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Within the study of language and social interaction, in which this book is situated, the concept of “accountability”—including related concepts, such as “account” or “motive,” “accounting,” and “being accountable”—has been of longstanding interest in terms of how interactants in both ordinary and organizational contexts manage their image or reputation, as well as how they achieve mutual understanding. However, these concepts are polysemous, with different senses being rather dramatic, such as accountability as “moral responsibility” and accountability as “intelligibility.” Even today this fact is not always remembered or fully recognized or appreciated by scholars, which has arguably slowed the development of these concepts. This volume brings together a collection of novel, conversation-analytic studies addressing accountability, with the goal of re-exposing its multiple senses, reiterating their interrelationships and, in doing so, breaking new conceptual ground and exposing new pathways for future research. Chapters advance our understanding of central theoretical issues, including turn taking, sequence and preference organization, repair, membership categorization, action formation and ascription, social solidarity and affiliation, and the relevance of context. Chapters range contextually, canvassing interactions between friends and family members, and during talk shows, broadcast news interviews, airline reservations, and medical visits. Chapters also range culturally, including English, Japanese, and Korean data.

This book offers both a naturalistic and critical theory of signs, minds, and meaning-in-the-world. It provides a reconstructive rather than deconstructive theory of the individual, one which both analytically separates and theoretically synthesizes a range of faculties that are often confused and conflated: agency (understood as a causal capacity), subjectivity (understood as a representational capacity), selfhood (understood as a reflexive capacity), and personhood (understood as a sociopolitical capacity attendant on being an agent, subject, or self). It argues that these facilities are best understood from a semiotic stance that supersedes the usual intentional stance. And, in so doing, it offers a pragmatism-grounded approach to meaning and mediation that is general enough to account for processes that are as embodied and embedded as they are articulated and enminded. In particular, while this theory is thereby focused on human-specific modes of meaning, it also offers a general theory of meaning, such that the agents, subjects and selves in question need not always, or even usually, map onto persons. And while this theory foregrounds agents, persons, subjects and selves, it does this by theorizing processes that often remain in the background of such otherwise erroneously individuated figures: ontologies (akin to culture, but generalized across agentive collectivities), interaction (not only between people, but also between people and things, and anything outside or in-between), and infrastructure (akin to context, but generalized to include mediation at any degree of remove).

This book explores the consequences of Noam Chomsky’s conjecture that head movement is not part of the narrow syntax, the computational system which relates the lexicon to the interfaces. Unlike other treatments of the subject that discard the concept entirely, it retains the core intuition behind head movement and examines the extent to which it can be reformulated and rethought. The book argues that the current conception of syntax must accommodate a species of head movement, although this operation differs somewhat in technical detail and in empirical coverage from earlier understandings of it. It proposes that head movement is part of the narrow syntax and that it applies where the goal of an Agree relation is defective, in a sense that it defines, contending that the theoretical status of head movement is very similar—in fact identical in various ways—to that of XP-movement. Thus head movement, like XP-movement, should be regarded as part of narrow syntax exactly to the extent that XP movement should be. If one aspect of minimalist theorizing is to eliminate unnecessary distinctions, then the book’s argument can be seen as eliminating the distinction between “heads” and “phrases” in relation to internal merge (and therefore reducing the distinctions currently made between internal and external merge).

Analogy is a central component of language structure, language processing, and language change. This book addresses central questions about the form and acquisition of analogy in grammar. What patterns of structural similarity do speakers select as the basis for analogical extension? What types of items are particularly susceptible or resistant to analogical pressures? At what levels do analogical processes operate and how do processes interact? What formal mechanisms are appropriate for modeling analogy? What analogical processes are evident in language acquisition? Answers to these questions emerge from this book which is a synthesis of typological, experimental, computational, and developmental paradigms.

