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This paper examines the non-situational (i.e., non-exophoric) pragmatic functions of the three adnominal demonstratives, óyo, wâná, and yangó in the Bantu language Lingala. An examination of natural language corpora reveals that, although native-speaker intuitions sanction the use of óyo as an anaphor in demonstrative NPs, this demonstrative is hardly ever used in that role. It also reveals that wâná, which has both situational and discourse-referential capacities, is used more frequently than the exclusively anaphoric demonstrative yangó. It is explained that wâná appears in a wide range of non-coreferential expression types, in coreferential expression types involving low-salience referents, and in coreferential expression types that both involve highly salient referents and include the speaker’s desire to signal a shift in the mental representation of the referent towards a pejorative reading. The use of yangó, on the other hand, is only licensed in cases of coreferentiality involving highly salient referents and implying continuation of the same mental representation of the referent. A specific section is devoted to charting the possible grammaticalization paths followed by the demonstratives. Conclusions are drawn for pragmatic theory formation in terms of the relation between form (yangó vs. wâná) and function (coreferentiality vs. non-coreferentiality).

Sundanese speech levels have been treated by Kern (1906), Kats and Soeriadiradja (1927), Eringa (1949), Satjadibrata (1956), Wirakusumah and Djajawiguna (1957), Noorduyn (1963), Wessing (1974), Djajawiguna (1978), Ayatrohaedi (1980), and Soedradjat (1986). Notwithstanding, these studies have been based on reported usage or intuition, not analysis of actual texts. This has yielded a standard model based on "features of the social environment in which the speech event is taking place", most notably, "a) social status of the addressee or referent, b) social status of the speaker, c) the difference (if any) between a) and b) [and], "d) the degree of friendship (intimacy) between the speaker and the addressee" (Wessing I974: I2). This paper presents this model in some detail and discusses results of an analysis of 60 texts documenting speech level use by Sundanese interlocuters. This analysis produces seven previously unreported aspects of interlocuters' knowledge of speech level use.

Some researchers have tried to explain early word learning via garden-variety learning processes and others by invoking linguistically specific "constraints" that help children to narrow down the referential possibilities. The social-pragmatic approach to word learning argues that children do not need specifically linguistic constraints to learn words, but rather what they need are flexible and powerful social-cognitive skills that allow them to understand the communicative intentions of others in a wide variety of interactive situations. A series of seven word learning studies demonstrate something of the range of communicative situations in which children can learn new words. These situations include many non-ostensive contexts in which no one is intentionally teaching the child a new word and the intended referent is not perceptually present at the time of the new word's introduction. Language acquisition in general, and word learning in particular, is best seen as a special case of cultural learning in which children attempt to discern adults' intentions toward their intentions toward things in the world. Keywords: Word Learning, Lexical Development, Pragmatics, Intentionality

The detailed semantic encoding of demonstrative systems of the world’s languages has come under increased scrutiny in recent years. One important finding is that spatial (notably distance) encoding, normally considered to lie at the heart of exophoric demonstrative semantics, may be rivalled as to its ‘basicness’ by more discourse-related forms of encoding, such as the status of the addressee’s attention in relation to the referent. This paper investigates the attentional characteristics of ton, a nominal demonstrative in Jahai (Mon-Khmer, Malay Peninsula) previously considered to encode spatial proximity to addressee. It does so in light of naturalistic interaction data from a specific object-identification task originally aimed at eliciting shape-encoding distinctions (Seifart 2003).

This paper examines the use of definite and indefinite noun phrases in everyday conversations in Finnish and English to establish meaning and to alter and build context in interaction. The paper shows that participants in conversation use the formal contrast between definite and indefinite NPs not only to express identifiability and non-identifiability of the referent to their addressees, but that they also use it dynamically to make claims about socially shared reality, to create referents in discourse and to build a novel identity for existing referents, to actively construct frames and create roles within them, and to reorganize the participant structure of a speech event.

Although a large number of studies are conducted on Japanese demonstratives, most of them explain referential functions of the three demonstrative types (the so-called proximal ko-, medial so-, and distal a-) based on sentence-level analysis, and little previous work has been directed toward the analysis of the demonstrative use in spontaneous interaction. This study employs Japanese conversational data and examines the demonstrative usages whose main function is NOT to refer to some entity in the speech situation or the discourse. From the analysis, the paper shows that the use of Japanese demonstratives can exhibit and emphasize an interactional meaning, such as the speaker’s antipathy, insult, suspicion, surprise, and affection toward the referent, and that it can be selected from among other choices, such as a noun phrase or ellipsis, when the speaker is willing to express these emotions or attitudes. In order to understand the process of expressing these emotions or attitudes, the paper applies Hanks’ (1990, 1992) ‘indexical framework’ and the interactionally defined notion of the speaker’s and addressee’s sphere proposed by Laury (1997) and Enfield (2003). Using these frameworks, this study illustrates that the relationship among the speaker’s and addressee’s spheres and the referent, as well as the context in which the three are projected, are not static or predefined but instead are flexible and do change during ongoing interaction.

