Repairing person reference in a small Caribbean community

2009 ◽  
pp. 281-308
Author(s):  
Hye-Kyung Lee

Lee’s chapter provides a corpus-based analysis of Korean first-person markers by examining the semantic and pragmatic features emerging from their dictionary definitions and their usages in discourse. Specifically, it is demonstrated that the use of the grammatical category of a pronoun does not quite fit the Korean data, because the exceptionally large number of the lexical items are highly specialized in their use. While the first-person markers have the primary function of referring to the speaker, self-referring via first-person markers in Korean is mediated by the speaker’s awareness of his perceived social role or public image, which is expected to conform to honorification norms. The author also argues that the situation with first-person reference in Korean supports the view that the indexical/non-indexical distinction standardly adopted in semantic theory ought to be reconsidered.


Author(s):  
Salvatore Caserta ◽  
Mikael Rask Madsen

This chapter analyzes the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), the creation of which was regarded as the culmination of the Caribbean’s long and protracted process toward independence from its former colonizers. Formally, the CCJ was instantaneously empowered to hear cases involving Caribbean Community law (Community law). The CCJ was also empowered to replace the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC) in London—a last court of appeal for civil and criminal cases from the Caribbean and the most visible remnant of the British Empire’s former rule. The CCJ’s unique double jurisdiction—original over Community law and appellate over other civil and criminal matters—underscores the complex sociopolitical context and transformation of which it is a part. Ultimately, the CCJ’s growing authority has increasingly made the Court the institutional intersection for the convergence of these two different paths toward establishing the Caribbean as a legally integrated regional unity.


This book addresses different linguistic and philosophical aspects of referring to the self in a wide range of languages from different language families, including Amharic, English, French, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Newari (Sino-Tibetan), Polish, Tariana (Arawak), and Thai. In the domain of speaking about oneself, languages use a myriad of expressions that cut across grammatical and semantic categories, as well as a wide variety of constructions. Languages of Southeast and East Asia famously employ a great number of terms for first-person reference to signal honorification. The number and mixed properties of these terms make them debatable candidates for pronounhood, with many grammar-driven classifications opting to classify them with nouns. Some languages make use of egophors or logophors, and many exhibit an interaction between expressing the self and expressing evidentiality qua the epistemic status of information held from the ego perspective. The volume’s focus on expressing the self, however, is not directly motivated by an interest in the grammar or lexicon, but instead stems from philosophical discussions of the special status of thoughts about oneself, known as de se thoughts. It is this interdisciplinary understanding of expressing the self that underlies this volume, comprising philosophy of mind at one end of the spectrum and cross-cultural pragmatics of self-expression at the other. This unprecedented juxtaposition results in a novel method of approaching de se and de se expressions, in which research methods from linguistics and philosophy inform each other. The importance of this interdisciplinary perspective on expressing the self cannot be overemphasized. Crucially, the volume also demonstrates that linguistic research on first-person reference makes a valuable contribution to research on the self tout court, by exploring the ways in which the self is expressed, and thereby adding to the insights gained through philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science.


Author(s):  
N. J. Enfield

This chapter undertakes a survey of commands and similar speech acts in Lao, the national language of Laos. The survey draws upon a corpus of naturally occurring speech in narratives and conversations recorded in Laos. An important linguistic resource for expressing commands is a system of sentence-final particles. The particles convey subtle distinctions in meaning of commands, including matters of politeness, urgency, entitlement, and expectation. These distinctions are illustrated with examples. Forms of person reference such as names and pronouns also play a role in the formulation of commands, particularly in so far as they relate to a cultural system in which social hierarchy is strongly valued. Various other linguistic issues related to commands are examined, including negative imperatives, complementation, indirect strategies for expressing commands, and serial verb constructions.


Multilingua ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Junko Mori ◽  
Chiharu Shima

AbstractThe current study examines how Japanese and international care workers at a geriatric healthcare facility in Japan manage one of the most fundamental elements of handover interactions – person reference and recognition to identify a particular care receiver and discuss their specific conditions and needs. By using Conversation analysis (CA) as a central mode of inquiry, this study examines how the participants approach the establishment of referential common ground while simultaneously attending to the progressivity of ongoing activity, and how written records on care receivers are incorporated into the process. The juxtaposition of three international care workers’ performances effectively illustrates how the international care workers’ performative competence is co-constructed with their Japanese colleagues in this interactive process and how the participants exhibit different kinds of orientations towards the activity arranged for the dual purpose of actual handover and for the international care workers’ language learning and socialization. As a contribution to a growing body of CA studies of second language talk at work, this study considers possible tensions between engaging in a language-learning activity regarding specific linguistic elements during a particular professional activity and learning to become a competent actor in the particular activity.


2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (14) ◽  
pp. 2100-2114 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. L. Cervantes-Henríquez ◽  
J. E. Acosta-López ◽  
M. L. Martínez-Banfi ◽  
J. I. Vélez ◽  
E. Mejía-Segura ◽  
...  

Objective: The aim of this study is to contrast the genetics of neuropsychological tasks in individuals from nuclear families clustering ADHD in a Caribbean community. Method: We recruited and clinically characterized 408 individuals using an extensive battery of neuropsychological tasks. The genetic variance underpinning these tasks was estimated by heritability. A predictive framework for ADHD diagnosis was derived using these tasks. Results: We found that individuals with ADHD differed from controls in tasks of mental control, visuospatial ability, visuoverbal memory, phonological and verbal fluency, verbal and semantic fluency, cognitive flexibility, and cognitive ability. Among them, tasks of mental control, visuoverbal memory, phonological fluency, semantic verbal fluency, and intelligence had a significant heritability. A predictive model of ADHD diagnosis using these endophenotypes yields remarkable classification rate, sensitivity, specificity, and precision values (above 80%). Conclusion: We have dissected new cognitive endophenotypes in ADHD that can be suitable to assess the neurobiological and genetic basis of ADHD.


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