Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction
Abstract
Cognitive Grammar is a radical alternative to the formalist theories that have dominated linguistic theory during the last half century. Instead of an objectivist semantics based on truth conditions or logical deduction, it adopts a conceptualist semantics based on human experience, our capacity to construe situations in alternate ways, and processes of imagination and mental construction. A conceptualist semantics makes possible an account of grammar which views it as being inherently meaningful (rather than an autonomous formal system). Grammar forms a continuum with lexicon, residing in assemblies of symbolic structures, i.e. pairings of conceptual structures and symbolizing phonological structures. Thus all grammatical elements are meaningful. It is shown in detail how Cognitive Grammar handles the major problems a theory of grammar has to deal with: grammatical classes, constructions, the relationship of grammar and lexicon, the capturing of regularities, and imposition of the proper restrictions. It is further shown how the framework applies to central domains of language structure: deixis, nominal structure, clausal structure, and complex sentences. Consideration is also given to discourse, the temporal dimension of grammar, and what it reveals about cognitive processes and the construction of our mental world.
... Bybee 2010) e cognitivista (e.g. Langacker 2008), o discurso, mais como processo do que como produto, é o objeto natural do estudo linguístico; o significado é o fenómeno linguístico fundamental; a variação linguística é intrínseca à gramática, visto que é a consequência imediata e inevitável do uso da língua; e a análise linguística deverá ser maximamente contextualizada, dando conta dos diferentes tipos de 1 Universidade Católica Portuguesa -Centro de Estudos Filosóficos e Humanísticos 2 O presente estudo foi apoiado por fundos nacionais portugueses atribuídos pela Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portugal) ao Centro de Estudos Filosóficos e Humanísticos através do programa de financiamento UIDB/00683/2020 in Rodrigo Pereira, Alexandra Guedes Pinto & María Cristina Aguilera (eds.), Estudos do campo discursivo na contemporaneidade. ...
... 1). Como explica Langacker (2001), evidenciando a natural integração do discurso no seu modelo de Gramática Cognitiva (Langacker 1987(Langacker , 1991(Langacker , 2008) -um dos modelos mais inovadores e impactantes da Linguística Cognitiva (Geeraerts & Cuyckens 2007, Dabrowska & Dagmar 2015, Wen & Taylor 2021) -, todas as unidades linguísticas emergem de eventos de uso, isto é, de instâncias atuais do uso da língua e, por conseguinte, do discurso. A conceptualização inerente a um enunciado compreende os elementos do ato de comunicação -locutor, interlocutor, os seus papeis psicológicos e sociais e as circunstâncias imediatas do ato de comunicação -e o espaço mental discursivo partilhado pelos falantes e incluindo os eventos anteriores e subsequentes e todos os outros elementos que estão na base da comunicação num determinado momento do fluir do discurso. ...
... Por exemplo, um copo com água a meio do seu volume pode ser conceptualizado como copo meio cheio, focalizando a parte com água, ou como copo meio vazio, perspetivando a parte sem água. Isto é mentalmente processado através do que em Linguística Cognitiva, especialmente Langacker (1987Langacker ( , 1991Langacker ( , 2008 e Talmy (2000), se designa como operações de perspetivação conceptual ("construal"). Estas operações envolvem capacidades cognitivas gerais, são essenciais na construção do significado, já que o significado de uma expressão linguística não se limita ao conteúdo conceptual que designa, mas inclui também o modo particular de como esse conteúdo é perspetivado, desempenham um papel fundamental na gramática e no discurso e têm um enorme potencial ideológico, donde a sua relevância para a Análise Crítica do Discurso. ...
... Johnson (2005) emphasizes the critical role of image-schematic structures in deciphering concepts ranging from spatial relations to abstract notions of reason, mind, knowledge, justice, rights, and values. Importantly, Langacker (2008) argues that an imagistic approach is as capable as a propositional one in depicting complex structures. Consequently, the notion of image schema has been found to be particularly compatible with the teaching and learning of prepositions (Brugman, 1988;Lam, 2009;Tyler, 2012;Tyler & Evans, 2003;Wong et al., 2018), whose primary function is to convey spatial and temporal relationships. ...
... For instance, the prepositions over, on, onto are all valid options for the sentence James put the blanket __ his bed. Therefore, when provided with options, learners might find nonspatial polysemes easier to recall than spatial polysemes as they are less abstract (Langacker, 2008). The substantial learning of spatial polysemes might indirectly suggest learners had not received sufficient help previously; therefore, the different instructions, despite variation, were useful in training spatial uses. ...
This study closely replicates Wong, Zhao, & MacWhinney (2018), who found that cognitive linguistics-inspired instruction (i.e., schematic diagram feedback) demonstrated a superiority effect over traditional instruction (i.e., rule and exemplar feedback or corrective feedback) on the translation test but not the cloze test. While the original study adopted the null hypothesis testing approach, the current study adopted Bayesian mixed effects logistic models to investigate how different variables might affect the learnability of prepositions among 81 Chinese-speaking learners of English. The research design, materials, and procedure are nearly identical to those of the original study except for an added delayed posttest. Our findings are generally consistent with the results reported in the original study, indicating that the cognitive linguistics-informed instruction demonstrates superiority effect. Furthermore, these positive learning outcomes persist over time, as evidenced by the results of the delayed posttest.
... 'This' and 'these' are proximal demonstratives that encode closeness between the speaker and the referent, and 'that' and 'those' are distal demonstratives that encode a distance between the speaker and the ISSN 1110-2721 referent (Giovanelli & Harrison, 2018). As Langacker (2008) points out, the speaker directs the listener's attention to a specific referent that is found in the discourse context: the pointing gesture is an overt analog of the mental process named 'singling out' which is characteristic of nominal grounding and this has a directive force to seek out the intended referent. ...
... With zero (ors), the present tense occupies immediate reality and the ISSN 1110-2721 process is coincident with the time of speaking. On the other hand, the past tense with (-ed) and its variants, places the profiled process in nonimmediate reality (Langacker, 2008). The second strategy of clausal grounding is modality and is defined as "the phenomenon that shows a speaker's attitude towards the potentiality of an event" (Giovanelli & Harrison, 2018, p.123). ...
... For studying the main of cultural concepts in Psycholinguistics (Barsalou, Santos, Simmons & Wilson, 2008;Coffa, 1991;Langacker, 2008), such general methods are used: synchronous method − thanks to it, linguo-cultural/cultural concepts of the same chronological section are compared; historical-genetic method allows us to follow the dynamics of the development of the concept, from the very beginning of its formation, and it is related to the history of the nominations that forms the concept; structural method is based on the selection of simple structural components, establishing connections between them; semantic method reflects the semantics of components as an indivisible structure; typological method expresses the typological similarity of the concepts of multifaceted cultures); sociolinguistic method helps to underline a set of sociological and linguistic procedures with the aim of studying the connection between a language and a society. ...
The purpose of the research was to describe the meanings of the concept EDUCATION, actualized in the semantic field of linguistic consciousness of managers, who connect their professional activity with IT-technologies. Methods. Theoretical methods were categorical and structurally-functional analysis of lexical units, the methods of systematization, modeling, generalization; empirical ones – the analysis of lexical units, the experiment. For the purpose of studying the ways of explication of the concept EDUCATION and its subconcepts in the consciousness of Ukrainian students we used the associative experiment; the designations of the kernel and the periphery of the concept EDUCATION were included as stimulus-words. Results. The first synonym series with a dominant subconcept “The process of teaching and training people” of the concept EDUCATION is characterized by seven synonyms: teaching; learning; instruction; schooling; tuition. Learning is a dominant. The second synonym series with a dominant subconcept “Knowledge, skills or experience acquired or developed in the process of learning” includes such synonyms: knowledge, skills, erudition, inculcation, etc. The dominant is knowledge as the awareness or understanding obtained information as a result of experience or training. The third synonym series includes a subconcept “Study of teaching methods and theories”. The dominant of it is the synonym of indoctrination. The fourth synonymous row has a subconcept “Teaching a certain subject”. Its dominant is сoaching. The fifth series includes a subconcept “People who are engaged into the process of teaching”. We consider teaching as a dominant synonym of it. The sixth synonym series has a subconcept “To be obtained in the process of learning”. We believe that the dominant synonym of the sixth series is upbringing. Conclusions. All subconcepts of the concept EDUCATION are complex, paradigmatic ones, in their structure and content. This is evidenced by generalized names of the subconcepts and the constituent elements, having been included in each of them. The concept EDUCATION includes three double cores, of which the dominant, largest core is the one that includes the following subconcepts: “The process of teaching and training people”, “Knowledge, skills or experience acquired or developed in the process of learning”. Thus, the process of teaching and training people and knowledge, skills or experience acquired or developed in the process of learning for contemporary managers are the most important ones in their professional and personal life.