Listeners make use of contextual cues during continuous speech processing that help overcome the limitations of the acoustic input. These semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic cues facilitate prediction of upcoming words and/or reduce the lexical search space by inhibiting activation of contextually inappropriate words that share phonological information with the target. The current study used the visual world paradigm to assess whether and how listeners use contextual cues about grammatical number during sentence processing by presenting target words in carrier phrases that were grammatically unconstraining ("Click on the . . .") or grammatically constraining ("Where is/are the . . ."). Prior to the onset of the target word, listeners were already more likely to fixate on plural objects in the "Where are the . . ." context than the "Where is the . . ." context, indicating that they used the construction of the verb to anticipate the referent. Further, participants showed less interference from cohort competitors when the sentence frame made them contextually inappropriate, but still fixated on those words more than on phonologically unrelated distractor words. These results suggest that listeners rapidly and flexibly make use of contextual cues about grammatical number while maintaining sensitivity to the bottom-up input. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Many languages of the world have genders, that is, grammatical agreement classes, based on such core semantic properties as animacy, sex and humanness, and also shape. In Manambu, a language of New Guinea, nouns are assigned genders according to the sex of a human referent, and to shape and size of any other referent. Men are assigned to the masculine, and women to the feminine gender. A long tube and a large house are masculine, and a round plate and a small house are feminine. Switching gender for humans has pejorative overtones: an unusually boisterous or bossy woman can be treated as masculine, and a squat fattish man who does not display fully masculine behaviour as feminine. Classifying humans by their shape and size implies downgrading them to the level of inanimates. Gender switch also reflects social stereotypes. Feminine gender is functionally unmarked for non-humans, but not for humans. The noun du, “man” can be used as a generic term for “human being.” Linguistic Gender of humans in Manambu unequivocally reflects Social Gender relations.

The semantic incorporation of nouns into predicates, like give a hug, is not morphologically marked in English, and how syntactic incorporation strategies like light verb constructions influence the discourse-prominence structure of an utterance has not yet been studied systematically. One hypothesis is that since semantically incorporated nouns are not morphosyntactically incorporated in English, they can function like any other noun as prominent and accessible referents for anaphora. Another hypothesis is that their semantic status and their predicative meaning influence their discourse prominence, and hence their accessibility by anaphoric means. We tested these two hypotheses in two experimental studies on different anaphoric preferences of English pronouns. Our studies demonstrate that the felicity patterns for the two different pronominal reference strategies are determined at different linguistic levels: For it, we found an impact of morphosyntactic form; for that, the semantic type of the referent (object vs. event) seems to play a role. Crucially, the degree of semantic incorporation does not affect discourse prominence and pronoun choice to the extent that we had expected.

Two 2nd person verbal indexation forms are reconstructed back to Proto-Trans-Himalayan (PTH): a suffix #-n(a) (Bauman 1975; DeLancey 1989, 2014; H. Sun 1983, 1995; van Driem 1993; Watters 2002), and a prefix #tV- (Watters 2002; Jacques 2012; DeLancey 2011a, 2014). While #-n(a) is in paradigmatic distribution with other suffixal forms, the prefixal position of #tV-raises the question of its functional origin. DeLancey (2011a, 2014: 23) suggests hypothetically that #tV- finds its origin either in a non-finite nominalization or in an irrealis nominalization, “ideal for an impersonal 2nd person use: ‘One might [speak]’ rather than ‘You will [speak].’” Through the comparison of cognate tV- possessive and tV- nominalizer prefixes found in rGyalrongic, Kuki-Naga (Ao), and Sinitic, I propose that 2nd person #tV- can be traced back to a nominal possessive modifier such as one’s or someone’s: a man-type of R-impersonals (Malchukov & Siewierska 2011). Spreading to verbs, #tV- was used as a nominalizer indexing the notional S or A argument. With nouns and verbs alike, the referent of the possessor, whether 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person, was specific (Siewierska 2011: 62), accessible in discourse, anaphorically or deictically, regardless of the presence of a coreferential overt noun-phrase. The prefix #tV- started to be used in particular to address 2nd person indirectly, a development likely triggered by pragmatic motivations, i.e. politeness, before being reanalyzed as a 2nd person indexation marker.

Contrary to the Gricean maxims of quantity (Grice, in: Cole, Morgan (eds) Syntax and semantics: speech acts, vol III, pp 41–58, Academic Press, New York, 1975), it has been repeatedly shown that speakers often include redundant information in their utterances (over-specifications). Previous research on referential communication has long debated whether this redundancy is the result of speaker-internal or addressee-oriented processes, while it is also unclear whether referential redundancy hinders or facilitates comprehension. We present an information-theoretic explanation for the use of over-specification in visually-situated communication, which quantifies the amount of uncertainty regarding the referent as entropy (Shannon in Bell Syst Tech J 5:10, 10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x, 1948). Examining both the comprehension and production of over-specifications, we present evidence that (a) listeners’ processing is facilitated by the use of redundancy as well as by a greater reduction of uncertainty early on in the utterance, and (b) that at least for some speakers, listeners’ processing concerns influence their encoding of over-specifications: Speakers were more likely to use redundant adjectives when these adjectives reduced entropy to a higher degree than adjectives necessary for target identification.

Textbooks are one of the main components in teaching learning activities. It is very important that textbooks should be adjusted to the children’s cognitive development at specific age. Semiotics is one of the aspects that can be evaluated in a textbook because the illustration of semiotics is very specific element that has great influence on children’s visual perception. Specifically, the aim of this study is to analyze Semiotics on the students’ English textbook in Elementary school. This study investigated the meaning of semiotics on students’ English textbook in the second grade Elementary school and how semiotics realized on students’ English textbook in the second grade Elementary School. This study applied qualitative research in terms of library research to collect the data from the students’ English textbook in the second grade Elementary school. Meanwhile, the data were analyzed by applying semiotic analysis based on the Pierce’s semiotic theory namely representaman (signifier), object (referent) and interpretan (signified). The results of this study indicated that this book is very suitable for learning for the second grade students of Elementary school at SDIT Al-Hijrah 2 because the exercises contain symbols, pictures and signs that are very interesting for the second grade students of Elementary school who have high imagination. The researchers had analyzed the main pictures related to the theme of the material in the exercises. In addition, the relationship between the pictures of the exercises and the meaning is interconnected each other.

We examined behavioral and electrophysiological indices of self-referential and valence processing during a Self-Referential Encoding Task in 9- to 12-year-old children, followed by surprise memory tasks for self- and other-referential trait adjectives. Participants endorsed more positive than negative self-referential information but equally endorsed positive and negative information about the other character. Children demonstrated enhanced parietal LPP amplitudes in response to self- compared to other-referential trait adjectives. Positive and negative information was differentially remembered depending on the order of the referent cues presented, suggesting that social information undergoes differential consolidation processes depending on the referent and the order of presentation.

