The Cognitive Representation of Speech


Book Description

The 32 main papers, taken together, provide a comprehensive review of speech research by scientists who have made leading contributions to our understanding of the topics discussed. The papers are assembled within a coherent, problem-oriented structure.







Language Diversity and Cognitive Representations


Book Description

Significant new developments in brain activity research have revived the debate on the universality of language and its neural basis. Within this debate, the question of language diversity and its implications for cognition remains central and controversial. It is here investigated in an original multimodal approach, covering various aspects of cross-linguistic variation, differences between spoken, signed and drum languages, between normal speech and pathological speech, and also between language and music, as revealed in electric brain activity associated with language processing. The various contributions (linguistic, anthropological, psychological and neurophysical) on the nature and status of variation and invariants in language provides evidence for complex interactions between language-specific processes and general cognitive faculties. This overview of some recent trends in cognitive linguistics opens up a promising new research area in the humanities as well as in the cognitive sciences.




Speech and Thought Representation in English


Book Description

Main description: The author argues for a new, linguistically grounded typology of speech and thought representation in English from a cognitive-linguistic perspective. Apart from direct and indirect speech/thought, the types described include the character-oriented free indirect and the narrator-oriented distancing indirect type, and two subjectified types in which reporting clauses such as I think function as hedges.







Perspectives on Mental Representation


Book Description

Originally published in 1982, the editors felt that their field was clearly in need of explanatory accounts for many different areas. This volume presents statements of the status of research in several areas by scholars at the forefront of the discipline. It tries at the same time to juxtapose theoretical and experimental perspectives in order to display some of the major lines of tension in the field. Divided into 5 parts it covers: Theoretical Perspectives; Experimental Studies in Processing; Neuropsychological Studies in Processing; Studies in Development; followed by Commentary on some specific chapters.




Speech and Thought Representation in English


Book Description

This book aims to provide a new, linguistically grounded typology of speech and thought representation in English on the basis of the systematic study of deictic, syntactic and semantic properties of authentic examples drawn from literary as well as non-literary sources. In the area beyond direct and indirect speech or thought, ‘free indirect discourse’ has often been implicitly treated as a residual category that can accommodate anything that is neither one nor the other. This book takes a fresh look at the evidence in the area of deixis, particularly through a close study of pronoun and proper name use, and proposes to distinguish the more character-oriented free indirect type from a narrator-oriented ‘distancing’ indirect type, which is grammatically wholly structured from the narrator’s deictic standpoint. Unlike free indirect representations, which coherently represent the character’s viewpoint, the distancing indirect type sees narrators appropriating character discourse for their own purposes, which may for instance be ironic. The distinctions thus drawn shed new light on the much debated ‘dual voice’ approach to free indirect discourse. Included in the scope of this book are subjectified uses of clauses such as I think, which no longer primarily construe a cognition process, but rather come to function as hedges. Such speaker-encoding uses are argued to involve an interpersonal type of structure, not based on complementation, whereas the non-subjectified cases receive an interclausal complementation analysis which does not have recourse to the problematic notion of ‘reporting verb’. This monograph is mainly of interest to researchers and graduate students interested in the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of reported speech viewed from a constructional perspective.




Event Representation in Language and Cognition


Book Description

Event Representation in Language and Cognition examines new research into how the mind deals with the experience of events. Empirical research into the cognitive processes involved when people view events and talk about them is still a young field. The chapters by leading experts draw on data from the description of events in spoken and signed languages, first and second language acquisition, co-speech gesture and eye movements during language production, and from non-linguistic categorization and other tasks. The book highlights newly found evidence for how perception, thought, and language constrain each other in the experience of events. It will be of particular interest to linguists, psychologists, and philosophers, as well as to anyone interested in the representation and processing of events.




Partitioned Representations


Book Description

One: Nuts and Bolts.- 1. Mental Representation.- Symbolism: The Classical Paradigm.- Cracks in the Symbolic Paradigm.- Connectionism: The Other Paradigm.- Methods of Models.- Assessing Theories of Mental Representation.- 2. Partitioned Representations.- General Overview.- The Contents of Spaces.- Parochial Reasoning.- Primary Contexts.- Partitioned Semantics.- Coherence.- Consolidation.- Secondary Contexts.- A Typology of Spaces.- Where Partitioned Representations Get Their Power.- Summary and Conclusions.- 3. Language: Process and Structure.- A Simple Philosophy of Language.- Linguistic Explanation.- The Process of Language Understanding.- Linguistic Evidence for Mental Representations.- 4. Three Levels of Language Processing.- Parochial Processing.- Distribution.- Contextualization.- An Example Discourse.- Conclusions.- Two: Studies in Language.- 5. Pedro's Donkey and Oedipus's Mother.- Some Common Parochial Linguistic Processes.- Some Common Cases of Distribution.- Interaction of Distribution and Parochial Processes.- Summary and Conclusions.- 6. Satisfying Presuppositions in Discourse.- The Problem of Presupposition.- Presupposition and Parochial Processing.- What Happens in Complex Sentences?.- Conclusions.- 7. Space Frogs and Henry Ford.- Linguistic Evidence for Contextualization.- The Semantic Contributions of Space Cues.- Summary.- 8. Temporal Aspect.- Reference Time: Temporal Perspective.- Semantics and Construction.- Reference Time: Contextualization.- The Case of the Present Perfect.- Conclusion.- 9. General Conclusions.- An Assessment of Partitioned Representations.- Prospectus.- The Importance of Partitioned Representations.- Appendices: Formal Models.- 10. A Logic of Partitioned Representations.- The Syntax of PR.- Rules of Inference for PR.- The Semantics of PR.- Soundness.- Conclusions.- 11. Generalized Natural Deduction.- Generalized Natural Deduction.- Time and Action.- Frames.- Summary and Conclusions.- 12. A Computational Model.- The Design of Spaceprobe.- Customizing Digestion.- Restructuring Rules for Distribution.- Handling Queries.- Language Understanding in Spaceprobe.- Summary.- References.- Author Index.




Language Diversity and Cognitive Representations


Book Description

Significant new developments in brain activity research have revived the debate on the universality of language and its neural basis. Within this debate, the question of language diversity and its implications for cognition remains central and controversial. It is here investigated in an original multimodal approach, covering various aspects of cross-linguistic variation, differences between spoken, signed and drum languages, between normal speech and pathological speech, and also between language and music, as revealed in electric brain activity associated with language processing. The various contributions (linguistic, anthropological, psychological and neurophysical) on the nature and status of variation and invariants in language provides evidence for complex interactions between language-specific processes and general cognitive faculties. This overview of some recent trends in cognitive linguistics opens up a promising new research area in the humanities as well as in the cognitive sciences.