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From Utterances to Speech Acts

By Mikhail Kissine

"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."

--François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod

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Academic Paper


Title: Constructions and their Acquisition: Islands and the distinctiveness of their occupancy
Paper URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/arcl.7.08ell
Author: Nick C. Ellis
Institution: University of Michigan
Author: Fernando Gonçalves Ferreira-Junior
Email: click here to access email
Homepage: http://lattes.cnpq.br/4773337313391912
Institution: Instituto Federal de Minas Gerais
Linguistic Field: Language Acquisition
Abstract: This paper presents a psycholinguistic analysis of constructions and their acquisition. It investigates effects upon naturalistic second language acquisition of type/token distributions in the islands comprising the linguistic form of English verb-argument constructions (VACs: VL verb locative, VOL verb object locative, VOO ditransitive) in the ESF corpus (Perdue, 1993).
 Goldberg (2006) argued that Zipfian type/token frequency distribution of verbs in natural language might optimize construction learning by providing one very high frequency exemplar that is also prototypical in meaning. Ellis & Ferreira-Junior (2009) confirmed that in the naturalistic L2A of English, VAC verb type/token distribution in the input is Zipfian and learners first acquire the most frequent, prototypical and generic exemplar (e.g. put in VOL, give in VOO, etc.). This paper further illustrates how acquisition is affected by the frequency and frequency distribution of exemplars within each island of the construction (e.g. [Subj V Obj Oblpath/loc]), by their prototypicality, and, using a variety of psychological and corpus linguistic association metrics, by their contingency of form-function mapping.
Type: Individual Paper
Status: Completed
Venue: Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics
Publication Info: MS
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/arcl.7.08ell


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