Language as shaped by the environment: linguistic construal in a collaborative spatial task

Nölle, Jonas; Fusaroli, Riccardo; Mills, Gregory; Tylén, Kristian

doi:10.1057/s41599-020-0404-9

Cited by 26 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 69 publications

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“…Recent research on the relation between environment, language and cognition has mostly involved either in vitro controlled experiments using a man-made environment (e.g., Christensen et al, 2016;Nölle et al, 2020), or a data analytic approach looking at the correspondences between two different systems without accounting for possible interactions that may impact either system (e.g., Everett, 2013;Palmer et al, 2017). In contrast with such paradigms, our methodology is inspired by Wilhelm Dilthey's notion of human sciences as a field of scholarship (Makkreel and Rodi, 1990).…”

Section: Methodology and Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

From language to meteorology: kinesis in weather events and weather verbs across Sinitic languages

Huang

Dong

Yang

et al. 2021

Humanit Soc Sci Commun

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Interactions among the environment, humans and language underlie many of the most pressing challenges we face today. This study investigates the use of different verbs to encode various weather events in Sinitic languages, a language family spoken over a wide range of climates and with 3000 years of continuous textual documentation. We propose to synergise the many concepts of kinesis that grew from Aristotle’s original ideas to account for the correlation between meteorological events and their linguistic encoding. It is observed that the two most salient key factors of weather events, i.e., mass of weather substances and speed of weather processes, are the two contributing components of kinetic energy. Leveraging the linguistic theory that kinesis underpins conceptualisation of verb classes, this paper successfully accounts for the selection of verbs for different meteorological events in all Sinitic languages in terms of both language variations and changes. Specifically, weather events with bigger weather substances and faster weather processes tend to select action verbs with high transitivity. The kinesis driven accounts also predict the typological variations between verbal and nominal constructions for weather expressions. The correlation between kinesis and the selection of verbs is further corroborated by an experiment on the perception of native Sinitic language speakers, as well as analyses of regional variations of verb selections that do not follow general typological patterns. It is found that such typological exceptions generally correspond to variations in meteorological patterns. By explicating the pivotal role of kinesis in bridging weather events and the linguistic encoding of weather, this study underlines the role of cognition as the conceptualisation of physical and sensory inputs to sharable knowledge encoded by language.

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Section: Methodology and Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

From language to meteorology: kinesis in weather events and weather verbs across Sinitic languages

Huang

Dong

Yang

et al. 2021

Humanit Soc Sci Commun

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“…Such temporary constructions can be seen as referential or conceptual pacts that interlocutors converge on when negotiating shared perspectives. They also represent adaptations to specific usage contexts and specific social and environmental conditions [69,[81][82][83]. Examples of such temporary constructions can be found in everyday discourse, e.g.…”

Section: The Enchronic Timescalementioning

confidence: 99%

Constructing a protolanguage: reconstructing prehistoric languages in a usage-based construction grammar framework

Hartmann

Pleyer

2021

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Construction grammar is an approach to language that posits that units and structures in language can be exhaustively described as pairings between form and meaning. These pairings are called constructions and can have different degrees of abstraction, i.e. they span the entire range from very concrete ( armadillo, avocado ) to very abstract constructions such as the ditransitive construction ( I gave her a book ). This approach has been applied to a wide variety of different areas of research in linguistics, such as how new constructions emerge and change historically. It has also been applied to investigate the evolutionary emergence of modern fully fledged language, i.e. the question of how systems of constructions can arise out of prelinguistic communication. In this paper, we review the contribution of usage-based construction grammar approaches to language change and language evolution to the questions of (i) the structure and nature of prehistoric languages and (ii) how constructions in prehistoric languages emerged out of non-linguistic or protolinguistic communication. In particular, we discuss the possibilities of using constructions as the main unit of analysis both in reconstructing predecessors of existing languages (protolanguages) and in formulating theories of how a potential predecessor of human language in general (protolanguage) must have looked like. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reconstructing prehistoric languages’.

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“…From such an evolutionary perspective, it is also highly relevant which factors influence the process of setting up conceptual pacts, as they can shed light on the processes involved in the first protolanguage users setting up conceptual pacts in interaction to solve communicative tasks. Conceptual pacts for situations where interlocutors need to agree on a new referring expression can also be influenced by the affordances of the environment (Nölle et al, 2020). However, as soon as they acquire a history of being successfully used to solve recurrent interactional tasks, especially when used with multiple interactants, just as other processes of interactive alignment they can acquire degrees of conventionalisation (Garrod and Doherty, 1994), and have also been implicated in potentially leading to processes of language change and grammaticalization (Nölle et al, 2020;Pickering and Garrod, 2017).…”

Section: Conceptual Pactsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Conceptual pacts for situations where interlocutors need to agree on a new referring expression can also be influenced by the affordances of the environment (Nölle et al, 2020). However, as soon as they acquire a history of being successfully used to solve recurrent interactional tasks, especially when used with multiple interactants, just as other processes of interactive alignment they can acquire degrees of conventionalisation (Garrod and Doherty, 1994), and have also been implicated in potentially leading to processes of language change and grammaticalization (Nölle et al, 2020;Pickering and Garrod, 2017). Both interactive alignment and the specific process of forming conceptual pacts therefore are potentially important interactional mechanisms involved in the emergence of (proto)constructions in the evolution of (proto)language(s).…”

Section: Conceptual Pactsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interactional and Cognitive Mechanisms in the Evolution of (Proto)language(s)

Pleyer¹

2021

Preprint

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This paper discusses the role of interactional and cognitive mechanisms in the emergence of (proto-)linguistic structures and the evolution of (proto)language(s) from the perspective of usage-based and constructionist approaches. Both the social, interactive nature of human communication and the enchronic, interactional timescale have received increasing attention in investigations of how structure emerges in the complex adaptive system of language, which operates across multiple timescales and is shaped by multiple different factors. This has also led to an increasing focus on the mechanisms involved in the dialogic co-construction of structure and meaning in interaction. These include ad hoc constructionalization, interactive alignment, conceptual pacts, reuse and modification, and local forms of entrenchment, routinisation and schematisation. Interactional and cognitive mechanisms like these not only play a crucial role in the emergence of structure in modern languages. They can also help explain how the first (proto)constructions came into being in hominin interaction. Frequently re-occuring, temporary, local (proto)constructions acquired increasing degrees of entrenchment, which led to their subsequent diffusion throughout hominin communities. They were then subject to processes of conventionalisation and cumulative cultural evolution. This process is hypothesised to eventually have led to the gradual transition from protolanguage to language.

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Language as shaped by the environment: linguistic construal in a collaborative spatial task

Cited by 26 publications

References 69 publications

From language to meteorology: kinesis in weather events and weather verbs across Sinitic languages

From language to meteorology: kinesis in weather events and weather verbs across Sinitic languages

Constructing a protolanguage: reconstructing prehistoric languages in a usage-based construction grammar framework

Interactional and Cognitive Mechanisms in the Evolution of (Proto)language(s)

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