units including syllables and feet.) here is
typically a comparison drawn between the shapes of developing
grammars and some end-state grammar. Order of emergence
of segmental (Dinnsen 1992) and prosodic complexity (Fikkert
1994; Levelt, Schiller, and Levelt 1999/2000), as well as error pat-
terns observed in the segmental and prosodic domains, whether
these patterns are expressed through rules (Smith 1973; Ingram
1974), templates (Macken 1992; Fikkert 1994), or constraints
(Pater and Barlow 2003; Goad and Rose 2004), are all considered
in relation to some adult grammar.
One exception is a body of research that views childrens
grammars as self-contained systems subject to their own con-
straints (Stoel-Gammon and Cooper 1984; Vihman 1996). his
research program developed in response to the observation that
childrens grammars are not simply reduced versions of the
target grammar; indeed, variation across learners is rampant
(Ferguson and Farwell 1975).
While childrens grammars may be self-organizing in that
they contain processes not present in the target language, they
can still be viewed as possible grammars (White 1982; Pinker
1984) if these processes have correlates in other adult languages.
he notion of possible grammar thus requires that, at each
stage, childrens grammars respect the constraints of adult gram-
mars, even if they bear little resemblance to the target system. In
optimality theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky [1993] 2004),
for example, alternate routes observed across learners, as well as
stages in the development of a single learner, are viewed from
the perspective of the typological options that adult languages
display: Both are accounted for by diferent rankings of the same
constraints.
Markedness
Although children take diferent paths to the adult grammar, early
phonologies are also strikingly similar (Jakobson [1941] 1968).
As Roman Jakobson emphasizes, these similarities relect cross-
linguistically unmarked properties. markedness constrains the
shapes of linguistic systems such that less complex properties are
favored. For example, there is a well-documented preference for
consonant+vowel (CV) syllables among children (Ingram 1978;
cf. Grijzenhout and Joppen-Hellwig 2002); this is also a syllable
shape that no end-state grammar forbids (Jakobson 1962). Since
unmarked patterns are systematically observed across learners,
one might reasonably infer that they relect early grammatical
organization. However, markedness has not always been well
integrated into the theory of grammar (as part of the theory of
representations or formulation of rules/constraints). his begs
the question of whether markedness should instead be part of
the theory of acquisition, which interfaces with, but is indepen-
dent of, the theory of grammar.
Phonology, Acquisition of
Table 1.
Ambient Stage Grammar: Stored form:
form:
[wei] 1 M >> F-perc, F /wei/
2 F-perc >> M >> F
/wei/
3 F-perc, F >> M
An advantage of OT is that the formal devices for expressing
phonological generalizations include a set of markedness con-
straints. Most researchers have proposed that learners begin
acquisition with a ranking wherein markedness constraints dom-
inate faithfulness (which favor identity between inputs [stored
representations] and outputs) (e.g., Demuth 1995; Gnanadesikan
[1995] 2004; Smolensky 1996; Pater 1997; Ota 2003; cf. Hale and
Reiss 1998). hroughout development, constraints are reranked
to yield more marked outputs. However, many paths can be fol-
lowed, as there are many options for what to rerank. hus, the
idea that grammars are initially unmarked is not inconsistent
with their being self-organizing.
Perception Versus Production
Most work in phonological acquisition has focused on produc-
tion; indeed, researchers typically assume that children accu-
rately perceive the ambient input. his is due, in part, to the
observation that prelinguistic infants can perceptually discrimi-
nate perhaps all contrasts exploited by the worlds languages
(Eimas et al. 1971; Werker et al. 1981). his ability largely declines
by age one (cf. Best, McRoberts, and Sithole 1988), coinciding
with a reorganization of perceptual categories according to what
is contrastive in the target language (Werker and Tees 1984). As
children start to speak around age one, it would appear that per-
ception is complete by the onset of production.
Research on phonemic perception, which requires the abil-
ity to form soundmeaning pairings, has challenged this view
(Shvachkin [1948] 1973; Edwards 1974; Brown and Matthews
1997). Although experiments examining minimal contrasts
between native-language sounds have revealed that perceptual
development is mostly complete by age two, some contrasts
develop as late as three. Even age three is probably conservative
because, for consonant perception, this research has focused
almost exclusively on word-initial position. Since contrasts in
other positions are harder to discriminate, many non-target
patterns that childrens productions display could relect per-
ceptual miscoding, rather than production constraints (Macken
1980).
If perception and production both relect aspects of childrens
competence, both must be included in the grammar (cf. Hale
and Reiss 1998). However, the time lag observed (production
trails perception) has suggested to some researchers that they
form independent (interacting) grammatical modules (see Menn
and Matthei 1992). his approach, though, cannot predict that
perception and production abilities develop in a similar order.
he latter favors the postulation of a single grammar if the time
lag can be built in. In Pater (2004), this is accomplished by intro-
ducing perception-speciic faithfulness constraints into OT.
Grammar: Produced
form:
M >> F-perc, F
[wei]
F-perc >> M >> F
F-perc, F >> M [wei]
As shown in Table 1, at Stage 1, both perception-speciic
faithfulness (F-perc) and general faithfulness (F) are outranked
by markedness (M). he result is unmarked forms stored in per-
ception and uttered in production. In the example provided, the
ambient form [wei] away undergoes truncation of the pre-
tonic syllable (an unstressed syllable immediately preceding a
stressed syllable) in both components of the childs grammar;
accordingly, words of this shape are perceived and produced
without this syllable. At Stage 2, the childs perceptual abilities
become more target-like (i.e., he/she learns to correctly iden-
tify information in the ambient language); this indicates that
the relevant markedness constraints have been demoted below
perception-speciic faithfulness. General faithfulness is still out-
ranked, yielding a mismatch between what the child perceives
and what he/she produces. At Stage 3, markedness is demoted
below general faithfulness, and the form is correctly produced.
he perception-production time lag results because forms that
are correctly perceived at Stage 2 are not correctly produced until
Stage 3.
Phonological Theory and Phonological Acquisition
As the preceding discussion reveals, research in phonological
acquisition has been directly impacted by thinking in generative
phonology. Modern generative phonology began with Chomsky
and Halles (1968) Sound Pattern of English (SPE). Although more
recent work has situated the shapes of developing grammars
within the typological range manifested by adult systems, this
was less the case in the SPE-based literature. Much of this work
used SPE as a tool only, in part because, with the formal appa-
ratus employed by the theory, it was diicult to constrain what
a possible grammar is: developing or end state. And although
the theory contained an evaluation metric to guide learners in
selecting the most highly valued among descriptively adequate
grammars, rules for unattested processes were as easy to formal-
ize as rules for commonly attested processes. Finally, SPE con-
tained no workable theory of markedness and, thus, childrens
grammars could not be considered relative to some notion of
optimal.
To facilitate a comparison between SPE and later theories,
we draw on truncation, further exempliied in (1) from Amahl,
age 2.60 (Smith 1973; [b,g] are voiceless unaspirated lenis stops).
(he discussion focuses on the stage when perception is target-
like and truncation is restricted to production.)
(1) [gep] escape
[an] banana
In SPE, every deviation from adult forms required one or more
rules, and so there was little in common between the rule sets
613
Phonology, Acquisition of

for developing and target systems. To capture truncation, Neil Table 2.

Smith (1973) provides the rules below, neither of which operates
in the adult grammar: ParseSyll Max[lab]-IO Max-IO I-Contig
(2) R14: V / # (C) ______ C V a. [b(nan)Ft]Wd *!
[-stress] [+stress] b. [(nan)Ft]Wd *! **
R16: [+sonorant] / [+consonantal] ______
c. [(ban)Ft]Wd ** *
R14 deletes initial vowels in words like escape. For consonant-
initial forms like banana, the result is [bnan], which then under-
goes R16, yielding [ban].
To illustrate, concerning truncation in Table 2, the con-
Since SPE employed linear representations, the theory did
straint ParseSyllable (syllables are parsed into feet), along
not ofer any insight into why pretonic rather than posttonic syl-
with other markedness constraints, must be satisfied at the
lables delete (escape [gep], but tiger [aig], *[ai()]).
expense of the lower-ranked faithfulness constraint Max-IO
he development of nonlinear phonology (see Goldsmith 1985
(every segment in the input has a correspondent in the out-
for an overview), notably the move to highly articulated prosodic
put). Fully faithful (a) is thus eliminated because the initial syl-
representations, led to signiicant breakthroughs in understand-
lable is unfooted. Concerning onset selection, Max[labial]-IO
ing this asymmetry. In trochaic languages, where the foot (the
(every [labial] in the input has a correspondent in the out-
rhythmic unit in which stress is assigned) is left-headed (stress-
put) must be ranked over I-Contiguity (the portion of the
initial), escape cannot form a single foot, [s(kip)Ft]Wd, whereas
input standing in correspondence forms a contiguous string).
tiger can, [(tig)Ft]Wd.
Preservation of [labial] in banana will thus be favored, (c),
Much work in nonlinear phonology has explored the idea
even though the result violates I-Contig through morpheme-
that prosodically deined templates constrain output shape
internal segment deletion.
(McCarthy and Prince 1995). Paula Fikkert (1994) proposes that
OT has had a major impact on acquisition research.
templates, which at early developmental stages relect what
Phonological processes are now generally expressed through
is unmarked, are responsible for truncation. If the childs pro-
constraints, rather than rules, as this provides a better concep-
ductions are limited to one foot, circumscribed from the adult
tualization of the observation that markedness shapes early
output, this template will determine which material is preserved
grammars. As discussed, childrens productions become more
from the adult form and which is deleted:
target-like when markedness constraints are demoted below
A dult output: Wd faithfulness. A similar idea, that development is best viewed as
the gradual relaxing of constraints, had been proposed earlier
Ft (Stampe 1969; Menn 1980), but it was diicult to formally imple-
keip ment it in the rule-based frameworks of the time.
s
e
OT seems to provide an appealing view of the initial state and
Ft of development; researchers can address important questions,
such as how the theory may restrict what a possible develop-
Child output: Wd ing grammar is, and how, in turn, data from development may
inform the theory. However, this is not to say that OT has solved
In contrast to SPE, nonlinear phonology reveals the rela-
all problems in phonological acquisition. One understudied
tionship between target and truncated forms, and the role that
problem is rogue behavior. We have been assuming that chil-
markedness plays in shaping outputs. he material inside the
drens grammars are possible grammars, thereby ignoring the
foot survives, as syllables organized by feet ([keip]) are less
fact that some commonly attested processes, notably conso-
marked than those linking directly to the word ([s]). One prob-
nant harmony (CH), have no adult analogs (Drachman 1978). In
lem with the templatic approach, however, is that it is too rigid: If
CH, consonants share place over vowels of any quality (Vihman
the segments predicted to survive are precisely those delimited
1978), as seen in (3) for Amahl, age 2.60 (Smith 1973):
by the constituent that serves to organize them in the adult form,
it becomes diicult to capture the observation that material from (3) [aig] tiger
the truncated syllable can also survive. For example, in Amahls [ok] stroke
pronunciation of banana in (1), onset selection favors [b], replac-
Some recent accounts of CH (Goad 1997; Rose 2000) incor-
ing [n] from the stressed syllable; that is, his production is [an]
rectly predict that the process should be attested in adult gram-
not *[nan] as expected from adult [b(nan)Ft]Wd (see Kehoe
mars; others (Pater 1997) appeal to child-speciic constraints,
and Stoel-Gammon 1997 for other problems with the templatic
thereby challenging the notion that childrens grammars are pos-
approach).
sible grammars. Neither of these approaches questions whether
his problem is rectiied in OT. First, there are no templates;
CH is truly grammar-driven nor addresses, more generally, the
templatic efects arise from the interaction of markedness con-
criteria that should factor into the determination concerning
straints. Second, segmental content (e.g., labial preservation)
what is grammar-driven and what is not. I leave these questions
is the responsibility of faithfulness constraints. Finally, all con-
to future work.
straints are interranked; thus, the co-occurrence of truncation
and onset selection is not unexpected (see Pater 1997). Heather Goad

614
Phonology, Acquisition of

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Best, Catherine, Gerald McRoberts, and Nomathemba Sithole. 1988.
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Kehoe, Margaret, and Carol Stoel-Gammon. 1997. he acquisition of
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Brown, Cindy, and John Matthews. 1997. he role of feature geometry
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Locke, John. 1993. he Childs Path to Spoken Language.
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Chomsky, Noam, and Morris Halle. 1968. he Sound Pattern of English.
Macken, Marlys. 1980. he childs lexical representation: he puzzle-
New York: Harper & Row.
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Demuth, Katherine. 1995. Markedness and the development of prosodic
. 1992. Wheres phonology? In Phonological Development: Models,
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Dinnsen, Daniel. 1992. Variation in developing and fully developed pho-
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Menn, Lise. 1980. Child phonology and phonological theory. In Child
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Menn, Lise, and Edward Matthei. 1992. he two-lexicon account to
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PHONOLOGY, EVOLUTION OF
True Phonology: How Did It Evolve?
phonology is the study of how languages use segmental and
prosodic categories to build spoken words and signal their dif-
ferences in meaning. Many animals that communicate vocally
use distinct sound patterns to signal diferent meanings, but
their repertoires are typically small and closed sets. By contrast,
humans have large vocabularies and learn new words all of
their lives. From infancy to adolescence, children acquire lexi-
cal entries at a remarkably fast rate. he vocabulary size of high
school students has been conservatively estimated at 60,000 root
forms a number that implies an average acquisition rate of
more than 10 words per day (Miller 1991).
his diference is linked to the uniquely human method of
coding information: the combinatorial use of discrete entities.
Combinatorial structure, the hallmark of true language, creates
the conditions for open-ended lexical and syntactic systems
that provide the foundation for the singular expressive power of
human languages. How did it evolve?
We focus on two areas of empirical research. One is the study
of human cognition. he other is the investigation of the phonetic
signal space from which all phonological patterns are drawn.
he irst theme highlights mans rich semantic abilities. he
second looks for phenomena that presage combinatorial sound
structure.
Cognitive Growth
he virtually ininite set of meanings encodable by language
raises the question of how mans cognitive capacity evolved
from skills not unlike those of present-day apes. How do we pic-
ture the transition from a nonhuman to a human primate mind?
What was the role of language?
According to Merlin Donalds synthesis of neurobiologi-
cal, psychological, archeological, and anthropological evidence
(1991), our ancestors broke away from the stimulus-driven
behavior of apes in two steps. First, during the period of Homo
erectus (from 1.5 million years ago), an adaptation called mimesis
occurred, a communicative culture allowing individuals to share
mental states and begin to represent reality in new and expand-
ing ways.
Mimetic behavior is an ability to voluntarily access and
retrieve motor memories and to rehearse and model them for
communication with others. he whole body is used as a rep-
resentational device, as in imitating vocal, manual, and postural
movements for a communicative purpose. Mimesis involved
major changes of motor and memory mechanisms based on
existing capacities.
616
Communication during this period was based on gestures.
Spoken language emerged in the second transition. In Donalds
scenario, it takes until the end of the period associated with
archaic Homo sapiens (45,000 years ago) for spoken language to
appear.
If mimesis was a basically gestural mode of communication,
would it not imply a proto-language that was signed, rather than
spoken (cf. Arbib 2005)? Donald assumes that as mimetic mes-
sages grew more elaborate, they eventually reached a complex-
ity that favored faster and more precise ways of communicating.
he vocal/auditory modality ofered an independent, omnidir-
ectional channel useful at a distance and in the dark. It did not
impede locomotion, gestures, or manual work. he vocal system
came to be exploited more and more and further adaptations
occurred: irst lexical invention and high-speed phonological
speech, syntax later.
Specializations of the Vocal/Auditory Modality
A number of comparative studies have been undertaken in
attempts to evaluate the adaptive signiicance of novel fea-
tures of human anatomy (see speech anatomy, evolution
of): for example, disappearance of air sacs (Hewitt, MacLarnon,
and Jones 2002), bigger hypoglossal and vertebral canals, smaller
masticatory muscle mass, genetic changes, and uniqueness of
craniofacial sensorimotor system (Fitch 2000; Kent 2004).
Perhaps the most conclusive example of a speech-related
adaptation is the descent of the larynx, which makes swallowing
more hazardous but expands the space of possible sound quali-
ties (Lieberman 1991; Carr, Lindblom, and MacNeilage 1995).
A human ability, central to language but curiously absent
in primates, is vocal imitation. A beginning of a neural account
of imitation was suggested by the discovery of mirror neurons.
First identiied in the macaques premotor cortex, these neurons
discharge when the monkey manipulates objects and when it
observes other monkeys or humans do the same. Neurons that
respond to sound and to communicative or ingestive actions
have also been identiied. Although there is no direct evidence
for a human mirror system, brain stimulation and imaging stud-
ies indicate increased activity in speech muscles when subjects
listen to speech (Hurley and Chater 2005; see mirror systems,
imitation, and language).
Signals for Speaker, Listener, and Learner
In technical jargon, phonology has been characterized as provid-
ing an impedance match between semantics and phonetics in
the sense that it succeeds in coding a large number of meanings
despite its use of only a small set of phonetic dimensions (Bellugi
and Studdert-Kennedy 1980). How was this match achieved?
GESTURES AS BASIC UNITS. One answer is that the building
blocks of speech are phonetic gestures, units corresponding to
the discrete articulators. he argument is that, evolutionarily,
as holistic utterances were processed by the mirror system, they
came to be parsed into the basic articulators of the vocal tract
and their preferred, natural motions. Data from early speech
have been used to argue that these units, when properly timed
and modulated in amplitude, produce the vowels and conso-
nants of the ambient adult input (Studdert-Kennedy 2005).
Phonology, Evolution of
PHYLOGENY OF THE SYLLABLE. he frame/content theory
(MacNeilage 2008) ofers an evolutionary account of the syllable.
Syllables are universally associated with openclose alternations
of the mandible, vowels being open and consonants closed artic-
ulations. his movement has a parallel in childrens babbles,
which resemble consonant-vowel sequences such as [bababa],
but are in no way organized in terms of discrete segments. Rather,
their syllabic and segmental character arises fortuitously from
adding phonation to the openclose jaw motion. his rhythmic-
ally repeated up-and-down movement is also found in so-called
lipsmacks, a facio-visual behavior in primates often combined
with phonation during grooming.
Accordingly, the evolutionary path to the syllable began in
deep prehistoric time when mammal biomechanics evolved for
feeding. A second stage was the use of this machinery in primate
communication. In a third step, this primate mechanism was co-
opted for speech by scafolding early phonology on its pseudo-
syllables and pseudo-segments.
QUANTAL THEORY. he acoustic consequences of a continuous
articulatory movement are often noncontinuous, as illus-
trated by the pseudo-segmental character of babbling. In the
babble example, the jaw moves continuously but the acoustics
shows an abrupt change from a vowel-like to a stoplike pattern.
his quantal jump illustrates a general fact about the phonetic
space. he mapping of articulation onto acoustic parameters
creates a set of acoustic patterns that forms a number of disjoint
subspaces, rather than a single continuous, coherent space.
Within each such subregion, sound quality is homogeneous.
