Dialogue introducers: the case of be + like

by Ferrera

be + like was introduced as a quotative since at least 1981. Speakers have a choice between say, go, and be like.

In Old English there was cwethen, secgan, and tellan (quoth, say, and tell). Cwethan was, at one time, used most frequently. In Beowolf say and cwethan are used interchangeably. Eventually say assumed uses that once belonged to cwethan and lost some of its uses to tell.

Ferrera gathered data from a diverse population (in terms of age, race, an gender) and documented the "evolution of the grammatical category of the quotative."

18-25 year olds of both genders use be +like. No one 40+ used it. For 40+, they only used say or go.

"functional expansion into third person"

Few rural speakers used it, but blacks and Hispanics did use it. Usage is uneven within speakers.

Usage is spreading and expanding.

Like is, like, focus

by Underhill

Like "functions with great reliability as a marker of new information and focus."

It also introduces new concepts or entities, marks focussed information, marks the focus in questions, marks the answers to questions, can be used as a hedge, sets off unusual notions (not meant to be taken seriously), sets off stereotyped expressions. It can also be sentence initial.

It could have derived from the use of like to mean for example.

MIDDLE-CLASS AFRICAN AMERICANS: REACTIONS AND ATTITUDES TOWARD AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH

by rahman

Rahman asked middle-class blacks at her university to listen to audiotapes of other blacks speaking and rate them according to perceived blackness.

"Findings here show that there is a strong correlation between the dense
use of certain grammatical and phonological features of AAVE, including
intonation, and strong judgments of African American ethnicity. But the attenuation
of AAVE features and use of features associated with other groups
can reduce the salience of speech as African American. The next section
will show that while the heavy use of AAVE features leads to the belief that
a speaker is black, being identifiable as black does not equate with low
judgments of standardness. Yet, it does appear that judgments of “black” or
“white” can be closely related to judgments of standardness and to judgments
of social class and appropriateness"

Use of falsetto voice or highly contoured intonation is one marker of ethnicity. SO is use of /a/ instead of /ay/.

Black Standard English was deemed appropriate at an all-black family barbeque or at a corporate meeting, whereas SE and AAVE were each only appropriate for one.

An overview on Primary Progressive Aphasia and its variants.

amici et al.

"We present a review of the literature on Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) together with the analysis of neuropsychological and neuroradiologic profiles of 42 PPA patients. Mesulam originally defined PPA as a progressive degenerative disorder characterized by isolated language impairment for at least two years. The most common variants of PPA are: 1) Progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA), 2) semantic dementia (SD), 3) logopenic progressive aphasia (LPA). PNFA is characterized by labored speech, agrammatism in production, and/or comprehension. In some cases the syndrome begins with isolated deficits in speech. SD patients typically present with loss of word and object meaning and surface dyslexia. LPA patients have word-finding difficulties, syntactically simple but accurate language output and impaired sentence comprehension. The neuropsychological data demonstrated that SD patients show the most characteristic pattern of impairment, while PNFA and LPA overlap within many cognitive domains. The neuroimaging analysis showed left perisylvian region involvement. A comprehensive cognitive, neuroimaging and pathological approach is necessary to identify the clinical and pathogenetic features of different PPA variants."

Sometimes it's just aphasia but aphasia and memory problems looks like dementia.

Composing Nature

Richard Johnson-Sheehan and Kristi Stewart
http://www.writinginstructor.com/johnson-sheehan

Ecocomposition is about writing about place. The writer situates herself in the place and writes about her surroundings. It is gaining momentum as environmentalism becomes more popular.

It aims to inject pathos back into FYC.

You can have students journal-write about a place, explore the metaphors we use to talk about nature and push those metaphors to their limits, and explore how the subject is in the place and the place is in the subject. Students can read John Muir and Thoreau.

FUnctional neuroimging indices of normal and atypical spoken language

by weber and gaillard
in brain, behavior, and learning

in general, studies of infant and older children's left hemispheres support the critical period hypothesis.

"Overall, evidence supports the theory that areas of language processing may be less consolidated and more bilateral in younger children"

94% of healthy right-handed adults have language in left hemisphere.

processing measures of cognitive-linguistic interactions for children with language impairment and reading disabilities

by windsor and kohnert
in brain, behavior, and learning

cognitive-linguistic processing emphasizes that lang. is part of a broader cognitive system and that processing proficiency is a better measure of capability than performance measures.

