En parcourant les registres – Une étude en corpus des usages stylistiques des « Light Verb Constructions » Cette contribution est consacrée aux aspects stylistiques d’usage de ce que l’on appelle des « Light Verb Constructions » (LVC) ; des phrases verbales complexes en Anglais. Alors que la majorité d’études jusqu’à présent se mettent d’accord sur la « note familière » des LVCs, des données empiriques montrent une vision plus complexe et hétérogène. Nos résultats qui sont (...) basés sur le Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) montrent que l’usage des LVCs est loin d’être limité à la parole informelle ou aux contextes familiers, mais que leur diffusion et usage sont beaucoup plus polyvalents que remarqué par le passé. (shrink)

En parcourant les registres – Une étude en corpus des usages stylistiques des « Light Verb Constructions » Cette contribution est consacrée aux aspects stylistiques d’usage de ce que l’on appelle des « Light Verb Constructions » (LVC) ; des phrases verbales complexes en Anglais. Alors que la majorité d’études jusqu’à présent se mettent d’accord sur la « note familière » des LVCs, des données empiriques montrent une vision plus complexe et hétérogène. Nos résultats qui sont (...) basés sur le Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) montrent que l’usage des LVCs est loin d’être limité à la parole informelle ou aux contextes familiers, mais que leur diffusion et usage sont beaucoup plus polyvalents que remarqué par le passé. (shrink)

In this paper, we present our Construction Grammar account of light verb constructions in the Indo-Aryan language Odia. These light verb constructions are asymmetric complex verb predicates that combine a main verb with a light verb. While the LVs are form-identical with a lexical verb, they are “light” because they have lost their lexical content as well as their argument structure. We argue that LV constructions present a coherent system: they (...) all modulate the interpretation of the event encoded by the main verb by adding a particular aspectual profile on the event and some of these light verbs further add a mirative interpretation. The present paper focuses on this subset of “aspectuo-mirative LVs” which can be characterised as non-parasitic expressions of mirativity; in particular, it presents new work on the light verb -uʈh ‘-rise’ that combines a profile on ONSET with mirativity. The constructional view that we present here offers an account of light verbs that is both descriptively and theoretically innovative. Its descriptive value resides in its systematic and fine-grained corpus-based analysis of the formal and semantic features of LVs beyond what is found in the existing literature. The theoretical contribution of our paper not only resides in offering a better understanding of the status of LVs in the grammar, but by situating the semantic value of some of these in the complex category of mirativity, it offers a more unified answer of quite disparate observations in the literature. Finally, we also address the question of whether this mirative value of the aspectuo-mirative LVs is semantic or pragmatic. As we will show, such a strict dichotomy cannot be maintained, which gives further support for a constructional approach. (shrink)

L’objectif de ce travail de recherche est d’étudier la distinction formelle entre les locutions verbales et les constructions à verbe support telles qu’elles sont présentées et décrites par les chercheurs travaillant dans le cadre théorique du lexique-grammaire. Dans ce but, nous avons conçu quatre tâches que nous avons proposées à nos deux groupes de participants : des locuteurs natifs du français et des apprenants du FL2. Nous avons testé plusieurs aspects de la maîtrise des constructions verbales complexes en français par (...) nos participants en mettant en lumière les différences dans les tâches de perception ainsi que dans les tâches de production des structures ciblées. Cette étude démontre que, bien que la perception des structures verbales complexes par les apprenants du FL2 soit assez semblable à celle des locuteurs natifs de cette langue, leur production représente un aspect assez difficile pour les premiers. (shrink)

In this paper, we present a computational algebraic representation of Hindi syntax. This paper is the first attempt to establish the representation of various facets of Hindi syntax into algebra, including dual nominative/ergative behavior, a syntacto-semantic case system and complex agreement rules between the noun and verb phrase. Using the pregroup analysis framework, we show how we represent morphological type reduction for morphological behavior of lexical markers, the representation of causative constructions which are morphologically affixed, as well as of (...) light verb constructions which form the verb by joint predication. We present examples adapted from the Hindi Dependency Treebank to show the pregroup analysis of Hindi sentences. (shrink)

In serial verb constructions (SVCs), multiple independent lexical verbs are combined in a mono-clausal construction. SVCs express a range of grammatical meanings and are attested in numerous spoken languages all around the world. Yet, to date only few studies have investigated the existence and functions of SVCs in sign languages. For the most part, these studies – including a previous study on Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) – relied on elicited data. In this article, we offer a cross-modal (...) typological contribution to the study of SVCs by investigating the phenomenon based on naturalistic corpus data from NGT. A search of the Corpus NGT yielded 41 mono-clausal utterances in which one of a closed set of verbs – namely GO, GIVE, TAKE, and CALL – combines with another lexical verb. While the combinations we found are in important respects reminiscent of SVCs described for spoken languages, our data also confirm the previous finding that the fixed verb in the SVC serves to express agreement (by means of spatial modulation) when the other verb cannot do so. In addition, we identified some novel uses of the verbs GO and GIVE: (i) GO functioning as a future tense marker and (ii) GIVE functioning as a light verb. We will also discuss aspects of the grammaticalization of SVCs in NGT: from lexical verb to light verb to auxiliary, again offering some comparison to grammaticalization paths described for spoken languages. (shrink)

We examine the Doubly Inflected Construction of Sicilian (DIC; Cardinaletti and Giusti 2001, 2003, Cruschina 2013), in which a motion verb V1 from a restricted set is followed by an event verb V2 and both verbs are inflected for the same person and tense features. The interpretation of DIC involves a complex event which behaves as a single, integrated event by linguistic tests. Based on data drawn from different sources, we argue that DIC is an asymmetrical serial (...) class='Hi'>verb construction (Aikhenvald 2006). We propose an analysis of DIC in which V1 and V2 enter the semantic composition as lexical verbs, with V1 contributing a motion event and projecting a theme and a goal argument which are identified, respectively, with an agent and a location argument projected by V2. A morphosyntactic mechanism of feature-spread requires that the person and tense features be realized both on V1 and on V2, while, semantically, these features are interpreted only once, in a position from which they take scope over the complex predicate resulting from the combination of V1 and V2. The semantic analysis is based on an operation of event concatenation, defined over spatio-temporally contiguous events which share specific participants, and is implemented in a neo-Davidsonian framework (Parsons 1990). (shrink)

Innovative verbs in Japanese are formed from nouns of various sources including loanwords, Sino-Japanese nouns, mimetics, and proper names. Regardless of their different origin, these innovative denominal verbs exhibit a collection of intriguing properties, ranging from phonological, morphological, to semantic and pragmatic. These properties are not strictly predictable from the component parts including the nature of the parent noun and verbal morphology. Such an unpredictable nature is suggestive of a constructional analysis. The form-meaning-function complex takes a templatic representation, which expresses (...) the phonological and morphological characteristics, and associated with it are semantic and pragmatic properties. These phonological, morphological, semantic, and pragmatic properties combine to capture the nature of innovative denominal verbs as a construction. The analysis supports the idea of applying construction grammar to morphology along the lines of the developing field of construction morphology (e.g., Booij, Compounding and derivation: Evidence for construction morphology, John Benjamins, 2005, Construction morphology and the lexicon: 34–44, Cascadilla Press, 2007, Linguistische Berichte 19: 1–14, 2009a, Compounding and construction morphology, Oxford University Press, 2009b). We further show how insights from templatic (or prosodic) morphology (e.g., McCarthy and Prince, Prosodic morphology, University of Massachusetts and Brandeis University, 1986, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 8: 209–282, 1990) can be conceptualized in terms of construction grammar. (shrink)

