Eve Sweetser

University of California, Berkeley | UCB · Department of Linguistics

Although formal linguists have focused on the deictic and (co)referential functions of pronouns, social categorization and identity are deeply involved in pronominal usage. I argue here that even the understanding of pronoun reference requires us to go beyond extensional (co)-reference. The extensive literature on linguistic categorization has focu...

This study employs an array of cognitive linguistic ( cl ) models to reveal some of the details in how contemporary readers understand and interpret characters in a New Testament parable, the one often tagged “The Good Samaritan.” It also uses cognitive narrative analysis to explore how Luke constructs and develops the dialog partners in the perico...

In this introduction to the special issue on time and viewpoint in narrative discourse, we highlight the central contributions of the issue concerning the relation between the linguistic construal and cognitive representation of time and viewpoint. We explain how linguistic and gestural cues guide the representation of narrative time progression an...

Video advertisements often involve metonymy and metaphor as major aspects of their structure. A complex multimodal ad's meaning, however, lies not just in individual metaphoric mappings or metonymic structures, but in the interrelationship between multiple mappings and mental spaces - that is, in the mental space network built up by the ad. Skilled...

Co-speech bodily gesture has remarkable flexibility in displaying or enacting viewpoint, since – unlike speech but like signed languages – it deploys multiple relatively orthogonal articulators, including head and gaze, two arms and hands, and torso posture. Combined with the viewpoints expressed in the linguistic track, this allows oral narrators...

In conceptual metaphor theory, mappings between source and target frames entail relations between roles within those frames. However, the contributing functions of metonymic relations between frame roles and type constraints on those roles ‒ e.g., whether the role is of type Entity or Process ‒ must also be established. These metonymic links and ty...

Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1987), pp. 446-459

Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1982)

Humans have historically spent immense communal effort and creativ-ity on religious structures. In this study, we examine two famous and complex monuments: one the 9th-century Buddhist monument of Borobudur and the other the cathedral church of Chartres. We argue that metaphor, metonymy, and other blends are literally "built in" to the architecture...

We suggest that the impact of metaphoric language does not depend entirely on the conceptual metaphor that is evoked, nor on the form the metaphoric language takes, but also on the steps involved in evoking a given metaphor. This is especially apparent in minimalist poetry. Readers are given hints, cultural conventions, or no guidance at all, on ho...

What makes us talk about viewpoint and perspective in linguistic analyses and in literary texts, as well as in landscape art? Is this shared vocabulary marking real connections between the disparate phenomena? This volume argues that human cognition is not only rooted in the human body, but also inherently ‘viewpointed’ as a result; consequently, s...

A Mental Space approach to subjectivity This chapter proposes an analysis of historical processes of meaning subjectification, in terms of viewpoint relations in a dynamic network of mental spaces. We argue that defining subjectification in terms of mental space structure allows added precision both in identifying subjective aspects of meaning and...

In Wallace Stevens’ poem “The anecdote of the jar”, the narrator has put a jar on a Tennessee hilltop, with apparently dramatic results. The jar, we are told, took dominion everywhere, imposed order on the slovenly wilderness, and forced the wilderness to surround the hill on which it sat. Before the jar, it seems there were no human objects in the...

Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1986), pp. 528-538

Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1985), pp. 505-518

Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1977), pp. 440-453

Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1988), pp. 389-405

The Basic Communicative Spaces Network (BCSN –Sanders et al., 2009) accounts for crucial semantic–pragmatic characteristics of causal relations expressed by frequently used Dutch causal connectives. BCSN integrates subjectivity theory, domain theory, and mental spaces theory to explain their linguistic categorization. Starting with the original thr...

Aims and Scope: All languages of the world provide their speakers with linguistic means to express causal relations in discourse. Causal connectives and causative auxiliaries are among the salient markers of causal construals. Cognitive scientists and linguists are interested in how much of this causal modeling is specific to a given culture and la...

Conditional constructions have long fascinated linguists, grammarians and philosophers. In this pioneering new study, Barbara Dancygier and Eve Sweetser offer a new descriptive framework for the study of conditionality, broadening the range of richly described conditional constructions. They explore theoretical issues such as the mental-space-build...

Cambridge Core - Cognitive Linguistics - Mental Spaces in Grammar - by Barbara Dancygier

When Robert Frost says, "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood . . . I took the one less traveled," he never specifies that the poem is really about life-decisions, not about physical road-intersections. But he doesn't have to; the metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY is so entrenched that most English speakers can do the mapping for him at no cost, and the re...

