The linguistic status of Isotype

It is ironic that Otto Neurath, one of those responsible for the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy of the twentieth century, should have been concerned during the last twenty years of his life with developing a ‘pictorial language’. By using simplified pictograms as components, the Wiener Methode der Bildstatistik (later called Isotype) bypassed verbal language to a great extent, creating the potential for universal understanding of biological, social and economic correlations. However, despite its consistency and rigour, Isotype was not a complete language, and Neurath knew that it never could be. This paper will examine the linguistic characteristics of Isotype and describe the deliberate resistance on the part of its creators to develop a full theory behind it.

Interpreting at Vindolanda: commercial and linguistic mediation in the Roman army.

A fragmentary tablet from Vindolanda (Tab. Vindol. II, 213) contains an occurrence of the verb interpretari (‘interpret’, ‘explain’, ‘mediate’) in an apparently commercial context, relating to the grain supply for the Roman fort. This usage is paralleled in a text on a wooden stilus tablet from Frisia in the Netherlands. ‘Interpreters’ and their activities make rather infrequent appearances in the Latin epigraphic and documentary records. In the Danubian provinces, interpreters (interpretes) are attested as army officers and officials in the office of the provincial governor. ‘Interpreters’, in both Latin and Greek inscriptions and papyri, often, however, play more ambiguous roles, not always connected with language-mediation, but also, or instead, with mediation in commercial transactions

Chercher pour or chercher après: arguing the case for contact-induced linguistic innovation in different varieties of French

This paper provides evidence for the claim made in Baetens Beardsmore (1971) that the grammatical collocation "chercher après" «to look for», which is very frequent in Brussels French, is the result of transfer from the contact language, Brussels Dutch. A detailed quantitative analysis of this construction in different varieties of French which have more or less contact with a Germanic language was made to investigate the likelihood of influence from the Germanic substrate. The differences between the meaning of "chercher" and "chercher après" are also analysed in some depth, to find out whether or not the particle is redundant. According to Trudgill (2004) redundant constructions are more often found in contact situations involving long-term, stable contact and child bilingualism. The particle "après" was found to add a particular shade of meaning to "chercher", and is thus not redundant. Therefore no evidence could be obtained from the current data for Trudgill’s (2004) claim.

Thinking for speaking and linguistic relativity among bilinguals: towards a new research agenda

This article evaluates how the different papers in this special issue fill a gap in our understanding of cognitive processes that are being activated when second language learners or bilinguals prepare to speak. All papers are framed in Slobin’s (1987) Thinking for Speaking theory, and aim to test whether the conceptualisation patterns that were learned in early childhood can be relearned or restructured in L2 acquisition. In many papers the focus is on identifying constraints on this restructuring process. Among these constraints, the role of typological differences between languages is investigated in great depth. The studies involve different types of learners, language combinations and tasks. As all informants were given verbal rather than non-verbal tasks, the focus is here on the effects of conceptual transfer from one language on another, and not on the effects of language on non-linguistic cognition. The paper also sketches different avenues for further research in this field and proposes that researchers working in this field might want to take up the challenge of investigating whether speakers of different languages perceive motion outside explicitly verbal contexts differently, as this will enable us to gain an understanding of linguistic relativity effects in this domain. Studying which teaching methods can help learners to restructure their conceptualisation patterns may also shed new light on the aspects of discourse organization and motion event construal that are most difficult for learners.

Patterns of discourse semantics: A corpus-assisted study of financial crisis in British newspaper discourse in 2009

Corpus-assisted analyses of public discourse often focus on the lexical level. This article argues in favour of corpus-assisted analyses of discourse, but also in favour of conceptualising salient lexical items in public discourse in a more determined way. It draws partly on non-Anglophone academic traditions in order to promote a conceptualisation of discourse keywords, thereby highlighting how their meaning is determined by their use in discourse contexts. It also argues in favour of emphasising the cognitive and epistemic dimensions of discourse-determined semantic structures. These points will be exemplified by means of a corpus-assisted, as well as a frame-based analysis of the discourse keyword financial crisis in British newspaper articles from 2009. Collocations of financial crisis are assigned to a generic matrix frame for ‘event’ which contains slots that specify possible statements about events. By looking at which slots are more, respectively less filled with collocates of financial crisis, we will trace semantic presence as well as absence, and thereby highlight the pragmatic dimensions of lexical semantics in public discourse. The article also advocates the suitability of discourse keyword analyses for systematic contrastive analyses of public/political discourse and for lexicographical projects that could serve to extend the insights drawn from corpus-guided approaches to discourse analysis.