Many researchers have reported that bridging analogies can productively support students’ scientific meaning-making. How this can be understood semiotically is, however, not well understood. This research followed an ethnographic case study approach to investigate Year 11 students meaning-making through a process of transduction (Kress, 2000; Volkwyn, 2020) across the submicroscopic and symbolic domains of Johnstone’s (1991) chemistry triangle. A “cross-and-portion” (CPO) model was devised as a bridging representation for learning the molar concentration and dilution concepts, informed by Peirce’s triadic model (1931) which relates the meaning of a concept to its representation in a sign, and its referent. The study drew on video capture of the classroom and small group activity, and interviews. The research findings indicated that the CPO model acted as a visualisation tool that facilitated students to link from the submicroscopic to symbolic domains of Johnstone’s triangle. A recursive model of meaning-making was formulated to describe how bridging representations are re-purposed to occupy shifting positions in Peirce’s triad to enable meaning through the system of interpretance. Students constructed, critiqued and transducted across multiple, multimodal representations to achieve discursive fluency across the dimensions of Johnstone’s triangle. The recursive model provides a fresh perspective on how students coordinate multimodal representations to learn science/chemistry.

An ongoing debate in the interpretation of referring expressions concerns the degree to which listeners make use of perspective information during referential processing. We aim to contribute to this debate by considering perspective shifting in narrative discourse. In a web-based mouse-tracking experiment in Dutch, we investigated whether listeners automatically shift to a narrative character’s perspective when resolving ambiguous referring expressions, and whether different linguistic perspective-shifting devices affect how and when listeners switch to another perspective. We compared perspective-neutral, direct, and free indirect discourse, manipulating which objects are visible to the character. Our results do not show a clear effect of the perspective shifting devices on participants’ eventual choice of referent, but our online mouse-tracking data reveal processing differences that suggest that listeners are indeed sensitive to the conventional markers of perspective shift associated with direct and (to a lesser degree) free indirect discourse.

Children learn words in ambiguous situations, where multiple objects can potentially be referents for a new word. Yet, researchers debate whether children maintain a single word-object hypothesis – and revise it if falsified by later information – or whether children establish a network of word-object associations whose relative strengths are modulated with experience. To address this issue, we presented 4- to 12-year-old children with sets of mutual exclusivity (fast-mapping) trials: offering them with obvious initial hypotheses (that the novel object is the referent for the novel word). We observe that children aged six years and above, despite showing a novelty bias and retaining this novel word – novel object association, also formed an association between the novel word and the name-known object, thereby suggesting that older children attend to more than one word-object association, in a manner similar to associative learning. We discuss our findings in the context of competing theoretical accounts related to word learning.

International audience; Past research shows that when a discourse referent is mentioned repeatedly, it is usually introduced with a full noun phrase and maintained with a reduced form such as a pronoun. Is this also the case in dialogue, where the same referent may be introduced by one person and maintained by another person? An experiment was conducted in which participants either told entire stories to each other or told stories together, thus enabling us to contrast situations in which characters were introduced and maintained by the same person (control condition) and situations in which the introduction and the maintaining of each character were performed by different people (alternating condition). Story complexity was also manipulated through the introduction of one or two characters in each story. We found that participants were less likely to use reduced forms to maintain referents in the alternating condition. The use of reduced forms also depended on the context in which the referent was maintained (in particular, first or second mention of a character) and on story complexity. These results shed light on how the pressure to signal understanding to one’s conversational partner affects referential choices throughout the interaction.

This paper investigates how politeness-related social meanings are indexed verbally and nonverbally. We focus on the contrast between “doing deference” and “performing intimacy” in Korean. We asked Korean students to perform a sequence of tasks, once to a professor (deferential condition) and once to a close friend (intimate condition) and analysed the production of a wide range of morphological and lexical forms, as well as nonverbal sound objects. Our analysis shows that the participants not only increased their use of address and referent honorifics when addressing the professor, but also increased their use of backchannels and ‘hissing’ sound objects, and decreased their use of um-/uh-type sound objects, case particle ellipsis, and ideophones. There were also weaker tendencies for participants to use more formal case markers and Sino-Korean lexical items when addressing the professor. Taken together, these results demonstrate that deference and intimacy are indexed via multiple channels, not just through the honorific markers that have been the focus of previous studies.

This paper focuses on the relational notion of prominence, in which entities of equal type are ranked according to certain prominence-lending features. In German two demonstrative forms, “der” and “dieser”, can function like personal pronouns in English. It has been proposed that processing “der” involves computing a prominence hierarchy of the prior referents, and excluding the referent with the highest prominence rank. The demonstrative “dieser” has not been extensively tested. In the current study, personal and demonstrative pronominal forms were investigated following ditransitive contexts, where three potential antecedents are available, in two rating experiments. The personal pronoun showed flexibility in that it received equally high ratings for all three antecedents in canonical configurations. The ratings fordieserfollowed a graded sensitivity to thematic role prominence, with lowest scores when referring to prominent antecedents (agents) and the highest scores for the least prominent antecedents (patients), with scores for the medium prominence candidate (recipients) differing from both.Derfollowed a similar but not identical pattern, with a less marked difference between lower prominence candidates. Positional information also has a strong influence on demonstratives. In sum, final interpretation is sensitive to fine-grained differences in prominence hierarchies.

