Chomsky Agonistes

This chapter provides an overview of Noam Chomsky’s current linguistic framework, the Minimalist Program, and the evolutionary milieu in which it is now mostly plied, including the linguistic implications of FOXP2, often called “the language gene” in popular media. The chapter also tackles the most touchy and slippery psychobiographical issue in the field of linguistics over the course of Chomsky’s lengthy and influential career: his rhetorical tactics, especially in connection with the truth. Chomsky has been widely accused of dishonesty, misrepresentation, and, in George Lakoff’s terms “fighting dirty,” as well as being venerated and defended just as widely. I examine that claim with respect to yet another Chomskyan tempest, the dispute over Daniel Everett’s claim that the language Pirahã does not exhibit recursion, a property that seems to be required by Chomsky's Universal Grammar, and through a close reading of an exchange over the existence of grammatical rules with philosopher and early Chomsky supporter, John Searle. Finally, it sifts through Chomsky’s record and the current state of the field to speculate about Chomsky’s legacy.

A preliminary description of mood in Welsh

In this paper we propose a functional account of the Welsh mood system, focussing on responsives in particular. The discourse functions of responsives are interpreted through the concept of negotiation within the systemic functional linguistic framework, which offers a rich model for accounting for both initiations and responses, including possible tracking and challenging moves. By examining the interaction of mood together with specific features of Welsh, e.g. a dominant VSO clause ordering, mood particles, Subject ellipsis and a complex system of negation, we are able to show that Welsh tends to highlight interpersonal meanings in clause initial position. As the first functional description of Welsh, we also set out important directions for future research, based on the findings presented in this paper.

WHAT IS IN A TWEET? DESIGNING A SEMANTIC LEXICON BASED ON EaD STUDENTS' OPINIONS

Among the various challenges regarding distance education is the necessity of reducing the student dropout rate. In this sense, the present research aimed to contribute to the design of a lexical database focused on emotions and opinions that can be incorporated into a predictive evasion software. For the database design, we used the Scup tool to collect 150 tweets containing distance education students’ opinions and analyzed them in the light of Martin and White’s Appraisal Framework, along with five resources related to the sentiment Analysis field, which were taken from Liu’s work. In addition, we used the Aulete dictionary to describe the lexical units found in our corpus to better fit them into the analysis categories. Results showed 220 opinion tokens, which were identified and labeled according to their polarity. Moreover, these tokens were included in the domains attitude (judgment and appreciation) and graduation (sharp and strong) from the linguistic framework used. The results also indicated the necessity of another resource to help identify the use of figurative language, slangs, and extralinguistic elements, such as GIFS and emojis.

When the search domain is back region in Baltic: The Latvian aiz as compared to the Lithuanian už

The paper sets out to examine prepositional polysemy in the Baltic languages. More precisely, the investigation focuses on the semantic structure of the Latvian preposition aiz + Gen. ‘behind, beyond’ as compared to the Lithuanian už + Gen. / Acc. ‘behind, beyond, for’ discussed in our previous paper (Šeškauskienė & Žilinskaitė-Šinkūnienė 2015). The methodology of research relies on the cognitive linguistic framework, mainly on the principle of motivated polysemy. Its key idea is that in the semantic network of the preposition all senses are seen as directly or indirectly linked to the central sense. In the case of aiz and už, the central sense encodes information about spatial configuration of Figure and Ground with the former located in the back region of the latter. A number of other senses, mostly concrete, derived from the central sense, overlap in Latvian and Lithuanian but demonstrate a differing degree of entrenchment. The most distinct differences are identifiable in the abstract senses.

Does Prenestinian fhe⋮faked actually exist?