There was a tendency, in the nineteenth century, for Europeans to denigrate the customs of dark-skinned peoples, and to put forward the uninformed opinion that their languages were ‘primitive’. To counter this mistaken idea, the first pages of textbooks and the first lectures of freshman courses in linguistics have emphasised, as loud as was possible, that ‘no language spoken in the world today is primitive’ and then ‘that all languages are about equal in complexity’. But surely they are not all of exactly equal worth. The present volume is the first serious attempt to address this question, in a measured and scientific manner. It is intended for students of linguistics and, beyond that, for a wide general audience. In essence, it presents a succinct portrait of the discipline of linguistics, pared down to its essentials. I work on the principle that if something can be explained, it should be explainable in everyday language, which any intelligent person can understand, although of course a degree of concentration and thoughtfulness is required. The use of technical terms has been kept to a minimum. Examples are quoted from a wide range of languages; these have been chosen to be simple (although not simplified), avoiding additional complexities which are irrelevant to the point being made. The book will be accessible to anyone with an interest in how languages work.

Arguing over Texts presents a rhetorical method for analyzing how people disagree over the meaning of texts and how they attempt to reconcile those disagreements through argument. The book recovers and adapts a classification of recurring types of disagreement over textual meaning, invented by ancient Greek and Roman teachers of rhetoric: the interpretive stases. Drawing on the rhetorical works of Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and Hermogenes, the book devotes a chapter to each of the six interpretive stases, which classify issues concerning ambiguous words and phrases, definitions of terms, clashes between the text’s letter and its spirit, internal contradictions, applications of the text to novel cases, and the authority of the interpreter or the text itself. From the dispute over Phillis Wheatley’s allegedly self-racist poetry to the controversy over whether some of Abraham Lincoln’s letters provide evidence he was gay, the book offers examples from religion, politics, history, literary criticism, and law to illustrate that the interpretive stases can be employed to analyze debates over texts in virtually any sphere. In addition to its classical rhetorical foundation, the book draws on research from modern rhetorical theory and language science to elucidate the rhetorical, linguistic, and cognitive grounds for the argumentative construction of textual meaning. The method presented in this book thus advances scholars’ ability to examine the rhetorical dynamics of textual interpretation, to trace the evolution of textual meaning, and to explore how communities ground their beliefs and behaviors in texts.

This book tells the story of an encounter between two cultures: Contemporary theoretical linguistics and the cognitive neurosciences. The study of language within a biological context has been ongoing for more than fifty years. The development of neuroimaging technology offers new opportunities to enrich the “biolinguistic perspective” and extend it beyond an abstract framework for inquiry. As a theoretical linguist in the generative tradition and also a cognitive scientist schooled in the new imaging technology, the author is equipped to explore this. He examines what he calls the “hidden” revolution in contemporary science: The discovery that the number of possible grammars is not infinite and that their number is biologically limited. This radical but little-discussed change in the way we look at language, the author claims, will require us to rethink not just the fundamentals of linguistics and neurosciences but also our view of the human mind. He searches for neurobiological correlates of “the boundaries of Babel”—the constraints on the apparent chaotic variation in human languages—by using an original experimental design based on artificial languages. The author offers a critical overview of some of the fundamental results from linguistics over the last fifty years, in particular regarding syntax, then uses these essential aspects of language to examine two neuroimaging experiments in which he took part. He describes the two neuroimaging techniques used (positron emission topography and functional magnetic resonance imaging), but makes it clear that techniques and machines do not provide interesting data without a sound theoretical framework.

Causation is a topic of great interest to a number of different domains related to the study of natural language, from philosophy to cognitive ontology to argument structure. However, these domains have historically seen little interaction. This volume collects research from experts in the fields of linguistics, philosophy, and psychology, making explicit their assumptions and key questions, with the aim of arriving at a more sophisticated understanding both of how causal concepts are expressed in causal meanings and of how those meanings in turn are organized into structures. The research presented here addresses some of the most exciting current questions related to the way causation is expressed in grammatical structures, using data from both familiar and less familiar languages.

The book offers a new approach to the evolution of language, arguing for a two-step process, syntax first evolving as an auto-organizational process for the human conceptual apparatus (as a Language of Thought), and this language of thought being then externalized for communication, due to social selection pressures. The book first argues that, despite the routine use of language in communication, current use is not a failsafe guide to adaptive history. It points out the many difficulties of accounts that see language as having evolved for communication: its uniqueness among animal communication systems and its structural properties, notably decoupling that makes a tool for deception in contradiction with all views on the evolution of communication, making it unlikely that it specifically evolved for communication. It highlights the specificity of human cognition relative to animal communication and notably the specific richness of the human conceptual apparatus. It proposes that syntax (on a minimalist view, Merge) evolved owing to a self-organizational process of the human conceptual apparatus. The last step, the externalization of language for communication, was due to the political organization of human hunter-gatherer groups, along the lines of the Argumentative Theory of Reasoning. The evolutionary processes involved are heterogeneous in keeping with the contemporary Extended Synthesis.