How children go about learning the general regularities that govern language, as well as keeping track of the exceptions to them, remains one of the challenging open questions in the cognitive science of language. Computational modeling is an important methodology in research aimed at addressing this issue. We must determine appropriate learning mechanisms that can grasp generalizations from examples of specific usages, and that exhibit patterns of behavior over the course of learning similar to those in children. Early learning of (...) verb argument structure is an area of language acquisition that provides an interesting testbed for such approaches due to the complexity of verb usages. A range of linguistic factors interact in determining the felicitous use of a verb in various constructions—associations between syntactic forms and properties of meaning that form the basis for a number of linguistic and psycholinguistic theories of language. This article presents a computational model for the representation, acquisition, and use of verbs and constructions. The Bayesian framework is founded on a novel view of constructions as a probabilistic association between syntactic and semantic features. The computational experiments reported here demonstrate the feasibility of learning general constructions, and their exceptions, from individual usages of verbs. The behavior of the model over the timecourse of acquisition mimics, in relevant aspects, the stages of learning exhibited by children. Therefore, this proposal sheds light on the possible mechanisms at work in forming linguistic generalizations and maintaining knowledge of exceptions. (shrink)

Riassunto: Intento di questo lavoro è di mostrare il valore euristico di alcuni modelli semiotici nella ricerca scientifica e in particolare nelle neuroscienze. Alcune teorie di Greimas, o di Lotman, per esempio, possono offrire efficaci strumenti per l’inquadramento di problemi di difficile soluzione nell'ambito degli studi sulla mente, sulla coscienza, sull’origine della semiosi e dei linguaggi. In questo modo, certe scoperte delle neuroscienze sembrano trovare coerenza alla luce dello studio dei sistemi complessi e dei modelli di informazione integrata. Ne emerge (...) una visione di “mente estesa” nella quale la coscienza umana ha bisogno di modalità intersoggettive per la sua stessa costruzione e per il suo funzionamento. Parole chiave: Coscienza; Consapevolezza; Neuroscienze; Semiotica; Mente estesa Consciousness, Awareness, and Sense. Semiotics and Neurosciences: This paper aims at showing the heuristic value of several semiotic models in scientific research, and in particular the neurosciences. In Greimas and Lotman’s theories, for example, we find effective and operationalized instruments that could help us address some of the most difficult problems related to the mind, consciousness, and the origin of semiosis and languages. In this way, certain scientific discoveries in the neurosciences seem to gain coherence in the light of complex systems theories and integrated information models. The emerging concept is a view of “extended mind” in which human consciousness requires an inter-subjective mode for its construction and functioning. Keywords: Consciousness; Awareness; Neuroscience; Semiotics; Extended Mind. (shrink)

There is ample evidence that speakers’ linguistic knowledge extends well beyond what can be described in terms of rules of compositional interpretation stated over combinations of single words. We explore a range of multiword constructions to get a handle both on the extent of the phenomenon and on the grammatical constraints that may govern it. We consider idioms of various sorts, collocations, compounds, light verbs, syntactic nuts, and assorted other constructions, as well as morphology. Our conclusion is that MWCs (...) highlight the central role that grammar plays in licensing MWCs in the lexicon and the creation of novel MWCs, and they help to clarify how the lexicon articulates with the rest of the grammar. (shrink)

Niche construction is a concept that captures a wide array of biological phenomena, from the environmental effects of metabolism to the creation of complex structures such as termite mounds and beaver dams. A central point in niche construction theory is that organisms do not just passively undergo developmental, ecological, or evolutionary processes, but are also active participants in them Evolution: From molecules to men, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983; Laland KN, Odling-Smee J, Feldman MW, In: KN Laland and T Uller (...) Evolutionary causation: Biological and philosophical reflections, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2019). In this paper, we distinguish between two fundamentally different ways in which organisms are active participants: as agents and as contributors. Roughly, organisms act as agents when niche constructing effects are a result of a goal-directed behavior over which the organisms have some degree of control. Organisms act as contributors when the niche constructing effects do not arise from a goal to perform the constructive activity. As illustrative examples we discuss plants altering leaf-morphology to optimize light exposure as reported by Sultan and bacteria creating novel niches through excreting energy-rich metabolites. The difference between agential and contributional niche construction is important for understanding the different ways organisms can actively participate in development, ecology, and evolution. Additionally, this distinction can increase our understanding of how the capacity of agency is distributed across the tree of life and how agency influences developmental and evolutionary processes. (shrink)

Introduction: The many faces of human nature / Agustín Fuentes and Aku Visala Chapter 1. Off human nature / Jonathan Marks. Response I. On your marks... get set, we’re off human nature / James M. Calcagno ; Response II. Rethinking human nature : comments on Jonathan Marks’s anti-essentialism / Phillip R. Sloan ; Response III. Off human nature and on human culture : the importance of the concept of culture to science and society / Robert Sussman and Linda Sussman Chapter (...) 2. "To human" is a verb / Tim Ingold. Response I. Free and easy wandering : humans, humane education, and designing in harmony with the nature of the way / Susan D. Blum ; Response II. On human natures : anthropological and Jewish musings / Richard Sosis ; Response III. The humanifying adventure : a response to Tim Ingold / Markus Mühling ; Response IV. The ontogenesis of human moral becoming / Darcia Narvaez Chapter 3. Recognizing the complexity of personhood : complex emergent developmental linguistic relational neurophysiologicalism / Warren Brown and Brad D. Strawn. Response I. "Self-organizing personhood" and many loose ends / Lluis Oviedo ; Response II. A last hurrah for dualism? / Kelly James Clark ; Response III. Why the foundational question about human nature is open and empirical / Carl Gillett Chapter 4. Human origins and the emergence of a distinctively human imagination : theology and the archaeology of personhood / J. Wentzel van Huyssteen. Response I. Constructing the face, creating the collective : Neolithic mediation of personhood / Ian Kuijt ; Response II. Imago Dei and the glabrous ape / Douglas Hedley Chapter 5. What is human nature for? / Grant Ramsey. Response I. The difficulties of forsaking normativity / Neil Arner ; Response II. Some remarks on human nature and naturalism / Aku Visala Epilogues. Putting evolutionary theory to work in investigating human nature / Agustín Fuentes ; Moving us forward? / Celia Deane-Drummond. (shrink)

Metaphor influences the construction of biological models and theories and the analysis of its use can reveal important tools of thought. Some aspects of biological organisation are investigated through the analysis of metaphors associated with treating biosystems as a kind of text. In particular, the use of glue and verbs is considered. Some of the reasons why glue is important in the construction of hierarchies are pursued in the light of specific examples, and some of the conceptual links between (...) glue in biology and other domains is discussed. Verbs are shown to be important in the construction of networks. Some of the relations between glue, verb and text are considered and the text metaphor is placed within a much broader context of ideas associated with form, relation and system. The paper concludes with comments on the nature of biological information and the need for extending or better understanding the verbal vocabulary. (shrink)

