Christopher Johnson

<HEAD> <STYLE TYPE="text/css" MEDIA=screen> addresse, blockquote, body, caption, center, dd, dir, div, dl, dt, form, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, menu, ol, p, td, th, ul { font-family: franklin gothic book, arial, sans-serif; color: #D3D3D3 } p { margin-left: 40px; color: #D3D3D3 } h1 { font-size: x-large; color: #FFFFE0 } h2 { margin-left: 20px; font-size: medium; color: #FFFFE0 } .note { margin-left: 7em; margin-right: 2em } .head {color: lightyellow; font-size: large} a {text-decoration:none; color: #ccffff} </STYLE> <title>Christopher R. Johnson</title> </HEAD> <body bgcolor=#330033 link="#80C0FF" vlink="#C080FF" alink="#FF8080"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="3" bgcolor="#330033" <tbody valign="top"> <tr><td height="40px"></td></tr> <tr> <td width="300px" align="right"> <h1>Christopher R. Johnson</h1> <a href="mailto:crj@uchicago.edu"><h2> crj@uchicago.edu</h2></a> </td> <td> <p align=left>Assistant Professor<br> <a href="http://humdev.uchicago.edu/" target="_blank">Committee on Human Development</a><br>and<br> <a href="http://www.college.uchicago.edu/index.html" target="_blank">The College</a><br> <a href="http://www.uchicago.edu/" target="_blank">The University of Chicago</a></p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <h2>research interests</h2></a> <p align-left>My work focuses on the relation between language, understood as a richly structured and highly conventionalized system of communication, and the cognitive, social, and semiotic factors that affect the way young children learn language in their interactions with older speakers. I regard the linguistic and developmental sides of this work as closely connected, because linguistic analysis reveals the structures and conventions that children must learn, and more crucially, because certain aspects of linguistic organization cannot be fully understood without taking developmental phenomena into consideration.</p> <p>As a linguist, I am especially interested in the semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic properties of grammatical constructions and lexical units, and in the roles played by conceptual structure, communicative interaction, and conventionalization in shaping these properties. I am partial to <a href="http://www.constructiongrammar.org" target="page">Construction Grammar</a> as a model of the lexicon-grammar continuum, and the related theory of <a href="http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~framenet" target="page">frame semantics</a> as an approach to the conceptual structures underlying lexical meanings and complementation patterns. Because I am interested in the "grounding" of linguistic phenomena in cognition and experience, my work is in the spirit of cognitive, functional, usage-based, and neurally-inspired models of language.</p> <h2>courses for fall 2002</h2></a> <p><b>Mind</b> (SOSC 14100)<br> Tuesday & Thursday 10:30-11:50 AM<br> The first quarter of a year-long Social Sciences sequence in the general education program that introduces the study of human thought and understanding. <p><b>Grammar, Cognition, and Experience</b> (HUDV 39200, LING 36500)<br> Monday 3:00-5:50 PM<br> This seminar surveys recent work that examines the influence of human experience and cognitive organization on grammatical structure. In constrast to syntactic research that attempts to identify abstract, formal properties of an innate mental module, this work regards the grammars of human languages as complex sign systems shaped by the interaction of cognitive, social, cultural, developmental, and historical phenomena. Topics include human construal (not truth conditions) as the basis for linguistic meaning, the conceptual scenarios or "frames" underlying argument structure, the complex interdependence of grammar and lexicon, the conventional and symbolic properties of grammatical patterns, the relation between grammar and language use, and the implications of a sign-based view of grammar for the study of first language acquisition.</p> <h2>education</h2></a> <p align-left><a href="http://www.berkeley.edu" target="_blank" >University of California, Berkeley</a><br> Ph.D. in <a href="http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu" target="_blank" > Linguistics</a>, 1999<br>Dissertation Committee: Charles Fillmore (advisor), George Lakoff, Dan Slobin, Eve Sweetser</p> <p align-left><a href="http://www.uchicago.edu" target="_blank" >University of Chicago</a><br> B.A. in General Studies in the Humanities</a>, 1987<br> Interdisciplinary concentration in linguistics, philosophy, and psychology</p> <h2>dissertation</h2></a> <p align-left><b>Constructional grounding: The role of interpretational overlap in lexical and constructional acquisition.</b>1999. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.<br> <p>This work presents arguments and longitudinal corpus evidence for "constructional grounding," a developmental process hypothesized to underlie certain relations between conventional linguistic signs (lexical units or grammatical constructions) that are distinct but related in function and almost identical in form. In this process, a child uses particular context-bound occurrences of one sign (the <i>source</i>) as the basis for an initial hypothesis about another sign (the <i>target</i>). This is made possible by an overlap in the formal properties of the two signs and a conceptually or experientially natural correlation between their interpretations in certain utterance contexts.</p> <p>The primary motivation for constructional grounding comes from the asymmetry between the source and target signs with respect to their conventional interpretations. Source signs are learned earlier by children because their interpretations are more easily demonstrated by and inferred from non-verbal cues, making them relatively accessible to both participants in a communicative interaction. Target signs, on the other hand, have interpretations that are more difficult to identify. In the overlapping utterance contexts that make constructional grounding possible, a use of the source sign exhibits important formal properties of the target sign, and gives rise to an interpretation that calls attention to dimensions of the context relevant to the correct interpretation of the target. As a result, a form-meaning pairing that is otherwise difficult for a child to identify is made more accessible. By generalizing over these overlap utterances, a child initially treats the target sign as a special instance of the source, only later learning that it is a distinct conventional sign with its own unique properties.