The modality-specificity of linguistic representations: Evidence from slips of the tongue and the pen

1997 ◽  
Vol 27 (5) ◽  
pp. 671-697 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Berg
Author(s):  
Olga B. Ponomareva ◽  
Valeriya I. Orlova

This article presents a comprehensive analysis of the basic concepts that make up the conceptual sphere of the novel “Of Human Bondage” by W. S. Maugham. These concepts act as cognitive dominants of the linguistic consciousness of the protagonist’s linguistic personality in the work under study. The novelty of this research lies in the fact that it is performed within the framework of a new paradigm of linguistics — the cognitive linguistics, which involves the study of mental and linguistic representations of thought processes that occur during the perception of information. Moreover, the novel “Of Human Bondage” by W. S. Maugham has not attracted the attention of linguists-cognitologists previously, which adds to the novelty of this article. In addition, the present study provides a comprehensive description of the basic concepts making up the conceptual sphere of the novel. The linguistic methods of representing various concepts in the analyzed work are determined by the national, personal, cultural, and psychological aspects of Maugham’s thinking. The authors employ a communicative-cognitive methodological analysis proposed by N. S. Bolotnova involving the modeling of textual and intertextual semantic fields of artistic concepts and the analysis of the conceptual sphere of a literary text. The universal concepts RELIGION, LOVE, PASSION, THE MEANING OF LIFE, which constitute the conceptual sphere of the novel by W. S. Maugham “Of Human Bondage”, are analyzed. The main result of the study is that THE MEANING OF LIFE concept is universal, not individual, and it includes other universal concepts, such as RELIGION, LOVE, PASSION, THE MEANING OF LIFE, conceptual metaphors and metonyms, symbols, and other words-associates, which constitute the broad figurative and evaluative periphery of the conceptual sphere of the novel.


2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 112-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony T. Cacace ◽  
Dennis J. McFarland

Purpose: This article argues for the use of modality specificity as a unifying framework by which to conceptualize and diagnose central auditory processing disorder (CAPD). The intent is to generate dialogue and critical discussion in this area of study. Method: Research in the cognitive, behavioral, and neural sciences that relates to the concept of modality specificity was reviewed and synthesized. Results: Modality specificity has a long history as an organizing construct within a diverse collection of mainstream scientific disciplines. The principle of modality specificity was contrasted with the unimodal inclusive framework, which holds that auditory tests alone are sufficient to make the CAPD diagnosis. Evidence from a large body of data demonstrated that the unimodal framework was unable to delineate modality-specific processes from more generalized dysfunction; it lacked discriminant validity and resulted in an incomplete assessment. Consequently, any hypothetical model resulting from incomplete assessments or potential therapies that are based on indeterminate diagnoses are themselves questionable, and caution should be used in their application. Conclusions: Improving specificity of diagnosis is an imperative core issue to the area of CAPD. Without specificity, the concept has little explanatory power. Because of serious flaws in concept and design, the unimodal inclusive framework should be abandoned in favor of a more valid approach that uses modality specificity.


1997 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Balcom

Zobl discussed inappropriate passive morphology (‘be’ and the past participle) in the English writing of L2 learners, linking its occurrence to the class of unaccusative verbs and proposing that learners subsume unaccusatives under the syntactic rule for passive formation. The research reported here supports and amplifies Zobl' proposal, based on a grammaticality judgement task and a controlled production task containing verbs from a variety of subclasses of unaccusatives. The tasks were administered to Chinese L1 learners of English and a control group of English native speakers. Results show that subjects both used and judged as grammatical inappropriate passive morphology with all verbs falling under the rubric of unaccusativity. The article concludes with linguistic representations which maintain Zobl’s insights but are consistent with current theories of argument structure.


