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The present study argues that variation across listeners in the perception of a non-native contrast is due to two factors: the listener-specic weighting of auditory dimensions and the listener-specic construction of new segmental representations. The interaction of both factors is shown to take place in the perception grammar, which can be modelled within an OT framework. These points are illustrated with the acquisition of the Dutch three-member labiodental contrast [V v f] by German learners of Dutch, focussing on four types of learners from the perception study by Hamann and Sennema (2005a).
The main tenet of the present paper is the thesis that nominalization – like other cases of derivational morphology – is an essentially lexical phenomenon with well defined syntactic (and semantic) conditions and consequences. More specifically, it will be argued that the relation between a verb and the noun derived from it is subject to both systematic and idiosyncratic conditions with respect to lexical as well as syntactic aspects.
This article raises a number of questions that should be dealt with in drawing up a lexicographic plan for Gabon. For which of the Gabonese languages should lexicographic units be established? This question entrains the issue of inventorying the Gabonese languages and their standardization as well as the issue of language planning for Gabon. What is the status of those foreign languages widely spoken in Gabon? What about French? Should Gabon keep importing its French dictionaries from France, or should the Gabonese compile their own French dictionaries, including French words and expressions exclusively used in Gabon? Finally, after trying to answer these questions, a number of suggestions are made for the establishment of a lexicographic plan for Gabon.
The main concern of this article is to discuss some recent findings concerning the psychological reality of optimality-theoretic pragmatics and its central part – bidirectional optimization. A present challenge is to close the gap between experimental pragmatics and neo-Gricean theories of pragmatics. I claim that OT pragmatics helps to overcome this gap, in particular in connection with the discussion of asymmetries between natural language comprehension and production. The theoretical debate will be concentrated on two different ways of interpreting bidirection: first, bidirectional optimization as a psychologically realistic online mechanism; second, bidirectional optimization as an offline phenomenon of fossilizing optimal form-meaning pairs. It will be argued that neither of these extreme views fits completely with the empirical data when taken per se.
In this contribution I shall be interested, among other things, in finding a place for the European phenomenon of the ›Speculum humanae salvationis‹ within German literary history, which will inescapably involve revisiting the unfashionable discussion of date and origins. I also intend to ask about the place of this text in the ‘didactic’ literature of the Middle Ages. Is a religious text structured according to sacred history didactic? Much didactic poetry is in the vernacular: What does it mean that the ›Speculum‹ was composed in Latin? And what place should be accorded to its vernacular reception? The ›Speculum‹ is inscribed within a set of oppositions that would appear to be recurrent in the didactic literature of the later Middle Ages: Latin and vernacular, verse and prose, words and pictures, religious and profane, moral
teaching and devotion, clerical and lay. In view of its exceptionally broad transmission in the German lands, both in Latin and in vernacular reworkings, is it possible to describe this text so that it takes a place within a larger picture? In some respects it may stand at a threshold in the history of European didacticism.
Ever since the discovery of neural networks, there has been a controversy between two modes of information processing. On the one hand, symbolic systems have proven indispensable for our understanding of higher intelligence, especially when cognitive domains like language and reasoning are examined. On the other hand, it is a matter of fact that intelligence resides in the brain, where computation appears to be organized by numerical and statistical principles and where a parallel distributed architecture is appropriate. The present claim is in line with researchers like Paul Smolensky and Peter Gärdenfors and suggests that this controversy can be resolved by a unified theory of cognition – one that integrates both aspects of cognition and assigns the proper roles to symbolic computation and numerical neural computation.
The overall goal in this contribution is to discuss formal systems that are suitable for grounding the formal basis for such a unified theory. It is suggested that the instruments of modern logic and model theoretic semantics are appropriate for analyzing certain aspects of dynamical systems like inferring and learning in neural networks. Hence, I suggest that an active dialogue between the traditional symbolic approaches to logic, information and language and the connectionist paradigm is possible and fruitful. An essential component of this dialogue refers to Optimality Theory (OT) – taken as a theory that likewise aims to overcome the gap between symbolic and neuronal systems. In the light of the proposed logical analysis notions like recoverability and bidirection are explained, and likewise the problem of founding a strict constraint hierarchy is discussed. Moreover, a claim is made for developing an "embodied" OT closing the gap between symbolic representation and embodied cognition.
The paper investigates the origins of the German/Dutch particle toch/doch) in the hope of shedding light on a puzzle with respect to doch/toch and to shed some light on two theoretical issues. The puzzle is the nearly opposite meaning of the stressed and unstressed versions of the particle which cannot be accounted for in standard theories of the meaning of stress. One theoretical issue concerns the meaning of stress: whether it is possible to reduce the semantic contribution of a stressed item to the meaning of the item and the meaning of stress. The second issue is whether the complex use of a particle like doch/toch can be seen as an instance of spread or whether it has to be seen as having a core meaning which is differentiated by pragmatics operating in different contexts.
We use the etymology of doch and doch as to+u+h (that+ question marker+ emphatic marker) to argue for an origin as a question tag checking a hearer opinion. Stress on the tag indicates an opposite opinion (of the common ground or the speaker) and this sets apart two groups of uses spreading in different directions. This solves the puzzle, indicates that the assumption of spread is useful and offers a subtle correction of the interpretation of stress. While stress always means contrast with a contrasting item, if the particle use is due to spread, it is not guaranteed that the unstressed particle has a corresponding use (or inversely).
In this paper, we outline the foundations of a theory of implicatures. It divides into two parts. The first part contains the base model. It introduces signalling games, optimal answer models, and a general definition of implicatures in terms of natural information. The second part contains a refinement in which we consider noisy communication with efficient clarification requests. Throughout, we assume a fully cooperative speaker who knows the information state of the hearer. The purpose of this paper is not the study of examples. Our concern is the framework for doing these studies.
The article aims to give an overview about the application of Optimality Theory (OT) to the domain of pragmatics. In the introductory part we discuss different ways to view the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics. Rejecting the doctrine of literal meaning we conform to (i) semantic underdetermination and (ii) contextualism (the idea that the mechanism of pragmatic interpretation is crucial both for determining what the speaker says and what he means). Taking the assumptions (i) and (ii) as essential requisites for a natural theory of pragmatic interpretation, section 2 introduces the three main views conforming to these assumptions: Relevance theory, Levinson’s theory of presumptive meanings, and the Neo-Gricean approach. In section 3 we explain the general paradigm of OT and the idea of bidirectional optimization. We show how the idea of optimal interpretation can be used to restructure the core ideas of these three different approaches. Further, we argue that bidirectional OT has the potential to account both for the synchronic and the diachronic perspective on pragmatic interpretation. Section 4 lists relevant examples of using the framework of bidirectional optimization in the domain of pragmatics. Section 5 provides some general conclusions. Modeling both for the synchronic and the diachronic perspective on pragmatics opens the way for a deeper understanding of the idea of naturalization and (cultural) embodiment in the context of natural language interpretation.