Abstracts

Backwards anaphora marking in coherence relations

Radoslava Trnavac & Maite Taboada (SFU) Sunday, May 20th Buchanan A201 This paper investigates the distribution of backwards anaphora in nucleus/satellite coherence relations as defined within Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann & Thompson 1988). In most approaches backwards anaphora is claimed to require the dependency of the pronoun clause on the antecedent clause (Carden 1978, van […]

An Autist Speaks: Joint Attentional Concordance and Discordance in Conversations with ‘S’

Todd Oakley (Case) Friday, May 18th Buchanan A201 Persons with high functioning autism (either Kanner’s or Asperser’s varieties) are widely purported to show deficits in prosodic and pragmatic aspects of language (cf. Peppe, et. al., 2006), yet there are wide ranging explanations for such infelicities, from deficits in mind reading (Baron-Cohen, 1995), deficits in central […]

Clarifying reference and plans in dialogue

Gregory Mills (Stanford) Saturday, May 19th Buchanan B213 One of the most contentious debates in studies of language use in interaction concerns the explanatory role assigned to interlocutors’ intentions. In (post) Gricean cognitive/pragmatic models of meaning (e.g. Sperber and Wilson 1987, Searle 1979, Levinson 2006), intentions play the central role: intentions are a priori mental […]

Performing Gesture: The Transformation of Gesture to Sign in Theatre

John Lutterbie (SUNY, Stony Brook) Saturday, May 19th Buchanan B213 This paper explores the dynamic relationship between speech and gesture in text-based, theatre performances. Using the work of David McNeill as a foundation, the reciprocal interaction between gesture and language in the emergence of thought in speech is related to the actor’s process of transforming […]

Subjectivity and Blending in Korea Conditional -taka

Jisup Hong (UCB) Saturday, May 19th Buchanan A hallway on the 2nd floor Korean -taka, which is considered an “interruptive” or “transferentive” connective (Choi 1961, Lee 1993, Martin & Lee 1969), typically refers to a scenario in which the initial clause event has been discontinued in favor of the main clause event, as in (1). […]

What is Literary “Atmosphere”? The Role of Fictive Motion & Hypothetical Focalization in Understanding Ambience in Fiction.

Mark Deggan (UBC) Friday, May 18th Buchanan B213 This paper demonstrates how Leonard Talmy’s influential frames of ception and fictive motion can be applied to larger scale literary constructions than are evident at the sentence level, while indicating the difficulties of how such motion is to be focalized. My presentation concentrates upon fictional instances in […]

Causal Inference and Language Comprehension: ERP Indices of Semantic Activation versus Updating and Integration

Tristan Davenport & Seana Coulson (UCSD) Saturday, May 19th Buchanan B213 Previous event-related potential (ERP) investigations of the role of causal inference in word processing have shown effects of causal relatedness limited to the N400 (Kuperberg, Paczynski & Ditman, 2011; Yang, Perfetti & Schmalhofer, 2007), suggesting the primary effect of causal relatedness is to modulate […]

“Bodied Forth:” conceptual blending and gesture in Shakespeare

Amy Cook (Indiana) Saturday, May 19th Buchanan B213 And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1) The study of linguistic processing – and the embodied and embedded thinking that it […]

How people conceptualize the web today

Spencer Castro, Paul P. Maglio, & Teenie Matlock (UC, Merced) Friday, May 18th Buchanan B213 When the world wide web came into popular use in the 1990s, people had to develop ways to talk about it and think about it. In 1995, we interviewed novices (individuals who had never used the web) to determine how […]

Conceptual blending in Supyire healing and protection spells

Robert Carlson (Africa IU & SIL) Friday, May 18th Buchanan A210 This paper examines Supyire (Senufo, Gur, Niger-Congo) spells (kulushî) which accompany healing (wempyii) and protecting (sárágá) rituals performed by ordinary people (as opposed to herbalist specialists). As in many African cultures (cf. for example Azande spells, described in Evans-Pritchard 1937: 450ff), Supyire spells use […]