Professionals in various disciplines adopt significantly different lexicons to report their discoveries and arguments. Scientists discover, philosophers argue, whereas legal practitioners apply and consider. Reporting, as a ubiquitous linguistic phenomenon, has its disciplinary characteristics. In court judgments, it reflects the way judges identify the evidence of different documents or other courts. In the self-built court judgment corpus, the paper focuses on the way that judicial arguments are constructed through reporting verbs. On the basis of the analysis of the representation and (...) distribution of reporting verbs in court judgments, the study identifies the reporting verbs with high frequencies in court judgments and compares these reporting verbs with those in the comparable reference corpus, written sampler of British National Corpus, which works as a reference corpus. It is found that the tokens of reporting verbs in court judgments are slightly less than those in general texts; the distribution pattern of the speech act verbs and mental verbs in the self-built court judgment corpus is similar to the pattern of two kinds of reporting verbs in the reference corpus; judicial speech act verbs are employed to express the authority of the statements, whereas the judicial mental verbs illustrate the legal reasoning process with individual agents; and there is a significant difference in terms of the reporting verbs’ frequencies within the court judgments and general texts. The results show that the reporting verbs in court judgments have their uniqueness, which may cast light on both judicial and pedagogical practices. (shrink)

This paper introduces Chinese synthetic verbs and analyses their contributions to debates in manner/result complementarity studies and cognitive typology studies. Chinese synthetic verbs simultaneously express manner information and path/result information, but encode them into separate root slots under Beavers and Koontz-Garboden’s (2012. Manner and result in the roots of verbal meaning. Linguistic Inquiry 43(3). 331–369) scopal modifier test, so they differ from English “manner+result verbs” and further challenge the manner/result complementarity hypothesis. Synthetic verbs followed by redundant path/result verbs constitute double-framing (...) structures that twice encode the framing information, and the non-motion case, i.e., the “synthetic verb+result verb” structure, supplements Croft et al.’s (2010. Revising Talmy’s typological classification of complex event constructions. In Hans C. Boas (ed.), Contrastive studies in construction grammar, vol. 10, 201–235. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company) classification that only includes the motion case, so that Chinese synthetic verbs complement the discussion on double-framing structures. This paper thereby further falsifies the manner/result complementarity hypothesis and provides an overall illustration of the double-framing structure in cognitive typology. This paper also illustrates the diachronic changes of manner, which might be universal and await further investigation. (shrink)

Whilst certain verbs may appear in both the intransitive inchoative and the transitive causative constructions (The ball rolled/The man rolled the ball), others may appear in only the former (The man laughed/*The joke laughed the man). Some accounts argue that children acquire these restrictions using only (or mainly) statistical learning mechanisms such as entrenchment and pre-emption. Others have argued that verb semantics are also important. To test these competing accounts, adults (Experiment 1) and children aged 5–6 and 9–10 (Experiment (...) 2) were taught novel verbs designed to be construed — on the basis of their semantics — as either intransitive-only or alternating. In support of the latter claim, participants' grammaticality judgments revealed that even the youngest group respected these semantic constraints. Frequency (entrenchment) effects were observed for familiar, but not novel, verbs (Experiment 1). We interpret these findings in the light of a new theoretical account designed to yield effects of both verb semantics and entrenchment/pre-emption. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that ecological evolutionary developmental biology accounts of cognitive modernity are compatible with cultural evolution theories of language built upon iterated learning models. Cultural evolution models show that the emergence of near universal properties of language do not require the preexistence of strong specific constraints. Instead, the development of general abilities, unrelated to informational specificity, like the copying of complex signals and sharing of communicative intentions is required for cultural evolution to yield specific properties, such as (...) language structure. We argue that eco-evo-devo provides the appropriate conceptual background to ground an account for the many interconnected genetic, environmental and developmental factors that facilitated the emergence of an organic system able to develop language through the iterated transmission of information. We use the concept of niche construction to connect evolutionary developmental accounts for sensory guided motor capacities and cultural evolution guided by iterated learning models. This integrated theoretical model aims to build bridges between biological and cultural approaches. (shrink)

Current technology has dramatically increased the prevalence of studies to establish the genetic correlates of a wide variety of human characteristics, including not only the physical attributes that determine what we look like and the risk of physiological disease but also the psychological and cognitive characteristics that often define who we are as individuals. Perhaps one of the most deeply personal and often controversial characteristics is the concept of general intelligence, known in the psychological literature as “g.” As with the (...) genetic study of any complex trait, the first step in studying the genetics of g is to carefully define the characteristic of interest. For g, this entails establishing what intelligence means and providing a clear operational definition for how it will be measured. In this paper, we provide a brief historical and theoretical overview of the construct of general intelligence, describe its relationship to the contemporary measurement of intelligence, and discuss these concepts in light of the challenges associated with defining g as a characteristic in the study of genetics. (shrink)

The study considers development and use of verb/predicate chaining constructions by Hebrew speakers from early childhood to adolescence, based on analysis of authentic conversational and narrative corpora. Three types of such constructions are considered, ordered hierarchically by stage of acquisition: (1) monoclausal extended predicates consisting of a verb (modal, aspectual, or evaluative) marked for tense or mood and followed by one or more complements in the infinitive – e.g., yaxol la-asot ‘can, is able to-do’; (2) coreferential interclausal predicate (...) chaining; and (3) mature discursively-motivated topic-chaining. Relevant typological features of Modern Hebrew are reviewed to explain the lack of canonic clause-chaining construction in the language (e.g. the paucity of non-finite constructions in everyday usage, lack of an uninflected basic form of verbs, lack of auxiliary verbs expressing categories of aspect and voice, and monolexemic verb-internal complexity). Monoclausal verb-chaining emerges early in the speech of toddlers in interaction with their caretakers, whereas predicate chaining by coordination across clauses occurs only later, and chunking of such constructions at the service of discourse connectivity is a late-developing device. Nonfinite subordination is an advanced form of clause-combining, in contrast to straightforward subordination with the multifunctional subordinator še’that’. The conclusion is that, unlike the obligatorily fused monoclausal “extended predicates”, bi- and multi-clausal predicate chaining represents an optional rhetorical choice on the part of a given speaker-writer in a particular communicative context. (shrink)

While much earlier work has indicated that prior verb bias from lifelong language experience influences language processing, recent findings highlight the fact that verb biases induced during lab-based exposure sessions also influence processing. We investigated the nature of updating, i.e., how prior and current experience might interact in guiding subsequent sentence production. Participants underwent a short training session where we manipulated the bias of known English dative verbs. The prior bias of each verb for the double-object (DO) (...) versus the prepositional-object (PO) dative was estimated using a corpus. Current verb bias was counterbalanced and controlled experimentally. Bayesian mixed-effects logistic models of participants’ responses (DO or PO) during subsequent free-choice production showed that both the prior and current verb biases affected speakers’ construction choice. These effects were additive and not interactive, contrary to the prediction from error-based learning models. Semantic similarity to other verbs and their experimentally manipulated biases influenced sentence production, consistent with item-based analogy and exemplar theory. These results shed light on the potential mechanisms underlying language updating and the adaptation of sentence production to ongoing experience. (shrink)

While proper names in argument positions have received a lot of attention, this cannot be said about proper names in the naming construction, as in “Call me Al”. I argue that in a number of more or less familiar languages the syntax of naming constructions is such that proper names there have to be analyzed as predicates, whose content mentions the name itself (cf. “quotation theories”). If proper names can enter syntax as predicates, then in argument positions they should have (...) a complex structure, consisting of a determiner and its restriction, like common nouns (cf. “definite description theories of proper names”). Further consideration of the compositional semantics of proper names in the naming construction also shows that they have another argument slot, that of the naming convention. As a result, we will be able to account for the indexicality of proper names in argument positions and provide compositional semantics of complex and modified proper names (e.g., the famous detective Sherlock Holmes ). (shrink)

