The emergentist program

O’Grady, William

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2006.12.001

Cited by 88 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…(Schmid 2007, p. 124) Several general cognitive abilities can be brought under the broad title of "construal operations". At issue is the fact that linguistic expressions do not, and cannot, designate a state of 17 There are other schools or orientations within the broadly Emergentist category, such as Functionalism (Bybee 1998;Dirven and Fried 1987), Construction Grammar (Croft 2001;Goldberg 1995;Fried and Östman 2004;Östman and Fried 2004;Kay 1995), various sorts of Sociolinguistics (Halliday 1978;Hurford 2000;Labov 1966Labov , 1975von Savigny 1988;Tomasello 1998;Van Valin 2003), and Language Evolution (Burling 2005;Cheney and Seyfarth 2005;Greenhill et al 2010;Li 2002;MacWhinney 2005;O'Grady 2008;Power 1998;Wildgen 2008;Worden 1998). affairs as it "objectively" is; rather, the scene must be processed and conceptualized by the human mind.…”

Section: (Some) Externalistsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Compositionality and Concepts—A Perspective from Formal Semantics and Philosophy of Language

Pelletier

2017

Language, Cognition, and Mind

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It's no secret that different of the subfields in cognitive science dispute what the correct solution is to various problems that they each investigate in their separate ways. Sometimes this is due to differing antecedent ideas about what is the appropriate way to investigate the phenomenon, other times it is due to differing antecedent ideas about what principles an adequate solution should embody, and still other times it is due to differing antecedent ideas concerning what the dispute is about. . . as for example when they use the same terminology for different phenomena. This paper is an investigation into these differing antecedent ideas in the realm of meaning and compositionality as they play out in linguistics, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of language. The focus is on the notions of subjective meaning and objective meaning, and a main conclusion is that there needs be a "two-factor semantic theory" to accommodate the overall goals of both sides. Some steps are made towards that end, but various previous attempts are argued to have missed the point. In the end it will be shown that, clearly, more work needs to be done along a number of specified dimensions, especially on the subjective side of the dispute.

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Section: (Some) Externalistsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Compositionality and Concepts—A Perspective from Formal Semantics and Philosophy of Language

Pelletier

2017

Language, Cognition, and Mind

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“…What is stored in the mind of the user, as Bybee (2010), Croft (2001), Goldberg (1995), Langacker (1987Langacker ( , 1991 and Tomasello (2009) argue, is a network of related linguistic constructions that emerge from interaction between people and exposure to data. The development of these constructions proceeds on the basis of general cognitive mechanisms, rather than mechanisms that are modality-specific to language, and is constrained by the processing capacity of the brain (Hawkins 2004(Hawkins , 2014O"Grady 2008O"Grady , 2012O"Grady , 2015.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To demonstrate the insights attainable through an emergentist approach, in this section we examine the wh-extraction construction in Afrikaans in more detail (for emergentist alternatives to the analysis of other constructions, also see O"Grady 2008O"Grady , 2015. Whextraction has enjoyed much attention in generative theorising over the years.…”

Section: Case Study: a Construction-based Emergentist Analysis Of Wh-mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Case for an Emergentist Approach

Rooy

Kruger

2015

SPILPlus

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This paper sets out an argument in favour of emergentism as an alternative theoretical paradigm to nativism, arguing that it offers a coherent, evidence-based account of language structure, language acquisition, language evolution, and language change. A number of key tenets of the nativist approach are summarised first, including the nature of the presumed complexity of language, the poverty of the input argument against the learnability of language, the assumption of parsimony, the view of language as an innate, biological faculty, and the view of the primary function of language as cognitive representation rather than communication. This is followed by a presentation of the emergentist alternative, which hinges on the notion of the grammatical construction as the central unit in the emergentist approach. The properties of constructions, and how they can come into being with recourse to only domain-general cognitive processes, are presented, before the implications of this view for the structure, acquisition, evolution and change of language are discussed. Additional points of difference with the nativist position are highlighted, including the assumptions of non-parsimonious storage and the centrality of communicative interaction in the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of language. Throughout the presentation, arguments are illustrated with reference to aspects of complementation in Germanic languages. The article concludes with a detailed case study of the wh-extraction construction, drawing on an analysis of corpus data from Afrikaans, to demonstrate how the construction-based, emergentist approach leads to an insightful analysis of a well-known construction, without having to make extensive assumptions about the underlying linguistic complexity and the need for innate mechanisms to enable the acquisition of such a complex construction.

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“…Constructionism (Goldberg 1995, Tomasello, 2003 treats syntax as nothing more than an assembly of form and function pairs (the constructions) and so "learning grammar is the piecemeal learning of many thousands of constructions and the frequency-biased abstraction of regularities within them" (Ellis 2002: 168). In O'Grady's general nativism approach (O'Grady, 2001(O'Grady, , 2005(O'Grady, , 2008) the core properties of natural language syntax follow from the operation of an efficiency-driven computational system that is indistinguishable from a processor.…”

Section: Inputmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adult second language acquisition

Slabakova

2013

LAB

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This review article selects and elaborates on the important issues of adult second language acquisition research in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The fundamental question of whether adult second language acquisition and child first language acquisition are similar or different is addressed throughout the article. The issues of a critical period for acquisition, the importance of the linguistic input, and processing are discussed. Generative as well as usagebased perspectives are considered. Future research concerns and promising areas of investigation are proposed.Key words: Critical Period Hypothesis, the Bilingual Turn, linguistic input, generative approaches to SLA, usage-based approaches to SLA, processing 1 I am grateful to three anonymous reviewers for giving me excellent suggestions on clarity as well as substance, Iregret that I could not incorporate even more of their suggestions than I did. Thanks also go to Tiffany Judy, who read the whole text in a preliminary version and helped me to enhance the accessibility of the exposition. All errors and opinions are mine. 2 IntroductionIn every review of an extensive body of research (such as, for example, the body of work investigating adult second language acquisition, SLA, or L2A), the author is inevitably faced with the hard choice of what issues to cover, from what perspective, and whether to go for a chronological or for a current-situation approach. In making these choices, then, I have been guided primarily by two considerations. The first is that the research reviewed should fall into the remit of the journal Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism; that is, it should represent formal and cognitive approaches to SLA that are based in a grammatical or psychological theory of language. This means that I will not attempt to cover much of the interesting research on aptitude, individual differences, motivation and the social factors that affect SLA, that is, the acquisition process from a learner's perspective. I will focus instead on what system of mental representations (mental grammar) learners build in the acquisition process, what prompts learners to go from one (relatively) steady state to another; and how they use this mental grammar in their language production and comprehension.Secondly, and not only for space reasons, I have mostly chosen to skip chronology and to present issues of current concern. Thus, for example, I am not going to spend much time on the issue of what constitutes the initial state of SLA, since it seems that not too many researchers have been inspired to make new claims about this matter in the last decade. This current lack of research interest in the topic does not mean that we have solved the matter to everyone's satisfaction, nor that we have a definitive answer to the question "What constitutes the initial state of L2A?" (Meisel, 2011:91). Perhaps it is altogether too optimistic to expect that answers to seminal questions within a scientific discipline will inevitably reach some sort of relative co...

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The emergentist program

Cited by 88 publications

References 42 publications

Compositionality and Concepts—A Perspective from Formal Semantics and Philosophy of Language

Compositionality and Concepts—A Perspective from Formal Semantics and Philosophy of Language

The Case for an Emergentist Approach

Adult second language acquisition

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