... Analysing the three dimensions of language separately seems a step backwards, if we compare it with recent concise grammar explanations such as functional grammar (Halliday, 2004), which sees language through ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions, and defines the ideational metafunction as a composition of the experiential and logic parts, thus resulting in a holistic description of meaning and form. In addition, the frameworks of cognitive (Langacker, 2008) and construction (Goldberg, 2006) linguistics emphasize the unity of the lexical and structural aspects. In contrast, research on learning and teaching language for specific purposes (LSP) puts strong weight on labelling systematicity and the particular lexical hierarchies in various epistemic domains (Arús, Bárcena & Read, 2014;Coxhead, 2012). ...
A lack of knowledge of the language of instruction is often believed to be the main reason for low achievement among students with an immigrant background. We regard language as a tripartite unit comprising aspects of concept formation, pragmatic language usage and the linguistic form. In this theoretical framework, we report two case studies of bilingual, Russian and Finnish speaking students’ explanations of their procedures while solving mathematical tasks. The students’ linguistic processing varied in terms of conceptualization, pragmatic meaning-making and grammatical form. In a bilingual context, the labelling of concepts and meaning-making through argumentation are simultaneously processed in two languages.
... As a point of departure, we look for cognitively-oriented theorizing of translation, especially the revised version of the gravitational pull (GP) model (Halverson, 2017), and the usage-based models of language that the model in turn draws from (see e.g., Langacker, 2008 for an overview). The GP model is structured around the notion of salience, that is, the relative prominence of some items within the schematic networks that comprise language systems, whereby "some patterns of activation [-] will be more prominent than others, due to their higher frequency of use over time" (Halverson, 2017, p. 13). ...
The study of features that affect the linguistic form of translated texts has been one of the central questions within the field of corpus-based translation studies. In the partially overlapping field of computational linguistics, previous studies have shown that source languages of individual texts can be detected automatically in direct translations and indirect translations (i.e., translations done from translations). However, computationally oriented approaches have paid limited attention to what specific linguistic features make successful classification possible. Consequently, the types of linguistic phenomena characterizing translations and the kinds of linguistic interference that can be detected in them remain underexplored. In this study, we study the linguistic features that contribute to the identification of the source language of direct translations from English, French, German, Greek, and Swedish, as well as indirect translations from Greek into Finnish, with English, French, German, and Swedish as mediating languages. Theoretically, this study builds on Halverson's (2017) gravitational pull model to explain the mechanisms behind our findings in a theoretically sound fashion and to generate theoretically motivated, specific hypotheses to be tested by future research. The analysis makes use of keyness analysis as a supervised machine learning technique, as well as exploratory factor analysis (EFA) as an unsupervised machine learning technique. The results indicate that sentence length, sentence-initial adverbs and sentence-final specification are the linguistic features that set the different types of translations apart from each other. Furthermore, the salient features of the ultimate source language outweigh those of the mediating languages in indirect translations or the entrenched parallels between specific language pairs.
... En nuestra forma de entender la acuñación de palabras, partimos de la heterogeneidad de este proceso, de modo que un mismo concepto puede ser aprehendido desde muy diversas perspectivas a la hora de ser nombrado, tal y como señala Langacker (2008): "an expression imposes a particular construal, reflecting just one of the countless ways of conceiving and portraying the situation in question" (p. 4; la cursiva es nuestra). ...
El propósito de esta investigación es analizar el procesamiento mental asociado a la acuñación de palabras y, concretamente, de aquellas que denotan pene en el español de América. Con este fin, se examinaron las características salientes del ICM (modelo cognitivo idealizado) de 241 palabras que denotan pene, documentadas en el Diccionario de americanismos español-checo. Los resultados muestran la activación de una gran variedad de características salientes durante el proceso de acuñación, destacando su forma, sus características fisiológicas, sus funciones (reproductiva, urinaria) y la percepción subjetiva de los hablantes. Además, resulta habitual que se combinen varias características y que tengan lugar metáforas o metonimias ulteriores. Se concluye que este artículo arroja nueva luz sobre la heterogeneidad, particularidades y posibilidades combinatorias de las características salientes del ICM durante el proceso de acuñación, ilustradas a través de un concepto, pene, que, dadas sus connotaciones culturales y sociales, destaca por una poco común abundancia de términos que lo denotan.
... To Kövecses conventionalised conceptual content stored in long-term memory that language users depend on to make figurative meanings and make sense of figurative expressions. mental spaces (Fauconnier 1994(Fauconnier , 2007, or the "current discourse space" (in Langacker's (2008) terminology), where conventionalised conceptual content is manipulated in a way that serves the speaker meaning, and, therefore, shapes the addressee's understanding of this meaning (see Evans 2013;Gibbs 2017;Zinken 2007). To Kövecses (2002Kövecses ( /2010Kövecses ( , 2020aKövecses ( , 2020b, discourse metaphors are the online representations of our understanding of experience in working memory. ...
Cognitive-oriented work on simile has developed out of attempts to pinpoint features distinguishing simile and metaphor. This development has had such consequences as 1) focusing on simile as an analogy-based process and 2)giving very little attention to the way simile and metaphor work together, treating them as independent rather than cooperating phenomena. Addressing these shortcomings, this study examines the ability of non-ironic like-simile to imply contrasts between the asserted source-target similarity and a thought or belief evoked by this similarity, giving rise to context-bound attitudinal and illocutionary implications. In cases of like-simile scaffolded by metaphors, the contrast-based process arises from the cooperation of the two phenomena in the sense that the scenario created by the like-simile rests on manipulating the conceptual metaphor(s) supporting the comparison. The analysis of these cases is placed in the Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory (ECMT) – a contextual, multilevel theory of figurative language conceptualisation. The contrast-based process, drawn from the model of irony developed within the Lexical Constructional Model (LCM), is added to this theory as a mental-space level activity. Raykowski’s sensory schema(a generalized notion of accumulation intuitions) is also added above the image-schema level metaphors, presenting the manipulation of the scaffolding metaphors as based on the expression of this schema.
... De acuerdo con Almulla (2015), una perspectiva basada en el uso del lenguaje considera que la frecuencia juega un papel crucial en el proceso de aprendizaje. Lo anterior se debe a que la estructura del lenguaje se deriva de un sistema complejo adaptativo que está conformado por el mismo uso del lenguaje (Barlow y Kemmer, 2000;Bybee, 2006Bybee, , 2010Hopper y Bybee, 2001;Goldberg, 1995Goldberg, , 2003Langacker, 1987Langacker, , 2000Langacker, , 2008Tomasello, 2003;Van, 2007). Dicho de otra manera, el lenguaje es un sistema dinámico en constante cambio que utiliza procesos cognitivos generales de dominio que no son específicos del lenguaje. ...
