Semplates: A new concept in lexical semantics? (2009)
Stephen C. Levinson, Niclas Burenhult
Language - Volume 85, Number 1, March 2009
Michael Dunn, Stephen C. Levinson, Eva Lindström, Ger Reesink, Angela Terrill
Language - Volume 84, Number 4, December 2008
With diversity in mind: Freeing the language sciences from universal grammar (2009)
Evans, Nicholas, Levinson, Stephen C.
Our response takes advantage of the wide-ranging commentary to clarify some aspects of our original proposal and augment others. We argue against the generative critics of our coevolutionary program...
The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science (2009)
Evans, Nicholas, Levinson, Stephen C.
Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages are all built to a common pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct...
Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation (2009)
Stivers, Tanya, Enfield, N. J., Brown, Penelope, Englert, Christina, Hayashi, Makoto, Heinemann, Trine, ...
Informal verbal interaction is the core matrix for human social life. A mechanism for coordinating this basic mode of interaction is a system of turn-taking that regulates who is to speak and when....
Semplates: A new concept in lexical semantics? (2009)
Levinson, Stephen C., Burenhult, Niclas
This short report draws attention to an interesting kind of configuration in the lexicon that seems to have escaped theoretical or systematic descriptive attention. These configurations, which we dub...
Language as mind tools: Learning how to think through speaking (2009)
Brown, Penelope, Levinson, Stephen C.
Speakers of the Mayan language Tzeltal use two frames of reference for spatial reckoning: an absolute system (based on the south/north axis abstracted from the overall slope of the land) and an...
Gaze, questioning and culture (2009)
Rossano, Federico, Brown, Penelope, Levinson, Stephen C.
Relatively little work has examined the function of gaze in interaction. Previous research has mainly addressed issues such as next speaker selection (e.g. Lerner 2003) or engagement and...
Brain mechanisms underlying human communication (2009)
Noordzij, Matthijs, Newman-Norlund, Sarah E., De Ruiter, Jan Peter, Hagoort, Peter, Levinson, Stephen C., Toni, Ivan
Human communication has been described as involving the coding-decoding of a conventional symbol system, which could be supported by parts of the human motor system (i.e. the “mirror neurons...
Asifa Majid, Melissa Bowerman, Sotaro Kita, Stephen C. Levinson
Frames of reference are coordinate systems used to compute and specify the location of objects with respect to other objects. These have long been thought of as innate concepts, built into our...
Statistical Reasoning in the Evaluation of Typological Diversity in Island Melanesia (2008)
Dunn, Michael., Foley, Robert., Levinson, Stephen C., Reesink, Ger P., Terrill, Angela.
Oceanic Linguistics - Volume 46, Number 2, December 2007
Language and landscape: A cross-linguistic perspective (2008)
Burenhult, Niclas, Levinson, Stephen C.
This special issue is the outcome of collaborative work on the relationship between language and landscape, carried out in the Language and Cognition Group at the Max Planck Institute for...
Landscape, seascape and the ontology of places on Rossel Island, Papua New Guinea (2008)
This paper describes the descriptive landscape and seascape terminology of an isolate language, Yélî Dnye, spoken on a remote island off Papua New Guinea. The terminology reveals an ontology of...
Majid, Asifa, Levinson, Stephen C.
Recurrent lexicalization patterns across widely different cultural contexts can provide a window onto common conceptualizations. The cross-linguistic data support the idea that sweet, salt, sour, and...
A biological infrastructure for communication underlies the cultural evolution of languages (2008)
De Ruiter, Jan Peter, Levinson, Stephen C.
Universal Grammar (UG) is indeed evolutionarily implausible. But if languages are just “adapted” to a large primate brain, it is hard to see why other primates do not have complex languages. The...
Dunn, Michael, Levinson, Stephen C., Lindström, Eva, Reesink, Ger, Terrill, Angela
Using various methods derived from evolutionary biology, including maximum parsimony and Bayesian phylogenetic analysis, we tackle the question of the relationships among a group of Papuan isolate...
Dunn, Michael, Levinson, Stephen C., Lindström, Eva, Reesink, Ger, Terrill, Angela
Using various methods derived from evolutionary biology, including maximum parsimony and Bayesian phylogenetic analysis, we tackle the question of the relationships among a group of Papuan isolate...
Stephen C. Levinson, Nancy Green
Levinson's book presents a theory of generalized conversational implicature (GCI), and makes the central claim that this theory necessitates a "new view of the architecture of the...
Optimizing person reference - perspectives from usage on Rossel Island (2007)
This chapter explicates the requirement in person–reference for balancing demands for recognition, minimalization, explicitness and indirection. This is illustrated with reference to data from...
Cut and break verbs in Yélî Dnye, the Papuan language of Rossel Island (2007)
The paper explores verbs of cutting and breaking (C&B, hereafter) in Yeli Dnye, the Papuan language of Rossel Island. The Yeli Dnye verbs covering the C&B domain do not divide it in the expected way,...