After more than a century since its discovery, the mystery of the Fibula Praenestina has been definitively solved. The artifact and the inscription are both authentic beyond any reasonable doubt. Complex spectrographic analyses published a few years ago have confirmed that the Fibula is not a forgery. However, quite paradoxically, an Early Latin reduplicated perfect fefaked is still implausible from a morphological point of view. This form continues to disturb the Early Latin linguistic framework, which can be reconstructed thanks to the available data at our disposal. The article presents a new reading of the text, which on the one hand confirms the congruity of the preterite morphology (not a reduplicated form of the root *d h ē- / d h ǝ-, but an ancient aorist similar to Faliscan făced / făcet) and on the other gives an account of the abnormal use of punctuation between <whe> and <wha>.

Experiential metafunction: representing environmental degradation

The constant exploration and exploitation of crude oil in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria had had a negative consequential effect on the entire ecosystem of the region. This has been a source of national and international concern and has attracted the attention of scholars from several disciplines, within and outside the region. Creative writers were not left out and this had given birth to which poetry was one of its most prolific genres. Though regional, the literature in general and poetry, in particular, had attracted myriads of attention from eco-literary criticism while the language of the poems had been understudied. Therefore, this study is a linguistic analysis of Niger Delta environmental poetry. Seven poems were purposefully selected from Tanure Ojaide’s Songs of Myself: Quartet (2015) and Nnimo Bassey’s We Thought It Was Oil but It Was Blood (2002). The Hallidayan Transitivity system of the Experiential meaning of the clause was adopted as a linguistic framework to show how the ecological realities of the region were encoded in the structure of the clause. The study revealed that the nature of the processes and the participants’ roles aptly encoded ecological degradation in the structure of the clause.

A pragmatic approach to the ontology of models

What are scientific models? Philosophers of science have been trying to answer this question during the last three decades by putting forward a number of different proposals. Some say that models are best understood as abstract Platonic objects or fictional entities akin to Sherlock Holmes, while others focus on their mathematical nature and see them as set theoretical structures. Although each account has its own strengths in offering various insights on the nature of models, several objections have been raised against these views which still remain unanswered, making the debate on the ontology of models seem unresolvable. The primary aim of this paper is to show that a large part of these difficulties stems from an inappropriate reading of the main question on the ontology of models as a purely metaphysical question. Building on Carnap, it is argued that the question of the ontology of scientific models is either (i) an internal theoretical question within an already accepted linguistic framework or (ii) an external practical question regarding the choice of the most appropriate form of language in order to describe and explain the practice of scientific modelling. The main implication of this view is that the question of the ontology of models becomes a means of probing other related questions regarding the overall practice of scientific modelling, such as questions on the capacity of models to provide knowledge and the relation of models with background theories.

Embodied Imagination and Metaphor Use in Autism Spectrum Disorder

This paper discusses different frameworks for understanding imagination and metaphor in the context of research on the imaginative skills of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In contrast to a standard linguistic framework, it advances an embodied and enactive account of imagination and metaphor. The paper describes a case study from a systemic therapeutic session with a child with ASD that makes use of metaphors. It concludes by outlining some theoretical insights into the imaginative skills of children with ASD that follow from taking the embodied-enactive perspective and proposes suggestions for interactive interventions to further enhance imaginative skills and metaphor understanding in children with ASD.

Epistemic stance in the translations of Chinese medicine classics: a case study of Huang Di Nei Jing

This article is a contrastive study of epistemic stance in the English translations of the Chinese medical classic Huang Di Nei Jing by clinicians and non-clinicians. Epistemic stance is concerned with a translator’s certainty about the proposition of a statement and is highly consequential to information validity. By drawing on the systemic functional linguistic framework and using two sets of translations of the Chinese medicine classic, Huang Di Nei Jing, by both clinicians and non-clinicians, the study investigates the linguistic choices concerning epistemic stance. The findings show that epistemic stance is closely related to the translators’ domain knowledge and expertise, with clinician-translators more likely to express their epistemic stance in the translations. However, this study also finds a counterintuitive epistemic pattern: non-clinician translators express more certainty in their translations.