Randolph Quirk Fellow Workshop #3: Prof. Martina Wiltschko
When: Wednesday, May 21, 2025, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Where: ArtsTwo 2.17 and online, Mile End Campus
Workshop 3: Does knowledge of language use affect the way we express emotions?
Click here to join online.
What do humans know when they use language?
One of the core goals of the generative enterprise (and other cognitive approaches towards language) is to explore what humans know when they know a language. To achieve this goal, generative linguists typically explore properties of individual languages, the commonalities across languages, as well as the range and limits of observed variation. What has long been ignored in this approach are aspects of language restricted to language in use. Two assumptions that prevail the generative enterprise have conspired to this status quo:
(1) Linguistic competence is the object of investigation and is to be distinguished from linguistic performance.
(2) The sentence is the unit of grammatical analysis.
On this view, units of language (UoLs) that appear at the periphery of sentences and which serve to regulate linguistic interaction (oh, huh, well ...) are not considered to fall within the purview of grammar. However, over the past two decades there is a growing consensus that the distribution of such UoLs can be successfully analyzed on the hypothesis that they occupy the very top of syntactic structures. If so, this has profound implications for the two assumptions above as summarized in (1') and (2').
(1') UoLs that serve to regulate interaction should be considered part of linguistic competence.
(2’) Grammatical analysis should not be restricted to the classic notion of the sentence.
While there are several competing proposals to model the integration of aspects of language in use into our knowledge of language, in this series of workshops I focus on one such proposal: the Interactional Spine Hypothesis (Wiltschko 2021), according to which grammatical knowledge includes not only knowledge of how to construct the propositional aspects of language (p-language) but also its interactional aspects (i-language).
Once we acknowledge that (at least some) conditions on language use are part of our grammatical competence, new research questions emerge as well as the need for new methodologies which go beyond the exploration of sentences in isolation. During the three workshops, I explore some of these questions and methodologies.
Workshop #3 Abstract
When we use language in interaction, we do not only formulate our thoughts, we also express our emotions. Thus, the question arises as to how the expression of emptions is integrated into our knowledge of language use. It has long been established that the expression of emotions pervades all levels of language (from phonetic details affected by emotions to particular discourse strategies). However, what is conspicuously missing in the languages of the world - and thus arguably from our knowledge of language - are grammatical categories that are dedicated to the expression of emotions. This is not a trivial fact as one could easily imagine a language where speakers must specify how the propositional content of the utterance relates to their emotive state. But this does not seem to be the case, as I demonstrate in this workshop. I further discuss the consequences of this empirical finding for the question of how our knowledge of language relates to our emotions and ultimately for our understanding of human cognition more generally.