Syllabus Language and Social Cognition 2013/2014 Fall Term CEU CogSci Anne Tamm
COURSE SYLLABUS
LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL COGNITION
Instructor:
Anne Tamm, PhD
Department of Cognitive Science
Central European University
Fall term 2013/2014
MA, PhD
2 credits (4 ECTS credits)
standard prerequisites for CogSci Phd program admission,
and for any other cross-listing program admission
Course level:
Credits:
Pre-requisites:
Course e-learning site:
Office hours:
http://e-learning.ceu.hu/course/view.php?id=1882
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Venue:
Time:
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Mondays after class meeting
(i.e. after15:10, Frankel Leo 30-34, room 206)
Tuesdays 11:30-12:30 Hattyúház, room 416
any time by prior email appointment TammA@ceu.hu
Frankel Leo 30-34. Room 206.
Mondays from 13:30 till 15:10
Course Description
Humans are special in having a communication system that employs complex
language(s) and advanced social cognition. This course offers an introduction to current
research on how these advanced human capacities interact. Language is discussed as a
cognitive ability as well as a central feature of human social interaction. During the
meetings we discuss how the prominent models and theories of language explain
linguistic phenomena that relate to social cognition. What is universal, what is language
specific? How are our linguistic concepts and categories connected to social cognitive
categories and capacities? How do these two powerful cognitive abilities feed into each
other? We will discuss linguistic phenomena from known and exotic languages that, via
their special link to social cognition, inform us about how the social mind works. The
linguistic topics include evidentiality, generics, duals, possessives, causation, numbermeasure-mass-count phenomena, negation, case, transitivity, and verbs. The social
cognitive topics that are related to them include ostensive communication, reputation
maintaining, gossip, epistemic vigilance, Theory of Mind, joint action, norms and values,
perspective taking, empathy and the perception of self. The course will also introduce
methods, resources and tools (surveys, experiments, databases, corpora) that help us
clarify the relationships between social cognitive and linguistic phenomena.
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Syllabus Language and Social Cognition 2013/2014 Fall Term CEU CogSci Anne Tamm
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
ü
ü
ü
ü
Identify areas where language and social cognition interact
Relate linguistic phenomena to social cognitive ones
Use the sources discussed in the course
Perform data analysis of social cognitive phenomena in language by means of
tools and methods learned during the course
ü Critically discuss the place of social cognition in competing theories in linguistics
Course Requirements
(1) Course participation (20% of the final grade). The points for this assignment are
awarded on the basis of regular contribution to the class activities. Bonus points can
be obtained by (a) written comments on the presentations of co-students and (b) by
contributing a slide with a comment or question by Monday 10 a.m. before class
meeting.
(2) Mid-course presentation (30% of the final grade). The grade for the presentation is
awarded along the dimensions defined by the first three learning outcomes identified
above. The presentation should demonstrate that the student is able to identify an
empirical area where language and social cognition interact and to relate a linguistic
phenomenon to a social cognitive phenomenon (e.g., values in social cognition and
prepositions in a language, gossip and evidentials). For this pairing of a linguistic and
social cognitive phenomenon, the presentation should demonstrate the ability to use at
least one source discussed in the course to identify relevant data (e.g., the CHILDES
database, the WALS database).
(3) Course paper (50% of the final grade). The formal requirement for the paper is 4000
words. The grade/points for the paper is/are awarded along the five learning outcomes
identified above. In the paper, the student is expected to undertake the linguistic
analysis of social cognitive phenomena in language and critically discuss the place of
social cognition in a linguistic theory. In addition to improving the presented material,
the paper is expected to demonstrate that the student can perform data analysis by
means of tools and methods learned during the course, for instance, a Surveymonkey
survey.
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Syllabus Language and Social Cognition 2013/2014 Fall Term CEU CogSci Anne Tamm
COURSE SCHEDULE
1. September 16, Monday.
Language and social cognition: specifically human abilities
Animals are much like us humans. Birds can express themselves by sound
sequences following certain rules, i.e., syntax, and are able to voice signals to
create new realities in their relationships. Bees are able to transfer meaning in a
structured way to conspecifics and thereby to contribute to the collective
knowledge. Dogs can understand the connection between sound and meaning.
The coupling of language-like elements––meaning, sound and syntax––in these
instances display several combinations. But differently from humans, these
elements are never simultaneously present. The second major difference
compared to humans is that each instance of combination is limited to a different
and highly specific social task. Meaning and structure are connected to contribute
to collective benefit, sounds are combined according to syntax to assert the
magnitude of one’s presence to conspecifics, and sounds are matched with
meanings in order to obey.