This study examines the cognitive information processes that Turkish advanced non-native speakers of English employ in assigning the referents of this and that in reading and production. We predicted that these speakers would assign referents in relation to the linear distance between discourse-linked anaphors and their referents in the discourse (i.e., based on spatial-temporal features of this and that), which means they would prefer this for a referent mentioned in the proximal chunk of text and that for a referent mentioned in the distal chunk. We also predicted that readers would not assign referents based on the focusing features of this and that. We tested our predictions in two eye- tracking reading experiments and one sentence-completion experiment. Turkish L2 learners’ on- line reference resolution in reading experiments was different from that of English native speakers that were tested in a previous study. In the eye-tracking experiments, Turkish L2 learners did not show evidence of using a recency strategy to resolve referential ambiguity and did not use spatial- temporal or focusing features of this and that to assign referents. On the other hand, in the sentence- completion experiment, the effect of prominence of discourse structure in the use of this and that was qualitatively similar to that of English native speakers, but their indexing of the degree of focus of this and that was different. Our results suggest that the difference between Turkish L2 learners and English native speakers is due to L1 interference.

BACKGROUND Many speakers with non-fluent aphasia (NFA) are able to produce some well-formed word combinations such as 'I like it' or 'I don't know', although they may not use variations such as 'He likes it' or 'I don't know that person'. This suggests that these utterances represent fixed forms. AIMS This case series investigation explored the impact of a novel intervention aimed at enhancing the connected speech of individuals with NFA. The intervention, motivated by usage-based principles, involved filling open slots in semi-fixed sentence frames. METHODS & PROCEDURES Five participants with NFA completed a 6-week intervention programme. The intervention trained participants to insert a range of different lexical items into the open slots of high-frequency phrases such as 'I like it' to enable more productive sentences (e.g., 'they like flowers'). The outcomes and acceptability were examined: The primary outcome measure focused on changes in connected narrative, and the availability of trained constructions (e.g., 'I like it') was explored through a story completion test. Two baseline measures of behaviour were taken prior to intervention, and outcomes assessed immediately after intervention and at a 6-week maintenance assessment. OUTCOME & RESULTS A pre-/post-treatment comparison of connected speech measures showed evidence of enhanced connected speech for two of the five participants (P2 and P5). An analysis of story completion test scores revealed positive change for two participants (P1 and P2). Findings were mixed with regard to baseline stability of outcome measures and post-intervention stability of language changes. The intervention was acceptable to all participants. CONCLUSION & IMPLICATIONS While this pilot study yielded promising findings with regard to the intervention's acceptability and increased connected speech for some participants, the findings were mixed across the sample of five participants. This research helps inform hypotheses and selection criteria for future studies. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS What is already known on the subject Despite difficulties producing grammatically correct sentences, many speakers with aphasia are able to produce well-formed utterances, often representing familiar expressions such as 'I don't know' and 'I like it'. In usage-based Construction Grammar (CxG) theories, familiar utterances are assumed to be processed as one unit and are therefore more resilient to brain damage. CxG assumes that residual utterances such as 'I like it' map onto more abstract sentence frames (e.g., '[REFERENT] like-TENSE [THING]'). What this paper adds to existing knowledge Sentence therapy, informed by CxG principles, is novel in aphasiology, and usage-based interventions need to be evaluated with regard to their impact on language processing at the connected speech level. This case series report explores the acceptability and outcomes of a usage-based sentence therapy. We also introduce and explore the value of an automated, frequency-based analysis tool for evaluating connected speech outcomes in aphasia therapy. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? The findings inform further development of usage-based aphasia interventions targeting word combinations.

Speakers tend to lengthen the durations of words when a phonologically overlapping word has recently been produced. Although there are multiple accounts of why lengthening occurs, all of these accounts generally assume that competition at some point in the production-comprehension process leads to lengthening. We investigated the contexts that lead to competition and consequent lengthening of target word duration. In three experiments, we manipulated the contexts in which a target word was produced. Speakers produced simple descriptions of animations involving referents that shared initial phonology with another potential referent (e.g., hat and hand). In Experiments 1 and 2, we manipulated whether the related referent (i.e. hat) was named by the speaker themselves, by another person, or was unmentioned. Experiment 2 additionally made speakers aware of competitors in the environment. In both experiments, we found that lengthening does not occur whenever there are two referents in the display that could be confused, even when it is clear that they are confusable. Instead, speakers only lengthened target words when the speaker or another person had named the phonologically related word out loud. Experiment 3 tested whether the task relevance of a phonological competitor influenced naming and found that speakers lengthen words that overlap with previously produced words, even when they were no longer competitors in the display. We propose that an auditory memory account best explains these results and discuss the implications of these findings for other accounts of lengthening.

Both definite descriptions and pronouns are often anaphoric; that is, part of their interpretation in context depends on prior linguistic material in the discourse. For example: (1) A student walked in. The student sat down. (2) A student walked in. She sat down. One popular view of anaphoric pronouns, the d-type view, is that pronouns like ‘she’ go proxy for definite descriptions like ‘the student who walked in’, which are in turn treated in a classical (neo-) Russellian or (neo-) Fregean fashion. I argue for a novel version of the d-type view in which anaphoric definites are restricted existential quantifiers that presuppose discourse uniqueness, which is uniqueness of discourse referent in the context, rather than uniqueness of object in the world. In other words, the anaphoric definites ‘the student’ and ‘she’ in (1) and (2) presuppose that there is a single object under discussion that is a student who walked in. I further argue that, by contrast, non-anaphoric definites are restricted existential quantifiers that presuppose worldly uniqueness, that is, that there is a unique object in the world that satisfies the descriptive information. The semantics for anaphoric and non-anaphoric definites accounts for the differences in truth conditions in discourses involving the two different types of definites, improving on existing accounts. It is further supported by crosslinguistic data. The semantics is formally implemented in a static system employing quantifier domain restriction in the style of Stanley and Szabo (Mind Lang 15(2–3):219–261, 2000) and extended to account for bridging definites and donkey sentences.

En México y particularmente en la universidad no se conocen los factores de éxito del e-learning. El propósito de este estudio fue conocer el peso de los factores y de las dimensiones de e-learning. Se enviaron 252 cuestionarios por correo electrónico a alumnos de la Licenciatura en Cultura Física de la Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, México; solo se contestaron 63. Para el análisis de dichas encuestas se usó el Proceso Analítico Jerárquico, para obtener el peso de los Factores Críticos de Éxito de e-learning que significa conocer la importancia de estos, y sus relaciones usando el análisis de componentes principales. Los resultados indicaron que los instructores tienen más peso que los alumnos y que no tiene peso la relación alumno con otros alumnos. Concluyendo que el peso de los factores y de las dimensiones del e-learning muestran un referente que anteriormente no existía de manera local para su orientación pedagógica.

