Norbert Francis | Northern Arizona University (original) (raw)
Papers by Norbert Francis
The Poetics of the Avant-garde in Literature, Arts, and Philosophy, 2020
The turn of the nineteenth century marked an inflection point in modern painting and sculpture ac... more The turn of the nineteenth century marked an inflection point in modern
painting and sculpture accompanied by new experimentation and research in literature, a movement that has yet to recede in our time. Russian artists and writers found themselves at the very center of a historic moment. The February Revolution of 1917 propelled this development forward in Russia into the second half of the 1920s. Notably, modern and experimental currents in the plastic arts maintained close contact with the verbal arts, this interaction being the topic of the present chapter. The mutual influences came to be so important that broader over-arching aesthetic principles may have been revealed as students of the various art forms under each category stepped back to consider this possibility. The argument will be made that the different branches of modern art and literature laid bare principles and devices that in fact were not new to modernism. But it was the early twentieth century critics and theorists who were the first to launch an explicit research program focused on foundational underpinnings, one that would try to study art from a scientific point of view. This initiative was associated most notably with the early period of Futurism.
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Journal of Adult Learning, Knowledge and Innovation, 2023
Community-based literacy teaching workshops attend to the learning needs of new students who have... more Community-based literacy teaching workshops attend to the learning needs of new students who have not been able to benefit from enrollment as children in the public school system. The following report from the field calls attention to the special circumstances of this heterogeneous group of literacy learners. The workshop described here engages learners who are literacy learners as well as second language learners of the national language, in this case Spanish. Literacy learning proceeds in parallel with second language learning. The report summarizes a series of informal interviews with students and their teacher and observation of their adult literacy program, during a period of approximately ten years. As such it provides preliminary findings for better understanding the problems of community literacy programs in bilingual communities in general. The tasks of learning to read and write present themselves in a special situation of language contact, that of community language and national language.
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Ethnologia, 2018
Linguistics and the science of Anthropology have much in common. In fact, to a large extent the t... more Linguistics and the science of Anthropology have much in common. In fact, to a large extent the two fields overlap. Field workers utilize research models of the ethnographic type as well as approaches that are experimental, methods that are qualitative as well as quantitative, for example. The study of language contact and bilingualism, topic of this paper, presents a good opportunity for drawing on contributions from the two overlapping fields. The focus of the following review of current research will be mainly from the cognitive science point of view, divided into four areas of recent work: (1) bilingual development, first and second language learning and language loss, (2) creolization and convergence, (3) codeswitching and borrowing, and (4) problems related to the distinction between language and dialect. A guiding concept in better understanding the findings of research in these four areas is the special status of the mother-tongue (child first language). In bilingual communities, children often develop mother-tongue, or native-language level, competence in two languages-the acquisition of two first languages. How is second language learning different, and in what ways will research show that it is similar, or the same? Linguistics in East Asia and in other multilingual regions around the world present us with common research problems in the study of language contact and bilingualism because of notable historical parallels. Some of these parallels can be traced to the movement and settlement of founding populations. The more recent immigration and settlement of newer arriving populations is also comparable in some ways from the point of view of cross-language and cross-cultural interaction. In this regard an especially interesting parallel is that between Taiwan and North and South America. The four sub-topics to be briefly reviewed are closely related. The creation of new languages in creolization and convergence is basically about first and second 第 42 期 2018 年 10 月 82 language learning (#1 and #2 above). Related to the questions in this field, we study codeswitching and borrowing (#3) as an aspect of language contact on different levels: internally between the two mental grammars of the bilingual, and externally in communication with other bilingual individuals. How does this kind of linguistic interaction affect learning, language loss, and possible convergence involving two languages or two dialects? Then, what do we mean when we ask: how is variation from one language to another different from variation within a language? This question (#4) is actually difficult to answer. But it is related to processes of learning and communication between speakers of one language, or dialect, and another. Finally, the comparisons centered on East Asia allow us to study the design features of the most divergent writing systems in use in the world today and how these contrasts might be related to the cross-language interaction issues.
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Language, 2008
H INRICHS , E RHARD , and T SUNEKO N AKAZAWA . 1989. Flipped out: Aux in German. Chicago Linguist... more H INRICHS , E RHARD , and T SUNEKO N AKAZAWA . 1989. Flipped out: Aux in German. Chicago Linguistic Society 25.193–202. M EURERS , W ALT D ETMAR . 2005. On the use of electronic corpora for theoretical linguistics: Case studies from the syntax of German. Lingua 115.11. ...