Humans are unique both in terms of the number of linguistic relationships and the
social functions that can be performed by them. Firstly, we have a communication
system that captures meaning, sound and syntax and thus gives evidence of more
possibilities of combination between levels of linguistic representation. A basic
set of human linguistic representations and interfaces between them consists of
three representations, phonological, syntactic, and semantic structures, each of
them connected with each other via an interface. A simple figure adapted from
Jackendoff illustrates a basic set of human linguistic representations and
interfaces between them, Figure 1.
Figure 1. Basic human linguistic representations and interfaces
In this basic set, there are three interfaces between three types of representations.
Humans share the interface between the phonological and syntactic structures
with birds, the interface between syntactic and semantic structures with bees, and
the interface between phonological and semantic structures with dogs. But the
relationship between social cognition and linguistic capabilities of humans is
unique. The difference between humans and animals is in the more complex
structure of interfaces in the latter case and in the ability of humans to use their
language to teach new social skills and values. Humans also engage in complex
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Syllabus Language and Social Cognition 2013/2014 Fall Term CEU CogSci Anne Tamm
social interactions that demonstrate and require particularly highly developed
social cognitive abilities. The intricate symbiotic system between language and
social cognition determines what we think about ourselves or others, how we
pursue individual and common goals and how we manage ourselves and our
relationships to others. Unlike other animals, whose linguistic-social functional
pairings are rather simple, humans combine the linguistic representational abilities
of bees, birds and dogs in the examples with more types of social functions. As a
result, we can accomplish much more than obeying, contributing to the collective
good, attracting a mate and setting boundaries on a territory.
The complexity of social cognition and language has much to do with the fact that
human children have a longer period of immaturity than any other living beings.
Language is one of the principal channels of the transmission of social norms and
values during several sensitive periods. Language learning is in turn guided by
social cognition.
Reading:
t.b.a. - the mandatory and complete further reading list will be announced after
the first session in September, since it will be finalized on the basis of the research
topics of the students enrolling for the course.
You can expect the complete reading list to be available by the beginning of the
Fall term on September 16.
Further reading:
• Fitch, W. T. (2010) The Evolution of Language. Cambridge: /Cambridge
University Press/. Fitch, W. T. (2011). Unity and diversity in human language.
/Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B/366:376-388.
• Hauser, M. D., Chomsky, N. & Fitch, W. T. 2002. The faculty of language:
What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science 298:1569-79.
• Jackendoff, R. (2002). Foundations of Language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press.
• Jackendoff, R. (2007). Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental
Structure. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• Premack, D. G.; Woodruff, G. (1978). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of
mind?. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1 (4): 515–526.
• Tallerman M, Gibson K, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
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Syllabus Language and Social Cognition 2013/2014 Fall Term CEU CogSci Anne Tamm
2. September 23, Monday
The advantage of having a language
One of the advantages we have just because we have language is that we are able
to convey information that is beyond our deictic sphere and thus cannot be
perceived directly. Unlike animals that express or respond to their experience
directly, humans have a rich inventory of linguistic means that mediate socially
relevant knowledge but also reveal our social cognitive biases, either in
spontaneous expression or in the grammaticalization or lexicalization patterns.
We can let the others know (by a generic marker) whether we have learned the
knowledge in a community, and if it is an unquestionable norm or value, whether
we have figured it out on our own, or whether we are just repeating a phrase heard
from others (with an evidential). Bees cannot preface their information on food
source with the authority of elder bees knowing about a traditional food source, or
with caveats that they inferred the knowledge putting together multiple pieces of
evidence, and birds cannot explicitly state that they ‘quote’ another bird’s songs.
We can also indicate what we perceive is missing from a normal state of affairs by
negation. While a dog would learn to differentiate between specific imperative
and prohibitive expressions, it would not understand the negation of a proposition
in a narrative. Some languages can use a dual to signal a social or functional
relationship between two participants in a described event.
By language we can categorize the transmission of food from one participant to
another as taking or giving, and reflect the social perspective through different
verbs and argument structures as in give (a three-place predicate) and take (a
two-place predicate). Language gives a form to the social perspective on
participants of events, allowing an asymmetric encoding by means of optional
and obligatory arguments, arguments and adjuncts. In some morphologically
rich languages we can use case marking to indicate if the state of affairs
corresponds to our idea of sufficiently good and bad value, and we can indicate by
case marking if a sentence conveys knowledge that is to be learned or should be
tested first, because it expresses episodic experience. Unlike birds, we can settle
our territorial disputes by using possessives, which can be used in creating various
connections between entities but also emotional connections between
conspecifics. We can count the possessions and indicate their absence or
magnitude; moreover, we can talk about social norms and values as well in terms
of polarity and their magnitude.