The current study investigates whether the types of pronominal errors children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) make are different from those of their TD peers at similar stages of language development. A recent review about language acquisition in ASD by Naigles and Tek (2017) argues that these children show relative deficits in assigning/extending lexical meaning alongside relative strengths in morpho-syntax. Pronouns provide an ideal test case for this argument because they are marked both for grammatical features (case) and features that reflect qualities of the referent itself (gender and number) or the referent’s role in conversation (person). The form-meaning hypothesis predicts that children with ASD should struggle more with these latter features. The current study tests this hypothesis with data from a caregiver report, completed by caregivers of 151 children with and without ASD. Reported pronominal errors were categorized as meaning or form and compared across groups. In accordance with the form-meaning hypothesis, a higher proportion of children with ASD make meaning errors than they do form errors, and significantly more of them make meaning errors than TD children do.

In all spoken languages, speakers use demonstratives - words like this and that e to refer to entities in their immediate environment. But which factors determine whether they use one demonstrative (this) or another (that)? Here we report the results of an experiment examining the effects of referent visibility, referent distance, and addressee location on the production of demonstratives by speakers of Ticuna (isolate; Brazil, Colombia, Peru), an Amazonian language with four demonstratives, and speakers of Dutch (Indo-European; Netherlands, Belgium), which has two demonstratives. We found that Ticuna speakers' use of demonstratives displayed effects of addressee location and referent distance, but not referent visibility. By contrast, under comparable conditions, Dutch speakers displayed sensitivity only to referent distance. Interestingly, we also observed that Ticuna speakers consistently used demonstratives in all referential utterances in our experimental paradigm, while Dutch speakers strongly preferred to use definite articles. Taken together, these findings shed light on the significant diversity found in demonstrative systems across languages. Additionally, they invite researchers studying exophoric demonstratives to broaden their horizons by cross-linguistically investigating the factors involved in speakers' choice of demonstratives over other types of referring expressions, especially articles. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This article, from a conversation analytic perspective, explores the functions of the Korean ‘subject’ particle ka, ‘topic’ particle nun, and zero particle, as used by children for formulating WH-questions (e.g., ‘What is this-ka/nun/o?’). Using video-recorded adult-child interactions, it describes how the three particles are deployed for organizing the information-seeking action as different types of stance-taking actions. The ka-marked WH-question is shown to be embedded in contexts where the target referent is oriented to as a ‘problem’, as revealed by the way a child speaker disjunctively solicits an adult recipient's assistance, often displaying a negatively valenced affective stance. Zero-marking, by contrast, embodies the child speaker's stance towards being congruent with the terms of the current activity, with the inquiry being made about the ‘situated relevance’ of the target referent therein. The use of the nun-marked WH-question is remedially motivated, with the child speaker's stance displayed towards enlivening/sustaining the sequence, and keeping an adult recipient involved as the interlocutor. The findings indicate that children's competence matches that of adults not only in implementing an information-seeking action, but also in organizing distinct types of stance and recipiency, through managing the three particles as interactional resources.

This study formalizes and compares two major hypotheses in speakers’ choices of referring expressions: the topicality model that chooses a form based on the topicality of the referent, and the rati...

This study examines, from a conversation-analytic perspective, the use of [NP+wa?] format turns ([NP+wa?] turns) by young Japanese children aged 23–33 months, who have started using the so-called topic marker wa. Most of their [NP+wa?] turns are used in one of the following environments: 1) the NP in an [NP+wa?] turn refers to a person or object absent from the scene, 2) the NP refers to an object of noticing that is present at the scene, and 3) [NP+wa?] turns are used repeatedly. I will show that each of these situations provides co-participants with guidance to determine how the NP referent is relevant to the here-and-now and what kind of response is expected. I will then claim that [NP+wa?] turns provide these children with a convenient and powerful tool to engage with the everyday social world around them; that is, to explore how the life-world is organized and ordered. Furthermore, I will propose that wa can be seen as marking the speaker's claim that the recipient should be able to detect the preceding NP referent's relevance to the here-and-now. I claim that this is what is fundamentally involved in the “topic-marking” function that is conventionally associated with the particle wa.

The growing awareness of environmental issues can be linked to the demand for green transport innovations. Consumer behavior studies have pointed to the importance of consumer innovativeness (CI) and green perceptions in the adoption of green innovations. The purpose of this paper is to identify how users and nonusers of shared micromobility perceive the greenness of shared e-bikes and e-scooters and how CI affects shared microvehicle adoption. The paper also analyses the relationships between green perceptions and environmental referent cognitions—biospheric values, environmental knowledge, ascription of responsibility, and environmental attitudes. Shared e-bike and e-scooter users and nonusers in Copenhagen and Stockholm were surveyed using an online questionnaire. Results revealed that users consider themselves innovative and perceive the shared microvehicles as relatively green, while nonusers do not. When comparing users, CI and green perceptions relate to shared e-bike use, but notably, only CI is linked to shared e-scooter use. The results also show that environmental knowledge and environmental attitudes are related to green perceptions. The practical and theoretical implications of the results are discussed. (Less)

This paper explores the extent to which L1-Korean L2-English speakers’ L1 influences the computation of conversational implicatures for the definite and demonstrative determiners the and that in English. Both the and that denote unique referents, but that carries implication of contrast (Roberts, 2002). Following Submaxim 2 of the Gricean Quantity Maxim, using that instead of unmarked the implicates that the referent is being implicitly contrasted with other members of the same noun. Korean has no equivalent for the and the demonstrative ku ‘that’ is situated on the semantic scale between the and that. This partial overlap could influence L1-Korean L2-English speakers’ implicature computation even though ku also carries implication of contrast. Acceptability judgment data indicate that unlike native speakers, L2 speakers did not show sensitivity to infelicitous use of that, indicating difficulty computing implicatures. Results are discussed in terms of crosslinguistic influence at the semantics-pragmatics interface in L2 acquisition.