Gesichtsbedrohende Akte [reprint: Face-threatening acts, 1987] (2007)
Brown, Penelope, Levinson, Stephen C.
This article is a reprint of parts of chapters 2 and 3 from Brown and Levinson (1987) discussing the concept of 'Face Threatening Acts'.
Imi no suitei [Japanese translation of 'Presumptive meanings', 2000] (2007)
When we speak, we mean more than we say. In this book, the author explains some general processes that underlie presumptions in communication. This is the first extended discussion of preferred...
Statistical reasoning in the evolution of typological diversity in Island Melanesia (2007)
Dunn, Michael, Foley, R., Levinson, Stephen C., Reesink, Ger, Terrill, Angela
This paper builds on a previous work in which we attempted to retrieve a phylogenetic signal using abstract structural features alone, as opposed to cognate sets, drawn from a sample of Island...
Pragmática [Portugese translation of 'Pragmatics', 1983] (2007)
The purpose of this book is to provide some indication of the scope of linguistic pragmatics. First the historical origin of the term pragmatics will be briefly summarized, in order to indicate some...
The typology and semantics of locative predication: Posturals, positionals and other beasts (2007)
Ameka, Felix K., Levinson, Stephen C.
This special issue is devoted to a relatively neglected topic in linguistics, namely the verbal component of locative statements. English tends, of course, to use a simple copula in utterances like...
Ameka, Felix K., Levinson, Stephen C.
This special issue is devoted to a relatively neglected topic in linguistics, namely the verbal component of locative statements. English tends, of course, to use a simple copula in utterances like...
Levinson, Stephen C., Siegel, Jeff.
Language - Volume 82, Number 1, March 2006
Cognition at the heart of human interaction (2006)
Sometimes it is thought that there are serious differences between theories of discourse that turn on the role of cognition in the theory. This is largely a misconception: for example, with its...
Parts of the body in Yélî Dnye, the Papuan language of Rossel Island (2006)
This paper describes the terminology used to describe parts of the body in Ye´lıˆ Dnye, the Papuan language of Rossel Island (Papua New Guinea). The terms are nouns, which display complex patterns...
Evolutionary psychology of spatial representations in the hominidae (2006)
Haun, Daniel B. M., Call, Josep, Janzen, Gabriele, Levinson, Stephen C.
Comparatively little is known about the inherited primate background underlying human cognition, the human cognitive “wild-type.” Yet it is possible to trace the evolution of human cognitive...
Cognitive cladistics and cultural override in Hominid spatial cognition (2006)
Haun, Daniel B. M., Rapold, Christian J., Call, Josep, Janzen, Gabriele, Levinson, Stephen C.
Current approaches to human cognition often take a strong nativist stance based on Western adult performance, backed up where possible by neonate and infant research and almost never by comparative...
Matrilineal clans and kin terms on Rossel Island (2006)
Yélî Dnye, the language of Rossel Island, Louisiade archipelago, Papua New Guinea, is a non-Austronesian isolate of considerable interest for the prehistory of the area. The kin term, clan, and...
Towards a linguist's workbench supporting eScience methods (2006)
Dimitriadis, A., Kemps-Snijders, Marc, Wittenburg, Peter, Everaert, M., Levinson, Stephen C.
Foundations of modern language resource archives (2006)
Wittenburg, Peter, Broeder, Daan, Klein, Wolfgang, Levinson, Stephen C., Romary, Laurent
A number of serious reasons will convince an increasing amount of researchers to store their relevant material in centers which we will call "language resource archives". They combine the duty of...
Evolutionary Psychology of Spatial Representations in the Hominidae (2006)
Haun, Daniel B. M., Call, Josep, Janzen, Gabriele, Levinson, Stephen C.
Cognitive cladistics and cultural override in human spatial cognition (2006)
Haun, Daniel B. M., Rapold, Christian J., Call, Josep, Janzen, Gabriele, Levinson, Stephen C.
Living with Manny's dangerous idea (2005)
Daniel Dennett, in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, argues that natural selection is a universal acid that eats through other theories, because it can explain just about everything, even the structure of the...
Structural phylogenetics and the reconstruction of ancient language history (2005)
Dunn, Michael, Terrill, Angela, Reesink, Ger, Foley, Robert A., Levinson, Stephen C.
Cornerstones of twenty-first century psycholinguistics (2005)
Cutler, Anne, MARCS Auditory Laboratories, Klien, Wolfgang, Levinson, Stephen C.
2005
Cornerstones of twenty-first century psycholinguistics (2005)
Cutler, Anne, MARCS Auditory Laboratories, Klien, W., Levinson, Stephen C.
