語用論(Pragmatics)を考える

Child psychiatrists, pediatricians, and other child clinicians need to have a solid understanding of child language development. There are at least four important reasons that make this necessary. First, slowing, arrest, and deviation of language development are highly associated with, and complicate the course of, child psychopathology. Second, language competence plays a crucial role in emotional and mood regulation, evaluation, and therapy. Third, language deficits are the most frequent underpinning of the learning disorders, ubiquitous in our clinical populations. Fourth, clinicians should not confuse the rich linguistic and dialectal diversity of our clinical populations with abnormalities in child language development. The challenge for the clinician becomes, then, how to get immersed in the captivating field of child language acquisition without getting overwhelmed by its conceptual and empirical complexity. In the past 50 years and since the seminal works of Roger Brown, Jerome Bruner, and Catherine Snow, child language researchers (often known as developmental psycholinguists) have produced a remarkable body of knowledge. Linguists such as Chomsky and philosophers such as Grice have strongly influenced the science of child language. One of the major tenets of Chomskian linguistics (known as generative grammar) is that children’s capacity to acquire language is “hardwired” with “universal grammar”—an innate language acquisition device (LAD), a language “instinct”—at its core. This view is in part supported by the assertion that the linguistic input that children receive is relatively dismal and of poor quality relative to the high quantity and quality of output that they manage to produce after age 2 and that only an advanced, innate capacity to decode and organize linguistic input can enable them to “get from here (prelinguistic infant) to there (linguistic child).” In “Constructing a Language,” Tomasello presents a contrasting theory of how the child acquires language: It is not a universal grammar that allows for language development. Rather, human cognition universals of communicative needs and vocal-auditory processing result in some language universals, such as nouns and verbs as expressions of reference and predication (p. 19). The author proposes that two sets of cognitive skills resulting from biological/phylogenetic adaptations are fundamental to the ontogenetic origins of language. These sets of inherited cognitive skills are intentionreading on the one hand and pattern-finding, on the other. Intention-reading skills encompass the prelinguistic infant’s capacities to share attention to outside events with other persons, establishing joint attentional frames, to understand other people’s communicative intentions, and to imitate the adult’s communicative intentions (an intersubjective form of imitation that requires symbolic understanding and perspective-taking). Pattern-finding skills include the ability of infants as young as 7 months old to analyze concepts and percepts (most relevant here, auditory or speech percepts) and create concrete or abstract categories that contain analogous items. Tomasello, a most prominent developmental scientist with research foci on child language acquisition and on social cognition and social learning in children and primates, succinctly and clearly introduces the major points of his theory and his views on the origins of language in the initial chapters. In subsequent chapters, he delves into the details by covering most language acquisition domains, namely, word (lexical) learning, syntax, and morphology and conversation, narrative, and extended discourse. Although one of the remaining domains (pragmatics) is at the core of his theory and permeates the text throughout, the relative paucity of passages explicitly devoted to discussing acquisition and proBOOK REVIEWS

Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition

The complete title of this book runs ‘Analyzing Linguistic Data: A Practical Introduction to Statistics using R’ and as such it very well reflects the purpose and spirit of the book. The author guides the reader in about 350 pages from descriptive and basic statistical methods over classification and clustering to (generalised) linear and mixed models. Each of the methods is introduced in the context of concrete linguistic problems and demonstrated on exciting datasets from current research in the language sciences. In line with its practical orientation, the book focuses primarily on using the methods and interpreting the results. This implies that the mathematical treatment of the techniques is held at a minimum if not absent from the book. In return, the reader is provided with very detailed explanations on how to conduct the analyses using R [1]. The first chapter sets the tone being a 20-page introduction to R. For this and all subsequent chapters, the R code is intertwined with the chapter text and the datasets and functions used are conveniently packaged in the languageR package that is available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). With this approach, the author has done an excellent job in enabling researchers and students alike to reproduce the analyses and learn by doing. Another quality as a textbook is the fact that every chapter ends with Workbook sections where the user is invited to exercise his or her analysis skills on supplemental datasets. Full solutions including code, results and comments are given in Appendix A (30 pages). Instructors are therefore very well served by this text, although they might want to balance the book with some more mathematical treatment depending on the target audience. After the introductory chapter on R, the book opens on graphical data exploration. Chapter 3 treats probability distributions and common sampling distributions. Under basic statistical methods (Chapter 4), distribution tests and tests on means and variances are covered. Chapter 5 deals with clustering and classification. Strangely enough, the clustering section has material on PCA, factor analysis, correspondence analysis and includes only one subsection on clustering, devoted notably to hierarchical partitioning methods. The classification part deals with decision trees, discriminant analysis and support vector machines. The regression chapter (Chapter 6) treats linear models, generalised linear models, piecewise linear models and a substantial section on models for lexical richness. The final chapter on mixed models is particularly interesting as it is one of the few text book accounts that introduce the reader to using the (innovative) lme4 package of Douglas Bates which implements linear mixed-effects models. Moreover, the case studies included in this

