Intersubjectivity and engagement in Ku Waru

AbstractFollowing Evanset al.(2018a, 2018b), I use “engagement” to refer to grammatical encoding of the relative accessibility of an entity or state of affairs to the speaker and addressee. I refer to what is thereby encoded as the “engagement function”. How neatly does that function map on to grammatical categories of particular languages? Here I address that question with respect to the Papuan language Ku Waru, focusing on spatial and epistemic demonstratives, and definiteness and indefinite marking. I show that forms within each of those word/morpheme classes do serve engagement functions, but in cross-cutting and partial ways. I show how the engagement function is also achieved through poetic parallelism, prosody, gaze direction and other aspects of bodily comportment. In the examples considered, the engagement function is realised through interaction between those extra-linguistic features and the grammatical ones. The main thing that is added by grammatical engagement marking is an explicit signalling of the intersubjective accord that has been achieved on other bases. I hypothesize that that is true of engagement overall, and conclude by suggesting some ways to test that hypothesis and to advance the understanding of engagement more generally.

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Speech Differences along the Ontario-United States Border

The Canadian Journal of Linguistics / La revue canadienne de linguistique ◽

10.1017/s031957320002631x ◽

1955 ◽

Vol 1 (R1) ◽

pp. 14-19 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Walter S. Avis

Keyword(s):

American English ◽

Social Contact ◽

Past Century ◽

Great Similarity ◽

Linguistic Features ◽

British English ◽

The Past ◽

Early Settlement ◽

History Of ◽

State Of Affairs

In the first article of this series I pointed out the great similarity between the speech habits of Ontarioans and those of their American neighbours across the line: both speak a variety of North American English. This state of affairs should not be surprising in view of the early settlement history of the borderlands and of subsequent cultural and social contact along the border.There are, nevertheless, many linguistic features not shared by speakers of English on both sides of the border. In terms of vocabularly I have already illustrated a number of such differences, indicating that, in the main, they probably result from the generalization in Ontario of words current in British English—the speech of thousands of immigrants who have come to Canada during the past century or so.

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The grammar of engagement II: typology and diachrony

Language and Cognition ◽

10.1017/langcog.2017.22 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

pp. 141-170 ◽

Cited By ~ 16

Author(s):

NICHOLAS EVANS ◽

HENRIK BERGQVIST ◽

LILA SAN ROQUE

Keyword(s):

Joint Attention ◽

Social Cognitive ◽

Canonical System ◽

Cognitive Capacities ◽

State Of Affairs ◽

Source Of Information ◽

Relative Accessibility

abstractEngagement systemsencodethe relative accessibility of an entity or state of affairs to the speaker and addressee, and are thus underpinned by our social cognitive capacities. In our first foray into engagement (Part 1), we focused on specialised semantic contrasts as found in entity-level deictic systems, tailored to the primal scenario for establishing joint attention. This second paper broadens out to an exploration of engagement at the level of events and even metapropositions, and comments on how such systems may evolve. The languages Andoke and Kogi demonstrate what a canonical system of engagement with clausal scope looks like, symmetrically assigning ‘knowing’ and ‘unknowing’ values to speaker and addressee. Engagement is also found cross-cutting other epistemic categories such as evidentiality, for example where a complex assessment of relative speaker and addressee awareness concerns the source of information rather than the proposition itself. Data from the language Abui reveal that one way in which engagement systems can develop is by upscoping demonstratives, which normally denote entities, to apply at the level of events. We conclude by stressing the need for studies that focus on what difference it makes, in terms of communicative behaviour, for intersubjective coordination to be managed by engagement systems as opposed to other, non-grammaticalised means.