1980 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 222-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Ritter ◽  
Laurence Rotkin ◽  
Herbert G. Vaughan

Author(s):  
Li Hsieh

Bilingual speakers rely on attentional and executive control to continuously inhibit or activate linguistic representations of competing languages, which leads to an increased efficiency known as “bilingual advantage”. Both monolingual and bilingual speakers were asked to perform multiple tasks of talking on a cell phone while simultaneously attending to simulated driving events. This study examined the effect of bilingualism on participants' performance during a dual-task experiment based on 20 monolingual and 13 bilingual healthy adults. The within-subject and between-subject comparisons were conducted on reaction times of a visual event detection task for (a) only driving and (b) driving while simultaneously engaged in a phone conversation. Results of this study showed that bilingual speakers performed significantly faster than monolingual speakers during the multitasking condition, but not during the driving only condition. Further, bilingual speakers consistently showed a bilingual advantage in reaction times during the multitasking condition, despite varying degrees on a bilingual dominance scale. Overall, experiences in more than one language yield bilingual advantage in better performance than monolingual speakers during a multitasking condition, but not during a single task condition. Regardless of the difference in bilingual proficiency level, such language experience reveals a positive impact on bilingual speakers for multitasking.


2008 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNA L. THEAKSTON ◽  
ELENA V. M. LIEVEN

ABSTRACTChildren pass through a stage in development when they produce utterances that contain auxiliary BE (he's playing) and utterances where auxiliary BE is omitted (he playing). One explanation that has been put forward to explain this phenomenon is the presence of questions in the input that model S-V word order (Theakston, Lieven & Tomasello, 2003). The current paper reports two studies that investigate the role of the input in children's use and non-use of auxiliary BE in declaratives. In Study 1, 96 children aged from 2 ; 5 to 2 ; 10 were exposed to known and novel verbs modelled in questions only or declaratives only. In Study 2, naturalistic data from a dense database from a single child between the ages of 2 ; 8 to 3 ; 2 were examined to investigate the influence of (1) declaratives and questions in the input in prior discourse, and (2) the child's immediately previous use of declaratives where auxiliary BE was produced or omitted, on his subsequent use or non-use of auxiliary BE. The results show that in both the experimental and naturalistic contexts, the presence of questions in the input resulted in lower levels of auxiliary provision in the children's speech than in utterances following declaratives in the input. In addition, the children's prior use or non-use of auxiliary BE influenced subsequent use. The findings are discussed in the context of usage-based theories of language acquisition and the role of the language children hear in their developing linguistic representations.


SETTING ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 119-122
Author(s):  
Ciro Elia

The reflective thinking does not originate simply from the repression of drive and motor pulls in order to achieve reality, so that, following Freud's conceptualizations; it would come to be an acting without action. The thinking development process is much more complex. The psychoanalytic psychotherapy of the most serious schizophrenic diseases, characterized by fragmentation and undifferentiation features, without any forms of noetic and self-noetic thought (see Tulving, 2002), as well as Solms' and Panksepp's Tertiary Process, give us important contributions to understand the beginning of thought not only at the therapeutic but also at the ontogenetic general level. The therapeutic process does not emphasize Gaetano Benedetti's symbolic symmetry, but the embodied one. That expresses itself by the metaphorizing iconicity of the therapist's wish, arises or builds the patient's imagine-cinetic-spatial schematas (Lakoff and Johnson, Mandler, 2004), that show a "metaphorical" correspondence with conceptual and later linguistic structures. Thinking itself is relational as constituted by post-oedipal linguistic representations organized in a triadic form in Matte Blanco's meaning. They are also, always and necessarily, invested by Id affects, shaped by early positive relationships. The paper contributes to the understanding of the reflective thinking development, generally speaking (not only in these patients), by an approach very different from the Freudian one.


Author(s):  
Daniel GARCÍA VELASCO

ABSTRACT Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) is a typologically-based theory of language structure which is organized in levels, layers and components. In this paper, I will claim that FDG is modular in Sadock’s sense, as it presents four independent levels of representation with their own linguistic primitives each. For modular grammars, the relation between the different levels (more technically, the nature of the interfaces) is a central issue. It will be shown that FDG is a top-down grammar which follows two basic principles in its dynamic implementation: Depth-first and Maximal depth. Together with external constraints, these principles conspire to create linguistic representations which are psychologically adequate and which allow levels to be circumvented if necessary, thus simplifying representations and creating mismatches among them.


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