Voiced and voiceless sounds, as well as diferent manners of
articulation (e.g., stops, nasals, fricatives, trills), exemplify such
distinct subspaces (Stevens 1989).
USER-BASED CONSTRAINTS: ON-LINE SPEECH. he human voice
is an expressive instrument that undergoes moment-to-moment
retuning by many nonlinguistic factors. Consequently, the pho-
netic patterns conveying linguistically the same utterance exhibit
great variability. However, the need for messages to be both intel-
ligible and pronounceable imposes a systematic distribution on
phonetic variations, placing them between clear hyperforms and
reduced hypoforms. his view portrays speakerlistener interac-
tions as a tug-of-war between the listeners need for comprehen-
sion and the speakers tendency to simplify. here is a great deal of
experimental evidence for this view of speech (Lindblom 1990).
USER-BASED CONSTRAINTS: PHONOLOGY. hese user-based con-
straints also leave their mark on phonology, as is evident from
typological data on strengthening and weakening processes in
phonological rules and sound changes (Kiparsky 1988) and from
attempts to simulate segment inventories. hese studies indicate
that systemic selections have been favored that simultaneously
optimize distinctiveness and articulatory ease. An example of
the efect of these conditions is the size principle: he larger the
system, the greater the proportion of articulatorily complex seg-
ments (Lindblom and Maddieson 1988)
SELF-ORGANIZATION. hese user-based constraints in conjunc-
tion with the quantal nature of the signal space help explain
why phonologies do not recruit more of a humans total sound-
making capabilities (e.g., mouth sounds and other non-speech
vocalizations; Catford 1982) but prefer practically the same small
set of phonetic properties. However, the study of these constraints
only partially illuminates the roots of combinatorial coding. his
topic has been explicitly addressed in computer modeling exper-
iments. One such study shows how discrete phonetic targets and
reuse can emerge from a dynamic systems network of agents
(speaker/listener models) whose vocalizations initially ran-
domly distributed in phonetic space tend to converge (driven
by a magnet-like dominance of the patterns heard most often) on
a few targets (Oudeyer 2006).
TARGETS AND MOTOR EQUIVALENCE. Traditionally, the basic units
of speech have been assumed to be targets, the intertarget transi-
tions being primarily determined by the response characteristics
of the production system. Speech, like other movements, exhib-
its motor equivalence: the ability of motor systems to compensate
and reach a given goal irrespective of initial conditions. his view
implies that the end state of phonetic learning is a set of context-
independent targets and a system capable of motor equivalence.
It moreover suggests that once a target has been learned in one
context, it can immediately be reused in other contexts, since the
motor equivalence capability handles the new trajectory. Also, it
means that, developmentally, discrete segments derive from the
emergent targets and recombination from motor equivalence.
A further relevant observation on the target hypothesis is that
linguistic systems with phonemically coded vocabularies would
be learned faster, more easily, and in an open-ended manner
than repertoires based on holistic forms (Lindblom 2007).
Conclusion
Where does combinatorial structure come from? From prespeci-
ications in our genetic endowment? Or from a modality-inde-
pendent principle shared by sign and speech and perhaps also
operating in genetics and chemistry (cf. the particulate principle
[Abler 1989])? Or from a mutually reinforcing interplay between
cognitive growth and a suite of conditions entailed by communi-
cating by vocal sounds?
In view of the materials reviewed here, a positive treatment of
the last possibility appears within reach. More lexical inventions
imply an increasing number of soundmeaning pairs. he link-
ing of phonetic shapes with distinct meanings would be subject
to numerous user-based constraints and processes shaping the
instrinsic content of lexical entries, fractionating them into dis-
crete units and facilitating unit recombination. Sound structure
could, thus, plausibly have evolved in response to the expressive
needs associated with growing semantic abilities and as a pro-
cess of phonetically biased scaling, self-organizing without
any formal a priori or modality-independent blueprint.
Bjrn Lindblom
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Abler, William L. 1989. On the particulate principle of self-diversifying
systems. Journal of Social and Biological Structures 12: 113.
Arbib, Michael. 2005. he mirror system hypothesis: How did proto-
language evolve? In Language Origins: Perspectives on Evolution, ed.
Maggie Tallerman, 2147. New York: Oxford University Press.
617
Phonology, Universals of
Bellugi, U., And M. Studdert-Kennedy. 1980. Signed and Spoken
Language: Constraints on Linguistic Form. (Dahlem Konferenzen.)
Weinheim, Germany: Verlag Chemie GmbH.
Carr, Ren, B. Lindblom, and P. MacNeilage. 1995. Rle de lacoustique in this limited space to discuss and exemplify more than a few
dans lvolution du conduit vocal humain. Comptes Rendus de
lAcadmie des Sciences (Paris) t 30, srie Iib: 47176.
Catford, John C. 1982. Fundamental Problems in Phonetics.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Donald, Merlin. 1991. Origins of the Modern Mind. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press
Fitch, W. Tecumseh. 2000. he evolution of speech: A comparative
review. Trends in Cognitive Science 4.3: 25867.
Hewitt, G., A. MacLarnon, and K. E. Jones. 2002. he functions of laryn-
geal air sacs in primates: A new hypothesis. Folia Primatol 73: 7094.
Hurley, Susan, and Nick Chater. 2005. Perspectives on Imitation: From
Neuroscience to Social Science. Vols. 1, 2. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kent, Ray D. 2004. Development, pathology and remediation of
speech. In From Sound to Sense: 50+ Years of Discoveries in Speech
Communication, ed J. Slifka et al. Cambridge, MA: Research
Laboratories of Electronics, MIT.
Kiparsky, Paul. 1988. Phonological change. In Linguistics: he Cambridge
Survey. Vol. 1. Ed. F. J. Newmeyer, 363415. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lieberman, Philip. 1991. Uniquely Human. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Lindblom, Bjrn. 1990. Explaining phonetic variation: A sketch of the H&H
theory. In Speech Production and Speech Modeling, ed. W. Hardcastle
and A. Marchal, 40339. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer.
. 2007. he target hypothesis, dynamic speciication and seg-
mental independence. In Syllable Development: he Frame/Content
heory and Beyond, ed. B. Davis and K. Zajd. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum.
Lindblom, B., and I. Maddieson. 1988. Phonetic universals in conso-
nant systems. Language, Speech and Mind, ed. Larry M. Hyman and
C. N. Li, 6278. London and New York: Routledge.
MacNeilage, Peter F. 2008. he Origin of Speech. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Miller, George A. 1991. he Science of Words. New York: Freeman.
Oudeyer, Pierre-Yves. 2006. Self-Organization in the Evolution of Speech.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Stevens, Kenneth N. 1989. On the quantal nature of speech. J Phonetics
17: 346.
Studdert-Kennedy, Michael. 2005. How did language go discrete? In
Language Origins: Perspectives on Evolution, ed. Maggie Tallerman,
4867. New York: Oxford University Press.
PHONOLOGY, UNIVERSALS OF
Phonological universals are those aspects of languages sound
system that are found either in every or most human lan-
guages or in diverse languages where their presence cannot be
accounted for by inheritance from a common parent language,
geographical proximity, or borrowing. hey are often referred
to as unmarked or default conditions in languages phonologies
when these terms imply reference to common cross-language
patterns. here are universal patterns in languages 1) sound
inventories, including their prosodies, 2) sequential constraints
(how sounds are sequenced), and 3) sound changes and the
phonological alternations they create within a given language.
hey are of interest because they give insight into the physical
factors that shape human speech, help to elucidate mechanisms
of sound change, and, perhaps, suggest something about the
618
supposed human innate capacity for language. here is a sizable
literature on phonological universals (e.g., Greenberg, Ferguson,
and Moravcsik 1978; Maddieson 1984), and it will not be possible
of those that have been discovered. What is more important and
what will be emphasized here is a consideration of the explana-
tion for phonological universals. he best evidence presented so
far points to their phonetic origin.
A caveat: Phonological universals as with any other phono-
logical generalization are inevitably stated in terms of a tradi-
tional pretheoretic taxonomy. One should always be alert to the
possibility that the taxonomic terms devised for purely practical
and descriptive purposes may not conform to the true essence
of speech, just as, for example, a pretheoretic category for living
animals of those that ly would result in a heterogeneous class
that included birds, bats, lying ish, and winged insects to the
exclusion of penguins, ostriches, emus, and kiwis.
Universals Deriving from Speech Aerodynamics
All languages have consonants and vowels. Among conso-
nants, all languages employ stops. Among stops, voiceless stops
are the default; that is, if a language employs voiced stops it
will also have voiceless stops, but not the reverse. his can be
explained by the aerodynamic voicing constraint (AVC) (Ohala
1983): Voicing requires air low through the approximated vocal
cords, and this requires a positive pressure diferential between
the subglottal and the oral air pressures. During obstruents, the
lowing air is blocked by the consonantal closure so that air accu-
mulates in the oral cavity, thus increasing the oral air pressure
above the glottis such that eventually the required pressure dif-
ferential diminishes, thereby reducing transglottal airlow below
the level needed for vocal cord vibration. Another universal pat-
tern explained in part by the AVC is that among languages that
do have voiced stops, it is often the case that the back-articulated
stop is missing, for example, as in Dutch and hai. his is because
insofar as the AVC can be ameliorated, it is due to the compli-
ance of the surfaces of the vocal tract to the impinging oral air
pressure. he magnitude of this compliance is greatest for labial
obstruents (due to expandability of the cheeks), less for apicals,
and least for velars, which have the least surface area exposed
to the oral pressure. hese factors also help to explain the kind
of sound change that occurred in Nubian, now manifested as
a morphophonemic alternation, whereby geminated voiced
stops become voiceless at all places of articulation except labial
(Table 1; data from Bell 1971).
Among languages that have both voiced and voiceless stops,
there are many that have only voiceless fricatives (e.g., hai,
Galician, Taba). Again, the AVC is part of the explanation: As
Table 1
Noun stem Stem + and English gloss
/fab/ /fab:n/ Father
/sgd/ /sgt:n/ Scorpion
/ka/ /ka: n/ Donkey
/mg/ /mk:n/ Dog
Phonology, Universals of

Table 2. Table 3.

Language Voiceless and voiced Voiced only a. Sundanese:

Awadi i, u, e a, o n to wet

Campa i o, e, a bhr to be rich

Chatino i, u o, e, a hkn to inform

Dagur i, u, e o, a msih to love

Huichol i, , e u, a
Serbo-Croatian i, u e, o, a
Tadjik i, u, a e, o, u
Tunica u i, e, , a, , o
Uzbek i, u e, , o, a
mentioned, optimal conditions for voicing require oral pressure
as low as possible (with respect to subglottal pressure), but opti-
mal conditions for generating frication (turbulence) at an oral
constriction requires the oral pressure as high as possible (with
respect to atmospheric pressure). hese conditions are con-
tradictory. hus, voiced fricatives are less common than voice-
less ones. Phonetically, in languages that have both voiced and
voiceless fricatives (e.g., English, French, Italian, etc.), the frica-
tion noise of voiced fricatives is always less than that for voiceless
fricatives.
Although all languages have voiced vowels, some languages
feature voiceless vowels as well, though often these are con-
textually determined, for example, word inally or in the envi-
ronment of voiceless consonants. In any case, it seems to be
always the case that a voiceless vowel has a voiced counterpart.
J. H. Greenberg (1969) provided a survey of the incidence of
voiceless vowels in several languages. He found a virtually uni-
form pattern: Voiceless vowels appear as the counterparts to
vowels higher in the vowel space. (See Table 2.) he explanation
for this also requires reference to the AVC. Among vowels, high,
close vowels like [i] and [u] are almost obstruents. If articulated
suiciently close, they impede the exiting airlow almost as much
as fricatives. his, in combination with other factors that could
create a slightly open glottis via coarticulation, such as appear-
ing in word- (and thus utterance-) inal position or near voice-
less obstruents, can lead to the vowel being voiceless. he same
factors apply to glides (approximants) that are high, close like
[j], [w], and [] and account for the frequent devoicing and frica-
tivization that gives rise through sound change to cases like the
dialectal alternations in English as Tuesday [thjuzdi] ~ [th uzdi],
and lieutenant [lwtnnt] ~ [lftnnt] and truck [t k]~[th k]
h small space between the tongue apex and the lips constitutes a
(and similar patterns in many other languages). he same factors
frequently lead to the africation of stops before high close vow-
els or glides as in Japanese, for example, or the sound change that
converted Benjamin Franklins natural [ntjul] to the modern
pronunciation [n t l].
Aerodynamic factors also explain patterns of nasal prosody
in languages as diverse as Sundanese (spoken in the Indonesian
archipelago) and Tereno (spoken in the Mato Grosso, Brazil).
As shown in Table 3, in these (and other) languages, the pres-
ence of a nasal consonant induces nasalization on all vowels and
b. Tereno:
1st person 3rd person
mbiho
piho I/he went
ahjaao anaao I/he desire(s)
iso nzo I/he hoed
owoku wgu my/his house
ajo jo my/his brother
emou m my/his word
iha nza my/his name
Sources: For Sudanese: Robins 1957; for Tereno: Bendor-Samuel 1960, 1966.
glides following, unless blocked by a buccal obstruent (that is,
one made in the oral cavity from the uvular-velar region to the
lips). Nonbuccal obstruents such as the glottal fricative [h] or
the glottal stop [] do not block it. his follows from a straightfor-
ward physiological constraint: Buccal obstruents, insofar as they
require the buildup of oral pressure, cannot tolerate venting of
this pressure via an open velic port. he nonbuccal obstruents
require a pressure buildup in a cavity that does not access the
velic port, and so whether the velic port is open or closed is irrel-
evant to their production.
Among fricatives, the most common are the apical s-like fric-
atives (Maddieson 1984). his stems from a combination of aero-
dynamic and anatomical factors. Apical fricatives have relatively
long and intense noise in the high frequencies (3 to 8 kHz) and
are thus easily detected and are distinct from all other speech
sounds. his is due to the fact that the approximation of the
tongue apex at or near the alveolar ridge enables the generation
of a relatively focused high-velocity air jet, which itself generates
noise, but the air jet is also directed at the incisors, which act as a
bale and cause the generation of more high-frequency noise as
the air hits the teeth surface (this is why s sounds are impaired
in the speech of juveniles when they lose their primary teeth and
before the growth of their permanent teeth). Additionally the
resonator that reinforces high frequencies.
he existence and properties of a resonator downstream of
the point where turbulent noise is generated underlies another
marked asymmetry in the incidence of stop types. We saw previ-
ously that in languages that have both voiced and voiceless stops,
the voiced velar stop [g] is often missing. Among voiceless stops,
the bilabial [p] is often missing (Sherman 1975), for example, in
Arabic and in Aleut (except for loanwords) and in Proto-Celtic.
Noise generated by the air turbulence at the lips have no down-
stream resonator to amplify the noise.

619
Phonology, Universals of
Figure 1. A schematic representation of the resonating cavities during the
production of different nasal consonants. The solid line demarcates the
main pharyngeal-nasal cavity, which is the same for all such nasals. What
differentiates one nasal from another is the effect produced by the oral
resonator, which branches off this main cavity. Even though a labial velar
consonant has two main constrictions, it is only the rearmost, the velar
constriction, that matters and thus sounds similar to the velar nasal [].
Virtually all languages employ nasal consonants (Ferguson
1963). However, there are never more place distinctions among
nasals than there are obstruents, and there are often fewer. he
acoustics of nasals probably account for this. All nasal conso-
nants have in common the pharynx-plus-nasal air space. What
diferentiates one nasal consonant from another is the efect of
the oral cavity, which branches of the nasal-pharyngeal cavity
(see Figure 1). hus, although nasals are highly distinct as a class
from non-nasals, they are auditorily very similar to one another.
his also partly accounts for the frequent pattern whereby nasals
assimilate in place to a following stop, for example, English
incredible [ikhbl]< in (neg. preix) + credible; Latin qunctus less common would such sequences be found; the greater the
> quntus (where original n = [] > [n] / __t).
An interesting cross-language pattern is the character of nasal
assimilation to labial velar consonants such as [kp], [ b] and
[w], that is, segments that have equal constrictions in the labial
and velar region. he nasal that appears before such segments
is invariably a velar [] not the labial [m], for example, Kpelle
and Melanesian (Table 4). he explanation for this pattern can
be seen in Figure 1. What matters for the place of articulation of
a nasal consonant is the irst buccal constriction encountered
from the nasal pharyngeal cavity. In a labial velar, this is the velar
constriction; the labial constriction, being beyond that, is acous-
tically largely irrelevant (Ohala and Ohala 1993).
Phonotactics
he conventional view of common cross-language sound
sequencing or phonotactics is couched in terms of whats
called the sonority hierarchy (attributed to E. Sievers and O.
Jespersen), whereby the favored pattern at syllable onset shows
sounds sequenced in the following order (where omissions
are possible): stop + fricative + nasal + liquid (i.e., non-nasal
620
Table 4.
Kpelle: [w] patterns with velars in nasal assimilation:
Indeinte Deinite
`mi wax
lu `nui fog, mist
l `il dog
we `wei white clay
Notes: Melanesian: m > / __w:
Common Melanesian /limwa/ hand ~ Fijian /linga/ (= phonetic [liwa])
/mala/ ~ /mwala/ ~ /wala/ (name of the Mala Island in different dialects of
the island)
Sources: For Kpelle: Welmers 1962; for Melanesian: Ivens 1931.
continuant) + glide + vowel and at syllable ofset, the reverse.
he English words swamp and tryst, the French words plume
[plym] and soir [swa], and the Czech Psov name of a city
[psf] would thus adhere to this generalization. But there are
reasons to be skeptical of the sonority hierarchy. First, there is
no empirical content to the term sonority; it has never been ade-
quately deined. Second, it ignores such very common clusters
as /sp/, /st/, and so on in syllable initial position and /ps/, /ts/,
and so on in syllable inal position. hird, it ignores cross-lan-
guage prohibitions of onset sequences like /tl/, /dl/, /ji/, /wu/,
/twu/, and /bji/, that is, sequences that have similar elements.
John Ohala and H. Kawasaki-Fukumori (1997) suggest replac-
ing a) the one-dimensional concept of sonority with a multidi-
mensional measure, where similarity of sounds is a function of
acoustic amplitude, formant frequencies and spectral shape in
general, degree of periodicity (whether from fricatives or stop
bursts), and even fundamental frequency; and b) the notion of
the ixed hierarchy with a measure of the degree of similarity of
sounds according to (a). he more two sounds are similar, the
diference in sounds, the more common. By this criterion, initial
sequences like /sp/and inal sequences like /-kst/ (in English
text), and so forth are normal, and initials /tl/, /ji/, /wu/, and so
forth are less preferred.
Sound Changes
Of the thousands of regular sound changes that have been
identiied using the comparative method in historical pho-
nology, certain ones are recognized as showing independent
cross-language incidence. One such is velar palatalization, k >
t, t, s, /__i (j), (and similar changes involving the voiced velar
/g/), for example, English cheese [thiz]] from Latin caseus (cf.
Dutch kaas); Ikalanga [ti-ledu] chin < Proto-Bantu *ki-dedu.