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LINGUISTIC FEATURES AND GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES

Folia Linguistica ◽

10.1515/flin.1983.17.1-4.387 ◽

1983 ◽

Vol 17 (1-4) ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

OLGA MIŠESKA TOMIĆ

Keyword(s):

Linguistic Features ◽

Grammatical Categories

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Evaluating stance-annotated sentences from the Brexit Blog Corpus: A quantitative linguistic analysis

ICAME Journal ◽

10.1515/icame-2018-0007 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 42 (1) ◽

pp. 133-166 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Vasiliki Simaki ◽

Carita Paradis ◽

Andreas Kerren

Keyword(s):

Quantitative Analysis ◽

Linguistic Analysis ◽

Linguistic Features ◽

Data Set ◽

Grammatical Categories ◽

Entire Data

AbstractThis paper offers a formally driven quantitative analysis of stance-annotated sentences in the Brexit Blog Corpus (BBC). Our goal is to identify features that determine the formal profiles of six stance categories (contrariety, hypotheticality, necessity, prediction, source of knowledgeanduncertainty) in a subset of the BBC. The study has two parts: firstly, it examines a large number of formal linguistic features, such as punctuation, words and grammatical categories that occur in the sentences in order to describe the specific characteristics of each category, and secondly, it compares characteristics in the entire data set in order to determine stance similarities in the data set. We show that among the six stance categories in the corpus,contrarietyandnecessityare the most discriminative ones, with the former using longer sentences, more conjunctions, more repetitions and shorter forms than the sentences expressing other stances.necessityhas longer lexical forms but shorter sentences, which are syntactically more complex. We show that stance in our data set is expressed in sentences with around 21 words per sentence. The sentences consist mainly of alphabetical characters forming a varied vocabulary without special forms, such as digits or special characters.

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sms4science: Korpusdaten, Literaturüberblick und Forschungsfragen

Linguistik Online ◽

10.13092/lo.48.330 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 48 (4) ◽

Author(s):

Adrian Stähli ◽

Christa Dürscheid ◽

Marie-José Béguelin

Keyword(s):

Language Contact ◽

Background Information ◽

International Project ◽

Methodological Issues ◽

Linguistic Features ◽

Research Project ◽

Introductory Article ◽

Significant Interest ◽

Research Questions ◽

State Of Affairs

This paper discusses some methodological issues related to current research on SMS communication in Switzerland, an ambitious research project situated in the context of the international project sms4science. Thus far, the analyses of the Swiss data focus on numerous inner-linguistic features, variational aspects and language contact phenomena; each of which is of the utmost interest for multilingual Switzerland (cf. the five articles contained in this issue). In the following pages we first provide some background information about the project and the constitution of the Swiss SMS-corpus. We then present some methodological demands and problems, which are discussed on the basis of a dialogic sub-corpus. In the final paragraphs of this introductory article, we outline the state of affairs in the field of the linguistic study of SMS communication and highlight some research questions that would be of significant interest for the further analysis of the Swiss corpus.

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The Need for a Broad-Based Model of Phonological Disorders

Language Speech and Hearing Services in Schools ◽

10.1044/0161-1461.2303.261 ◽

1992 ◽

Vol 23 (3) ◽

pp. 261-268 ◽

Cited By ~ 24

Author(s):

Alan G. Kamhi

Keyword(s):

Speech Production ◽

Phonological Disorders ◽

Production Processes ◽

Assessment And Treatment ◽

Speech Delays ◽

Explanatory Adequacy ◽

State Of Affairs ◽

Assessment Procedures ◽

Treatment Procedures

My response to Fey’s article (1985; reprinted 1992, this issue) focuses on the confusion caused by the application of simplistic phonological definitions and models to the assessment and treatment of children with speech delays. In addition to having no explanatory adequacy, such definitions/models lead either to assessment and treatment procedures that are similarly focused or to procedures that have no clear logical ties to the models with which they supposedly are linked. Narrowly focused models and definitions also usually include no mention of speech production processes. Bemoaning this state of affairs, I attempt to show why it is important for clinicians to embrace broad-based models of phonological disorders that have some explanatory value. Such models are consistent with assessment procedures that are comprehensive in nature and treatment procedures that focus on linguistic, as well as motoric, aspects of speech.

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