Las Pruebas de Juicio de Gramaticalidad se consideran un método estandarizado para medir el uso del idioma de los estudiantes porque se les pide que hagan un pronunciamiento intuitivo sobre la precisión de la forma y estructura de oraciones individuales y descontextualizadas. Por lo tanto, existe una investigación limitada sobre las reflexiones metalingüísticas detrás de la emisión de un juicio de gramaticalidad. En este estudio se busca que además de emitir juicios gramaticales, los estudiantes detecten reglas subyacentes de uso para para corregir y justificar errores gramaticales de manera colectiva; ya que esto podría tener un impacto positivo en su aprendizaje del inglés como L2. Apoyada del marco de la Teoría Sociocultural para el desarrollo de la Conciencia Metalingüística entre pares y de la verbalización de los procesos reflexivos involucrados en la cognición mediante tareas gramaticales y la evocación estimulada como técnica metodológica, la presente investigación explora el proceso por el que dieciséis universitarios mexicanos pasaron al crear, editar y aplicar sus propias reglas gramaticales para tratar de entender cómo funcionan los complementos infinitivos y gerundios en inglés; uno de los temas más complejos de adquirir por estudiantes del inglés como L2, por carecer de reglas de uso. El objetivo es el de contribuir al campo de la investigación empírica en el desarrollo de la conciencia metalingüística en la que se atiende al proceso de aprendizaje de estructuras que los estudiantes normalmente memorizan. Los hallazgos señalan la existencia de posibles factores cognitivos que vinculan el aprendizaje de estos complementos con la reflexión metalingüística y el andamiaje cognitivo entre pares. Las actividades que fomentan la reflexión metalingüística, tal como las entrevistas de evocación estimulada, pueden conducir a los estudiantes de nivel intermedio - avanzado a que desarrollen sus propias reglas gramaticales las cuales son generadas con un fundamento sintáctico y posteriormente, semántico; como sucedió en este estudio. Aunado a lo anterior y a partir de un cuidadoso análisis microgenético de los procesos de desarrollo metalingüístico y metacognitivo en los estudiantes, se generó el modelo REBUCREA, en el que se observa la revisión, búsqueda, creación, evaluación y aplicación de las reglas gramaticales.
Palabras clave: complementos infinitivos y gerundios, conciencia metalingüística, inglés como L2.
... When describing events, linguists often resort to a thematic role structure where the basic roles are agent and patient (Dowty, 1991;Gisborne & Donaldson, 2019;Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 2005;Rissman & Majid, 2019). Some researchers view thematic roles as primitive semantic notions, but Gisborne and Donaldson (2019) give several arguments against this position (see also Langacker, 2008, on "conceptual archetypes"). In contrast, I argue that the event structure is primitive and that thematic roles can be derived from it (see also Gisborne & Davidson, 2019, p. 239). ...
An enigma for human languages is that children learn to understand words in their mother tongue extremely fast. The cognitive sciences have not been able to fully understand the mechanisms behind this highly efficient learning process. In order to provide at least a partial answer to this problem, I have developed a cognitive model of the semantics of natural language in terms of conceptual spaces. I present a background to conceptual spaces and provide a brief summary of their main features, in particular how it handles learning of concepts. I then apply the model to give a geometric account of the semantics of different word classes. In particular, I propose a “single‐domain hypotheses” for the semantics of all word classes except nouns. These hypotheses provide a partial answer to the enigma of how words are learned. Next, a dynamic cognitive model of events is introduced that replaces and extends the function of thematic roles. I apply it to analyze the meanings of different kinds of verbs. I argue that the model also explains some aspects of syntactic structure. In particular, I propose that a sentence typically refers to an event. Some further applications of conceptual spaces are briefly presented.
... Literary language is seen as one expression of language, and is seen as an integral facet of cognition as mentioned by Langacker (2008). Stockwell on the other hand asserts that "there is nothing inherently different in the form of literary language; it is reasonable and safe to investigate the language of literature using approaches produced in the language system in general," ...
The originality of intertextuality begins in the field of literary criticism. Most of literary scholars have expanded the research of intertextuality to many other fields, for instance, the linguistics. More recently, they have had a growing interest in exploring the interrelations between literary texts without, however, focusing on how readers have generated these connections. With the development of intertextuality in linguistics, this paper attempts to deal with intertextuality with a particular focus on places in two famous literary works: William Shakespeare`s Romeo and Juliet as representative of English and Qais Ibn Al-Mulawwah's Layla and Majnun as representative of Arabic within the borders of contrastive studies. English and Arabic are two universal languages with rich literary legacy and this legacy is full of cultural load which carry the traits of men of literature. Among these traits is intertextuality which is assumed to be the plain through which literary men tried to communicate rhetorical intentions. Accordingly, the present paper is a new attempt in the realm of English and Arabic contrastive studies that aims at sorting out intertextual features in those classical works that represent English and Arabic.
... Within this framework, literary language emerges as a subset of this communicative toolset, enabling individuals to articulate their thoughts and emotions. According to Langacker (2008), the significance of literary language extends beyond mere expression and plays a vital role in human comprehension. However, Stockwell contends that there are no inherent distinctions in the structure of the language of literary. ...
Intertextuality is a relatively new literary theory that has its roots in literary criticism. Most literary academics have broadened the study of intertextuality to include many other disciplines, icluding linguistics. Recently, there has been a flurry of interest in examining links between works of literature, but not always with an eye toward how individual readers have made such connections. The present study endeavours to explore the concept of intertextuality, specifically examining the role of settings in two renowned literary works: Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, symbolising the English language, and Layla and Majnuna, representing the Arabic language, within the framework of comparative analysis. Both Arabic and English have a long and storied literary tradition laden with the values and characteristics of their literary forefathers. Intertextuality is sometimes cited as evidence that literary men were attempting to convey rhetorical objectives in this way. This research is innovative in comparative studies between English and Arabic; it seeks to classify intertextual characteristics in canonical works from each language.
... It consists of (i) identifying grammatical constructions in different languages; (ii) identifying the underlying concepts; (iii) comparing the construal; (iv) how the same idea can be expressed in many languages with varying grammatical means; and (v) investigating the relationship between grammatical structure and mental processes. Langacker's ( , 2008 works remain the foundation of compensation contrastive studies. They provide by way of blueprints what grammar ought to be, demonstrating the mutual cooccurrence of language and cognition. ...
The present study aims to assess and contrast five different approaches in the field of contrastive semantics: natural semantic metalanguage (NSM), conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), frame semantics (FC), semantic field theory (SFT), and cognitive grammar (CG). The research is set to review the available literature on the described techniques in order to focus on their distinguishing characteristics, practical applications, and illustrative samples. The findings reveal that these five models do play an insightful role when it comes to analyzing and comparing synonymous and semantically related profiles across distinct languages. Relations of semantic elements are the core concern of NSM while CMT investigates the internal schemata of the mind. As opposed to cognitive frame analysis, where knowledge structures are the central object of study, in SFT are language units grouped according to their meaning, while CG sees no separation of grammatical and meaning structures. This paper expounds on how these frameworks fill the gaps left by each of them and offers a broader understanding of the ways words encode meaning and how speakers of different cultures think about the world. Moreover, this study augments the knowledge regarding the variations of languages and gives an understanding of how languages relate to cognition, culture, and how people think about the world through words.
... Cognitive linguistics has also become a cover term for a broad family of approaches that share the assumption that language draws on domain-general cognitive capacities. Important representatives of cognitive linguistics are Langacker's (1987Langacker's ( , 1991Langacker's ( , 2008 cognitive grammar, Lakoff and Johnson's (2003) conceptual metaphor theory, and cognitive construction crammar as pioneered by Goldberg (1995). Cognitive grammar is a key example of the "primacy of semantics in linguistic analysis" (Geeraerts, 1997: 9) that is characteristic of cognitivelinguistic approaches. ...
... Given what is known about the alternative construals of plurals as mass vs. multiplex (Johnson, 1987;Lakoff, 1987;Langacker, 2008) and the existence of number variation based on clashes between semantics and syntax (Corbett, 2000), it is perhaps unsurprising that Ukrainian багато admits both Singular and Plural agreement. It also makes sense that both Word order and Animacy should play a role in number agreement. ...
We reveal an ongoing language change in Ukrainian involving a construction with a subject comprised of the indefinite quantifier багато ‘many’ modifying a noun phrase in the Genitive Plural. Number agreement on the verb varies, allowing both Singular (in 69.1% of attestations) and Plural (in 30.9% of attestations). Based on statistical analysis of corpus data, we investigate the influence of the factors of year of creation, word order of subject and verb, and animacy of the subject on the choice of verb number. We find that, while all combinations of word order and animacy are robustly attested, VS word order and inanimate subjects tend to prefer Singular, whereas SV word order and animate subjects tend to prefer Plural. Since about the 1950s, the proportion of Plural has been increasing, overtaking Singular in the current decade. We propose that this Singular vs. Plural variation is motivated by the human embodied experience of construing a group of items as either a homogeneous mass (and therefore Singular) or a multiplicity of individuals (and therefore Plural). This proposal is supported by the identification of micro-constructions that prefer Singular and show reduced individuation of human beings.
