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This study investigated whether an analysis of narrative style (word use and cross-clausal syntax) of patients with symptoms of generalised anxiety and depression disorders can help predict the likelihood of successful participation in guided self-help. Texts by 97 people who had made contact with a primary care mental health service were analysed. Outcome measures were completion of the guided self-help programme, and change in symptoms assessed by a standardised scale (CORE-OM). Regression analyses indicated that some aspects of participants' syntax helped to predict completion of the programme, and that aspects of syntax and word use helped to predict improvement of symptoms. Participants using non-finite complement clauses with above-average frequency were four times more likely to complete the programme (95% confidence interval 1.4 to 11.7) than other participants. Among those who completed, the use of causation words and complex syntax (adverbial clauses) predicted improvement, accounting for 50% of the variation in well-being benefit. These results suggest that the analysis of narrative style can provide useful information for assessing the likelihood of success of individuals participating in a mental health guided self-help programme.
In their analysis of methods that participants use to manage the realization of practical courses of action, Kendrick and Drew (2016/this issue) focus on cases of assistance, where the need to be addressed is Self’s, and Other lends a helping hand. In our commentary, we point to other forms of cooperative engagement that are ubiquitously recruited in interaction. Imperative requests characteristically expect compliance on the grounds of Other’s already established commitment to a wider and shared course of actions. Established commitments can also provide the engine behind recruitment sequences that proceed nonverbally. And forms of cooperative engagement that are well glossed as assistance can nevertheless be demonstrably oriented to established commitments. In sum, we find commitment to shared courses of action to be an important element in the design and progression of certain recruitment sequences, where the involvement of Other is best defined as contribution. The commentary highlights the importance of interdependent orientations in the organization of cooperation. Data are in German, Italian, and Polish.
How to propose an action as an objective necessity. The case of Polish trzeba x (‘one needs to x’)
(2011)
The present study demonstrates that language-specific grammatical resources can afford speakers language-specific ways of organizing cooperative practical action. On the basis of video recordings of Polish families in their homes, we describe action affordances of the Polish impersonal modal declarative construction trzeba x (“one needs to x”) in the accomplishment of everyday domestic activities, such as cutting bread, bringing recalcitrant children back to the dinner table, or making phone calls. Trzeba-x turns in first position are regularly chosen by speakers to point to a possible action as an evident necessity for the furthering of some broader ongoing activity. Such turns in first position provide an environment in which recipients can enact shared responsibility by actively involving themselves in the relevant action. Treating the necessity as not restricted to any particular subject, aligning responsive actions are oriented to when the relevant action will be done, not whether it will be done. We show that such sequences are absent from English interactions by analyzing (a) grammatically similar turn formats in English interaction (“we need to x,” “the x needs to y”), and (b) similar interactive environments in English interactions. We discuss the potential of this research to point to a new avenue for researchers interested in the relationship between language diversity and diversity in human action and cognition.
The authors compare the use of two formats for requesting an object in informal everyday interaction: imperatives, common in our Polish data, and second-person polar questions, common in our English data. Imperatives and polar questions are selected in the same interactional “home environments” across the languages, in which they enact two social actions: drawing on shared responsibility and enlisting assistance, respectively. Speakers across the languages differ in their choice of request format in “mixed” interactional environments that support either. The finding shed light on the orderly ways in which cultural diversity is grounded in invariants of action formation.
The article discusses the possibilities and challenges of combining conversation analysis and ethnography in the study of everyday family life. We argue that such a combination requires the decision whether to prioritise interaction data or ethno-graphic (in particular, interview) data in the analysis. We present a conversation analytic case study of how household work is commonly brought up in the interactions of one couple and bring this to bear on a re-analysis of a possible conflict situation originally described in the ethnographic analysis by Klein, Izquierdo, and Bradbury (2007), published in this journal. While the findings of the two analyses converge, they inform us about different dimensions of couple interaction. The ethnographic analysis is focused on participants’ experiences, and the conversation analysis is focused on participants’ practices. We conclude that the methodological decision to prioritise interaction or interview data has consequences for the kind of questions we can ask.
Psychological research has emphasized the importance of narrative for a person’s sense of self. Building a coherent narrative of past events is one objective of psychotherapy. However, in guided self-help therapy the patient has to develop this narrative autonomously. Identifying patients’ narrative skills in relation to psychological distress could provide useful information about their suitability for self-help. The aim of this study was to explore whether the syntactic integration of clauses into narrative in texts written by prospective psychotherapy patients was related to mild to moderate psychological distress. Cross-clausal syntax of texts by 97 people who had contacted a primary care mental health service was analyzed. Severity of symptoms associated with mental health difficulties was assessed by a standardized scale (Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation outcome measure). Cross-clausal syntactic integration was negatively correlated with the severity of symptoms. A multiple regression analysis confirmed that the use of simple sentences, finite complement clauses, and coordinated clauses was associated with symptoms (R2 = .26). The results suggest that the analysis of cross-clausal syntax can provide information on patients’ narrative skills in relation to distressing events and can therefore provide additional information to support treatment decisions.
