From immediate to extended intersubjectification:a gradient approach to intersubjective awareness and semasiological change

This paper provides a theoretical and methodological contribution to the heated debate on intersubjectivity and intersubjectification (Nuyts, 2001, 2012; Traugott & Dasher, 2002; Traugott, 2003, 2010, 2012; Verhagen, 2005; Narrog, 2010, 2012; Dancygier & Sweetser, 2012). I will argue that intersubjectivity, intended as a subject’s awareness of the other persona(s)’ feelings, knowledge, and beliefs, can be construed alternatively on an ‘immediate’ and on an ‘extended’ level. Immediate intersubjectivity (I-I) corresponds to the mutual awareness of the speech participants during the ongoing speech event, whereas extended intersubjectivity (E-I) includes an assumed third party (specific or generic) who has an indirect social bearing on the utterance (cf. Tantucci 2013, 2014). Along a unidirectional cline of change, extended intersubjectification constitutes a further stage of semantic and/or grammatical reanalysis with respect to its immediate counterpart. In order to empirically justify the diachronic continuum between the two, I provide some corpus-illustrated (cf. Tummers et al., 2005, p. 235) examples from Mandarin and corpus-based evidence about the constructions [you don’t want X] and believe it or not in American English

Toward a typology of constative speech acts:actions beyond evidentiality, epistemic modality, and factuality

The present study joins the long-running debate about the semantic– pragmatic distinction of the three domains of epistemic modality, evidentiality, and factuality. In particular, this work aims at providing both a theoretical and operational framework to investigate what type of speech act is at stake when a speaker/writer alternatively decides to mark a proposition as an epistemic modal, an evidential, or a factual construction. In fact, three basic types of illocutionary force will be shown to determine the modal marking of a constative speech act: evaluational (EvF(p)), presentative (PrF(p)), and assertive (AsF(p)) force. This classification is based on a set of tests that can effectively address either grammaticalized constructions or pragmatic strategies, independent from the specificity of the item under enquiry. This approach is first used to disen- tangle the controversial meaning of MUST-type predicates and then further theorized as a speech-act based framework of epistemic disambiguation

Entrenchment inhibition:Constructional change and repetitive behaviour can be in competition with large-scale “recompositional” creativity

This paper addresses creativity as inhibition of repetitive behaviour. We argue that entrenchment and constructional change can be in competition with large-scale creative attempts of recomposition of constructions’ internal constituency. After undergoing chunking, the recurrent usage of a construction may be significantly counterbalanced with new attempts of entrenchment inhibition (viz. inhibition of entrenchment). These are cases where speakers opt for more compositional and less predictable ways to express a similar meaning of a conventionalised form. We focus on the constructionalisation of noun–participle compounds (e.g. snow-covered) in the Historical Corpus of American English. During the second part of the twentieth century, speakers increasingly inhibit the usage of conventionalised noun phrase–past participle forms in favour of more compositional strategies involving the same internal constituents. This entails that constructional change not only affects the meaning of the chunk that undergoes constructionalisation but also the way speakers creatively rediscover its internal constituency. These results additionally aim to inform research in cognitive architectures and artificial intelligence, where creativity is often merely considered as a problem-solving mechanism rather than a potential process of inhibition of automatised behaviour

Textual factualization:the phenomenology of assertive reformulation and presupposition during a speech event

This work provides an operational framework to study the unfolding of new factual propositions out of originally suspended-factual (Narrog 2009, Tantucci 2015b) statements during a speech event. In particular, this model is centered on the dynamic relationship between cognitive control (i.e. Kan et al. 2013) and epistemic certainty. A speaker/writer’s epistemic inclination towards the factuality of a proposition P occurs throughout a text, either in the form of the assertive reformulation of an originally suspended-factual proposition P, or in the form of a presupposition trigger also turning P into a new factual statement. I refer to this phenomenon as textual factualization (TF) and I provide corpus data from the British National Corpus (BNC) to demonstrate it to be a frequent mechanism where an originally suspended-factual proposition [apparently P] is subsequently factualized both in written and spoken texts. I argue that TF instantiates as a form of interference/misinformation effect (cf. Ecker et al. 2015) as it triggers the qualitative alteration of an event memory by partially overwriting an original memory trace: from [apparently P] to [P

From Co-Actionality to Extended Intersubjectivity:Drawing on Language Change and Ontogenetic Development

This article combines research results centred on theory of mind (ToM) from cognitive and developmental psychology (Goldman 2006; Apperly 2010; Wilkinson and Ball 2012) with the notion of intersubjectivity in usage-based linguistics (i.a. Verhagen 2005; Nuyts 2012; Traugott 2012). It identifies some of the controversies in the literature from both domains and suggests the desiderata for a hybrid approach to intersubjectivity, which is distinctively designed to tackle applied research in social and cognitive sciences. This model is based on a mismatch between interaction as mere ‘co-action’ vs. interaction as spontaneously communicated awareness of an(other) mind(s). It provides a case study centred on the first language acquisition of pre-nominal usage of this/that and such. From, respectively, a distinctive collexeme (Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004) and behavioural profile analysis (Gries 2010) will emerge that beyond expressions of joint attention, children’s ToM ability progressively underpins ‘ad-hoc’ generalized instantiations based on extended intersubjectivity, viz. the socio-cognitive skill to problematize what a general persona would act, feel, or think in a specific context

An evolutionary approach to semasiological change:Overt influence attempts through the development of the Mandarin 吧-ba particle