... The exploration of the embodied theory's biological basis and the existence of a cognitive 'vocabulary', summarizes the relation between action representations and motor movements. This theorization resonates with Johnson's theorization of image schemas (1992) as combinations of schemas and images: conceptual structures that contribute to the creation of elaborate and abstract concepts through metaphorical projection (Langacker, 2008). In other words, an image schema is a synthetization of bodily and sensory experiences that results in structures that help humans in their daily interaction with their surroundings. ...
Codifying the body and describing its movements during the act of signing is a task that has long been discussed in the field of sign language studies, with enquiries on how to capture and label signed discourse being established since the very beginning of contemporary sign language research (Stokoe, 1960). Starting from this premise, and laying its ground on an interdisciplinary perspective, the present work aims to present a multimodal dataset in Italian Sign Language (LIS), describing a process of data collection and computational annotation. Traditionally, the field of sign language research has been characterized by a dichotomy between perspectives of contrast and continuity within features and attributes associated to vocal languages. In this regard, this thesis proposes a challenging middle-ground viewpoint, integrating characteristic insights from formalist and functionalist approaches in the study of sign languages. The goal is to draw aspects and methodologies from these perspectives that can be advantageously integrated to promote an interdisciplinary, current, and accessible collection and description of LIS.
Positioning itself theoretically within the cognitive and socio-semiotic framework of sign language description (Volterra et al., 2022), this work aims to suggest and apply guidelines and best practices for the collection and computational annotation of video data in LIS by taking into account other corpora collections and annotation experiences. It ponders the peculiarities of LIS, such as its multimodal and multilinear nature, while also considering the daily use made of it by the Italian signing community. In this perspective, language cannot be separated from its sociocultural and historical context (Russo Cardona, 2004b), nor from its embodied nature (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), as it is through the body that we humans live and describe our experiences. This assertion becomes even more important when the object of study is a sign language mediated through the visual-gestural channel, where the body itself constructs meaning.
Building on these assumptions, this thesis introduces a video collection method for LIS. This method is grounded in the use of multimodal and synchronized RADAR sensor and camera video capturing tools, allowing for detailed information gathering on all body parts involved in the act of signing, whether referring to manual or body elements. The subsequent annotations, developed using the ELAN software, occur on different levels, employing vocal labels in Italian and English, along with a specific annotation system for sign languages: Typannot (Bianchini, 2023). The interdisciplinary nature of the project is also reflected in the accessibility of annotations, enabling various users to access the information contained in the recorded videos, regardless of familiarity with LIS.
This thesis thus demonstrates that the suggested system of data collection, employing RADAR sensor and camera video capturing tools, alongside integrated multimodal corpora annotation techniques, accurately reflects the intricate nature of a signed language. This approach extends beyond the current state of the art by offering a pathway for the advancement of sign language recognition systems and more effective automatic translation tools.
This Elements monograph presents a Cognitive Grammar (CG) approach to a range of signed language grammatical phenomena. It begins with a background on the history of sign linguistics, focusing on what was a widely-held belief that signs are simply gestures. The first section traces the modern linguistic examination of signed languages, focusing on Stokoe and his demonstration that these languages exhibit phonology and duality of patterning. Next, we present some fundamental principles that are foundational for cognitive linguistics and sign linguistics. In a section on Cognitive Grammar, we present a brief overview of CG principles, constructs, and models. Section 4 presents extensive analyses of signed language constructions applying CG, including nominal grounding; the concepts of Place and placing; a CG approach to 'agreement' constructions in signed languages; reported dialogue; grammatical modality; and the grammatical meaning of facial displays. A final section examines the controversial role of gesture in grammatical constructions.
Mastering how to convey meanings using language is perhaps the main challenge facing any language learner. However, satisfactory accounts of how this is achieved, and even of what it is for a linguistic item to have meaning, are hard to come by. Nick Chater was one of the pioneers involved in the early development of one of the most successful methodologies within the cognitive science of language for discovering meaning: distributional semantics. In this article, we review this approach and discuss its successes and shortcomings in capturing semantic phenomena. In particular, we discuss what we dub the “distributional paradox:” how can models that do not implement essential dimensions of human semantic processing, such as sensorimotor grounding, capture so many meaning‐related phenomena? We conclude by providing a preliminary answer, arguing that distributional models capture the statistical scaffolding of human language acquisition that allows for communication, which, in line with Nick Chater's more recent ideas, has been shaped by the features of human cognition on the timescale of cultural evolution.
Bien que les verbes à particule aient été largement étudiés sous différents angles théoriques, les recherches précédentes se sont fortement concentrées sur la sémantique de la particule (et éventuellement du verbe), tandis que l’interaction avec le co(n)texte n’a suscité que peu d’intérêt. En revanche, cet article adopte une approche en cadres sémantiques plus dynamique et montre, sur la base d’exemples tirés de corpus, que les verbes à particule espagnols formés avec para atrás lit. ‘(en) arrière’ sont sujets à des interprétations spatio-aspectuelles variables. De plus, l’interprétation de ces résultats sera discutée à la lumière de l’intérêt croissant des grammaires de construction pour l’impact sémantique et pragmatique des éléments co(n)textuels et la représentation de la signification des constructions.
El presente trabajo se centra en analizar y comparar los infinitivos en español y francés tanto teórica como empíricamente. La introducción al tema central se da en el primer capítulo en el que se explica el marco teórico dentro del cual situamos nuestra investigación. El enfoque que nos ha guiado en el estudio de los infinitivos es triple: a la vez cognitivo, contrastivo y empírico.
El segundo capítulo consiste en la descripción del estatuto de los infinitivos en la gramática española y francesa. Después de tratar la cuestión de su etimología y morfología, mostramos por qué el infinitivo se percibe como forma incompleta en cuanto a la expresión de persona, número, tiempo, modo y aspecto y, luego, cómo compensa esta defectividad.
A continuación nos dedicamos a la crítica del infinitivo como forma híbrida. Argumentamos que, dependiendo del contexto en el que se encuentra, el infinitivo aparece con carácter verbal o nominal. Estos rasgos, junto con las diferentes funciones que puede desempeñar el infinitivo, se describen a lo largo de este capítulo. Concluimos que, desde un punto de vista cognitivo, el infinitivo siempre mantiene algo de su naturaleza verbal, pero se trata de un verbo menos prototípico.
En el tercer capítulo se investigan los infinitivos en base de un corpus paralelo. En primer lugar, se hace un análisis cuantitativo del corpus para indagar en qué lengua el infinitivo es más frecuente y si lo mismo ocurre en las traducciones. En segundo lugar, tratamos de describir los datos del corpus cualitativamente, centrándonos en los casos donde el infinitivo aparece nominalizado, independiente o como parte de una oración subordinada o perífrasis verbal. Para cada tipo de infinitivo, se dan numerosos ejemplos y se proponen los equivalentes traductivos.
Finalmente, en el último capítulo, constatamos que el estudio empírico del corpus resulta útil a la hora de elaborar ciertos asuntos teóricos relacionados con los infinitivos en español y francés. La comparación de estas dos lenguas nos permite concluir que el infinitivo español es más frecuente y que puede expresar con más facilidad algunos valores nominales y verbales que el infinitivo francés.
This introductory chapter provides an overview of the stated aims of this edited collection and accessible definitions of relevant concepts and principles of Vygotskian sociocultural theory (VSCT). These concepts and principles represent the theoretical foundation for the L2 teacher education (SLTE) professional development innovations included in this collection. Overall, the goals of this chapter and edited collection are twofold: (1) to showcase the variety of praxis-oriented pedagogical interventions that L2 teacher educators/researchers who engage with VSCT have yielded across instructional contexts, teacher populations, languages, and borders and (2) to highlight meaningful insights into what it means to adopt and enact a VSCT theoretical perspective in L2 teacher education pedagogy and research through the frames of innovation, intentionality, and intervention.
