Bronwyn Winter
Biographic Data
| ID | 351869 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bronwyn Winter |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bronwyn |
| FAMILY NAME | Winter |
| SIGNATURE | WINTER B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Birmingham |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6036-6774 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 65 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 218 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 64 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Approximate round number use depends on magnitude
Numbers have mathematically defined, formal meanings, which afford precision and objectivity. In practice, however, we show that round numbers are frequently used approximately, and this approximate use depends on magnitude. Across three analyses of British and American English, we demonstrate the following: (1) people use round numbers more often, and round to a greater extent, at higher magnitudes; (2) the distributional semantics of larger rou…
Open hands, large numbers
Several studies suggest that numerical cognition interacts with spatial cognition. Here, we explored spatial-numerical associations through the lens of manual gestures. We asked English and Italian participants to generate ‘random’ sequences of numbers while simultaneously moving the hands outwards, away from the torso, or inwards, towards the mid center of the body. These manual gestures were modeled after gestures that are common in naturally o…
BSL signers combine different semiotic strategies to negate clauses
Signers of Deaf community signed languages negate clauses via manual negating signs and/or non-manual movements such as headshakes. Several claims about the dominance of manual versus non-manual negation across signed languages have been made, mostly based on survey responses and elicited data. Here, we describe how clause negation was signalled in 420 clauses identified in dyadic conversations between 40 deaf signers of British Sign Language (BS…
Manual wh -signs and English wh- mouthings differentiate BSL content and polar questions
How do deaf BSL signers signal polar and content questions? This study quantitatively investigates the manual and non-manual forms used to signal polar and content questions during dyadic conversations documented in the BSL Corpus. We found that non-manual movements such as eye, eyebrow and/or head movements do not differentiate content and polar questions in BSL. Instead, it is the presence or absence of conventionalised wh -forms that most stro…
Iconic Words Are Associated With Iconic Gestures
Iconicity ratings studies have established that there are many English words which native speakers judge as “iconic,” that is, as sounding like what they mean. Here, we explore whether these iconic English words are more likely to be accompanied by iconic gestures. We report a large‐scale quantitative study comparing the gesture rate of words rated as high in iconicity (e.g., swoosh , puffy , crispy ) to those rated as low in iconicity (e.g., ord…
Strategic use of English quantifiers in the reporting of quantitative information
This study investigates how quantifiers are used strategically to serve differ-ent argumentative goals. We report two experiments on how English speak-ers describe the results of school exams when being instructed to frame theirdescriptions either as a good or bad outcome. Experiment 1 shows thatparticipants have clear preferences for specific quantifier combinations inthis task. Experiment 2 shows that, in situations where producing descrip-tion…
Semantic distance predicts metaphoricity and creativity judgments in synesthetic metaphors
This paper discusses a way of operationalizing metaphoricity quantitatively using a numerical measure of the semantic distance between two domains. We demonstrate the construct validity of this measure with respect to metaphoricity and creativity judgments in the domain of English synesthetic metaphors – expressions such as sweet melody and loud color that involve combinations of terms from conceptually distinct sensory modalities. In a pre-regis…
Is It Polite to Hiss
This paper explores the politeness-related functions of an ingressive hissing-like sound that occurs frequently in Korean and which is typically transcribed as ssup . This nonverbal sound is produced by drawing air alongside the tongue or between the teeth and may appear either before the production of a turn, or during turn production. Previous studies have shown that Korean speakers produce more frequent hisses when addressing status superiors.…
Why is Semantic Change Asymmetric? The Role of Concreteness and Word Frequency and Metaphor and Metonymy
Metaphors and other tropes are commonly thought to reflect asymmetries in concreteness, with concrete sources being used to talk about relatively more abstract targets. Similarly, originating senses in diachronic semantic change have often been argued to be more concrete than extended senses. In this paper, we use a dataset of cross-linguistically attested semantic changes to empirically test the idea that asymmetries in figurative language are p…
Gestures are modulated by social context