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Chinese as a Second Language Research
For both second and foreign language students, mastery of the Chinese writing system typically pr... more For both second and foreign language students, mastery of the Chinese writing system typically presents itself as a special learning challenge. This report begins with a summary of relevant aspects of an exploratory study of East Asian immigrant language learners. It serves to set the stage for a discussion of theoretical problems that hopefully will lead to new directions in research focused on second language (L2) learners of Chinese in general. In particular, the discussion will highlight the circumstances of that population of learners who come to the task of L2 Chinese literacy as already literate in their first language. In this regard, what is the role of language awareness in learning to read and write, in particular regarding the link between characters and their pronunciation? The participants in the study were young adult immigrants from Vietnam who today look back on their experience of language learning in the host country over the course of the last 20 years.
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As a first approximation, modular approaches to the study of bilingualism attempt to analyze the ... more As a first approximation, modular approaches to the study of bilingualism attempt to analyze the relevant cognitive components that make up a person's knowledge of two languages and his or her ability to use them. The objective would be to describe in what way, in fact, these components might be characterized as autonomous domains and how they interact with other components. Far from a unified approach to the problem of modeling linguistic competence and language proficiency, modularity is a concept that has given rise to a great diversity of views. Perhaps, as a blessing in disguise, this divergence could favor a greater openness for the coming together of new lines of discussion, especially in applied linguistics where major theoretical differences can often be temporally set aside. Why this is true is an interesting question in its own right, I suspect, having something to do with the modularity concept itself. Be that as it may, the study of bilingualism will serve to provid...
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Journal of Linguistics, 2020
But an equally plausible approach, and perhaps even more appealing under popular morphological th... more But an equally plausible approach, and perhaps even more appealing under popular morphological theories like Distributed Morphology, is that paradigms are epiphenomena, rather than grammatical entities. In short, Verb Movement in Romance makes an enormous empirical contribution with regard to the height of verb movement across Romance languages. It surveys not only an impressive breadth of Romance varieties, but also a large number of forms and contexts within each of those varieties. Schifano also documents a correlation between inflectional richness and height of verb movement and hypothesizes a parameter hierarchy that corresponds to the attested patterns. However, both Schifano’s diagnostics and empirical generalizations are limited to Romance, and rely on the reality of the paradigm and, to a limited extent, on the cartographic entreprise.
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International Journal of Taiwan Studies, 2022
Following President Xi Jinping’s speech at the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese ... more Following President Xi Jinping’s speech at the 100th anniversary of the founding
of the Chinese Communist Party (ccp) in 2021, the eyes of the world again
turned to the Taiwan Strait. Intelligence analysts estimated the window of
opportunity to remain open anywhere from six to twenty years. This study by
Stephen J. Hartnett is concerned with the opportunity to preserve one of the
advanced democracies in East Asia. Thus, on all sides the guiding objective
should steer us away from the traps of miscalculation and spirals of misunderstanding.
For this objective, the single-minded focus needs to be on providing
an accurate assessment for a more effective communicative dynamic taking up
at every moment the lessons of history starting from 1945.
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Chinese as a Second Language Research, 2022
For both second and foreign language students, mastery of the Chinese writing system typically pr... more For both second and foreign language students, mastery of the Chinese writing system typically presents itself as a special learning challenge. This report begins with a summary of relevant aspects of an exploratory study of East Asian immigrant language learners. It serves to set the stage for a discussion of theoretical problems that hopefully will lead to new directions in research focused on second language (L2) learners of Chinese in general. In particular, the discussion will highlight the circumstances of that population of learners who come to the task of L2 Chinese literacy as already literate in their first language. In this regard, what is the role of language awareness in learning to read and write, in particular regarding the link between characters and their pronunciation? The participants in the study were young adult immigrants from Vietnam who today look back on their experience of language learning in the host country over the course of the last 20 years.
