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Ad hoc categorization in linguistic interaction
Full text linkCaterina Mauri | University of Bologna
The aim of this paper is to describe and explain the role that linguistic interaction plays in category construction and communication, by looking at naturally occurring data of spoken language. First, it will be argued that there is a way of building categories that is inherently interactional and indexical, namely ad hoc categorization. Ad hoc categorization will be defined as a bottom-up exemplar driven process, that is dependent on context for both its construction and its interpretation, and crucially relies on non-exhaustivity and exemplification. After a brief overview of the linguistic strategies that may encode ad hoc categorization, we will concentrate on linguistic interaction, taking the perspective of so-called languaging. It will be shown that categorization is frequently instrumental to intersubjective aims, such as mutual agreement, negotiation, and the general management of the speakers’ reciprocal positioning. In turn, it is collaboration between the interlocutors that allows to fine-tune categorization and achieve mutual understanding. Finally, we will focus on the incrementality of ad hoc categorization in interaction along two dimensions, namely, the identification of the category borders and the progressive anchoring of the category to the interlocutors’ experience
Posizionamento del sé e rappresentazione dell’Altro nel discorso: una prospettiva interculturale
No full textLo studio presentato in questo capitolo presenta e commenta alcune particolari strategie linguistiche che i parlanti usano nel discorso per categorizzare gli altri e, al contempo, per affermare le proprie identità locali rispetto a quelle stesse categorie. Si parla in questi casi di atti di posizionamento: chi parla propone alcune categorie – che, per definizione, includono alcune persone e ne escludono altre (alto/basso, amico/conoscente/estraneo, ecc.) – e si posiziona rispetto a esse sottolineando la propria appartenenza a un gruppo e non agli altri.
Questo fenomeno è noto per quanto riguarda gruppi sociali ben riconoscibili e in qualche modo convenzionalizzati (Davies, Harré 1990; Van Langenhove, Harré 2010). Si sa ad esempio che, anche quando stanno parlando di altro, le persone fanno spesso esplicito o implicito riferimento a categorie umane specifiche (“gli italiani”, “i filosofi”, “le madri”, ecc.) per comunicare a chi li ascolta a quali gruppi (non) appartengono e quindi quali identità riconoscono a se stessi. Rispetto a queste, le strategie di posizionamento su cui ci concentriamo nelle pagine seguenti hanno una peculiarità: si basano su categorie per cui la lingua non dispone di mezzi lessicali precostituiti, ma che vengono create dal parlante ad hoc attraverso particolari formulazioni linguistiche riconducibili a due diverse tipologie. In un primo momento, ci concentriamo su quella che abbiamo chiamato la prospettiva “di costruzione incrementale”, in cui la definizione della categoria sociale ad hoc necessaria al posizionamento viene co-costruita dai partecipanti all’interazione (§3.4). Dopodiché tratteremo il fenomeno della “costruzione lessicale di categorie sociali”, secondo cui il parlante, per creare una categoria sociale instabile (o, ad hoc, appunto), propone un’etichetta linguistica “nuova”avvalendosi di processi morfologici di tipo derivazionale (§3.5). Infine, nella discussione generale e nelle conclusioni (§3.6), riprenderemo insieme le due strategie e commenteremo il ruolo che ciascuna svolge in riferimento al posizionamento identitario
CLUB Working Papers in Linguistics
Full text linkCon questo volume, la collana "CLUB Working Papers in Linguistics" giunge al suo terzo anno di vita, e presenta ancora una volta, con 18 contributi in formato open access, i risultati dello scambio di idee e di prospettive che si è sviluppato attraverso i vari incontri organizzati dal CLUB nell’a.a. 2017–18. Il volume, che ospita anche i risultati del CLUB DAY su "Tipologia e diacronia: alla ricerca di sinergie", contiene saggi a firma di Fabio Ardolino, Silvia Ballarè, Alessandra Barotto, Chiara Calderone, Sonia Cristofaro, Ilaria Fiorentini, Fernando Giacinti (vincitore del premio CLUB ‘Una tesi in linguistica’ per l’anno 2018), Chiara Gianollo, Eugenio Goria, Nicola Grandi, Pierre Larrivée, Pauline Levillain, Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri, Elisabetta Magni, Yahis Martari, Francesca Masini, Simone Mattiola, Caterina Mauri, Marco Mazzoleni, Maria Napoli
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads
No full textThe journal aims to host research within the field of linguistic typology. It is meant to give space above all, but not exclusively, to studies exploring the crossroads at which linguistic typology meets its closest neighbors. The journal will therefore welcome works dealing especially with the intersections between typology and other areas of linguistics, such as diachrony, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, corpus-based analysis of speech and discourse
LEAdhoC - Linguistic Expression of Ad hoc Categories
No full textThe LEAdhoC project aims to analyze the linguistic expression of a basic cognitive process, namely the construction of ad hoc categories (Barsalou 1983 and onwards).
