bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Tellings and renderings in medieval Karnataka
Authors: Satyanath T.S.
Published: March 2014

Indian literature provides examples of multiple renderings of a text that are radically different from the purported original. Scholars have suggested that it is better to refer to these as tellings, since they have a symbolic relationship as different versions of a story. In fact, medieval Indian tellings and renderings could be regarded as cultural transactions with a complex intertextuality amongst them. Multiple tellings and renderings also acted as pluralistic epistemologies for categories such as gender, caste, religion, sect and language, not only interconnecting them but also protecting the rights of these categories over their knowledge. Taking written, oral and non-verbal representations from the Karnataka region, this paper attempts to understand the processes and methods at work in the cultural transactions that produced these representations.
(Mis)Representation of sufism through translation
Authors: Farahzad Farzaneh
Published: March 2014

Although rooted in ancient Persian beliefs, Sufism emerged as a tradition within Islam. so Sufi literature was written in both Persian and Arabic. In the selection of Arabic Sufi material for translation, first into Latin and later into other European languages, literature was excluded or downplayed in favour of philosophy and logic. Meanwhile, most Persian Sufi works selected for translation, particularly into English, revolved around the theme of Love, which has supported certain interpretations and representations of Sufism. One approach overemphasises abstract love of the divine, while another associates Sufi love with eroticism. Both ignore or play down the relationship between these two types of love and downplay Sufi practice as social behaviour, resulting in the repeated translation of certain writers and poets at the expense of others. This paper also argues that the Sufi concept of patience seems to have been misinterpreted in the West.
Beyond Descriptivism
Authors: Bouchard Denis
Published: March 2014

I present two views on what is unique to human language. Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch (2002) hypothesize that the crucial property is a recursive system which links the Sensory-Motor system and the Conceptual-Intentional system. I assume that the distinctive property is that human language has signs: whereas an animal call is an immediate reflex response to a perceptual stimulation, a sign has a nonimmediate and potentially unlimited signifié. This expressive power comes from the arbitrariness of the sign, which has its source in the nature of the two substances involved: as Saussure compellingly argued, there is nothing in the nature of the perceptual substance or the conceptual substance to have any particular pairing. Recursion is a by-product of some of these substantive properties. This model has the advantage that it derives several other novel traits of language which appear to be unconnected in the HCF model. My model also leads to more explanatory analyses of basic syntactic constructions, as illustrated by five key constructions.
The Diachronic Development of a French Indefinite Pronoun
Authors: Edmonds Amanda
Published: March 2014

Both Modern French quantifiers and the Modern French Determiner Phrase have been the focus of numerous analyses. The current study is a diachronic contribution to this literature, focusing on the development of one universal quantifier—chacun “each”—from 1100 through 1925. Old and Middle French chacun fulfilled a variety of syntactic functions: It was used as a pronoun, a modifier, and was found in emphatic constructions with the indefinite article (un chacun “a each”). By the 16th century, this surface heterogeneity gave way and pronominal chacun dominated. On the basis of the diachronic evidence, I first consider the possibility of extending an existing analysis of a different quantifier, aucun “none, not any,” to chacun. After arguing against this extension, I suggest that, contrary to appearances, a unified syntactic structure underlies the Old and Middle French chacun, and that this single construction gave rise to two modern syntactic structures.
2. Representations of [voice]: Evidence from acquisition
Authors: Kager René , van der Feest Suzanne , Fikkert Paula , Kerkhoff Annemarie , Zamuner Tania S.
Published: March 2014

We consider two theories of laryngeal representation, one using a single feature [voice] generalizing across prevoicing languages and aspiration languages, and the other using multiple features: [voice] for pre-voicing languages and [spread glottis] for aspiration languages. We derive predictions for children’s early productions, and test these for three Germanic languages. Children acquiring Dutch, a prevoicing language, show de-voicing of stops, while available data from German, an aspiration language, show de-aspiration. Although the difference might simply reflect intrinsic properties of children’s early production and perception systems, we argue that a representational account is in order, based on multiples features. The case is made for English, an aspiration language, based on the early productions of a single child. A laryngeal harmony pattern is found which spreads voicelessness from coda to onset, which is argued to involve activity of [spread glottis]. This is interpreted as evidence for a laryngeal representation involving multiple features.
The quirky case of participial clauses
Authors: Alcázar Asier , Saltarelli Mario
Published: March 2014

Adverbial participial clauses exhibit quirky case properties. The internal argument of a transitive verb may bear accusative or nominative morphological case in Romance. Unlike gerundivals, these clauses lack T and v*, among other heads, undermining a standard case licensing approach. We propose that absolutes are VPs that value the case of their internal argument. Other alternatives like a morphological default/inherent case fail to capture the paradigm in Romance. Our approach finds independent support in data from Medieval and Renaissance Italian, an accusative system, as well as the ergative system of Basque.
Transfer in periphrastic causatives in L2 English and L2 Spanish
Authors: Cabrera Mónica , Zubizarreta María Luisa
Published: March 2014