Here I shine light on the concept of and call for safe space and on the implicit argument that seems to undergird both the concept and the call, complicating and problematizing the taken for granted view of this issue with the goal of revealing a more complex dynamic worthy of interpretive attention when determining educational response. I maintain that the usual justification for safe space covers rather than clarifies the logic of safe space and makes it difficult for an (...) educator to respond to harassment in a constructive and fitting way. I also claim that calls for safe space can only be properly interpreted—and responded to—when the link between fear and safety is uncovered and deconstructed. In the process, I note that the assumption of “safety” as a “positive condition” for education is problematic and warrants careful consideration. (shrink)

Learning to map words onto their referents is difficult, because there are multiple possibilities for forming these mappings. Cross-situational learning studies have shown that word-object mappings can be learned across multiple situations, as can verbs when presented in a syntactic context. However, these previous studies have presented either nouns or verbs in ambiguous contexts and thus bypass much of the complexity of multiple grammatical categories in speech. We show that noun word learning in adults is robust when objects are moving, (...) and that verbs can also be learned from similar scenes without additional syntactic information. Furthermore, we show that both nouns and verbs can be acquired simultaneously, thus resolving category-level as well as individual word-level ambiguity. However, nouns were learned more quickly than verbs, and we discuss this in light of previous studies investigating the noun advantage in word learning. (shrink)

Psychological construction represents an important new approach to psychological phenomena, one that has the promise to help us reconceptualize the mind both as a behavioral and as a biological system. It has so far been developed in the greatest detail for emotion, but it has important implications for how researchers approach other mental phenomena such as reasoning, memory, and language use. Its key contention is that phenomena that are characterized in (folk) psychological vocabulary are not themselves basic features of the (...) mind, but are constructed from more basic psychological operations. The framework of mechanistic explanation, currently under development in philosophy of science, can provide a useful perspective on the psychological construction approach. A central insight of the mechanistic account of explanation is that biological and psychological phenomena result from mechanisms in which component parts and operations do not individually exhibit the phenomena of interest but function together in an orchestrated and sometimes in a complex dynamical manner to generate it. While at times acknowledging the compatibility of the mechanist approach with constructionist approach (Lindquist, Wager, Kober, Bliss-Moreau, & Barrett, 2012), proponents of the constructionist approach have at other times pitched their approach as anti-mechanist. For example, Barrett (2009) claims that the psychological constructionist approach rejects machines as the primary metaphor for understanding the mind, instead favoring a recipe metaphor; constructionism also purportedly rejects the “mechanistic” picture of causation, which it portrays as linear or sequential in nature (see also Barrett, Wilson-Mendenhall, & Barsalou, in press). While some mechanistic accounts do fit this description, we will see that the mechanisms generating phenomena can be complex and dynamic, producing phenomena far less stereotypic and more adaptive than people often associate with machines. Our goal, however, is not just to render constructionism and mechanism compatible. Philosophers of science have been examining the nature of mechanistic explanation in biology with the goal of gaining new insights into the operation of science. We will identify some of the places where the mechanistic account can shed new light on the constructionist project. (shrink)

Simple claims with the verb ‘seem’, as well as the specific sensory verbs, ‘look’, ‘sound’, etc., require the speaker to have some relevant kind of perceptual acquaintance (Pearson, 2013; Ninan, 2014). But different forms of these reports differ in their perceptual requirements. For example, the copy raising (CR) report, ‘Tom seems like he’s cooking’ requires the speaker to have seen Tom, while its expletive subject (ES) variant, ‘It seems like Tom is cooking’, does not (Rogers, 1972; Asudeh and Toivonen, (...) 2012). This contrast has led some theorists to hold that the matrix subject in CR constructions is uniformly interpreted as the perceptual source (p-source) (Asudeh and Toivonen, 2012; Rett and Hyams, 2014). Others, based on examples of CR reports that seem not to require perception of the referent of the matrix subject, have taken the p-source interpretation instead to be non-uniform across CR reports (Landau, 2011; Doran, 2015). We reconsider these theoretical approaches to copy raising in light of new experimental work probing the sensitivity of these requirements to the matrix verb, the embedded ‘like’-clause, and the context. While we find some motivation for a non-uniform p-source analysis, it comes from importantly different cases than those others have relied on. Furthermore, our findings cast doubt on the prevalent assumption that the perceptual requirements of CR reports are to be captured solely by the presence or absence of the p-source interpretation. We suggest that the data motivating a non-uniform p-source view are better captured by an alternative approach, which makes use of a more minimal evidential source role, in place of the perceptual source role. We close by considering the relationship between English copy raising and evidential constructions cross-linguistically. (shrink)

The evolution of complex life forms, such as multicellular organisms, is the result of a number of evolutionary transitions in individuality (ETIs). Several attempts have been made to explain their origins, many of which have been internalist (i.e., based largely on internal properties of these life form's ancestors). Here, we show how an externalist perspective, via the ecological scaffolding model in which properties of complex life forms arise from an external scaffold, can shed new light on the question of (...) ETIs. Ultimately, we anticipate progress in the field will occur by recognizing the importance of both the internalist and externalist modes of explanation for ETIs. We illustrate this by considering an extension of the ecological scaffolding model by niche construction in which particles modify the environment which later becomes the scaffold giving rise to collective-level individuality. (shrink)

Languages are complex systems that allow speakers to produce novel grammatical utterances. Yet, linguists differ as to how general and abstract they think the mental representation of speakers have to be to give rise to this grammatical creativity. In order to shed light on these questions, the present study looks at one specific construction type, English comparative correlatives, that turns out to be particularly interesting in this context: on the one hand it has been described in terms of one (...) of the most abstract and general syntactic rules, on the other hand it shows specific idiomatic structures that are often produced without any variation. While the syntax and semantics of the English Comparative Correlative construction have received considerable attention in the literature, so far only a small number of usage-based analyses have been published on the topic. These either only relied on small databases or focussed only on the productivity of one slot in the construction. In contrast to this, the present study analyses more than 1,400 CC tokens sampled from COCA. The results of the present study yield important results concerning English CC constructions, including the schematicity and generality of their mental representations. (shrink)

This contribution aims at providing an argumentative method to account for epistemic modality and evidentiality. I claim that these two linguistic categories can work as semantic components of defeasible argumentative schemes based on classification processes. This kind of approximate reasoning is, in fact, frequently indicated by appearance verbs which signal that the inferred standpoint is conceived by the speaker as uncertain due to the deceiving nature of perceptual data. Drawing from an analysis at the semantic-argumentative interface, the way in which (...) prototype theory sheds light on the processes of meaning construction underlying defeasible arguments from definition is also shown. (shrink)

Do not chew with your mouth open! Take your hat off when you enter a church! Do not skip the queue! Pay your taxes! Do not cross on a red light! These are familiar imperatives, and their immediate source are ‘socially constructed norms’: norms that exist as a matter of social fact. These range from informal etiquette and politeness norms to the complex norms making up our legal systems. While we often feel bound by these norms, we are also (...) aware that they can be pernicious: the product of injustice and vehicles for its perpetuation. The question thus arises: when and why, if ever, does the fact that a socially constructed norm requires us to perform a certain action place us under a genuine moral obligation to comply? In Morality and Socially Constructed Norms, I answer that such an obligation, when it exists, is grounded in a broader, familiar duty, namely the duty to respect people’s permissible and authentic exercises of agency. This is what I call the ‘Agency-Respect View.’ The first part of the book outlines and defends the view, the second part considers relevant applications. (shrink)