Ad hoc categories are constructed to achieve communicative goals and depend on context for their interpretation (e.g. "activities one can do at home"), are usually less established in memory and less easily mastered by speakers than common categories. While the latter can typically be expressed by fairly short conventional linguistic means (words, e.g. clothing, or small phrases, e.g. vegetarian food), ad hoc categories often do not come with ready-made linguistic labels. Their identification in discourse nonetheless crucially depends on verbalization, i.e. the linguistic strategies that speakers systematically employ to refer to the process of ad hoc category building.
These strategies typically involve the explicit naming of one or more exemplars, that the addressee processes as pointers for conjuring up the ad hoc category: e.g., in interpreting 'let's play tennis, take a walk, or something like that', the addressee has to construct the category 'activities we could do outdoor', in order to imagine further alternatives. However, the role of exemplars and the degree of context-dependence may vary in the process of ad hoc category building. For instance, in order to construct the category 'people and situations revolving around Berlusconi' from the derived noun 'Berluscon-ame' (Italian), Berlusconi has to be taken as an exemplar, but also as a property shared by all members, and no access to the specific speech situation is required, but rather a general knowledge of Italian politics.
From a structural point of view, a shallow cross-linguistic survey shows great variation in the constructions encoding ad hoc categories, ranging from transparent discourse-level constructions such as “general extenders” (e.g. English ‘or stuff like that'), to synthetic, less transparent means, such as non-exhaustive connectives (e.g. Japanese -ya), dedicated plurals (e.g. similative plurals, Daniel 2000), derivational affixes and special types of reduplication.
First name
5 - Publication produced without the participation of tutor specified in the previous paragraph
LEAdhoC
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Although ad hoc categories are ubiquitous in our everyday cognition, no systematic analysis of their linguistic realizations has ever been made. The aim of the LEAdhoC project is to answer the following core theoretical questions, through three complementary research directions:
1) What types of constructions are attested to express ad hoc categories? Are there universal patterns and correlations between the type of ad hoc category, the degree of context-dependence and particular morphosyntactic features?
TYPOLOGICAL SURVEY -The sampling procedure will be compliant with current standards in typological research. Due to the highly discursive nature of the phenomenon, descriptive grammars will be integrated by a metalinguistic questionnaire for language experts, a context/translation questionnaire for educated native speakers, and wherever possible by the analysis of naturally occurring texts.
2) What grammatical resources are recurrently mobilized to convey this function?
DIACHRONIC ANALYSIS - The diachronic analysis is meant to provide (i) a comprehensive diachronic typology of the sources of the constructions encoding ad hoc categories and (ii) in-depth analyses of the pathways leading to them, with a focus on Romance languages.
3) Are there different aims and different ways in which ad hoc categories may be built in discourse?
CORPUS-BASED STUDY - The analysis will minimally be conducted for English and Italian, based on a comparable conversational corpus that will be specifically designed and implemented for the project.
A comprehensive picture of how languages encode (and speakers use) ad hoc categories may have theoretical implications for philosophical and psychological research on human rationality and conceptual processing, with potential applications for artificial intelligence and machine learning
DiverSIta. Diversity in Spoken ITalian
No full textAn important part of cultural heritage is represented by the complex and diverse set of linguistic resources used in every-day spoken communication, to which we refer as oral heritage. Compared to written language, the documentation of oral heritage poses a number of difficulties, part of which arise from the great variability of spoken language and can be seen as a reflection of diversity in society. The DiversITa project aims to develop a digital resource documenting the transforming nature of the oral Italian heritage, with a focus on the urban contexts of Bologna and Torino, in the belief that a better representation of the diversity subsumed in spoken Italian may be a crucial step towards a more inclusive society, that is one able to represent the diversity of its individuals.
This goal will be achieved by expanding an already existing corpus of spoken Italian (KIParla, www.kiparla.it), with new modules that will make it representative 1) of the diverse constellation of speakers of Italian, without aprioristic assumptions on their linguistic and sociological backgrounds, and 2) of the varieties of Italian that are spoken by these individuals, including underrepresented ones (e.g. sociolects of groups with minor educational achievements, learner varieties and ethnolects of Italian spoken within communities of speakers with an international migration background). At the end of the project we expect to have an open-access, modular, incremental, replicable resource including six modules (KIP, ParlaTO, PArlaBO, KIPasti, Stra-PArlaTO and Stra-ParlaTO), for a total of 310 h of transcribed recordings, aligned with audio, and searchable through ad-hoc queries thanks to metadata-based filters. The whole process and methodology will be documented, making it fully accessible and replicable also for other languages in and outside Europe, in compliance with the FAIR principles.
