ABSTRACT Intonational tunes systematically affect a wide range of inferences including sentential force, contextual background assumptions, attitudinal meaning, social/interactional meaning, etc. However, analysing their conventional meaning contributions has remained a challenge, in part because many issues remain open regarding how intonational forms, on the one hand, and meanings, on the other, should be represented and analysed. In this paper, we review recent semantic and pragmatic work on English intonation and examine how discussions on these issues are evolving. Offering case studies of a few English tunes and building on the emerging generalizations, we propose that (i) the parsing of intonational form is subject to a variety of considerations including pragmatic ones, that (ii) conventional discourse effects (CDEs) provide useful analytical primitives through which intonational meanings can be captured, and that (iii) this widens the empirical scope of formal semantic/pragmatic analyses to include a variety of social and perlocutionary inferences. We also demonstrate that the explorations of intonational form and intonational meaning are interconnected, often mutually informing each other.
ABSTRACT Silent gesture is increasingly used in linguistics to investigate questions that are difficult or impossible to address using natural language data alone, including issues of language emergence, word order, grammatical categorisation, and iconicity. However, the interpretation of silent‐gesture findings remains methodologically complex. This paper critically examines the interpretive possibilities and limits of the silent‐gesture paradigm, focusing especially on its use in sign‐language linguistics. After discussing the assumptions underlying silent‐gesture research and the types of comparisons it enables, I review three major areas where the paradigm has been widely employed: word‐order preferences, the emergence of noun–verb distinctions, and iconicity in formational and grammatical structure. I argue that silent gesture should not be treated as direct evidence of ‘pure’ communicative or cognitive biases, nor as a proxy for language emergence itself. Rather, silent gesture is a complementary methodological tool that allows researchers to experimentally isolate communicative pressures interacting with linguistic structure under controlled conditions. Its findings can therefore only be adequately interpreted when situated within and evaluated against evidence from spoken languages, sign languages, homesign systems, and other natural communicative settings. The paper concludes with methodological recommendations for designing and interpreting silent‐gesture studies in relation to spoken languages, sign languages, and other signing varieties.
ABSTRACT Incrementality is one of the hallmarks of realtime language comprehension. It contrasts sharply with another feature of language comprehension, the high degree of context dependence exhibited by many expressions calling for global adaptations to the larger discourse context. The present article highlights the importance of the semantic notion of scope for the interpretation of operators of various sorts. We review a number of non‐incremental effects from previous literature and hypothesize that they can be better understood if we consider the processing domains in terms of scope that may be underlying their interpretation. To do so, we propose a novel account, the Scope‐Domain Account , mediating between immediate specification and local underspecification. We apply this account to findings from the literature contrasting incremental and non‐incremental effects observed for negation and quantifiers but also apply it to phenomena that have only rarely been connected to scope processing so far.
ABSTRACT The troves of speech data that have driven an increasing orientation towards large‐scale methods in linguistics have been, for the most part, available only to closed teams of researchers and their collaborators. The Archive of Pittsburgh Language and Speech (APLS, https://apls.pitt.edu ) is a new open data resource, consisting of nearly 46 h of audio from sociolinguistic interviews with 40 speakers of Pittsburgh English. Powered by the corpus management software LaBB‐CAT, APLS interviews are richly annotated with multiple layers of linguistic information at the phrase, word, and segment level. Thanks to APLS's graphical user interface, users can access powerful tools for searching the corpus and extracting acoustic measurements with relatively few technical barriers to entry. We describe how APLS fits into the current landscape of (socio)linguistic open data, exemplify APLS's capabilities via a case study of 7137 /aʊ/ tokens, and contextualise the data both in terms of how fieldwork was carried out and Pittsburgh in the early 2000s.
ABSTRACT Trauma has been front of mind for many language teachers in the tumultuous first decades of the 21st century, but until quite recently, language teaching research that names trauma as such has been relatively scarce. In this short paper, I give a brief overview of different understandings of trauma, and draw on orienting principles and frameworks to make a case for language pedagogy that is informed by local and empirical wisdom about trauma so that it can be more trauma‐responsive. I also look at how teachers and scholars of language have engaged with, and responded to, trauma as concept and reality across a variety of language learning contexts around the world, and consider trauma in light of insights from the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies to explore how we might renew our commitment to fostering conditions of linguistic safety in language teaching and learning.