Toddlers learn more about the world from picture books with photographs instead of drawings, but commercial books often have tactile features such as flaps that may counterintuitively hinder learning. This study tested how lift-the-flap features in a commercial picture book of first words affected 2-year-olds’ (N = 32) learning of a new word for an unfamiliar food. Sixteen children saw the original lift-the-flap book, which depicted photos, and 16 saw the same book except that it was modified to have no flaps. The researcher went through the book with the child, labeling each fruit and vegetable six times. All children were unfamiliar with starfruit and were taught that it was called “carambola.” After they saw the book, children’s learning was tested by asking them to choose the target (i.e., “Show me carambola”) from an array of 3 photos and then from an array of 3 fake food objects. Children who saw the lift-the-flap book chose the carambola target significantly less often than those who saw the modified no-flap book, and only those who saw the no-flap book performed above chance. However, the 2 groups did not differ in recognizing six higher frequency food words that were also presented in the book. Thus, 2-year-olds’ word learning was hindered when taught using a book with tactile features versus one without. This finding supports dual representation accounts arguing that a symbol’s concreteness interferes with representation of its abstract referent, and cognitive load accounts suggesting that tactile features distract attention from the book’s content. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

The Map Task (Anderson et al., 1991) and Tangram Task (Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986) are traditional referential communication tasks that are used in psycholinguistics research to demonstrate how conversational partners mutually agree on descriptions (or referring expressions) for landmarks or unusual target objects. These highly-controlled, laboratory-based tasks take place under conditions that are relatively unusual for naturally-occurring conversations (Speed, Wnuk, & Majid, 2016). In this study, we used the Artwalk Task (Liu, Fox Tree, & Walker, 2016) – a real world-situated blend of the Map Task and Tangram Task – to demonstrate that the process of negotiating referring expressions ‘in the wild’ is similar to the process that takes place in a laboratory. In Artwalk, participant pairs communicated via a Skype-to-mobile phone connection. One participant guided the other through a small downtown area with the goal of identifying public art objects, finding objects twice during two rounds. In addition to replicating laboratory results, we also found that acquaintanceship and extraversion influenced the number of unique descriptors used by dyads in this task. In Round 1, introverts in stranger dyads used fewer descriptors but introverts in friend dyads were indistinguishable from extraverts. The influence of extraversion declined by Round 2. This study suggests that referent negotiation observed in labs is generalizable but that naturalistic communication is subject to social and personality factors that may not be as influential in laboratory conditions.

The article is devoted to the analysis of a sarcastic evaluation of a person, which leads to their discrediting in media texts. Sarcastic evaluation is considered in terms of linguistic praxeology: the language and compositional means of nomination, description, and actions are analyzed. In a media text, these means interact with the means of expressing the category of deviance and forming semantic nodes. The category of deviance can manifest itself, on the one hand, in exuberance or the absurd, while on the other, in simplification or insufficiency of the sign revelation. Also, specific sarcastic speech techniques are identified. They are based on the discrepancy of referent and illocutionary meanings in the person’s speech portrait. The study of Russian media discourse about Swedish eco-activist Greta Thunberg revealed the active use of linguistic means expressing sarcastic evaluation to demonstrate the opposing viewpoint in relation to the transmitted semantic position of “Other”. When the media represents Greta in the totality of her disadvantages, this enters into a polemic against those who support the ideas of this person. With the help of sarcasm, the media shows the absurdness and failure of these ideas. In this case, a sarcastic evaluation becomes an instrument of discrediting not only the person him/herself, but also his/her views and associates. Linguistic means of sarcastic evaluation are widely represented in discrediting media texts. The most important of them are means such as absurdity, hyperbole, alogism, simplification, etc.

This study illustrates Korean speakers' routine practice of deploying the so-called subject particle ka in negatively valenced questions that display incipient disagreement, express disbelief, or make a challenge or complaint. An examination of 18 naturally occurring face-to-face conversations shows that a speaker's selection of the particle in such questions is contingent on neither the grammatical role of the referent (subject) nor the referent's information state (new vs. old). It is instead consistently contingent on the interactional job being done by the question (action formation) and the question's position in the sequential and interactional environment: the speaker questions how a referent is represented or understood in a prior turn, or notes a problem with the current state of the referent, as departing from the speaker's knowledge, understanding, or expectations. The particle serves to bring the target referent to the fore as the object of trouble at that moment of the interaction while leaving other possible candidates behind. This study illuminates the interactional import of the particle ka by demonstrating how it contributes to speakers' practices for managing discrepancies in their knowledge, understanding, or expectations regarding objects or matters in the material and social world with other participants of the talk-in-interaction.

The specialty of hybrid nouns is their different agreement according to certain features of the agreement target. They result from a conflict within in the gender assignment system. For example, the German noun Mädchen (semi-transparent diminutive for denoting a girl) is grammatical neuter but it refers to a female person. In German, nouns denoting females are feminine but diminutives are neuter. Since both rules apply, you can refer to Mädchen with a neuter (es) but also with a feminine pronoun (sie). There are different factors which influence the agreement pattern: the linear distance between noun and pronoun and the type of agreement target. So far there are only few studies on the influence of possible non-grammatical factors such as the age of the referent. In this paper, I elaborate on those factors and present the results of a discourse completion task focusing on the influence of a sexualized context.

