Sociobiological bases of information structure / Viviana Masia.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Masia, Viviana, author.

Series:

Advances in interaction studies ; Volume 9.

Advances in Interaction Studies ; Volume 9

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Discourse analysis--Psychological aspects.

Discourse analysis.

Pragmatics--Psychological aspects.

Pragmatics.

Sociobiolgogy--Philosophy.

Sociobiolgogy.

Semantics (Philosophy).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (37 pages) : illustrations.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam, Netherlands ; Philadelphia, [Pennsylvania] : John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017.

Summary:

The book tackles the sociobiological bases of Information Structure (IS) inquiring both its evidential and neurobiological underpinnings in human communication. Its purpose is to delve into the epistemic and neurocognitive rationales behind the realization of informational hierarchies in a sentence. The book zooms in on an interplay, that between IS and evidentiality, that has never been explored in IS studies and seeks to recast IS phenomena in an epistemological perspective. The neurocognitive approaches discussed propose neurophysiological investigations on IS processing, both with ERP and ERS vs. ERD measurements. In its overall structure and general purposes, the book is conceived for interested scholars working in the fields of linguistics, neuropragmatics, experimental psychology, philosophy of language and cognitive sciences in general, and it adds some further contribution to ongoing psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experimental research on the processing of topic-focus and presupposition-assertion dichotomies.

Contents:

Intro

Sociobiological Bases of Information Structure

Editorial page

Title page

LCC data

Dedication page

Table of contents

List of tables

List of figures

Preface

Acknowledgments

chapter 1

Presupposition and assertion

Theoretical overviews

1.1 Preamble

1.2 Presupposition and assertion

1.2.1 Theoretical perspectives on presupposition

1.2.2 Approaches to presupposition projection: Dynamic semantics and discourse representation theory

1.2.2.1 Dynamic semantics

1.2.2.2 Discourse representation theory

1.2.3 A snapshot on categories: Presuppositions as not implicatures

1.3 Theoretical perspectives on assertion

chapter 2

Topic, focus, given and new

2.1 Preamble

2.2 Topic and focus: From the prague linguistic circle onwards

2.3 Later approaches to information structure

2.4 Given and new

2.5 Levels of information structure: Long-term vs. short-term memory and the effects of information packaging

2.6 Summary and conclusion

chapter 3

Sociobiological perspectives

For a unified account of evidentiality and information structure

3.1 Preamble

3.2 Evidence, territory of knowledge, epistemic statuses and epistemic stances

3.3 Evidentiality in the world's languages: Information source and speaker's attitude

3.3.1 Information source evidentiality

3.3.2 Speaker attitude evidentiality

3.4 Evidentiality and information structure

3.4.1 Epistemic stances and the evidential values encoded by IS units

3.4.1.1 Assertion, focus and personal experience evidentiality

3.5 Closure

chapter 4

Experimental perspectives on information structure processing

A literature review

4.1 Preamble

4.2 Psycholinguistic background on IS units

4.2.1 Psycholinguistic perspectives on presupposition vs. assertion processing.

4.2.2 Psycholinguistic perspectives on the processing of topic, focus, given and new information

4.3 Neurological frontiers on language studies: Brain imaging techniques

4.3.1 Language-related neurophysiological components: N400 and P600

4.3.2 Brain oscillatory dynamics as revealed by frequency bands

4.3.3 Towards context-dependent approaches to the study of sentence processing

4.3.4 Neurolinguistic approaches to presupposition vs. assertion processing

4.3.5 Topic-focus, given-new and event-related brain potentials

chapter 5

Two electrophysiological studies

5.1 Study 1. Electrophysiological response to presupposition vs. assertion of new information: Evidence from event-related potentials

5.1.1 Prelude

5.1.2 Limits of previous experimental research on presupposition processing

5.1.3 Study rationale and experimental predictions

5.1.4 Materials and method

5.1.4.1 Participants

5.1.4.2 Experimental design

5.1.4.3 Stimuli

5.1.5 Measures on materials

5.1.5.1 Naturalness

5.1.5.2 Readability and length

5.1.6 Procedure and task

5.1.7 EEG recording and analysis

5.2 Results

5.2.1 Behavioral task

5.2.2 ERP results

5.2.3 N400 analysis

5.2.4 Latency analysis

5.3 Discussion

5.4 Study 2. Power spectrum analysis of different frequency bands during the online processing of aligned and misaligned Topic-Focus structures

5.4.1 Prelude

5.4.2 Method

5.4.3 Predictions

5.4.4 Data recording

5.4.5 Data pre-processing

5.4.6 Results

5.4.7 Discussion

5.4.8 Concluding remarks

5.5 Information structure processing between bottom-up and top-down modalities

5.6 Summary and conclusion: Chapter four and chapter five

chapter 6

A biolinguistic perspective on information structure

6.1 Preamble.

6.2 Earlier accounts

6.3 When selectivity matters

6.3.1 Emerging selectivity: Ontogenetic evidence of information structure development

6.4 A closer look at evolution

6.4.1 Information structure as shaped by nature

6.4.1.1 Cognitive constraints on the emergence of IS units: The role of bottom-up (or data-driven) processing modalities

6.4.1.2 Cognitive constraints on the emergence of IS units: The role of top-down (or context-driven) processing modalities

6.5 Conclusion

References

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.