This paper investigates gesture as a resource for marking politeness-related meanings. We asked 14 Korean and 14 Catalan participants to retell a cartoon, once to an unknown superior and once to a close friend. Participants in both languages curtail gestures when interacting with a socially distant superior. Speakers of both languages produced fewer gestures when addressing the superior, reduced their gesture space, decreased the encoding of mann…
Size sound symbolism in the English lexicon
Experimental and cross-linguistic evidence suggests that certain speech sounds are associated with size, especially high front vowels with ‘small’ and low back vowels with ‘large’. However, empirical evidence that speech sounds are statistically associated with magnitude across words within a language has been mixed and open to methodological critique. Here, we used a random-forest analysis of a near-exhaustive set of English size adjectives (e.g…
Iconicity ratings really do measure iconicity, and they open a new window onto the nature of language
This paper reviews recent research using participant ratings to measure the iconicity (form-meaning resemblance) of words and signs. This method, by enabling wide coverage of lexical items and cross-linguistic comparison, has revealed systematic patterns in how iconicity is distributed across the vocabularies of different languages. These findings are consistent with established linguistic and psychological theory on iconicity, and they connect i…
Gesture and legitimation in the anti-immigration discourse of Nigel Farage
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) increasingly recognises the role played by multiple semiotic modes in the discursive construction of social identities and inequalities. One embodied mode that has not been subject to any systematic analysis within CDA is gesture. An area where gesture has been extensively studied, and where it is shown to bear significant semiotic load in multimodal utterances, is cognitive linguistics. Here, we use insights fro…
The linguistic dimensions of concrete and abstract concepts
The distinction between abstract and concrete concepts is fundamental to cognitive linguistics and cognitive science. This distinction is commonly operationalized through concreteness ratings based on the aggregated judgments of many people. What is often overlooked in experimental studies using this operationalization is that ratings are attributed to words , not to concepts directly. In this paper we explore the relationship between the linguis…
Beyond politeness markers
Poisson regression for linguists
Count data is prevalent in many different areas of linguistics, such as when counting words, syntactic constructions, discourse particles, case markers, or speech errors. The Poisson distribution is the canonical distribution for characterising count data with no or unknown upper bound. Given the prevalence of count data in linguistics, Poisson regression has wide utility no matter what subfield of linguistics is considered. However, in contrast …
Independence and generalizability in linguistics
Quantitative studies in linguistics almost always involve data points that are related to each other, such as multiple data points from the same participant, multiple texts from the same book, author, genre, or register, or multiple languages from the same language family. Statistical procedures that fail to account for the relatedness of observations by assuming independence among units can lead to grossly misleading results if these sources of …
Materialist Feminisms
Intonation does aid serial recall after all
A sequence of spoken digits is easier to recall if the digits are grouped into smaller chunks (e.g., through the insertion of pauses). It has been claimed that intonation does not facilitate recall over and above the effect achieved by pauses. This may be related to the fact that past research has used synthesized intonation contours. In this replication study, we show that intonation does provide benefits once more naturalistic intonation contou…
Power, Gender, and Individual Differences in Spatial Metaphor
English speakers use vertical language to talk about power, such as when speaking of people being “at the bottom of the social hierarchy” or “rising to the top.” Experimental research has shown that people automatically associate higher spatial positions with more powerful social groups, such as doctors and army generals, compared to lower spatial positions, which are associated with relatively less powerful groups, such as nurses and soldiers. H…
Loudness Trumps Pitch in Politeness Judgments
Social meaning is not conveyed through words alone, but also through how words are produced phonetically. This paper investigates the role of loudness and pitch in determining the perception of politeness-related judgments in Korean. It has been proposed that high pitch is universally associated with polite or deferential social meanings. In contrast to this, Experiment 1 examined the perceptual effect of pitch and found no effect. Experiment 2 t…
Statistics for Linguists
Statistics for Linguists: An Introduction Using R is the first statistics textbook on linear models for linguistics. The book covers simple uses of linear models through generalized models to more advanced approaches, maintaining its focus on conceptual issues and avoiding excessive mathematical details. It contains many applied examples using the R statistical programming environment. Written in an accessible tone and style, this text is the ide…
