bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Mauritian Creole determiner system
Authors: Guillemin Diana
Published: March 2014

The process of article incorporation early in the genesis of Mauritian Creole (MC) resulted in the occurrence of a bare nouns in argument positions with ambiguous interpretations between (in)definite, singular, plural and generic. A new determiner system gradually emerged, but MC continues to admit bare nouns in argument positions. It is argued in this paper that the process of article incorporation triggered a shift in noun denotation from predicative in French to argumental in MC. Like English bare plurals, MC nouns are of an argumental kind-denoting terms that do not require a determiner in argument positions. The MC singular indefinite article enn and the plural marker bann serve to cderive instances of kinds. The differential behaviour of MC count and mass nouns is attributed to the number feature which must be checked for count nouns, and provides evidence for a phonologically null definite determiner which is licensed in subject position by the specificity marker la.
Contact, complexification and change in Mindanao Chabacano structure
Authors: Grant Anthony P.
Published: March 2014

This paper examines several instances of phonological and structural complexification in Mindanao Chabacano, a predominantly Spanish-lexifier creole of southwestern Mindanao, which have arisen as the result of the interaction of elements of Philippine (especially Tagalog and the Bisayan languages), Spanish and English origin in the language, which have given rise to contact-induced change in the language’s structure.
Morphosyntactic finiteness as increased complexity in a mixed negation system
Authors: Slomanson Peter
Published: March 2014

This paper presents data from negation in Sri Lankan Malay (SLM), a language whose grammar has converged typologically on the grammar of Sri Lankan Muslim Tamil, and to some extent of Sinhala. SLM negation exhibits greater inflectional complexity than its lexifier, by encoding finiteness and tense features. SLM has also developed independently of the other Sri Lankan languages. It has developed a strict morphological contrast between all non-finite negation contexts on the one hand (infinitives, participles, and imperatives), and finite negation contexts (tensed verbs). This effectively circumvents the Dravidian constraint blocking co-occurring tense and negation morphology, in order to emphasize a contrast which is salient in the discourse structure that is common to the languages in the sprachbund.
Competition and selection
Authors: Aboh Enoch Oladé
Published: March 2014

This paper demonstrates that the notion of simplicity as often used in creole studies is completely irrelevant to the understanding of the structure, as well as the genesis, of creole languages. This is because creole languages are linguistic hybrids in the biological sense. They emerge from the recombination of linguistic features from different languages. Given this perspective, it appears that what could be of some relevance to the study of language change is rather the notion of complexity. Within the framework of Competition and Selection as proposed in Mufwene (2001ff.), and adopted in this paper, creole languages develop opaque syntactic and semantic features. These could not have arisen solely in the context of their source languages. Accordingly, the common claim that creoles are simplified versions of their sources is a fallacy, just as it would be to claim in biology that hybrids are genetically simplified children of their parents.
Motivating the flexibility of oriented -ly adverbs
Authors: Broccias Cristiano
Published: March 2014

This paper discusses participant-oriented uses of adverbs and tries to motivate their conceptual flexibility within a framework largely inspired by Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar. Usually, at least two types of participant-oriented adverb are identified, manner and transparent adverbs. It is argued here that they define a network where both a schema and a prototype can be recognized and that the difference between manner and transparent adverbs results from a difference in vantage point. Transparent adverbs, which code either cause or result, imply an internal vantage point while manner adverbs imply an external vantage point. The prototype is identified with those (manner) adverbs which involve some (external) evaluation of the clausal event on the part of the conceptualizer. The schema is regarded as merely coding temporal coextension between the verbal event and the property hinted at by the adjectival base of the adverb. Finally, the relation between participant-oriented adverbs, on the one hand, and depictive adjectives and resultative adverbs is also briefly addressed.
What motivates an inference?
Authors: Izutsu Mitsuko Narita , Izutsu Katsunobu
Published: March 2014

The present article proposes both theoretical and empirical explanations for the semantic shift from the meaning temporal/spatial overlap to the meaning contrast/concessive, observable across genetically and geographically unrelated languages (e.g. English while, Japanese -nagara). The shift involves metonymic inference (Traugott & König 1991). However, our three experiments show that this inference is further motivated by a temporal/spatial overlap of two situations, which largely corresponds to perceptual overlap in Langacker’s viewing arrangement. Therefore, among Radden and Panther’s (2004) language-independent factors of motivation, perceptual motivation (perceptual overlap) is more fundamental to the semantic change in question than cognitive motivation (metonymic inference).
Metonymy, metaphor and the “weekend frame of mind”
Authors: Brdar Mario , Brdar-Szabó Rita
Published: March 2014

