William Frawley

The expression of modality

This book covers the essentials of modality and offers both foundational ideas and cutting edge advances. The book consists of what are essentially tutorials on modality and modal notions, covering definitions of modality, morphosyntactic form, conceptual and logical semantics, historical development, and acquisition. There are also specific chapters on modality in Zapotec and American Sign Language, which show the range of forms that modal notions can take. To assist its tutorial function, the book closes with a comprehensive conceptual outline of all the chapters.Key features:textbook covers the essentials of modality Well-known editor Cognitive categories are currently among the most important areas of research in linguistics and beyond (biology, psychology)

A processing theory of alexithymia

This paper presents a processing theory of alexithymia in terms of failure of report across the components of emotional processing and the nature of explicit and implicit knowledge. The typical features of alexithymia (e.g., failure of cue recognition, flattened expression, inability to articulate emotional states) correspond to disruptions at the interfaces of components in emotional processing. The output of various components of emotional processing requires explicit representations in a variety of forms: it is these structured outputs which have suggested to some that alexithymia is a deficit of awareness or of emotional representations in working memory. This combination of information transfer and explicit/implicit knowledge leads to clarifications of the nature of alexithymia, the severity of the syndrome, and methods of measurement and intervention. These insights in turn suggest a broader consideration of alexithymia in terms of the vocabulary of cognitive science.

Linguistics and literacy

Linguistics and Writing.- The Literate Writes and the NonLiterate Chants: Written Language and Ritual Communication in Sociolinguistic Perspective.- The Myth of Orality and Literacy.- Soviet Psycholinguistics: Implications for Teaching of Writing.- Universal Grammar and Composition: Relativization, Complementation, and Quantification.- Relationships: What Did I Write? What Did I Draw?.- The Pragmatic Structure of Rhetorical Maturity in the Sciences.- The Function of a Grammatical Alternation in 14 Surgical Reports.- Computers and Literacy.- Computerized Aids to Writing.- Computer-Ease: A Twentieth-Century Literacy Emergent.- A Computer-Aided Study of Confusion in Latin Morphology.- Linguistics and Reading.- Spelling, Reading, Language Variation.- Linguistics and/or Reading or Is Applied Linguistics a Caveat Emptor Technology?.- The Development of Verbal Reasoning: Pragmatic, Schematic and Operational Aspects.- Teaching Reading in the Inner City.- Early Reading Experiences: Some Linguistic Perspectives on Parent/Child Interaction in Book Sharing Situations.- A Propositional Analysis of Spanish Language Texts.- Second-Language Literacy.- Strategic Interaction from Texts: Converting Written Discourse into Spoken Conversation.- Word Frequency and Contextual Richness in ESL Word Identification.- Some Reflections on Error Analysis in the Speech of Near-Bilinguals whose Mother Tongue is Italian.- Non-Native Speakers of English and their Composition Abilities: A Review and Analysis.- French Verb Forms Simplified.- Discourse Content Structures in Beginning Spanish Learners.

Speaking and Self-Order: A Critique of Orthodox L2 Research.

While the recent explosion of work on L 2 discourse has provided researchers with a mass of data on the development of communicative abilities, we find that most of this work is predicated on a single (perhaps even curious) assumption: that all discourse, of which L 2 discourse is taken as a subcategory, is intended by its speakers to be informative to some interlocutor (i.e., transmits a message via an acoustic or graphic conduit) and that the production of discourse entails the formulation of strategies on the part of speakers in order to maximize this transmission of data. That discourse is not communicative (i.e., sending and receiving information) by nature has, in fact, been long known, but overlooked, especially in L 2 research. Malinowski pointed out as early as 1935 that: Language is an activity the function of which is not an expression of thought or communication of ideas … the neglect of the obvious has often been fatal to the development of scientific thought. The false conception of language as a means of transferring ideas from the head of the speaker to that of the listener has, in my opinion, largely vitiated the philological approach to language (Malinowski, 1935, 9).

Conjunctive cohesion in four English genres

A major ingredient of textuality is cohesion. A text is not a text unless it coheres. But different text types do not cohere in the same way. In thispaper, we foats on one type ofcohesive tie, conjuction, and compare its use in four different American English genres — fiction, journalism, religion, and science. Our results show that methods of conjunction in these genres vary in a statistically significant way and that conjunctions, althoughfew in number of types and tokens, play a major wie in structuring these different text types.

Control and Cross-Domain Mental Computation: Evidence from Language Breakdown

This paper uses the notion of control from programming languages to look at the organization of mental code. Data for the analysis comes principally from language breakdown. The paper first outlines the well known distinction between logic and control in algorithms and argues that the same distinction holds in mental code. Discussion then focuses mainly on control—the management of data flow—and shows that a variety of language disorders affect either the logic component of the mental algorithms for language (e.g., Specific Language Impairment) or the control component (e.g., Williams syndrome and Turner syndrome). A comparative study of the loss of morphology in Williams syndrome and Specific Language Impairment reinforces the logic/control split as an accurate guide to the explanation of linguistic behavior in these disorders. The data, moreover, are not accountable to sheer performance factors, but to the way the disorders disrupt the structure of mental algorithms. The paper closes with a discussion of how control and the management of cross‐domain computation fit into recent theories of modular mental architecture and proposals about the explicitness of representations and their availability to working memory.

Coming to Our Senses: A Naturalistic Program for Semantic Localism

Introduction 1. A critique of the case for semantic holism 2. The methodology of naturalistic semantics 3. A case for semantic localism 4. Meanings and their ascription 5. Eliminativism and revisionism.

In defense of the dictionary: A response to Haiman

Abstract This paper is a response to John Haimans ‘Dictionaries and Encyclopedias’ ( Lingua 50, 329-57). It is argued that Haiman fails in his attempts to blur the distinctions which have been traditionally taken to separate dictionaries from encyclopedias: language/ culture; subjective fact/objective fact; essence/accidence; semantics/pragmatics; analytic truth/synthetic truth; proper nouns/common nouns. Haimans case is built on oversights, oversimplifications, and paradoxes. He blurs no distinctions, and he does not subsume the dictionary under the encyclopedia. The dictionary is a distinct entity.

Lexicography and the Philosophy of Science

This paper1 is designed to show how lexicography can come to the aid of a descriptive philosophy of science, a project which doubtless suggests that there is presently something amiss in the philosophy of science. Indeed, there is something wrong. Let begin by demonstrating that the philosophy of science is in need of considerable help. What is the philosophy of science? It is the discipline which seeks to describe the nature, origin, and progress scientific knowledge. Such a systematic and exhaustive cataloguing of scientific knowledge, however, has been realized only sporadically. Harold Browns pertinent comments point this out:

Intertextuality and the Dictionary: Toward a Deconstructionist Account of Lexicography

The purpose of this paper is to give a philosophical account of the dictionary from the standpoint of post-structural, deconstructionist, literary criticism. The motivation for looking at the dictionary in this manner is that while linguists and lexicographers have devoted a great amount of attention to the structure of the dictionary, few researchers, if any, have concerned themselves with the dictionary simply as a phenomenon, or, more specifically, as a written phenomenon. Granted, there have been sociological studies of the dictionary—the book as a social phenomenon (e.g., McDavid, 1979; Malkiel, 1980; Baker, 1972)—but these studies are, if the circularity can be pardoned, sociological, and thus they center on the role of the dictionary in society, not on the dictionary itself as a textual phenomenon.