In summary, humans display a link between social cognitive aspects in a way that
is linked to various aspects of language in a highly integrated way.
Reading:
t.b.a
Carey, S. The Origin of Concepts, Chapter 7 (Repeated for next class as well).
Carey's talk at CEU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBzQu1G1cuU
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Syllabus Language and Social Cognition 2013/2014 Fall Term CEU CogSci Anne Tamm
The Origin of Concepts-2.pdf
Croft, William. 2009. Toward a social cognitive linguistics. New
directions in cognitive linguistics, ed. Vyvyan Evans and Stéphanie
Pourcel, 395-420. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Everett, Daniel L. (2005). "Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in
Pirahã". Current Anthropology 46 (4): 621–646
Gumperz, J., S. Levinson eds. (1996), Rethinking Linguistic
Relativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Sapir, E. (1983), David G. Mandelbaum, ed., /Selected Writings of
Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and Personality/, University of
California Press
Traugott, E. C. 2003. From subjectification to intersubjectification. In Hickey, R.
(ed.) Motives for language change. Cambridge: CUP, 124-139.
Verhagen, A. 2005, Constructions of Intersubjectivity. Discourse, Syntax, and
Cognition. Oxford: OUP.
Whorf, B. (1956), John B. Carroll (ed.), ed., /Language, Thought,
and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf/, MIT Press
(_http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/632_)
.
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Syllabus Language and Social Cognition 2013/2014 Fall Term CEU CogSci Anne Tamm
3. September 30, Monday
Introduction to theoretical frameworks in linguistics
This meeting introduces the main theoretical frameworks in contemporary
linguistics and how they address social cognition. The lecture presents the
methodologies built up in formal-generative research and the achievements of the
functional-typological approaches and sketches how they can be connected to
experimentally verifiable questions.
While it is widely recognized that linguistic and social cognitive phenomena are
related, it is difficult to find clarity in the conceptual frameworks in linguistics.
How are these representations and processes integrated into the linguistic models
and theories? Functional linguistics addresses aspects such as values, norms,
perception of self and other and joint action, but it has no adequate conceptual
apparatus distinguishing between representational levels. Formal generative
linguistics deals with the theoretical relationships between the various levels but
fails to incorporate the growing evidence about mismatches in the mapping
between these levels and the variation stemming from social cognitive factors.
Functional linguists try to capture linguistic structures in terms of the functions
they carry out. Theories that are functional in nature thus by definition deal more
with the social function of linguistic expression. The prevailing belief in this
research tradition is that the two are intertwined; language has a function that is
intrinsically social. Many subdisciplines within linguistics that deal with variation
data, for instance, historical linguistics or sociolinguistics, are more often than not
conducted within the functional frameworks. However, there may be some core
social cognitive aspects that are separate from the core linguistic ones, and there
may be yet other aspects that are common. The fact is that all human languages
are still more similar to each other than any of the animal ‘languages’, despite the
knowledge that is being accumulated by field linguists about vast language
diversity.
The following questions present themselves:
Why are the differences and similarities patterned as they are cross-linguistically?
What can form a body of evidence for parallels between aspects of social
cognition and language variation?
Reading: t.b.a. Mandatory reading and complete further reading will be
announced in September.
Asudeh, A., M. Dalrymple and I. Toivonen 2008. Constructions with Lexical
Integrity: Templates as the Lexicon-Syntax Interface. Proceedings of LFG,
Sydney, July 2008.
Asudeh, A. 2006. Direct Compositionality and the Architecture of LFG. In M.
Butt, M. Dalrymple and T. H. King (eds.) Intelligent Linguistic Architectures:
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Syllabus Language and Social Cognition 2013/2014 Fall Term CEU CogSci Anne Tamm
Variations on themes by Ronald M. Kaplan. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications,
363–387.
Börjars, K. and J. Payne 2013. Dimensions of variation in the expression of
functional features: modelling definiteness in LFG. Talk at LFG Conference.
University of Debrecen, July 19, 2013.
Bresnan, J. (ed.) 1982. The mental representation of grammatical relations.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Bresnan, J. 2001. Lexical Functional Syntax. Oxford: Blackwell.