A series of corpus-based case studies on the availability of metonymically used proper names in the language of media, where the name of a capital is used to refer indirectly to the government, shows that this particular type of metonymy is available in Hungarian and Croatian but underused in comparison with English and German. The picture is all the more puzzling because the distribution of metonymies is very uneven in Hungarian and Croatian – some texts exhibiting hardly any such metonymies while they abound in some other texts. When examined along the temporal dimension, the data reveal a cyclic variation in the availability of these metonymies, with productivity regularly peaking at the weekend. These contrasts appear to be ultimately motivated by the workings of a cultural model whose essential ingredient is a correlation obtaining between two very general conceptual metaphors: time is space and social and mental world is physical world.
The “meaning-full” vocabulary of English and German
Authors: Sanchez-Stockhammer Christina
Published: March 2014

It is widely believed that only a small part of the English vocabulary is analyzable into constituents that are both formally and semantically related to the meaning of the complex word. De Saussure (1916) already described English as a langue lexicologique, a phenomenon that Leisi (1955) attributes to the large proportion of Romance words that have become part of the originally Germanic English language. Leisi concludes that, in contrast to German, many words of contemporary English are not integrated into any word family.This paper presents the results of a research project in which the motivatability of the 2,500 most frequent English and German words is investigated. The approach adopted here distinguishes the four categories of ‘fully motivatable’, ‘partially motivatable’, ‘unmotivatable but transparent’ and ‘fully unmotivatable’ words. The two most important findings of the study are: (i) the German vocabulary is in fact more motivatable than the English vocabulary – if only marginally so, and (ii) the non-native origin of a word has no negative effect on its motivatability.
Reviewing the properties and prototype structure of metonymy
Authors: Barcelona Antonio
Published: March 2014

Building on previous research (Barcelona, 2002, 2003), the author carefully discusses and takes a stand on the issues he finds problematic in the standard cognitive linguistic notion of metonymy. These include, among others, the status of metonymy as a mapping, as a stand-for relationship, as a type of activation, and as a type of “domain highlighting”; prototype-based vs. unitary definitions of metonymy; and the distinction of metonymy from metaphor, “modulation”, “facets”, and active zones. On the basis of his discussion of those issues, he puts forward a technical unitary (“schematic”) notion of metonymy, which he claims to coexist with three tightly interrelated prototype-based notions of metonymy that he proposes: “purely schematic”, “typical”, and “prototypical” metonymies, all parts of a continuum.
The role of metonymy in complex tropes
Authors: Herrero Ruiz Javier
Published: March 2014

This chapter, following preliminary work in Herrero (2009), adds to Lakoff’s (1987) taxonomy of icms other so-called figures of speech or tropes (often disregarded within Cognitive Linguistics) such as irony, oxymoron, overstatement, understatement, euphemism, and dysphemism. These figures are icms refined to create specific meaning effects, and can be divided into: (i) simple (models in which the generation of additional meanings is built upon propositional icms), and (ii) complex (tropes in which the creation of extra meaning is based on a representational, non-propositional, model). The present chapter studies the role of metonymy in producing the extra meaning effects conveyed by some complex tropes, in terms of both the cognitive operations associated with metonymy and its pragmatic implications.
What do metonymic chains reveal about the nature of metonymy?
Authors: Brdar-Szabó Rita , Brdar Mario
Published: March 2014

The central issue that concerns us in this chapter is whether metonymy should be conceived as a mapping. The way metonymies function in authentic discourse indicates that we have two-way traffic. The initial conceptual substrate is designated by the source concept, but it is plastic and flexible enough to allow considerable customizing, often within complex metonymic networks. The inferences that steer the customizing are guided by the information based on text (i.e., cotext) and context (circumstances). It is argued that metonymy should best be approached as an inference-based domain elaboration (either expansion or reduction) of the metonymic source, in the course of which domains are tailored to an optimal conceptual measure with regard to their function.
Grounding in terms of anchoring relations
Authors: Temurcu Ceyhan
Published: March 2014