Formal linguistic approaches to L3/Ln acquisition: a focus on morphosyntactic transfer in adult multilingualism

The goal of this article is to introduce the reader to contemporary adult multilingual acquisition research within generative linguistics. In much the same way as monolingual and bilingual acquisition studies are approached within this paradigm, generative multilingual research focuses primarily on the psycholinguistic and cognitive aspects of the acquisition process. Herein, we critically present a panoramic view of the research questions and empirical work that have dominated this nascent field, taking the reader through several interrelated epistemological discussions that are at the vanguard of contemporary multilingual morphosyntax work. We finish this article with some thoughts looking towards the near future of adult multilingual acquisition studies.

Linguistic interfaces and language acquisition in childhood: introduction to the special issue

Much contemporary L1 acquisition theory and empirical research are guided by the hypothesis that acquisition delays in children are often related to the integration of information across grammatical and other cognitive modules, such as syntax and discourse-pragmatics (see e.g., Grinstead, 2010). This special issue brings together cutting edge research from all relevant paradigms addressing interface issues in child language acquisition and provides a platform for the study of the interaction between different levels of linguistic knowledge. In this introduction, we present the reader with the tools needed to best understand the contributions of the individual studies and what they bring to bear on larger theoretical questions as a collective.

Aspect selection in adult L2 Spanish and the competing systems hypothesis: when pedagogical and linguistic rules conflict.

Native-like use of preterit and imperfect morphology in all contexts by English learners of L2 Spanish is the exception rather than the rule, even for successful learners. Nevertheless, recent research has demonstrated that advanced English learners of L2 Spanish attain a native-like morphosyntactic competence for the preterit/imperfect contrast, as evidenced by their native-like knowledge of associated semantic entailments (Goodin-Mayeda and Rothman 2007, Montrul and Slabakova 2003, Slabakova and Montrul 2003, Rothman and Iverson 2007). In addition to an L2 disassociation of morphology and syntax (e.g., Bruhn de Garavito 2003, Lardiere 1998, 2000, 2005, Prévost and White 1999, 2000, Schwartz 2003), I hypothesize that a system of learned pedagogical rules contributes to target-deviant L2 performance in this domain through the most advanced stages of L2 acquisition via its competition with the generative system. I call this hypothesis the Competing Systems Hypothesis. To test its predictions, I compare and contrast the use of the preterit and imperfect in two production tasks by native, tutored (classroom), and naturalistic learners of L2 Spanish.

Linguistic epistemology and the notion of monolingualism

This article has several interrelated goals, all of which relate to an attempt at understanding why monolingualism is taken to be the default norm in linguistic inquiry (from sociolinguistics to formal linguistic theorizing). With others, I will take the position that comparing instances of multilingualism to so-called monolingualism is an unfair and inevitably inaccurate comparison since, among other variables, the social environments and access to input of multilinguals compared to monolinguals is most often unavoidably different (cf. Cruz-Ferreira 2006; Edwards 2004). Additionally, I will attempt to demonstrate that even so-called monolinguals have access to a variety of grammars related to different registers of speech and, therefore, are not truly monolingual in the sense that they poses one monolithic grammatical competence. Taken together, the present discussion questions both the default status of monolingualism as well as the functional adequacy of the term monolingualism.

Does grammatical aspect affect motion event cognition? A cross-linguistic comparison of English and Swedish speakers

In this article, we explore whether cross-linguistic differences in grammatical aspect encoding may give rise to differences in memory and cognition. We compared native speakers of two languages that encode aspect differently (English and Swedish) in four tasks that examined verbal descriptions of stimuli, online triads matching, and memory-based triads matching with and without verbal interference. Results showed between-group differences in verbal descriptions and in memory-based triads matching. However, no differences were found in online triads matching and in memory-based triads matching with verbal interference. These findings need to be interpreted in the context of the overall pattern of performance, which indicated that both groups based their similarity judgments on common perceptual characteristics of motion events. These results show for the first time a cross-linguistic difference in memory as a function of differences in grammatical aspect encoding, but they also contribute to the emerging view that language fine tunes rather than shapes perceptual processes that are likely to be universal and unchanging.

Linguistic evidence supports date for Homeric epics

The Homeric epics are among the greatest masterpieces of literature, but when they were produced is not known with certainty. Here we apply evolutionary-linguistic phylogenetic statistical methods to differences in Homeric, Modern Greek and ancient Hittite vocabulary items to estimate a date of approximately 710–760 BCE for these great works. Our analysis compared a common set of vocabulary items among the three pairs of languages, recording for each item whether the words in the two languages were cognate – derived from a shared ancestral word – or not. We then used a likelihood-based Markov chain Monte Carlo procedure to estimate the most probable times in years separating these languages given the percentage of words they shared, combined with knowledge of the rates at which different words change. Our date for the epics is in close agreement with historians' and classicists' beliefs derived from historical and archaeological sources.