This paper reports the results of a bidirectional study on the L2 acquisition of English and Spanish periphrastic causatives by adult learners. It is argued that different L1 grammatical properties are transferred at different levels of L2 proficiency. At earlier stages, L2 learners focus on L1 word order properties. However, at the advanced proficiency stage, L1 distinctions between causation types encoded by certain periphrastic causatives seem to be more at play. It is claimed that the L2 data is more consistent with a view of transfer as a developmentally constrained process.
Instability and age effects at the lexicon-syntax interface
Authors: Kraš Tihana
Published: March 2014

This paper addresses the instability of the lexicon-syntax interface in bilingual L1 and L2 acquisition, as well as the effects of the age of first exposure to the L2 on the ultimate attainment of this interface. The phenomenon under scrutiny is auxiliary selection with intransitive verbs in Italian, whose orderly gradience is captured by the Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy. Child and adult Croatian advanced/near-native L2 speakers, Croatian-Italian simultaneous bilinguals and Italian L1 speakers performed an acceptability-judgment task. Bilingual L1 and L2 speakers proved to be sensitive to the gradience in auxiliary selection with intransitive verbs, but to have less determinate intuitions than monolingual L1 speakers, which is interpreted as evidence for the instability of the lexicon-syntax interface in non-monolingual development. In addition, adult L2 speakers proved to be less sensitive to the gradience than child L2 speakers, pointing to an interaction between the age of first exposure to the L2 and the acquisition of the lexicon-syntax interface.
Pragmatic solutions for syntactic problems: Understanding some L2 syntactic errors in terms of discourse-pragmatic deficits
Authors: Rothman Jason
Published: March 2014

Contemporary research in generative second language (L2) acquisition has attempted to address observable target-deviant aspects of L2 grammars within a UG-continuity framework (e.g. Lardiere 2000; Schwartz 2003; Sprouse 2004; Prévost & White 1999, 2000). With the aforementioned in mind, the independence of pragmatic and syntactic development, independently observed elsewhere (e.g. Grodzinsky & Reinhart 1993; Lust et al. 1986; Pacheco & Flynn 2005; Serratrice, Sorace & Paoli 2004), becomes particularly interesting. In what follows, I examine the resetting of the Null-Subject Parameter (NSP) for English learners of L2 Spanish. I argue that insensitivity to associated discoursepragmatic constraints on the discursive distribution of overt/null subjects accounts for what appear to be particular errors as a result of syntactic deficits. It is demonstrated that despite target-deviant performance, the majority must have native-like syntactic competence given their knowledge of the Overt Pronoun Constraint (Montalbetti 1984), a principle associated with the Spanish-type setting of the NSP.
A poverty-of-the-stimulus argument for the innateness of the identification conditions on VP ellipsis
Authors: Santos Ana Lúcia
Published: March 2014

The co-existence in European Portuguese of Null Complement Anaphora and of VP ellipsis licensed by main verbs poses a learnability problem and ultimately provides a poverty-of-the stimulus argument for the innateness of the identification conditions on VP ellipsis. If the identification constraint operating on ellipsis derives from innate principles and if the acquisition of VP ellipsis depends on the acquisition of V-to-I movement, we should expect VP ellipsis to be acquired as early as V-to-I. The analysis of a new spontaneous production corpus of the acquisition of EP shows that children produce VP ellipsis as early as 1;6 in simple contexts such as answers to yes-no questions. This is evidence for early V-to-I but it is also evidence for a very early ability to deal with the syntax – discourse interface, in case Merchant’s (2001) approach of the identification conditions on ellipsis is adopted.
The Status of Old French Clitics in the 12th Century
Authors: Culbertson Jennifer
Published: March 2014

This paper proposes a new analysis of 12th century Old French clitic pronouns as enclitics obeying independent constraints on positioning rather than simple proclitics on the finite verb, as they are traditionally considered. Several characteristics of 12th century OF clitics suggest that they are second position elements, and should be treated as independent from the verb, including their enclisis to preceding elements, sensitivity to the Tobler-Mussafia law, and clustering in second position. These behaviors are analyzed within an alignment approach to second-position effects, with clitics treated as instantiating agreement features and positioned post-syntactically (following Legendre 1998). The verb-second pattern in the language is given a parallel analysis where finite verb positioning is constrained by syntax but motivated by feature alignment.
Towards a Unified Account of Positive and Negative Polarity: Evidence from Romanian
Authors: Fălăus Anamaria
Published: March 2014