Cross-cultural multimodal politeness
Pragmatic meanings are not only conveyed through words alone, but also through how words are produced phonetically. The current study investigated phonetic features that characterize the distinction between deferential and non-deferential speech style in Japanese. The Japanese data were then compared to previously published Korean data collected through the same methodology. The results revealed striking similarities between the two languages: De…
Contending Legitimacy in World Politics
Sensory Linguistics
One of the most fundamental capacities of language is the ability to express what speakers see, hear, feel, taste, and smell. Sensory Linguistics is the interdisciplinary study of how language relates to the senses. This book deals with such foundational questions as: Which semiotic strategies do speakers use to express sensory perceptions? Which perceptions are easier to encode and which are "ineffable"? And what are appropriate methods for stud…
Phonetics and politeness
What makes a word prominent? Predicting untrained German listeners' perceptual judgments
Assessing incomplete neutralization of final devoicing in German
The phonetic profile of Korean formal and informal speech registers
Emergent data analysis in phonetic sciences
Women, the Law, and Cultural Relativism in France
Multimodal indexicality in Korean
This study investigates the nonverbal behaviors used in two interconnected relational practices in Korean: “doing deference” towards status superiors and “performing intimacy” towards status equals. We extracted 154 interactions from Korean televised dramas that represented these two relational practices, and annotated the data for various nonverbal behaviors, including body position and orientation, facial expressions, manual gestures, and touch…
Cross-cultural multimodal politeness
Pragmatic meanings are not only conveyed through words alone, but also through how words are produced phonetically. The current study investigated phonetic features that characterize the distinction between deferential and non-deferential speech style in Japanese. The Japanese data were then compared to previously published Korean data collected through the same methodology. The results revealed striking similarities between the two languages: De…
Sensory Linguistics
One of the most fundamental capacities of language is the ability to express what speakers see, hear, feel, taste, and smell. Sensory Linguistics is the interdisciplinary study of how language relates to the senses. This book deals with such foundational questions as: Which semiotic strategies do speakers use to express sensory perceptions? Which perceptions are easier to encode and which are "ineffable"? And what are appropriate methods for stud…
Independence and generalizability in linguistics
Quantitative studies in linguistics almost always involve data points that are related to each other, such as multiple data points from the same participant, multiple texts from the same book, author, genre, or register, or multiple languages from the same language family. Statistical procedures that fail to account for the relatedness of observations by assuming independence among units can lead to grossly misleading results if these sources of …
Sensory language across lexical categories
Poisson regression for linguists
Count data is prevalent in many different areas of linguistics, such as when counting words, syntactic constructions, discourse particles, case markers, or speech errors. The Poisson distribution is the canonical distribution for characterising count data with no or unknown upper bound. Given the prevalence of count data in linguistics, Poisson regression has wide utility no matter what subfield of linguistics is considered. However, in contrast …
Religion, culture and women's human rights
The UN Approach to Harmful Traditional Practices
Although we support UN initiatives to combat those cultural practices it has identified as harmful to women and children, we have some reservations about the way in which those initiatives have been conceptualised. We are concerned that the UN emphasis on 'non-Western' cultures gives the impression that the metropolitan centres of the West contain no 'traditions' or 'culture' harmful to women, and that the violence which does exist there is idios…
Gesture and legitimation in the anti-immigration discourse of Nigel Farage
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) increasingly recognises the role played by multiple semiotic modes in the discursive construction of social identities and inequalities. One embodied mode that has not been subject to any systematic analysis within CDA is gesture. An area where gesture has been extensively studied, and where it is shown to bear significant semiotic load in multimodal utterances, is cognitive linguistics. Here, we use insights fro…
Loudness Trumps Pitch in Politeness Judgments
Social meaning is not conveyed through words alone, but also through how words are produced phonetically. This paper investigates the role of loudness and pitch in determining the perception of politeness-related judgments in Korean. It has been proposed that high pitch is universally associated with polite or deferential social meanings. In contrast to this, Experiment 1 examined the perceptual effect of pitch and found no effect. Experiment 2 t…