As figurational sociologists and sociolinguists, we need to know that we currently find support from other fields in our efforts to construct a sociocultural science focused on interdependencies and processes, creating a multidimensional picture of human beings, one in which the brain and its mental and emotional processes are properly recognized. The paradigmatic revolutions in 20th-century physics, the contributions made by biology to our understanding of living beings, the conceptual constructions built around the theories of systems, self-organization and complexity, all (...) these implore that we reflect on social sciences paradigms in the light of the great changes in these other disciplines. The application of metaphors or theoretical images of complexity and figurational sociology in understanding language and socio-communication phenomena is of great use, since language is not an ‘object’, but a ‘complex’; it exists simultaneously in and among different domains. ‘Languaging’ and interaction are co-phenomena. The former exists within the latter, and the latter within the former. By visualizing, for instance, the different levels of linguistic structure not as separate entities but rather as united and integrated within the same theoretical frame, by seeing their functional interdependencies, by situating them in a greater multidimensionality that includes what for a long time was considered ‘external’ – the individual and his or her mind-brain, the sociocultural system, the physical world, etc. – and expanding in this way our classical view, we should be able to make important, if not essential, theoretical and practical advances. (shrink)

The paper investigates a light verb construction in Yiddish in which the light verb combines with a verbal stem to produce a special aspectual meaning, the exact nature of which depends on the event type denoted by the stem. Though the specific interpretations associated with the stem construction vary, I show that they have in common the property of denoting an event which is minimized in time. I analyze the semantics of the stem construction in terms (...) of an aspectual operator (located in an inflectional head) which modifies the properties of the event argument of the stem, yielding an appropriately truncated event in each case. (shrink)

This essay criticizes a prominent strand of theorizing about global justice, Rawlsian global constructivism. It argues that the constructivist method employed by cosmopolitan and social liberal theorists cannot grapple with the complexities of interdependence, deep pluralism, and socio-cultural diversity that arise in the global context. These flaws impugn the persuasiveness and plausibility of the substantive conclusions reached by Rawlsian global constructivists and highlight serious epistemological problems in their approach. This critique also sheds light on some broader problems with ideal (...) theory in the global context, showing how it leads to distortions in our thinking about justice and again raising doubts about the epistemological and normative conclusions of global constructivist approaches. Keywords: global justice; constructivism; cosmopolitanism; social liberal theory; ideal theory; Rawls (Published: 27 February 2012) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 5 , No. 1, 2012, pp. 1-26. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v5i1.8406. (shrink)

This article contributes to Construction Grammar, historical linguistics, and Russian linguistics through an in-depth corpus study of predicate agreement in constructions with quantified subjects. Statistical analysis of approximately 39,000 corpus examples indicates that these constructions constitute a network of constructions (“allostructions”) with various preferences for singular or plural agreement. Factors pull in different directions, and we observe a relatively stable situation in the face of variation. We present an analysis of a multidimensional network of allostructions in Russian, thus contributing to (...) our understanding of allostructional relationships in Construction Grammar. With regard to historical linguistics, language stability is an understudied field. We illustrate an interplay of divergent factors that apparently resists language change. The syntax of numerals and other quantifiers represents a notoriously complex phenomenon of the Russian language. Our study sheds new light on the contributions of factors that favor singular or plural agreement in sentences with quantified subjects. (shrink)

In this volume Nick C. Ellis, Ute Römer, and Matthew Brook O’Donnell present a view of language as a complex adaptive system that is learned, both in first and second language contexts, through usage. In a series of research studies, they analyze Verb-Argument Constructions (VACs) in language learning, processing, and use. Drawing on diverse epistemological and methodological perspectives, they convincingly demonstrate that language emerges in the development of both mother tongue and additional languages out of multiple experiences of meaning-making (...) following general principles of learning relating to frequency, contingency, and semantic prototypicality. They draw implications from this work that will be of value to students and scholars from a wide range of disciplinary interests in language and learning. (shrink)