</p> <p>Constructional grounding resembles the context-induced reinterpretation of utterances that gives rise to new signs historically, and is in fact made possible by parallels between signs that arise through such historical changes. Relations anchored in this dynamic process may be weakened as a child learns properties that distinguish one sign from another, and therefore may not play as strong a role in the competence eventually achieved by the child. For that reason, constructional grounding helps to explain how one sign can be strongly motivated by another, yet have properties that are not accounted for by, or in fact are at odds with, that motivation.</p> <p>Constructional grounding can be considered a special case of a more general process of conceptual development: children perceive correlations of phenomena in their experience, pick out classes of experience based on correlated properties, form concepts by extracting generalizations about these classes, and refine their concepts by teasing apart dimensions of experience that normally co-occur. In this view, children's early conceptual representations may "conflate" aspects of experience that are clearly distinguished by adults, and the achievement of adult concepts may therefore involve a process of differentiation or "deconflation." There are cases of constructional grounding that make these conceptual foundations of the process especially apparent. Such cases involve different conventional senses of a polysemous lexical item that are not initially distinguished by children, but rather are assimilated to a single, relatively holistic understanding of the kinds of situations in which the lexical item is used.</p> <p>Constructional grounding differs from both the synchronic and the diachronic explanations typically proposed by linguists for relations between signs, offering a new way to understand linguistic structures and conventions and their relation to first language acquisition.</p> <p align-left>(Download my dissertation in <a href="Johnson-dissertation.ps" target="page">postscript</a> or <a href="Johnson-dissertation.pdf" target="page">pdf</a> format).</p> <h2>publications</h2></a> <p><i>Authored</i> </p> <p><b>Converging evidence for the notions of "subscene" and "primary scene."</b> <br> With Joseph Grady. 2002. In: René Dirven and Ralf Pörings (eds.), <i>Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast</i>. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. (Revised version of a paper that first appeared in: <i>Proceedings of the 23rd annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society</i>, 123-136. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society)</p> <p><b>Constructional grounding: On the relation between deictic and existential <i>there</i>-constructions in acquisition.</b> <br> 2001. In: Alan Cienki, Barbara J. Luka, and Michael B. Smith (eds.), <i>Conceptual and Discourse Factors in Linguistic Structure</i>, 123-136. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. </p> <p><b>Review of <i>Pattern Grammar: A Corpus-Driven Approach to the Lexical Grammar of English</i>, by Susan Hunston and Gill Francis.</b> <br> 2001. <i>Computational Linguistics 27(2)</i>, 318-320.</p> <p><b>From states to events: The acquisition of English passive participles.</b> <br> With Michael Israel and Patricia Brooks. 2000. <i>Cognitive Linguistics 11-1/2</i>, 1-27. </p> <p><b>The FrameNet tagset for frame-semantic and syntactic coding of predicate-argument structure.</b><br> With Charles J. Fillmore. 2000. <i>Proceedings of the 1<sup>st</sup> Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, </i>56-62. <a href="http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~crj/NAACL2000-FrameNet-tagset.pdf" target="page">[download pdf]</a></p> <p><b>The FrameNet Project: Tools for Lexicon Building, Version 0.7.</b><br> With Charles J. Fillmore, Esther J. Wood, Josef Ruppenhofer, Margaret Urban, Miriam R. L. Petruck, and Collin F. Baker. 2000. Web publication: <a href="http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~framenet/book.html" target="page">http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~framenet/book.html</a>.</p> <p><b>The semantics of <i>place</i>, <i>time</i> and <i>way</i> and their strange syntactic behavior: A Construction Grammar analysis.</b> <br> 1999. In: Barbara A. Fox, Dan Jurafsky and Laura A. Michaelis (eds.), <i>Cognition and Function in Language</i>, 220-234. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. </p> <p><b>Metaphor vs. Conflation in the acquisition of polysemy: The case of <i>see</i>.</b> <br> 1999. In: Masako K. Hiraga, Chris Sinha and Sherman Wilcox (eds.), <i>Cultural, Psychological and Typological Issues in Cognitive Linguistics. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 152</i>, 155-169. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.</p> <p><b>Learnability in the acquisition of multiple senses: SOURCE reconsidered.</b><br> 1997b. <i>Proceedings of the 22nd annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society</i>, 469-480. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society.<a href="http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~crj/BLS97-Learnability.pdf" target="page">[download pdf]</a> <a href="http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~crj/BLS97-Learnability.ps" target="page">[download postscript]</a><br> </p> <p><b>The acquisition of the "What's X Doing Y?" construction</b>. <br> 1997a. <i>Proceedings of the 21st annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Vol. 2</i>, 343-353. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. <br>   </p> <p><i>Edited</i> </p> <p><b>Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, February 18-21, 1994: General Session, Dedicated to the Contributions of Charles J. Fillmore.</b> <br> With Susanne Gahl and Andrew Dolbey. 1994. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.</p> <p><b>Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, February 15-18, 1991: General Session and Parasession on the Grammar of Event Structure.</b> <br> With Laurel Sutton and Ruth Shields. 1991. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.</p> <h2>curriculum vitae</h2></a> <p><a href="Johnson-CV.ps" target="page">postscript</a></p> <p><a href="Johnson-CV.pdf" target="page">pdf</a></p> <h2>contact</h2></a> <p align=left>Committee on Human Development<br> The University of Chicago</a><br> 5730 South Woodlawn Avenue<br> Chicago, IL 60637-1681</p> <p align=left>Office: Human Development 302<br> Phone: (773) 702-1368<br> Fax: (773) 702-0320<br> Email: crj@uchicago.edu</p> </body>