Analyzing linguistic data: a practical introduction to statistics using R

A grammar of spoken Chinese = 中國話的文法

The biolinguistic perspective regards the language faculty as an “organ of the body,” along with other cognitive systems. Adopting it, we expect to find three factors that interact to determine (I-) languages attained: genetic endowment (the topic of Universal Grammar), experience, and principles that are language- or even organism-independent. Research has naturally focused on I-languages and UG, the problems of descriptive and explanatory adequacy. The Principles-and-Parameters approach opened the possibility for serious investigation of the third factor, and the attempt to account for properties of language in terms of general considerations of computational efficiency, eliminating some of the technology postulated as specific to language and providing more principled explanation of linguistic phenomena

/pdf/three-factors-in-language-design-3ui5wze9cz.pdf

Three Factors in Language Design

Just as teenagers divide the world into jocks, nerds, goths, preps, townies, posers, and so on, linguists tend to categorize languages in broad strokes by what is best known about them: Bantu languages are defined by applicatives and tones, Slavic languages by palatalization and aspect, Native American languages by polysynthesis and attrition, and so on. Ask a linguist who does not work on Austronesian what he or she knows about these languages and you are likely to hear about nasal substitution, infixation, verb-initial word order, articulated systems of grammatical voice, or restrictions on movement. Any book that is addressed to the general public, not just to Austronesianists, and that takes the reader beyond these staple topics fills an important gap. The book reviewed here does just that and more. If pressed to name its goals, I would identify them as twofold: to make issues that at first sight may seem parochial to Austronesianists relevant to the entire field by identifying the theoretical challenges they pose, and to move the analysis of Austronesian beyond the traditional stereotypes, such as named above, but in a way that also connects the new theoretical challenges with established ones. The interests of the three editors are nicely distributed: Gärtner is best known for his semantic work on a number of languages, Sabel is a dedicated explorer of everything Malagasy who has done important work in theoretical syntax, and Law combines interests in syntax with attention to Malagasy. Leaving phonology and morphology aside, the most publicized, although not yet fully understood, aspects of Austronesian languages include verb-initial word orders (often accompanied by the right-hand subject), articulated voice systems, and very rigid constraints on what can be extracted—usually the only constituent undergoing extraction is subject-like, or what many researchers call an external argument (“subject-only restriction”). The introductory chapter, “Clause structure and adjuncts in Austronesian languages,” by Gärtner, Law, and Sabel, does an excellent job surveying the main approaches to these three phenomena, and in so doing will be of clear use not only to specialists in Austronesian but also to generalists and syntacticians. With respect to verb-initiality, a number of researchers have argued that pathways to verb-initial order may differ across languages, and even within a language family or group. The well-recognized possibilities include (i) nonconfigurationality (see, for example, Austin 2004); (ii) base-generation, with parametric variation in the position of the specifier in functional projections either to the right or to the left (the rightward specifier of T allows one to derive VOS order in a direct way); (iii) subject lowering (as argued for Chamorro and Māori by Chung 1998); (iv) verb-raising; and (v) VP-raising. The introductory chapter does a particularly good job presenting options (iv) and (v) and discussing their pros and cons. Still, more explicit comparisons with other verb-initial languages outside the Austronesian family would have been useful—after all, these languages may present additional test cases for particular theories. This criticism notwithstanding, the background part of the introductory chapter is clearly written and can be a valuable companion in courses on verb-initiality, restrictions on

/pdf/clause-structure-and-adjuncts-in-austronesian-languages-xjo9zhfvzp.pdf

Clause structure and adjuncts in Austronesian languages (review)

Experimental design for field linguistics

Proceedings of the Eighteenth Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association

in Linguistics and Cognitive Science

https://scholar.harvard.edu/gbahadir/files/bahadirpolinsky_accepted_presentation_paper_eng_under_revision.pdf

Maria Polinsky

Papers

Clause structure and adjuncts in Austronesian languages (review)

Experimental design for field linguistics

Proceedings of the Eighteenth Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association

in Linguistics and Cognitive Science

Is Structural Priming Sensitive to the Phrase-Clause Distinction? Concealed Question NPs versus Embedded Interrogatives and Declaratives