It has been recently argued (Szabolcsi 2004) that the distribution of positive polarity items can be accounted for in terms of negative polarity items-licensing. I present empirical evidence in favor of the strong relation between NPIs and PPIs on the basis of two types of polarity items in Romanian: n-words and the PPI oarecare. I argue that these dependent elements are sensitive to the same semantic property, namely antimorphy: the former are licensed only in antimorphic contexts, the latter are anti-licensed in the same anti-morphic environments. This generalization provides strong support for Szabolcsi’s claim that positive polarity is not just a prohibition to appear in the scope of negation, but rather “halfway licensing” of polarity sensitive items. At a more theoretical level, I argue that resumptive quantification is the semantic mechanism underlying the interpretation of both positive and negative polarity.
Prosodic structure and consonant development across languages
Authors: Arbisi-Kelm Timothy , Beckman Mary E.
Published: March 2014

This paper relates consonant development in first-language acquisition to the mastery of rhythmic structure, starting with the emergence of the “core syllable” in babbling. We first review results on very early phonetic development that suggest how a rich hierarchy of language-specific metrical structures might emerge from a universal developmental progression of basic utterance rhythms in interaction with ambient language input. We then describe salient differences in prosodic structures across the languages being studied in a cross-language investigation of phonological development, in which we are eliciting and analyzing recordings from hundreds of children aged two years through five years who are acquiring Cantonese, English, Greek, or Japanese. Finally, we present examples of how patterns of disfluent consonant production differ across children acquiring the different languages in this set, in ways that seem to be related to the differences in metrical organization across the languages.
The adaptation of Romanian loanwords from Turkish and French
Authors: Friesner Michael L.
Published: March 2014

This paper examines several factors affecting loanword adaptation, using a data set of Romanian loanwords from Turkish and French. After exploring the position of loanwords in the lexicon and the nature of the two contact situations, the author considers relevant social, morphological, and phonological factors. First is the difference in the loanwords’ semantic domains and their motivations for being borrowed. Next, the author introduces the morphophonological factors considered—stress, desinence class, and gender assignment—and discusses their behavior in the core vocabulary and previous relevant studies. Subsequently, the author examines the loanword data in detail, comparing and contrasting the Turkish- and French-origin loanwords. The author concludes that one must consider different modules of the language—the phonology and the morphology—and that only by contrasting borrowings from different languages into the same language can one determine the relative effect of internal and external factors on the outcome of contact.
The phonetics of tone in Saramaccan
Authors: Good Jeff
Published: March 2014

This paper presents the results of a preliminary investigation of the phonetics of tone in Saramaccan, an Atlantic creole spoken in Suriname. Two particular aspects of Saramaccan tonology are focused on (i) the ways in which a phonological split between words marked for pitch accent and words marked for lexical tone are manifested phonetically and (ii) the phonetic properties of a phonological process of high-tone plateauing found in the language. The results of the study indicate that, on a phonetic level, surface tones deriving from phonological pitch accent are not distinguished from true lexical tones, and they also establish the presence of a super-high tone found only ideophones. In addition, the study mostly verifies existing descriptions of the plateauing process.
Sri Lanka Malay
Authors: Smith Ian , Paauw Scott
Published: March 2014

Two sociolinguistic characteristics of Sri Lanka Malay (SLM) are atypical for a creole: a non-European, non-colonial lexifier (Vehicular Malay), and a single substrate (Sri Lanka Muslim Tamil) with which it remained in contact. The Tamil-like characteristics of present-day SLMdiffer from those often claimed to typify creoles. In particular, the SLMtense-mood-aspect system expresses Tamil categories rather than the traditional creole categories of anterior, nonpunctual and irrealis. Bakker (2000) claims 19th century SLM more closely resembled a ‘typical’ creole, and the Tamilization of SLM represents a recent process of ‘conversion’. However, present-day SLMdescends from (unrecorded) 19th century colloquial SLM, not from the written diglossic high. The Tamilized structure of SLM results more plausibly from its atypical developmental context than from recent influence.
A linguistic time-capsule
Authors: Ferreira Fernanda L.
Published: March 2014

The present study builds on the work of Lipski (2005a) regarding the nature and scope of Afro-Iberian language. It narrowly focuses on pluralization patterns found in historical texts covering five centuries. The analyses show that the representations of Black speech in Afro-Portuguese examples are consistent with a pattern of plural marking independently verified in comparable creole and semi-creole systems, such as Cape Verdean, Papiamentu, Helvécia and popular varieties of Brazilian Portuguese. Comparatively, the evidence of variation found in earlier Afro-Hispanic texts is less conclusive about the possible contribution of the bozal language to modern-day varieties of Caribbean Spanish. The analyses add to the debate over the prior creolization of non-standard varieties in Latin America.
Was Haitian ever more like French?
Authors: Parkvall Mikael
Published: March 2014