This paper focuses on the pragmatics of overt influence attempts (cf. Reich, 2011, 2012; Tantucci, 2016a) and their cognitive relationship with semasiological change. As a case study, the present analysis is centred on the recent history of the Mandarin 吧-ba sentence-final particle, starting from the Qing Dynasty (1644--1911) up to its present day usage. Corpus-based data from the CCL Peking corpus highlight a progressive shift from an original directive usage towards a later assertive employment. In the latter case, speaker/ writer ‘invites’ addressee/reader to agree with his/her statement on the basis of what is ‘socially’ or ‘interpersonally’ expected to be true/ sensible. The cooperatively ‘expected action’ originally prompted by the particle, will then turn into cooperatively ‘expected certainty’ in later usages. From an evolutionary-psychological angle, at every stage of the cline it emerges the speaker/writer's consistent attempt to exert social influence on addressee/reader in the form of an ‘interested’ co-act proposal (cf. Reich, 2011; Tantucci, 2016b). Crown Copyright © 2017 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Evidentiality ‘In’ and ‘As’ Context:Corpus-Based Insights About the Mandarin V-过 guo Construction

In this paper we argue that evidentiality can be a category of a linguistic system that emerges from the intersection between form, usage and ‘contextual situ- atedness’. We provide a multivariate corpus-based case study about the usage of the V-过 guo construction in written Mandarin, and show how the text types in which the chunk appears significantly contribute to determine its pragmatic usage and its emer- gent meaning grounded in shared knowledge and collective recognition. This approach sheds new light on two critical issues. The first is that evidentiality is an important gram- matical category of documentary, factual and academic prose in Mandarin Chinese. The second, much broader, claim of this paper is that generalisations about grammatical/ semantic categories need to account for the usage of specific items in context. In this sense, ‘physical and sociocultural situatedness’ is as important a dimension as form and meaning in order to define categorial membership

Dynamic resonance and explicit dialogic engagement in Mandarin first language acquisition

The present paper aims to shed light on the relationship between priming and creativity throughout Chinese children’s ontogenetic development. It has been suggested that priming in naturalistic interaction occurs not as an exclusively implicit phenomenon. New methodological desiderata beyond traditional acceptability judgements have been proposed, including large-scale corpus-based analysis (cf. Branigan & Pickering 2017; Lester et al. 2017), as it is noted that priming may correlate with interlocutors’ engagement and intersubjectivity throughout naturalistic interaction (Authors 2021b). This study is centred on priming occurring creatively, in the form of dynamic resonance, viz. involving the re-elaboration ‘on the fly’ of a previously encountered construction. We fitted a conditional inference tree and mixed effects linear regression based on the normalised entirety of Child-Carer/Child-Peer interaction of the Zhou2 and Zhou3 Mandarin corpora of first language acquisition (cf. Li & Zhou 2004; Zhang & Zhou 2009), from 8 months to 5 years of age. The models indicate that children significantly acquire the ability to creatively re-use a constructional prime around age 4, distinctively in combination with sentence final particles of intersubjectivity (cf. Author 2017, 2018, 2020). The latter are non obligatory markers that speakers employ to express their concern about the addressee’s reaction to an ongoing utterance. These results constitute a fundamental discovery in the research on priming, as they indicate that the ability to creatively re-use a prime is ontogenetically correlated with explicit dialogic engagement

Illocutional concurrences:The case of evaluative speech acts and face-work in spoken Mandarin and American English

This paper proposes a novel usage-based approach to modal and illocutionary analysis. As a case study, it provides a holistic picture of the interplay between evaluations and face-work (i.a. Goffman 1967) as they occur in the Spoken Callhome corpora of Mandarin and American English. We plotted a conditional inference tree model (Hothorn et al. 2006) to gather what we call language-specific illocutional concurrences (IC). IC encompass converging factors at various levels of verbal experience that contribute both locally (i.e. at the morphosyntactic level) and peripherally (i.e. at the illocutionary level) to the encoding of contextually and culturally situated speech acts or pragmemes (i.a. Mey 2001; Author 2016a). From this study will emerge that Mandarin evaluations tend to include a higher number of instances of propositional face-work, viz. cases where the speaker overtly addresses the hearer as the target of his/her evaluation. Similarly, Mandarin evaluations show higher illocutional complexity, in the sense of having a more diverse pool of overtly coded dimensions that speakers account for whilst making evaluations. Finally, Mandarin evaluations also show a stronger tendency to overtly account for harmonious rapport-maintenance (i.a. Goffman 1967; Spencer-Oatey 2008) and intersubjectivity (i.a. Traugott & Dasher 2002; Traugott 2010)

Diachronic change of rapport orientation and sentence-periphery in Mandarin

This article provides a corpus-based analysis of formal structure and rapport orientation of evaluative speech acts in written Mandarin starting from the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) leading up to the present. It focuses on illocutional concurrences (IC) where the change of rapport management with the interlocutor significantly correlates with evaluative speech acts. The IC are holistic patterns that emerge at various levels of an utterance. They contribute both locally (i.e. at the morphosyntactic level) and peripherally (i.e. at the illocutionary level) to the encoding of contextually and temporally situated speech acts or pragmemes. Mixed methods of hierarchical clustering and multiple correspondence analysis indicate that the recent history of evaluative speech acts in written Chinese is characterised by a shift from prevalently rapport-maintaining orientation to utterances more overtly marked for (im-)politeness. Evaluative language in written Mandarin became less mitigated at the structural level and increasingly oriented towards rapport enhancement and rapport challenge. This shift significantly intersects with a progressive replacement of clause-final particles during the 20th century, especially after the so-called ‘May the 4th Movement’