This book brings together researchers with cognitive-scientific and literary backgrounds to present innovative research in all three variations on the possible interactions between literary studies and cognitive science. The tripartite structure of the volume reflects a more ambitious conception of what cognitive approaches to literature are and could be than is usually encountered, and thus aims both to map out and to advance the field. The first section corresponds to what most people think of as ‘cognitive poetics’ or ‘cognitive literary studies’: the study of literature by literary scholars drawing on cognitive-scientific methods, findings, and/or debates to yield insights into literature. The second section demonstrates that literary scholars need not only make use of cognitive science to study literature, but can also, in a reciprocally interdisciplinary manner, use a cognitively informed perspective on literature to offer benefits back to the cognitive sciences. Finally, the third section, ‘literature in cognitive science’, showcases some of the ways in which literature can be a stimulating object of study and a fertile testing ground for theories and models, not only to literary scholars but also to cognitive scientists, who here engage with some key questions in cognitive literary studies with the benefit of their in-depth scientific knowledge and training.

This book, which offers a theory of human communication that is both formalized through logic and empirically validated through experimental data and clinical studies, argues that communication is a cooperative activity in which two or more agents together, consciously and intentionally, construct the meaning of their interaction. In true communication (which the book distinguishes from the mere transmission of information), all the actors must share a set of mental states. The book takes a cognitive perspective, investigating communication not from the viewpoint of an external observer (as is the practice in linguistics and the philosophy of language) but from within the mind of the individual. It examines communicative interaction through the notion of behavior and dialogue games, which structure both the generation and the comprehension of the communication act (either language or gesture). The book describes both standard communication and nonstandard communication (which includes deception, irony, and “as-if” statements). Failures are analyzed in detail, with possible solutions explained. The book investigates communicative competence in both evolutionary and developmental terms, tracing its emergence from hominids to homo sapiens and defining the stages of its development in humans from birth to adulthood. It correlates this theory with the neurosciences, and explains the decay of communication that occurs both with different types of brain injury and with Alzheimer’s disease.

This book examines the issue of competing motivations in grammar and language use. The term “competing motivations” refers to the conflicting factors that shape the content and form of grammatical rules and which speakers and addressees need to contend with when expressing themselves, or when trying to comprehend messages. For example, there are on-going competitions between the speaker's interests and the addressee's needs, or between constraints imposed by grammar and those imposed by online processing. These competitions impact a wide variety of systems, including case marking, agreement, and word order, politeness forms, lexical choices, and the position of relative clauses. The twenty-one studies are mostly based on English data but evidence from many languages is also discussed. In addition to grammar and usage in adult language, many of the chapters analyze data from first- and second-language acquisition as well; others probe into the motivations that drive historical change.

This is a book about language as a species-typical trait of humans. Linguists customarily describe it as an extremely exceptional capacity, even when compared with the biological endowment of closely related species, and this is the source of the many quarrels that exist around the aim of explaining its evolutionary origins. This book argues that language is not so exceptional after all, as according to the text it is just the human version of a rather common and conservative organic system that they refer to as the Central Computational Complex. The book argues that inter-specific variation of this organ is restricted to (i) accessible memory resources, and (ii) patterns of external connectivity, both being the result of perturbations in the system underlying its development. The book thus offers a fresh perspective on language as a naturally evolved phenomenon.

This book makes a significant contribution to sociolegal analysis and also represents a valuable contribution to conceptual metaphor theory. By utilising the case of copyright in a digital context it explains the role that metaphor plays when the law is dealing with technological change, displaying both ‘conceptual path dependence’, normative implications of reusing already established concepts for new phenomena, as well as what is called non-legislative developments in the law. The analysis draws from conceptual studies of ‘property’ in intellectual property, and shows how the property regime of copyright is the projection of an older regime of control onto a new set of digital social relations. Moreover, through an analysis of the concept of ‘copy’ in copyright as well as the Swedish court case against the founders of the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay, the author shows the historical and embodied dependence of digital phenomena in law, and the significance of metaphorical framing (for example, was The Pirate Bay a ‘platform’, a ‘storage service’ or a ‘bulletin board’?). The contribution is thereby relevant for how to understand the conceptual and regulatory dynamics of a multitude of contemporary sociodigital phenomena in addition to copyright and file-sharing. On an overarching level, it is here argued that the conceptual battles to define the Internet, as well as the implications of digital development, are significant battles for the role of law in society. There are conceptions in, and underlying, both law and digital architecture—that is, in the code.

