Kasper Boye

Epistemic meaning : a crosslinguistic and functional-cognitive study

This book is intended to contribute to the clarification of the linguistic research area covered by the terms modal, evidential and epistemic. It sets out to demonstrate that on cross-linguistic grounds a hitherto overlooked epistemic meaning domain must be given due recognition in linguistic theory, on a par with domains such as time and number. The relevant domain is coherent, but at the same time complex in that it consists of two subdomains: one which comprises degree-of-certainty meanings, and one which comprises information-source meanings. The book offers three arguments for giving recognition to such a meaning domain. The first argument concerns the clustering of linguistic expressions with epistemic meaning into morphosyntactically delimited systems of elements. The second argument has to do with the variation pertaining to the coding of epistemic meanings, as highlighted in a semantic map of epistemic expressions. The third argument turns upon the scope properties of epistemic meanings and the morphosyntactic reflections of these properties. Finally, the book proposes a unified cognitive analysis of epistemic meaning in terms of which it attempts to account for the properties of the epistemic meaning domain as well as of individual epistemic meanings.

Evidence for what? Evidentiality and scope

Abstract This paper deals with the scope properties of evidential meanings. It rejects the idea that different types of evidential meanings have different scope properties. More basically, it rejects the idea that evidential meanings apply to ‘speech acts’ or to ‘states of affairs’. The paper argues that evidential meanings share scope properties in the sense that they are all conceptually dependent on a ‘proposition’ – i.e. a meaning unit which can be said to have a truth value. Subsequently, it outlines how the scope properties can be employed in criteria of membership of the category of evidentiality.

Semantic maps and the identification of cross-linguistic generic categories: evidentiality and its relation to epistemic modality

Cross-linguistic generic categories like Evidentiality, Tense, Aspect, Number and Person are entrenched in linguistic theory. However, it is not clear that that there is much empirical substance to them. There is a remarkable lack of criteria for what counts as a category. This paper tries to show that semantic maps can be used to give empirical substance to claims about cross-linguistic generic categories. It is argued that as falsifiable cross-linguistic generalizations semantic maps provide us with a criterion for categorial status and category membership as well as with a basis for identifying relations between different categories. However, it is also argued that there are limits to the use of semantic maps in evaluating claims about cross-linguistic generic categories, and that the criterion for categorial status and category membership provided by semantic maps ultimately needs to be supplemented by other criteria. In its argumentation the paper focuses on the category of Evidentiality and on the relation between Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality.

Reference and clausal perception-verb complements

Abstract Clausal perception-verb complements are known to show a contrast in meaning between “object of perception” and “knowledge acquired”. This contrast has traditionally been analyzed denotationally in terms of a distinction between extra-linguistic entities belonging to two ontologically different types. However, Cognitive Grammar offers an analysis which is based on a distinction between two ways of construing the same conceptual content and does not presuppose the relevant notion of extra-linguistic entities. The present paper argues that both analyses are inadequate. On the basis of a number of relevant crosslinguistic data, it argues that the contrast under scrutiny must be understood in terms of a distinction which turns on a certain link between conceptual contents and extra-linguistic entities: reference. More precisely, it must be understood in terms of a distinction between nonreferring and referring status in the sense of Lyons 1977. A conception of this distinction is outlined, and an analysis is proposed which can bridge the gap between a purely cognitive and a purely denotational approach to clause meaning. Eventually, the paper sketches how the analysis can be adopted within Cognitive Grammar.

Language usage and language structure

The volume addresses an issue hotly debated in current linguistic theory: the relation between language usage and language structure. The contributors represent different theoretical positions. What they have in common is that they recognize structure and usage as non-reducible linguistic phenomena and take seriously the challenge to describe the relation between them.

Grammatical and lexical pronoun dissociation in French speakers with agrammatic aphasia: A usage-based account and REF-based hypothesis

Abstract Background Pronouns have been shown to be impaired in agrammatic production but not all types of pronouns are equally affected. For instance, clitic pronouns are more impaired than non-clitic ones. A usage-based theory of grammatical status suggests a reclassification of pronouns into grammatical and lexical and predicts that grammatical pronouns are more impaired in agrammatic production. Besides, the reorganization of elementary functions (REF) model, which describes the underlying neurocognitive processes of post-injury recovery, explores the variability across individuals with agrammatism. Aims The current study hypothesizes that those pronouns that by the usage-based theory of grammatical status are grammatical are more affected than the lexical ones in agrammatic speech. In addition to this, the REF-model predicts that individuals with agrammatism will either build up unique strategies to cope with the deficit or they will rely more on fixed expressions. Method & Procedures : Spontaneous speech data collected from six French speaking individuals with agrammatism and nine non-injured controls in three different contexts (autobiography, narrative speech and descriptive speech) was used to test the hypothesis. We categorized 137 French pronouns into lexical and grammatical and calculated a grammatical pronoun index (GPI) for the groups and the individual speakers with agrammatism. We also conducted a qualitative analysis to look for adaptive strategies. Results Four individuals with agrammatism out of six produced significantly fewer grammatical pronouns than the non-injured group in the autobiography task. The two individuals with agrammatism who did not significantly differ from the control group were more fluent than the other four. The exclusion of pronouns containing fixed expressions did not result in drastic changes. The pronoun-verb analysis showed that there is no consistent connection between subject pronoun production and verb finiteness. Conclusions Grammatical pronoun production is indeed more severely impaired in agrammatic production. Moreover, the impairment pattern varies across individuals with agrammatism. Variability is observed both across participants with agrammatism and across tasks, which may indicate the use of unique adaptive strategies, as predicted by the REF-model.

