Mark Ellison
List of John Benjamins publications in which Mark Ellison is involved.
Articles
2026 The one–new–idea constraint, functor–argument metaphors, and holistic speech processing Functions of Language: Online-First Articles | Article
The one-new-idea constraint (ONICON) is a hypothesis about how much information we can package in one intonation unit (Chafe 1982, 1992, 1994). Chafe (1994) suggests that constructions containing multiple new content words do not necessarily violate the ONICON. Examples include prefabs as well… read more
2024 A typological approach to language change in contact situations Demystifying New Methods in Historical Linguistics , Round, Erich (ed.), pp. 379–413 | Article
Language contact phenomena have increasingly been researched from different historical linguistic, sociolinguistic and areal-typological perspectives. However, since most of this research is based on case studies, an assessment of contact phenomena from a worldwide comparative perspective has… read more
2014 Iconicity: From sign to system in human communication and language Diagrammatic Reasoning, Fusaroli, Riccardo and Kristian Tylén (eds.), pp. 244–263 | Article
This paper explores the role of iconicity in spoken language and other human communication systems. First, we concentrate on graphical and gestural communication and show how semantically motivated iconic signs play an important role in creating such communication systems from scratch. We then… read more