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| Cortical Plasticity and One Hemisphere: Language and Motor Functions Reorganized after Hemispherectomy Stella de Bode Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders/ Linguistics Program University of South Carolina This presentation will touch upon various aspects of cognitive (language, memory) and motor behaviour in children who have undergone hemispherectomy, the removal (or complete separation) of one cortical hemisphere, as a result of intractable seizures. The focus will be on cortical plasticity underlying the developing brain and issues related to the cortical functions that range from spared to impaired. Behavioral study will be accompanied by the brain imaging results of paradigms in language and motor functioning in a large group of left- and right - hemispherectomized children.
Classic ethnographies of Mayas have examined how elaborate forms of verbal art (Gossen 1977) and ritual humor (Bricker 1973) make-up the fabric of community life and are consequential in shaping local forms of sociopolitical organization. However, these studies adopt the same adult-centric bias, reflecting locally salient theories of children as merely mimicking adult artistic genres and expressions. Recent scholarship in Mayan language socialization practices and Maya children's play suggests that verbal art and other forms of verbal play are also inextricably part of early childhood development (Gaskins 1999; Maynard 2002; Rogoff 2003) and socialization into communicative competence (Brown 1998; de Leon 1998; Reynolds 2002). In fact, children and youth contribute equally to intergenerational and cross-gender interactional exchanges especially in types of conflict talk. In this paper, I follow in the footsteps of interpretive approaches to the study of children's language socialization and peer talk; drawing from ethnographic research that I conducted in the highland Guatemala Kaqchikel Maya town of San Antonio Aguas Calientes, from March 1998-1999. I discuss how Maya children's verbal arsenal of types of conflict talk: teasing, shaming, and nicknaming in verbal duels comprise some of the most powerful interactional practices in the everyday negotiation and co-construction of peer politics and sibling group social relationships. I specifically examine how children from three different households of a single extended family reinterpret formulaic politeness rituals to tease and shame rival siblings, neighbors and peers. Over the course of this talk, I trace the 'natural history' (i.e. the birth, near death, and subsequent institutionalization) of a newly coined insult. Specifically, I focus on how one youth, Ernesto, introduces a novel expression of insult that subverts inherent power asymmetries in ritual forms of greeting as well as in household caregiving & extended kin hierarchies. This novel use of reciprocal greetings as verbal duel becomes institutionalized and elaborated only with the collaboration of younger children. In all of these scenarios, siblings and peers' talk-in-interaction reveal how one's clever ways with words is paramount to being recognized as a competent speaker as well as a core part of how peers negotiate and define peer culture in a society that regards youths' and children's contribution to ritual forms of speech unremarkable and inconsequential.
DC government is actively implementing a plan to bring professional baseball back to the nation’s capitol. One of the points in the plan calls for construction of a baseball stadium in an area of Southeast DC currently occupied by a cluster of gay-oriented show bars and sex clubs, as well as several conventional businesses and private residences. Surprisingly, the proposed eradication of this segment of DC’s commercial gay terrain, the costs of public financing, and the ensuing displacement of other businesses and residents have generated little objection from local gay activists or from the city’s gay residents as a whole. The area may be “gay space,” as DC gay men readily affirm, but it is not a gay space worth fighting for. A close reading of DC gay men’s descriptions of this area and of their engagement with its gay venues helps me understand why there has been so little gay-resistance to this unfolding agenda of urban restructuring. This presentation discusses the approach to text analysis that I am using in this project and reviews some of the explanations for this non-engaged stance that the close reading of these materials reveals. There are also broader issues at stake in this inquiry. Besides clarifying meanings which individual gay men assign to personal experiences at these sites, the analysis of these materials also addresses the ideologies of place that bring together urban gay commercial practices and policies of urban restructuring in the late-modern metropolis worldwide.1 And this inquiry explores the language of place that accommodates this ideological positioning of (homo)sexuality and urban planning, often at the expense of adjacent residents whose lives are equally disrupted by these proposals. In effect, this project is an instance of urban anthropology/ linguistic field work that extends deeply into public anthropology, critical theory, as well as queer theory, and this presentation address implications of the work for all of these fields. 1Following Althusser (1971, esp. 170-177), Gramsci (1971) and Pecheux (1982), I define ideology as a socially privileged form of “common sense,” and assume (borrowing from Wollard, 2000: 27) that linguistic studies of “the microculture of communicative action” offers useful insights into the “political economic considerations of power and social inequality” relevant to the site. I do not assume that ideology is a form of false consciousness, however: as Althusser explains, subjects are certainly able to achieve recognition of their status as subjects, (1971: 173); or as Rosa Luxembourg reportedly noted, more succinctly: workers are not fools. Relevant references: Althusser, Louis Gramsci, Antonio Leap, William L. Pecheux, Michel Wollard, Kathryn