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Neohelicon, 2021
The following proposal for research begins with the observation that in specific contexts of perf... more The following proposal for research begins with the observation that in specific contexts of performance poetic language appears to allow for varying degrees of access across language boundaries. This cross-language access, if it can be verified empirically, might be attributed to distinguishing features that differentiate poetic from prosaic discourse, on the one hand, and from musical structure on the other, an important problem in its own right. To approach this research question it is recommended to begin with poetic works as they are performed for a listening audience and to prioritize, at the beginning of the research project, composition and performance from the popular culture, broadly defined, and from the traditional genres of the oral tradition. Another point of reference for this discussion, which follows from the above recommended approach, is the Lerdahl-Jackendoff proposal of analyzing poetry as a kind of musical form.
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Linguistics and Education, 2005
The article reports on findings from a replication of a study of bilingual children’s editing and... more The article reports on findings from a replication of a study of bilingual children’s editing and correction strategies. The earlier study analyzed revisions that 2nd, 4th, and 6th graders made to their own compositions, written in Spanish. The present study applied the same procedure and assessment rubric to the first draft of compositions written in the other language students speak, Nahuatl. Subjects were all fluent speakers of both languages, from an indigenous community in Central Mexico. The discussion of the findings examines how the concept of a Common Underlying Proficiency [Cummins, J. (2000). Language, power and pedagogy: Bilingual children in the crossfire. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters] may apply to a situation of community-wide bilingualism that is characterized by wide sociolinguistic disparities between the language of schooling and an indigenous language spoken by both students and teachers. Specifically, how might the access to underlying abilities related to lite...
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First Language, 2020
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Journal of Linguistics, 2017
This new book by Daniel Everett stands as a significant contribution to the discussion of langua... more This new book by Daniel Everett stands as a significant contribution to the
discussion of language evolution because it puts forward the strongest claims so
far in what has been an important exchange, probably the most visible in recent
years. While How Language Began (henceforth HLB) is written for a general
readership, the main proposals are presented clearly, drawing the lines of the
debate sharper than in previous turns. Its strong hypotheses now set the stage
for better understanding the points in contention and for drawing us closer to
resolving them. Crucially, the first chapters chart a space of common ground with other
approaches to the study of human evolution:
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Bilingual Competence and Bilingual Proficiency in Child Development, 2012
In this chapter, we will delve deeper into the idea that bilingual proficiency is componential—w... more In this chapter, we will delve deeper into the idea that bilingual proficiency is
componential—what it means to say that it is internally diverse. Along the way, we
will see that the proposed modification to Cummins’s Common Underlying Proficiency
model (figure 3.2) turns out to be in need of some modification of its own.
Paivio’s (1991, 2007) Bilingual Dual Coding Model and M. Paradis’s (2004) Three-
Store Hypothesis will help move the task of elaboration and specification along.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
A new study of modern Chinese poetry has been published that deserves the at‑ tention of linguist... more A new study of modern Chinese poetry has been published that deserves the at‑ tention of linguists working in both the applied and theoretical fields. The focus of the book is experimental and avant‑garde literature, and as such it raises ques‑ tions that are different than the ones we are accustomed to considering in the field of poetics. This review essay considers proposals for understanding poetic ability and sensibility from the point of view of applications of cognitive science.
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Asian Studies
An account of the history of the Uyghur people is indispensable for understanding the current cri... more An account of the history of the Uyghur people is indispensable for understanding the current crisis in Xinjiang province. This is where China and the Uyghurs begins. As a historian of East Asia, Professor Rossabi approaches the problem of understanding by applying an objective procedure of fact-finding, as is required of researchers in his field. Objective, here, first implies the gathering of evidence and other reliable information from historical sources and from reports of events, also from reliable sources, as they unfold in real time. Secondly, it implies examining the available information critically, from more than one point of view.
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Conocimientos ancestrales y procesos de desarrollo , 2017
Si retrocedemos en el pasado, recordamos que el periodo temprano de la colonización española del ... more Si retrocedemos en el pasado, recordamos que el periodo temprano
de la colonización española del Nuevo Mundo, hasta finales del siglo
XVII, se caracterizó por el uso activo de las lenguas indígenas para
que los españoles pudieran comunicarse con las poblaciones americanas.
Las lenguas quichua y náhuatl, por ejemplo, llegaron a ser lenguas
francas en sus respectivos territorios y tuvieron cierto prestigio y valor
en las primeras etapas de la colonización; pero, paulatinamente, su uso
comenzó a debilitarse. Asimismo cabe recordar el papel importante de
las lenguas prehispánicas en la evangelización, proceso que se llevó a
cabo al principio en las lenguas nativas con la ayuda de misioneros e
intérpretes.
