3 research outputs found
The Grammar of Exchange: A Comparative Study of Reciprocal Constructions Across Languages
Cultures are built on social exchange. Most languages have dedicated grammatical machinery for expressing this. To demonstrate that statistical methods can also be applied to grammatical meaning, we here ask whether the underlying meanings of these grammatical constructions are based on shared common concepts. To explore this, we designed video stimuli of reciprocated actions (e.g., âgiving to each otherâ) and symmetrical states (e.g., âsitting next to each otherâ), and with the help of a team of linguists collected responses from 20 languages around the world. Statistical analyses revealed that many languages do, in fact, share a common conceptual core for reciprocal meanings but that this is not a universally expressed concept. The recurrent pattern of conceptual packaging found across languages is compatible with the view that there is a shared non-linguistic understanding of reciprocation. But, nevertheless, there are considerable differences between languages in the exact extensional patterns, highlighting that even in the domain of grammar semantics is highly language-specific
The island of time: YĂ©lĂź Dnye, the language of Rossel Island
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2013_The_island_of_time.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)This paper describes the linguistic description of time, the accompanying gestural system, and the âmental time linesâ found in the speakers of YĂ©lĂź Dnye, an isolate language spoken offshore from Papua New Guinea. Like many indigenous languages, YĂ©lĂź Dnye has no fixed anchoring of time and thus no calendrical time. Instead, time in YĂ©lĂź Dnye linguistic description is primarily anchored to the time of speaking, with six diurnal tenses and special nominals for n days from coding time; this is supplemented with special constructions for overlapping events. Consequently there is relatively little cross-over or metaphor from space to time. The gesture system, on the other hand, uses pointing to sun position to indicate time of day and may make use of systematic time lines. Experimental evidence fails to show a single robust axis used for mapping time to space. This suggests that there may not be a strong, universal tendency for systematic space-time mappings.18 februari 201
Time in terms of space
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119764.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access