4 results
Japanese two-year-olds use morphosyntax to learn novel verb meanings*
- AYUMI MATSUO, SOTARO KITA, YURI SHINYA, GARY C. WOOD, LETITIA NAIGLES
-
- Journal:
- Journal of Child Language / Volume 39 / Issue 3 / June 2012
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 13 September 2011, pp. 637-663
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
Previous research has found that children who are acquiring argument-drop languages such as Turkish and Chinese make use of syntactic frames to extend familiar verb meanings (Göksun, Küntay & Naigles, 2008; Lee & Naigles, 2008). This article investigates whether two-year-olds learning Japanese, another argument-drop language, make use of argument number and case markings in learning novel verbs. Children watched videos of novel causative and non-causative actions via Intermodal Preferential Looking. The novel verbs were presented in transitive or intransitive frames; the NPs in the transitive frames appeared ‘bare’ or with case markers. Consistent with previous findings of Morphosyntactic Bootstrapping, children who heard the novel verbs in the transitive frame with case markers reliably assigned those verbs to the novel causative actions.
3 - The macro-event property
-
- By Jürgen Bohnemeyer, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, N. J. Enfield, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, James Essegbey, University of Florida at Gainesville, Sotaro Kita, University of Birmingham
- Edited by Jürgen Bohnemeyer, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Eric Pederson, University of Oregon
-
- Book:
- Event Representation in Language and Cognition
- Published online:
- 01 March 2011
- Print publication:
- 23 December 2010, pp 43-67
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Towards a semantic typology of event segmentation
Semantic typology is the study of semantic categorization. In the simplest case, semantic typology investigates how an identical perceptual stimulus is categorized across languages. The problem examined in this article is that of event segmentation. To the extent that events are perceivable, this may be understood as the representation of dynamic stimuli in chunks of linguistic code with categorical properties. For illustration, consider an example from a classic study on event cognition (Jenkins, Wald and Pittenger 1986): a woman prepares a cup of tea. She unwraps a tea bag, puts it into the cup, gets a kettle of water from the kitchen, pours the water into the cup, etc. This action sequence can be diagrammed schematically as in fig. 3.1.
It is conceivable that at some level of “raw” perception – before the onset of any kind of categorization – the action sequence is represented as a continuous flux. But it is hard to imagine how higher cognitive operations of recognition and inference could operate without segmenting the stream of perceived activity into units that are treated as instances of conceptual categories. Let us call the intentional correlates of such categories ‘events.’ Regardless of whether or not one assumes internal representations of the action sequence to operate on event concepts, linguistic representations of it do require segmentation into units that can be labeled as instances of unwrapping a tea bag, pouring water into a cup, and so on.
12 - A grammar of space in Japanese
-
- By Sotaro Kita, University of Birmingham
- Edited by Stephen C. Levinson, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands, David P. Wilkins, San Francisco State University
-
- Book:
- Grammars of Space
- Published online:
- 22 September 2009
- Print publication:
- 14 September 2006, pp 437-474
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
Japanese is spoken by roughly 110 million people, most of whom live in Japan. The earliest extensive texts in Japanese date back to the early eighth century. Its genetic affiliation is controversial (see Shibatani (1990) for the survey of various suggestions in the literature). The language consists of many dialect groups. In this chapter, we will focus on the dialect spoken in the Tokyo metropolitan area.
Japanese expressions for three types of spatial information are discussed. One is location, namely, where an entity is located. The other is motion, in which an entity changes its locative relationship with another entity. The third is frames of reference, with which space is divided into regions with respect to a reference point so as to specify location and direction and trajectory of motion.
Very brief grammatical overview of the language
Japanese has a nominative-accusative case-marking pattern, and the canonical order among subject, direct object and indirect object is S-DO-IO-V. While rigidly verb final, various discourse factors lead to ‘scrambling’ of the constituent order among S, DO, IO, adjuncts and adverbials. Furthermore, when recoverable from the context, verb arguments are usually left unexpressed in Japanese discourse. Derivational morphology of verbs is complex. Categories marked by productive verbal morphology include tense, aspect, passive, causative, reciprocal, ‘can do X’, ‘want to do X’, ‘to do X too much’, epistemic modality, negation and honorification. There is no participant marking on the verb, and grammatical relations are marked by postpositions on NPs.
8 - How representational gestures help speaking
-
- By Sotaro Kita, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen
- Edited by David McNeill, University of Chicago
-
- Book:
- Language and Gesture
- Published online:
- 07 January 2010
- Print publication:
- 03 August 2000, pp 162-185
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the speaker-internal motivation to produce representational gestures. Consequently, the communicative aspects of gesture will be backgrounded in the following discussion, and the main focus will be on the cognitive functions of representational gestures. Representational gestures are defined here as iconic gestures and abstract deictic gestures (McNeill 1992). In an iconic gesture there is a certain degree of isomorphism between the shape of the gesture and the entity that is expressed by the gesture. An abstract deictic gesture points to a seemingly empty space in front of the body, as if establishing a virtual object in the gesture space or pointing at such a virtual object. Because these gestures have a relatively transparent form–function relationship, they play an important role in communication.
However, it is known that people also produce representational gestures without visual contact with the interlocutor, although under such a condition the frequency decreases (Rimé 1983). This cannot be fully explained as a habit formed during more frequent face-to-face interactions. This is because certain types of gestures that are meant to be seen are not produced if there is no visual contact with the interlocutor. For example, waving a hand to mean “Bye-bye” at the end of a phone conversation feels extremely unnatural. Bavelas et al. (1992) experimentally demonstrated that ‘interactive gestures’, whose signification function involves other participants in the speech event, are produced less frequently when there is no visual contact between the interactants.