Producing and perceiving the Canadian Vowel Shift
This paper investigates interspeaker variation in the mid and low short vowels of Jewish Montreal English, analyzing the Canadian Shift in both production and perception. In production, we find that young women are leading in the retraction of /æ/ and the lowering and retraction of /ε/. We furthermore find that across speakers, the retraction of /æ/ is correlated with the lowering and retraction of /ε/, providing quantitative evidence that the mo…
(Mis)representations
Who Counts (or Doesn't Count) What as Feminist Theory
Gestures are modulated by social context
This paper investigates gesture as a resource for marking politeness-related meanings. We asked 14 Korean and 14 Catalan participants to retell a cartoon, once to an unknown superior and once to a close friend. Participants in both languages curtail gestures when interacting with a socially distant superior. Speakers of both languages produced fewer gestures when addressing the superior, reduced their gesture space, decreased the encoding of mann…
The linguistic dimensions of concrete and abstract concepts
The distinction between abstract and concrete concepts is fundamental to cognitive linguistics and cognitive science. This distinction is commonly operationalized through concreteness ratings based on the aggregated judgments of many people. What is often overlooked in experimental studies using this operationalization is that ratings are attributed to words , not to concepts directly. In this paper we explore the relationship between the linguis…
Beyond politeness markers
The Ties that Bind Us’
Gay marriage has become a major transnational gay rights issue: a key marker of gay citizenship, to the extent that it is considered self-evident that its legalisation represents progress. Yet it is becoming apparent that this ‘progress’ is concurrent with other forms of exclusion. In this article, I argue that gay marriage is a convenient liberal smokescreen, leaving other exclusions unaddressed or even enabling their reinforcement. The discussi…
Sûr de rien
Among the provisions of the French law of 10 December 2003 modifying the law of 1952 on the right of asylum is the introduction of the notion of "safe" countries of origin. The rights of people coming from these countries are supposedly protected by the state; these people are thus assumed not to be at risk according to the terms of the Geneva Convention on Refugees of 1951. The first list of "safe countries" was established in 2005. It now compr…
Preemptive Fridge Magnets and Other Weapons of Masculinist Destruction
Women, the Law, and Cultural Relativism in France
(Mis)representations
Who Counts (or Doesn't Count) What as Feminist Theory
Fundamental Misunderstandings
Within feminist debates on Islamism, many issues remain both contentious and insufficiently explored, including the relationship of fundamentalism to religion, the situation of Islamism in relation to a supposed crisis of modernity and search for authenticity, its legitimation through "democratization" and "multiculturalism," the connection between fundamentalisms and extreme right politics, and the qualitative value attributed to women's widely …
The UN Approach to Harmful Traditional Practices
Although we support UN initiatives to combat those cultural practices it has identified as harmful to women and children, we have some reservations about the way in which those initiatives have been conceptualised. We are concerned that the UN emphasis on 'non-Western' cultures gives the impression that the metropolitan centres of the West contain no 'traditions' or 'culture' harmful to women, and that the violence which does exist there is idios…
Women's rights, globalisation and the nation-state
(2002). Women's rights, globalisation and the nation-state: are human rights and democracy enough?. Australian Feminist Law Journal: Vol. 17, Reimagining the Global Space: Feminism, Globalisation and Law, pp. 1-16
Our Response to the ‘Reply’ to our Article, ‘The UN Approach to Harmful Traditional Practices’
Religion, culture and women's human rights
Secularism Aboard the Titanic
OVER APPROXIMATELY THE LAST fifteen years, in countries as diverse as Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Turkey, Algeria, Singapore, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Canada, the hijab and other aspects of Islamic female attire and the interpretation and application of Islamic personal law have increasingly become the focus not only of political debate and legal battles but also, in a number of cases, of political violence. Examples of the latter in…
Preemptive Fridge Magnets and Other Weapons of Masculinist Destruction
Feminism, Economics and Utopia
Feminism, Economics and Utopia: Time Travelling through Paradigms, by Karin Schonpflug. New York: Routledge, 2008. 264 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0-415-41784-6 (hbk.). US$150.00. This is an ambitious book. I
Guns, Money and Justice