Traditionally, the causes of sound change were attributed to two
opposite tendencies: speakers striving for ease of articulation,
which would lead to assimilations and reductions, and speak-
ers striving to speak more clearly, which would lead to exag-
geration of articulation and augmentation of pronunciation.
here is no doubt that speakers do alter their pronunciation
in these manners, but it may be seriously questioned whether
Phonology, Universals of
these changed forms replace previous norms of pronunciation.
here is no evidence for this. here is, however, an alternative
scenario of sound change that does have empirical support: lis-
teners errors. here have been numerous speech-perception
experiments, some involving natural speech, which revealed
errors that mirrored sound change; for example, in a study in
Winitz Scheib, and Reeds (1972) where listeners heard a frag-
ment of consonant/vowel (CV) syllables, [khi] was misidentiied
as [thi] 47 percent of the time, paralleling the change in place
found in velar palatalization. Ohala (1981) has elaborated a
theory of sound change based on listeners misperception or
misparsing of the speech signal. Such common sound change
includes VN > V , for example, Sanskrit dant tooth > Hindi /
dt/, Latin bon- good > French /b/, and the assimilation of
place in C1C2 consonant clusters, Latin scriptu > Italian scritto,
English congress [khagrs] < (ultimately) Latin com- together
+ gradi to walk.
Phonological Universals and Universal Grammar
It has also been proposed that phonological universals arise from
humans genetic endowment in the form of whats called univer-
sal grammar (Pertz and Bever 1975). Such claims have been dis-
puted by those who ind phonological universals rooted in the
physical and physiological attributes of all human speakers and
hearers. he dust has not settled on this issue as yet.
John Ohala
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
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Review 9: 11559.
Bendor-Samuel, J. T. 1960. Some problems of segmentation in the pho-
nological analysis of Tereno. Word 16: 34855.
. 1966. Some prosodic features in Terena. In In Memory of J. R.
Firth, ed. C. E. Bazell, J. C. Catford, M. A. K. Halliday, and R. H. Robins,
309. London: Longmans.
Ferguson. C. A. 1963. Some assumptions about nasals. In Universals of
Language, ed. J. H. Greenberg, 427. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Greenberg, J. H. 1969. Some methods of dynamic comparison in linguis-
tics. In Substance and Structure of Language, ed. J. Puhvel, 147203.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
. 1970. Some generalizations concerning glottalic consonants,
especially implosives. International Journal of American Linguistics
36: 12345.
Greenberg, J. H, C. A. Ferguson, and E. A. Moravcsik, eds. 1978. Universals
of Human Language. Vol. 2. Phonology. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Ivens, W. G. 1931. A grammar of the language of KwaraAe, North Mala,
Solomon Islands. Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 6: 679700.
Maddieson, I. 1984. Patterns of Sounds. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Ohala, J. J. 1981. he listener as a source of sound change. In Papers
from the Parasession on Language and Behavior, ed. C. S. Masek,
R. A. Hendrick, and M. F. Miller, 178203. Chicago: Chicago Linguistics
Society.
. 1983. he origin of sound patterns in vocal tract constraints.
In he production of Speech, ed. P. F. MacNeilage, 189216. New
York: Springer-Verlag.
Ohala, J. J., and H. Kawasaki-Fukumori. 1997. Alternatives to the sonor-
ity hierarchy for explaining segmental sequential constraints. In
Language And Its Ecology: Essays In Memory Of Einar Haugen, ed.
Phrase Structure
S. Eliasson and E. H. Jahr, 34365. Trends in Linguistics: Studies and
Monographs, Vol. 100. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Ohala, J. J., and J. Lorentz. 1977. he story of [w]: An exercise in the
phonetic explanation for sound patterns. Berkeley Linguistics Society,
Proceedings, Annual Meeting 3: 57799.
Ohala, J. J., and M. Ohala. 1993. he phonetics of nasal phonol-
ogy: heorems and data. In Nasals, Nasalization, and the Velum, ed.
M. K. Hufman and R. A. Krakow, 22549. San Diego, CA: Academic
Press.
Pertz, D. L., and T. G. Bever. 1975. Sensitivity to phonological universals
in children and adolescents. Language 39: 34770.
Robins, R. H. 1957. Vowel nasality in Sundanese. In Studies in Linguistic
Analysis, 87103. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sherman, D. 1975. Stop and fricative systems: A discussion of paradig-
matic gaps and the question of language sampling. Stanford Working
Papers in Language Universals 17: 131.
Welmers, W. E. 1962. he phonology of Kpelle. Journal of African
Languages 1: 6993.
Winitz, H., M. E. Scheib, and J. A. Reeds. 1972. Identiication of stops
and vowels for the burst portion of /p,t,k/ isolated from conversation
speech. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 51.4: 130917.
PHRASE STRUCTURE
It is an ancient observation that natural language syntax is hier-
archically organized. As can be seen from a variety of diagnostics,
the words comprising a sentence do not behave as beads on
a string but group into successively larger units, or constituents.
Phrase structure (PS) is a formal representation of this constit-
uent structure. PS is typically depicted as a tree-structured
graph (Figure 1), which encodes three sorts of structural informa-
tion: i) dominance, specifying the words and constituents that a
constituent contains within it (e.g., as shown by vertical placement
in the igure, prepositional phrase (PP) dominates on and televi-
sion); ii) precedence, specifying the temporal orderings among the
words and constituents (e.g., as shown by horizontal position, the
constituent most fans precedes the constituent watched the game
on television); and iii) labeling, specifying the grammatical cate-
gory of each word and constituent (e.g., the constituent the game
is a noun phrase (NP)). In PS-based approaches, this structural
information plays an important role in deining the conditions
under which grammatical dependencies may obtain (see agree-
ment, anaphora, binding, and case), and PS is often taken to
be the input to transformational operations (see movement and
transformational grammar). Further, PS representations
serve as the interface between syntax and semantics, as they pro-
vide the structural information necessary for interpretation (see
compositionality, thematic roles, and logical form).
A fundamental question concerns how the range of possible
PS is speciied in a grammar. he earliest answer comes from
Noam Chomsky (1957), who suggests that PS is generated by a
set of phrase structure rules, like the following:
1. S NP VP
2. NP N
3. NP Det N
4. VP V NP
5. VP VP PP
6. PP P NP
621
Pidgins
Figure 1. Phrase structure representation for Most fans watched the game
on television.
In these rules, a symbol appearing to the left of the arrow can be
rewritten as the sequence of symbols to the right of the arrow. he
process of PS generation begins with a distinguished start sym-
bol S and successively rewrites the symbols in the string using
the rules of the grammar until no rewritable symbols remain.
An example of this process follows, with the number above each
arrow indicating the rewriting rule used:
1 3 5 4
S NP VP Det N VP Det N VP PP Det N V NP PP
6 2
Det N V Det N PP Det N V Det N P NP Det N V Det N P N
he PS in Figure 1 can be understood as a history of this
derivation: he children of a node correspond to the sequence
of symbols into which that node is rewritten. Some recent
approaches have maintained rewriting as part of the grammar
but have questioned the nature of the rewrite rules employed
in this system, generalizing and modifying them in a variety
of respects (see x-bar theory and minimalism ). Other
approaches have abandoned rewriting, taking well-formed
PS representations to be those that best satisfy a set of gram-
matical constraints (see head-driven phrase structure
grammar, lexical-functional grammar , and opti-
mality theory ).
Robert Frank
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING.
Baltin, Mark, and Anthony Kroch, eds. 1989. Alternative Conceptions of
Phrase Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. he Hague: Mouton.
PIDGINS
Pidgins are the worlds only non-native languages. hey are
typically acquired by adults, after the critical period for language
acquisition has passed. hey normally arise wherever suicient
speakers of mutually incomprehensible languages must inter-
act with one another. Some pidgins arose through and for trade;
the most plausible derivation ofered for the origin of the name
pidgin attributes it to the Chinese pronunciation of business
622
(Baker and Muhlhausler 1990). Pidgins used widely for trading
purposes (but not limited to such functions) include Russenorsk,
Chinese Pidgin English, and Chinook Jargon, once widely used in
the American Northwest. Other pidgins arose where large num-
bers of slaves and/or indentured laborers had to work together
on colonial plantations. Such pidgins were usually short-lived,
evolving into creole languages; contrary to some claims, careful
examination reveals manifold signs of their pidgin ancestry, and
the earliest attestations of some (Baker and Corne 1982; van den
Berg 2000) show pidgin-like structures. Although the reality of this
pidgin-to-creole cycle has been denied (see entry on creoles),
massive empirical evidence exists in Hawaii, as described by S. J.
Roberts (1995, 1998); there is also evidence of prior pidginization
in other creoles, such as fossilized sequence markers and marked
vocabulary mixture (see the following examples).
As compared with natural languages (including creoles), all
pidgins are severely impoverished, with sharply reduced vocab-
ularies, few structural consistencies, and few if any inlectional
aixes; complex sentences very seldom occur. Function words
are rare, if not completely absent; categories normally expressed
via auxiliary verbs of tense, mood and aspect are indicated, if at
all, by two adverbial forms meaning roughly soon or inish
that are attached, not adjacent to the verb as in natural lan-
guages generally, but clause-inally or clause-initially. We ind,
3
for example, baimbai (English by-and-by) and pau (Hawaian
inished), baimbai and pinis in Tokpisin; also a number of sim-
ilar pidgin fossils in creoles (sometimes inside, sometimes still
outside the verb phrase), such as in(i), inish in French-related
creoles, done in English-related creoles, or (ka)ba (Portuguese
acabar inish) in Portuguese-related creoles.
If a pidgin persists in a relatively stable population (one not
subject to the rapid expansion and turnover that typically char-
acterize creole societies) and is widely used over a long enough
period, it may acquire a more stable (although still limited)
structure. However, pidgins still sufer from widespread misun-
derstanding of the linguistic mechanisms through which they
arise. According to many writers (e.g., Bakker 1995; Manessy
1995) they are reduced or simpliied versions of preexisting
languages, or failed attempts by speakers with inadequate access
to acquire the locally dominant language a view reinforced by
standard usage of expressions such as Pidgin English, Pidgin
French, and so on.
Pidgins do not derive from processes applied to any preexist-
ing natural language, however, but (as is clear both from histori-
cal data in Hawaii and reminiscences of older residents; see, e.g.,
Bickerton 1981, 11) arise naturally from strategies employed by
individuals of any ethnic background in a multilingual situation
where no single existing language is both viable and accessible.
Speakers seek to communicate by any means possible, using iso-
lated words from their own language, from their interlocutors
language (if they know any), and from any third or fourth lan-
guage that they may happen to have picked up.
hese words are seldom assembled in the way words are
assembled in modern human languages, that is, hierarchically.
Except for occasional rote-learned phrases, words are attached
sequentially, like beads on a string. Consequently, no true gram-
matical relations exist, limiting utterances to brief strings of a few
words without embedding.
Pidgins
he degree to which pidgins (and subsequent creoles) show
lexical mixture has been underestimated in the literature.
Noteworthy are Russenorsk (with roughly equal quantities of
Norwegian and Russian words, but also 14% of its vocabulary
drawn from other languages; Broch and Jahr 1984) and Chinook
Jargon (only 41% from Chinook, with at least 11 other languages,
European and non-European, contributing to the remainder;
Gibbs 1863). he baragouin that preceded the formation of the
Lesser Antillean French Creoles showed a similar mixture (Wylie
1995).
Evidence from creoles suggests that the pidgins they evolved
from had equally mixed vocabularies. Berbice Dutch draws 27
percent of its vocabulary from one African language, Ijaw (Smith,
Robertson, and Williamson 1987). Saramaccan may have as
many as 50 percent African words (Price 1976). Comparison of
Saramaccan and Sranan vocabularies shows that these creoles,
both derived from the same pidgin, difer in perhaps as many as
75 percent of their vocabulary items; contra most sources, rela-
tively few of these diferences involve a Portuguese/English con-
trast, strongly suggesting an antecedent macaronic pidgin that
drew on English, Dutch, and Portuguese, as well as a variety of
African and Amerindian languages, and from which Sranan and
Saramaccan each made a diferent selection.
Why pidgins have so often been regarded as simpliica-
tions of particular (almost invariably, European) languages is
revealed by the massive database of contemporary citations
gathered by Roberts (summarized in Roberts 1995, 1998. 2005,
but not yet published in its entirety). From this data, it is clear
that pidgin descriptions have been shaped by observer bias.
Most citations from English-language sources contain a pre-
ponderance of English words, showing why J. E. Reinecke (1969)
and others characterized the lingua franca of early Hawaii as a
predominantly English pidgin with a sprinkling of Hawaiian
words. However, the abundant Hawaiian-language sources
reverse this picture, presenting a predominantly Hawaiian
vocabulary with a sprinkling of English words, while the much
sparser Japanese-, Chinese-, and Portuguese-language sources
each contain a higher admixture of their own languages (brief
sentences containing words from three diferent languages are
by no means uncommon). Clearly, in a pidgin situation, observ-
ers record what they best understand and downplay or ignore
the rest.
he well-attested existence of a pidgin phase in the life cycle
of creoles also helps to explain the strong structural similari-
ties that hold between creoles of widely diferent provenance.
For such similarities to arise, input had irst to be reduced to an
abnormally low level of structure, forcing children to draw on
their innate language faculty for the systematic structures that a
pidgin can manage without, but that are essential for any natural
language.
Derek Bickerton
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Baker, P., and C. Corne. 1982. Isle de France Creole. Ann Arbor,
MI: Karoma.
Baker, P., and P. Muhlhausler. 1990. From business to pidgin. Journal
of Asian Paciic Communication 1: 87115.
Pitch
Bakker, P. 1995. Pidgins. In Pidgins and Creoles: An Introduction, ed. J.
Arends, P. Muysken, and N. Smith, 2539. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Bickerton, D. 1981. Roots of Language. Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma.
Broch, I., and E. H. Jahr. 1984. Russenorsk: A new look at the
Russo-Norwegian pidgin in northern Norway. In Scandinavian
Language Contacts, ed. P. S. Ureland and I. Clarkson, 2164.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gibbs, G. 1863. A Dictionary of the Chinook Trade Jargon or Trade
Language of Oregon. New York: Gramoisy.
Manessy, G. 1995. Croles, Pidgins, Varits Vehiculaires. Paris: CNRS
Editions.
Price, R. 1976. he Guiana Maroons: A Historical and Bibliographical
Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Reinecke, J. E. 1969. Language and Dialect in Hawaii. Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press.
Roberts, S. J. 1995. Pidgin Hawaiian: A sociohistorical study. Journal of
Pidgin and Creole Languages 10: 156.
. 1998. he role of difusion in the genesis of Hawaiian Creole.
Language 74: 139.
. 2005. he Emergence of Hawaii Creole English in the Early 20th
Century: he Sociohistorical Context of Creole Genesis. Ph.D. diss.,
Stanford University.
Smith, N., I. Robertson, and K. Williamson. 1987. he Ijaw element in
Berbice Dutch. Language in Society 16: 4990.
van den Berg, Margot. 2000, Mi no sal tron tongo: Early Sranan in Court
Records, 16671767. Unpublished Masters thesis, Radboud University
Nijmegen.
Wiley, J. 1995. he origin of Lesser Antillean French Creole: Some lit-
erary and lexical evidence. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages
10: 71126.
PITCH
When an object vibrates, its movement produces changes in
air pressure that radiate like waves from the source. If the fre-
quencies of the vibrations are roughly between 20 and 20,000
cycles per second, or Hertz (Hz), ideally they can be heard by a
young, healthy human listener. he range of hearing frequen-
cies declines with age. he physical characteristic of the vibrat-
ing body, frequency, produces a psychological experience called
pitch. In general, a low frequency produces the sensation of a low
pitch (for example, the 60 Hz hum produced by electrical power
in a poorly grounded radio), with the pitch increasing as the fre-
quency increases (a male voice at 100 Hz, a female voice at 200
Hz, a childs voice at 300 Hz). Because there is a close corres-
pondence between frequency and pitch, people frequently use
the terms interchangeably. However, in addition to frequency,
the sensation of pitch is inluenced by an interaction between
the amplitude of the vibration and the range of the frequency.
Pitch is also inluenced by the complexity of the vibration and its
corresponding wave form.
A vibrating body oscillates as a single entity, producing a fre-
quency referred to as the fundamental frequency. So, when the
key for A above middle C is played on a piano, a string vibrates
at 440 Hz. Vibrating bodies are not perfectly rigid, though, and
the string also vibrates in parts as if it is two strings (producing
a frequency of 880 Hz), and three strings (1320 Hz), etc. hus, a
vibrating body produces a series of frequencies beginning with
the fundamental frequency (f0) and including its harmonics,
which are multiples of the f0. he distribution of acoustic energy
623
Pitch
across the harmonic series contributes to the quality or timbre
of the sound. In addition to sound quality, the harmonics con-
tribute signiicantly to the perception of pitch. he fundamental
frequency of a harmonic series can be artiicially removed with-
out changing the pitch, a demonstration referred to as the miss-
ing fundamental. In speech, the harmonic series is a function of
the complex wave produced by the glottal source. Formants are
bands of resonance that concentrate the acoustic energy pro-
duced by the glottal source as a function of the vocal tract conig-
uration and have center frequencies that relect the vocal tract,
rather than the harmonic series.
Pitch can be experienced from pure tones (f0 alone), which
do not occur naturally, as well as from complex tones (f0 + har-
monic series), but the pitch of complex tones is a stronger per-
cept, allowing iner discriminations of f0 frequency diferences.
he processing of pitch from a determination of the f0 versus
the pattern recognition of a harmonic series relies on difer-
ent neurological systems. Simple frequency determination can
occur at multiple levels of the nervous system, but complex pitch
processing occurs in auditory areas in the right cerebral hemi-
sphere that complement speech and language areas in the left
cerebral hemisphere (Sidtis 1980; see also right hemisphere
language processing and left hemisphere language
processing).
For practical purposes, pitch in language can be viewed as a
direct function of f0. Unlike the pitch distinctions made in music,
linguistic pitch distinctions are comparatively coarse. Whereas
a musical octave can be divided into 12 semitones, and vibrato
in experienced singers can be consistently less than a semitone,
most linguistic communicative situations only require distinc-
tions of three semitones or more. Further, the pitch distinctions
in language are relative, allowing men, women, and children to
make the same linguistic and paralinguistic distinctions despite
diferent vocal f0s (see paralanguage), whereas pitch distinc-
tions in music reference speciic frequencies (e.g., a musical
scale tuned to 440 Hz).
A number of linguistic and paralinguistic phenomena are
provided by pitch. At the suprasegmental level, pitch produces
the melodic line of an utterance to convey linguistic intona-
tion (e.g., declination efect: falling pitch anticipating the end
of a statement, rising pitch indicating a question), sociolin-
guistic information (e.g., uptalk, rising pitch at the end of a
statement, falling pitch as a cue for turn-taking), and paralin-
guistic information (e.g., emotion, attitude). Pitch can also be
used with loudness to provide syllable accent at the segmen-
tal level.