Butt, M, M. Dalrymple, and A. Frank.1997. An Architecture for Linking Theory in
LFG. In M. Butt and T. H. King, (eds.) Proceedings of the LFG97 Conference.
Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Cinque, G. 1999. Adverbs and functional heads: a cross-linguistic perspective.
Oxford: OUP.
Croft, W. 2009. Toward a social cognitive linguistics. In V. Evans & S. Pourcel
(eds.) New directions in cognitive linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 395420.
Croft, W. A. (2001). /Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in
Typological Perspective/. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dalrymple, M. 2001. Lexical Functional Grammar. New York: Academic Press.
Evans, V., B. Bergen & J. Zinken. (2007). The Cognitive Linguistics reader.
London: Equinox. (Introduction, pp. 2-36) .
Evans and Levinson 2009. The myth of language universals. Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 32:5, 429-492.
Everett, D. L. 2005. Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã
Current Anthropology 46, 4: 621–646.
The
second
attached
file
is
the
reading
for
next
week:
Fauconnier, G. (1997). Mappings in Thought and Language.
Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner (2003). The Way We Think. New York: Basic
Books.
Fillmore, J. (1982). Frame semantics. In Linguistics in the Morning Calm. Seoul,
Hanshin Publishing Co., 111-137.
Goldberg, A. (2006). Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in
Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hengeveld, K. & Mackenzie, L. 2008, Functional Discourse Grammar: A
typologically-based theory of language structure. Oxford: OUP.
Jackendoff, R. 2010. The Parallel Architecture and its Place in Cognitive Science,
in B. Heine and H. Narrog (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, 583605. Oxford: OUP.
Langacker, Ronald (1987, 1991). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. 2 vols.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Pinker, S. (1994), The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language,
Perennial.
Taylor, J. R. (2002). Cognitive Grammar. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a Language. A Usage-Based Theory of
Language Acquisition. Harvard University Press.
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Syllabus Language and Social Cognition 2013/2014 Fall Term CEU CogSci Anne Tamm
4. October 7, Monday
Introduction to the phenomena
By examining the functioning of specific linguistic phenomena of grammatical
categories and the lexicon, such as genericity, evidentiality, duals, possessives,
number and mass-count, negation, case marking, and verb argument
structure, one can tap the interaction between social cognitive and linguistic
representations and processes. The following phenomena will be introduced
during this meeting as examples of interaction:
• Genericity, evidentiality, and social learning (primary focus,
example of analysis)
• Evidentiality, epistemic vigilance, gossip and reputation
• Possessives, the social deictic center and empathy
• Negation, social cognition, and the constraints on the modality of
communication
• Number, measure, mass-count and part-whole relationships
• Duals and joint action
• Argument encoding and values and norms
• Predicate-argument structure and the social perspective on events
Remember to go the talk given by George Lakoff at the CEU later this week.
Reading (see the reading lists under the specific topics):
t.b.a.
Mandatory reading and complete further reading will be announced in September.
General:
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal
About the Mind. University of Chicago Press.
Murphy, G.L. (2002) The Big Book of Concepts. MIT Press.
Lakoff, G. & M. Johnson (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
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Syllabus Language and Social Cognition 2013/2014 Fall Term CEU CogSci Anne Tamm
5. October 14, Monday
Genericity and social learning
Out of the phenomena presented in the previous class, genericity will occupy the
most central role, since this is the area where the interaction of the grammar of
language and social cognition plays out in the most transparent fashion. In
linguistics the topic of genericity appears through the analysis of the generic
markers. A generic marker is part of the grammar system and it conveys the
meaning of the English word generally as in Generally, tigers are striped. While
the opposite grammar markers (meaning, approximately, not generally or in this
specific instance) appear in several languages, genericity is a category that rarely
appears as a linguistic marker. The possible exceptions known from literature are
Wolof, Isekiri, West Greenlandic and Maori.