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Language in Society, 2007
Researchers and students of applied linguistics and anyone interested in bilingualism and second ... more Researchers and students of applied linguistics and anyone interested in bilingualism and second language learning will find this nontechnical and accessible state-of-the-art survey useful. Regardless of which neurolinguistic theory of bilingualism ends up holding sway, it is in the central nervous system that the core mental operations that underlie language use are materially computed. So, as we do our work, it is good to keep an eye on what's going on here.
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Ethnologia, Oct 1, 2018
Linguistics and the science of Anthropology have much in common. In fact, to a large extent the t... more Linguistics and the science of Anthropology have much in common. In fact, to a large extent the two fields overlap. Field workers utilize research models of the ethnographic type as well as approaches that are experimental, methods that are qualitative as well as quantitative, for example. The study of language contact and bilingualism, topic of this paper, presents a good opportunity for drawing on contributions from the two overlapping fields. The focus of the following review of current research will be mainly from the cognitive science point of view, divided into four areas of recent work: (1) bilingual development, first and second language learning and language loss, (2) creolization and convergence, (3) codeswitching and borrowing, and (4) problems related to the distinction between language and dialect.
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The controversies and discussions sparked by the Russian Formalists are important to review today... more The controversies and discussions sparked by the Russian Formalists are important to review today because many of the same issues are still current. The most well-known exchange occurred in the early 1920s between Leon Trotsky and Victor Shklovsky, between a high government official of the Soviet regime and a leading member of the Society for the Study of Poetic Language. Was the discussion a harbinger of future Soviet policies? Interestingly, some of the objections voiced by government officials, at the time charged with overseeing cultural policy, are reflected in modern-day conceptions of Russian Formalism. An important question to consider is why a theory in poetics should have stirred the heated debate, about questions of ideology and art, in the first place.
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The Poetics of the Avant-garde in Literature, Arts, and Philosophy, 2020
The turn of the nineteenth century marked an inflection point in modern painting and sculpture ac... more The turn of the nineteenth century marked an inflection point in modern
painting and sculpture accompanied by new experimentation and research in literature, a movement that has yet to recede in our time. Russian artists and writers found themselves at the very center of a historic moment. The February Revolution of 1917 propelled this development forward in Russia into the second half of the 1920s. Notably, modern and experimental currents in the plastic arts maintained close contact with the verbal arts, this interaction being the topic of the present chapter. The mutual influences came to be so important that broader over-arching aesthetic principles may have been revealed as students of the various art forms under each category stepped back to consider this possibility. The argument will be made that the different branches of modern art and literature laid bare principles and devices that in fact were not new to modernism. But it was the early twentieth century critics and theorists who were the first to launch an explicit research program focused on foundational underpinnings, one that would try to study art from a scientific point of view. This initiative was associated most notably with the early period of Futurism.
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Journal of Adult Learning, Knowledge and Innovation, 2023
Community-based literacy teaching workshops attend to the learning needs of new students who have... more Community-based literacy teaching workshops attend to the learning needs of new students who have not been able to benefit from enrollment as children in the public school system. The following report from the field calls attention to the special circumstances of this heterogeneous group of literacy learners. The workshop described here engages learners who are literacy learners as well as second language learners of the national language, in this case Spanish. Literacy learning proceeds in parallel with second language learning. The report summarizes a series of informal interviews with students and their teacher and observation of their adult literacy program, during a period of approximately ten years. As such it provides preliminary findings for better understanding the problems of community literacy programs in bilingual communities in general. The tasks of learning to read and write present themselves in a special situation of language contact, that of community language and national language.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Ethnologia, 2018
Linguistics and the science of Anthropology have much in common. In fact, to a large extent the t... more Linguistics and the science of Anthropology have much in common. In fact, to a large extent the two fields overlap. Field workers utilize research models of the ethnographic type as well as approaches that are experimental, methods that are qualitative as well as quantitative, for example. The study of language contact and bilingualism, topic of this paper, presents a good opportunity for drawing on contributions from the two overlapping fields. The focus of the following review of current research will be mainly from the cognitive science point of view, divided into four areas of recent work: (1) bilingual development, first and second language learning and language loss, (2) creolization and convergence, (3) codeswitching and borrowing, and (4) problems related to the distinction between language and dialect. A guiding concept in better understanding the findings of research in these four areas is the special status of the mother-tongue (child first language). In bilingual communities, children often develop mother-tongue, or