2005
Cornerstones of twenty-first century psycholinguistics (2005)
Cutler, Anne, MARCS Auditory Laboratories, Klien, Wolfgang, Levinson, Stephen C.
2005
Cornerstones of twenty-first century psycholinguistics (2005)
Cutler, Anne, MARCS Auditory Laboratories, Klien, Wolfgang, Levinson, Stephen C.
2005
Cornerstones of twenty-first century psycholinguistics (2005)
Cutler, Anne, College Of Arts, MARCS Auditory Laboratories, Klien, Wolfgang, Levinson, Stephen C.
2005
Cornerstones of twenty-first century psycholinguistics (2005)
Cutler, Anne, College Of Arts, MARCS Auditory Laboratories, Klien, Wolfgang, Levinson, Stephen C.
2005
Frames of spatial reference and their acquisition in Tenejapan Tzeltal (2004)
Brown, Penelope, Levinson, Stephen C.
This is a reprint of the Brown and Levinson 2000 article.
Can language restructure cognition? The case for space (2004)
Majid, Asifa, Bowerman, Melissa, Kita, Sotaro, Haun, Daniel B. M., Levinson, Stephen C.
Frames of reference are coordinate systems used to compute and specify the location of objects with respect to other objects. These have long been thought of as innate concepts, built into our...
Levinson, Stephen C., Meira, Sergio.
Language - Volume 79, Number 3, September 2003
Levinson, Stephen C., Brown, Penelope
This is a translation of Levinson and Brown (1994).
Levinson, Stephen C., Meira, Sérgio
Most approaches to spatial language have assumed that the simplest spatial notions are (after Piaget) topological and universal (containment, contiguity, proximity, support, represented as semantic...
The DOBES archive: It's purpose and implementation (2002)
Brugman, Hennie, Levinson, Stephen C., Skiba, Romuald, Wittenburg, Peter
Multimodal annotations in gesture and sign language studies (2002)
Brugman, Hennie, Wittenburg, Peter, Levinson, Stephen C., Kita, Sotaro
For multimodal annotations an exhaustive encoding system for gestures was developed to facilitate research. The structural requirements of multimodal annotations were analyzed to develop an Abstract...
Returning the tables: Language affects spatial reasoning (2002)
Levinson, Stephen C., Kita, Sotaro, Haun, Daniel B. M., Rasch, Björn H.
Li and Gleitman (Turning the tables: language and spatial reasoning. Cognition, in press) seek to undermine a large-scale cross-cultural comparison of spatial language and cognition which claims to...
Frames of spatial reference and their acquisition in Tenejapan Tzeltal. (2000)
Brown, Penelope, Levinson, Stephen C.
Recent crosslinguistic studies of spatial language and cognition have revealed that many languages utilize one or more of three basic frames of reference in reckoning spatial relationships:...
Politeness: Some universals in language usage. (1999)
Brown, Penelope, Levinson, Stephen C.
This article is a reprint of chapter 1, the introduction to Brown and Levinson, 1987, Politeness: Some universals in language usage (Cambridge University Press).
Politeness: Introduction to the reissue: A review of recent work. (1998)
Brown, Penelope, Levinson, Stephen C.
This article is a reprint of chapter 1, the introduction to Brown and Levinson, 1987, Politeness: Some universals in language usage (Cambridge University Press).
Semantic typology and spatial conceptualization. (1998)
Pederson, E., Danziger, Eve, Wilkins, David P., Levinson, Stephen C., Kita, Sotaro, Senft, Gunter
Social deixis in a Tamil village /--by Stephen Curtis Levinson. (1977)
Microfilm of typescript. Ann Arbor, Mich. : University Microfilms International, 1978. -- 1 reel ; 35 mm.
Social deixis in a Tamil village / (1977)
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Berkeley.
Social deixis in a Tamil village / (1977)
Thesis (Ph. D. in Anthropology)--University of California, Berkeley, Dec. 1977.
Cognitive cladistics and cultural override in Hominid spatial cognition
Haun, Daniel B. M., Rapold, Christian J., Call, Josep, Janzen, Gabriele, Levinson, Stephen C.
Current approaches to human cognition often take a strong nativist stance based on Western adult performance, backed up where possible by neonate and infant research and almost never by comparative...
Brain Mechanisms Underlying Human Communication
Noordzij, Matthijs L., Newman-Norlund, Sarah E., De Ruiter, Jan Peter, Hagoort, Peter, Levinson, Stephen C., Toni, Ivan
Human communication has been described as involving the coding-decoding of a conventional symbol system, which could be supported by parts of the human motor system (i.e. the “mirror neurons...
Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation
Stivers, Tanya, Enfield, N. J., Brown, Penelope, Englert, Christina, Hayashi, Makoto, Heinemann, Trine, ...
Informal verbal interaction is the core matrix for human social life. A mechanism for coordinating this basic mode of interaction is a system of turn-taking that regulates who is to speak and when....