In Swiss German dialects first names are commonly used with a preceding article. Historically, the function of these so-called onymic articles was to show the name’s case. They first arose when inflection of first names had been omitted and case was thus no longer expressed in suffixes. The data gathered in 2016 in an online survey for the research project “Das Anna und ihr Hund” indicate that today the function of reflecting the case is hardly relevant. However, it is important to the speakers to emphasize the nameʼs grammatical gender. The three grammatical genders in (Swiss) German are feminine, masculine, and neuter. Typically, the ono­nymic articles’ grammatical gender corresponds to their referents’ biological gender, i. e. feminine articles for women’s names, masculine articles for men’s names. But sometimes neuter articles are used with female or, less often, with male names. Therefore, the same first name can have different grammatical genders that are indicated with an onymic article, e. g. d Anna (f.) or s Anna (n.). The choice of the article depends on the speaker, the situation, the referent, and other factors. Based on these observations, it is argued that marking grammatical gender is the onymic article’s main function and marking case is secondary.

In this study, stress diacritics were used to investigate the processing of stress information in lexical decision. We ran two experiments in Italian, a language in which stress position is not predictable by rule and only final stress—that is, the less common pattern—is orthographically marked with a diacritic. In Experiment 1, a lexical decision task, two factors were manipulated: the stress pattern of words—antepenultimate (nondominant) and penultimate (dominant)—and the presence/absence of the diacritics, signalling the stress position. Participants were faster to categorise stimuli as words when they bear dominant than nondominant stress. However, the advantage disappeared when the diacritic was used. In Experiment 2, a same-different verification task was used in which participants had to decide if a referent word and a target were same (carota-CAROTA, /ka’rɔta/; tavolo-TAVOLO, /’tavolo/) or different. We compared two conditions requiring a “different” response, in which referent and target with dominant and nondominant stress were congruent (caròta-CAROTA; tàvolo-TAVOLO) or incongruent (càrota-CAROTA; tavòlo-TAVOLO) with the word’s stress. For words with dominant stress, “different” responses were faster in the incongruent condition than the congruent condition. This congruency effect was not observed for words with nondominant stress pattern. Overall, the data suggest that stress information is based on lexical phonology, and the stress dominance effect has a lexical base in word recognition.

Introduction. Objectives. The paper discusses functioning of Russian pronominal lexemes kakoj ‘which’ and kak ‘how’ in the speech of children, separating them from other interrogative/relative wh-words. It also questions to what extent children’s speech behavior in this field is different from adults’ behavior. Material and Methods. To analyse children’s speech we have used transcripts of audio and video recordings provided by the Children’s speech data foundation of Herzen Russian State Pedagogical University and Institute of Linguistic Studies RAS (5 children aged 1,5 to 6 years); to analyse adults’ speech we have used the data of the spoken subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus. We have extracted 925 utterances with kakoj and kak from the children’s corpora and, for comparison, 1040 utterances from the Russian National Corpus, and run the functional-semantic analysis of the utterances. Results. The main functions characteristic for kakoj and kak are: relative, interrogative, deictic, emphatic and indefinite. In the children’s speech the first place is given to the types connected with the idea of the deictic reference point: demonstrative phrases like vot kakoj ‘that’s what/which’, demonstrative-relative constructions like smotri, kakoj ‘look, what/which’, emphatic, and such interrogative types, where the referent is present within the communicative situation. The adults’ speech primarily features the interrogative function (the referent is outside of the communicative situation) and relative constructions with the verbs of speech and thought. Moreover, only adults use the indefinite function. Conclusions. "Kakoj" and "kak" in the speech of children tend to be more deictic than quantifying (interrogative) and closer to their demonstrative counterparts takoj ‘such’ and tak ‘in a such manner’ that to other wh-words. When children grow older, their pronominal system becomes more adult-like: the number of demonstrative utterances decreases, while the questions on the objects and actions excluded from the communicative situation get more frequent; relative constructions with the verbs of speech and thought and with coreferent nouns and pronouns develop.

Objective: Consistently strong negative associations have been found between self-compassion and depressive symptoms, but less is known about mechanisms that underlie this relationship. This study ...

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of referent power, expert power, legitimate power, reward power, and coercive power as independent variables on performance improvement and impression management as the dependent variable. This study aims to answer exploratory, descriptive, explanatory, and predictive research using a survey method in the form of a questionnaire containing a list of statements that will be given to respondents to be filled in to obtain information from respondents and data processing using the WarpPLS 5.0 application. The results showed that referent power, reward power, and coercive power affected performance improvement and impression management, while expert power and legitimate power did not affect performance improvement and impression management.

We present a review of action and perception stability within the theoretical framework based on the idea of control with spatial referent coordinates for the effectors at a number of hierarchical levels. Stability of salient variables is ensured by synergies, neurophysiological structures that act in multi-dimensional spaces of elemental variables and limit variance to the uncontrolled manifold during action and iso-perceptual manifold during perception. Patients with Parkinson’s disease show impaired synergic control reflected in poor stability (low synergy indices) and poor agility (low indices of anticipatory synergy adjustments prior to planned quick actions). They also show impaired perception across modalities, including kinesthetic perception. We suggest that poor stability at the level of referent coordinates can be the dominant factor leading to poor stability of percepts.

This study aims at conducting a comprehensive comparison of pronouns in three languages namely Arabic, English and Spanish. The comparison is implemented in light of three types of pronouns; personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns and relative pronouns. The comparison aims chiefly at revealing areas of differences and similarities between pronouns in the three languages under investigation. The researchers compare pronouns in terms of their types, classifications and main characteristics. The comparison is accompanied with illustrative examples to enhance understanding the use of pronouns in the three languages. The needed data for the study are collected from different linguistic resources so that a detailed examination and exploration of pronouns in the three languages is made based on the collected resources. The results of analysis of pronouns reveal that pronouns in the three languages share the same referential function, which is assigning some elements to their actual referents. The analysis also depicts that the three languages act differently in terms of using those pronouns, in the sense that the differences are mostly exhibited in the pronouns specifying the number of referents, their gender and distance from referent.

