Metaphor and the Grammaticalization of Evidentials

Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1989), pp. 215-22

Spontaneous eye movements during passive spoken language comprehension reflect grammatical processing

Language is tightly connected to sensory and motor systems. Recent research using eye- tracking typically relies on constrained visual contexts, viewing a small array of objects on a computer screen. Some critiques of embodiment ask if people simply match their simulations to the pictures being presented. This study compared the comprehension of verbs with two different grammatical forms: the past progressive form (e.g., was walking), which emphasizes the ongoing nature of actions, and the simple past (e.g., walked), which emphasizes the end-state of an action. The results showed that the distribution and timing of eye movements mirrors the underlying conceptual structure of this linguistic difference in the absence of any visual stimuli. Thus, eye movement data suggest that visual inputs are unnecessary to solicit perceptual simulations

Smashing New Results on Aspectual Framing: How People Talk About Car Accidents

How do people describe events they have witnessed? What role does linguistic aspect play in this process? To provide answers to these questions, we conducted an experiment on aspectual framing. In our task, people were asked to view videotaped vehicular accidents and to describe what happened (perfective framing) or what was happening (imperfective framing). Our analyses of speech and gesture in retellings show that the form of aspect used in the question differentially influenced the way people conceptualized and described actions. Questions framed with imperfective aspect resulted in more motion verbs (e.g., driving), more reckless language (e.g., speeding), and more iconic gestures (e.g., path gesture away from the body to show travel direction) than did questions framed with perfective aspect. Our research contributes novel insights on aspect and the construal of events, and on the semantic potency of aspect in leading questions. The findings are consistent with core assumptions in cognitive linguistics, including the proposal that linguistic meaning, including grammatical meaning, is dynamic and grounded in perceptual and cognitive experience

Eye movements during listening reveal spontaneous grammatical processing

Recent research using eye-tracking typically relies on constrained visual contexts in particular goal-oriented contexts, viewing a small array of objects on a computer screen and performing some overt decision or identification. Eyetracking paradigms that use pictures as a measure of word or sentence comprehension are sometimes touted as ecologically invalid because pictures and explicit tasks are not always present during language comprehension. This study compared the comprehension of sentences with two different grammatical forms: the past progressive (e.g., was walking), which emphasizes the ongoing nature of actions, and the simple past (e.g., walked), which emphasizes the end-state of an action. The results showed that the distribution and timing of eye movements mirrors the underlying conceptual structure of this linguistic difference in the absence of any visual stimuli or task constraint: Fixations were shorter and saccades were more dispersed across the screen, as if thinking about more dynamic events when listening to the past progressive stories. Thus, eye movement data suggest that visual inputs or an explicit task are unnecessary to solicit analog representations of features such as movement, that could be a key perceptual component to grammatical comprehension

Accelerating the timeline for climate action in California

The climate emergency increasingly threatens our communities, ecosystems, food production, health, and economy. It disproportionately impacts lower income communities, communities of color, and the elderly. Assessments since the 2018 IPCC 1.5 Celsius report show that current national and sub-national commitments and actions are insufficient. Fortunately, a suite of solutions exists now to mitigate the climate crisis if we initiate and sustain actions today. California, which has a strong set of current targets in place and is home to clean energy and high technology innovation, has fallen behind in its climate ambition compared to a number of major governments. California, a catalyst for climate action globally, can and should ramp up its leadership by aligning its climate goals with the most recent science, coordinating actions to make 2030 a point of significant accomplishment. This entails dramatically accelerating its carbon neutrality and net-negative emissions goal from 2045 to 2030, including advancing clean energy and clean transportation standards, and accelerating nature-based solutions on natural and working lands. It also means changing its current greenhouse gas reduction goals both in the percentage and the timing: cutting emissions by 80 percent (instead of 40 percent) below 1990 levels much closer to 2030 than 2050. These actions will enable California to save lives, benefit underserved and frontline communities, and save trillions of dollars. This rededication takes heed of the latest science, accelerating equitable, job-creating climate policies. While there are significant challenges to achieving these goals, California can establish policy now that will unleash innovation and channel market forces, as has happened with solar, and catalyze positive upward-scaling tipping points for accelerated global climate action.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figure

Timescales of Massive Human Entrainment

The past two decades have seen an upsurge of interest in the collective behaviors of complex systems composed of many agents entrained to each other and to external events. In this paper, we extend concepts of entrainment to the dynamics of human collective attention. We conducted a detailed investigation of the unfolding of human entrainment - as expressed by the content and patterns of hundreds of thousands of messages on Twitter - during the 2012 US presidential debates. By time locking these data sources, we quantify the impact of the unfolding debate on human attention. We show that collective social behavior covaries second-by-second to the interactional dynamics of the debates: A candidate speaking induces rapid increases in mentions of his name on social media and decreases in mentions of the other candidate. Moreover, interruptions by an interlocutor increase the attention received. We also highlight a distinct time scale for the impact of salient moments in the debate: Mentions in social media start within 5-10 seconds after the moment; peak at approximately one minute; and slowly decay in a consistent fashion across well-known events during the debates. Finally, we show that public attention after an initial burst slowly decays through the course of the debates. Thus we demonstrate that large-scale human entrainment may hold across a number of distinct scales, in an exquisitely time-locked fashion. The methods and results pave the way for careful study of the dynamics and mechanisms of large-scale human entrainment.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables, 4 supplementary figures. 2nd version revised according to peer reviewers' comments: more detailed explanation of the methods, and grounding of the hypothese

Figurative language processing

This chapter is concerned with visual processing in the context of figurative language. Included is background on research that has used the visual world paradigm to study the processing of fictive motion sentences. These sentences, which are ubiquitous in everyday language, include a motion verb but describe no motion (e.g., “A road goes through the desert”, “The cord runs along the wall”). Also included is discussion of emerging concepts that form novel hypotheses for how figurative language is processed. This chapter grounds fictive motion processing in interactive dynamical systems and takes figurative language in a new direction