The force-dynamic core meaning of Danish modal verbs

Abstract In this paper I present a notion of modal core meaning in general and a corresponding analysis of the core meaning of the Danish modals. The approach to modal meaning presented may be seen as cognitive linguistic in the sense that to a great extent it rests on the notion of force dynamics developed in Talmy 1988 and Sweetser 1990. Elaborating this notion, I try to show that in addition to unifying the meanings of the Danish modals it provides a motivation for 1) the syntactic relations of the Danish modals, 2) specific, sofar unnoticed or unexplained, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic phenomena involving Danish modals, 3) the capability of the Danish modals of expressing future time meaning. First of all, however, the notion of force dynamics unifies the Danish modals in an economic semantic field. In the literature on the subject I pay special attention to Davidsen-Nielsen 1990 and Brandt 1999.

Planning and production of grammatical and lexical verbs in multi-word messages

Grammatical words represent the part of grammar that can be most directly contrasted with the lexicon. Aphasiological studies, linguistic theories and psycholinguistic studies suggest that their processing is operated at different stages in speech production. Models of sentence production propose that at the formulation stage, lexical words are processed at the functional level while grammatical words are processed at a later positional level. In this study we consider proposals made by linguistic theories and psycholinguistic models to derive two predictions for the processing of grammatical words compared to lexical words. First, based on the assumption that grammatical words are less crucial for communication and therefore paid less attention to, it is predicted that they show shorter articulation times and/or higher error rates than lexical words. Second, based on the assumption that grammatical words differ from lexical words in being dependent on a lexical host, it is hypothesized that the retrieval of a grammatical word has to be put on hold until its lexical host is available, and it is predicted that this is reflected in longer reaction times (RTs) for grammatical compared to lexical words. We investigated these predictions by comparing fully homonymous sentences with only a difference in verb status (grammatical vs. lexical) elicited by a specific context. We measured RTs, duration and accuracy rate. No difference in duration was observed. Longer RTs and a lower accuracy rate for grammatical words were reported, successfully reflecting grammatical word properties as defined by linguistic theories and psycholinguistic models. Importantly, this study provides insight into the span of encoding and grammatical encoding processes in speech production.

Contrasting Grammatical and Lexical Determiners

This paper investigates the difference between the production of grammatical determiners and lexical determiners in the production of adjective-noun phrases (NPs) in Danish. Models of sentence processing (Garrett in Psychology of learning and motivation, Academic press, New York, pp 133–177, 1975; Bock in J Mem Lang 26(2):119–137, 1987) suggest that the phonological encoding stage of grammatical items can only be specified once lexical items have been phonologically encoded. In their usage-based linguistic theory of the grammar-lexicon distinction, Boye and Harder (Lang 88(1):1–44, 2012) propose that this later encoding of grammatical elements is motivated by two specific features of grammatical elements. The first feature, dependence, is that grammatical items (morphemes, words, constructions) cannot be produced in isolation, but are always dependent on a lexical host item. This feature entails a more complex processing which might lead to longer reaction times when comparing the production of NPs with a grammatical determiner to a lexical one. Additionally, a more complex processing might lead to a lower accuracy rate for the grammatical condition relative to the lexical one. The second feature, low prominence, is that grammatical items code background information and therefore cannot convey the main point of a linguistic message. Less focus on grammatical elements might lead to a lower accuracy rate for the production of grammatical elements relative to lexical ones. Those predictions were tested in a task comparing the production of Danish grammatical determiners (indefinite articles) with the production of lexical ones (numerals, which are homonymous with the articles except for a stress difference) in similar contexts. Group-based analyses were performed in order to take inter-individual differences into account. The results show that the two features as proposed by Boye and Harder (2012) are only revealed for the fastest speakers group but not the slower ones.

Inter)subjectification in a functional theory of grammaticalization

One may sometimes get the impression that (inter)subjectification is regarded as an aspect of grammaticalization, so that (roughly speaking) the more (inter)subjective an expression has become, the more grammaticalized it is. We propose that the two phenomena are better understood as clearly distinct. Grammaticalization in our view consists in a process whereby an expression becomes ancillary in relation to another expression (type), thereby at the same time creating a structural relation and a difference in prominence status. (Inter)subjectification, on the other hand, is purely a change in conventional semantic content. However, there is a particular type of diachronic process in which the two may go hand in hand. We try to give a precise account of what that type is and how it differs from other, related changes.