In the debate on whether or not plantation creoles started out their lives as pidgins, attention has focused on the amount of structure inherited from the lexifier language. Many who argue for a mother-daughter relationship between lexifiers and creoles assume that these similarities derive from the lexifier input in the original contact situation. It has also been suggested that the distance between creoles and their lexifiers grow steadily bigger by time. This paper argues that Haitian Creole, a creole not normally thought of as decreolized, has diachronically moved closer to French. The theoretical implication of this observation is that it allows the possibility of today’s Haitian having an ancestor more deviant from French, an ancestor which might have been a pidgin.
4. Papiamentu and Brazilian Portuguese
Authors: Kester Ellen-Petra , Schmitt Cristina
Published: March 2014

This paper presents a comparative study on bare nominals in Papiamentu and Brazilian Portuguese, taking into account also the distribution of definite and indefinite articles in these languages. Following Munn and Schmitt (2001) and Schmitt and Munn (1999 , 2003), we argue bare singulars in both languages are nouns phrases that lack interpretable number, which allows them to be interpreted both as singular or plural depending on the context. Semantically they can be interpreted as kinds as in Chierchia 1998 . The differences are to be explained by differences among the items competing for the same position in the syntactic structure. Bare plurals in both languages, on the other hand, differ syntactically and semantically. While bare plurals in Papiamentu are disguised bare plurals in the sense that they have a definite feature, which dramatically restricts their distribution, bare plurals in Brazilian Portuguese behave like English bare plurals.
1. The problem of multiple substrates: The case of Jamaican Creole
Authors: Kouwenberg Silvia
Published: March 2014

In this paper, I argue that the late seventeenth-century context in which Jamaican Creole emerged was one of multilingualism within the slave population, with no evidence for a dominant substrate language. This finding goes against established scholarship, which has claimed Akan as the dominant substrate for Jamaican Creole. A creolization context involving multiple substrates calls for a different substratist research methodology than that applied to cases where dominant substrates can be shown to exist. I will argue that a comparative typological research methodology is called for.
4. Optimizing public information brochures
Authors: de Jong Menno , Schellens Peter Jan
Published: March 2014

Various methods are available for the formative evaluation of public information brochures. An important objective of scholarly research in the field of document design is the development and validation of text evaluation methods. In this chapter, we describe two of our research projects in this area. Second, we describe the development of a text-focused evaluation method based on a functional analysis of brochures about laws and regulations. This approach appears to be particularly suited for detecting high-level deficiencies in brochures concerning, for instance, the macro-structure, navigational aids, and possible omissions in the information given.
8. Convincing citizens
Authors: Hoeken Hans
Published: March 2014

In a democracy, public acceptance of proposed policies is an important determinant of a successful government. Communication plays an important role in ascertaining public acceptance. The government has to convince the public that the proposed policy in the interest of the individual citizen or of society as a whole. To attain this goal, the government is expected to use proper arguments instead of taking its refuge to manipulation. Therefore, the quality of the arguments used is important. Argument quality is determined by two aspects: (1) argument strength, i.e., the belief in the probability that a consequence will arise, and (2) argument valence, i.e., the perceived desirability of the consequence. In order to convince the public of a policy’s desirability, the government has to convince the public that the policy will probably have desirable effects. This paper presents empirical research on how to attain this goal.
Common ground and (re)defanging the antagonistic: A paradigm for argumentation as shared inquiry and responsibility
Authors: Emmel Barbara A.
Published: March 2014

Any rhetorical exchange can involve a form of ‘identity theft’ if others attempt to wrest authorship from the rhetor. The paradigms of the late 1900s that privileged mutual inquiry into shared knowledge have now evolved into ones that privilege not only the shared, but also difference, debate, even dispute – and the ways in which we might change as a result of a negotiation between what is shared and what is unshared. Such paradigms seek to defang the antagonistic even as they recognize that inquiry into difference is an essential part of rhetorical exchange, as well as increased individual (and social) responsibility for position-taking, i.e. our very identities as social and thinking beings. Whereas ‘common ground’ now represents the acceptance of difference and responsibility as the starting point of any rhetorical exchange, a ‘rhetoric of recognition’ represents an increased awareness of the possibility of change as a result of rhetoric.
Irony as a rhetorical device in dialogic interaction
Authors: Feller Sebastian
Published: March 2014

In the present article I will critically discuss various approaches to irony originating from different disciplines. Besides traditional definitions of ironic speech dating back to Roman times as well as present-day linguistic models, I will also deal with irony from a psychological perspective. As this inquiry will show, all the approaches under discussion are exclusively monologic and so do not provide a full account of the communicative functions of ironic expressions in language use. I will therefore suggest a dialogic perspective which highlights the communicative effects of ironic talk neglected by previous models. As a result, I will show that irony need not merely be used by a speaker to bypass direct criticism in order to avoid conflict or to compensate for psychological incongruities but as a skilful rhetorical device to motivate the interlocutor to act for the good of herself or of other people around.
Recontextualization of concepts in European legal discourse
Authors: Kjær Anne Lise
Published: March 2014

