New Books in Language

The recognition of speech acts – classically, things like stating, requesting, promising, and so on – sometimes seems like a curiously neglected topic in the psychology of language. This is odd for several reasons. For one, there’s a rich philosophical tradition devoted to the topic. For another, it’s in many ways a really classic linguistic problem: one of those things that speakers can do effortlessly, but for which it’s extremely hard to explain how. With his new book From Utterances to Speech Acts (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Mikhail Kissine offers a stimulating contribution to the debate. His approach aims to identify certain broad classes of speech act with communicative processes that are genuinely fundamental to human interaction (not merely cultural creations). Moreover, it aims to account for the recognition of speech acts in a way that obviates the need for the classically Gricean process of multi-layered intention attribution: which, as we discuss, has the potential to explain how individuals with deficits in ‘mind-reading’ can nevertheless grasp the intended purpose of ambiguous utterances. In this interview, we also discuss the major philosophical and practical contributions of this approach, and explore the consequences of it for our views of the nature of human-human communication. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

A common philosophical picture of language proposes to begin with the various kinds of communicative acts individuals perform by means of language.  This view has it that communication proceeds largely by way of interpretation, where we hear the sounds others make, and infer from those sounds the communicative intentions of speakers.  On this view, communication is a highly deliberate affair, involving complex mediating processes of inference and interpersonal reasoning. In his new book, Semantic Perception: How the Illusion of a Common Language Arises and Persists (Oxford University Press 2013), Jody Azzouni accepts the idea that we must begin theorizing language from the perspective of language use.  But nonetheless he rejects this common picture.  In fact, Azzouni argues that the common view actually misconstrues our experience as communicators.  On Azzouni’s alternative, we involuntarily perceive language items as public objects that have meaning properties independently of speaker intentions.  Put differently, Azzouni argues that meaning is perceived, not inferred, much in the way we perceive the properties of physical objects. And yet he also argues that our perception of there being a common language– such as English– which supplies a common vehicle for communication is a kind of inescapable collective illusion.  What’s more, Azzouni argues that the view that a common language is an illusion makes better sense of our experiences and practices with language. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

One of the risks of a telephone interview is that the sound quality can be less than ideal, and sometimes there’s no way around this and we just have to try to press on with it. Under those conditions, although I get used to it, I can’t help wondering whether the result will make sense to an outside listener. I mention this now because Anne Cutler‘s book, Native Listening: Language Experience and the Recognition of Spoken Words (MIT Press, 2012), is an eloquent and compelling justification of my worrying about precisely this issue. In particular, she builds the case that our experience with our native language fundamentally shapes the way in which we approach the task of listening to a stream of speech – unconsciously, we attend to the cues that are useful in our native language, and use the rules that apply in that language, even when this is counterproductive in the language that we’re actually dealing with. This explains how native speakers can typically process an imperfect speech signal, and why this sometimes fails when we’re listening to a non-native language. (But I hope this isn’t going to be one of those times for anyone.) In this interview, we explore some of the manifestations of the tendency to use native-language experience in parsing, and the implications of this for the rest of the language system. We see why attending to phonologically ‘possible words’ is useful in most, but not quite all, languages, and how this helps us solve the problem of embedded words (indeed, so effectively that we don’t even notice that the problem exists). We consider how the acquisition of language-specific preferences might cohere with the idea of a ‘critical period’ for second-language learning. And we get some insights into the process of very early language acquisition – even before birth – which turns out to have access to richer input data than we might imagine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

It’s tempting to think that lexicography can go on, untroubled by the concerns of theoretical linguistics, while the rest of us plunge into round after round of bloody internecine strife. For better or worse, as Patrick Hanks makes clear in Lexical Analysis: Norms and Exploitations (MIT Press, 2013), this is no longer true: lexicographers must respond to theoretical and practical pressures from lexical semantics, and this lexicographer has very interesting things to say about that discipline too. Hanks’s central point is perhaps that the development of huge electronic corpora poses enormous problems, as well as exciting challenges, for the study of word meaning. It’s no longer tenable to list every sense of a word that is in common currency: and even if we could, it would be a pointless exercise, as the vast output of such an exercise would tell us very little about what meaning is intended on a given instance of usage. However, these corpora provide us with the opportunity to say a great deal about the way in which words are typically used: and the theory that Hanks develops in this book represents an attempt to make that notion precise. In this interview, we discuss the impact of corpus-driven work on linguistics in general and lexical semantics in particular, and discuss the analogy between definitions and prototypes. In doing so, we find for Wittgenstein over Leibniz, and tentatively for ‘lumpers’ over ‘splitters’, but rule that both parties are at fault in the battle between Construction Grammar and traditional generative syntax. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Stephen Crain, a professor and author of The Emergence of Meaning, discusses the intriguing concept of logical nativism—how certain logical structures may be innate rather than acquired through experience. He highlights cross-linguistic patterns, particularly in child language acquisition, that suggest a shared cognitive framework underlying diverse languages like English and Mandarin. The conversation also tackles how children interpret logical concepts such as 'or,' emphasizing the role of logical reasoning in language development and critiquing experience-based theories.