This chapter presents the results of an innovative L2 teacher education initiative which aimed to foster the development of a novice teacher as he participated in a series of online cyclical dialogic interactions that combined narrative writing and synchronous discussions of video-recorded instruction. The study investigated how the interplay between a teacher educator (TE) and a novice teacher created social situations of development during which responsive mediation was offered, ZPD activities were forged, and the teacher's perezhivanie was capitalized on. The concepts of ‘student centeredness’ and ‘communicative context’ were constantly present in the TE's mediation to intentionally lead the teacher to revisit his everyday notions of grammar teaching through ideals to be achieved. The deliberately cyclical design of the initiative allowed the TE to continuously address the concerns the novice teacher brought forth, leading him to fly beyond the confines of his everyday experience and embrace a richer, more holistic conception of his craft, which harmoniously intertwines grammar, language use, communicative context, and student-centeredness, accomplishing a kind of teaching that would no longer cause him discomfort.
This article analyses two English constructions, the monotransitive that -cl construction and the np+ to- infinitive construction . In particular, we will show how the principles of collostructional analysis can be used to establish collo-profiles for argument structure constructions, i.e. the verbs to be found very frequently in a construction, and how such collo-profiles can provide important cues for a semantic characterization of these constructions. In this case, we find that the that -clause cxn contains a large number of verbs of reporting, indicating a factual character of the construction in contrast to the infinitive construction that expresses a kind of modal meaning.
The interlanguage of L2 learners is shaped by various factors, perhaps most noticeably transfer from the L1 to the L2 and overgeneralization in the L2. Transfer has traditionally been treated as an all-or-nothing phenomenon by focusing on L2 structures that either have or do not have an equivalent in the L1. Only recently, researchers working in usage-based construction grammar have taken into account frequencies and association strengths of L2 structures. These studies suggest that entrenchment plays a similar role in L2 learning as it does in L1 acquisition. This paper extends this research by systematically taking into account the potential role of the entrenchment of L1 structures and its interaction with L2 entrenchment. We report a translation study and two acceptability rating studies that investigate these factors using the case of the ditransitive construction in the interlanguage of German learners of English as a Foreign Language. Ditransitive constructions exist in both languages but the German construction has a broader meaning (it can encode almost any type of three-participant event) than the English one (which is restricted to events of caused reception and has a large number of idiosyncratic restrictions on individual verbs). This semantic difference leads to differences in the collostructional preferences of the constructions in the two languages (i.e., the set of verbs that they are associated with positively or negatively), allowing us to investigate the extent to which the transfer of L1 usage patterns to the L2 depends on the entrenchment of verb-construction combinations in the L1, and the extent to which transfer can be inhibited by the positive or negative entrenchment of verb-construction associations in the L2. Our results suggest an influence of both L1 entrenchment and L2 entrenchment (positive and negative) on linguistic production and linguistic representation respectively, such that learners transfer L1 associations between verbs and constructions to their L2, especially if these L1 associations are strong, and that they seem to be sensitive to negative L2 entrenchment, especially if the corresponding L1 associations are only weakly entrenched. However, differences between the translation study and the judgment studies suggest that learners may not acquire the specific semantic restrictions of the English ditransitive at all, relying on verb-specific associations to particular argument structures in the L2 instead and resorting to their L1 knowledge when such verb-specific associations are not available to them.
This article discusses strategies involved in aligning word classes (parts of speech), particularly participles, in two dictionaries and one grammar for Swedish, all issued by the same publishing house, which at the same time is a language authority in Sweden. The dictionaries are Svenska Akademiens ordlista (‘The Swedish Academy glossary’), abbreviated as SAOL, and Svensk ordbok utgiven av Svenska Akademien (‘The Contemporary Dictionary of the Swedish Academy’), abbreviated as SO. The grammar in question is Svenska Akademiens grammatik (‘The Swedish Academy grammar’), abbreviated as SAG. I will discuss whether it is possible or desirable to harmonize word classes in dictionaries and grammars from the same publisher, in this case from the Swedish Academy.
W UKRAINIE (IN UKRAINE) OR NA UKRAINIE (ON UKRAINE)? ON PREPOSITIONS AND TOPONYMS IN POLISH FROM A HISTORICAL AND COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVE The author of this paper discusses the usage of the preposition na (‘on’) with some country names, such as Ukraina (Ukraine), Litwa (Lithuania) and Węgry (Hungary) in Polish. The above examples are exceptions to the general rule according to which names of countries take the preposition w (‘in’) and do (‘to’) to describe, respectively, static and dynamic relations. Na, in turn, regularly occurs with names of Polish provinces. Historically, the pair w/do was used with both categories of place-names, while na was a linguistic innovation in that context. Statistical analysis of historical texts shows that its spread was gradual. Individual toponyms adopted the preposition na in different periods, reflecting the loss of their autonomy. However, following the partitions of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century, na started to be used with most Polish provinces and several foreign ones (which are currently independent states). Thus, the linguistic change was caused by a change in the perception of the terms in question, the latter being a shift from political to ethnographic terms. The mechanism itself can be best accounted for with the use of the term zooming, or change of the vantage point, which, in this case, was zoomed in.
作为人类认知中的一个基本概念，因果关系是哲学、心理学、语言学等学科的重要研
究话题。不同语言的使用者对因果关系的识解和表征既存在共性，又存在特性。本文基于
Langacker 的识解理论，通过视频诱导实验考察了汉语母语者对因果关系事件的概念化过程。研究发现：（1）在概念化过程中，汉语母语者通常首先识解必有因果成分（使因事件和结果事件）以构筑概念基底，形成“因+果”单句和“因，果”复句两种句法表征，这两种表征的详略度均较低。（2）基于概念基底提供的整体参照框架，时间维度识解机制促使部分汉语母语者注意到必有成分之外的细节。高详略度识解机制进而促使这些汉语母语者对语言表征进行补充、阐释及增容，最终形成因果关系子类（初始／持续因果关系）特有的构式表征。（3）初始因果概念可通过基本的、已符号化的持续因果概念、高详略度和时间维度识解机制予以激活和建构，两个概念间的转化可形成层级模型。本文首次通过实证研究探讨了详略度和时间维度识解机制对语言使用者建构和分化因果关系概念的驱动效应，并建立了汉语母语者识解和表征因果关系事件的认知模型，为进一步探究跨语言的因果关系事件感知和概念化奠定了基础。
This book explores Atwood’s distinctive use of language and style, across a selection of her most recent prose publications, through an extended, reader-centred and cognitive stylistic perspective. This introduction chapter outlines the stylistic context for the book and summarises the themes, frameworks and prose fiction case studies that make up the analytical chapters. With reference to Margaret Atwood’s critical reflections on writing, this opening chapter presents a stylistic exploration of three recurring metaphors underpinning her work: Writers are criminals, Writing is a journey and Books are conduits.
Atwood’s Stone Mattress (2014) is a collection of ‘nine wicked tales’ about ageing and revenge. While these tales follow different characters and vary in genre, they are all connected through references to their physically cold setting, with many taking place during an ice storm. This chapter extends the application of concepts from Cognitive Grammar (Chapter 3) to explore how a domain of cold is networked across the short stories, building and establishing the collection’s distinctively macabre ambience. Drawing on reader data transcribed from a book group discussion, the chapter examines the shifting balance between the collection’s atmospheric and tonal effects, and the increasingly emotional and metaphorical associations created through dominion chaining within and across key scenes. Finally, it is argued that the dialogic relationship between the vengeful characters and the icy setting they inhabit is presented as an innate, and elemental, ecological alliance.
This chapter explores the earliest Atwood publication under consideration in this book, Alias Grace (1996). In a similar way to The Blind Assassin, Alias Grace is a novel which draws on strategies of repetition and fragmented storytelling, raising questions about the lines between fact and fiction, and of the authenticity and reliability of authorship. The stylistic exploration of Grace Marks’ voice outlined in this chapter examines how Cognitive Grammar’s concept of ‘reconstrual’ (Langacker in Cognitive grammar: a basic introduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008) can elucidate the linguistic and conceptual mechanisms that give rise to these central themes, and which govern reader attention in the revelation and concealment of significant storyworld details. As a storyteller, Grace repeats and overreports the same events, while omitting and obscuring the facts of the crime she relates. It is argued that the reconstrual operations in the descriptions of key scenes, objects and events form the basis of Grace’s fragmented, patchworked and, ultimately, uncooperative storytelling style. The stylistic choices of the retold accounts are central to the novel’s categorisation as an ‘anti-detective’ novel (Ingersoll in Stud Nov 35:543, 2003), which neither confirms nor denies her culpability.
