ELC Seminar Series

The University of Hertfordshire English Language and Communication Group meets once per semester to host both internal and external speakers presenting papers on any aspect of linguistics and language teaching.

Programme for 2010/2011

Semester A 

Thursday 9 December, 3-5pm in R026/034:

Early Second Language Acquisition in Bilingual Preschools: Experiences, Methods and Results

Dr Christina Schelletter (University of Hertfordshire)

The presentation focuses on the acquisition of another language in preschool, using the method of immersion, which enables language learning to start early and to proceed in a way that is as natural as possible.

Results are presented from an EU-funded project on Early Language and Intercultural Acquisition (ELIAS) which has monitored the progress of preschool children learning English in such an immersion setting.

The background for the project is the aim of the European Commission, stated in their Action Plan 2004 – 2008 that in order for citizens to have a working knowledge of at least two foreign languages, language learning needs to be effective and start at a young age. 

Argumentation and Adapted Cognition: Activations of the Cheater-Detection Module in Anti-Immigration Discourse

Dr Christopher Hart (University of Hertfordshire)

Critical Discourse Analysis has identified a number of (fallacious) argumentation schemes that reoccur in anti-immigration discourse and which serve strategically to legitimise restrictive immigration policies.

In this paper, I argue that the move from the premise to the presupposed conclusion which realises such argumentation strategies in fact reflects adapted decision rules operationalised by a so called ‘cheater-detection’ module (Cosmides 1989).

On this account, assertions in anti-immigration discourse provide the necessary input to the cheater-detection module to result in decisions in favour of discriminatory policies and practices.

Persuasion, or perhaps even manipulation, is then not a matter of pragmatic reasoning processes but may instead involve the exploitation of evolved cognitive programmes. I show how assertions in anti-immigration discourse activate the cheater-detection module in a critical analysis of representations of immigrants and asylum-seekers in the British right-wing press.

Semester B

Thursday 31 March, 3-5pm. Room R110:

Something out of Nothing? Why ‘Free’ Pragmatic Enrichment Needs to be Constrained

Dr Marjolein Groefsema (University of Hertfordshire)

Unarticulated constituents are defined in cognitive pragmatics as constituents of the proposition communicated by a certain utterance which are in no sense articulated at any level of linguistic representation (Hall 2008), and which are supplied entirely on pragmatic grounds, by a pragmatically motivated and controlled process of free enrichment.

This is in contrast to two alternative accounts of this phenomena, namely indexicalism (Stanley 2000, Stanley & Szabo 2000, Szabo 2001), who argue that these constituents are syntactically represented at the level of LF, and minimalism (Borg 2005, Cappelen & Lepore 2005) who argue that they are not part of the proposition expressed and are therefore semantically irrelevant.

Recanati (2004:89-90) claims that questioning UCs is pretty much an impossible task: since the doubter/denier “… makes a sweeping claim and is forced to deal with every putative counterexample.”

However, the notion of ‘free pragmatic enrichment’ itself faces a number of problems.  It is not clear what licenses ‘free’ enrichment.  To date we have not been given an explicit account of how we can get, for example,  from a logical form containing a one-place predicate such as ‘eat’ as  in ‘I’ve already eaten’ to a logical form containing a different concept, such as the two-place predicate ‘eat’. 

Moreover, there are examples which should allow free pragmatic enrichment but in fact don’t do so. This account therefore faces counterexamples of its own. In the third place, we find that psycholinguistic findings point at gaps (i.e. hidden constituents) being postulated even in the most pragmatically infelicitous sentences, contrary to what we would expect on the ‘free pragmatic enrichment’ view.

I will present an alternative account, namely that the pragmatic recovery of under-determined content is structurally constrained rather than free and will show how this account can deal with a range of examples discussed in the literature. 

Language and Communication in Individuals with William Syndrome: Issues and Debates

Dr Vesna Stojanovic (University of Reading)

Williams syndrome (WS) is a relatively rare genetic disorder which occurs due to a microdeletion on chromosome 7. This results in an array of physical and mental disabilities, but also in a rather uneven neuro-cognitive profile with relative strengths in aspects of language and face processing, and relatively good short-term memory and weaknesses in visuo-spatial skills and problem solving.

This genetic syndrome has been the focus of quite intense research over the past 3 decades or so, because of its relevance for theoretical debates with regard to the independence of language from general cognitive processes.

Early studies of WS suggested rather sophisticated language and communication abilities in WS in the face of impaired non-verbal abilities, however it is becoming clear from recent research studies that the picture is a very complex one and that WS does not provide prima facie evidence that language develops independently of other cognitive and non-verbal skills.

In this presentation, I will focus on 4 aspects of the language profile of individuals with WS mainly drawing on my own research over the past 10 years: vocabulary, prosody, social interaction and on-line sentence processing.

For each of these 4 areas I will present my recent findings and discuss these within the context of existing theoretical issues and other studies.