Recently, genericity has received much attention in cognitive science, philosophy
and formal semantics. In cognitive science, it is studied in relation to ostensive
gestures, such as pointing. An ostensive gesture indicates that the signal that
follows will be a deliberate act of communication about something of relevance to
the receiver: ‘I am about to tell you something useful’. A number of scholars
within cognitive psychology have established the relevance of ostensive
communication in learning. Csibra and Gergely (2011) argue that ostensive
communication enables fast and efficient social learning. Observational learning
mechanisms alone would yield too slow progress because cultural knowledge is
cognitively opaque. The authors claim that information communicated ostensively
to infants is generic in nature. This was also studied by Butler and Markman
(2012) in an experiment with children. They found that if the object is presented
to infants in a pedagogical setting, that is, with ostensive signals such as ‘Look!’
or pointing, the children learn more efficiently about the properties of the object
than if they experience the object through observation or exploration. They
generalize more, which is shown by the effect on the behavior of the child while
exploring the properties of the new object. Evidence gained from pedagogical,
ostensive communication leads to generalization and the tolerance of
counterexamples.
In languages that have generics, this observation can be checked against the use
and understanding of generic markers. A grammatical generic marker should in
principle lead to generalization along similar lines with the results of the
experiment described above. Those instances when grammaticalization occurs
must be particularly interesting for theoretical linguistics, philosophy and
cognitive sciences, but the representatives of these disciplines rarely possess the
research tools necessary for their study, as such an endeavor would require both
familiarity with the relevant abstract theoretical frameworks and excellent
knowledge of the respective languages. So students who have a background in
both of these areas or who are native speakers of a language with a generic marker
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Syllabus Language and Social Cognition 2013/2014 Fall Term CEU CogSci Anne Tamm
are particularly encouraged to complement the ongoing research in cognitive
science and linguistics by choosing a topic related to this area for the paper.
In this meeting I will present a way to gain knowledge about the phenomenon of a
grammatical marker expressing genericity (joint work with Aksu-Koc, Caglar,
and Csibra). This involves an experiment conducted in Istanbul in 2013. Turkish
has a generalizing modal marker -DIr that appears in sentences expressing generic
statements. Similarly to the Butler and Markman’s experiment, pedagogical
demonstration was contrasted with sentences presenting the properties and objects
with the generalizing modal markers. According to preliminary results, the
Turkish general modal markers have the effect of tolerating counterexamples, and
they also lead to generalization, so they can be indeed regarded as generic
markers.
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Reading: t.b.a. Mandatory reading and complete further reading will be
announced in September. Further reading:
Butler, L. P., & Markman, E.M. (2012). Preschoolers use intentional and
pedagogical cues to guide inductive inferences and exploration. Child
Development, 83, 1416-1428.
Carlson, G. and Pelletier, F. J. (eds.). 1995. The Generic Book. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Csibra, Gergő & György Gergely 2011: Natural pedagogy as evolutionary
adaptation – Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 366, 1149-1157.
Dahl, Östen. 1995. The Marking of the Episodic/Generic Distinction in TenseAspect Systems. In Carlson, G. and Pelletier, F. J. (eds.). The Generic Book.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 412–425.
Futó, Judit, Téglás, Ernő, Csibra, Gergely & Gergely, György 2010:
Communicative function demonstration induces kind-based artifact
representation in preverbal infants. – Cognition 117: 1-8.
Gelman, S. A. 2003: The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday
thought. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hollander, Michelle A., Susan A. Gelman & Jon Star 2002: Children’s
Interpretation of Generic Noun Phrases. – Developmental Psychology 38(6):
883–894
Kratzer, Angelika. 1995. Stage-Level and Individual-Level Predicates. In G.
Carlson and J. Pelletier (eds.): The Generic Book. Chicago (Chicago University
Press), 125-175.
Krifka, M., F. Pelletier, G. Carlson, A. ter Meulen, G. Chierchia, and G. Link.
1995. Genericity: An Introduction. In G. Carlson and F. J. Pelletier (eds.) The
Generic Book. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1–125.
Leslie, S. J. 2008. Generics: Cognition and Acquisition. Philosophical Review,
117(1). 1–47.
Nordlinger, R & L Sadler. 2008. From juxtaposition to incorporation: an
approach to generic-specific constructions. In M. Butt & T. H. King (eds)
Proceedings of the LFG08 Conference. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 394-412.
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Syllabus Language and Social Cognition 2013/2014 Fall Term CEU CogSci Anne Tamm
6. October 21, Monday
Evidentiality, social learning, epistemic vigilance, and reputation
Evidentials encode the source of information. The optionality of evidentials is a
puzzle that cannot be solved well without understanding the role of social
cognition. Frequently evidentials appear in subordinate clauses or are logically
understood to be embedded (I heard that PROPOSITION, [I heard [that CP]]).