Studies on global and local discourse have shown that sign languages indeed allow for occurrence of referentially unanchored pronominal index (ıx) signs referring to non-present antecedents to appear in ambiguous contexts. In local contexts, resolving the reference of these expressions has been suggested to either depend on a modality-specific anaphora resolution mechanism (localization) or on the next mention bias (first/second mention preference) influencing the salience of the referents. This paper presents a two-alternative forced choice referent selection task investigating the impact of a default localization pattern on the interpretation of referentially unanchored pronominal ix sign, in the local discourse with two competing antecedents. To do that, comparative response data was collected from right- and left-handed signers of German Sign Language (DGS) and Turkish Sign Language (TİD). Results provide evidence for second-mention or object preference for pronominal ix in both languages. In addition, the default localization pattern is identified only in restricted environments (i.e., with reciprocal verbs) to resolve pronominal reference. This modality-specific means is shown to be subject to variation across two unrelated sign languages under investigation. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------RESOLVENDO A REFERÊNCIA PRONOMINAL EM CONTEXTOS LOCAIS: UMA TAREFA DE SELEÇÃO DE REFERENTESEstudos existentes sobre discursos globais e locais mostram que as línguas de sinais claramente permitem que os sinais de apontação (ıx) pronominais referenciais não-ancorados referindo-se a antecedentes ausentes possam ocorrer em contextos ambíguos. Em contextos locais, sugere-se que a resolução da referência dessas expressões dependeriam tanto de um mecanismo de resolução anafórica específico da modalidade visual (localização), bem como de uma tendência de que a próxima menção (uma preferência pela primeira/segunda menção) influenciasse na saliência dos referentes que serão retomados. Este artigo apresenta uma tarefa de seleção de referentes feita obrigatoriamente a partir de duas alternativas que teve por objetivo investigar o impacto do padrão de localização default na interpretação do sinal de apontação pronominal referencial não-ancorado no discurso local, tendo como competidores, dois potenciais antecedentes. Para realizar tal tarefa, comparamos os dados obtidos das respostas de sinalizadores destros e canhotos da Língua de Sinais Alemã (DGS) e da Língua de Sinais Turca (TİD). Os resultados evidenciam que ıx pronominal retoma preferencialmente o segundo referente mencionado ou o objeto em ambas as línguas. Ainda, identificamos que o padrão de localização default só resolve a referência pronominal em ambientes restritos (ex: com verbos recíprocos). Mostramos que este modo de resolver a referência pronominal é específico da modalidade visual e está sujeito à variação paramétrica nas duas línguas de sinais investigadas, que não possuem relação de familiaridade.---Original em inglês.

The aim of this study is to describe the use of the pronouns le and les in the Spanish spoken in the province of Barcelona. We analyzed a sample of 12 reading tasks and 22 oral interviews taken from two corpora: the FEC (Fonología del Español Contemporáneo, Pustka et alii 2018) corpus (with mainly Catalan-dominant bilingual speakers) and the Corpus oral de profesionales de la lengua castellana en Barcelona (Sinner 2001, with mainly Spanish-dominant bilinguals). In doing so, we took into account several linguistic variables as well as language dominance of the speakers in order to find out 1) if there is leísmo in Catalan Contact Spanish (although there is no equivalent of leísmo in Catalan) and if so, 2) which features of the referent and of the verb trigger leísmo in this variety, and 3) if Catalan-dominant bilinguals produce leísmo to a lesser extent. While the results of the reading task suggest that leísmo is not absent in the Spanish of Barcelona, there are only a few cases of leísmo in spontaneous speech in both corpora. Regarding the linguistic variables, we see that on the one hand, leísmo is not restricted to leísmo correcto in our corpora; on the other hand, the majority are fake-leismo cases. Thus, our data seem to suggest that the Spanish of Barcelona is only a fake-leísmo variety. Regarding the language dominance, however, we find that Catalan-dominant bilinguals do not produce fewer cases of leísmo, since the leísmo rate is higher in the FEC corpus.

This paper describes the use of Spanish nominal address terms in Mexican literary works: Los bandidos de Rio Frio (1892-1893), by Manuel Payno, Los de abajo (1915-1920), by Mariano Azuela, and the play Los albaniles (1969), by Vicente Lenero. The quantitative and qualitative analyses are based on the occurrence of address terms types with two grammatical (Spanish second-person systems and the grammatical category of the corresponding nominal phrase head) and two pragmatic variables (the interpersonal relationship of the speaker with the referent of the address term and the evaluation that the first attributes to the second). It is observed that the use of nominal address terms does not follow a stable pattern based on these variables, among other factors that intervene in communicative contexts. Instead, variability is the most common situation. In addition, the same type of address term may undergo changes in dialogic dynamism.

The ability to predict upcoming actions is a characteristic hallmark of cognition and therefore not surprisingly a central topic in cognitive science. It remains unclear, however, whether the predictive behaviour commonly observed in strictly controlled lab environments generalizes to rich, everyday settings. In four virtual reality experiments, we tested whether a well-established marker of linguistic prediction (i.e. anticipatory eye movements as observed in the visual world paradigm) replicated when increasing the naturalness of the paradigm by means of i) immersing participants in naturalistic everyday scenes, ii) increasing the number of distractor objects present, iii) manipulating the location of referents in central versus peripheral vision, and iv) modifying the proportion of predictable noun-referents in the experiment. Robust anticipatory eye movements were observed, even in the presence of 10 objects (hereby testing working memory) and when only 25% of all sentences contained a visually present referent (hereby testing error-based learning). The anticipatory effect disappeared, however, when referents were placed in peripheral vision. Together, our findings suggest that working memory may play an important role in predictive processing in everyday communication, but only in contexts where upcoming referents have been explicitly attended to prior to encountering the spoken referential act. Methodologically, our study confirms that ecological validity and experimental control may go hand in hand in future studies of human predictive behaviour.

On 2 September 2015, Alan Kurdi’s image went viral on the social media and immediately shook the world. This paper concerns not so much with the referent as with the capacity of image to represent....