native-language level, competence in two languages-the acquisition of two first languages. How is second language learning different, and in what ways will research show that it is similar, or the same? Linguistics in East Asia and in other multilingual regions around the world present us with common research problems in the study of language contact and bilingualism because of notable historical parallels. Some of these parallels can be traced to the movement and settlement of founding populations. The more recent immigration and settlement of newer arriving populations is also comparable in some ways from the point of view of cross-language and cross-cultural interaction. In this regard an especially interesting parallel is that between Taiwan and North and South America. The four sub-topics to be briefly reviewed are closely related. The creation of new languages in creolization and convergence is basically about first and second 第 42 期 2018 年 10 月 82 language learning (#1 and #2 above). Related to the questions in this field, we study codeswitching and borrowing (#3) as an aspect of language contact on different levels: internally between the two mental grammars of the bilingual, and externally in communication with other bilingual individuals. How does this kind of linguistic interaction affect learning, language loss, and possible convergence involving two languages or two dialects? Then, what do we mean when we ask: how is variation from one language to another different from variation within a language? This question (#4) is actually difficult to answer. But it is related to processes of learning and communication between speakers of one language, or dialect, and another. Finally, the comparisons centered on East Asia allow us to study the design features of the most divergent writing systems in use in the world today and how these contrasts might be related to the cross-language interaction issues.
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Language, 2008
H INRICHS , E RHARD , and T SUNEKO N AKAZAWA . 1989. Flipped out: Aux in German. Chicago Linguist... more H INRICHS , E RHARD , and T SUNEKO N AKAZAWA . 1989. Flipped out: Aux in German. Chicago Linguistic Society 25.193–202. M EURERS , W ALT D ETMAR . 2005. On the use of electronic corpora for theoretical linguistics: Case studies from the syntax of German. Lingua 115.11. ...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Chinese as a Second Language Research
For both second and foreign language students, mastery of the Chinese writing system typically pr... more For both second and foreign language students, mastery of the Chinese writing system typically presents itself as a special learning challenge. This report begins with a summary of relevant aspects of an exploratory study of East Asian immigrant language learners. It serves to set the stage for a discussion of theoretical problems that hopefully will lead to new directions in research focused on second language (L2) learners of Chinese in general. In particular, the discussion will highlight the circumstances of that population of learners who come to the task of L2 Chinese literacy as already literate in their first language. In this regard, what is the role of language awareness in learning to read and write, in particular regarding the link between characters and their pronunciation? The participants in the study were young adult immigrants from Vietnam who today look back on their experience of language learning in the host country over the course of the last 20 years.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
As a first approximation, modular approaches to the study of bilingualism attempt to analyze the ... more As a first approximation, modular approaches to the study of bilingualism attempt to analyze the relevant cognitive components that make up a person's knowledge of two languages and his or her ability to use them. The objective would be to describe in what way, in fact, these components might be characterized as autonomous domains and how they interact with other components. Far from a unified approach to the problem of modeling linguistic competence and language proficiency, modularity is a concept that has given rise to a great diversity of views. Perhaps, as a blessing in disguise, this divergence could favor a greater openness for the coming together of new lines of discussion, especially in applied linguistics where major theoretical differences can often be temporally set aside. Why this is true is an interesting question in its own right, I suspect, having something to do with the modularity concept itself. Be that as it may, the study of bilingualism will serve to provid...
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Journal of Linguistics, 2020
But an equally plausible approach, and perhaps even more appealing under popular morphological th... more But an equally plausible approach, and perhaps even more appealing under popular morphological theories like Distributed Morphology, is that paradigms are epiphenomena, rather than grammatical entities. In short, Verb Movement in Romance makes an enormous empirical contribution with regard to the height of verb movement across Romance languages. It surveys not only an impressive breadth of Romance varieties, but also a large number of forms and contexts within each of those varieties. Schifano also documents a correlation between inflectional richness and height of verb movement and hypothesizes a parameter hierarchy that corresponds to the attested patterns. However, both Schifano’s diagnostics and empirical generalizations are limited to Romance, and rely on the reality of the paradigm and, to a limited extent, on the cartographic entreprise.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
International Journal of Taiwan Studies, 2022
Following President Xi Jinping’s speech at the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese ... more Following President Xi Jinping’s speech at the 100th anniversary of the founding
of the Chinese Communist Party (ccp) in 2021, the eyes of the world again
turned to the Taiwan Strait. Intelligence analysts estimated the window of
opportunity to remain open anywhere from six to twenty years. This study by
Stephen J. Hartnett is concerned with the opportunity to preserve one of the
advanced democracies in East Asia. Thus, on all sides the guiding objective
should steer us away from the traps of miscalculation and spirals of misunderstanding.