However, there is a form-meaning mismatch because there is variation across
languages regarding marking in the evidential clauses. Evidential markers are
optional in contexts where they would be required according to the logic of
applying evidentials. For instance, in Estonian contexts such as quotations of
others Kolumbus ütles, et maakera on ümmargune 'Columbus said that the earth
was round', we would expect the verb on to appear in the evidential form, as
olevat. An evidential form would be justified because the clause is a quote, and
one cannot directly experience the roundness of the earth. Yet, in fact olevat is
optional and rather dispreferred. In other languages (Turkish, several native
American languages) evidentials are obligatory.
It seems that the optionality of evidentials is regulated by causal mechanisms that
are related to social cognition. I illustrate one possible way of obtaining by means
of a survey. I demonstrate how I studied the role of grammaticalized evidentials in
social cognition, more specifically, reputation maintaining (joint work with
Giardini and Fitneva). By indicating that the source of information is other than
the speaker herself, the speaker can convey the information that is for her or for
the common good but simultaneously hide her own agency or epistemic state,
and, by doing so, retain her reputation. I ran a survey with 200 Estonian, 100
Turkish, and some Hungarian, Russian, Khanty (Ostyak) participants. I found out
that the optional Estonian evidential is significantly more used to hide the
epistemic state in situations of competition, whereas in case of the obligatory
Turkish evidentials the same effect is more muted. I will discuss the implications
of these findings in the class as an example of how the student paper could
conduct the analysis and discuss its results.
Reading:
t.b.a., further reading:
• Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2004: Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
• Aksu-Koç, A., Balaban, H. Ö. & Alp, İ. E. 2009: Evidentials and source
knowledge in Turkish. – New Directions in Child and Adolescent Development
125: 13-28.
• Faller, Martina T. 2002. Semantics and pragmatics of evidentials in Cuzco
Quechua. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University.
• Hintz, Daniel. 2012. Building common ground: The evidential category of
mutual knowledge. Presentation at the Nature of Evidentiality, Leiden, June
15th, 2012 http://hum.leiden.edu/lucl/tne-2012/keynote/hintz.html
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Syllabus Language and Social Cognition 2013/2014 Fall Term CEU CogSci Anne Tamm
•
•
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Mascaro, Olivier & Dan Sperber 2009: The Moral, Epistemic, and
Mindreading Components of Children’s Vigilance towards Deception.
Cognition 112: 367–380
Sperber, Dan, Fabrice Clément, Christophe Heintz, Olivier Mascaro, Hugo
Mercier, Gloria Origgi & Deirdre Wilson 2010: Epistemic Vigilance. – Mind
and Language 25(4): 359–393.
Tamm, Anne 2009: The Estonian partitive evidential: Some notes on the
semantic parallels between the aspect and evidential categories. – Lotte
Hogeweg, Helen de Hoop & Andrej Mal’chukov (eds): Papers from TAM
TAM: Cross-linguistic semantics of Tense, Aspect, and Modality. Benjamins,
Amsterdam: 365-401.
7. October 28, Monday.
Methods.
This lecture is given by a guest lecturer. Discussion of presentation topics.
The topic will be announced in September.
Reading:
t.b.a.
Mandatory reading and complete further reading will be announced in September.
further reading:
Laura A. Janda, ed. Cognitive Linguistics: The Quantitative Turn. The Essential
Reader, 1-32. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
8. November 4, Monday
Methods.
This lecture is given by a guest lecturer. Discussion of presentation details.
The topic will be announced in September.
Reading:
Mandatory reading and complete further reading will be announced in September.
t.b.a.
further sources and further reading
• CHILDES = <http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/>.
• WALS = Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.). 2011. The
World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Munich: Max Planck Digital
Library, Available online at http://wals.info/
• Christopher Butler, Statistics in Linguistics, available online:
http://www.uwe.ac.uk/hlss/llas/statistics-in-linguistics/bkindex.shtml
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Syllabus Language and Social Cognition 2013/2014 Fall Term CEU CogSci Anne Tamm
9. November 11, Monday
Possessives.
Student presentations.
Possessives are grammatical forms or relationships that indicate ownership or
belonging. Consider the following Hungarian examples in (1a), where the
accusative case is optional on objects that have 1st and 2nd person possessive
suffixes. Possessive suffixes can render the accusative optional in 1st and
2ndperson only; third person does not allow the omission of the accusative marker,
as illustrated in (1b).
(1) Hungarian
a.
b.
Lát-om
a
see-1S.DEF
DEF
‘I see my/your car.’