Pitch also has a lexical role in tone and pitch accent lan-
guages. Tone languages may have many tone patterns (esti-
mates vary, but the numbers are fewer than the 12 notes in the
musical octave), and they tend to fall in relative categories like
high, medium, and low, further distinguished by rising and fall-
ing patterns. Because such distinctions are relative, the listener is
required to perform a tone normalization to identify a speakers
lexical tones. Just as simple and complex pitch perception rely
on diferent brain mechanisms, the processing of pitch for lin-
guistic and nonlinguistic purposes engage diferent neurological
systems, principally the temporal lobes in the left and right
cerebral hemispheres (Van Lancker and Fromkin 1973).
624
Poetic Form, Universals of
In sum, the perception of pitch can play linguistic and para-
linguistic roles at the suprasegmental and segmental levels of
utterances. Pitch is closely related to the physical stimulus fre-
quency, but as a psychological event, it is inluenced by the com-
plexity, frequency range, and loudness of the tone. Pitch can be
processed in a low-resolution mode at many levels in the ner-
vous system or at high-resolution mode in specialized areas of
the cerebral cortex of the brain in the right temporal lobe. Pitch
can also be processed in linguistic and nonlinguistic modes by
the left and right temporal lobes of the brain, respectively. he
variation of pitch during luent speech can be considered a truly
integrative process that conveys both linguistic and paralinguis-
tic information.
John Sidtis
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Crystal, David. 1987. he Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. New
York: Cambridge University Press. Presents multiple brief discussions
of pitch in diferent linguistic roles.
Sidtis, John J. 1980. On the nature of the cortical function underlying right
hemisphere auditory perception. Neuropsychologia 18.3: 32130.
Sidtis, John J., and D. Van Lancker Sidtis. 2003. A neurobehav-
ioral approach to dysprosody. Seminars in Speech and Language
24.2: 93105. Describes how diferent aspects of prosody rely on dif-
ferent brain structures.
Van Lancker, Diana, and V. A. Fromkin. 1973. Hemispheric specializa-
tion for pitch and tone: Evidence from hai. Journal of Phonetics
1: 1019.
POETIC FORM, UNIVERSALS OF
A poetic universal is manifested by a feature that is found very
widely (for example, rhyme; see rhyme and assonance) or by
a relation between features that is found very widely (for exam-
ple, rhyme is generally found in verse, not in prose). Like linguis-
tic universals, poetic universals might be studied by comparative
work (often depending on fairly salient features) or by focused
work on the abstract forms (hypothesized abstract universals)
underlying the surface poetic forms in a particular language.
A theory of universals can be formulated in terms of universal
parameters (sets of related formal options) from which a speciic
poetic tradition makes speciic choices. Unlike a language, where
only one choice can be made, a literary tradition can divide into
subtraditions, each making a diferent choice (thus, for example,
classical Sanskrit literature includes quite diferent kinds of met-
rical verse). here is no presupposition that diferent modalities
will throw up signiicantly diferent universals; thus, the gen-
eral assumption is that written, oral, and signed literatures will
have similar characteristics (see oral composition and sign
languages). he term literature is here used interchangeably
with verbal art and should not be used to imply a special status
for written literature.
With the exception of folklore studies (which, however, tend
to have a narrow areal range), no discipline or subdiscipline
takes as its responsibility the investigation of poetic universals.
Some researchers are actively hostile to universals in favor of
an alternative emphasis on the special characteristics of each
tradition, and some ieldworkers ignore verbal arts when they
Poetic Form, Universals of
gather information about a language; some missionary linguists
have even been known to displace indigenous verbal arts with
hymns or Bible stories, with the odd result that it is these, rather
than indigenous texts, that are gathered in grammars and other
reports. hus, there has been relatively little work, either descrip-
tive or theoretical, on poetic universals.
he universal of poetic form that is most widely manifested,
and may indeed be found everywhere, is the possibility of verse,
as a way of organizing language. A text that is in verse is a text
cut into a sequence of lines (= verse lines). A line is a section of
text that supports two or more generalizations, and the investiga-
tion of universals of poetic form is largely an investigation of the
generalizations formulated in terms of the line.
For example, Miltons poem Paradise Lost is in lines, and
so is verse. (his example is chosen [see Fabb 2002] because
in the eighteenth century some critics claimed that it was not
verse.) Here are ive generalizations that are supported by the
line in this poem: 1) here are 10 syllables in each line; 2) the
end of the line coincides with the end of a word; 3) while there
is a tendency for stressed syllables to be in even-numbered
positions, the line-initial position is often also occupied by a
stressed syllable; 4) the word of is found with greater than
expected frequency as the irst word in a line, as seen, for exam-
ple, in the irst two lines of the poem; and 5) the printed form of
the text arrays lines in a vertical sequence. he study of poetic
universals seeks to establish the distribution of each of these
kinds of form (i.e., each of these generalizations) and then to
understand whether these distributions imply anything about
poetic universals.
What would the study of poetic universals make of these
generalizations? Generalization 1 can be understood more
abstractly as the line contains a speciic number of syllables,
and this is deinitely a universal, in the sense that it is true of
many verse traditions; however, we might also ask whether the
fact that there are speciically 10 syllables in the line also consti-
tutes a (more narrowly manifested) universal. Generalization
2 is also very widespread; while lineation does not necessarily
respect phrase or sentence boundaries, word boundaries
are usually respected (and this connects with the fact dis-
cussed later that metrical rules control for word boundaries
but not for phrase or sentence boundaries); hence, there is an
interesting potentially universal relation between the line that
is a nonlinguistic section of text and the word that is a linguis-
tic constituent. Generalization 3 in its speciic formulation is
generally true of English, but more abstractly the possibility of
relaxing a rule at the beginning of a line is found widely; for
example, Greek verse lines often begin with a syllable whose
weight is uncontrolled (anceps). Generalization 4 holds true
also of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century verse after Milton;
is it telling us something signiicant about of or about the natu-
ralness of beginning a line with a preposition phrase? On the
one hand, we might say that post-Miltonic verse is just imitat-
ing a kind of form that Milton may have invented, but we might
also note that much twentieth-century free verse also favors
preposition-initial lines. It is worth noting that the Greek early
elegiac poets tended to begin and end lines mainly with words
used previously by Homer, suggesting again that choice of par-
ticular words at line edges has the potential to be a universal.
his generalization also draws attention to the fact that literary
practices can have features in common because of imitation
of an admired writer or foreign tradition. Finally, generaliza-
tion 5 is not true of all ways of writing verse, but we might ask
whether the wide acceptance of this practice tells us some-
thing about the cognitive status of lines (e.g., that we cognize
each line as a separate, isolated unit). hese are the kinds of
questions we might ask in exploring the possibility of univer-
sals of poetic form.
Relative to the line, six categories of poetic form might be iden-
tiied, which follow; there may be others (such as the tendency
to use speciic words at line edges), and the grouping in this list
depends on theoretical assumptions and is not simply given to
us by the data. For each of the categories, we might explore its
status as a universal. None of these kinds of form is required in a
verse tradition. Most verse traditions are either metrical (i.e., they
involve the counting of syllables) or parallelistic, which is itself
an interesting universal. Either metrical or parallelistic verse can
also have rhyme and alliteration, though rhythm and word
boundary rules are usually found only in metrical verse. here
are some verse traditions, such as modern free verse, that do not
consistently manifest any of these categories of poetic form (but,
as noted, they may manifest other categories of poetic form, such
as the tendency to use particular words or particular syntactic
structures at line edges).
1. he counting of syllables: In all metrical verse, the
line has a speciic number of syllables (Irish deibhidhe has 7,
Icelandic drttkvaett has 6) or a deined range of possible num-
bers of syllables (English iambic pentameter is normatively 10
but permits 911, French alexandrin 1213, Homeric dactylic
hexameter 1317, Japanese haiku 35 or 47 in diferent lines,
etc.). Some theories of meter suggest that units other than syl-
lables can also be counted, such as morae (subsyllabic units)
or larger groupings of syllables. Across literary traditions, we
ind that not all syllables in the line are counted for metrical
purposes; in particular, when a vowel-inal syllable precedes a
vowel-initial syllable, many traditions permit or require these
to count as a single metrical syllable. Various other generaliza-
tions can be made about the counting of syllables, which may
be the source of universals (this is the basic claim of Fabb and
Halle 2008).
2. he patterning of syllables, requiring a division of sylla-
bles into two classes for metrical purposes: Accentual rhythms
manifest this type of patterning, where syllables are distin-
guished into two classes as stressed versus unstressed and pat-
terned on this basis, for example, into triplets where every third
syllable is stressed. More generally, most kinds of metrical verse
divide syllables into two classes, on the basis of stress, syllable
weight, lexical tone, or whether they alliterate and on possibly
other characteristics yet undiscovered); the class membership
of a syllable then admits it to speciic positions within the verse
line. In some cases, the distribution of the two types of syllable is
periodic (e.g., a regular recurrence as in an iambic rhythm) and
in other cases partially periodic or apparently nonperiodic (as
in the supericially aperiodic sequences of heavy and light syl-
lables required in Classical Sanskrit verse). An interesting rhyth-
mic universal is that syllables are divided into just two classes
for metrical purposes, even when there would be a basis in the
625
Poetic Form, Universals of
language for more than two classes. For example, Vietnamese
has six types of lexical tone, which are grouped into just two
tonal classes for the purposes of metrical regulation. It has been
claimed that another rhythmic universal is based on the (opti-
mality-theoretic) phonological notion of the moraic
trochee as a basic rhythmic unit (see, for example, Golston and
Riad 2005). Robbins Burling (1966) claimed that a certain com-
bination of meter and rhythm is found universally in childrens
verse.
3. Word-boundary rules: In the metrical line, two adjacent
syllables can be required to be in separate words that is, a
word boundary must intervene (by a caesura rule); or they can
be required to be in the same word that is, a word boundary
must not intervene (by a bridge rule). Thus, for example, the
sixth syllable in a French 12-syllable alexandrin must be word-
final. Word-boundary rules are widespread, and this suggests
an underlying universal. In particular, the word seems to
have a special status in meter: Metrical rules do not control
for phrase or sentence boundaries, and this also points to a
universal.
4. Rhyme understood as the repetition of the end of the
syllable (usually including its nucleus): Rhyme is very wide-
spread, including in nonmetrical verse: Parallelistic verse can
have rhyme, and we may even ind rhyme of a kind in prose.
Rhyme would seem to manifest a universal. Furthermore, it is
cross-linguistically true that sound sequences can be counted
as rhyme that are phonetically dissimilar but share underlying
similarities; this possibility, and perhaps the way in which dis-
similar phonetic sequences are admitted as equivalent, may
manifest universals.
5. Alliteration: Understood as the repetition of the beginning
of the syllable (sometimes including its nucleus), alliteration is
much rarer than rhyme, which may itself tell us something about
poetic universals. he fact that words beginning with dissimilar
vowels are considered to alliterate in separate traditions (e.g.,
Old English and Somali) may suggest a universal. Alliteration
also appears to be subject to locality constraints that do not hold
for rhyme; thus, alliteration tends to be line-internal or between
adjacent lines and does not interlace as rhyme does in ABAB
structures (Fabb 1999).
6. Parallelism: his formal property is very widespread in the
literatures of the world, and Roman Jakobson (1960) thought of
it as a deining formal characteristic of poetry because it draws
attention to form by repeating it (he included meter, rhythm,
rhyme, and alliteration as types of parallelism). here are dif-
ferent kinds of parallelism, all quite widely distributed, includ-
ing parallelism of sound sequences, parallelism of words, and
parallelism of syntactic structures. Universals have yet to be
established.
Lines may be organized into larger units, such as stanzas. he
possibility of organizing lines into stanzas is suiciently wide-
spread as to count as a universal. Stanzas have characteristics,
such as having a speciic number of lines, lines of the same or
varying lengths, or rhyme. While there is clearly much variety,
universals may be discovered, perhaps involving the way lines
are counted in a stanza, or the possible ways in which rhyme
patterns can be structured. For example, there may be locality
efects, such as limits on the possible distance (e.g., number of
626
intervening lines) between related elements in diferent lines.
(Bruce Hayes and Margaret MacEachern 1998 discuss universals
in stanza structure.)
Are there any kinds of poetic form that are unrelated to the
line? In part, this is a matter of deinition (i.e., of whether we
intend poetic to mean verse). Clearly, various types of igure
and trope are widely found in the worlds literatures, and not only
in verse (though these may be better understood as linguistic or
pragmatic universals, rather than poetic universals; see prag-
matics, universals in). And there are possible universals of
narrative form (see narrative universals) that might also be
thought of as poetic, some of which may in fact be related to
universals of verse form. It is possible that there are universals
that relate verbal art to counting (perhaps via the aesthetic,
and perhaps extending beyond verbal art). Metricality is based
on counting, as are the kinds of form closely related to metrical-
ity, such as rhythm and word-boundary placement. Parallelism
may be based on counting of a diferent kind (a tally or one-to-
one alignment). Narratives seem to involve counting at various
levels, including Dell Hymess (1992) suggestion that narratives
are structured around pattern numbers, with narrative units
organized in two and four or in three and ive in a particular
tradition.
What is the relation between poetic form and linguistic
form? One widely held view (associated, for example, with
Jakobson) is that the forms of poetry in a particular language
are dependent on the linguistic form of that language; the ixing
of a choice from a poetic parameter is thus dependent on the
ixing of a choice from a linguistic parameter. hus, for exam-
ple, the claim might be that some languages are better suited to
quantitative meters (where the distinction between heavy and
light syllables is criterial) and others better suited to accentual
meters (where the distinction is instead between stressed and
unstressed syllables); English, for one, has successful accentual
verse, but neither nonaccentual syllable counting nor quanti-
tative meters have taken hold in the poetic tradition, despite
attempts to introduce them. Kristin Hanson and Paul Kiparsky
(1996) propose a theory of poetic universals that has a param-
eter ofering a range of diferently sized phonological units that
can match metrical positions; in a speciic tradition, a speciic
size of phonological unit matches the metrical position. hus,
for example, Chinese and Japanese verse both have ive- and
seven-unit lines, whose positions are illed by syllables in the
former and subsyllabic morae in the latter. An alternative posi-
tion is taken by Nigel Fabb and Morris Halle (2008), who argue
that poetic form and linguistic form have systemic subcom-
ponents in common, including some parameters (and indeed
share subcomponents also with music); however, there is no
necessary relation between the poetic form and the linguistic
form of a particular language.
Is verbal art itself a universal? hat is, is there any single way
in which it can be characterized, and distinguished from gen-
eral verbal behavior? he most commonly given answer to this
question is yes: that verbal art is distinguished from verbal
behavior because it draws attention to its own form. his is the
basis of Jakobsons (1960) projection principle, of Nelsons
Goodmans (1978) notion of style as exempliied by a text, or
of Richard Baumans (1984) notion of verbal art as a text that is
Poetic Language, Neurobiology of
fully performed. All of these answers assume that the question
is not about the work itself, which cannot categorically be said
to be either verbal art (literature) or not verbal art (not litera-
ture); instead, works are more or less verbal art to the extent that
they carry the distinguishing characteristics of verbal art (or as
Goodman would say, works may carry symptoms of verbal art).
Being verbal art is thus a matter of degree. All of these answers
also imply that verbal art should be universal and that all users of
language should be able to have a literature because literature is
just a particular and always-possible way of using language.
Nigel Fabb
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bauman, Richard. 1984. Verbal Art as Performance. Prospect Heights,
IL: Waveland.
Burling, Robbins. 1966. he metrics of childrens verse: A cross-linguis-
tic study. American Anthropologist 68: 141841.
Edmonson, Murray S. 1971. Lore: An Introduction to the Science of Folklore
and Literature. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. A survey of the
worlds literatures, with an interest in universals.
Fabb, Nigel. 1997. Linguistics and Literature: Language in the Verbal Arts
of the World. Oxford: Blackwell. A survey of linguistic work on litera-
ture, drawing out potential universals.
. 1999. Verse constituency and the locality of alliteration. Lingua
108: 22345.
. 2002. Language and Literary Structure: he Linguistic Analysis of
Form in Verse and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fabb, Nigel, and Morris Halle. 2008. Meter in Poetry: A New heory.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. he irst comprehensive the-
ory of the worlds meters.
Golston, Chris, and Tomas Riad. 2005. he phonology of Greek lyric
meter. Journal of Linguistics 41: 77115.
Goodman, Nelson. 1978. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Hanson, Kristin, and Paul Kiparsky. 1996. A parametric theory of poetic
meter. Language 72: 287335.
Hayes, Bruce, and Margaret MacEachern. 1998. Quatrain form in English
folk verse. Language 64: 473507.
Hymes, Dell. 1992 Use all there is to use. In On the Translation of
Native American Literatures, ed. B. Swann, 83124. Washington,
DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Jakobson, Roman. 1960. Linguistics and poetics. In Style in Language,
ed. T. Sebeok, 35077. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Preminger, A., and T. V. F. Brogan, eds. 1993. he New Princeton
Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press. he best source of information about the worlds poetic
traditions.
POETIC LANGUAGE, NEUROBIOLOGY OF
Not unlike the elephant approached by a delegation of blind
men, each of whom investigated a body part seemingly unre-
lated to the others, the neurobiology of poetic language has
been approached from such widely varying perspectives that
the results hardly seem to share tusks and a tail. One can peer
into ancient poetry in search of evidence that consciousness has
changed over time, or explore cross-cultural poetics for clues
to common neural processing mechanisms. One can map the
regions of the brain involved in the processing of poetic devices,
or pursue the question of how poets and nonpoets may difer in
their neural functioning.
In he Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
Bicameral Mind ([1978] 1990), psychologist Julian Jaynes
claimed that Homers Iliad and the oldest books of the Hebrew
Old Testament portrayed human beings in a twilight state of
awareness. According to Jaynes, the characters in the worlds
most ancient poetry take action not as the result of personal
thought and conscious decision but because they hear the voice
of a god ordering them to do so. He hypothesized that the voices
of the gods were actually auditory hallucinations produced in the
brains right temporal lobe. Transmitted to the left temporal
lobe, seat of left hemisphere language processing, they
were perceived as coming from outside the self. Pointing to the
metered verse spoken by Greek oracles, the language of Hebrew
prophets, and the god-dictated Vedas of India as evidence of
the link between poetry and god-speech, Jaynes asserted that
the god-voices spoke in verse. Beginning around 1000 b.c.e., he
believed, the discovery and spread of writing brought about a
breakdown in the functioning of the bicameral mind, although
the auditory hallucinations of modern-day schizophrenics fur-
nish evidence that contemporary consciousness can revert to its
earlier state. While the book was a inalist for the National Book
Award, his theory has generated controversy.
Homers dactylic hexameter verse line is among those
surveyed by literary scholar Frederick Turner and psychophysi-
cist Ernst Pppel in their essay, he neural lyre: Poetic meter,
the brain, and time (1989). Comparing the metrical verse line
lengths of various language cultures, Turner and Pppel found
that almost all of the lines took two to four seconds to recite,
with distribution peaking in the range of 2.5 to 3.5 seconds. he
authors suggested that their indings might relect a constant in
human neural processing: a human present moment or infor-
mation bufer averaging about three seconds in length, subject
to variation due to cultural factors. Literary critics have targeted
the essays biological reductionism and its underlying politics,
as the authors view free verse as an historical anomaly compat-
ible with bureaucratic or even totalitarian modes of cognition. To
date, their thesis has not been subjected to empirical scientiic
testing.