As the focalised character in Hag-Seed (Atwood in Hag-Seed. Penguin, London, 2016), a retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Felix’s loose grasp on reality and theatrical world view forms a key part of the text’s critical commentary on ‘the relationship between reality and fantasy that theatre provides’ (Howells in Contemp Women’s Writ 11:309, 2017). In reference to reader data transcribed from a book group discussion of the novel, this chapter draws on contemporary research in the stylistic representation of fictional minds to consider how Felix’s mind style (Fowler in Linguistics and the novel. Methuen, London, 1977) is related through his collective characterisation of the prisoners, and via his blurred representation of fantasy, reality and theatrical production. It is argued that Felix’s distinctive characterisation, and his dramaturgical world view, is a central part of the recontextualisation of the themes of performance, performativity and illusion from the original play.
This volume comprises a selection of papers that were presented at the 24th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL24), which took place at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra from 1-5 July, 2019. The volume’s aim is to reflect the breadth of research presented at the conference, with each chapter representative of a workshop or themed session. A striking aspect of ICHL24 was the three-day workshop on computational and quantitative approaches to historical linguistics and two of the chapters represent different aspects of this workshop. A number of chapters present research that explores mechanisms and processes of change within specific domains of language, while others explore interactions of change across linguistic domains. Two chapters represent a common theme at the conference and consider the role of historical linguistics in explaining non-linguistic histories of language diversification.
The investigation of phraseology through corpus-based and computational approaches holds significant relevance for various professionals, including translators, interpreters, terminologists, lexicographers, language instructors, and learners. Computational Phraseology, and in particular the computational analysis of multiword expressions (also known as multiword units), has gained prominence in recent years and is essential for a number of Natural Language Processing and Translation Technology applications. The failure to detect these units automatically could result in incorrect and problematic automatic translations and could hinder the performance of applications such as text summarisation and web search. Against this background, the volume offers 13 articles carefully selected and organised into two parts: ‘Computational treatment of multiword units’ and ‘Corpus-based and linguistic studies in phraseology‘. The contributions not only highlight the latest advancements in computational and corpus-based phraseology but also reiterate its vital role in all areas of language technologies, including basic and applied research.
The portrayal of key participants in gender-based violence (GBV) by the media has been analyzed as ideologically driven by critical discourse analysis (CDA) scholars. Nevertheless, previous studies of media coverage of GBV cases with a CDA approach were confined to qualitative analysis while quantitative evidence was lacking and were perpetrator-oriented without the victim’s perspectives. Addressing these gaps, this study conducted a case analysis of four British newspapers, each representing different political inclinations. Results revealed that the political inclinations did not influence media’s preference for certain constructions. However, the perpetrator was ascribed with a much greater degree of agency in high frequency active constructions. Even in passive and nominal constructions, he was specified more frequently than deleted, contradicting most previous research indicating that the perpetrators were often deleted to conjure away responsibility. We also verified the significance of the context particularly in interpreting the agentless passive and nominal constructions. Further research from diachronic and reader-oriented perspectives should bring more converging evidence.
Reference to current discourse is often cited as a definitional criterion for classifying linguistic units as metapragmatic . However, there is no consensus in research on the precise meaning and limits of this criterion. In this paper, a cognitive-linguistic perspective is adopted to address this issue by focusing on how interactants conceptualize discourse. A synthesis of Langacker’s (2001) current-discourse-space model ( CDS model ) and the notion of pragmatic frames is used to analyze metapragmatic practices in a television discussion. The analytical annotation process shows that metapragmatic markers ( MPMs ) evoke specific kinds of frame structures including the instantiation of pragmatic frames . Based on the annotation of the entire transcribed discussion, it will be argued that the visualization of discourse sequences in the CDS model and the examination of the specific frame structures evoked by MPMs contribute to a better understanding of the core of metapragmaticity. The paper concludes with a pilot study that uses quantitative methods to demonstrate the analytical potential of a cognition-centered categorization of MPMs. It is shown that the use of MPMs reflects different interactional roles (i.e., host or discussant) and the conversational strategies used to shape the conceptualization of argumentative discourse to pursue specific interactional goals.
Acknowledgment sections are a rich but underused resource for understanding how language is used for social purposes (such as expressing gratitude and communicating social relations networks), and how conventions and patterns emerge in this process. This paper presents a usage-based case study combining qualitative and quantitative methods for analyzing a dataset of >300 acknowledgment sections from medical dissertations written in German. In our quantitative analysis, we gauge keywords and key n-grams and assess the relative position of recurrent words in each text. Our analysis shows that this text type has developed clear conventions, with acknowledgments in the professional domain being followed by a usually smaller set of expressions of gratitude associated with the private domain. In addition, our quantitative analysis suggests recurrent patterns that can be linked to specific socio-pragmatic functions. For instance, an analysis of n-grams attested in text segments associated with the professional vs. the private domain shows some differences with regard to the typical patterns chosen in those segments. Our analysis also raises a number of future research questions, thus showing that acknowledgment sections are a highly interesting object of study that deserve to be investigated in more detail.
Ray Jackendoff understands that Noam Chomsky’s linguistic models distort the nature of language due to its ‘syntactocentrism.’ Coined by Jackendoff, this term means Chomsky’s assumption that the syntactic component of language is central while the phonological and semantic components are merely interpretive. Jackendoff also states that since the 1970s many researchers have made a mistake opposite to Chomsky’s, by denying that syntax has a relevant role in grammar. Considering such a scenario, this paper analyzes Ronald Langacker’s cognitive grammar, in which syntax is replaced by semantics as the central linguistic component. The goal is to show how Langacker misrepresented language structure by doing so.
In this paper I discuss the variation among the directional cases in Udmurt (Permic, Uralic). Udmurt has a spatial case system consisting of seven cases in total, of which four are directional cases. Two of the directional cases, elative and egressive, express the source of an action, and two, illative and terminative, the goal of an action. Previous accounts have established that the distinguishing factor between the pairs is the expression of some limit. Egressive and terminative are used to express beginning and end limit, respectively, whereas elative and illative are seen not to express a limit. This kind of distinction in a spatial case system is typologically extremely rare. Especially a case dedicated for starting limit seems not to be attested anywhere else than in the Permic languages, Udmurt, and its closes relative Komi.
The explanation for the variation between the cases given in previous research, namely that egressive and terminative express a limit, whereas elative and illative do not, seems not to be general enough, however. Especially, in the spatial domain there are examples where, e.g., illative is said to express the endpoint of movement, and terminative the end limit of a movement, but the depicted situations seem basically identical. Therefore, I suggest that there is a more general tendency of using the limit cases to construe an event as bounded from the beginning or the end, respectively, whereas the non-limit cases is used when the construal does not include a boundary of the event, or the boundary is backgrounded.
To explore this possibility, I conduct a qualitative analysis of the senses of each case, as well as a quantitative analysis exploring the effects of different aspects of verbal semantics on the choice between the limit and non-limit cases in the spatial domain. The dataset is 500 manually annotated and analyzed examples of Udmurt literary language, mostly newspaper texts. The process is done manually, as the automatic annotation of the original corpus yields too many false positives when queried for instances of cases. The qualitative analysis is conducted by the Principled Polysemy approach, which yields reliable results on the semantic structure of spatial elements in general. The quantitative analysis is done by implementing a random forest analysis on the dataset. Random forest is chosen for the method because the dataset is somewhat small, and the data points cannot be considered independent.
The qualitative analysis reveals that the limit cases are indeed used to express senses like the beginning or end of a timespan or a change in amount, which seem to incorporate a boundary of the event. In contrast, the non-limit cases are used to express senses where the boundary is implied but backgrounded. The quantitative analysis reveals that the semantics of the verb indeed do play a role in the choice between the limit and non-limit cases in the spatial domain. However, due to the nature of the data and the chosen methodology it is not possible to say how exactly the semantics of the verb affect the choice between cases. Nonetheless, the results firmly point to the direction that the difference between the limit and non-limit cases should be analyzed as a difference in the construal of the events, which then have special cases depending on the exact situation expressed.
