Presentations

Abstract

The central niche for language use is social interaction: this is the context in which language is
learned, most heavily used, and doubtless evolved. Interactive language use has well defined
properties which look strongly universal. Amongst these is turn-taking or the rapid alternation
of speakers. Investigations of turn-taking reveal rather stable temporal parameters, with
alternating short bursts of speech (averaging c. 2 secs), separated by modal gaps of only 200 ms
or less. Given the latencies involved in language production (c. 600 ms for a single word, 1500
ms for a simple clause) this implies an overlap in comprehension and production by the
addressee towards the end of the incoming turn, an implication confirmed by neuroimaging
and other measures. Such multitasking must involve a high cognitive load. Looking at the
development of turn-taking in infancy and childhood, one can see relatively quick responses in
the early months slowing down as ever more complex language has to be crammed into short
turns, with children struggling to meet adult norms even in middle childhood. The intensive
processing required by turn-taking suggests it might be a kind of “fossil” with temporal
properties inherited from our primate ancestors before complex vocal language gradually
developed, filling short turns with increasingly complex structures. A glance across our primate
cousins gives some reasons to think this is a plausible scenario.

Abstract

This paper approaches the issues surrounding the relationship between language and music tangentially, by arguing that the language sciences have largely misconstrued the nature of their object of study – when language is correctly repositioned as a quite elaborate cultural superstructure resting on two biological columns as it were, the relationship to music looks rather different.

Abstract

This paper addresses the phenomenon of single turns, even single turn-constructional units, that perform multiple speech acts or social actions. The paper reviews the main approaches - ''indirect speech acts'' as treated in linguistic pragmatics, and the ''vehicle'' approach as in conversation analysis - and argues that both of these are inadequate. Instead a solution is sought in the hierarchical nature of action planning, and it is shown that this approach sheds considerable light on multi-action turns. The simplest cases involve pre-sequences, but more complex cases involving extended ''projects'' by participants are also reviewed. It seems that there is no principled limit to the number of actions that a single turn-construcional unit can perform - certainly cases of up to four such actions can be found. The implications for speech act theory and conversation analysis are spelled out.

Abstract

Recursion has become a lamp for the linguistic moths – it has become an obsession far from the centre of what linguistics should be focused on. It plays a limited role in the structure of many languages, indefinite recursion is of course never actually displayed, and what is exemplified could therefore always be modeled in practice by finite state devices. There are many more central puzzles to focus on, like the diverse specific structures mapped on strings, rather than the mechanisms that generate unstructured string-sets. Embedded clauses have been the main focus of interest, but it is noteworthy that (a) many languages offer very limited embedding possibilities; (b) some which do have embedding effectively cap embedding at one deep; (c) almost any such embeddings can be paraphrased by parataxis (strings of adjoined clauses as in veni, vidi, vici). Parataxis is why many languages can lack embedded clauses of different kinds without any loss of expressive power: the expressive power is always present in the pragmatics whether or not it is there in the syntax. To make the point that expressive power lies in the pragmatics, I’ll examine centre-embedding in interactive discourse. Centre-embedding has the virtue that it is easily distinguished from parataxis – which is not the case for edge-recursion in many languages. Centre-embedding in clauses is effectively capped at two deep in all spoken languages (very occasionally three deep in written), apparently by memory and parsing limitations. But centre-embedding in interactive discourse can break this barrier, and does so routinely. The explanation for this is actually unclear, but the phenomenon would seem to show the advantages of distributed cognition. Rather than thinking of recursion as the performance-limited “externalization” of an individual competence, the discourse phenomena suggest that interactive language usage, where centre-embedding is hyper-trophied, is the natural home base and the ultimate source of complex recursion in the grammatical system.