In this paper, we will argue that, of the various grammatical and discourse constraints that affect acceptability in Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE), only the structural parallelism constraint is unique to VPE. We outline (previously noted) systematic problems that arise for classical structural accounts of VPE resolution, and discuss efforts in recent research on VPE to reduce explanations of acceptability in VPE to general well-formedness constraints at the level of information structure [e.g. Kehler, 2000, 2002, Kertz, 2013, Kehler, 2015]. In (...) two magnitude estimation experiments, we show that — in line with Kehler’s predictions — degradation due to structural mismatch is modulated by coherence relation. On the other hand, we consistently find residual structural mismatch effects, suggesting that the interpretation of VPE is sensitive to structural features of the VPE antecedent. We propose that a structural constraint licenses VPE, but that sentences violating this constraint can nevertheless be interpreted. The variability in acceptability is accounted for not by additional constraints on VPE in the grammar, but by the numerous general biases that affect sentence and discourse well-formedness, such as information structural constraints [as proposed by Kertz, 2013], discourse coherence relations Kehler [2000], sensitivity to Question Under Discussion structure [e.g. Ginzburg and Sag, 2000, Kehler, 2015], and thematic role bias at the lexical level [e.g. McRae et al., 1998]. We test the prediction that thematic role bias (Experiment 3) and QUD structure (Experiment 4) will influence both elliptical and non-elliptical sentences alike, while structural mismatch continues to degrade elliptical sentences alone. Our proposal differs from existing proposals in cutting the explanatory pie in a different way with respect to how variations in acceptability are accounted for. We suggest that degradation can result from at least two distinct and separable sources: violating construction-specific grammatical constraints, or from complexity differences in interpretation related to very general discourse level information. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 70-75. cartography of ghosts . . . And as a way to talk . . . of temporality the topography of imagination, this body whose dirty entry into the articulation of history as rapturous becoming & unbecoming, greeted with violence, i take permission to extend this grace —Akilah Oliver from “An Arriving Guard of Angels Thusly Coming To Greet” Our disappearance is already here. —Jacques Derrida, 117 I wrestled with death as a threshold, an aporia, a bandit, (...) a part of life. —Akilah Oliver Moraine in geological lingo is that which is left behind. Moraine- a euphemism for the de-stabilizing referent of the writer-ly body as a “troubled and troubling landscape marked by cultural and historical signifiers, the body as flesh memory [...] the body as transitory” (Oliver, Author Statement). Moraine— a geological metaphor of the poet as a holder of memory, as an accumulation of rocks and debris carried along the edge, terminal, dropped at the foot of language (in language). “Flesh Memory” according to Akilah Oliver is "that which my body recalls [...] everything has to do with the task of remembrance and its narrative reinvention [...] I was always translating an idea of the world as it presented itself at any given time. To write was a choice about how to be seen, how to enter the world as translator, actor, participant, in the dialogues that apparently made the real 'real'" (Levitsky). Flesh. Memory. The stuff some poems are made from. The stuff that gets abandoned, gleaned, and picked up by more flesh and memory. "My body, my life has always felt like a kaleidoscopic rip in the dominant fabric [...] has always been a dialogue with the impossible and the apparent” (Levitsky). The impossible-body or poet's body anticipates and performs (through language) an irretrievable death. IN APORIA I realized everything I must have been doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day—a holiday—and every time you turned on the radio they said something like ‘four million’ or ‘going to die’.” — Andy Warhol I’m trying on egos, [a justification for the planet’s continuance]. Oh hello transgressor, you’ve come to collect utilitarian debts, humbling narrative space. Give me condition and wheatgrass, I his body disintegrating. I his body is ossification. Death my habit radius, yeah yeah. I his body can’t refuse this summons. I can’t get out this fucking room. Tell me something different about torture dear Trickster. Tell me about the lightness my mother told me to pick the one i love the best how it signals everything I ever wish to believe true just holy on my ship. I jump all over this house. this is it [what I thought is thought only, nothing more deceptive than]: I his body keeps thinking someone will come along, touch me. As like human or lima bean. I’m cradling you to my breast, you are looking out. A little wooden lion you & Peter carve on Bluff Street is quieting across your cheekbone. Not at all like the kind of terror found in sleep, on trembling grounds. It is yesterday now. I have not had a chance to dance in this century. Tonight I shall kill someone, a condition to remember Sunday morning. To think of lives as repetitions [rather than singular serial incarnations]. To understand your death is as exacerbating as trying to figure out why as schoolchildren in mid-nineteen-sixties Southern California we performed reflexive motions: cutting out lace snowflakes, reading Dick and Jane search for their missing mittens, imagining snow. Disintegrat ing . The -ing gerund catapults from the non-finite verb into past, present, future. The -ing as a tail pinned to death, a dog spinning to bite and never fully reaching itself, always shy of the end, circumreferential; a double copulative: deathing. Possessively AO calls it “habit radius” (a virtual fetish attribute) or an inescapable death presence that “confronts us with the paradox of an unattainable object [...] through it’s being unattainable” (Agamben, 27). A flirtation or dialogue with an unknowable thing and aporia utilized as investigative instrument to engage (death) while (in Southern California) we “perform reflexive motions,” cut lace snowflakes, imagine snow, and pay rent like “yeah, yeah” what else is new. And this too, fiction. The book I wish to right. The restored fallen, heroic. Did you expect a different grace from the world? Or upon exit? I’m working on “tough.” They think I am already. All ready. Who is the dead person? Is "I'm sorry" real to a dead person? Browning grass. My hands on this table. A contentious century. A place to pay rent. Redemptive moments. Am I now the dead person? Dead person, dead person, will you partake in my persimmon feast? The body inside the body astounds, confesses sins of the funhouse. I too have admired the people of this planet. Their frilly, orderly intellects. The use they’ve made of cardamom, radiation as well. How they’ve pasteurized milk, loaned surnames to stars, captured tribes, diseases, streets, and ideas too. The living-body as archive: is it possible to experience the living-body as archive without a (kind of) death? Sifting the rubble, rummaging through hoarded debris, skin sheds, memory-napping, and re-awoken (in flesh and) on terrain. “An investigative poetics seeks to unravel staid communities of thought and grasp at what might always be just beyond reach; a poetics of inquiry that lies between language as meaning, and language as rapturous entry into the world of posited ideas and idealism”( Levitsky). Something snaps. Lights blow out prior to embarking upon an investigative poetics. It begins with a question (often a sexy aporia) that leads to openings. "Every politics of memory [...] implies an intervention of the state. It's a state that legislates and acts with regard to the nonfinite mass of materials to be stored, materials which must be collected, preserved” (Derrida & Stiegler, 62). It seems poetic investigation already contains the potentiality of an (invisible) archive if the writer is “always writing” especially when not. Here’s my stupid digital romantic inclination: the living-body (of a poet) is a self-sustaining archive of non-finite memories. But not even I really believe that. AO innovated and sculpted an investigative poetic praxis. In a conversation with poet Rachel Levitsky, poetic-voice is viewed not as a precious identifier, but as a means to think through/about form, concluding that form is linked to framing. While poetic-voice may have tendency to precede form, it also erupts as a result of framing techniques. “They are frames that hold the shape of thinking (which is also to say of imagining) [...].”7 This reminds me of my rabbit who symmetrically chewed the corners of his hutch, which makes me wonder if it’s an expression of the shape of some animal anxiety tick I won’t ever have access to. Beyond the form/frame, death is an unoriginal yet unique limit; death is a damn deathless thing. It functions as a source of poetic investigation; that thing always “just beyond reach.” And how is death not a fetish (in this case an obsessive reverence for something non-material)? “Insofar as it [death] is a presence, a fetish [...] it is in fact something concrete and tangible; but insofar as it is the presence of an absence, it is, at the same time, immaterial and intangible, because it alludes continuously beyond itself to something that can never really be possessed [...] The fetish is [...] a sign of an absence, it is not an unrepeatable unique object; on the contrary, it is something infinitely capable of substitution, without any successive incarnations ever succeeding in exhausting the nullity of which it is the symbol” (Agamben, 33). AO utilized absence (the absent body [catapulted by the death of a beloved]) as an apparatus to investigate. In the process of conversing with absence or that which is absent, the absent body is affectionately objectified, incessantly summonsed back to a place of recognition, of objects, a desire for the absent body to remain intact while exiting the structural limits of grammar and syntax by moving into chant forms “to say what cannot be said” (Levitsky). from AN ARRIVING GUARD OF ANGELS THUSLY COMING TO GREET dear oluchi- the light is blinking rapidly on the black boxy machine. your room seems bigger than before and i am still planning to read some of those robert jordan books of yours. yesterday at the used bookstore where i was browsing the mysteries to “stall reality” (they are really not mysteries at all, they just employ death as the plot mistress but are unable to grasp its mystery at all)—well the point is, things were calm down here for a while and the world was little. i want to be big like you. or i want you not vast, not dead, not gone, but human small and here. i am so selfish. that is what i really want. to see you again. to oil your scalp. to hear you walk in the door, say ma i’m home . give me a chance to say welcome home son. or when leaving, don’t forget your hat . what do you wear out there? i wish you could have taken your new shoes with you. i’m so proud of you. i’m sorry for the way you died. i miss you all the time. even before, i missed you. out there, one time, some different men said: “shake for me girl, i wanna be your backdoor man.” who dat you love. 5/18/03 A letter-poem in sixteen lines “dear oluchi-” is safe-housed in epistolary form. Poetic voice is rendered as internal thought meanderings, a not-so-much confession, private/(pillow?) talk in the desire to be heard/witnessed by the referent and reader with an intent to absolve. The diminutive “i” bears a relation to poet Fanny Howe’s “little g God” in that “One of the (many) things I like about little g God is that you can have a vodka tonic while you talk to little g God, sing along to Bowie’s “I’m Afraid Of Americans,” and hum Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” though maybe not all at the same time” (Oliver, 2009). Towards the middle of the poem AO is at a used bookstore and remarks on the funny employment of death as a ‘plot mistress’ that ‘they’ (the dubious employed mystery authors) are ‘unable to grasp’, thereby giving death a mouthpiece, a modeling job, something to do to pass the time. from THE VISIBLE UNSEEN When I first saw graffiti, I recognized in it an ugly aesthetic, a dialectics of violence, a distortion of limbs, a hieroglyph. It was only later when I read the names of the dead that I then saw the path of ghosts charted there; its narrative of loss for the visible unseen whose place in history has been fictionalized and rendered unseen under the totalizing glare of history. Inscriptions, traces, specters. Graffiti begs a public face just as ghosts require non-ghosts (humans) to sense them. The “visible unseen” is a game of hide-and-seek between public viewer and graffiti-inscriber, an ephemeral-violent aesthetic on an ephemeral-policed canvas. Graffiti-inscribers already submit to being forgotten, expect to be washed away; perhaps it’s a holy urban mandala created by gangster-type monks without Buddhism. [...] in its refusal to disappear it forces a discourse in the public imagination we are forced to see what we would rather not, to make sense of an encoded language that we cannot read on the level of meaning. it irritates, forces its agency on us, speaks outside and beyond semiotic reach. An epic font-size pervading the public’s imagination, illegible, I could just close my eyes, remain passive, drive past, abandon it beyond reach, push it further away beyond death walls. In Barcelona I watched a clean up crew wash walls with an awesome water hose but I was more intrigued by their bodies; not a distortion of limbs, not hieroglyph but also not entirely legible; the laboring body permanently erasing specters of the city, and of course they knew it was also an invitation for the ghosts to return. Graffiti is death’s little sister, is also an aporia. [...] Graffiti (fr GK -graph(os), something drawn or written, to diagram or chart) attempts to stage the impossible: to erase the essence of its own subjectivity. Graffiti is a cartography of ghosts, a mapping of elegiac rapture (the transporting of a person from one place to another, as in heaven) and rupture (the state of being broken open.) Dwelling is a fiction stasis. [...] The notion of the past as being something done with, a look-back event, inhibits the possibility of reading graffiti as rapture, as rupture. If graffiti posits history as always in the process of becoming undone. [...] Because what is the body, if not also a complex temple, an unstable site through which to negotiate subjects, materiality, economies, gods, and modes of representations? The site where we are all already belated. Graphein meaning “to write.” “Derrida says every archive makes a law, and the law of genre is its own rupture” (Bloch, 39). However, graffiti is an (non/anti)-archive of erasure due to (the politics of) washing out its subjectivity, which only adds onto (or is symptomatic of) its character. The inhibition of “reading graffiti as rapture, as rupture” is partly due to it being a “look-back” event in that it’s process involves scratching through layers to reveal previous specters underneath. Graffiti (as an ancient genre) has always been a thing of ‘becoming undone’, and therefore ‘belated and always in arrival’ (Levitsky). It’s a Dionysian activity done at night with it’s back turned toward us. "The specter [...] is of the visible, but of the invisible visible, it is the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and blood [...] appearing for vision, to the brightness of day [...] something becomes almost visible which is visible only insofar as it is not visible in flesh and blood. It is a night visibility. As soon as there is a technology of the image, visibility brings night. It incarnates in a night body, it radiates in a night light" (Derrida & Stiegler, 115). (shrink)