"Language performance measures are heavily experience-dependent"

the authors found tasks that seperated bilingual kids from normal readers from RD kids.

Rapid Automatic Naming tasks "tap into a common cognitive skills setthat underlies performance across languages."

these tasks de-emphasize experience.

defining and differentiating dysgraphia, dyslexia, and language learning disability within a working memory model

by virginia w. berninger
in brain, behavior, an learning in language and reading disorders

"children with dyslexia have selective impairment in phonological awareness, but those with language learning disabilities have selective impairment in phonological, morphological (especially derivational suffixes), and syntactic awareness."

"neither executive function nor working memory is ... fully modular." they interact with each other

orthographic--dysgraphia
orthographic and phonological--dyslexia
orthographic, phonological, and morphological--language learning disability

critical periods in second language learning

by john t. bruer
in brain, behavior, an learning in language and reading disorders

"There is a difference between establishing the existence of a critical period phenomenon and proviing a causal theory that might account for such a phenomenon."

maturational theories: endogenous causes for opening and closures of critical periods
learning theories: exogenous causes for at least the closures

Emergentism and language impairment in children: its all about change

by julia l. evans

in brain, behavior, an learning in language and reading disorders

"Cognitivism" uses the omputer as a metaphor for the human brain.
"Empiriciam" versus "Nativism": nurture v. nature. Combined view: "interactionist perspective"

Emergentism: the brain is a complex system that may have "radical novelty." It is a coherent integrated whole. Self-organization.


"STudies of typical and atypical lang. development are shifting away from the focus on the static, globally ordered, stage-like patterns in children's language, toward an emergentist view of language development as a flexible, transient, variable phenomenon."

Atypical neurodevelopmental variation as a basis for learning disorders

gilger & wilkins

in brain, behavior, an learning in language and reading disorders

Atypical Brain development (ABD) = genetic developmental disorders

About 10% o our population is dyslexic, and "progenitors of today's population with dslexia may have had better interpersonal skills or spatial orientation abilities that gave them some sort of procreative edge () e.g., West 1999)."

"The RD concept was created by societal demands and were it not for the written alphabet would not otherwise exist. Reading itself was not instrumental to our development and survival as a species, although correlated traits may have been..."

NOte 1: "In other linguistic populations in which written language is more phonetically consistent, such as Italian, the frequency of RD may be significantly lower."

Theories of developmental dyslexia: insights from a multiple case study of dyslexic adults

by Ramus et al.

Summary
A multiple case study was conducted in order to assess
three leading theories of developmental dyslexia: (i) the
phonological theory, (ii) the magnocellular (auditory
and visual) theory and (iii) the cerebellar theory.
Sixteen dyslexic and 16 control university students were
administered a full battery of psychometric, phonological,
auditory, visual and cerebellar tests. Individual
data reveal that all 16 dyslexics suffer from a phonological
de®cit, 10 from an auditory de®cit, four from a
motor de®cit and two from a visual magnocellular
de®cit. Results suggest that a phonological de®cit can
appear in the absence of any other sensory or motor
disorder, and is suf®cient to cause a literacy impairment,
as demonstrated by ®ve of the dyslexics. Auditory
disorders, when present, aggravate the phonological
de®cit, hence the literacy impairment. However, auditory
de®cits cannot be characterized simply as rapid
auditory processing problems, as would be predicted by
the magnocellular theory. Nor are they restricted to
speech. Contrary to the cerebellar theory, we ®nd little
support for the notion that motor impairments, when
found, have a cerebellar origin or re¯ect an automaticity
de®cit. Overall, the present data support the
phonological theory of dyslexia, while acknowledging
the presence of additional sensory and motor disorders
in certain individuals."

University students with dyslexia were compared to a control group without dyslexia. Both groups were given a variety of tasks: phonological, auditory, balance/cerebellar, language-related.

"16 dyslexics out of 16 had
poor performance in phonology, 10 in audition, four in
cerebellar function and two in magnocellular vision."

Where are the dialects of American ENglish at anyhow?

by Preston
http://americanspeech.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/78/3/235.pdf

Preston wishes Labov, Ash and Boberg had surveyed people who live outside major cities.

He proposes that there IS a Midland, but it is very skinny and begins north of Indianapolis!