Browsing by Subject "Reference"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Control and disposal of demonstratives, with electrophysiological evidence from English and Japanese
    (2014-06) Stevens, James Michael
    Demonstratives are lexical forms that pick out an object by making use of constraints in a discourse context to establish some form of contrast. They represent among the most basic uses of language, yet escape simple definition. The two forms gthish and gthath in English, the three forms ,± gko,h ,» gso,h , gah in Japanese, etc. have traditionally been interpreted in terms of relative distance from the speaker or hearer to the object. An alternative framework presents demonstratives as a device to refocus attention (e.g., Strauss, 2002), where gthish requires more of the hearerfs attention, to represent new information, or to refer to objects relatively important in the discourse, versus objects called gthath or gith. However, distance or attention alone is an insufficient parameter to predict form selection. This dissertation builds upon Brovold and Grushfs (2012) analysis of demonstratives in terms of control over an object. I propose that demonstrative forms, at least in English and Japanese, can be predicted from an array of control spaces that allow for varying levels of potential action toward an object. The proposed framework of control spaces implies an embodied view of language, such that language and physical behavior work toward shared goals and link mature human language use to other forms of animal communication, to child language acquisition, and with adult humansf response to a changing environment (De Ruiter, 2006; Melinger & Levelt, 2005).The control space framework incorporates previous models and makes three specific predictions. First, relative distance serves as one determinant for demonstrative form selection. Second, the weight of relative distance in demonstrative form selection will decrease without shared eye gaze between the speaker and hearer. 3. Demonstrative use would show as a tendency greater dependency on the co-speech pointing gesture for speakers of a language (e.g., English) that has fewer demonstrative terms than another (e.g., Japanese). To evaluate the three predictions, two perceptual studies that employed behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) measures were conducted to assess language usersf intuitions and cortical-level neural responses to the presentation of demonstrative expressions in differing visual contexts. When the simultaneous visual context with demonstrative expressions did not correspond with expected relative distances among speaker, hearer, and object, participants responded with significantly longer reaction times accompanied by a brain response called the N400, which is associated with semantic/contextual incongruities (Kutas & Hillyard, 1980, 1984). The elicitation of the N400 response for the incongruent audiovisual matchup in demonstrative use depended on shared gaze between the speaker and hearer, and the N400 responses were found in both English and Japanese subjects. English and Japanese subjects, however, differed in their responses to trials that did not include a pointing gesture in the visual scenes. In the absence of co-speech pointing gesture, English speakers expressed a P600 response, an index of pattern violations, but Japanese speakers did not. These findings indicate that in addition to spatial distance, language users rely on shared gaze in determining the proper use of demonstrative forms and show language-specific sensitivity to the presence or absence of gesture when analyzing demonstratives.The results of this dissertation project highlight the contingent, contrastive, and attention-orienting nature of demonstratives and further illustrate the necessity to study speech communication as a multimodal social event, which is subject to a number of factors, including perspectives of the speaker and listener, physical context, gesture, and language per se. Demonstratives function as basic lexical means to make meaning out of the world. They represent a special case of names, which are interpreted here as deictic means to form an object out of a nameless ground. Demonstratives, more specifically, serve as names that are used once and then no longer refer to the same object, resuming the naming practice with every use. The ERP results reported in this dissertation show promising brain signature markers for understanding the multimodal processing nature of spatial demonstratives. Further directions for research are suggested, including measuring the relationship between autistic individualsf competence with demonstratives alongside their imitative physical skills.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Creating Videos for Reference and Instruction
    (Archival Practice, 2014-12) Engseth, Ellen
    The author provides a case study of creating screencasts rendered as videos and disseminated as learning objects to support archival reference and instruction. These videos fit into a broader learning object experience at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee (UWM) Libraries. The project's context, implementation, and evaluation and recommendations are provided.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Pronouns in Kumyk discourse: a cognitive perspective.
    (2009-03) Humnick, Linda Anne
    This dissertation investigates pronominal forms of referring expressions in Kumyk, a Turkic language spoken primarily in the Dagestan region of Russia. The Kumyk language has six third person pronominals, including null arguments, demonstratives, and reflexives. Morphologically, each of these forms is unmarked for gender or animacy. This work provides an explanatory account of the distribution and interpretation of different pronominal forms in Kumyk primarily in terms of what these forms communicate about the status of their referents in the minds of the speech participants, specifically claiming that different pronominal forms signal differences in the cognitive status of their referents, following the Givenness Hierarchy model of Gundel, Hedberg, and Zacharski (1993). The analysis is based primarily on data from a corpus of oral and written Kumyk texts with supporting evidence from grammaticality judgments of constructed examples in questionnaires. According to the analysis, null arguments and reflexives signal the status, ‘in focus’, while demonstratives signal the status, ‘activated’. Particular attention is given to the role of scalar implicatures which arise from the unidirectional entailment of statuses on the Givenness Hierarchy and the fact that the demonstrative sho, which signals activation, has a particular association with this implicature. A unique contribution of the analysis is the evidence for the fact that sho not only gives rise to a scalar implicature in contexts where two referents have different maximal cognitive status(e.g. one in focus versus one at most activated), but also in contexts where two referents have the same maximal cognitive status, a fact which leads to the conclusion that this form specializes in indicating the less salient of two or more entities. The study also provides evidence that the demonstrative bu specializes in indicating the more prominent of two or more entities that are at least activated. Finally, in addition to the role of pronominals in signaling cognitive status and communicating the relative prominence of multiple referents, the study explores contextual effects such as imposed salience, point of view, empathy, or contrastive focus that are associated with particular forms.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Python Attitude Heading and Reference System
    (2014-07-23) Taylor, Brian
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Use of referring expressions by autistic children in spontaneous conversations: does impaired metarepresentational ability affect reference production?
    (2012-01) Wicklund, Mark Donald
    References that speakers make can include both conceptual information, which contributes to explicatures, and procedural information, which constrains explicatures (Wilson & Sperber 1993). The current study compares the references made by autistic and typically developing children in naturally occurring conversational settings, with an understanding of pronouns and determiners (following Gundel et al. 1993) as procedural markers of an intended referent’s cognitive status in the minds of listeners. The result is an exploration of how the metarepresentational impairment associated with autism affects procedural and conceptual aspects of reference production in an unstructured context that many researchers recommend to better observe how autistic children handle the pragmatic challenges presented in everyday life. Results support a hypothesis that most day-to-day uses of pronouns and determiners do not involve metarepresentational consideration of the mental states of one’s listeners. However, analysis of references to entities judged to be in the current focus of listener attention suggests that autistic children are impaired in recognizing what information regarding cognitive status and conceptual content listeners require. Possible explanations are considered including: impaired metarepresentational mindreading ability limits appreciation of listener needs; early joint attention impairment interferes with recognition of references as intentional acts and subsequent acquisition of pronouns and determiners as procedural markers of referent cognitive status; and as a connectivity disorder, impairment in autism is most manifest when the need for high-level integrative processing is greatest. Monitoring relevant reference information in unstructured social situations strains the integrative processing ability of autistic children, resulting in tendencies toward over- and underspecification.