Open Access

This special issue investigates early responses—responsive actions that (start to) unfold while the production of the responded-to turn and action is still under way. Although timing in human conduct has gained intense interest in research, the early production of responsive actions has so far largely remained unexplored. But what makes early responses possible? What do such responses tell us about the complex interplay between syntax, prosody, and embodied conduct? And what sorts of actions do participants accomplish by means of such early responses? By addressing these questions, the special issue seeks to offer new advances in the systematic analysis of temporal organization in interaction, contributing to broader discussions in the language and cognitive sciences as to the social coordination of human conduct. In this introductory article, we discuss the role of temporality and sequentiality in social interaction, specifically focusing on projective and anticipatory mechanisms and the interplay between multiple semiotic resources, which are crucial for making early responses possible.

This paper demonstrates systematic cross-linguistic differences in the electrophysiological correlates of conflicts between form and meaning (“semantic reversal anomalies”). These engender P600 effects in English and Dutch (e.g. Kolk et al., 2003, Kuperberg et al., 2003), but a biphasic N400 – late positivity pattern in German (Schlesewsky and Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, 2009), and monophasic N400 effects in Turkish (Experiment 1) and Mandarin Chinese (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 revealed that, in Icelandic, semantic reversal anomalies show the English pattern with verbs requiring a position-based identification of argument roles, but the German pattern with verbs requiring a case-based identification of argument roles. The overall pattern of results reveals two separate dimensions of cross-linguistic variation: (i) the presence vs. absence of an N400, which we attribute to cross-linguistic differences with regard to the sequence-dependence of the form-to-meaning mapping and (ii) the presence vs. absence of a late positivity, which we interpret as an instance of a categorisation-related late P300, and which is observable when the language under consideration allows for a binary well-formedness categorisation of reversal anomalies. We conclude that, rather than reflecting linguistic domains such as syntax and semantics, the late positivity vs. N400 distinction is better understood in terms of the strategies that serve to optimise the form-to-meaning mapping in a given language.

Traditionell wird das Genus der Nomina im Lexikon verortet. Die beiden anderen Erscheinungen des Genus, nämlich syntaktische Integration bei der Kongruenz sowie pragmatische Identifikation von Partizipanten im Diskurs, werden als Folgeerscheinungen der lexikalischen Verankerung des Genus betrachtet. Wir wollen der lexikalistischen Theorie eine Alternative gegenüberstellen, bei der das Genus in der Syntax und Pragmatik verwurzelt ist. Erst in der Produktion einer Nominalphrase greift der Sprecher auf das Genusmerkmal (GM) für die morphologische Gestaltung der Phrase zurück. Dabei ist die Genuskodierung von Einzellexemen im Lexikon nur eine von vielen Quellen für die Gewinnung der Merkmale. Vorgestellt werden unterschiedliche Auslösertypen für das Genus. Unter anderem werden Merkmale diskutiert, die durch den Referenten, durch morphologische und syntaktische Prozesse oder auch durch ein Begriffsfeld im Lexikon bedingt sind. Genusvariation ergibt sich demnach aus der Konkurrenz zwischen verschiedenen Auslösertypen, die auf die gleiche NP (und deren nominalen Kopf) zielen.