The Construal of Spatial Meaning: Windows into Conceptual Space explores the construal and expression of various aspects of the SPACE domain. Within the broad framework of Cognitive Linguistics, the research reported probes the interaction between language and cognition. We take linguistics to encompass both verbal and non-verbal communication systems and include metaphorical as well as literal forms of expression. Although the papers focus on the relation between physical and mental space as expressed in human communication, they cover a wide variety of research topics and reflect the multidisciplinary character of the study of space. Through the structure of this book the editors wish to convey to the reader the metaphor that the different approaches in the analysis of SPACE offer windows through which researchers are able to catch glimpses of ‘inner space’. An eye-tracking experiment shows eye movement to reflect spatiality during visualizations of both pictures and spoken scene descriptions. A study of a child shows how the development of linguistic communicative ability may be seen as a transition from pointing in physical space to pointing in mental spaces. A study of drawings based on verbal stimuli suggests that people are engaging in an imaginative embodied simulation of metaphorical motion. In one gesture study on route direction with blocked visibility, participants tend to use the dominant hand for referential aspects and the weak hand for self-orientational functions. In another, through gestures and body postures, a girl with the Patau syndrome extracts and conveys intricate information in communication situations. In yet another gesture study, speakers express lateral (left/right) direction in co-speech gestures when using next to to complement the linguistic spatial unit with unlexicalized locative information. An analysis of the motion situation distinguishes between primary and secondary figure and ground, and subdivides Talmy’s notion of Manner into manner of static existence and dynamic activity and makes Talmy’s telic Path dependent on autonomous resultant state situations. One cross-linguistic study offers experimental support for basic-level verbs of locomotion without making recourse to the loose notion of Manner, while another, in which German and French children describe motion events, supports the view that general cognitive factors and language-specific properties determine children’s construction of the semantics of space when encoding Manner and Path. In a usage-based study of children’s acquisition of Dutch spatial adjectives it is suggested that children, who often use spatial adjectives to express contrast, store specific adjective–noun/object pairings from the input and start by reproducing them with the same communicative function as in the language they hear around them. A corpus-study of Danish directional adverbs shows how the forms can be described and explained as different ways of profiling a dynamic motion event in a basic Path event frame. A construction-grammar analysis of some complex predicate constructions reveals systematic differences between English and Spanish in the organization of the argument structure, and argues that fundamental typological distinctions should be based on the relative importance of constructional and lexical constraints. In a corpus-based study of road, path, way it is shown that both non-metaphorical and metaphorical instances of these terms are closely connected with people’s embodied experiences of travel through space along paths, roads, or ways. The last paper, investigating negation, opens up a window to the ‘inner space’ by suggesting that antonyms are organized into conceptual spaces. ‘Not’ is a degree modifier operating on the configurational construals in SPACE. In combination with BOUNDED antonyms it operates on the boundary and bisects a spatial structure, while with UNBOUNDED antonyms it modifies the UNBOUNDED SCALE structure and evokes a range on the scale in SPACE, like ‘fairly’.