Functional cognitive linguistics and cognitive stylistics provide the linguistic background and methodological foundations of this paper. The most significant tenet of cognitive stylistics is the proposition that the formation of linguistic structures does not function merely as stylistic embellishments; instead, style represents an integral aspect of textual meaning. Names created by literary naming can be interpreted and analysed as defining elements of style. Following an introduction to the theory of language and style, the paper examines the fundamental issues of translating literary proper names. The most relevant question is whether it is necessary or possible to translate proper names in literary works. The following section presents an analysis of the significance of naming in Krúdy’s prose, followed by an examination of the main types of Krúdy’s names with ironic stylistic purpose. The third section analyses the German translations of Krúdy’s ironic names. In conclusion, it can be stated that the appropriate reproduction of Krúdy’s ironic names, which reflects the stylistic effect and meaning formation of the source language, is a particularly challenging task for translators. It is not uncommon to observe that connotational meanings and shades of meaning present in source language texts are not fully conveyed in translation. In certain instances, pre-existing linguistic coincidences (e.g., Hungarian Rezeda ‘reseda’ – German Reseda ‘reseda’) can assist in the translation process. In other cases, however, the translator’s professionalism, linguistic sophistication, and creativity are crucial to ensure such names’ accurate and effective translation.
This study investigates the semantic structures of degree adverb constructions (DAC) in Mandarin through a network-based approach. We first utilized covarying collexeme analysis to determine significant collexeme pairs strongly associated with the DAC. We then incorporated network-based quantitative methods to analyze the emerging schemas from these collexeme pairs. Our approach involved implementing network analyses at two levels. The collexeme-based network consisted of lexical nodes representing degree adverbs and modified heads, while the construction-based network featured collexeme pairs as nodes. The collexeme-based network reveals that degree adverbs develop distinct semantic preferences for attributes within specific semantic fields, primarily capturing subjective and eval-uative aspects of human experience. The construction-based network highlights dynamic interactions among these significant collexeme pairs, showcasing semantically interconnected collexeme pairs forming cohesive constructional families. Furthermore, these semantic groupings underscore the crucial role of metaphorical extension in creating larger semantic clusters for higher-level linguistic generalization. The emergence of semantic coherences from both networks reflects the evolving nature of linguistic generalizations, transitioning from low-level pivot schemas in the collexeme-based network to higher-order generalizations in the construction-based network. This study contributes to the field of usage-based grammar by emphasizing the fundamental role of sequentiality and interconnec-tedness between linguistic units in linguistic generalization.
In this article, we discuss the approach to description of constructions adopted in William Croft’s monograph “Morphosyntax. Constructions of the World’s languages” (2022) and compare it to the approach to description and classification that is used in the Russian Constructicon. We conclude that Croft’s system and the Russian Constructicon show several substantial differences. First, Croft’s approach is based on the notion of Comparative Concepts and on an a priori classification of grammatical domains. By contrast, in the Russian Constructicon, a bottom-up approach is taken: it presupposes collecting the most representative inventory of constructions and, then, creating a system for classifying them. Second, the Russian Constructicon represents properties of constructions as a system of tags, where a construction can bear multiple tags, while Croft does not discuss cases of multiple tagging or grammatical class intersection. Finally, Croft’s system focuses on the core of grammar and includes mainly those values that are grammaticalized, while in the Russian Constructicon, attention is given not only to grammatical constructions, but also to constructions that can be termed ‘quasi-grammatical’ or ‘lexicalized’ — they have narrow semantics and combinational properties (here belong, for instance, iterative / frequentative constructions, such as to i delo ‘frequently’, and constructions with the terminative / resultative meaning, such as svoё otguljal ‘[he] is done with having fun’).
This paper argues that human signification is governed by “agentive systems,” inspired by an extended framework that combines the Practical Logic of Cognitive Systems and Peircean semiotics. An agentive system encompasses both the efficient anticipation of resource utilization and the use of actual available resources, including bodily capacities in the form of embodied habits. These resources are allocated based on agendas (goals) pursued by human agents in their interactions with the environment. In this context, signification involves the meaning of actions embedded within their agentive system, encompassing the agent performing the actions, the action’s goal or agenda, and the available resources, whether bodily (skills, abilities, capacities) or non-bodily (objects, signs). After presenting the general framework in which the concept of an agentive system is approached, I develop a proposal drawing on insights from Göran Sonesson’s reflections on the importance of sedimentation and Lifeworld for semiotics. This proposal highlights how the acquisition of embodied habits facilitates and promotes the significance of cultural products, while their deployment allows for the emergence of situated signification.
In this article, the author analyzes the conceptual metaphors politics is a pond, a politician is a carp and a politician is a pike in Czech political discourse. The investigation is based on the theory of conceptual metaphor and follows the principles of ethnolinguistics and cognitive linguistics. The author shows how the specific features of these conceptual metaphors relate to the Czech linguistic worldview and proposes metaphorical mapping that conveys salient features of the target domain (politics and politicians). The conceptual metaphor politics is a pond helps the speaker to depict a problematic domestic political situation that needs to be changed. The metaphors a politician is a carp and a politician is a pike are usually used to create the “friend-foe” opposition in political discourse. The conceptual metaphor a politician is a carp discloses the passivity and laziness of politicians and their inability or unwillingness to change the current situation. On the other hand, the conceptual metaphor a politician is a pike can be used to indicate both the positive qualities of a politician (activity, energy, initiative) and the negative ones (greed, selfishness, cruelty). The use of culturally specific conceptual metaphors allows a politician to establish close contact with the audience to increase the number of loyal voters.
The article concerns the phenomenon of profiling as a cognitive concept and a research paradigm implemented in German discourse linguistics and used successfully in the linguistic discourse analysis. The contrastive analysis is carried out based on the Polish and German-language research corpus. The analysis aims to reconstruct the profiles of the controversial biographers in the press – Artur Domosławski (author of Kapuściński’s biography), and Gerhard Gnauck (author of Reich-Ranicki’s biography). In this approach, profiling in the media discourse is understood as a dynamic process, pointing to journalists’ competing and mutually combating positions and points of view, embedded in different cultures. Based on the theoretical assumptions and the specificity of the corpus, important questions arise about who profiles whom, what perspective they adopt and what linguistic practices they use. The analysis will examine nominations (referential forms) and predications (predicative forms) in the context of their potential for profiling discourse actors. The selected tools will allow us to reconstruct the culturally specific profiles of both biographers.
Der Aufsatz stellt eine umfassende, gebrauchsbasierte Analyse des Richtungsadverbs vorbei dar, das bislang wenig Aufmerksamkeit erhalten hat. Als Datengrundlage der Untersuchung dient das PaGeS-Korpus, ein umfangreiches Korpus zeitgenössischer Texte. Der morpho-syntaktische Status von vorbei wird kritisch beleuchtet, wobei seine umstrittene Zuordnung als Wortbildungselement oder syntaktische Kombinationsstruktur betrachtet wird. Die zahlreichen strukturellen und syntaktischen Varianten der vorbei-Phrasen werden detailliert beschrieben, wobei auf ihre topologischen Eigenschaften sowie auf ihre syntaktischen Funktionen eingegangen wird. Der Schwerpunkt der Arbeit liegt auf der semantischen Analyse der vorbei-Konstruktionen. Im Rahmen der kognitiven Semantik von Talmy und der Metapherntheorie von Lakoff und Johnson werden die Konstruktionen beschrieben, die sowohl faktische als auch abstrakte Bewegungen zum Ausdruck bringen. Besonderes Augenmerk wird dabei auf den temporalen Gebrauch von vorbei gelegt.
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1987), pp. 422-434
Spanish and English have exocentric verb+obiect = subiect/instrument compounds, such as abrelatas (opens-cans) 'can-opener' and scarecrow. They share a general constructional pattem, consist of "clumps" or subfamilies of forms, and have a negative or jocular tendency. They differ in their individual compounds, subfamilies and constructional prototypes. The Spanish construction is a widely productive, major mechanism for naming instruments; the English construction names subjects, and is a minor pattem currently productive only in one subfamily.