For this objective, the single-minded focus needs to be on providing
an accurate assessment for a more effective communicative dynamic taking up
at every moment the lessons of history starting from 1945.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Chinese as a Second Language Research, 2022
For both second and foreign language students, mastery of the Chinese writing system typically pr... more For both second and foreign language students, mastery of the Chinese writing system typically presents itself as a special learning challenge. This report begins with a summary of relevant aspects of an exploratory study of East Asian immigrant language learners. It serves to set the stage for a discussion of theoretical problems that hopefully will lead to new directions in research focused on second language (L2) learners of Chinese in general. In particular, the discussion will highlight the circumstances of that population of learners who come to the task of L2 Chinese literacy as already literate in their first language. In this regard, what is the role of language awareness in learning to read and write, in particular regarding the link between characters and their pronunciation? The participants in the study were young adult immigrants from Vietnam who today look back on their experience of language learning in the host country over the course of the last 20 years.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Neohelicon, 2021
The following proposal for research begins with the observation that in specific contexts of perf... more The following proposal for research begins with the observation that in specific contexts of performance poetic language appears to allow for varying degrees of access across language boundaries. This cross-language access, if it can be verified empirically, might be attributed to distinguishing features that differentiate poetic from prosaic discourse, on the one hand, and from musical structure on the other, an important problem in its own right. To approach this research question it is recommended to begin with poetic works as they are performed for a listening audience and to prioritize, at the beginning of the research project, composition and performance from the popular culture, broadly defined, and from the traditional genres of the oral tradition. Another point of reference for this discussion, which follows from the above recommended approach, is the Lerdahl-Jackendoff proposal of analyzing poetry as a kind of musical form.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Linguistics and Education, 2005
The article reports on findings from a replication of a study of bilingual children’s editing and... more The article reports on findings from a replication of a study of bilingual children’s editing and correction strategies. The earlier study analyzed revisions that 2nd, 4th, and 6th graders made to their own compositions, written in Spanish. The present study applied the same procedure and assessment rubric to the first draft of compositions written in the other language students speak, Nahuatl. Subjects were all fluent speakers of both languages, from an indigenous community in Central Mexico. The discussion of the findings examines how the concept of a Common Underlying Proficiency [Cummins, J. (2000). Language, power and pedagogy: Bilingual children in the crossfire. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters] may apply to a situation of community-wide bilingualism that is characterized by wide sociolinguistic disparities between the language of schooling and an indigenous language spoken by both students and teachers. Specifically, how might the access to underlying abilities related to lite...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
First Language, 2020
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal of Linguistics, 2017
This new book by Daniel Everett stands as a significant contribution to the discussion of langua... more This new book by Daniel Everett stands as a significant contribution to the
discussion of language evolution because it puts forward the strongest claims so
far in what has been an important exchange, probably the most visible in recent
years. While How Language Began (henceforth HLB) is written for a general
readership, the main proposals are presented clearly, drawing the lines of the
debate sharper than in previous turns. Its strong hypotheses now set the stage
for better understanding the points in contention and for drawing us closer to
resolving them. Crucially, the first chapters chart a space of common ground with other
approaches to the study of human evolution:
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bilingual Competence and Bilingual Proficiency in Child Development, 2012
In this chapter, we will delve deeper into the idea that bilingual proficiency is componential—w... more In this chapter, we will delve deeper into the idea that bilingual proficiency is
componential—what it means to say that it is internally diverse. Along the way, we
will see that the proposed modification to Cummins’s Common Underlying Proficiency
model (figure 3.2) turns out to be in need of some modification of its own.