Lát-om
a
see-1S.DEF
DEF
‘I see his/her car.’
kocsi-m-at/
car-PX1S-ACC
kocsi-d-at/
kocsi-m/kocsi-d.
car-PX2S-ACC car-PX1S car-PX2S
kocsi-já-t/
car-PX3S-ACC
*kocsi-ja.
car-PX3S
There are no structural differences between the possessive markers of the first,
second, and third person that would warrant their different use in the object
position. But in terms of social deixis, talking about entities that belong to me and
you is different from talking about objects that belong to third persons. The
omission of the accusative is even more frequent if the objects are personal
pronominal forms, which supports the hypothesis that the omission is sensitive to
the aspect of being in the social deictic center:
engem(-et) I-(ACC) ‘me’
téged(-et) you-(ACC) ‘you’
ő-t him/her-ACC ‘him/her’
The question is whether possessions of first and second persons are perceived
differently from possessions of third parties. In the class we explore some analyses
for explaining these distributional peculiarities.
It seems to be a near-universal that possessives are used to manipulate emotional
connections, like in the utterance: ‘You and your computer––when does this
constant reading stop?!’. In this utterance, the speaker conveys annoyance with the
attention that the reader has “wasted” on the computer. Some languages have
grammaticalized this device (a more positive but also more exotic example will
follow). One can illustrate morphologically induced empathy with an Udmurt
narration, where a goat runs away from a woman called Ekaterina and is stumbled
upon accidentally in a dark sauna by little Ivan. This narration works as an
entertaining story not because of its plot, which is rather uninteresting, but because
of the possessive markers. These possessive markers are used for establishing joint
attention between the speaker and the hearer and to focus attention on a participant
(‘your’ Ekaterina, ‘your’ Ivan) with whom the hearer should feel empathy. As the
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Syllabus Language and Social Cognition 2013/2014 Fall Term CEU CogSci Anne Tamm
example below shows, the second person possessive marking appears not in the
first sentence introducing the referent, but in the second sentence, in order to
establish empathy towards Ekaterina’s sadness.
(2)
The second person possessive marking persists on the inflected noun phrase
referring to Ekaterina throughout the narrative until the boy Ivan is brought in.
After introducing Ivan, Ivan is referred to by a pronoun. Thus, in example (3), the
third person pronoun ta-id 3S-2PX ‘literally: your he’ refers to Ivan, who is already
introduced in the narrative.
(3)
The fact that the second person possessive marking appears on a pronoun
demonstrates that this marker links the participants of speech event and narrated
event as part of grammar.
By comparing languages that do not use possessives in narration with those that do,
I hope to find out whether the distinction is universal or specific for some
languages. How is it in your language? The experiments can target what the
generality of this phenomenon is: whether it is a language-specific idiosyncrasy or
it reflects a general cognitive bias or strategy.
Reading:
t.b.a.
Mandatory reading and complete further reading will be announced in September.
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Syllabus Language and Social Cognition 2013/2014 Fall Term CEU CogSci Anne Tamm
10. November 18, Monday
Number, measure, and the mass-count distinction in languages. Norms and
standards. Negation, social cognition, and the constraints on the modality of
communication, Sign Languages. Duals and joint action.
At first glance, number, measure, and the mass-count distinction have little in
common with social cognition. Number and problems of mass and count are
studied in relation to the partitive case and object and subject case alternations. In
Finnic, these phenomena relate to argumenthood and argument expression as well
as to the expression of genericity. Social cognition enters the picture via social
norms. The partitive argument patterns with the lack of norms or a situation where
the norm is not obtained.
The area of negation that is targeted in this study concerns the abessives, which
are related to implicit values and norms or expectations of normality in some
languages. The differences and convergences between negative structures are
partly social and partly induced by other cognitive and linguistic factors, which is
witnessed by the phenomena in spoken and sign languages. What are the
convergences and divergences in comparing the forms of negation in Hungarian
and Hungarian Sign? The challenge here is to examine the social cognitive
differences that are reflected in these languages that share official national culture
and diverge in modality. How much of the structure of spoken Hungarian can be
found in Sign, what is missing, and what are the regularities? We see that certain
pragmatic strategies of spoken Hungarian (e.g., wouldn’t you like a cup of tea?)
are missing in Hungarian Sign. There is a possibility that a Hungarian Sign
speaker will join the course meeting.