Initial data on the neurobiology of poetic language came from
studies of subjects who had sustained brain damage or under-
gone commissurotomy, surgical severing of the corpus cal-
losum. hose indings suggested that comprehension of many
poetic devices involved right hemisphere language pro-
cessing, even though the left hemisphere was known to control
language in most persons: Verbal intelligence tests of the isolated
left hemispheres of commissurotomy subjects fell in the normal
range, while subjects experienced aphasia after left (but rarely
right) hemisphere damage. However, over time, tests of right-
hemisphere-damaged (RHD) subjects revealed subtle linguistic
deicits in comprehending poetic devices such as metaphor or
connotation, while other studies showed that the isolated right
hemisphere recognized certain concrete nouns (i.e., images),
vowel sounds (i.e., assonance), and emotional prosody in spo-
ken or written language all important for understanding poetry
(Kane 2004).
For example, Ellen Winner and Howard Gardner (1977) had
left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD), RHD, and control subjects
match a spoken expression such as He has a heavy heart to one
627
Poetic Language, Neurobiology of
of four pictures, with the correct response being metaphoric. To
their surprise, RHD patients performed poorly, often selecting
the literal match for example, an illustration of someone carry-
ing a giant heart. Similar results were obtained from metaphoric
word-matching studies. hen G. Bottini and colleagues (1994)
used PET (positron emission tomography; see neuroimag-
ing) to scan normal brains processing literal and metaphoric
sentences; blood low (signaling brain activation) increased in
six regions of the RH when metaphoric but not literal sentences
were being processed. he right hemispheres role in controlling
metaphor seemed obvious or was it?
As advances in technology have made fMRI (functional mag-
netic resonance imaging) studies of normal linguistic processing
possible, the results have raised as well as answered questions.
It is now known that conventional or frozen metaphors are
processed much like ordinary denotative language, primarily
in the left hemisphere, whereas novel metaphors as well as
ironies and the literal meanings of idioms light up additional
regions of the right hemisphere (Giora et al. 2000; Mashal, Faust,
and Hendler 2005; Sotillo et al. 2005; Eviatar and Just 2006, Faust
and Mashal 2007). hanks to fMRI, the precise brain regions
involved in novel metaphoric processing can be pinpointed: the
right homologue of wernickes area, right and left premotor
areas, right and left insula, and brocas area (Mashal, Faust,
and Hendler 2005). Of course, novel and not conventional met-
aphors are the stuf of poetic language, unless ones deinition
of poetry extends to greeting card verse, and so the role of the
right hemisphere remains signiicant. It was at irst assumed that
the right hemispheres increased involvement in novel meta-
phoric processing corresponded to visuospatial processing of
evoked imagery, whereas conventional metaphors were unlikely
to evoke pictures in the mind. However, Rachel Gioras graded
salience hypothesis (1997; Giora et al. 2000), which assumes that
the most common or salient meaning of an expression is pro-
cessed irst, regardless of whether it is literal or metaphoric, and
that right hemisphere language processing regions get recruited
only when secondary meanings must be accessed, provides an
alternate explanation.
Concrete nouns are the building blocks of poetic images, and
preliminary studies of commissurotomy patients led by Michael
Gazzaniga showed that the isolated right hemisphere was capa-
ble of recognizing simple nouns. Subsequent tests of normal sub-
jects, isolating either the right or left visual ield, suggested that
the left hemisphere excelled at processing abstract nouns and
low-imagery nouns, adjectives, and verbs, while the right per-
formed as well as the left in processing high-imagery nouns and
adjectives. Once again, neural-imaging studies have revealed a
more nuanced model than the simple association of left with
words and right with pictures (Kiehl et al. 1999). Marcel Just
and his colleagues (1996) and Jean Franois Demonet, Guillaume
hierry, and Dominique Cardebat (2005) suggest that as cognitive
processing increases in complexity, right-hemispheric regions
get recruited to handle the additional demand. hat hypothesis
does not necessarily conlict with behavioral data showing the
right hemisphere to be poor at processing abstractions but good
at processing concrete nouns on its own.
Studies of connotation, another essential element of poetic
language, have followed a similar trajectory from brain-damaged
628
to normal subjects, and from behavioral tests to technology-as-
sisted observations. In the 1970s and 1980s, RHD subjects per-
formed poorly on connotative word meaning tests, while LHD
subjects experienced problems with denotation (Gardner and
Denes 1973; Brownell, Potter, and Michelow 1984; Drews 1987).
One might have assumed that the left hemisphere processed
denotation and the right, connotation, but over time, a more
complex picture emerged. Christine Chiarello and others estab-
lished, using visual-ield testing, that primary and subordinate
word meanings are initially activated in both hemispheres, but
that subordinate meanings are quickly suppressed in the left
hemisphere, resulting in a more eicient processing time for the
dominant meaning not unlike Gioras graded salience model,
where the most salient meaning of an expression, metaphoric or
not, gets processed irst and faster than a less commonly occur-
ring meaning (Chiarello and Maxield 1995).
Finally, the neurobiology of poets may play a signiicant role
in the neurobiology of poetic language. Poets are known to sufer
from afective disorders in particular, hypomania and bipolar
illness at rates far exceeding those of the general population
or other categories of writers (Andreasen 1987; Jamison 1989;
Ludwig 1994; Post 1996). Feeling negative emotion strongly,
being introspective, and spending time alone are traits associ-
ated with expressive writing as well as mental dysfunction, and
mentally ill persons may feel drawn to express their anguish in
writing; James Kaufman and John Baer (2002) propose these
and other behavioral explanations for the poetry/afective dis-
order connection. Taking a neurobiological approach, Felix
Post (1996) suggests that the intensive intellectual and emo-
tional efort involved in writing poetry may trigger overactivation
of neural networks and, thus, cause mental illness. Julie Kane
(2004) suggests the opposite, that overactivation may precede
poetic output: Pointing to substantial evidence that handed-
ness and dominance for language can shift temporarily from the
left to right hemisphere during manic episodes, she proposes
that abnormal mood elevation may activate right-brain regions
involved in processing poetic language. Recently, too, Dawn
Blasko and Victoria Kazmerski (2006) have shown that poets and
nonpoets difer in the brain regions that they activate while read-
ing poems.
here is a vast amount of territory yet to be covered in explor-
ing the elephant of poetic language, complicated by the fact
that new research indings often seem to challenge the old. But
as neuroimaging techniques become more precise and less inva-
sive, illuminating features that could only be guessed at before,
one thing becomes increasingly clear: he neurobiology of poetic
language is not the same animal as the neurobiology of ordinary
language.
Julie Kane
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Andreasen, Nancy. 1987. Creativity and mental illness: Prevalence
rates in writers and their irst-degree relatives. American Journal of
Psychiatry 144: 128892.
Blasko, Dawn, and Victoria Kazmerski. 2006. ERP correlates of individual
diferences in the comprehension of nonliteral language. Metaphor
and Symbol 21.4: 26784.
Poetic Language, Neurobiology of
Bottini, G., R. Corcoran, R. Sterzi, E. Paulesu, P. Schenone, P. Scarpa, R.
Frackowiak, and C. Freith. 1994. he role of the right hemisphere in
the interpretation of igurative aspects of language: A positron emis-
sion tomography study. Brain 117: 124153.
Brownell, Hiram, Heather Potter, and Diane Michelow. 1984. Sensitivity
to lexical denotation and connotation in brain-damaged patients: A
double dissociation. Brain and Language 22: 25365.
Chiarello, Christine, and Lisa Maxield. 1995. Initial right hemispheric
activation of subordinate word meanings is not due to homotopic cal-
losal inhibition. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 2: 37580.
Demonet, Jean-Franois, Guillaume hierry, and Dominique Cardebat.
2005. Renewal of the neurophysiology of language: Functional neu-
roimaging. Physiological Reviews 85: 4995.
Drews, Etta. 1987. Qualitatively diferent organizational structures of
lexical knowledge in the left and right hemispheres. Neuropsychologia
25: 41927.
Eviatar, Zohar, and Marcel Just. 2006. Brain correlates of discourse pro-
cessing: An fMRI investigation of irony and conventional metaphor
comprehension. Neuropsychologia 44.12: 234859.
Faust, Miriam, and Nira Mashal. 2007. The role of the right cere-
bral hemisphere in processing novel metaphoric expressions
taken from poetry: A divided visual field study. Neuropsychologia
45.4: 86070.
Gardner, Howard, and Gianfranco Denes. 1973. Connotative judge-
ments by aphasic patients on a pictorial adaptation of the semantic
diferential. Cortex 9: 18396.
Giora, Rachel. 1997. Understanding igurative and literal language: he
graded salience hypothesis. Cognitive Linguistics 7.1: 183206.
Giora, Rachel, ed. 2007. Is metaphor unique? Neural correlates of nonlit-
eral language. Brain and Language 100.2 (Special Issue).
Giora, Rachel, Ofer Fein, Ann Kronrod, Idit Elnatar, Noa Shuval, and
Adi Zur. 2004. Weapons of mass distraction: Optimal innovation and
pleasure ratings. Metaphor and Symbol 19: 11541.
Giora, Rachel, Eran Zaidel, Nachum Soroker, Gila Batori, and Asa
Kasher. 2000. Diferential efects of right- and left-hemisphere dam-
age on understanding sarcasm and metaphor. Metaphor and Symbol
15: 6383.
Jamison, Kay Redield. 1989. Mood disorders and patterns of creativity
in British writers and artists. Psychiatry 52: 12534.
Jaynes, Julian. [1978] 1990. he Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown
of the Bicameral Mind. 2d ed. Boston: Houghton.
Just, Marcel, Patricia Carpenter, Timothy Keller, William Eddy, and Keith
hulborn. 1996. Brain activation modulated by sentence comprehen-
sion. Science 274.5284: 11416.
Kane, Julie. 2004. Poetry as right-hemispheric language. Journal of
Consciousness Studies 11.5/6: 2159.
Katz, Albert, ed. 2006. Metaphor and Symbol 21.4. Special issue on neural
processing of nonliteral language.
Kaufman, James, and John Baer. 2002. I bask in dreams of sui-
cide: Mental illness, poetry, and women. Review of General Psychology
6.3: 27186.
Kiehl, Kent, Peter Liddle, Andra Smith, Adrianna Mendrek, Bruce Forster,
and Robert Hare. 1999. Neural pathways involved in the processing of
concrete and abstract words. Human Brain Mapping 7: 22533.
Ludwig, Arnold. 1994. Mental illness and creative activity in women
writers. American Journal of Psychiatry 151: 16506.
Mashal, Nira, Miriam Faust, and Talma Hendler. 2005. he role of
the right hemisphere in processing nonsalient metaphorical mean-
ings: Application of principal components analysis to fMRI data.
Neuropsychologia 43.14: 2084100.
Mashal, Nira, Miriam Faust, Talma Hendler, and Mark Jung-Beeman.
Processing salient and less-salient meanings of idioms: An fMRI
investigation. Cortex. In press.
Poetic Metaphor
Post, Felix. 1996. Verbal creativity, depression and alcoholism: An inves-
tigation of one hundred American and British writers. British Journal
of Psychiatry 168: 54555.
Sotillo, Maria, Luis Carreti, Jos Hinojosa, Manuel Tapia, Francisco
Mercado, Sara Lpez-Mrtin, and Jacobo Albert. 2005. Neural activ-
ity associated with metaphor comprehension: Spatial analysis.
Neuroscience Letters 373: 59.
Turner, Frederick, and Ernst Pppel. 1989. he neural lyre: Poetic meter,
the brain, and time. In Expansive Poetry: Essays on the New Narrative
and the New Formalism, ed. Frederick Feinstein, 20954. Santa Cruz,
CA: Story Line.
Winner, Ellen, and Howard Gardner. 1977. he comprehension of met-
aphor in brain-damaged patients. Brain 100: 71729.
POETIC METAPHOR
Since Aristotles irst articulation of a comparative theory of
metaphor, metaphor studies in literary and ordinary language
have proceeded without interruption in philosophy, rhetoric,
linguistics, and literary criticism. Two traditions have emerged
in metaphor theory: conceptual and linguistic traditions. he
conceptual view emphasizes metaphors fundamental role in
everyday thought and language; the linguistic tradition lim-
its the range of metaphor to local pragmatic and aesthetic
functions (Ortony 1993). he range of accounts within both
traditions is variegated and well beyond the scope of this entry.
Nonetheless, for the language sciences, it seems that the con-
ceptualist tradition has dominated in recent years. he present
discussion assumes a conceptual view of metaphor as under-
stood through the frameworks of conceptual metaphor
theory (CMT) and conceptual blending theory (CBT),
where poetic metaphor is regarded as a special case of these
underlying conceptual operations. At present, poetic or literary
metaphor cannot be easily extracted from the central questions
of metaphor theory in general, namely: What is metaphor, and
what is metaphor for? he present discussion merely touches on
the irst question, in favor of a more elaborate treatment of the
second question.
he question of what metaphor is and how poetic metaphor
can help language sciences understand the everyday mind and
language is addressed in the irst section, where I compare and
contrast the two models of metaphor. he question of what met-
aphor is for is addressed in the second section.
What Is Metaphor?
CMT purports to unearth the systematic correlations of experi-
ence and meaning. Meaning arises from everyday experience.
Abstract notions such as time, causation, states, change, and
purposes depend on a rich system of metaphors. Metaphor is
the name given to the process of conceptual mappings from
source to target domains (see source and target). he latest
incarnation of CMT (Lakof and Johnson 1999) builds on Joseph
Gradys (1997) theory of primary metaphor, in which the onto-
genetically basic process of domain correlation constitutes the
experiential basis of conceptual metaphors. A primary metaphor
is a correlation of subjective experience with a more abstract
concept. For instance, MORE IS UP is a primary metaphor, based
on the tight ontological correlation between the accumulation of
the same entities and vertical height.
629
Poetic Metaphor
CBT, while not a theory of metaphor, accounts for metaphor
as a species of conceptual blending that often involves the inte-
gration of concepts that do not normally go together. CBT takes
a decidedly usage-based perspective to metaphor and other
phenomena, in which systematic correlations arise from con-
ceptual blending itself, the process of constructing new scenes
and scenarios with speciic emergent properties from multiple
mental models. he aim is to see how metaphors arise on the
ly as we think and talk. CMT has as its basic unit of cognitive
structure the conceptual domain. CBT has as its basic unit of
organization a mental space, or scenes and scenarios set up as
we think, talk, and otherwise interact. CBT models the dynamic
unfolding of a language users representations. In this respect,
CBT has developed analytic routines and modeling techniques
that capture constitutive principles and governing constraints of
blending. (See Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 30952.)
What Is Metaphor For?
his question has no straightforward answer, but Samuel Levin
provides an initial approximation by suggesting that these onto-
logically bizarre notions are constructed for the purpose of
conceiving what a world would have to be like were it in fact to
comprise such states of afairs (1993, 121). Levin suggests that
we construct worlds in which the metaphor is literally true, but
only in order to tease out inferences that guide reasoning about
the real world. Consider the opening line of John Miltons poem,
On Time, in which the poet commands:
Fly envious Time, till thou run out thy race,
his conceit depends on the conventional metaphoric mapping
TIME IS A MOVER, creating a world in which time is literally an
intentional being running a race, the purpose of which is to focus
attention on the theological implications of speeding up the pace
at which the known world ends. In the poets world, the notion
of time as running a race can be considered preternatural, but
the theological implication of the end of days is the great truth
to be disclosed. In a similar vein, consider now the conventional
metaphor STATES ARE SHIPS.
he text in question is the sermon, he Negro Element in
American Life: An Oration. Delivered by Reverend A. L. DeMond
on January 1, 1900, this oration illustrates the degree to which
a conventional metaphor can be extended and elaborated. he
reverend ends with a poem that makes elaborate use of the Ship-
of-State metaphor, a potentially disastrous rhetorical maneuver,
given the history of the forced importation of Africans. he ser-
mon ends thus:
As the old ship of State sails out into the ocean of the 20th century,
the Negro is on board, and he can say:
(1) Sail on, O ship of State,
(2) Sail on, O Union, strong and great;
(3) Humanity, with all its fears,
(4) With all the hope of future years
(5) Is hanging breathless on thy fate.
(6) We know what master laid thy keel,
(7) What workman wrought thy ribs of steel;
630
(8) Who made each mast, and sail and rope;
(9) What anvils rang, what hammers beat;
(10) In what a forge and what a heat
(11) Were shaped the anchors of thy hope.
(12) Fear not each sudden sound and shock,
(13) Tis of the wave, and not the rock;
(14) Tis but the lapping of a sail,
(15) And not a rent made by the gale.
(16) In spite of rock and tempests roar,
(17) In spite of false lights on the shore,
(18) Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea,
(19) Our hearts, our hopes are all with thee;
(20) Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,
(21) Our faith triumphant oer our fears
(22) Are all with thee, are all with thee.
A CMT analysis begins by positing cross-domain mappings
between the source domain of ships and the target domain of
states or nation-states. he conventional mappings between
source and target domains include the following correspon-
dences ofered in Grady, Oakley, and Coulson (1999, 109):
Nation-State = Ship
Leader = Ships captain
National policies/actions = Ships course
National success/improvement = Forward motion of the
ship
National failures/problems = Sailing mishaps
Circumstances affecting the = Sea conditions
nation
All these metaphoric mappings derive from the basic pri-
mary metaphoric couplings of ACTION-AS-SELF-MOTION,
COURSES-OF-ACTION-AS-PATHS, SOCIAL-RELATIONSHIPS-AS-
DEGREES-OF-PHYSICAL-PROXIMITY,andCIRCUMSTANCES-AS-
WEATHER. hese experiential correlations (and perhaps others)
interact in a way that motivates the framing of a nation and its his-
tory as a ship gliding through water.
As George Lakof and Mark Turner (1989, 6772) argue, the
power of poetic metaphor, in particular, issues from the exten-
sion of these mappings for local expressive purposes. A conven-
tionalized metaphor never gives you all you need, and poetic
thought is marked by its ability to stretch or extend conventional
metaphors. Notice that with lines 67, DeMond extends the typi-
cal range of mappings to include ship building and the role
shipwright.
Poems also employ expressions in which the schemas and
domains underlying the metaphor can be elaborated in unusual
or novel ways. Lines 6 and 7, when understood against the con-
text of the whole speech, take on unusual signiicance. he impli-
cation of line 6 is that the master shipwright is God, while the
workman is identiied with the Negro, echoing a consistent
theme of the speech the hard labor of the Negro race in build-
ing America.
Poetic Metaphor
A blending analysis helps account for ways in which the
NATION-AS-SHIP metaphor is not a simple and obvious map-
ping between two conceptual domains. While conceptual
domains name large depositories of knowledge about the physi-
cal and social world, mental spaces comprise on-line scenes and
scenarios; they are speciic and sensitive to pressures from local
context.
Levins (1993) account of poetic metaphor is more com-
pletely captured in CBT, a theoretical framework in which pre-
ternatural scenes are constructed to reveal how to reason and
draw inferences about something else. Conceptual blends are
often richly counterfactual, but rarely do they exist for their
own ends. In this case, the blended scenario extends and elabo-
rates the conventional metaphor for local rhetorical purposes. A
basic blending analysis of DeMonds introductory sentence and
the irst ive lines of the poem proper would include a discourse
ground specifying the participants, the situation, and setting, a
mental space for Seafaring, a mental space for Nation, and the
initial blended space for Nation-as-Ship, each of which is set up
in the very irst line of the poem.