Cognitive linguists have long been interested in analogies people habitually use in thinking and speaking, but little is known about the nature of the relationship between verbal behaviour and such analogical schemas. This article proposes that discourse metaphors are an important link between the two. Discourse metaphors are verbal expressions containing a construction that evokes an analogy negotiated in the discourse community. Results of an analysis of metaphors in a corpus of newspaper texts support the prediction that regular analogies are form-specific, i.e., bound to particular lexical items. Implications of these results for assumptions about the generality of habitual analogies are discussed.
This article explores the role that metaphors play in the ideological interpretation of events. Research in cognitive linguistics has brought rich evidence of the enormous influence that body experience has on (metaphorical) conceptualization. However, the role of the cultural net in which an individual is embedded has mostly been neglected. As a step towards the integration of cultural experience into the experientialist framework in cognitive metaphor research I propose to differentiate two ideal types of motivation for metaphor: correlation and intertextuality. Evidence for the important role that intertextual metaphors play in ideological discourse comes from an analysis of Polish newspaper discourse on the tenth anniversary of the end of communism.
This article discusses possibilities for an elaboration of cognitive linguistic metaphor theory that takes into account the sociocultural situatedness of language and cognition. The approach of the Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin, linking anthropological with cognitive perspectives on language, is introduced. The objectives of the article are i) to introduce this line of research, well-known in linguistics in Eastern Europe, but little known in the “Western”, English speaking scientific discourse; ii) to illustrate the usefulness of particular ideas within this approach for metaphor analysis in a corpus study of the metaphorical understanding of system transformation in German public discourse in the late 1980s and early 1990s; and iii) to discuss diverging elaborations of the notion of experience in cognitive linguistics, contrasting the Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin with Conceptual Metaphor Theory.
This paper introduces a method for computer-based analyses of metaphor in discourse, combining quantitative and qualitative elements. This method is illustrated with data from research on German newspaper discourse concerning the ongoing system transformations of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Methodological aspects of the research procedure are discussed and it is argued that quantitative elements can enhance comparability in cross-cultural and cross-lingual research. Some basic findings of the research are presented. The peculiarities of the German Wende discourse - especially the salience of a passive perspective on the ongoing political and social changes - are outlined.
‘Linguistic relativity’ has become a major keyword in debates on the psychological significance of language diversity. In this context, the term ‘relativity’ was originally taken on loan from Einstein’s then-recent theories by Edward Sapir (1924) and Benjamin L. Whorf (1940). The present paper assesses how far the idea of linguistic relativity does analogically build on relevant insights in modern physics, and fails to find any substantial analogies. The term was used rhetorically by Sapir and Whorf, and has since been incorporated into a cognitivist research programme that seeks to answer whether ‘language influences thought’. Contemporary research on ‘linguistic relativity’ has developed into a distinct way of studying language diversity, which shares a lot with the universalistic cognitivist framework it opposes, but little with relational approaches in science.
Badania etnolingwistyczne zdobyly w ciqgu ostatnich dwu dekad znaozna populamosc. Najwazniejsz^ formuh\ nietaforycznn okreslajqcii glowny przedmiot tych badaií jest .jçzykowy obraz swiata”. W zwiqzku z tym. iz powstaj^ obecnie projekty studiów komparatyslycznych na duzíi skalç, warto byt moze rozwazyc, czego takie ujçcie etnolingwistyki nie uwzglçdnia. Wizualna metafora obrazów implikuje, ze mówincy si\ w slanie wyjsc ix>za swiat i patrzec nan (oraz nazywac go) z zewmprz. Artykul oinawia dwie kcinsekwencje tej inetafory, które mog^ przysporzyc problemów. Po pierwsze, wyizolowanie jçzyka ze swiata ludzkich dzialan, którego jyzyk wszak jest czçsci^. prowadzi do przyjçcia kognitywistycznego modeln znaczenia jako oddzielnego stmmienia komunikaeji. Taki model nie pasuje do eodziennego doswiadezenia przezroczystosci jyzyka. Po drugie, wyizolowanie jçzyka z zycia sprzyja stosowaniu metod „bezczasowych” oraz studiom nad stowami wyalKtrahowanymi z sytuaeji, w której zostaly one uzyte (jesli nie wyjçtymi z kontekstu). Przyjmuj^c takie metafory i inetody, inozetny stracic z oczu znaczn^ czçsc tego, co jest istotne dla jyzyka poUx;znego — przedmiotu badan etnonauki.
