Games with Words: Findings: Linguistic Universals in Pronoun Resolution. Unlike a proper name (Jane Austen), a pronoun (she) can refer to a different person just about every time it is uttered. While we occasionally get bogged down in conversation trying to interpret a pronoun (Wait! Who are you talking about?) , for the most part we sail through sentences with pronouns, not even noticing the ambiguity. I have been running a number of studies on pronoun understanding. One line of work looks at a peculiar contextual effect, originally discovered by Garvey and Caramazza in the mid-70s: (1) Sally frightens Mary because she... (2) Sally loves Mary because she... Although the pronoun is ambiguous, most people guess that she refers to Sally in (1) but Mary in (2). One open question has been whether the same verbs show the same pronoun biases across different languages. (What else could be causing the pronoun bias, you ask?
Random cheetah picture (couldn't find a picture about cross-linguistic studies of pronouns) Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Group 4 photo: Kevin Law. Games with Words: Findings: The Causality Implicit in Language. Finding Causes Consider the following: (1) Sally hates Mary. a. How likely is this because Sally is the kind of person who hates people? B. How likely is this because Mary is the kind of person whom people hate? Sally hates Mary doesn't obviously supply the relevant information, but starting with work by Roger Brown and Debora Fish in 1983, numerous studies have found that people nonetheless rate (a) as more likely than (b).
In contrast, people find Sally frightens Mary more indicative of Sally than of Mary (the equivalent of rating (b) higher than (a)). Brown and Fish, along with many of the researchers who followed them, explain this in terms of an inference from knowledge about how the world works: Consider the two verbs flatter and slander… Just about everyone (most or all persons) can be flattered or slandered. Similar results are found by using other ways of asking about who is at fault: (2) Sally hates Mary. a. Most people think that "she" refers to Mary in (3) but Sally in (4). Rhetorica: Press-Politics Journal.
Language Log. Language on the Move. Racism without racistsLanguage on the Move. In the past couple of years, I have been a passenger in Sydney taxis driven, inter alia, by an agricultural engineer from India, a civil engineer from Somalia, a surgeon from Vietnam, an MBA graduate from Pakistan, an architect from Iran, and an IT professional from Egypt. I don’t recall ever being in a Sydney taxi driven by a native-born person. While this may not mean much as I don’t catch taxis all that often, I’ve been in taxis driven by native-born Australians in Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory.
In contrast to migrant taxi drivers, none of them had tertiary qualifications. The overqualified migrant taxi driver has by now become a stock character of Australian literature, e.g., the taxi-driving former orchestra conductor from Vietnam featured in Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist. The deskilling of skilled migrants is not unique to Australia but also a feature of Canada’s skilled migration program. Creese, G., & Wiebe, B. (2009). English, Jack.