Let us assume the analysis from the perspective of a worshiper
sitting in the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in 1900. Under these
conditions, the ground includes the identities of the churchgo-
ers, the speaker, and the setting. Let us further assume that the
discourse participants are African Americans and that the poetic
persona represents them. Initially, the Seafaring and Nation
spaces project conceptual structure into the blend under the
inluence of the cross-space mappings as speciied here. In the
blend, America is a ship, Negro citizens are among its passen-
gers, the ocean is time, and the twentieth century is an unspeci-
ied landmark on open water. he blend allows the audience
to imagine temporally, causally, and spatially difuse political
events as attaining, for the moment, the look and feel of primary
experience.
Once composed, the blend and the network of mental spaces
permit the addition of new information and relations. A notewor-
thy contribution of the blending framework here is that it ofers
precise ways of accounting for the elements of the Nation-as-
Ship image that have no speciic counterparts in the target space
of nations and politics. Once the network is up and running,
readers can combine concepts luidly. For instance, line 2 com-
mands, Sail on, O Union, strong and great, wherein the poet
fuses elements from diferent mental spaces into tight syntactic
units. hus, in the blend it is perfectly natural and logical for a
union to sail. What is more, it is perfectly natural for the ship to
plot a straight course. Once the image is created, many other ele-
ments of ships become mentally accessible. For instance, ships
must be made of particular materials in order to be seaworthy.
he phrase, ribs of steel, in line 6 satisies local formal and con-
ceptual imperatives in 1) providing completion for the couplet
with line 5, and 2) suggesting that the nation is made of sturdy
material and (opportunistically) made from the very material
that the Negro worker has been responsible for manufacturing.
Importantly, the mapping between Shipwright and Creator is
responsible for all aspects of the nation.
he goal of using this conventional metaphor is to construct
a view of social reality for the Negro race, focusing on communal
activities and on achieving collective goals. he ship of state has
Poetics
been conventionalized for just that purpose because the image
potential associated with building, operating, and navigating is
of rich social activities. In the blended space, however, the choice
to sail on is framed as an all-or-nothing proposition. If the ship of
state does not sail, it ceases to exist. In the sailing space, however,
the ship, once built, exists whether or not the crew sails; in the
sailing space, a captain and crew can choose when and when not
to sail, and the crew can still be referred to as sailors whether on
land or on sea. In the blend, a refusal to board and sail is tanta-
mount to renouncing ones citizenship. By exploiting elements
of the shipwright (a collective activity) and by attributing that
activity to a divine creator, DeMonds version of the ship of state
takes on the voice of a divine decree.
As suggested, DeMond takes considerable risk in quoting a
poem that makes extensive use of this metaphor, for members of
the congregation may generate a metaphoric mapping in which
the cross-domain counterpart of American Negro is not passen-
ger but cargo, destroying the political legitimacy of the image.
DeMond, however, assiduously avoids focusing any attention
on the circumstances that brought them to America. Instead, he
picks up the story at their arrival and tells of the Negro race as
those who built the nation.
he present analysis presents CMT and CBT as complemen-
tary analytic frameworks, wherein the irst focuses solely on con-
ventionalized mappings, while the latter is much more interested
in how these mappings operate in local rhetorical contexts, and
thus can point scholars in the direction of a usage-based theory
of poetic metaphor.
Todd Oakley
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
DeMond, A. L. 1900. he Negro element in American life: An oration.
Available online at: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/
murray:@ield(DOCID+@lit(lcrbmrpt0e10div2).
Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2002. he Way We hink. New
York: Basic Books.
Grady, Joseph. 1997. Foundations of meaning: Primary metaphors and
primary scenes. Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley.
Grady, Joseph, Todd Oakley, and Seana Coulson. 1999. Blending and
metaphor. In Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics, ed. F. Gibbs and G.
Steen, 10124. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Lakof, George, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh. New
York: Basic Books.
Lakof, George, and Mark Turner. 1989. More han Cool Reason: A Field
Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Levin, Samuel. 1993. Language, concepts, and worlds. In Metaphor
and hought. 2d ed. Ed. A. Ortony, 11223. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ortony, Andrew. 1993. Metaphor, language, and thought. In Metaphor
and hought. 2d ed. Ed. A. Ortony, 116. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
POETICS
In ancient Greece, as Aristotle pointed out, there was no com-
mon name for all the diferent poetic genres (Poetics, 47b),
including epic, tragic drama, dialogue, elegy, and poems writ-
ten in various meters. Poetry in the sense of making or creation
became the general name for literary expressions in diverse
631
Poetics
forms, and Poetics, the term used by Aristotle for his treatise on
tragedy and epic, thus represented the kind of critical and ana-
lytical treatment of poetry that would be called in later times lit-
erary criticism or literary theory.
Aristotles Poetics ofers an important model in Western liter-
ary criticism, but it was not widely known in Europe in antiquity
or in medieval times, and it did not become a classic until the
latter half of the sixteenth century. During the time that it was lost
in medieval Europe, however, the Poetics, along with some other
works by Aristotle, was being studied by Arabic scholars, notably
Ibn Rushd, known in the West as Averros. But once it was redis-
covered and commented on by such inluential Renaissance crit-
ics as Lodovico Castelvetro (150571) and Francesco Robertello
(151667), the Poetics quickly became one of the most inluential
works in Western literary criticism. Epic and tragedy discussed
therein became the two major classical genres before the rise
of the modern novel and, after Dante, poets of every European
nation tried to create an epic in the vernacular to mark the matu-
rity of a modern language and the establishment of a national
literary tradition. Aristotles philosophical treatment of plot, lan-
guage, and rhetoric of the tragic drama provides a model of criti-
cal analysis, and many basic concepts used in the Poetics, such
as imitation, recognition, the reversal of fortune, tragic hubris,
and the catharsis of pity and fear, have all had a tremendous
inluence on later criticism. In our own time, Aristotles Poetics
remains a major classic and continues to be discussed and com-
mented on by important critics and theoreticians from various
perspectives.
As the aforementioned Arabic commentaries suggest, the
systematic study of the literary art is by no means conined to
the European tradition. here are, for example, well-established
traditions of sophisticated literary criticism or poetics in South
and East Asia. he earliest treatise on dance and dramatic art in
ancient India, Bharatamunis Ntyastra (ca. second cent. b.c.),
ofers a comprehensive discussion of Sanskrit drama in terms of
taste and emotions (rasa) and of language and bodily gestures
that give expression to various emotions. In the seventh century,
Sanskrit poetics was fully established by such important theorists
as Bhmaha and Dandin. In the ninth century, nandavardhana
made signiicant contributions to its further development with
discussions of the theoretical notions of rasa and dhvani, while
Abhinavagupta and Kuntaka in the tenth century explored new
areas by debating on the issue of indirect and suggestive expres-
sions (vakrokti) in poetic language. Indeed, as an Indian scholar
remarks, A study of Sanskrit poetics from Bharata (5th century
b.c.) to Panditarja Jaganntha (17th century a.d.) will bear wit-
ness to the existence of a highly developed poetics in ancient
India, with a rigorous scientiic method for description and anal-
ysis of literature (Pathak 1998, 345).
In China, the Great Preface to the Mao edition of the Book
of Poetry (second century b.c.) articulated the Confucian ideas
about poetry and its functions, and laid the foundation of a poet-
ics that both acknowledges the release of emotions as the origin
of poetry and the eicacy of moral teaching as its ultimate justii-
cation. Lu Ji (261303), with his Rhyme-Prose on Literature added
to the critical tradition a more focused attention on the impor-
tance of emotions (qing), and he argued for the necessity to learn
both from nature and from the ancients. Liu Xies (465?520?)
632
Point of View
Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons is deservedly famous
as the most systematic study of the literary art in the Chinese
critical tradition. his substantial work of Chinese poetics relates
literature to the cosmic tao and the exemplary classics of ancient
sages, thereby elevating literature to a position of high social and
moral values. Its focus, however, is on the art of literature. he
Literary Mind irst formulates some basic principles of the idea of
wen or literature, gives a survey of all the literary genres in clas-
sical Chinese literature, commenting on their origin and devel-
opment, and then presents a highly developed theory of literary
creation, making contributions to the important issues of the
relationship between poetry and reality, the style and character-
istics of a literary work, the efect of imagery and poetic imagina-
tion, and the regulations of metric composition. Since the eighth
century in Tang China, and particularly the eleventh century in
the Song Dynasty, there have been numerous works in a critical
genre known as remarks on poetry (shihua), which often contain
valuable insights into the nature of poetry, the techniques of the
literary art, and the principles of aesthetic appreciation. Like the
aforementioned Indian example, the Chinese critical tradition
also ofers an alternative form of poetics outside the Aristotelian
and European tradition.
In a broad sense, then, poetics can be understood as a crit-
ical, theoretical, and more or less systematic treatment of poetry
or literature in general. In such an expanded usage, what the
term signals is a theoretical discourse on a subject in arts or lit-
erature, covering a considerable range of oeuvre, and ofering
some philosophical insights into the nature of the subject under
discussion. Poetics, therefore, becomes a general term for a sus-
tained argument or a long essay in literary and art criticism.
Zhang Longxi
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Aristotle. 1987. Poetics with the Tractatus Coislinianus, Reconstruction
of Poetics II, and the Fragments of the On Poets. Trans. Richard Janko.
Indianapolis: Hackett.
Averros. 1977. hree Short Commentaries on Aristotles Topics,
Rhetoric, and Poetics. Ed. and trans. Charles E. Butterworth.
Albany: State University of New York Press.
De, S. K. 1988. History of Sanskrit Poetics. Calcutta: Firma KLM Pvt. Ltd.
Liu, James J. Y. 1975. Chinese heories of Literature. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
. 1988. Language-Paradox-Poetics: A Chinese Perspective. Ed.
Richard John Lynn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Miner, Earl. 1990. Comparative Poetics: An Intercultural Essay on heories
of Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Pathak, R. S. 1998. Comparative Poetics. New Delhi: Creative Books.
Rajendran, C. 2001. Studies in Comparative Poetics. Delhi: New Bharatiya
Book Co.
POINT OF VIEW
In narrative studies (see narratology), this term, also per-
spective or focalization, refers to textual strategies that provide
the reader with the illusion of seeing things through the eyes
of a character. hese strategies are mostly linguistic in nature,
ranging from deictic positioning in the characters mental here
and now (see deixis) to lexical choices linking up with the
Point of View
characters worldview and ways of thinking and perceiving the
world. Point of view, from a linguistic perspective, is therefore an
important aspect of linguistic pragmatics.
Origins and History
he strategies of point of view narration are of fairly recent date.
hey came into existence as part of the shift toward increasingly
subjective literary narratives near the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury, and document authors attempts to portray characters
individuality not merely in the rendering of idiosyncratic dia-
logue (for instance, in dialect) but also in the extensive depic-
tion of characters minds or consciousness. Already in the 1790s,
the Gothic novel igured the female protagonists anxious medi-
tations, and Ann Radclife and Charles Maturin also portrayed
the impact that the contemplation of sublime scenery had on
their heroines. Gothic novels are, therefore, important anticipa-
tions of the point of view technique which, in English literature,
came into its own in the work of George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell,
homas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James and in the
stream of consciousness novels of literary modernism (James
Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansield, D. H. Lawrence,
Aldous Huxley, E. M. Forster). Since then, the point of view tech-
nique has been standard in ictional narrative, especially so in
the short story, even though postmodernist texts of the radical
experimental sort do not employ it as often.
he term point of view (interchangeably with center of vision)
was irst used by Percy Lubbock in he Craft of Fiction (1921),
although Henry James in his prefaces had already analyzed the
phenomenon under the heading of center of consciousness
and the image of the house of iction having many windows
(James [18801/1908] 1975, 7). Point of view in James refers to
the presentation of the story from the perspective, hence point of
view, of a character, for instance, Strether in he Ambassadors: It
afected Strether: horrors were so little supericially at least in
this robust and reasoning image. But he was none the less there
to be veracious (James [1903] 1994, 99). However, even in James,
the point of view technique, in the meaning of limited perspec-
tive (seeing the world through the naive, obsessed, or puzzled
perspective of a character), is extended from the new narrative
form of the (third person) stream of consciousness novel (follow-
ing the protagonists associations in the depiction of their con-
sciousness) to experiments with unreliable or otherwise limited
irst person narrators, as in Jamess he Real hing or Daisy
Miller. In these texts, the narrator is very naive, and has a clearly
reduced intellectual capacity. For Lubbock (1921), Jean Pouillon
(1946), and Norman Friedman (1955), the term, by contrast,
comprises not one technique of focusing the narrative through a
central characters mind but a variety of three (Pouillon) to eight
(Friedman) alternative points of view that authors can choose.
Not only was point of view a vague term because it included
so many diferent aspects of narrative; it, moreover, was very
limiting since it focused on the visual metaphor. As a conse-
quence, the term point of view, though still used as a general
label, became displaced in narratology by more inclusive or more
speciic terms: narrative situation, perspective, and focalization.
Franz Karl Stanzels ([1979] 1984) three narrative situations
([1] authorial roughly: omniscient; [2] irst person; and [3]
igural the presentation through a characters mind) follows
Friedman in looking at types of narrative. Boris Uspensky ([1973]
1983), too, extends the meaning of point of view under his term
perspective to include a) vision (spatio-temporal perspective); b)
language (phraseological perspective); c) knowledge and feelings
(psychological perspective); and d) ideology. Although these
four types of perspective are all determinable from the language
of the text (the spatio-temporal perspective through deictics; the
ideological through tell-tale phrases like tovarish [comrade]
for fellow man; the psychological through the syntax and
lexis of emotion), it is the phraseological level of perspective that
is most linguistic in its deployment of register and style to
signal narrators or characters perspectives, for instance, in the
citing of dialect words, hints at pronunciation typical of certain
social groups, or the contrast between high and low register in
heteroglossic texts (Bakhtin 1981; see dialogism and het-
eroglossia). For instance, Uspensky cites Tolstoys sentence
Anna Pavlova had been coughing for the last few days: she had
an attack of la grippe, as she said (1983, 33) as an example of
phraseological point of view, where la grippe registers Anna
Pavlovas class and social snobbery. Psychological perspec-
tive can be exempliied by a sentence from Toni Morrison: He
examined the bushes, the branches, the ground for a berry, a nut,
anything (1977, 255; emphasis added). he sentence traces the
order of Milkmans order of perception and the urgency of his
quest for food. Uspensky devotes a whole chapter to the inter-
relation of the four types of perspective in texts.
Grard Genettes reconceptualization of point of view as focal-
ization (zero; external; internal) abides by the visual metaphor,
with focalization opposed to voice (who sees? vs. who speaks?
[1972] 1980, 186). Genettes typology of focalization is one of
limited perspective either no limitation of point of view (zero
focalization) or limitation to a view on characters from outside
(external focalization) or a subjective view from inside (internal
focalization). he narrator and narrative voice are excluded from
the discussion, in contrast to Friedmans or Stanzels analyses.
More recent models of focalization are discussed by Manfred
Jahn (2005), who has himself proposed the distinction among
strict, ambient, weak, and zero focalization based on an optical
analogy.
Linguistic Signals of Point of View
he textual inscription of point of view depends on the insertion
of signals of subjectivity and individual knowledge, opinion, or
worldview in the text such that they can be aligned with a char-
acter. he same signals can also be employed to relate the sub-
jectivity or individual stance of the speaker/narrator of a text/
utterance, and this alignment is usually discussed under the
heading of voice and not point of view. Voice and point of view
can get into conlict or overlap as in free indirect discourse, a tech-
nique for rendering speech or thought in which the language of
the reported speaker/thinker (his/her point of view) is to some
extent preserved in the report: She had never, ever told ibs, not
for worlds. (Here, the syntax and vocabulary of the reported
speaker are integrated into the report.)
Free indirect discourse (thought representation) is one of the
most common signals of point of view in literary texts since it
introduces a characters perspective (feelings, intentions, world-
view) to the reader. Moreover, the narrative can be studded with
633
Point of View
stylistic and lexical markers relating to the characters social
position, age, gender, and so on. For instance, when in Charles
Dickenss Our Mutual Friend Mrs. Veneering remarks that
these social mysteries make one afraid of leaving Baby ([18645]
1952, 414; emphasis added), the word Baby relates to the moth-
erchild relationship of the reported speaker and represents her
point of view. At the same time, the phrase these mysteries and
the pronoun one underline Mrs. Veneerings upper-class status.
Addressee-oriented expressions like forms of address (Maam,
Sir, Your Excellency, etc.) also invoke social position by linguistic
means (cf. Fillmore 1983, 1997).
Most basically, deictics serve the function of positioning
speakers and, hence, creating point of view. For example, in
Bleak House Mr. Bucket (still grave) inquires if to-morrow morn-
ing, now, would suit ([18523] 1962, 720; emphasis added),
in which the futurity of to-morrow relates to Mr. Buckets
moment of utterance. Among linguists, Charles Fillmores work
on deixis (1983, 1997) needs to be credited with incisive insights
into the generation of point of view by means of deixis. From a
linguistic perspective, these signals are expressivity markers,
implying a speaking or thinking consciousness, a deictic center
(Bhlers [1934] origo) from which the world is being viewed. In
the widest possible sense, such expressivity markers are indica-
tive of ideation and emotion, the latter capable of being textually
suggested by syntactic means, such as intensifying repetitions
besides merely lexical intensiiers and emphatic vocabulary.
Evaluative point of view can be illustrated in sentences like Do
talk to the poor dear. Incomplete sentences (indicating hesi-
tation or derangement), sentence modiiers (in any case, sure
enough), clause-initial adjuncts (oh, well), interjections (good
grief), negative inversion (Never will he forget) or left and right
dislocation are among the most common strategies used (cp.
Fludernik 1993, 22779). In oral discourse, moreover, expressiv-
ity shows up in intonation and the echoing of idiosyncratic
pronunciation (imitated in writing: she sho was happy).
In medieval literature, point of view is often signaled by inter-
jections like alas or by means of repetition. Such signals of point
of view occur intermittently in medieval literature and early
modern English prose but do not constitute a continuous repre-
sentation of a characters perspective as in the Gothic novel and
the later stream of consciousness novel.
Like the study of narrative discourse markers, the focus on
expressivity signals can help to emphasize the speciically narra-
tive uses of point of view for the linguist. Point of view markers not
only establish free indirect discourse; they are, moreover, crucial
to text beginnings, where they help distinguish between narra-
tives with a prominent speaker (= narrator) function and others
in which the reader is eased into the story by means of a protago-
nists perspective. (Roland Harweg [1968] has contrasted these
as emic and etic text beginnings, respectively.) Peculiarities of
thought and worldview are also constitutive of M. A. K. Hallidays
mind-style (1971) as the distinctive linguistic representation of
individual self (Shen 2005, 312). Ultimately, an analysis of point
of view as expressivity links up with the linguistic enquiry into
individual style.
