The grammar of exchange: A comparative study of reciprocal constructions across languages (original) (raw)
Related papers
The semantics of reciprocal constructions across languages: An extensional approach
Journal of Phonetics, 2011
H ow sim ilar are reciprocal co n struction s in the sem antic param eters they encode? We investigate this question by using an extensional approach, w hich exam ines sim ilarity of m eaning by exam ining how constructions are applied over a set o f 64 videoclips depicting reciprocal events (Evans et al. 2004). We apply statistical m odelling to descriptions from speakers o f 20 languages elicited using th e videoclips. We show th a t th ere are substantial differences in m ean in g betw een constructions o f different languages. i .
This special issue of the Journal of Pragmatics concerns the activity of inviting and responding to invitations in authentic telephone calls in six different languages. Using Conversational Analysis to investigate telephone calls that were audio-recorded in family homes, and in one case, in a bank office, the papers here included focus on invitations to friends, family members, acquaintances and other casual recipients in ordinary and institutional conversations. We have two main goals in this special issue. First, owing to the number and size of the corpora analyzed, we aim to gain a deeper understanding of the action of inviting as an interactional task; we hope to discover a clearer picture of what speakers actually do when they invite others to participate in social events beyond our vernacular understanding of the activity. We aim to examine in close detail speakers' linguistic and communicative conduct, both when they are engaged in extending an invitation, and when they receive, recognize and respond to it. Our second general aim bears on the uniformity of the corpora and of the settings in which the interactions took place. In all but the paper on the invitation by a bank employee to clients, calls were almost exclusively addressed to relatives, friends and acquaintances. The uniformity of the settings across the corpora, combined with the different languages in which talk was produced, provides an opportunity to draw some observations on the feasibility and relevance of comparative analysis of actions across languages. In this introduction we outline the project behind this collection, as related to the two dimensions, highlighting how these connect with the results of prior research on inviting from other approaches, perspectives and traditions. In section 1.1 we provide a provisional characterization of the specific action of inviting. Section 1.2 focuses on the data and the method of Conversation Analysis (CA), which was adopted in all papers. In section 1.3, we review prior relevant research on invitations from other perspectives and traditions in pragmatics and in cross-language studies. In section 1.4, we return to the characterization of inviting, in the light of our prior explication of CA's view on language and social actions. Finally, in section 1.5 we outline
Looking at language contact through reciprocity
"In my talk, I address the contact situation of a particular area of the Indian sub-continent through the lenses of the reciprocal construction. The so-called “North East” of India is the area with the largest linguistic and biological diversity of the sub-continent. Three major language families are represented in the area: Indo-Aryan, Tibeto-Burman and Austro-Asiatic. I look at the expression of reciprocity in specific languages at the level of morphology and syntax and the historical relations between them. Where these languages are genetically unrelated, we still expect common patterns due to constant contact. For example, the Tibeto-Burman languages Nyishi and Meitei employ both nominal and verbal morphology in reciprocal constructions, whereas the Indo-Aryan languages Assamese, Bangla and Hindi do not. I will show that the former languages are losing their verbal morphology and use nominal reciprocity more productively due to contact with Indo-Aryan which dominates the region for various socio-political reasons. These are just some of the highly interesting aspects of language contact in the Indian North-East."
Reciprocal Constructions in English: each other and beyond
2007
In this paper we investigate the constructions that are used to encode reciprocal situations in English, based on responses to the 64 reciprocals videoclips developed for the Reciprocals Across Languages project (Evans, Levinson, Enfield, Gaby and Majid 2004). This work complements the extensive body of previous research on English reciprocals by focusing on spoken data. While our data supports the traditional view of each other as the primary and most common reciprocal construction in English, we find a greater degree of variation in construction types than this traditional view might suggest. Furthermore, we show that each other does not have the same degree of acceptability with all reciprocal situation types.
Cognition, 2015
In communicating events by gesture, participants create codes that recapitulate the patterns of word order in the world's vocal languages (Gibson et al., 2013; Goldin-Meadow, So, Ozyurek, & Mylander, 2008; Hall, Mayberry, & Ferreria, 2013; Hall, Ferreira, & Mayberry, 2014; Langus & Nespor, 2010; and others). Participants most often convey simple transitive events using gestures in the order Subject-Object-Verb (SOV), the most common word order in human languages. When there is a possibility of confusion between subject and object, participants use the order Subject-Verb-Object (SVO). This overall pattern has been explained by positing an underlying cognitive preference for subject-initial, verb-final orders, with the verb-medial order SVO order emerging to facilitate robust communication in a noisy channel (Gibson et al., 2013). However, whether the subject-initial and verb-final biases are innate or the result of languages that the participants already know has been unclear, be...
Apart from references to perception, words such as see and listen have shared, non-literal meanings across diverse languages. Such cross-linguistic meanings have not been systematically investigated as they appear in their natural home-informal spoken interaction. We present a qualitative examination of the semantic associations of perception verbs based on recorded everyday conversation in thirteen diverse languages. Across these diverse communities, spontaneous interaction provides evidence for two commonly-discussed extensions of perception verbs-perception~cognition, hearing~linguistic communication as well as illustrating other meanings and functions (e.g., the use of perception verbs as discourse markers) that have been less appreciated heretofore. The range of usage that is readily observable in informal conversation makes it clear that this type of data must take center stage for the empirically grounded study of semantics. Moreover, these data suggest that commonalities in polyse-mous meanings may rely not only on universal cognition, but also on the universal exigencies of social interaction.
2014
In this paper we examine interactions of the reciprocal with distributive and collective operators, which are encoded by prefixes on verbs expressing the reciprocal relation: namely, the Czech distributive po- and the collectivizing na-. The theoretical import of this study is two-fold. First, it contributes to our knowledge of how word-internal operators interact with phrasal syntax/semantics. Second, the prefixes po- and na-generate (a range of) readings of reciprocal sentences for which the Strongest Meaning Hypothesis (SMH) proposed by Dalrymple et al. (1998) does not make the right predictions. The distributive prefix po- prefers the Strong Reciprocity reading, although the SMH predicts that a weakening should take place, while with the prefix na- we find cases where weaker reciprocal readings are preferable to the stronger ones predicted by the SMH. This behavior of po- and na- is, we propose, due to the way in which they modulate two factors that are crucial in the interpreta...