This paper falls within the research field of legal linguistics. The subject is a question of great concern in current comparative legal research: Is it possible to develop a common legal language in the European Union, given the cultural and linguistic plurality of Europe? I argue that it is. What it requires is a common legal discourse and the development of a common European interpretive community. A key mechanism of this development is the recontextualization of legal concepts , i.e. the circulation of concepts among and across the national and international interpretive communities of the European Union accompanied by the discursive interactions of the legal actors at national and supranational levels of EU law. The contribution provides one element in a wider discourse analytical framework for the study of the paradox of ‘unity in diversity’ inherent in the ambition of developing a common legal language in Europe.
The cognitive motivation for the use of dangling participles in English
Authors: Hayase Naoko
Published: March 2014

Dangling participles are considered incorrect usage in written Standard English. Nonetheless, dangling participles enjoy widespread usage, particularly in spoken English. This paper argues that the use of dangling participles is semantically and cognitively motivated. In adopting a usage-based view and analyzing attested data from the British National Corpus, this study shows that constructions with a dangling participle describe a coherent “cognizance scenario” as their constructional meaning. The dangling participial construction evokes a conceptualizer who conceives the situation described in the main clause. Thanks to its constructional semantics, the dangling participle is especially common in text genres which focus on the interaction with the hearer.
Metaphoric motivation in grammatical structure
Authors: Baicchi Annalisa
Published: March 2014

This chapter is concerned with the use of non-motion verbs in the caused-motion construction. Their literal or figurative motional interpretation is claimed to be motivated by high-level conceptual metaphors. Typically, these non-motion verbs are lexically intransitive and coerced into transitive verbs in the caused-motion construction. The goal of the paper to identify the constructional meanings of these verbs resulting from processes of metaphorization. These meaning constructions are analyzed within the theoretical frameworks of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the Lexical-Constructional Model.
Motivation in English must and Hungarian kell
Authors: Pelyvas Peter
Published: March 2014

The aim of this paper is to find motivation (and perhaps also some of its limits) in grammatical structures associated with the English modal must and its Hungarian equivalent kell. Motivation is seen as coming from various ingredients of a conceptual structure associated with the modals that is assumed to be far more complex than was suggested in previous analyses of the 1990s. The view of modality offered here is more fine-grained in including participants and matching forces associated with them, especially in the deontic senses. The roles attributed to participants in conceptual structure can be seen as motivating alternative grammatical structures and, conversely, the presence of these structures can be taken as indirect evidence that the conceptual structure is valid. The correlation, however, has its limits as well. Some of the radical changes in conceptual structure resulting from the root to epistemic extension are at best marginally represented in grammatical structure. The paper also offers suggestions as to why this may be the case.
Intrinsic or extrinsic motivation?
Authors: Marzo Daniela
Published: March 2014

This paper is concerned with motivation and transparency in the lexicon. After a theoretical discussion of motivation, the author presents an empirical study that focuses on the motivation of formally simple and complex polysemous Italian words. It is shown that the motivatability of polysemous words does not depend on formal complexity alone, but also on the cognitive relation (metaphor vs. metonymy) that connects the meanings of a polysemous word.
Zones, facets, and prototype-based metonymy
Authors: Geeraerts Dirk , Peirsman Yves
Published: March 2014

This chapter investigates the relationship between metonymy and two related semantic phenomena: profile/zone discrepancy and facetization. Both of these phenomena aim to explain linguistic examples that activate only a specific zone or facet of the entity referred to. However, their precise semantic status, both with respect to each other and to metonymy, remains unclear. In order to resolve the resulting terminological confusion, we claim that profile/zone discrepancy functions as an overarching category that spans a continuum ranging from the classic concept of metonymy, via facetization, to non-metonymical language. We put forward several pragmatic, syntactic, and semantic arguments in support of this position.
Imperfective aspect and epistemic modality
Authors: Boogaart Ronny , Trnavac Radoslava
Published: March 2014

As is well known, the epistemic reading of modal verbs typically arises with imperfective complements. It is argued that this is related to a more general connection between imperfective aspect and subjectivity: imperfective forms express simultaneity of a situation with an independently provided point of reference. This may be a point of perspective, an epistemic evaluation time, or the point of speech itself. Data from Russian, however, suggest that this particular link between imperfective aspect and epistemic modality is restricted to imperfective aspect of the Germanic, and Romance, kind.
The epistemic uses of the English simple past and the French imparfait
Authors: Patard Adeline
Published: March 2014

This chapter explores the connection between past tense and modality in English and French. After arguing for a temporal definition of past tenses, I reinterpret the classical opposition between temporal uses and modal uses in terms of the speakers’s referential or subjective intentionality. I further distinguish between the epistemic uses – which express the speaker’s assessment of the probability of the denoted situation – and the illocutory uses – which express the speaker’s degree of commitment in her speech act. I finally suggest an analysis of two epistemic uses of the English simple past and the French imperfect, namely their conditional use and optative use, thanks to the notion of dialogism, which refers to the heterogeneity of the enunciative sources of a given utterance.
How novels feel
Authors: Keller Wolfram R. , Lohöfer Astrid , Ott Christine
Published: March 2014

