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Chapman University

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Full-Text Articles in Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics

The Property Species: Mine, Yours, And The Human Mind, Bart J. Wilson Aug 2020

The Property Species: Mine, Yours, And The Human Mind, Bart J. Wilson

Economics Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"Arguing that neither the sciences nor the humanities synthesizes a full account of property, the book offers a cross-disciplinary compromise that is sure to be controversial: Property is a universal and uniquely human custom. Integrating cognitive linguistics with philosophy of property and a fresh look at property disputes in the common law, the book makes the case that symbolic-thinking humans locate the meaning of property within a thing. That is, all human beings and only human beings have property in things, and at its core, property rests on custom, not rights. Such an alternative to conventional thinking contends that the …

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Gesture Production And Theory Of Mind: Effective Disambiguation In Communication Through Gesture, Minju Kim, Adena Schachner Jan 2020

Gesture Production And Theory Of Mind: Effective Disambiguation In Communication Through Gesture, Minju Kim, Adena Schachner

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

People design their speech acts with their listeners in mind,accounting for their knowledge and other mental states. Is this ability specific to spoken language and co-speech gesture, or does it appear in pantomimic gestures as well? We ask whether adults flexibly shift their silent gestures to emphasize relevant information, representing different features of the target indifferent contexts. In a two-item reference game, adults gestured to a partner to indicate which object was the target.Item pairs differed in one of three features (size, shape,pattern). We found that adults were more likely to gesture a feature when it was relevant to distinguishing …

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Shiwilu (Jebero), Pilar Valenzuela, Carlos Gussenhoven Jan 2013

Shiwilu (Jebero), Pilar Valenzuela, Carlos Gussenhoven

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Articles and Research

Shiwilu (a.k.a. Jebero) is a critically endangered language from Peruvian Amazonia and one of the two members of the Kawapanan linguistic family. Most of its nearly 30 remaining fluent speakers live in and around the village of Jeberos (District of Jeberos, Province of Alto Amazonas, Loreto Region), at approximately 5° S, 75° W. The documentation of Shiwilu is scarce and no survey grammar is available. Until very recently, the only trained linguist who had worked on Shiwilu was John Bendor- Samuel, who carried out fieldwork in 1955–1956 and completed a doctoral thesis in 1958 (see Bendor-Samuel 1981 [1958]). An abridged …

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Argument Encoding And Pragmatic Marking Of The Transitive Subject In Shiwilu (Kawapanan), Pilar Valenzuela Jan 2011

Argument Encoding And Pragmatic Marking Of The Transitive Subject In Shiwilu (Kawapanan), Pilar Valenzuela

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Articles and Research

Shiwilu (a.k.a. Jebero) is a nearly extinct Kawapanan language from Peruvian Amazonia. The goal of this article is twofold. First, it investigates the obligatory cross-referencing of arguments in the complex Shiwilu verb. This system is predominantly nominative accusative, with the caveat that main clause object markers coincide with those conveying subject in one type of clause involving nominal predicates, as well as subject and object of dependent clauses. Second, this article provides a first analysis of the enclitic =ler, which may attach to transitive subjects and thus exhibits an ergative-like distribution. Unlike the situation in languages with syntacticized ergative systems, …

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