Directly connected to the achievement of this goal is the second objective of the DiverSIta project. Thanks to the analysis of oral data, we will design an ORAL COMPASS, namely, a tool for non-academic interlocutors (city institutions, immigration offices, schools, etc.) to orient themselves in the multifaceted processes that characterize spoken language, in particular those practices leading to the co-construction and communication of social categories in and through language. Oral Compass will provide guidelines and visual instruments designed for people working in cross-cultural contexts, to interpret with greater awareness the processes through which social actors construct and convey specific social categories (e.g. “foreigners”, vs “migrants”, “newcomers”, etc.). We expect the Oral Compass to have a crucial impact on the dynamics of social inclusion, thanks to the active involvement of local institutions, who will participate in the design of the resource and will be guided through a process of uptake and implementation of the research results and recommendations
DIVERSITÀ TRA LE LINGUE E PRAGMATICA
Full text linkQuesto lavoro intende discutere la relazione tra universali del linguaggio e uso del linguaggio stesso, prendendo in esame la diversità (e l’universalità) che lingue del mondo mostrano in relazione alla pragmatica. Dopo un inquadramento preliminare del rapporto tra tipologia e pragmatica, verranno descritti due casi di studio recenti, che permettono di osservare da vicino il rapporto tra i due ambiti. La prima ricerca scelta per illustrare la questione prende in esame l’espressione esplicita della gratitudine in otto lingue, mentre la seconda indaga le strategie di riparazione a problemi di comunicazione in dodici lingue. In entrambi i casi la ricerca è stata condotta da un team ampio di ricercatori, che ha raccolto dati di parlato spontaneo all’interno di campioni di lingue appartenenti a famiglie linguistiche diverse, parlate in aree geografiche anche molto distanti. I risultati di queste ricerche mostrano comportamenti linguistici molto simili anche in lingue e culture diverse, suggerendo che il modo si usa il linguaggio abbia alcune caratteristiche universali, che dipendono solo in minima parte dalla lingua e dalla cultura.
Diversity between languages and pragmatics
This paper discusses the relationship between language universals and the use of language itself, looking at the diversity (and universality) that the world’s languages in relation to pragmatics. After a preliminary framing of the relationship between pragmatics and linguistic typology, two recent case studies will be described for a closer look at the relationship between these two fields. The first study examines the explicit expression of gratitude in eight languages, while the second investigates repair strategies due to communication problems in twelve languages. In both cases, research was conducted by a large team of researchers, who collected spontaneous speech data from samples including languages from different families, spoken in distant geographical areas. The results show very similar linguistic behaviors even in different languages and cultures, suggesting that the way language is used has some universal characteristics, which depend only in a small part on the specific language and culture
What do languages encode when they encode reality status?
No full textIntroduction to the special issue "What do languages encode when they encode reality status?" (Guest editors: Caterina Mauri, Andrea Sanso'
Obiettivi, metodi e strumenti della tipologia
No full textIn questo capitolo ci occuperemo di delineare il percorso di ricerca che segue il tipologo, concentrando l’attenzione sulle prime fasi che lo caratterizzano, dall’individuazione degli obiettivi e degli interrogativi di ricerca al reperimento dei dati, chiarendo gli aspetti metodologici necessari per costruire una base empirica solida
Le parti del discorso
No full textLe classi lessicali, che tradizionalmente vengono individuate sotto eti- chette come nomi, verbi, aggettivi o avverbi, sono concetti profonda- mente problematici sia in un’ottica intralinguistica sia in prospettiva interlinguistica, perché sembrano sfuggire tanto a rigide definizioni semantiche quanto a univoche caratterizzazioni morfosintattiche. Questa difficoltà classificatoria mette in dubbio il carattere universale delle parti del discorso: se, infatti, è ben noto che non tutte le lingue possiedono gli articoli o le preposizioni, non è altrettanto noto che i problemi emergono anche con quelle che vengono considerate le classi lessicali maggiori, che coprono la stragrande maggioranza delle parole di una lingua, cioè i nomi, i verbi, gli aggettivi e, in misura minore, gli avverbi1. In questo capitolo, cercheremo di capire se sia possibile trovare dei criteri definitori universali, validi per tutte le lingue del mondo, oppure se le classi di nome, verbo e aggettivo debbano essere definite unicamente in base a parametri specifici per ogni lingua, e ci chiedere- mo se esistano dei modelli di variazione in qualche misura prevedibili
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