Abstract. Programming a computer is a complex, cognitively rich process. This paper examines ways in which human cognition is reflected in the text of computer programs. We concentrate on naming: the assignment of identifying labels to programmatic constructs. Naming is arbitrary, yet programmers do not select names arbitrarily. Rather, programmers...

Cognitive research on metaphoric concepts of time has focused on differences between moving Ego and moving time models, but even more basic is the contrast between Ego- and temporal-reference-point models. Dynamic models appear to be quasi-universal cross-culturally, as does the generalization that in Ego-reference-point models, FUTURE IS IN FRONT...

This article proposes a new interpretation of the relationship between poetic form and literary interpretation in Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, focusing on the special affordances of rhyme and meter in dramatic verse and on Rostand's virtuosic exploitation of poetic blending possibilities in Cyrano. I claim that poetic blends play a thematically es...

Conditional constructions have long fascinated linguists, grammarians and philosophers. In this pioneering new study, Barbara Dancygier and Eve Sweetser offer a new descriptive framework for the study of conditionality, broadening the range of richly described conditional constructions. They explore theoretical issues such as the mental-space-build...

This article explores and critiques conservative and liberal theological understandings of metaphor in light of the contemporary research in cognitive linguistics. This assessment is followed by a cognitive examination of the biblical metaphors for God, their unconscious entailments, an assessment of why certain metaphors are more effective than ot...

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Determining what a gesture “means” is an intuitive inferential process, which can profit from the application of a formalism which guides analysis. This paper uses a detailed exploration of a single example to illustrate the efficacy of the conceptual integration framework (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002) in organizing and understanding the process of m...

Analysis of English metaphor systems shows a pervasive correlation between up-down vertical models of Self and Society and in-out container models (e.g., the social "top dogs" may also be the "in crowd"). Examination of these two apparently separate metaphor systems, and of their bodily experiential bases, shows why they should be interlinked in su...

Analysis of English metaphor systems shows a pervasive correlation between up-down vertical models of Self and Society and in-out container models (e.g., the social "top dogs" may also be the "in crowd"). Examination of these two apparently separate metaphor systems, and of their bodily experiential bases, shows why they should be interlinked in su...

Mental Spaces theory, with its sophisticated mechanisms for representing the contents of speech, thought, and perception, opens routes for the exploration of relations between these domains and the ‘‘real’’ world. One of the most intriguing of these relations isperformativity, defined by Searle (1989) as the ability of some descriptions to bring ab...

English causal and conditional conjunctions show significant overlap both in functions and in the ranges of grammatical constructions in which they occur. These phenomena are related: one reason why different conjunctions can express similar meanings is that the lexical semantics of one conjunction may explicitly involve meaning which is not presen...

Mental Spaces theory, with its sophisticated mechanisms for representing the contents of speech, thought, and perception, opens routes for the exploration of relations between these domains and the "real" world. One of the most intriguing of these relations is performativity, defined by Searle (1989) as the ability of some descriptions to bring abo...

Every aspect of our cognitive selves is shaped by the fact that we experience the world as embodied human beings. If we were to imagine intelligences without bodies, or with bodies as small as electrons, their experience of the universe would be radically divergent from ours. Being a human being means, for example, that our primary experience of a...

To what extent is conceptualization based on linguistic representation? And to what extent is it variable across cultures, communities, or even individuals? Of crucial importance in the attempt to develop a comprehensive theory of human cognition, these remain amongst the most difficult of questions in the cognitive sciences. This volume brings tog...

In the highly influential mental-spaces framework developed by Gilles Fauconnier in the mid-1980s, the mind creates multiple cognitive "spaces" to mediate its understanding of relations and activities in the world, and to engage in creative thought. These twelve original papers extend the mental-spaces framework and demonstrate its utility in solvi...

It has long been a familiar fact that mythologies involve metaphorical and symbolic structures. This paper will attempt to expose some of the relationships between those structures and the metaphorical structures commonly found in everyday language. Although this is part of a project which will eventually involve more crosscultural comparison, I in...

In 1987 I described a set of metaphors for language and thought which have shaped semantic histories of speech verbs and epistemic verbs in the Indo-European language family at large, as well as specifically in English. This paper analyzes the motivations for the basic speech metaphors involved in English polysemy structures, as elucidated by the b...

Dedication Acknowledgements Preface 1. Introduction 2. Semantic structure and semantic changes: English perception-verbs in an Indo-European context 3. Modality 4. Conjunction, coordination and subordination 5. Conditionals 6. Retrospect and prospect References Index.

investigates how the semantic structure of one English word depends on, and reflects, our models of relevant areas of experience (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)