This chapter investigates the depiction of cognitive processes within two “autofictional” novels, Serge Doubrovsky’s Fils and David Williams’s Eye of the Father. Both works feature literary scholars as the main protagonists, who recognize their own emotional predicament through their emotional and rational interpretations of literature. These texts speak in interesting ways to – and challenge – recent work in cognitive poetics, raising the question whether rational or emotional reading processes trigger epiphanies. Both novels suggest that the two different literary responses are interdependent, thus rendering suspect the possibility of purely rational, objective approaches to literature. Reading the novels at the nexus of emotion, “autofiction”, and interpretation, we argue that literary scholarship needs to account for emotional-subjective and rational-objective approaches.
A cultural-linguistic look at Japanese ‘eye’ expressions
Authors: Occhi Debra J.
Published: March 2014

The present study examines Japanese expressions related to the human eye, specifically the eye’s behavior as well as its various appearances. Among the meanings of these expressions, one finds an emphasis on judgment – of the object viewed or of the viewer’s emotional reaction or basic personality. The eye also forms the basis for an image schema motivating metaphoric uses of ‘eye’ to describe non-bodily matter. The schema of Japanese social hierarchy, which underlies a wealth of pragmatic variation in utterance forms (and has consequences for behavior), is based on a verticality metaphor that classifies people as ‘person/s above/below [the] eye’. Thus, expressions regarding eye contact between interlocutors reveal important details about the nature of their social interaction. Gender norms are also reflected in certain ‘eye’-related expressions. The findings of this study further our understanding of embodiment in language and culture in general as well as in Japanese in particular.
Convergence in cognitive linguistics
Authors: Langacker Ronald W.
Published: March 2014

In contrast to the generative tradition, the overall tendency in cognitive linguistics has been convergent rather than divergent. At the outset it was quite diverse, as it did not stem from any single theory, scholar, or object of description. The passing years have seen the recognition of common interests and the integration of various strands of research. Conceptual unifications have been achieved (e.g. the constructional approach to lexicon and grammar; metaphor and grammatical composition as instances of conceptual integration). There has been convergence with other theoretical approaches (even generativism, as it has evolved). From an initial focus on semantics and grammar cognitive linguistics has made contact with other disciplines, methodologies, and sources of evidence. A coherent overall view is emerging.
Do people infer the entailments of conceptual metaphors during verbal metaphor understanding?
Authors: Gibbs Raymond W. , Corrêa Ferreira Luciane
Published: March 2014

One of the central claims of conceptual metaphor theory is that metaphorical mappings from source to target domains express a rich set of correspondences or entailments. We present the results of a psychological experiment that suggests people can recognize certain metaphorical inferences about a target domain as being appropriate when they read metaphorical statements. Moreover, when people read verbal metaphors about a target domain, they see other metaphorical entailments from different conceptual metaphors as being less appropriate. These data are reasonably consistent with certain claims of conceptual metaphor theory, yet more empirical studies are needed to examine the conditions under which people actually generate entailments motivated by underlying conceptual metaphors during ordinary language use.
Compositional and embodied meanings of somatisms
Authors: Ziem Alexander , Staffeldt Sven
Published: March 2014

The chapter focuses on the problem of meaning determination of German idioms that consist of at least two words and contain a body part term as a constituent. Such so-called “somatisms” make up a considerable part of the phrasemes in German and English. What do these terms in idiomatic somatisms designate? Addressing this question, we examine two controversial issues in current cognitive linguistic research: (i) Are the meanings of bodily expressions in somatisms arbitrary? (ii) To what extent are the meanings of somatisms and of their somatic constituents grounded in human bodily experience? By analyzing selected examples of phrasemes containing Finger on the basis of substantial corpus data, answers to these questions are provided.
2. Pragmatically disambiguating space
Authors: Maillat Didier
Published: March 2014

This chapter addresses two points of a research agenda set by Levinson and Wilkins (2006) for the analysis of spatial information processing in natural languages. First, a pragmatic model is proposed that relies mostly on general pragmatic principles to inferentially disambiguate semantically underdetermined spatial expressions. Second, this model is claimed to be cross-linguistically applicable and leads to a universal generalisation about the pragmatics of spatial frames of reference. In the second part, a report is provided of an experimental design in support of the theoretical points raised before. Finally, cross-linguistic evidence from Tzeltal is proposed to back the generalisation argued for. To conclude, the evidence presented is taken to strongly support the predictions made by a pragmatic model of spatial language. Such a model offers a fresh take on the central question of universality vs. linguistic diversity in spatial language as it uses semantic and pragmatic universals to explain linguistic variation.
7. Language-specific perspectives in reference to time in the discourse of Czech, English, and Hungarian speakers
Authors: Vanek Norbert
Published: March 2014