The continuation of an expression is a portion of its surrounding context. This book proposes and defends the continuation hypothesis: that the meaning of a natural language expression can depend on its own continuation (it can denote a function on its surrounding context). Part I develops a continuation‐based theory of scope and quantificational binding. Taking inspiration from the theory of computer programming languages, and unlike other accounts of scope, continuations provide fine‐grained control over the order in which expressions are evaluated (processed). This leads to a principled yet nuanced explanation for sensitivity to order in scope‐related phenomena such as scope ambiguity, crossover, superiority, reconstruction, negative polarity licensing, dynamic anaphora, and donkey anaphora. Throughout Part I, concrete, explicit formal analyses are presented in a novel ‘tower’ format, which is designed to be easy to learn and easy to use, with diagrams, derivations, and detailed motivation and explanation. Part II develops an innovative substructural logic for reasoning about continuations. This enables an analysis of the notoriously challenging compositional semantics of adjectives such as “same” in terms of parasitic scope and recursive scope. In a separate investigation, certain cases of ellipsis are treated as anaphora to a continuation, leading to a new explanation for a subtype of sluicing known as sprouting. Attention is given throughout the book to the formal and computational properties of the analyses. Taken together, the empirical case studies support the conclusion that any complete and adequate theory of natural language meaning must recognize continuations as an essential explanatory element.

Language is a hallmark of the human species; the flexibility and unbounded expressivity of our linguistic abilities is unique in the biological world. In this book, Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater argue that to understand this astonishing phenomenon, we must consider how language is created: moment by moment, in the generation and understanding of individual utterances; year by year, as new language learners acquire language skills; and generation by generation, as languages change, split, and fuse through processes of cultural evolution. Christiansen and Chater propose a revolutionary new framework for understanding the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, offering an integrated theory of how language creation is intertwined across these multiple timescales. Christiansen and Chater argue that mainstream generative approaches to language do not provide compelling accounts of language evolution, acquisition, and processing. Their own account draws on important developments from across the language sciences, including statistical natural language processing, learnability theory, computational modeling, and psycholinguistic experiments with children and adults. Christiansen and Chater also consider some of the major implications of their theoretical approach for our understanding of how language works, offering alternative accounts of specific aspects of language, including the structure of the vocabulary, the importance of experience in language processing, and the nature of recursive linguistic structure.

Language did not evolve only in the distant past. Our shared understanding of the meanings of words is ever-changing, and we make conscious, rational decisions about which words to use and what to mean by them every day. Applying Charles Darwin's theory of “unconscious artificial selection” to the evolution of linguistic conventions, this book suggests a new, evolutionary explanation for the rich, complex, and continually reinvented meanings of our words. The choice of which words to use and in which sense to use them is both a “selection event” and an intentional decision, making Darwin's account of artificial selection a particularly compelling model of the evolution of words. After drawing an analogy between the theory of domestication offered by Darwin and the evolution of human languages and cultures, the book applies its analytical framework to the question of what makes humans unique and how they became that way. It incorporates insights from David Lewis's Convention, Brian Skyrms's Signals, and Kim Sterelny's Evolved Apprentice, all while emphasizing the role of deliberate human choice in the crafting of language over time. The model casts humans' cultural and linguistic evolution as an integrated, dynamic process, with results that reach into all corners of our private lives and public character.

The book presents new and stimulating approaches to the study of language evolution and considers their implications for future research. Leading scholars from linguistics, primatology, anthropology, and cognitive science consider how language evolution can be understood by means of inference from the study of linked or analogous phenomena in language, animal behaviour, genetics, neurology, culture, and biology. The introduction shows how these approaches can be interrelated and deployed together through their use of comparable forms of inference and the similar conditions they place on the use of evidence.

This book makes a case for a gradualist, adaptationist (Darwinian) approach to the evolution of syntax/grammar, subject to natural selection. It provides a specific framework for studying the evolution of syntax, with postulates that are at the right level of granularity to allow a synergy among the fields of evolutionary biology, theoretical syntax, typology, neuroscience, and genetics. This book pursues an internal reconstruction of the stages of grammar based on the syntactic theory associated with Chomskyan Minimalism, to arrive at very specific, testable hypotheses, which are corroborated by an abundance of theoretically analyzed ‘living fossils’ for each postulated stage, drawn from a variety of languages. What also distinguishes this approach is that it shows how these fossil structures do not just coexist side-by-side with more modern structures, but that they are in fact literally built into the very foundation of more complex structures, leading to quirks and complexities that best befit a gradualist evolutionary scenario. Importantly, the postulated stages clearly reveal the selection pressures that would have driven the progression through stages. By reconstructing a particular path along which syntax evolved, this approach is able to shed light on the crucial properties of language design itself, as well as on the major parameters of crosslinguistic variation. As a result, this reconstruction can be meaningfully correlated with the hominin timeline, as well as with the quickly accruing genetic evidence.