Research - Russell S. Tomlin

Research	Publications and Bibliography \| FishFilm Resources
My work falls into several broad areas in language and cognition and functional theory and methodology. The general directions of research and the current projects tied to those directions include:
Attention and Grammar: Linguists interested in understanding voice, word order, intonation and other structural alternations have proposed a number of pragmatic functions--theme, topic, focus, and the like--as the functional basis for these grammatical alternations. I suspect that these pragmatic functions are reflections in language use of several attention processes (attention detection, attention orientation...) that govern how information is sorted and selected more generally.	FISHFILM Studies: Attention and Grammar in Language Production The traditional pragmatic notion of clause-level theme or topic can be understood as the linguistic reflection of a more general process of attention, attention detection. The FishFilm paradigm involves speakers describing on-line in real time a sequence of animated events in which either the agent or the patient is cued to draw attention to it. Results in English align well with conventional beliefs about the function of syntactic subject and voice in managing theme or topic. Current work focuses on extending this robust paradigm to the study of other languages, including Japanese, Korean, Swedish, Finnish, Malagasy, and others. Function of wa in Japanese The traditional treatment of the function of wa in Japanese discourse production is to identify a dual function, either to mark clause-level theme/topic or to mark clause level focus/contrast. This effort investigates whether these disparate functions might be explained under a more general analysis in which the use of wa is tied to a central attentional process, attention orientation.
Event Representations in Mind and Language: Linguists routinely appeal to notions of the event to explain a number of grammatical matters, including serialization, clause union, and patterns of transitivity. I am interested in puzzling out the cognitive foundations of event representations in order to base claims about events and language use on representations that do not depend on language behavior directly.	Event boundaries and Clause Integration This effort is tied to the experimental investigation of clause integration and separation as speakers describe animated sequences on-line in real time. As events are separated from one another, the clauses that describe the pertinent activity tend to be more independent of one another while events that are more tightly integrated tend to see descriptions with clauses more structurally integrated as well.
Second Language Acquisition: Since SLA is not strictly a linguistically constrained process, it makes sense to investigate the interplay of more general learning mechanisms with the details of exposure to second language input. This is an area, then, where there is a central role for attention and its component mechanisms to support the development of an interlanguage grammar as the learner engages others in various kinds of communicative tasks.	Attention and Second Language Acquisition There has been considerable interest in recent years in SLA on the role of attention and awareness on SLA. Based on earlier work (Tomlin and Villa 1994), I am continuing examining theoretical and empirical issues arising from attempts to incorporate more general work in attention in cognitive psychology into SLA. The Role of Attention in the Acquisition of Voice Former UO students Jongbai Hwang and Lynne Yang and I have extended the FishFilm paradigm into SLA. This work looks at how the careful manipulation of visual attention to the component elements of a visual during exposure to second language input supports the staged acquisition of voice in English by non-native speakers. FLATLAND: Investigating Early Acquisition The Flatland paradigm permits the examination of virtually all of the input and interaction leading to changes in the emerging interlanguage grammar of nil proficiency learners of a second language. Within this paradigm a native speaker and a nil proficiency learner complete a communicative task in which the learner develops comprehension abilities in L2 great enough to manipulate a set of eight objects in a limited environment. The resulting video record permits a close look--turn by turn--at the input and interaction leading to the current state of the IL grammar at each moment over the first hour or so of exposure. The paradigm permits one to look at such diverse matters as vocabulary acquisition, the role of repetition, the differences in the use of simple versus more complex utterances, among other topics.
Functional Theory and Analysis: Those of us who work within the disparate threads of research that fall under the general description of functionalism must nonetheless worry about the intellectual coherence and certitude of our claims. There is a pressing need for greater theoretical precision and methdological rigor in functional research, whether we are interested in merely describing a connection between linguistic form and function or in explaining why such patterns as we observe should in fact occur. Return to Top of Page	Theoretical and Empirical Constraints on Functional Interactions Linguists engaged in functional analysis, determining how alternative linguistic structures are used in discourse, routinely make claims about mappings between linguistic form and function. This work distinguishes several kinds of "coding" relationship between form and function, and it considers both logical and empirical requirements on argumentation about form-funciton mappings.