Contemporary research, across various disciplines, alludes to notion of complexity. Indeed, the phenomenon has even been accredited for comprising a new “world-view” that not only heralds theory construction but also instigates miscellaneous nifty yet practical avenues. On the other hand, however, the complexityparadigm has frequently been criticized of obscurity, contestation and scope imprecision. In addition, its various mutually incommensurable philosophical implications have lead to much heated debates regarding methodological pluralism and metaphorical applications, within literature. To elaborately discussand resolve these concerns, (...) this paper will be organized in three sections: The first section will build on the idiosyncratic characteristics of complexity that differentiate it from related notions of chaos and complicatedness. The second section will shed light on the philosophical deliberations of individual complexityattributes, toward metaphysics of complexity, through elaborately drawn diagrams. Also, this section will draw attention to several conflicting perspectives encompassing the theological, epistemological and ontological domain of complexity. The third section will trace the origins of such paradoxical debates, in the complexity literature, through a ‘Super-System-Outlook’ (SSO) framework. The framework is likely to be of particular significance as it aims to not only divulge an eradicable joint cause of the disparity governing complexity studies but also to propose a possible assimilation of such deliberations. (shrink)

Much of children's early syntactic development can be seen as the acquisition of sentence-level constructions that correspond to relatively complex events and states of affairs. The current study was an attempt to determine the relative concreteness (verb-specificity) or abstractness (verb-generality) of such constructions for children just beginning to produce large numbers of multi-word utterances. Sixteen children at 2.0 years of age and sixteen children at 2,5 years of age participated (all English speaking). Each child was taught two novel (...) verbs for a highly transitive action: one in a transitive construction (Ernie is tamming the car) and one in an intransitive construction (with patient äs subject: The ball is meeking). They were then given opportunities to use their newly learned verbs, in many cases in discourse situations that encouraged use of the "opposite" construction (i.e., agent and patient-focused questions). Results showed that 2.0-year-old children almost never produced an utterance using a novel verb in anything other than the construction in which it had been modeled. Children at 2.5 years of age were somewhat more productive, but still the large majority of these children avoided using the experimental verbs in nonmodeled constructions. These results suggest that when English-speaking children produce simple transitive and intransitive utterances in their spontaneous speech, they are doing so on a verb-specific basis (verb Island constructions), schematizing more abstract constructions only later äs they discover patterns that apply across many such lexically specific constructions. (shrink)

In this study, we test a number of predictions concerning children's knowledge of the transitive Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) construction between two and three years on one child (Thomas) for whom we have densely collected data. The data show that the earliest SVO utterances reflect earlier use of those same verbs, and that verbs acquired before 2;7 show an earlier move towards adult-like levels of use in the SVO construction and in object argument complexity than later acquired verbs. There is not (...) a close relation with the input in the types of subject and object referents used, nor a close adherence to Preferred Argument Structure (PAS) before 2;7, but both early and late acquired verbs show a simultaneous move towards PAS patterns in selection of referent type at 2;9. The event semantics underpinning early transitive utterances do not straightforwardly fit prototype (high or inalienable) notions of transitivity, but rather may reflect sensitivity to animacy and intentionality in a way that mirrors the input. We conclude that children's knowledge of the transitive construction continues to undergo significant development between 2;0 and 3;0, reflecting the gradual abstraction and integration of the SVO and VO constructions, verb semantics, discourse pragmatics, and the interactions between these factors. These factors are considered in the context of a prototype for the transitive construction. (shrink)

In this, the first of two ground-breaking volumes on the nature of language in the light of the way it evolved, James Hurford looks at how the world first came to have a meaning in the minds of animals and how in humans this meaning eventually came to be expressed as language. He reviews a mass of evidence to show how close some animals, especially primates and more especially apes, are to the brink of human language. Apes may not (...) talk to us but they construct rich cognitive representations of the world around them, and here, he shows, are the evolutionary seeds of abstract thought - the means of referring to objects, the memory of events, even elements of the propositional thinking philosophers have hitherto reserved for humans. What then, he asks, is the evolutionary path between the non-speaking minds of apes and our own speaking minds? Why don't apes communicate the richness of their thoughts to each other? Why do humans alone have a unique disposition to reveal their thoughts in complex detail? Professor Hurford searches a wide range of evidence for the answers to these central questions, including degrees of trust, the role of hormones, the ability to read minds, and the willingness to cooperate. Expressing himself congenially in consistently colloquial language the author builds up a vivid picture of how mind, language, and meaning evolved over millions of years. His book is a landmark contribution to the understanding of linguistic and thinking processes, and the fullest account yet published of the evolution of language and communication."A wonderful read - lucid, informative, and entertaining, while at the same time never talking down to the reader by sacrificing argumentation for the sake of 'simplicity'. Likely to be heralded as the major publication dealing with language evolution to date. Frederick J. Newmeyer, University of Washington. (shrink)

James Franklin has argued that the formal, mathematical sciences of complexity — network theory, information theory, game theory, control theory, etc. — have a methodology that is different from the methodology of the natural sciences, and which can result in a knowledge of physical systems that has the epistemic character of deductive mathematical knowledge. I evaluate Franklin’s arguments in light of realistic examples of mathematical modelling and conclude that, in general, the formal sciences are no more able to guarantee (...) certainty than the natural sciences. Yet the formal sciences are characterized by a ‘domain-independence’ that is philosophically interesting, and I argue that it is this property that Franklin actually employs to distinguish the formal from the natural sciences. I use Einstein’s ‘principle’/‘constructive’ theory distinction to contrast the domain-independence of physical theories with the domain-independence of formal mathematical theories, and show how both kinds of domain-independence function to generate the domain-independence that is observed in the complex systems sciences. © 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Awe seems to be a complex emotion or emotional construct characterized by a mix of positive (contentment, happiness), and negative affective components (fear and a sense of being smaller, humbler or insignificant). It is striking that the elicitors of awe correspond closely to what philosophical aesthetics, and especially Burke and Kant, have called “the sublime.” As a matter of fact, awe is almost absent from the philosophical agenda, while there are very few studies on the experience of the sublime as (...) such in the psychological literature. The aim of this paper is to throw light on the complex relationship between awe (as understood by psychologists) and the experience of the sublime (as discussed by philosophers). We distinguish seven ways of conceiving this relationship and highlight those that seem more promising to us. Once we have a clearer picture of how awe and the experience of the sublime are related, we can use it to enhance collaboration between these domains. We would be able to use empirical results about awe in a philosophical analysis of the experience of the sublime, which in turn can help us to design novel experimental hypotheses about the contexts in which we experience awe. (shrink)