It should be noted that all of these signals of expressivity are
clichs and cannot directly claim mimetic relevance (Fludernik
1993, 43464). On the contrary, they depend on typical recurrent
634
models of speech that are employed to create an illusion of
authenticity. Moreover, the attribution of expressivity markers
to the primary frame speaker (narrator) or reported speaker
(character) is frequently problematic. he mere presence of
expressivity markers does not convey a clear point of view;
point of view needs to be constructed interpretatively by the
listener or reader in the overall context of the utterance or text.
hus, though point of view can be fruitfully analyzed by linguis-
tic means, it cannot be exhaustively described within a purely
formal framework. Point of view, therefore, is a pragmatic phe-
nomenon located on the threshold between narrative pragmat-
ics and literary narratology (see also literary character
and character types).
Monika Fludernik
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTED FURTHER READING
Bakhtin, Michael M. 1981. he Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed.
Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bhler, Karl. 1934. Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktionen der Sprache.
Jena: Gustav Fischer.
Dickens, Charles. [18523] 1962. Bleak House. London: Oxford University
Press.
. [18645] 1952. Our Mutual Friend. London: Oxford University
Press.
Fillmore, Charles. 1983. How to know whether youre coming or going.
In Essays on Deixis, ed. Gisa Rauh, 21927. Tbingen: Narr.
. 1997. Lectures on Deixis. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of
Language and Information.
Fludernik, Monika. 1993. he Fictions of Language and the Languages
of Fiction: he Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness.
London: Routledge.
Friedman, Norman. 1955. Point of view in iction: he Development of a
Critical Concept. PMLA 70: 116084.
Genette, Grard. [1972] 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method.
Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Halliday, M. A. K. 1971. Linguistic function and literary style: An inquiry
into William Goldings he Inheritors. In Literary Style: A Symposium,
ed. Seymour Chatman, 33065. London: Oxford University Press.
Harweg, Roland. 1968. Pronomina und Textkonstitution. Munich: Wilhelm
Fink.
Jahn, Manfred. 1999. More aspects of focalization: Reinements and
applications. In Recent Trends in Narratological Research, ed. John
Pier, 21, 85110. Tours: Groupes de Recherches Anglo-Amricaines de
Tours, University of Tours.
. 2005. Focalization. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative
heory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan,
1737. London: Routledge.
James, Henry. [18801/1908] 1975. he Portrait of a Lady. Ed. Robert D.
Bamberg. New York: W. W. Norton.
. [1903] 1994. he Ambassadors. Ed. S. P. Rosenbaum . New
York: Norton.
. [1934] 1953. he Art of the Novel. Intro. R. P. Blackmur. New
York: Scribner.
Lubbock, Percy. 1921. he Craft of Fiction. London: Jonathan Cape.
Morrison, Toni. 1977. Song of Solomon. New York: Signet.
Pouillon, Jean. 1946. Temps et roman. Paris: Gallimard.
Shen, Dan. 2005. Mind-style. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative
heory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan,
31112. London: Routledge.
Stanzel, Franz Karl. [1979] 1984. A heory of Narrative.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Politeness
Uspensky, Boris. [1973] 1983. A Poetics of Composition: he Structure of the
Artistic Text and Typology of a Compositional Form. Trans. Valentina
Zavarin and Susan Wittig. Berkeley: University of California Press.
POLITENESS
Politeness is essentially a matter of taking into account the feel-
ings of others as to how they should be interactionally treated,
including behaving in a way that demonstrates appropriate
concern for interactors social status and their social relation-
ship. In this broad sense of speech oriented to an interactors
social persona or face, politeness is ubiquitous in language use.
Since taking account of peoples feelings generally involves
saying things in a less straightforward or more elaborate man-
ner than when one is not considering such feelings, ways of
being polite provide a major source of indirectness, reasons for
not saying exactly what one means, in how people frame their
utterances.
here are many folk notions for these kinds of attention to
feelings, captured in terms like courtesy, tact, deference, sensibil-
ity, poise, rapport, and urbanity, as well as terms for the contrast-
ing behaviors rudeness, gaucheness, social gafes and their
consequences, embarrassment or humiliation. Such terms attest
both to the pervasiveness of notions of politeness and to their
cultural framing.
Peoples face is invested in their social status and in their
relationships with one another, and so indexing this relationship
appropriately is necessary for maintaining face expectations. In
addition, one often has interactional goals that potentially con-
travene face, and the expression of such communicative inten-
tions (e.g., requests, ofers, disagreements, complaints) tends to
be mitigated by attention to face.
Politeness is crucial to the construction and maintenance
of social relationships; indeed, it is probably a precondition for
human cooperation in general. Politeness phenomena have,
therefore, attracted interest in a wide range of social sciences,
particularly linguistics, anthropology, psychology, sociology,
and communication. Work in these disparate ields can be char-
acterized in terms of three main classes of theoretical approach.
Politeness as Social Rules
To the layperson, politeness is a concept designating proper
social conduct, rules for speech and behavior stemming generally
from high-status individuals or groups (cf. standardization).
hese notions range from polite formulae like please and thank
you, codiied forms of greetings and farewells, honoriic address
forms, and so on, to more elaborate routines, for example, for
table manners or the protocol for formal events. Politeness in
this view is conventionally attached to certain linguistic forms
and formulaic expressions, which may be very diferent in difer-
ent languages and cultures.
Some analytical approaches to politeness are formulated in
terms of the same sorts of culture-speciic rules for doing what is
socially acceptable, for example, the work by Sachiko Ide (1989)
and others on Japanese politeness as social indexing or discern-
ment. In these approaches, politeness inheres in particular lin-
guistic forms when used appropriately as markers of pregiven
social categories.
Politeness as Conversational Maxims
A diferent approach understands politeness as a set of social
conventions coordinate with Paul Grices (1975) coopera-
tive principle for maximally eicient information transmis-
sion (Make your contribution such as required by the purposes
of the conversation at the moment), with its four maxims of
quality, quantity, relevance, and manner (see conversational
implicature). Robin Lakof (1973) argued that three rules
of rapport underlie choices of linguistic expression, rules that
can account for how speakers deviate from directly expressing
meanings. Choice among the three pragmatic rules gives rise
to three distinct communicative styles: Rule 1, Dont impose,
produces a distant style; Rule 2, Give options, gives rise to a
deferent style; and Rule 3, Be friendly, results in a style of cama-
raderie. Geofrey Leechs (1983) proposal is in the same vein.
Complementary to Grices cooperative principle, Leech postu-
lated a politeness principle, Minimize the expression of impolite
beliefs, with six maxims of tact, generosity, approbation, mod-
esty, agreement, and sympathy. As with Grices maxims, devia-
tions from what is expected give rise to inferences. Cross-cultural
diferences derive from the diferent importance attached to par-
ticular maxims.
he conversational maxim view shares with the social norm
view the emphasis on codiied social rules for minimizing friction
between interactors and the idea that deviations from expected
levels or forms of politeness carry a message.
Politeness as Face Management
A more sociological perspective places face work at the core of
politeness. Erving Gofman (1967) considered politeness as
an aspect of interpersonal rituals, central to public order. He
deined face as an individuals publicly manifest self-esteem and
proposed that social members have two kinds of face require-
ments: positive face, or the want of approval from others, and
negative face, or the want not to ofend others. Attention to these
face requirements is a matter of orientation to Gofmans dip-
lomatic iction of the virtual ofense, or worst possible reading
(1971, 138 f), the working assumption that face is always poten-
tially at risk, so that any interactional act with a social-relational
dimension is inherently face threatening and needs to be modi-
ied by appropriate forms of politeness. Deference (attention
owed to the others face) can be distinguished from demeanor
(attention owed to oneself).
Building on Gricean and Gofmanian approaches, Penelope
Brown and Stephen C. Levinson ([1978] 1987) introduced a
comparative perspective by drawing attention to the detailed
parallels in the construction of polite utterances across widely
difering languages and cultures, arguing that universal prin-
ciples underlie the construction of polite utterances. he par-
allels they noted are of two sorts: how the polite expression of
utterances is modiied in relation to social characteristics of
the interloculors and the situation, and how polite utterances
are linguistically formulated. At least three social factors are
involved in deciding how to be polite: 1) One tends to be more
polite to social superiors; 2) one tends to be more polite to people
one doesnt know. In the irst case, politeness tends to be asym-
metrical (the superior is less polite to an inferior); in the second,
politeness tends to be symmetrically exchanged. In addition,
635
Politeness
3) in any culture there are norms and values afecting the degree
of imposition or unwelcomeness of an utterance, and one tends
to be more polite for more serious impositions. he linguistic
structures for conveying particular kinds of politeness are also
underlyingly similar across languages, with the politeness of
solidarity (positive politeness) characterized by expressions of
interest in the addressee, exaggerated expressions of approval,
use of in-group identity markers and address forms, seeking
of agreement, and avoidance of disagreement, whereas avoid-
ance-based politeness (negative politeness) is characterized
by self-efacement, formality, restraint, deference, hedges, and
impersonalizing mechanisms like nominalization or passive
constructions.
To explain these kinds of detailed parallels across languages
and cultures in the minutiae of linguistic expression in socially
analogous contexts, Brown and Levinson proposed an abstract
model of politeness as strategic attention to face, deriving strat-
egies for constructing polite utterances in diferent contexts on
the basis of assessments of three social factors: the relative power
(P) of speaker and addressee, their social distance (D), and the
intrinsic ranking (R) of the face-threateningness of an imposition.
In contrast with rule-based approaches, Brown and Levinson
argued that politeness inheres not in words or sentences per se;
politeness is an implicature that may be conveyed by utterances
spoken in context, by virtue of successful communication of a
polite attitude or intention.
Politeness continues to be a major focus for research in many
disciplines concerned with social interaction, and the topic
now has its own professional journal, the Journal of Politeness
Research. Over the past 30 years, empirical descriptions of par-
ticular politeness phenomena from many diferent parts of the
world have accumulated, with the research emphasis largely
on cross-cultural diferences. here has been much theoretical
controversy over whether, indeed, there are any universal prin-
ciples of politeness and if so, what form they take. he recent
trend seems to be toward emphasizing emic rather than etic
approaches (cf. Watts 2003; Eelen 2005). But the importance of
politeness goes far beyond the ps and qs of appropriate behav-
ior and speech in a particular cultural setting. Its wider signii-
cance is in the interactional, communicative, day-to-day basis of
social life and the conduct of social relationships. Recent devel-
opments in the theory of social interaction that take account
of our common human nature (e.g., Goody 1995; Enield and
Levinson 2005; see also universal pragmatics) ofer hope
for theoretical progress in this ield.
Penelope Brown
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. [1978] 1987. Politeness: Some
Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eelen, Gino. 2005. A Critique of Politeness heories. Manchester: St.
Jerome.
Enield, Nick, and Stephen C. Levinson, eds. 2005. Roots of Sociality.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gofman, Erving. 1967. he nature of deference and demeanor. In
Interaction Ritual, ed. Erving Gofman, 4795. New York: Anchor
Books.
. 1971. Relations in Public. New York: Harper Colophon Books.
636
Politics of Language
Goody, Esther. 1995. Social Intelligence and Interaction.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Grice, H. Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Syntax and
Semantics. Vol. 3: Speech Acts. Ed. P. Cole and J. Morgan, 4158. New
York: Academic Press.
Hickey, Leo, and Miranda Stewart, eds. 2005. Politeness in Europe.
Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Ide, Sachiko. 1989. Formal forms and discernment: Two neglected
aspects of linguistic politeness. Multilingua 8.2/3: 22338.
Lakof, Robin. 1973. he logic of politeness or minding your ps and qs.
In Papers from the Ninth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic
Society, 292305.
Leech, Geofrey. 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.
Placencia, Mara E., ed. 2006. Research on Politeness in the Spanish-
Speaking World. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Watts, Richard J. 2003. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Watts, Richard J., Sachiko Ide, and Konrad Ehlich, eds. 1992. Politeness in
Language. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
POLITICS OF LANGUAGE
Politics of language is not a domain or subdiscipline. It is an idea
that puts the study of language in a perspective: the idea that
language is a politically invested object and that people, con-
sequently, act politically in, through, and on language. In that
sense, the term covers an enormous range of phenomena and
cuts across numerous disciplinarily organized practices. he
issue is one of function, and the politics of language suggests
that political meanings and efects are among the functions of
language. In fact, some would emphasize that there are no non-
political meanings.
Such political functions are metapragmatic: hey operate
through meta-discourses on language, on things people say
about language in language. hus, the politics of language is a
language-ideological phenomenon. Clear instances of it are
widespread utterances such as English is the language of busi-
ness or Xhosa is a language for community interaction. In
both instances, a particular language is deined as a language
that operates with a speciic load, a speciic set of social, cul-
tural, economic political attributes, all of them implicitly
articulated: Whenever I use English, my language use will be
framed as business, and I will speak like a businessman. he
politics of language has to do with the way in which we associ-
ate particular varieties of language (forms) with particular nor-
mative complexes, genres and topical domains, and identities
(functions). he relationship between forms and functions, thus
deined and seen as relatively stable (stable enough to generate
shared meanings), is usually deined as ideology, and authors
explicitly addressing the politics of language often focus on ide-
ology, hegemony, and ideological naturalization.
In what follows, I irst give a brief overview of some key notions
and authors, then engage in a brief survey of some recent work
and focus on language ideologies as a frame for understand-
ing such political functions. I conclude with an appraisal of this
work.
Key Notions and Authors
Language has been deined as politically invested since Aristotle
and the Sophists; it is therefore futile to attempt a historical survey.
Politics of Language
Rather, I would suggest we read history backwards, starting from
the current approaches to the politics of language and look-
ing into those authors who are seen as formative now. From
that vantage point, two groups of authors stand out: authors
who developed a political view of language and authors whose
political-analytic work provides tools for scholars in the ield of
language. he irst category is dominated by such scholars as M.
M. Bakhtin, V. N. Voloshinov, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault,
and Pierre Bourdieu (see habitus); in the latter, Karl Marx (see
marxism) and Antonio Gramsci stand out.
his collection of authors and insights, it must be realized,
can only be discussed in a more or less coherent way when a
number of conditions are met. In particular, two presuppositions
are required:
(i) It is clear that relections of this kind are predicated on a
view of language as a social object (not a mental object); such
relections belong to the realm of a social theory of language.
(ii) hey also are predicated on a view in which language
displays intricate connections with social structure: Either
language mirrors social structure (especially structures of
inequality) or it can become an instrument for changing
social structure.
hese presuppositions ensure that the authors mentioned can
become interlocutors for current practitioners in the ield, and such
practitioners would then be clustered in applied ields, such as
discourse analysis (both linguistic and foucaultian),
sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology.
he work of Bakhtin and Voloshinov has been inluential in
its emphasis on the social and political dimensions of a key fea-
ture of real language: its heteroglossic nature (see dialogism
and heteroglossia). Heteroglossia stands for the presence
of multiple voices in an act of communication, and such
voices are intricately related to social formations and interests.
Whenever we communicate, thus, we engage with existing com-
plexes of social (and cultural) meaning, we insert ourselves in an
intertextual tradition in which such complexes make sense,
and we articulate interests, not only (neutral, self-contained)
meanings. In addition, the articulation of such interests is not
a unilateral and linear event. Bakhtin (1981) emphasizes the
importance of evaluative uptake in interaction his dialogical
principle in which every act of communication requires rati-
ication by the other in order to be valid, that is, in order to be
meaningful. his process of ratiication is evaluative: It is done
from within ordered complexes of forms-and-meanings in
which appropriateness, social roles, luency, and other quality
attributes are speciied. hus, even if I think I produce a cogent
story, my interlocutor may judge it to be of the mark because
what I say and how I say it do not qualify as good enough in his/
her evaluative framework. And evidently, such evaluative frame-
works are relections and instruments of the social and political
order (Voloshinov 1973).
his social and political order penetrates language at a fun-
damental level: It shapes discourses. Discourses are complexes
of communicative forms (genres, styles) mapped onto thematic
and social domains, and what the social and political order does
is to create spaces in which particular discourses operate while it
eliminates other such spaces. his idea is central to the work of
Barthes (1957), who emphasizes the discursive routines and the
silences that are generated by the consumer-capitalist society. It
also underlies Foucaults (1984) notion of order of discourse,
and it is relected in Bourdieus (1991) notion of legitimate lan-
guage. In each case, macrosocial order manifests itself in dis-
course patterns, structures, both positively and negatively. he
fact that some things can only be said in some ways is an efect of
the social and political order; the fact that some things cannot be
said at all is an efect of the same thing (Blommaert 2005).
he fact is, however, that people rarely experience this shap-
ing of discourses as an efect of social and political forces. Mostly,
we perceive these discourse routines and absences as normal,
as just the way things are. It is at this point that we see scholars
refer to the Marxian notion of ideology an agentive notion in
which ideational complexes such as discourses have real mate-
rial efects as well as to the Gramscian notion of hegemony.
Hegemony is ideological dominance, that is, dominance that
is not perceived as dominance but as a neutral, normal state of
afairs. Social and political forces operate in language through
hegemony, that is, through naturalized, neutralized, and nor-
malized perceptions and forms of behavior.
hese authors all provide frequently used key notions and
insights, all of which revolve around the same central node: that
language is not a neutral phenomenon but one that bears deep
traces of social and political structures and processes in society.
he use of language, consequently, is always an activity that has
social and political dimensions: It can reproduce existing struc-
tures or challenge them, it can empower or disempower people,
and it can enfranchise and disenfranchise them.
State of Affairs
he political load of language is one of the central concerns
for critical discourse analysis (CDA), an approach to dis-
course analysis that, especially since the 1990s, explicitly focuses
on the ways in which discourse relects power and social struc-
ture and constructs it (Fairclough 1989, 1992; Blommaert 2005).
It is CDAs stated goal to analyze opaque as well as transparent
structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power
and control as manifested in language (Wodak 1995, 204) a
paradigmatic choice that is relected in numerous studies on rac-
ism, sexism, media, and political discourse and advertisements.
In all of these, linguistic and textual patterns are analyzed as con-
duits for hegemony and power abuse, and CDA has been inlu-
ential in identifying registers and genres of power and control.
CDA clearly subscribes to a view of language as loaded (cf.
Bolinger 1980) and as invested with social and political interests
that steer discourse into particular, structural (i.e., nonarbitrary)
patterns of use and abuse. he inluence of Foucault, Gramsci,
Bourdieu, and other critical theorists is explicitly acknowledged
in much CDA work.
he same paradigmatic choice underlies work in what
could be called critical sociolinguistics: an approach in which
the distribution of language in society is also seen as a relec-
tion of power processes, often crystallized in normative (stan-
dards) discourses and invariably entailing judgments of users
through judgments of language use (e.g., Milroy and Milroy
1985; Cameron 1995; see standardization). Variation in lan-
guage speaks to variation in society, and such forms of variation
637
Politics of Language
are evaluated given diferent value. Institutionalization, such
as, for example, in the education system (Rampton 1995) or in
bureaucracy (Sarangi and Slembrouck 1996) can stabilize and
reify such evaluative patterns and use them as normative, exclu-
sive, and excluding instruments of power and control. Sensitive
social identities, such as gender and immigrant identities, can
be especially vulnerable to exclusion or marginalization in such
reiied normative structures.