What does this study find how second language (L2) learners form complex wh-questions? Although questions of this type (called wh-scope-marking questions) are only grammatical in German but ungrammatical in English and Japanese, this presentation documents that they can readily be observed in the English interlanguage of both German and Japanese L2 learners. It extends earlier investigations of wh-scope-marking in early Japanese-English interlanguage (Yamane 2003) to advanced adult native Japanese and German learners employing an improved methodology (using a variety of matrix verbs and controlling for the possibility that such questions are merely 2 sequential questions), as well as three different measures, namely (i) an on-line stop-making-sense task, (ii) an off-line acceptability judgment task and (iii) Thornton's (1990) elicited-production task. Results based on 27 German and 27 Japanese learners of English show that wh-scope-marking is a robust phenomenon both in German- and in Japanese-English interlanguage not limited to language comprehension but also occurring in production; and in on-line as well as off-line acceptability judgments. Though the German L2 learners might reasonably have transferred this construction into their interlanguage from their native language, it forms neither part of the native nor of the target language for the Japanese learners who, thus, 'create' this construction. It is argued that the emergence of this construction in these Japanese-English interlanguages results from processing limitations rather than being a competence-induced error.
In the mind of a bilingual, the existence of interaction between fully-fledged language systems is taken as given (Grosjean, 1982). However, in studies on second language learners, the relationship between the L1 and the L2 within an individual mind is generally viewed as unidirectional. Therefore, L1 features are said to transfer to the L2 across various linguistic domains and even across modalities. The few studies that do investigate the reverse direction of influence, i.e. effects of an L2 on the L1, generally approach the question from the perspective of language attrition, with results highlighting L1 errors in populations that are functionally bilingual (e.g. Jarvis, 2003; Pavlenko, 2003). The current study differs from previous research in three ways: by investigating whether an emerging language system can influence an established language system within an individual mind, by investigating whether such influence, if it exists, necessarily leads to errors in the L1 system, and by investigating whether influence is visible across modalities.
The aim of this presentation is to provide insights into what a listener does in linguistic interaction and to present a comprehensive account of listenership from a pragmatic standpoint. With that end in mind, I will review listener roles and processes in three aspects of communication: (i) verbal understanding; (ii) verbal production; and (iii) negotiation of meaning. Although a listener’s primary role is to interpret the language produced by the speaker, they also play a central role in the production and negotiation of meaning. The complexity of a listener’s role requires a multidisciplinary –socio/cognitive- descriptive approach provided by Politeness and Relevance theories. These three aspects of communication are explored and then related to second language teaching, thus acknowledging Cauldwell’s (1998) caution to the effect that we need knowledge of what happens in real communication before we set out to develop methodologies to teach foreign languages.
This presentation will examine within the framework of diachronic cognitive semantics the semantic evolution of color terms in Spanish. The first section will describe the historical sources of Spanish color terms. The majority of these items do not go back to chromatic designations in Latin (or other source languages); rather they reflect metaphorical and metonymic evolutions of terms with other meanings. The second part of the paper will describe the figurative non-chromatic meanings developed by color terms in the recorded history of Spanish. Parallels will be offered from the other Romance languages as well as non-Romance languages in an attempt to determine the respective roles of cognitive and cultural factors in the history of color terms.
When speakers shift from their first language to another language as their main public language, what do the grammars of the languages involved look like when the shift is in progress? This presentation reports on data from South Africa on an issue of general theoretical interest, namely, the nature of grammatical shift. Is it gradual or abrupt? The results from this study support the hypothesis that such a shift is grammatically abrupt (i.e. shift is from one system to another, not partial). Also, a shift in progress does not affect the grammars of all members of a community equally. Rather, bilingual speakers fall into distinct groups in terms of their use of elements in the community-dominant language that is the target of the shift. Specifically, the presentation reports on data from 48 Xhosa-English bilinguals who are in-migrants to the industrialized, urban area of the Gauteng Province in South Africa, an area including the cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria. The speakers have all lived in their area for at least two years and moved there from their home area, where Xhosa is a main L1. English is the main public lingua franca in Gauteng Province, making in-migrants vulnerable to shift to English.
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