In late 2005, Suzette Nicolas, then known publicly only as ‘Nicole’, alleged that on 1 November of that year she had been gang-raped by US Marines in Olongapo City in the Subic Bay area on the island of Luzon, site of one of two former large US military bases in the Philippines. Thus began what was to become an internationally notorious rape case, involving the US and Philippine governments, the US military, the Philippine judiciary and a broad f…
Ruin
Ruin: What Happens When You Keep On Buying the Same Old Line Bronwyn Winter (bio) It is both flattering and a little odd that September 11, 2001: Feminist Perspectives has come to be considered a feminist "classic." A classic is a pinnacle of artistic achievement, a perfect example, a model to which one aspires. During the ten short months between October 2001 and July 2002, when Susan Hawthorne and I worked to bring the book together, artistic o…
Imagined Transcultural Histories and Geographies
In a globalised world, an assumption prevails that the nation has somehow lost its power to regulate our lives, being undermined by other forces, either top-down through the impact of global capitalism or bottom-up through migrations, transnational religious, ethnic or social movement communities or other transversal politics. A related idea is that ‘culture’ is now irrevocably hybridised and border-zoned, that we no longer live in a world of dis…
Sûr de rien
Among the provisions of the French law of 10 December 2003 modifying the law of 1952 on the right of asylum is the introduction of the notion of "safe" countries of origin. The rights of people coming from these countries are supposedly protected by the state; these people are thus assumed not to be at risk according to the terms of the Geneva Convention on Refugees of 1951. The first list of "safe countries" was established in 2005. It now compr…
The phonetic profile of Korean formal and informal speech registers
Making Judgments Based on Similarity and Proximity
In this study, we investigate the conceptual structure of the metaphor “SIMILARITY IS PROXIMITY.” The results of four experiments suggest a tight mental link between similarity and proximity. Two experiments revealed that people judge entities to be more similar to each other when they are placed closely in space, while two other experiments showed that entities are judged to be closer to each other when they are thought to be more similar. We di…
Languages with More Second Language Learners Tend to Lose Nominal Case
In this paper, we provide quantitative evidence showing that languages spoken by many second language speakers tend to have relatively small nominal case systems or no nominal case at all. In our sample, all languages with more than 50% second language speakers had no nominal case. The negative association between the number of second language speakers and nominal case complexity generalizes to different language areas and families. As there are …
Using space to talk and gesture about numbers
This paper examines naturally occurring gestures produced in descriptions of numbers and quantities in television newscasts. The results of our analysis show that gestures reveal the metaphorical and spatial nature of numerical thinking. That is, speakers’ hands mimic known spatial mappings between space and quantity, including horizontal mappings (smaller quantities left, larger quantities right), vertical mappings (smaller quantities down, larg…
Horror Movies and the Cognitive Ecology of Primary Metaphors
Horror movies consistently reflect metaphorical associations between verticality and affect, as well as between brightness and affect. For example, bad events happen when movie characters are going downwards, or when lights go off. Monsters and villains emerge from below and from the darkness. And protagonists get lost and stuck in dark underground caves, dungeons, tunnels, mines, bunkers or sewers. Even movies that are primarily set above ground…
The Ties that Bind Us’
Gay marriage has become a major transnational gay rights issue: a key marker of gay citizenship, to the extent that it is considered self-evident that its legalisation represents progress. Yet it is becoming apparent that this ‘progress’ is concurrent with other forms of exclusion. In this article, I argue that gay marriage is a convenient liberal smokescreen, leaving other exclusions unaddressed or even enabling their reinforcement. The discussi…
Walking the Middle of the Peace Road? The Emergence of JCall in France
On 3 May 2010, a ‘Call to reason’ (Appel à la raison) was presented to the European Parliament in Brussels by a number of prominent figures from European Jewish political and intellectual classes, launching JCall, which is supposedly the European version of the US J Street. JCall explicitly positions itself as pro-Israel on one hand but against the Israeli state's occupation and increased settlement of Palestine, including East Jerusalem, on the …
Assessing incomplete neutralization of final devoicing in German
Phonetics and politeness
France and the Mediterranean
From the outset, the editors of this collection contextualise its contributions with relation to the Arab uprisings of 2011 and then President Sarkozy's response. Although all the entries were writ
Psychology (29 works) · Linguistics (28 works) · Computer Science (25 works) · Political science (25 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Law (19 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (17 works) · Cognitive psychology (15 works) · Politics (14 works)