Both CDA and critical sociolinguistics seek an integration of
the linguistic or discourse-analytic method with social theory,
thus reversing the tendency toward autonomy and disciplinary
recognizability that characterized earlier phases in the develop-
ment of these disciplines (e.g., Cameron 1992; Chouliaraki and
Fairclough 1999). his move is aimed at strengthening the funda-
mental theoretical assumption: that language and social struc-
ture stand in an intricate relationship to each other and that one
cannot be understood without an understanding of the other.
From another theoretical angle, linguistic anthropology has
signiicantly contributed to the study of the politics of language.
In contrast to the previous schools, linguistic anthropology has its
roots in an integrated science of human behavior. he anthropo-
logical notion of language, consequently, appears easier to inte-
grate into a mature social-theoretical framework than notions of
language that have their feet in twentieth-century linguistic tra-
ditions. he fact that language forms and structures need to be
seen as relective and constructive of sociocultural and political
realities was central to Edward Sapirs work (1921), and the post
World War II reemergence of the ethnography of communication
(Gumperz and Hymes 1972; Gumperz 1982; Hymes 1996) started
from the assumption that there is no occurrence of language that
is not drenched in social, cultural, historical, and political con-
texts and that, consequently, can be understood without atten-
tion to these contexts (Duranti 1997). It is from within linguistic
anthropology that the paradigm of language ideologies devel-
oped (Schiefelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity 1998; Blommaert 1999;
Kroskrity 2000; Bauman and Briggs 2003).
Language Ideologies
Language ideologies are beliefs, ideas, views, and perceptions
about language and communication. Such ideational complexes
pertain to every aspect of communication: about linguistic forms
and functions, as well as about the wider behavioral frames (often
called nonlinguistic) in which they occur. hus, in the ield of
language ideologies, people are seen to perform meanings, and
language in the narrow sense of the term is seen as just one mode
of meaning production. People produce semiosis (meaningful
symbolic behavior) as performance, and they do so within a
regimented field in which language ideologies produce stability
and recognizability. Seen from that perspective, language ide-
ologies are of course not just ideational; they are practical in the
sense of Bourdieu, referring to the Marxian praxis, rather than to
the Mannheimian or Durkheimian notion of ideology.
he study of language ideologies emerged out of the Whorian
concern with connections between language form and world
view (Hill and Mannheim 1992). To recap Benjamin Whorfs
basic idea, he argued that grammatical categories encoded
and thus revealed aspects of collective perceptions of reality;
as such, grammatical organization was not random, logical, or
638
autonomous but cultural and social, and it displayed coherence
with other aspects of social and cultural patterning. In that sense,
grammatical form responded to collective patterns that orga-
nized social and cultural behavior, including linguistic behavior.
he full richness of Whorfs approach was established by people
like Michael Silverstein (1979). Silverstein suggested that we
read Whorfs argument as follows: Linguistic form is indexical;
it indexes aspects of context through ideological inferences: A
particular form stands for a particular social and cultural
meaning (also Silverstein 2003). hus, in French, tu and vous
share a great deal of linguistic meaning but are diferentiated by
indexical meanings; tu indexes a low second person singular
addressee, while vous indexes a high second person singular
addressee. he one who uses tu or vous would express indexically
his/her degree of respect and social distance toward the inter-
locutor, and the interlocutor would attribute conventional iden-
tity features, such as polite, proper, well educated, middle
class, and so on to the one using these forms. hus, we select
linguistic (and wider semiotic) forms in relation to socially and
culturally shared ideas about what would be appropriate, good,
useful, and salient communicative behavior in a speciic context,
and our use of semiotic means creates, supports, and manipu-
lates contexts.
his reconstruction of Whorfs foundational insight has signif-
icant implications. One efect is that it creates a new, but essen-
tially inseparable, layer to language structure: a metapragmatic
layer. Accepting that layer means that the analyst must accept
that whenever we communicate, we not only communicate in
our communication but also communicate about our commu-
nication: We always lag socially and culturally shared (ideo-
logical) indexical meanings while we talk, and these indexicals
make others perceive our talk as serious, arrogant, funny,
or knowledgeable. he metapragmatics of language organizes
its pragmatics its meaning in society. And this, then, means
that approaches solely focused on a pragmatics of language risk
buying into commonly shared metapragmatic frames; in other
words, a normal linguistics always risks dragging along the
widespread language ideologies that dominate its object.
Another efect is that the range of variability in language is
vastly expanded, for the metapragmatic layer also provides an
enormous potential for social and cultural diferentiation (dis-
tinction, to borrow Bourdieus term). In a nutshell, we can say
that every possible diference in language can become a socially
and culturally salient and important diference and that linguis-
tic diferences need not be big in order to generate important
social and cultural diferences.
Evaluation
he idea that language is a politically invested object and that
people act politically in, through, and on language is by now a
well-established theoretical frame, the legitimacy of which no
longer requires debate. One reason is the fact that the diferent
approaches discussed here all have very strong empirical incli-
nations and that studies documenting the politics of language
often manage to transcend the slogans of a committed social
science and bring theoretical and methodological innovation to
the ield. CDA has done much to sensitize discourse analysts at
large about the fact that discourse matters to people because it
Politics of Language
is invested with power and social capital; critical sociolinguis-
tics has likewise drawn attention to the fact that sociolinguistic
distribution is not just a horizontal phenomenon but also a ver-
tical one: Sociolinguistic diference is complemented by socio-
linguistic inequality. And from within linguistic anthropology,
we have witnessed the emergence of a powerful ethnographic
paradigm that recovers the holistic and rich agenda developed
earlier by the likes of Sapir and Whorf and applies these insights
to an expanding ield of fundamental and applied topics of lan-
guage in society. he language-ideological approach appears to
be the most promising one because of its compelling theoret-
ical coherence and empirical applicability, and it would beneit
adjacent disciplines if the central insight that every pragmat-
ics of language is accompanied by a metapragmatics would be
adopted.
Jan Blommaert
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. he Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Barthes, R. 1957. Mythologies. Paris: Seuil.
Bauman, R., and C. Briggs. 2003. Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies
and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Blommaert, J. 2005. Discourse: A Critical Introduction.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Blommaert, J., ed. 1999. Language Ideological Debates. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Bolinger, D. 1980. Language: he Loaded Weapon. London: Longman.
Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge,
UK: Polity.
Cameron, D. 1992. Feminism and Linguistic heory. London: Macmillan.
. 1995. Verbal Hygiene. London: Routledge.
Chouliaraki, L., and N. Fairclough. 1999. Discourse in
Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Duranti, A. 1997. Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Fairclough, N. 1989. Language and Power. London: Longman.
. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Foucault, M. 1984. he order of discourse. In Language and Politics, ed.
M. Shapiro, 10838. London: Blackwell.
Gumperz, J. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press
Gumperz, J., and D. Hymes, eds. 1972. Directions in Sociolinguistics: he
Ethnography of Communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston
Hill, J., and B. Mannheim. 1992. Language and world view. Annual
Review of Anthropology 21: 381406.
Hymes, D. 1996. Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Toward
an Understanding of Voice. London: Taylor and Francis.
Kroskrity, P., ed. 2000. Regimes of Language. Santa Fe, NM: SAR.
Milroy, J., and L. Milroy. 1985. Authority in Language: Investigating
Language Prescription and Standardisation. London: Routledge.
Rampton, B. 1995. Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents.
London: Longman.
Sapir, E. 1921. Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. Orlando,
FL: Harcourt Brace.
Sarangi, S., and S. Slembrouck. 1996. Language, Bureaucracy and Social
Control. London: Longman.
Schiefelin, B., K. Woolard, and P. Kroskrity, eds. 1998. Language
Ideologies: Practice and heory. New York: Oxford University Press.
Possible Worlds Semantics
Silverstein M. 1979. Language structure and linguistic ideology. In
he Elements, ed. P. Clyne, W. Hanks, and C. Hofbauer, 193247.
Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
. 2003. Indexical order and the dialectics of sociocultural life.
Language and Communication 23: 193229.
Voloshinov, V. N. 1973. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Wodak, R. 1995. Critical linguistics and critical discourse analysis. In
Handbook of Pragmatics: Manual, ed. J. Verschueren, J. O. stman,
and J. Blommaert, 20410. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
POSSIBLE WORLDS SEMANTICS
Possible worlds semantics is a family of semantic theories in
which the truth conditions of modal concepts and other inten-
sional locutions are expressed with the help of the concept of
possible world (scenario, possible state of afairs, possible course
of events). (See modality, intension and extension.)
Human beings constantly ind themselves concerned with
what could happen or might have happened. he modal notions
of possibility and necessity are used to cope with such situations.
Less directly, notions like knowledge, belief, obligation, permis-
sion, and so on serve the same purpose. Concepts behaving in
essentially the same way as necessity, knowledge, and so on are
known as intensional concepts. Modal notions have several vari-
eties, among them logical, conceptual, metaphysical, natural,
nomic, and physical modalities. When the diferent possibilities
can be weighted, one can also evoke the concept of probability.
It is nevertheless only relatively late that philosophers and
logicians came to think that in order to understand modal
notions (and other related notions), we have to consider unreal-
ized courses of events or states of afairs and, hence, merely pos-
sible worlds. Earlier philosophers usually did not think in such
terms. For one thinker, Aristotle, the only reality is the succession
of present moments outside of which there are no other possible
courses of events. he idea of many worlds began its develop-
ment in the Middle Ages, encouraged by the famous condemna-
tion of 1277 of the view that God could not create other worlds.
he notion of possible world was put to major metaphysical uses
by G. W. Leibniz for whom metaphysical truths are truths hold-
ing in all possible worlds.
In twentieth-century philosophical logic, the notion of possi-
ble world became prominent when modal logic was approached
from a model-theoretical or semantic point of view. he use of the
notion of possible world in the study of modalities is analogous
to the measure-theoretical approach to probability theory, with
probability theorists sample-space points playing the same role
as logicians possible worlds. One of the pioneers of the seman-
tic study of modalities was Rudolf Carnap (1947), who explicitly
acknowledged the inspiration he received from Leibniz. he
early treatments of the logic and semantics of modalities nev-
ertheless relied heavily on syntactical concepts and arguments.
For instance, Carnap represented possible worlds by sets of
sentences he called state-descriptions. A state-description is a
complete list of atomic sentences and the negations of atomic
sentences that are true in some model.
In such semisyntactical theorizing, interpretational questions
were neglected, relatively speaking. Fortunately, this neglect did
not initially matter. For what is the cash value of assuming that
639
Possible Worlds Semantics
possible worlds exist? According to Van Quine, such existence
means that we can quantify over them (see quantification).
he starting point of possible worlds semantics is the insight that
many modal and other intensional concepts can be construed as
quantiiers over suitable classes of possible worlds. If NS means
it is necessary that S, it is true if and only if S is true in all pos-
sible worlds. It is possible that S, briely PS, is true just in case
S is true in some possible world. If KaS means a knows that S,
it is true if and only if S is true in all the possible worlds not ruled
out by what a knows, and so on. hus, the idea of possible worlds
was involved right from the beginning in the development of the
semantics of modal logic, following the work of Alfred Tarski and
his associates. (Cf. Copeland 2002; Kanger 1957; Hintikka 1957a,
1957b; Kripke 1959.) he irst to emphasize the role of possible
worlds semantics as the basis of general semantics seems to have
been Richard Montague (cf. Montague 1974).
Even though this is, for most purposes, an adequate expla-
nation of the meaning of KaS, the characterizations of necessity
and possibility need further speciication, namely, an indication
of what kind of modality we are dealing with. For instance, not
all logically possible worlds are nomically (physically, naturally)
possible.
We thus seem to obtain a semantically interpreted language
by adding to a irst-order language the operator or those opera-
tors we are interested in. On the basis of this idea, we can develop
much of a viable modal logic, epistemic logic, and so on, as well
as the required methods of proof.
his procedure is not suicient alone, however. For one thing,
the possible worlds that igure in these explanations are relative
to the world w in which NS, PS, KaS, and so on are evaluated
semantically. hey will be called alternatives to w. To deal with
iterated or multiple modalities, we have to consider alternatives
to alternative worlds, and so on. he alternativeness relation
involved here is sometimes called the accessibility relation.
his does not yet completely determine the possible worlds
semantics. To see what is missing, consider how the references
of linguistic expressions are determined. he guiding principle of
possible worlds semantics is that the application of a language,
including the reference of any expression e, in a given world w
must depend only on that world. he way in which the reference
of e in w is determined is, therefore, codiied in the function f that
determines the reference of e as a function f(w, e) only. We could
call the totality of these functions the reference system of the
language. For instance, the reference of the 44th president of
the United States is whoever wins the 2008 election.
hese ideas of reference and meaning are, in fact, the corner-
stone of the version of possible worlds semantics most exten-
sively used in linguistics, known as Montague semantics (see
montague grammar). It was developed by Montague (1974)
and applied in linguistics most vigorously by Barbara Partee
(1976, 1989).
here are further problems in the development of possible
worlds semantics, however. When we use a quantiier, we con-
sider each of its values as being the same individual in diferent
possible worlds. But how can such identities be recognized?
hey cannot be established by examining the diferent possible
worlds in question independently of one another. For instance,
a name-conferring (dubbing) ceremony in one world does not
640
automatically help the identiication of the same individual in
another world. Nor does the rest of the reference system help us
here. here must exist principles deining what counts as a single
individual across possible worlds. heir totality can be called an
identiication system.
he nature of such identiication has given rise to extensive
discussion and controversies. he identiication system codiied
in our language is largely independent of the reference system.
Indeed, there are two diferent kinds of identiication actually
used in our conceptual system. An identiication system can
be visualized as a kind of map shared by the possible worlds
between which the identiication is to take place. In the most
common cases of identiication, the map can be thought of as a
kind of universal registry of the relevant population. For instance,
if the iles of the Social Security System were to serve as such a
system, I would know who someone is if and only if I knew his or
her social security number. Such identiication could be called
public. An idea of how the criteria of public identiication could
work can be obtained by considering how we reidentify objects
over time. Continuity considerations obviously play a major role,
but questions as to how objects behave over time also come into
play.
An individuals position in someones perceptual space or
remembered role in someones past experiences can also serve
as a framework of identiication. he simplest framework of this
kind is someones visual space. Such forms of identiication are
called perspectival. Among other expressions of our language,
demonstratives rely on perspectival identiication. heir oper-
ation is illustrated by Bertrand Russells onetime view that the
only logically proper names of English are this, that, and
I. he explanation is that Russell tacitly presupposed only per-
spectival identiication.
he distinction between perspectival and public identiica-
tion gains further interest and robustness from the fact that these
two systems are, in the case of visual cognition, implemented
by diferent parts of the human brain (Vaina 1990; Hintikka and
Symons 2003). Since quantiiers depend on identiication, they
acquire a diferent meaning according to the kind of identiica-
tion presupposed.
hese observations open the doors to extensive applica-
tions of logical languages with a possible worlds semantics. For
instance, a simple wh-statement Alonzo knows who (call him or
her x) is such that F[x] can be expressed by a sentence of the form
(x)KAlonzoF[x] where x ranges over persons. his shows how to
formalize simple knows who statements in general. For example,
(x)KAlonzo(Barbara = x) says that Alonzo knows of some particu-
lar individual x that Barbara is that x. his unmistakably means
that Alonzo knows who Barbara is. Such statements may be con-
trasted to Ka(x)(b = x), which merely says that a knows that b
exists.
his kind of variation of operator ordering K versus (x)
cannot do the whole job, at least if we want to stay on the irst-
order level. In order to do so, we have to resort to a recently
introduced idea of operator independence (Hintikka 2003).
Since modalities are characterized by quantiication over pos-
sible worlds, the same kind of independence can obtain between
modal operators and quantiiers as between quantiiers. his
independence can be expressed by a slash. hus, we can express
Possible Worlds Semantics
(x)Ka(b = x) equivalently as Ka(x/Ka)(b = x), where x/Ka
means that is independent of Ka. (Notice that by so doing, we
can stay closer to the structure [word order] of the corresponding
English knowledge statements.) In more complicated cases, we
can, for instance, express a knows which function g(x) is by
Ka(x)(y/Ka)(g(x) = y).
We cannot stay on the irst-order level here without the inde-
pendence indicator.
his does not clear up all interpretational problems, however.
We can still ask: What are the relevant possible worlds in difer-
ent applications? his question is connected with the question as
to what kinds of modalities and other intensional notions there
are.
he characterization of possible worlds as represented by
maximal consistent classes of sentences of a given language has
encouraged the idea that what is intended by possible worlds are
indeed worlds in the sense of entire universes. However, a com-
parison with probability theory shows that such grandiose inter-
pretations are neither unavoidable nor even preferable. In most
applications of probability theory, the possible worlds (sample
space points) are not worlds in any ordinary sense of the word.
hey usually are what might be called scenarios, namely, courses of
events involving a small region of space-time, for example, tosses
of a die. Some probability theorists speak of small worlds, and
practically all realistic applications of possible worlds semantics
are to such small worlds. In some of his work, Montague, in fact,
operates with contexts of use, rather than possible worlds.
here remains the question of diferent modalities. Are they
all viable in the light of possible world semantics? here are no
major unsolved conceptual problems about epistemic or dox-
astic modalities or other similar intensional concepts. he class
of alternative epistemic worlds has a clear meaning or at least
as clear a meaning as our language has. Logical (conceptual)
Possible Worlds Semantics and Fiction
. 2003. A second generation epistemic logic and its general signii-
cance. In Knowledge Contributors, ed. by V. Hendricks, K. F. Jrgensen,
and S. A. Pedersen, 3356. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer
Academic.
Hintikka, Jaakko, and John Symons. 2003. Systems of visual identiica-
tion and neuroscience: Lessons from epistemic logic. Philosophy of
Science 70: 89104.
Kanger, Stig. 1957. Provability in Logic. Stockholm Studies in Philosophy.
Vol. 1. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wicksell.
Kripke, Saul A. 1959. A completeness theorem in modal logic. Journal
of Symbolic Logic 24: 114.
Montague, Richard. 1974. Formal Philosophy: Selected Papers by
Richard Montague, ed. by Richmond homason. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Partee, Barbara H. 1989. Possible worlds in model-theoretic seman-
tics: A linguistic perspective. In Possible Worlds in Humanities, Arts
and Sciences: Proceedings of Nobel Symposium, ed. by S. Alln, 93123.
Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Partee, Barbara H., ed. 1976. Montague Grammar. New York: Academic
Press.
Vaina, Lucia. 1990. What and Where in the Human Visual System: Two
Hierarchies of Visual Modules. Synthese 83: 4991.
POSSIBLE WORLDS SEMANTICS AND FICTION
he applications of the philosophical concept of possible world
to narrative and to iction were irst developed in the late 1970s
and early 1980s as a reaction to structuralist poetics, a
movement that adhered to Ferdinand de Saussures conception
of language as a self-enclosed system of signs. As homas Pavel
has argued, this theoretical position led to a moratorium on
representational topics (1986, 6) and on the notion of reference
to a world external to language. In its literary applications, pos-
sible worlds (hence, PW) semantics is an attempt to restore the
relevance of mimesis, reference, and the question of truth with-