In this article, we will attempt to understand Sellars’ puzzling notion of ‘adequate picturing’ and its relation to the Sellarsian ‘conceptual order’ through Spinoza’s intuitive knowledge. First, it will be suggested that there are important structural similarities between Sellarsian ‘adequate picturing’ and Spinoza’s intuitive knowledge which can illuminate some ‘dark’ and not so well understood features of Sellarsian picturing. However, there remain some deep differences between Sellars’ and Spinoza’s philosophy, especially with regard to their notion of ‘adequacy’ and the sense (...) in which an idea can be said to ‘correspond’ with its object. As a consequence of those differences it turns out that, from a Sellarsian viewpoint, Spinoza’s notion of intuitive knowledge is a version of the myth of the Given. However, Sellars’ own proposed way out of the Myth has problematic consequences by Sellars’ own lights: His sharp distinction between the ‘space of reasons’ level and the level of picturing makes the Sellarsian vision of the ‘stereoscopic fusion’ of those levels virtually unintelligible. Finally, it will be argued that a non-standard interpretation of Spinoza’s intuitive knowledge -proposed in Baltas -, combined with a Sellars-inspired bifurcated understanding of Dreyfusian expert knowledge, can provide the means 1) for constructing a notion of intuitive knowledge that evades the myth of the Given, and, 2) for making full sense of the claim that the ‘space of reasons’ dimension of understanding the world can in principle be fused with the ‘picturing’ dimension and provide us with a single complex coherent experience of reality and our place in it. (shrink)

Multigene delivery and expression systems are emerging as key technologies for many applications in contemporary biology. We have developed new methods for multigene delivery and expression in eukaryotic hosts for a variety of applications, including production of protein complexes for structural biology and drug development, provision of multicomponent protein biologics, and cell‐based assays. We implemented tandem recombineering to facilitate rapid generation of multicomponent gene expression constructs for efficient transformation of mammalian cells, resulting in homogenous cell populations. Analysis of multiple parameters (...) in living cells may require co‐expression of fluorescently tagged sensors simultaneously in a single cell, at defined and ideally controlled ratios. Our method enables such applications by overcoming currently limiting challenges.Here, we review recent multigene delivery and expression strategies and their exploitation in mammalian cells. We discuss applications in drug discovery assays, interaction studies, and biologics production, which may benefit in the future from our novel approach. (shrink)

Le présent article vise à éclairer la nature des activités perceptives et cognitives attribuées au νοῦς d’Anaxagore, en particulier à lever les difficultés liées à l'évaluation de la part des dimensions mécaniques, cognitives et téléologiques dans l'activité du νοῦς cosmique, par une comparaison avec l'usage des verbes γιγνώσκω, νοέω et du substantif νοῦς dans le contexte du champ de bataille homérique. Les rangeurs d'hommes homériques partagent avec le νοῦς d'Anaxagore une description de leurs activités en termes de tri, d'extraction et (...) de mise en ordre, par l'usage commun des verbes διακρίνω, ἀποκρίνω, διακοσμέω. Or l'analyse des opérations perceptives et cognitives de ceux-là révèle un modèle d'action immanente, liant la perception des singularités au sein de touts complexes et mouvants à l'appréhension globale des positions passées, présentes et possibles des troupes en action. Pensé sur ce modèle, le νοῦς d'Anaxagore sera conçu selon un modèle de perception par immersion dont sa nature physique très particulière le rend capable : c'est en faisant intégralement corps avec le mélange matériel que le νοῦς se rend capable d'en faire le tri et d'en anticiper les états possibles. L'illimitation de sa connaissance et de son pouvoir a néanmoins une conséquence qui le différencie du chef homérique : n'avoir aucun choix du fait de la puissance de réaliser toutes les différenciations possibles. (shrink)

The development of abstract schemas and productive rules in language is affected by both token and type frequencies. High token frequencies and surface similarities help to discover formal and functional commonalities between utterances and categorize them as instances of the same schema. High type frequencies and diversity help to develop slots in these schemas, which allow the production and comprehension of novel utterances. In the current study we looked at both token and type frequencies in two related constructions in German (...) child-directed speech: simple transitive and complement-clause constructions. Both constructions contain high frequency verbs, which potentially support the development of verb-specific schemas. However, only the frequent verbs in the transitive constructions occur with a variety of subject types, which also supports the development of a slot in the subject position. We then used an elicited production task to compare 4- and 5-year-old German-speaking children's productivity with simple transitive constructions and complement-clause constructions. The children were prompted to change the subjects of high and low frequency simple transitive verbs, such as essen ‘eat’ and naschen ‘nibble’, mental-state complement-taking verbs, such as denken ‘think’ and vermuten ‘presume’, and communication complement-taking verbs, such as sagen ‘say’ and berichten ‘report’. In accordance with earlier findings, children had less difficulty producing new utterances with high frequency transitive verbs than with low frequency transitive verbs. For the other verb classes, however, we found either reverse frequency effects or no frequency effects. For these verb classes, children's productivity can be determined by diversity rather than simple token frequency. We discuss how token frequency interacts with diversity, discourse function, semantic complexity, and syntactic complexity. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article the development of the thought of two important twentieth-century legal theorists is compared. Although Hans Kelsen is primarily known for his Pure theory of law and Hermann Kantorowicz is one of the founders of the Free law movement, the article will revolve around their respective proposals for the post-War restoration of the international legal order. It is argued that these are based on their respective conceptions of ‘law’ and ‘the state’. By virtue of this comparison, it (...) is possible to shed light on the basic thinking behind their complex ideas, as well as show how these were formulated and influenced by the political circumstances of their times. Lastly, the article shall concern the concrete post-War influence of Kantorowicz and Kelsen, as a result of the shared and different philosophical, methodological and scientific convictions of both scholars. (shrink)

Teams are considered to be extremely complex dynamic entities that suffer at the hand of constant evolution of their structure to meet and adapt to the varying situational demands they come face-to-face with (Kozlowski & Ilgen, 2006). Agencies, industries, and government institutions are currently placing greater attention to the adaption of team dynamics and teamwork as they are important to key organizational outcomes. As greater attention is being placed on the maturation of team dynamics, the incorporation of efficient methodological tools (...) to understand how teams are being measured over time becomes critical. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to present a review of relevant academic articles detailing the science behind methodological tools and general approaches to study team dynamics over time. We provide an overview of the methodological tools used to understand team dynamics with accordance to specific temporal elements. Drawing from Kozloski, Gully, Nason, and Smith (1999) process model of team development, we highlight relevant emergent team constructs within each stage. As well, for each stage, we discuss the what and how to measure team dynamics. Our analyses bring to light relevant, novel and complex approaches being used by researchers to examine specific constructs within different team developmental phases (e.g., agent-based simulations, computational modeling) and the importance of transitioning from a single source methodology approach. Implications and future research are also discussed. (shrink)