Pretty much everyone who’s done a linguistics course has come across the name of Ferdinand de Saussure – a name that’s attached to such fundamentals as the distinction between synchrony and diachrony, and the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. Yet when it comes to the man behind the ideas, most people know much less. Who was this man – this aristocrat with a Calvinist upbringing who shook the foundations of the linguistic establishment, and whose influence was felt more strongly after his death than it ever was in life? When John Joseph started looking into these questions, he found only scattered information. As a result, he ended up having to write the book that he himself had wanted to read. The result, Saussure (OUP, 2012), is a detailed but nevertheless readable account of the life and works of one of the most respected figures in the history of linguistics. In this interview we discuss some of the questions that arise in connection with Saussure: his major intellectual influences, his remarkable lack of publications during his adult life, the originality (and historical antecedents) of some of his central ideas, and “Calvinist linguistics”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Perry Link, a scholar of Chinese history and literature, dives into the intricate anatomy of the Chinese language. He discusses how rhythm and metaphor shape communication, informed by decades of exploration. Link examines the relationship between language and cultural identity through the lens of modern literature and political language. He highlights consciousness in language via directional metaphors, contrasts eating metaphors, and reveals the political dynamics at play in China, where language often serves as a tool for power.

Morphology is sometimes painted as the ‘here be dragons’ of the linguistic map: a baffling domain of idiosyncrasies and irregularities, in which Heath Robinson contraptions abound and anything goes. In his new book, Universals of Comparative Morphology: Suppletion, Superlatives, and the Structure of Words (MIT Press, 2012), Jonathan Bobaljik reassesses the terrain, and argues that there are hard limits on the extent to which languages can vary in the morphological domain. The book is a comparative study of comparatives and superlatives with a broad typological base. Bobaljik’s contention is that, at an abstract cognitive level, the representation of the comparative is contained within that of the superlative. From this hypothesis, couched within the theoretical framework of Distributed Morphology, a number of generalizations immediately follow: for instance, in a language which, like English, has forms of the type “good” and “better”, the superlative cannot be of the type “goodest”. As he shows, these generalizations are solid candidates for the status of exceptionless linguistic universals. In this interview, Jonathan outlines the generalizations and their evidential basis, and we go on to discuss apparent counterexamples (including the mysterious Karelian quantifiers), why the comparative should be contained within the superlative, how the generalizations extend to change-of-state verbs, and how similar generalizations can be found in domains as diverse as verbal person marking and pronominal case. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Although there seems to be a trend towards linguistic theories getting more cognitively or neurally plausible, there doesn’t seem to be an imminent prospect of a reconciliation between linguistics and neuroscience. Network models of various aspects of language have often been criticised as theoretically simplistic, custom-made to solve a single problem (such as past tense marking), and/or abandoning their neurally-inspired roots. In The Neural Architecture of Grammar (MIT Press, 2012), Stephen Nadeau proposes an account of language in the brain that goes some way towards answering these objections. He argues that the sometimes-maligned Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) approach can genuinely be seen as a way of modelling the brain. Combining theoretical, experimental and biological perspectives, he proposes a model of language function that is based upon these principles, proceeding concisely all the way from concept meaning to high-level syntactic organisation. He proposes that this model offers a plausible account of a wealth of data from studies of normal language functioning and, at the same time, a convincing perspective on how language breaks down as a consequence of brain injury. Within an hour, it’s hard to do justice to the full complexity of the model. However, we do get to discuss much of the background and motivation for this approach. In particular, we talk about the emergence of PDP models of concept meaning and of phonological linear order. We consider the relations between this concept of meaning and the increasingly well-studied notion of ’embodied cognition’. And we look at the aphasia literature, which, Nadeau argues, provides compelling support for a view of language that is fundamentally stochastic and susceptible to graceful degradation – two automatic consequences of adopting a PDP perspective. We conclude by touching on the potential relevance of this type of account for treatments for aphasia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

A problem with doing linguistics is that once you start, it’s kind of inescapable – you see it everywhere. At some point a few months back, I was watching a DVD of a comedy series and came to the conclusion that its distinctiveness was all about the way in which expectations about dialogue act type were generated and violated. Then I came to the conclusion that I was watching comedy too hard and had to give up for the day and go and do some work instead. However, despite the dangers, comedy is a very useful tool in explaining linguistics, as this engaging book makes clear. In Understanding Language Through Humor (Cambridge UP, 2011), Stanley Dubinsky and Chris Holcomb draw upon a rich set of examples, acquired over many years’ diligent study, that illuminate every level of organisation from phonetics up to discourse structure, as well as covering some topics that cut across these boundaries (acquisition, cross-cultural misunderstanding, and the nature of communication in general). But as well as being systematic, it’s also very relatable – it tends to underscore the idea that, for all the complicated terminology, linguistics is essentially the study of something we all do and of capabilities that we all have. In this interview, we talk about how the book came to be written, and how it can be and is being used. We see how the nature of humour changes as we go through the levels of linguistic organisation; and we explore how personal experience informs our language awareness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language