Senior members of the Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication present their
research during the
OAP DAG 2015 (‘Oud Amsterdams Peil’)
Friday 11 December, 2015
Current and former members and students alike are cordially invited to join us for this
informal and festive event, which will be rounded off with drinks.
The OAP dag will take place in room 560 of the P.C. Hoofthuis, Spuistraat 134, 1012 VB
Amsterdam, and will start at 13.30.
Programme:
13.30-13.45
Room open, coffee/tea
13.45-14.20
Eveline Feteris
Prototypical argumentative patterns in the justification of judicial
decisions.
14.20-14.55
Hella Olbertz
The loss of the null-subject in Brazilian Portuguese in comparison to
Romance ‒ a functional view
14.55-15.30
Enoch Aboh
The emergence of linguistic competence in multi-language context
15.30-15.50
Break, coffee/tea
15.50-16.25
Olga Fischer
The role played by analogy in processes of language change: The case
of English ‘HAVE to’ compared to Spanish ‘tener que’
16.25-17.00
Gerard Steen
Constraints on discourse variation: in search of a genre model
17.00-
Drinks (third floor Bungehuis)
Abstracts:
Eveline Feteris
Prototypical argumentative patterns in the justification of judicial decisions.
In my paper I give a pragma-dialectical analysis of prototypical patterns in the justification of judicial
decisions. I clarify the nature and rationale for the argumentative patterns from the perspective of
the institutional function of legal justification and I distinguish different argumentative patterns in
clear cases and hard cases in the justification of judicial decisions.
Hella Olbertz
The loss of the null-subject in Brazilian Portuguese in comparison to Romance
‒ a functional view
From a typological perspective, null subject languages can be subdivided into two different types. In
the first type, where the person-number marking on the verb is more informative than a pronoun
would be, the corresponding verbal marking is fully referential, and the occurrence of a subject
pronoun would be a case of “co-reference”. In the second type, where the verbal person-number
morphology carries less information than a subject pronoun would, the verb expresses “agreement”,
more specifically “contextual agreement” because, when not specified, the identity of the subject
referent has to be retrieved from the context (Hengeveld 2012). Contextual agreement can develop
into “syntactic agreement”, in which case the verbal person-number morphology is no longer
referential by itself and the subject pronoun has become obligatory, as is the case in French. Other
Romance national languages, such as Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, are, to varying degrees, of the
contextual agreement type. Brazilian Portuguese, however, makes use of subject pronouns to such a
degree that it seems to be more akin to French than to the other Romance languages (Kaiser 2009;
Marins & Soares da Silva 2012). Starting from contrastive corpus analysis (Cresti & Moneglia 2005;
Gonçalvez 2007), I aim at describing and explaining the position of the Brazilian Portuguese
agreement pattern in relation to contextual and syntactic agreement in Romance.
Enoch Aboh
The emergence of linguistic competence in multi-language context
Chomsky’s (1965:3) view of the ideal speaker-listener suggests that children replicate their native
language(s) faithfully. This view, once commonly adopted in acquisition studies, lacks plausibility in a
globalized world with a growing number of polyglots. In this talk, I argue for a multi-language
approach to acquisition that integrates the dynamic multilingual character of our contemporary
world.
During acquisition, children are exposed to heterogeneous inputs from which they learn to master
multiple linguistic sub-systems allowing communication in the community. This learning partly results
from a basic cognitive process: recombination. It enables learners to merge linguistic features
selected from the inputs into new variants. The outputs of recombination are new hybrid linguistic
constructs which embed selected features from the varieties feeding the inputs. These new
constructs in turn populate the inputs of new generations. Language inputs are always varied and in
flux. This leads me to postulate that: (i) learners of a community do not derive identical monolithic
grammars from the inputs; (ii) each learner internalizes multiple (sub)-grammars. These assumptions
subsume variation across speakers, as observed in sociolinguistics. Yet, cross-linguistic tendencies
and learning biases evidenced by typological and acquisition studies suggest that learning by
recombination is constrained. We therefore face a paradox: speakers vary enormously, but language
variation is constrained. I address this paradox by contrasting domains of grammar that appear to be
immune to recombination with domains that seem to be vulnerable during acquisition and might be
prone to variation.
Olga Fischer
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The role played by analogy in processes of language change: The case of English ‘HAVE to’ compared
to Spanish ‘tener que’
In line with similar developments involving a possessive verb like HAVE, where HAVE in combination
with an infinitive (or a past participle) grammaticalized from a full verb into an auxiliary, it has usually
been taken for granted that English HAVE-to represents a regular case of grammaticalization, i.e. the
grammaticalization proceeds along a path of pragmatic-semantic change with bleaching of
possession first, followed by the development of obligative colouring later, while the word order
change and the syntactic re-bracketing are seen as the final stage of the development. To come to
an understanding of what happened in this process, we need to look not only at the construction
itself undergoing change, but also at the synchronic circumstances under which the change takes
place, i.e. at other constructions that may have played a(n analogical) role in the process. In order to
find out to whether the factors found to have been relevant for the English development can in any
way be generalized, I will briefly compare it to the Spanish development of TENER que. This verb too
developed from a possessive verb into a modal auxiliary expressing obligation. I hope to show that
the synchronic analogical circumstances play as great a role in Spanish as they did in English, showing
that they are as, if not more pertinent, than the mechanism of grammaticalization to explain what
has happened in each case.
Gerard Steen
Constraints on discourse variation: in search of a genre model
The ACLC program does not only look at language but also at communication, which in this text will
be referred to as ‘discourse’. Discourse can be seen as a second-order semiotic modeling system
which is based on the first-order semiotic modeling system of language. This double layering
suggests two fundamental assumptions:
(a) discourse has its own level of organization, generating text-in-code-in-context,
which can be described by means of a genre model for discourse;
(b) discourse is also always reflected in language use at the same time, the first-order
semiotic structures and functions on which discourse is based.
Both of these assumptions can form part of the ACLC research program for discourse. The
second assumption creates a bridge between the discourse side and the language side of the
complete ACLC program.
In parallel with the ACLC research program for the language blueprint, a research program in
discourse can aim to reconstruct a general model for discourse that underlies discourse variation.
It can do so by developing a model of genre. This model can comprise all naturally occurring
discourse events as structural-functional units involving text-in-code-in-context that can be
recognized and used by participants in a discourse community. The focus on discourse via
genre enables profiling one side of the special nature of the ACLC research institute. It also
enables application and valorization of our research via interdisciplinary work with the cognitive and
social sciences.
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