Exceptional forms in both languages approach each other's prototype. In both languages the
category fits into wider families or categories of constructions, but those wider families are
different.
These patterns illuminate basic tenets of Cognitive grammar, including: (1) usage-based
grammar. (2) Multiple pattems. (3) Lower-leve1 outranking higher-leve1 pattems. (4) Functional motivation, but ( 5 ) persistence of pattems despite absence of functionality. These considerations underline (6) the insufficiency of models positing innate, absolute, few and simple rules.
The meanings of personal pronouns are described using basic notions of Cognitive Linguistics. Among these notions are subjective vs. objective construal, profiling, grounding, intersubjectivity, paths of mental access, and conceptual blending. Pronouns are situated with respect to other strategies of nominal grounding. It is explained how personal pronouns can be used impersonally, and the meaning of impersonal it is characterized. Special attention is devoted to I and you. Their abstracted conceptual meanings invoke very basic cognitive models pertaining to the ground, a speech event, and subject vs. object of conception. With these models as inputs, the pronouns' meanings are constructed through successive levels of blending. The crucial factor is intersubjectivity.
COGNITIVE SEMANTICS: The last quarter century has seen the emergence of what has come to be known as cognitive semantics. This collective endeavor has vastly expanded and profoundly altered our view of both meaning and its relation to grammar. It offers new solutions to classic problems. More fundamentally, it reshapes the entire conceptual landscape within which the problems themselves are posed and formulated. The most basic development is simply the unequivocal identification of meaning with conceptualization, i.e., the cognitive activity constituting our apprehension of the world (Langacker, 1987a, 2000; Talmy, 2000a, 2000b). Since the mind is part of the loop, linguistic semantics does not just reflect the external situations described, but inescapably incorporates particular ways of construing those situations and portraying them for linguistic purposes. It thus involves the full range of our mental capacities, as well as the elaborate conceptual structures we construct and manipulate. Included – being absolutely fundamental to cognition and language – are capacities reasonably called imaginative: metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999), metonymy (Kövecses & Radden, 1998), fictivity (Matsumoto, 1996a, 1996b; Talmy, 1996; Langacker, 1999b), mental space construction (Fauconnier, 1985; Fauconnier & Sweetser, 1996), and conceptual blending (Fauconnier, 1997; Fauconnier & Turner, 1998a, 1998b, 2002). These capacities are however grounded in everyday bodily experience: motion, perception, muscular exertion, etc. Basic experience of this sort is projected metaphorically onto other domains, and in abstracted form provides the skeletal organization of conceptual structure in general. This of course is embodiment (Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1987).
This paper presents a discourse-functional account of English inversion, based on an examination of a large corpus of naturally-occurring tokens. It is argued that inversion serves an information-packaging function, and that felicitous inversion depends on the relative discourse-familiarity of the information represented by the preposed and postposed constituents. The data moreover indicate that evoked elements and inferrable elements are treated alike with respect to inversion; both are treated as discourse-old information. Finally, it is suggested that discourse-familiarity correlates not with subjecthood, but rather with relative sentence position.
This paper presents an analysis of the constraints on pronominal anaphora in English within the framework of Cognitive Grammar in terms of semantic distinctions between pronouns and full noun phrases. Semantic notions of prominence and conceptual interconnection are used to develop a model of CONCEPTUAL REFERENCE POINTS which defines the contexts within which coreference is acceptable or unacceptable. The analysis provides a conceptual-semantic account of the 'core' anaphora facts which have previously been explained in terms of structural notions such as c-command, as well as certain data which have long been problematic for structural accounts.
The issue of discreteness vs. continuity comes into play in all domains of linguistic analysis and at multiple levels. The distinction's experiential basis is discussed, as well as various means of discretization and continuization. Most phenomena are sufficiently complex that treatments emphasizing discreteness and continuity both have some validity - it is not a matter of choosing between them, but of determining what each contributes and how they relate to one another. These notions are applied to a number of specific problems, including genetic relationships, constituency, constructions, grammaticality, and grammatical categories. Special attention is devoted to the network model of complex categories. Like any metaphor, it can be misleading if pushed too far. An alternative is proposed which arguably represents a more appropriate mixture of discreteness and continuity.
In this article, I argue that neither of the two main approaches to definiteness, familiarity or unique identifiability, provide necessary or sufficient conditions for the use of the definite article in English. I propose instead that the basic meaning of the article is to signal the accessibility of a discourse referent, more specifically, the availability of an access path through a configuration of mental spaces, or cognitive domains. Speakers employ the article to construct discourse referents under various conceptual guises, as well as to guide addressees in establishing mental spaces and appropriate connections between the elements in those spaces. The access paths are underspecified by the grammar, so the article is compatible with a range of functions in addition to unique identifiability (familiarity): discourse prominence, role/value status, and point-of-view shifts. The analysis if supported by a range of new types of empirical evidence gleaned from an examination of naturally occurring discourse.
I present below a battery of semantic properties which absolutives (subjects of intransitive verbs and direct objects of transitive ones) have in common to the exclusion of subjects of transitive verbs. These properties are broadly characterized in terms of bondedness to the verb, thematic role, and control phenomena. In consequence we may regard languages in which case marking and verb agreement operate on an ergative/absolutive basis as codifying these semantic properties in surface.
This article examines instances of the pu relative construction in Modern Greek in which the semantic role of the head is underspecified by the syntax. Such cases include sentences whose nominal head corresponds to some complement of the relative clause predicate and sentences in which the head does not have any sort of syntactic relationship with the relative. The latter, which are characteristic of oral, informal discourse, have been completely ignored in the previous literature, which has defined relatives on the basis of exclusively structural criteria. It is argued that a unified account of the pu-construction (including gapped and gapless relatives) can be achieved if we analyze it as a conventional instruction for a particular kind of conceptual integration. Semantic and pragmatic factors influencing successful construal (one which leads to the construction of a unique blend) are systematically examined The lack of a clear cut-off point in acceptability for such utterances tallies with the conclusion reached here, namely that the constraints governing such uses are constraints on interpretability.
A history of the notion of PROPERHOOD in philosophy and linguistics is given. Two long-standing ideas, (i) that proper names have no sense, and (ii) that they are expressions whose purpose is to refer to individuals, cannot be made to work comprehensively while PROPER is understood as a subcategory of linguistic units, whether of lexemes or phrases. Phrases of the type the old vicarage, which are potentially ambiguous with regard to properhood, encourage the suggestion that PROPER is best understood as mode of reference contrasting with SEMANTIC reference; in the former, the intension/sense of any lexical items within the referring expression, and any entailments they give rise to, are canceled. PROPER NAMES are all those expressions that refer nonintensionally. Linguistic evidence is given that this opposition can be grammaticalized, speculation is made about its neurological basis, and psycholinguistic evidence is adduced in support. The PROPER NOUN,asa lexical category, is argued to be epiphenomenal on proper names as newly defined. Some consequences of the view that proper names have no sense in the act of reference are explored; they are not debarred from having senses (better: synchronic etymologies) accessible during other (meta)linguistic activities.
An active system is frequently analyzed as the most semantically transparent case-marking system, where the agent-patient opposition underlies case marking and/or cross-referencing patterns. It has also been claimed that transitivity and its prototypical manifestation of subject-object opposition are irrelevant for this language type. This paper examines these claims in the light of the grammatical system of Guaraní, an active language spoken in Paraguay. Based on lexical and morpho-syntactic data such as reflexivization, passivization, relativization, incorporation and external possession, the results suggest that grammatical relations are indeed semantically driven and that they do not correlate with subjects and objects. The paper clarifies the semantic underpinnings of the active-inactive distinction in this language and shows that the relevant opposition is not that of agent-patient but rather that of source-locative. The study argues for an analysis based on language-specific event typing and construal.
It is generally agreed that the English ‘present tense’ is not appropriately analyzed as indicating present time: present-time events often cannot be expressed in the present tense; conversely, the present tense is often used for nonpresent occurrences. I will argue, however, that these problems are only apparent, arising from a failure to appreciate the numerous conceptual factors that are crucially involved. When these are properly elucidated, using notions available in cognitive semantics and cognitive grammar, the characterization ‘coincidence with the time of speaking’ proves remarkably adequate in accounting for present-tense usage.