Paivio’s (1991, 2007) Bilingual Dual Coding Model and M. Paradis’s (2004) Three-
Store Hypothesis will help move the task of elaboration and specification along.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
A new study of modern Chinese poetry has been published that deserves the at‑ tention of linguist... more A new study of modern Chinese poetry has been published that deserves the at‑ tention of linguists working in both the applied and theoretical fields. The focus of the book is experimental and avant‑garde literature, and as such it raises ques‑ tions that are different than the ones we are accustomed to considering in the field of poetics. This review essay considers proposals for understanding poetic ability and sensibility from the point of view of applications of cognitive science.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Asian Studies
An account of the history of the Uyghur people is indispensable for understanding the current cri... more An account of the history of the Uyghur people is indispensable for understanding the current crisis in Xinjiang province. This is where China and the Uyghurs begins. As a historian of East Asia, Professor Rossabi approaches the problem of understanding by applying an objective procedure of fact-finding, as is required of researchers in his field. Objective, here, first implies the gathering of evidence and other reliable information from historical sources and from reports of events, also from reliable sources, as they unfold in real time. Secondly, it implies examining the available information critically, from more than one point of view.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Conocimientos ancestrales y procesos de desarrollo , 2017
Si retrocedemos en el pasado, recordamos que el periodo temprano de la colonización española del ... more Si retrocedemos en el pasado, recordamos que el periodo temprano
de la colonización española del Nuevo Mundo, hasta finales del siglo
XVII, se caracterizó por el uso activo de las lenguas indígenas para
que los españoles pudieran comunicarse con las poblaciones americanas.
Las lenguas quichua y náhuatl, por ejemplo, llegaron a ser lenguas
francas en sus respectivos territorios y tuvieron cierto prestigio y valor
en las primeras etapas de la colonización; pero, paulatinamente, su uso
comenzó a debilitarse. Asimismo cabe recordar el papel importante de
las lenguas prehispánicas en la evangelización, proceso que se llevó a
cabo al principio en las lenguas nativas con la ayuda de misioneros e
intérpretes.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Language in Society, 2007
Researchers and students of applied linguistics and anyone interested in bilingualism and second ... more Researchers and students of applied linguistics and anyone interested in bilingualism and second language learning will find this nontechnical and accessible state-of-the-art survey useful. Regardless of which neurolinguistic theory of bilingualism ends up holding sway, it is in the central nervous system that the core mental operations that underlie language use are materially computed. So, as we do our work, it is good to keep an eye on what's going on here.
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Ethnologia, Oct 1, 2018
Linguistics and the science of Anthropology have much in common. In fact, to a large extent the t... more Linguistics and the science of Anthropology have much in common. In fact, to a large extent the two fields overlap. Field workers utilize research models of the ethnographic type as well as approaches that are experimental, methods that are qualitative as well as quantitative, for example. The study of language contact and bilingualism, topic of this paper, presents a good opportunity for drawing on contributions from the two overlapping fields. The focus of the following review of current research will be mainly from the cognitive science point of view, divided into four areas of recent work: (1) bilingual development, first and second language learning and language loss, (2) creolization and convergence, (3) codeswitching and borrowing, and (4) problems related to the distinction between language and dialect.
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The controversies and discussions sparked by the Russian Formalists are important to review today... more The controversies and discussions sparked by the Russian Formalists are important to review today because many of the same issues are still current. The most well-known exchange occurred in the early 1920s between Leon Trotsky and Victor Shklovsky, between a high government official of the Soviet regime and a leading member of the Society for the Study of Poetic Language. Was the discussion a harbinger of future Soviet policies? Interestingly, some of the objections voiced by government officials, at the time charged with overseeing cultural policy, are reflected in modern-day conceptions of Russian Formalism. An important question to consider is why a theory in poetics should have stirred the heated debate, about questions of ideology and art, in the first place.
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Medium, 2023
En 1519, Malintzin (doña Marina) llegó a Tlaxcala junto con los destacamentos españoles y totonac... more En 1519, Malintzin (doña Marina) llegó a Tlaxcala junto con los destacamentos españoles y totonacos para negociar una alianza con el tlatoani Xicohtencatl el Viejo. En 1531 se funda la ciudad de Puebla, en 1534, Huamantla, diez años después de la llegada a Nueva España de los primeros doce franciscanos. Eran años muy difíciles. Al mismo tiempo, y tal vez de manera contradictoria, eran los años del inicio de grandes obras de construcción. El siglo XVI formó parte de una época de nuevos proyectos de infraestructura que hoy nos presenta con datos importantes sobre el origen de las comunidades ubicadas en la periferia de las ciudades. Nos enfocamos en una en particular: San Miguel Canoa, Puebla.
