Epistemic Vigilance, Cautious Optimism and Sophisticated Understanding

Humans have developed a critical alertness to the believability and reliability of communication: epistemic vigilance (Sperber et al. 2010). It is responsible for trusting interlocutors and believing interpretations. But what is exactly its role in communication? This paper suggests that epistemic vigilance may trigger shifts from a default processing strategy driven by expectations of optimal relevance to more complex processing strategies. These would be enacted when hearers notice speakers’ linguistic mistakes, hearers realise that they have made interpretive mistakes or when hearers discover that speakers seek to mislead them to erroneous or unintended interpretations

The Typological Diversity of Morphomes: A Cross-Linguistic Study of Unnatural Morphology

This is the first typologically-oriented book-length treatment of morphomes, systematic morphological identities, usually within inflectional paradigms, that do not map onto syntactic or semantic natural classes. In the first half of the book, Borja Herce outlines the theoretical and empirical challenges associated with the identification and definition of morphomes, and surveys their links with related notions such as syncretism, homophony, segmentation, and economy, among others. He also presents the different ways in which morphomic structures in a language have been observed to emerge, change, and disappear. The second part of the book contains its core contribution: a database of 120 morphomes across 79 languages from a range of families, which are presented and analysed in detail. A range of findings emerge as a result, including the idiosyncratic nature of morphomes in the Romance languages, the existence of cross-linguistically recurrent unnatural patterns, and the preference for more natural structures even among morphomes. The database also allows further explorations of other issues such as the effect of learnability and communicative efficiency on morphological structures, and the lexical and grammatical informativity of morphs and their distribution

The Arabic (Re)dubbing of Wordplay in Disney Animated Films

Although audiovisual translation (AVT) has received considerable attention in recent years, evidence suggests that there is a paucity of empirical research carried out on the dubbing of wordplay in the Arabophone countries. This piece of research sets to identify, describe and assess the most common translation techniques adopted by translators when dubbing English-language animated films into Arabic. The focus is on the special case of dubbing Disney animated films into Egyptian Arabic (EA) and their subsequent redubbing into Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), during the 1975-2015 period. The ultimate goal is to ascertain the similarities as well as the differences that set the two versions apart, particularly when it comes to the transfer of wordplay. To reach this objective, the methodological approach adopted for this study is a corpus of instances of wordplay that combines a quantitative phase, which has the advantage of identifying correlations between the types of wordplay and particular translation techniques and results and is then followed by a qualitative analysis that further probes the results and determines the different factors that contribute to the way wordplay is translated. The analysis reveals that, in their attempt to render this type of punning humour, in both Arabic dubbed versions, Arabic translators resort to a variety of translation techniques, namely, loan, direct translation, explication, paraphrase, substitution and omission. The examination of the data shows that achieving a humorous effect in the target dialogue is the top priority and driving factor influencing most of the strategies activated in the process of dubbing wordplay into EA. Dissimilarly, there is a noticeable lower amount of puns crossing over from the original films to the MSA dubbed versions, highlighting the fact that the approach generally taken by the dubbing teams seems to give priority to the denotative, informative dimension rather than the socio-pragmatic one. By shedding light on the intricacies of dubbing, it is hoped that this study would contribute to the advancement of knowledge in the translation of wordplay in the Arabophone countries and, more specifically, in the field of dubbing children’s programmes

The role of chunking and analogy in early vocabulary acquisition and processing

Chunking and analogy, learning through associations and similarities respectively, are crucial cognitive processes in a usage-based theory of language development. Assessing their roles in child naturalistic word learning has posed significant challenges. In this thesis, I offer methodological solutions to examine the developmental plausibility of these processes. Chapter 2 discusses limitations in studies of early word segmentation from naturalistic speech, affecting conclusions about the processes' developmental plausibility. I present a new chunking-based model, CLASSIC Utterance Boundary (CLASSIC-UB), to study how English infants discover words from continuous naturalistic speech. Its plausibility is assessed through new metrics focusing on child production vocabularies from large-scale conversational corpora. I show the advantages of using large word production samples and how this can improve the refinement of early word segmentation and learning theories. In Chapter 3, conclusions about CLASSIC-UB’s plausibility are supported by extending this approach cross-linguistically, using Italian as a case study. Across Chapters 2 and 3, CLASSIC-UB more accurately captures child productions than other chunking and non-chunking accounts, supporting its plausibility in early word segmentation and learning. In Chapter 4, I identify methodological challenges in assessing the independent effects of chunking and analogy in child word processing. I focus on how children use sentence context to resolve ambiguous word meanings (word sense disambiguation). I present ChiSense-12, a new open-access sense-tagged corpus of child-directed speech, and describe its use in creating experimental stimuli to disentangle variables (verb-object associations and verb-event structures) that are informative about the independent role of chunking and analogy. Using this corpus, I showed - for the first time - that 4-year-old children exploit both bottom-up verb-object associations and top-down verb-event structures to resolve lexical ambiguities. Overall, this thesis makes a significant contribution to usage-based theories of language development and improves our understanding of how children acquire language in real-life contexts