Much language-related research in cognitive robotics appeals to usage-based models of language as proposed in cognitive linguistics and developmental psychology [1, 2] that emphasise the significance of learning, embodiment and general cognitive development for human language acquisition. Over and above these issues, however, what takes centre stage in these theories are social-cognitive skills of “intention-reading” that are seen as “primary in the language acquisition process” [1] – and also as difficult to incorporate into computational models of language acquisition. The present paper addresses these concerns: we describe work in progress on a series of experiments that take steps towards closing the gap between ‘solipsistic’ symbol grounding in individual robotic agents and socially framed embodied language acquisition in learners that attend to common ground [3] with changing interlocutors.
Co-development of action, conceptualization and social interaction mutually scaffold and support each other within a virtuous feedback cycle in the development of human language in children. Within this framework, the purpose of this article is to bring together diverse but complementary accounts of research methods that jointly contribute to our understanding of cognitive development and in particular, language acquisition in robots. Thus, we include research pertaining to developmental robotics, cognitive science, psychology, linguistics and neuroscience, as well as practical computer science and engineering. The different studies are not at this stage all connected into a cohesive whole; rather, they are presented to illuminate the need for multiple different approaches that complement each other in the pursuit of understanding cognitive development in robots. Extensive experiments involving the humanoid robot iCub are reported, while human learning relevant to developmental robotics has also contributed useful results.
Disparate approaches are brought together via common underlying design principles. Without claiming to model human language acquisition directly, we are nonetheless inspired by analogous development in humans and consequently, our investigations include the parallel co-development of action, conceptualization and social interaction. Though these different approaches need to ultimately be integrated into a coherent, unified body of knowledge, progress is currently also being made by pursuing individual methods.
Within cognitive linguistics, there is an increasing awareness that the study of linguistic phenomena needs to be grounded in usage. Ideally, research in cognitive linguistics should be based on authentic language use, its results should be replicable, and its claims falsifiable. Consequently, more and more studies now turn to corpora as a source of data. While corpus-based methodologies have increased in sophistication, the use of corpus data is also associated with a number of unresolved problems. The study of cognition through off-line linguistic data is, arguably, indirect, even if such data fulfils desirable qualities such as being natural, representative and plentiful. Several topics in this context stand out as particularly pressing issues. This discussion note addresses (1) converging evidence from corpora and experimentation, (2) whether corpora mirror psychological reality, (3) the theoretical value of corpus linguistic studies of ‘alternations’, (4) the relation of corpus linguistics and grammaticality judgments, and, lastly, (5) the nature of explanations in cognitive corpus linguistics. We do not claim to resolve these issues nor to cover all possible angles; instead, we strongly encourage reactions and further discussion.
Construction-based language models assume that grammar is meaningful and learnable from experience. Focusing on five of the most elementary argument structure constructions of English, a large-scale corpus study of child-directed speech (CDS) investigates exactly which meanings/functions are associated with these patterns in CDS, and whether they are indeed specially indicated to children by their caretakers (as suggested by previous research, cf. Goldberg, Casenhiser and Sethuraman 2004). Collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003) is employed to uncover significantly attracted verb-construction combinations, and attracted pairs are classified semantically in order to systematise the attested usage patterns of the target constructions. The results indicate that the structure of the input may aid learners in making the right generalisations about constructional usage patterns, but such scaffolding is not strictly necessary for construction learning: not all argument structure constructions are coherently semanticised to the same extent (in the sense that they designate a single schematic event type of the kind envisioned in Goldberg’s [1995] ‘scene encoding hypothesis’), and they also differ in the extent to which individual semantic subtypes predominate in learners’ input
Research on syntactic ambiguity resolution in language comprehension has shown that subjects' processing decisions are influenced by a variety of heterogeneous factors such as e.g., syntactic complexity, semantic fit and the discourse frequency of the competing structures. The present paper investigates a further potentially relevant factor in such processes: effects of syntagmatic lexical chunking (or matching to a complex memorized prefab) whose occurrence would be predicted from usage-based assumptions about linguistic categorisation. Focusing on the widely studied so-called DO/SC-ambiguity in which a post-verbal NP is syntactically ambiguous between a direct object and the subject of an embedded clause, potentially biasing collocational chunks of the relevant type are identified in a number of corpus-linguistic pretests and then investigated in a self-paced reading experiment. The results show a significant increase in processing difficulty from a collocationally neutral over a lexically biasing to a strongly biasing condition. This suggests that syntagmatically complex and partially schematic templates of the kind envisioned in usage-based Construction Grammar may impinge on speakers' online processing decisions during sentence comprehension.
Introduction
(2008)