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Medium, 2023
En el trabajo de campo en comunidades cuando nos topamos con artefactos, a veces los hallazgos da... more En el trabajo de campo en comunidades cuando nos topamos con artefactos, a veces los hallazgos dan pistas para acercarnos a problemas de investigación en que no hemos pensado. En los pueblos de habla náhuatl ubicados en las faldas de la Matlalcuéyatl (Malinche, o Malintzi) hemos atendido los temas relacionados con el lenguaje: su uso en relación con la cultura, el aprendizaje, la adquisición de la primera lengua y de la segunda, y el desplazamiento de una por parte de la otra. Como es natural el tema del origen de las comunidades, en este caso de San Isidro Buensuceso (Tlaxcala) y San Miguel Canoa (Puebla), surge entre colegas y compañeros y entre vecinos e informantes porque nos ayuda a entender mejor el vasto panorama lingüístico y cultural, la historia reciente y el pasado remoto (1). Por ejemplo, un pueblo vecino, San Juan Ixtenco, es de habla otomí. ¿Cuál es la relación entre la variante local y lo que los especialistas llaman el náhuatl clásico?
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Communication & Cognition, 2023
Nowhere is the discussion on the relationship between competence and performance more interesting... more Nowhere is the discussion on the relationship between competence and performance more interesting than in the research on bilingualism. Fortuitously, it is in this field of language acquisition and language learning where proponents of both Universal Grammar and Usage-Based approaches have found space for discussion on a number of language contact phenomena. This dialogue parallels a similar coincidence in the study of literacy learning. On this point, a new proposal for research on second language learning and first language attrition appears to fundamentally redefine basic concepts in the field. This response counters that future research will be best served by continuing to apply current conceptions until the discussion of research findings presents a new framework. In addition, a better understanding of language attrition will benefit from an exchange among researchers who work within the framework of different theoretical models. In the end, the exchange will contribute to better understanding the concept of Language Faculty, beginning with an open-ended discussion.
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Medium, 2022
The following report is an abbreviated version of “Awareness of form and pattern in literacy asse... more The following report is an abbreviated version of “Awareness of form and pattern in literacy assessment: Classroom applications for first and second language,” published in The Reading Matrix, v. 19, n. 1, pp. 20—34 (2019).
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Medium, 2019
The following review is an excerpt from: "Literacy and the language awareness hypothesis," publis... more The following review is an excerpt from: "Literacy and the language awareness hypothesis," published in Writing Systems Research, v.11, n.2, pp. 176-187 (2019).
With the growing emphasis on cross-language and cross-writing system research, we have begun to converge upon principles of literacy and literacy learning that are foundational, principles that should now apply across all cultures. Even in the case of historical research, in which experiments can no longer be carried out on learning, results from the study of the development of ancient writing systems suggest conclusions that are compatible with current interdisciplinary models.
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Medium, 2022
The following discussion of literary language in popular culture is an excerpt from the paper: “V... more The following discussion of literary language in popular culture is an excerpt from the paper: “Verbal art across language and culture: Poetry as music” that appeared in Neohelicon, v. 48, n. 2, pp. 539–552 (2021).
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Issues in Applied Linguistics, 2022
In the science of language, as in all of its sister disciplines, a mystery is an empirical questi... more In the science of language, as in all of its sister disciplines, a mystery is an empirical question yet to be resolved. The research problems surveyed in this book offer students of bilingualism and second language learning a guide for designing their own research program, one that keeps an eye on the pending questions. Practitioners will be well served by the review of recent work that updates ongoing projects from years past.
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For educators working in the field of second language learning, staying current with the basic re... more For educators working in the field of second language learning, staying current with the basic research in bilingualism and crosslinguistic interaction will help us to better understand the progress of learners. This volume covers recent work on cross-language phenomena in a wide range of language-contact situations, both in the classroom and in the wider bilingual speech communities. The chapters make reference to discussions and debates among investigators on difficult scientific questions around which consensus has only begun to gather. The broader controversies in theoretical and applied linguistics related to learning are also part of the interesting discussions.
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