This chapter investigates patterns exhibited in the way native speakers of Czech, English, and Hungarian organise temporal information for the expression of events in context. Cross-linguistic contrasts have been identified with respect to four discourse dimensions: levels of granularity, degrees of condensation, preferred topic time management techniques, as well as selected event perspectivation frames. Through the analyses of film retellings and written picture descriptions, comparable language-specific patterns surfaced across modalities and task types. Observed systematic differences in event construal support the idea of language-specificity in the processes of time perspectivation. It is claimed that perspectivation contrasts stem from differences in the linguistic means that are available for encoding temporality in particular languages, and emerge as a result of minimising ambiguity.
17. A temporal approach to motion verbs
Authors: Nishi Yumiko
Published: March 2014

This chapter examines the temporal meaning of motion verbs ‘come’ and ‘go’ in languages that have deictically specified lexical forms. Even though motion events of coming and going usually involve duration in reality, the situations denoted by ‘come’ and ‘go’ are typically conceptualized as a punctual event. Yet, some differences were observed in the temporal meanings of the two verbs within languages and across languages. It is argued that what is entailed by these two verbs is different beyond the spatial deictic constraints, and languages differ in how temporal meaning is encoded in the verb forms. The present chapter explores the relationship between space and time by focusing on the semantics of verbs that involves change of location through time.
3. Aspectual coercions in content composition
Authors: Asher Nicholas , Hunter Julie
Published: March 2014

This chapter investigates the encoding of temporal information in aspect, and how that information may shift based on contextual factors. Analyzing these shifts leads to a more complex view as to how temporal information in a sentence or a discourse results from meaning composition than standardly assumed.
5. The “Russian” attitude to time
Authors: Apresjan Valentina
Published: March 2014

This chapter explores the semantics and pragmatics of the Russian temporal syntactic phraseme ‘X to X’, which expresses either the speaker’s surprise at the fact that events go as planned (surprising punctuality interpretation) or the speaker’s surprise at the fact that unplanned events go as if they had been pre-planned (surprising fateful coincidence interpretation). While the construction is not unique, and occurs in other languages, its preferred interpretations are language-specific. The chapter demonstrates differences between Russian and English outlooks on time, based on their fundamental differences in linguistic worldviews. While in Russian surprising punctuality interpretation prevails, English favours the surprising fateful coincidence interpretation of this phraseme (see also Charlier, this volume on Mongolian temporality).
Chapter 6. Metaphorical expressions in L2 production
Authors: Golden Anne
Published: March 2014

To what extent do learners of Norwegian use metaphorical expressions in Norwegian? What types of expression are used, in which context, and by whom? What are the learners’ characteristics? Does their mother tongue influence their use of certain expressions? Using data from the ASK corpus at the University of Bergen, this chapter examines metaphorical expressions involving the high frequency nuclear verb ta (English: ‘take’) in the writing of learners with German, Spanish and Russian as their first language. All the expressions are compared with frequencies of these expressions in written Norwegian used by native speakers. The findings of this study reveal the importance of the topic in comparative studies of this kind.
Chapter 7. Researching linguistic metaphor in native, non-native and expert writing
Authors: Chapetón-Castro Claudia Marcela , Verdaguer Isabel
Published: March 2014

In order to discover where pedagogical efforts need to be made in helping students to develop metaphorical competence in their writing, it is necessary to be able to show what distinguishes the kind of metaphorical language used by native and non-native speakers of the language, and if there are any differences between the kind of metaphors used in writing by native and non-native speakers of English of the same age and educational background and those used by older, more expert writers. The aim of this chapter is to illustrate how we may arrive at a detailed description of the similarities and differences between metaphor use by different groups of writers through the application of a combined procedure of metaphor identification.
Chapter 11. Conceptual types of terminological metaphors in marine biology
Authors: Ureña Gómez-Moreno José Manuel
Published: March 2014

Metaphor can be analysed from a structural, functional, conceptual, or contrastive point of view. From a conceptual viewpoint, an experientialist account of conceptual metaphor includes: (i) mechanisms of metaphorization, (ii) image metaphors vs. multiple-correspondence metaphors, (iii) motivation for metaphorical transfer, and (iv) conceptual themes (Alexiev 2004). This chapter draws on Alexiev’s parameters to analyse an inventory of metaphorical pairs in English and Spanish extracted from a bilingual corpus of specialized research articles and publications on marine biology. The results obtained point to the existence of cross-linguistic conceptual patterns in specialized discourse in the two languages studied. These findings and their implications are discussed in relation to some of the claims of Lakoff’s (1993) Conceptual Metaphor Theory.
Chapter 16. Metaphors, snowflakes, and termite nests
Authors: Gibbs Raymond W.
Published: March 2014