Dual is a grammatical number that some languages use in addition to singular and
plural. The English ‘both’ refers to two entities and can thus be regarded as a
comparable form that appears in many better-known languages. When a noun or
pronoun appears in dual form, it is interpreted as referring to precisely two of the
entities (objects or persons) identified by the noun or pronoun. Verbs can also
have dual agreement forms in these languages. However, several Uralic languages
have duals that are used to refer to “socially combined duals” or “social pairs”, as
opposed to any randomly occurring but precisely two entities. For instance, if two
persons are described as living in a town, then a dual is preferred if they are a
couple or if they work together, and the plural is preferred if they have no
common projects.
It is unclear whether there is a cognitive disposition to couple social entities
together regardless of dual marking and whether the use of dual affects
interpretation.
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Syllabus Language and Social Cognition 2013/2014 Fall Term CEU CogSci Anne Tamm
Reading:
Mandatory and optional
t.b.a.
Jackendoff, R. (1991). Parts and Boundaries. In Levin, Beth & Pinker, Steven.
Lexical & conceptual semantics. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.
Jackendoff, R. 2006. The peculiar logic of value, Journal of Cognition and Culture 6,
375-407.
The interview with F. Grosjean
http://www.francoisgrosjean.ch/interview_en.html
11. November 25, Monday
Lexical concepts. Argument encoding, values and norms. Predicateargument structure and the social perspective on events.
This week we will concentrate on lexical matters. Lexicon also contains
phenomena that are sensitive to social cognition: mapping to arguments. An
argument is an expression that is required to complete the meaning of a predicate,
such as the verb give. Give has three arguments, as in Mary gave John a book: the
one who yields an object, the object given and the recipient of the object.
Arguments are distinguished from adjuncts, which are optional: in Mary gave
John a book in the library on Monday, the phrases in the library and on Monday
can be omitted.
What are the principles that regulate the linking of the concepts of events (giving)
to predicates (give), and the linking of the event participants to linguistic
arguments or adjuncts? The linkages are shaped by the social cognition of the
events, since the perspective––on which side of the object transfer one is as a
participant of the event––clearly matters for the optionality of the arguments. This
can be proved by investigating the opposite social perspective on a giving event––
a taking event. Give and take have an identical number of participants in the
objective transfer event, but the corresponding predicate has one obligatory
argument less in take: John took the book (from Mary). Looking at the transfer
event from the perspective of taking, the predicate of take allows for the
optionality of the argument that corresponds to the person yielding the object
(Mary).
Argument structure is thus a linguistic representational level that partly builds
upon social cognition, on our social perception of possessions, harm and benefit
arising from the transmission. Levin 1993 shows for about 3000 English verbs the
correlations between the semantics of verbs and their syntactic behavior. I
concentrate in this meeting on social exchanges, mainly verbs of transfer of
possession or information. These verbs are described as having the Lexical
Conceptual Structure pattern: [eventGO+poss([thing ], [path ])]. Verbs of transfer of
possession include 9 classes in Levin 1993. Value judgments about the transfer
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Syllabus Language and Social Cognition 2013/2014 Fall Term CEU CogSci Anne Tamm
(e.g., the transfer is illegal or unjust, a robbery) are not accounted for in previous
classifications, but there is evidence that a normative stance plays a role in
argument realization of the two social agents in interaction, compare the
regularities across languages: Mary gave John a book (3 obligatory arguments),
Mary took a book ((from John), 2 arguments), I robbed him of his wallet (3
arguments, both social agents obligatory). Therefore, the lexical conceptual
structure, which I take as the structure that is linked to thematic and argument
structures, should also interface with social cognition.
What are the social cognitive causes for convergence and divergence between the
arguments? There are many factors that will be discussed in this meeting.
Reading:
t.b.a.
Mandatory reading and complete further reading will be announced in September.
Carey, S. (1985) Conceptual change in childhood, Cambridge, MA,MIT Press
Clark, E. V. (1993). The Lexicon in acquisition. Cambridge UP.
Jackendoff, R. (1991). Parts and Boundaries. In Levin, Beth & Pinker, Steven.
Lexical & conceptual semantics. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.
Kittila. ed. Beneficients and maleficients. Benjamins.
Levin, B. 1993 English verb classes and alternations: a preliminary investigation.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Tomasello, M. 2008. Origins of Human Communication. MIT Press.
12. December 2, Monday
Concluding remarks. Discussion of the papers.
How are the two specifically human cognitive areas, language and social
cognition, related? Could we answer any of the questions that we asked in the
first meetings? Can social cognition be built into language modeling? What are
the ways to test if the model works?
You can expect the complete reading list to be available by the beginning of the
Fall term on September 16.
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