Metaphoric language is very much the product of human action, and many scholars now claim that metaphor in language arises from metaphors in thought. But the reasons for why we think metaphorically and speak (gesture) in these ways may be rooted in principles of self-organization that describe the existence, and forms, of many other animate and inanimate things, ranging from snowflakes to termite nests. This chapter describes the benefits of looking at metaphor from a self-organizational point of view, known as dynamical systems theory, and suggests how this perspective can solve several long-standing debates in metaphor scholarship on the variability of metaphors in context and the mental processes by which they are understood.
Does Searle’s challenge affect chances for approximating assertion and quotative modal wollen?
Authors: Gärtner Hans-Martin
Published: March 2014

The possibility of reporting on overheard monologic or ‘secret’ language use by means of the German quotative modal wollen shows that a ‘volitional-epistemic’ analysis of the latter is problematic. This finding allows making a further distinction between Searle’s and Zaefferer’s analyses of assertion, indicating that only the former, based solely on speaker commitment, would be able to properly approximate assertion and quotative wollen. However, embeddability of wollen under negation casts doubt on the desirability of such an approximation. Keywords: assertion; commitment; embedding; quotative evidentials; volition
The pragmatics of argumentation
Authors: Becker Thomas
Published: March 2014

Argumentation in everyday life is a matter of pragmatics. A speaker who utters an assertion that is meant to be an argument is not only committed to the truth of the assertion itself and its presuppositions but also to the implicit premises that make the assertion a reasonable argument. For example, if a speaker utters an argumentum ad verecundiam “Dr XY said so”, he is committed to the truth of “Dr XY is an expert in the relevant field” among other premises. This follows from the properties of assertions alone if the commitment attributed to assertions is extended from ‘commitment to truth’ to ‘commitment to relevance’. Keywords:﻿﻿ argumentation; assertion; commitment; implicit premises; relevance; truth
Variation in the categorization of motion events by Danish, German, Turkish, and L2 Danish speakers
Authors: Jessen Moiken , Cadierno Teresa
Published: March 2014

This study examines the semantic categories in the motion domain by adult learners of Danish with typologically different L1s – Turkish and German, and compares their categorization patterns to that of Danish NSs. The participants described 39 video clips depicting a large variety of motion events. The results of the study showed that the meanings assigned by the two learner groups to the Danish motion verbs gå ‘walk’, løbe ‘run’ and kravle ‘crawl’ are influenced by the semantic categorization of their respective L1s. In addition, typological membership is found to play a role with respect to the processes involved in the restructuring of meaning/conceptual categories. These processes involve both conceptual transfer from the learners’ L1 to the L2 and conceptual convergence.
Iconicity and the divine in the fin de siècle poetry of W.B. Yeats
Authors: Pryor Sean
Published: March 2014

This article examines the iconicity of the divine in the early poetry of W. B. Yeats. It begins with a central difficulty: how can poetic form mime meaning when that meaning, the divine, is unknown or even ineffable? Some of Yeats’s early poems respond to this difficulty with an ironic form of iconicity, mourning the fact that the more a poem seems like the divine, the less it is divine. The article then explores the ways in which Yeats’s early poetry tests this distinction between likeness and identity. It closes by examining certain poems which transform iconic effects into acts of creation (so that it is as if meaning mimes form), and by exploring the troubling implications of this inversion.
Meaning on the one and on the other hand
Authors: Adam Meike , Iversen Wiebke , Willkinson Erin , Morford Jill P.
Published: March 2014

The present study investigates the effect of language-specific knowledge on iconicity ratings of native and foreign signs. German signers judged the iconicity and similarity of DGS (German Sign Language) and ASL (American Sign Language) signs. We found that iconicity ratings were higher for DGS than for ASL signs, and that DGS signers perceived the ASL signs to be less iconic than ASL signers. Further, iconicity judgements of foreign signs were mediated by the phonological and conceptual similarity of those signs to DGS signs. Overall our results indicate that iconicity is not an ontological attribute of the sign itself, no ‘objective iconicity’ exists. We conclude that the perception of iconic reference depends on an interpreter and is shaped by language-specific experiences.
Iconic text strategies
Authors: Ungerer Friedrich
Published: March 2014

This paper takes the iconic approach to text interpretation beyond the traditional perspectives of iconic sequencing, iconic proximity and quantitative iconicity by claiming that for our comprehension of texts strategies we depend on the holistic or gestalt transfer from complex natural or human action patterns. Pursuing this line the article not only presents prototypical examples (guidebooks and manuals for the path strategy, the top-down structure of news stories for the sorting & weighting strategy and lyrical poems for the kaleidoscope strategy), but also discusses examples of strategy blends and strategy incorporation, focussing on the relationship between individual episodes and overarching strategies found in films such as Les favoris de la lune, Short Cuts, Night on Earth and Italiensk for Begyndere.