This chapter aims to contribute to the understanding of the connection between ‘present time reference’ and the evidential category ‘new information’ by investigating the epistemic associations of the Turkish ‘continuous aspect’ marker -Iyor (when used as the only TAM marker on a verbal predicate), with analyses based on the framework of anchoring relations developed in Temürcü (2007). Similar to Brisard’s (2002b, 2005) analysis of the English present progressive construction, -Iyor is shown to be associated with ‘epistemic contingency’. The treatment is then compared to the epistemic account of tenses and aspects in Cognitive Grammar. It is argued that temporal and epistemic categories should be taken as distinct but interacting components of sentence meaning and that the connection between ‘present time reference’ and ‘new information’ is best explained in terms of metonymy.
New current relevance in Croatian
Authors: Stanojević Mateusz-Milan , Geld Renata
Published: March 2014

Croatian grammarians make conflicting claims about the Croatian aorist. Some consider it a general past tense used with perfective verbs denoting completed past while others believe that it denotes a recent past action. Both accounts focus on one of aorist uses, failing to explain some others, notably future reference. Based on a corpus study and speaker judgments, we claim that the Croatian aorist has a dual role as an aspectual and tense phenomenon expressing epistemic immediacy. We propose an analysis that contrasts an epistemically immediate virtual plane (which includes the aorist) and an epistemically distant virtual plane (which includes the Croatian perfect tense), offering a unified explanation of all aorist uses and fitting in with other Croatian and cross-Slavic data.
Communicating about the past through modality in English and Thai
Authors: Jaszczolt Katarzyna M. , Srioutai Jiranthara
Published: March 2014

The chapter concerns semantic representation of past-time reference. It begins with the proposal that temporality be subsumed under the category of epistemic modality, understood as a degree of detachment from the content of the expressed proposition. We present arguments in support of this stance and refer to other arguments already aired in the linguistic and philosophical literature. We briefly summarise the contextualist theory of Default Semantics and apply it to the analysis of past-time expressions in Thai and English. We point out that the semantic representation of temporal expressions requires a perspective that combines the insights of cognitive approaches to meaning with a formal account of ‘pragmatic compositionality’. We focus on the Simple Past and Narrative Present in English and on the modal auxiliary d1ay1II in Thai that frequently assumes past-time reference.
Genre between the humanities and the sciences
Authors: Steen Gerard J.
Published: March 2014

This chapter outlines an approach to genre as the driving force behind language, cognition, and communication. Genre can and has been studied in the humanities as well as the cognitive and social sciences, but the present chapter presents a theoretical integration of these approaches and offers a model that can be empirically investigated by various methods across the board of these disciplines. The model itself is based in cognitive psychology, and a number of possibilities and implications for text analysis are illustrated. Both the role of language itself as well as the connection with literature are included in the discussion in order to suggest how a complete picture can be achieved of the bi-directional traffic between cognitive science and the humanities.
Culture-specific concepts of emotionality and rationality
Authors: Niemeier Susanne
Published: March 2014

The cultural models of emotionality and rationality showing up in figurative language use vary extensively on a worldwide scale. Such variation is largely due to different cultural backgrounds, for instance, concerning underlying ethnomedical or philosophical beliefs. The present chapter reports on a research project involving various, partly unrelated languages and the different cultural models that underlie these cultures’ conceptualizations of emotions and of the mind. Three general categories of conceptualization (namely abdominocentrism, cardiocentrism, and cerebrocentrism) are distinguished and discussed. As an example from the category of cerebrocentrism, metaphorical and metonymic expressions referring to emotionality and rationality concepts in present-day English are analyzed in depth.
WRITING is medicine
Authors: Busse Beatrix
Published: March 2014

This chapter investigates Paul Auster’s novels The Brooklyn Follies (2006) and The Book of Illusions (2002) from a cognitive stylistic and corpus stylistic perspective. The first section shows that, following Fauconnier and Turner’s (2002) approach to blending, the blend of writing is medicine, and some variations on it, structure the main characters’ mental lives as well as the readers’ inferencing processes. In the second part of the chapter, I test to what extent the blend of writing is medicine has a textually foregrounded base. Drawing on corpus stylistic methods, I demonstrate that the input spaces of writing and medicine both implicitly and explicitly show up in the lexico-grammatical structure of The Brooklyn Follies. Finally, I stress the need for using a cognitive stylistic approach in conjunction with text-based methods to measure and describe in detail the lexico-grammatical character of a text.
Embodied mind and cross-cultural narrative patterns
Authors: Zhang Yehong
Published: March 2014

The fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm are important because of their influence on literary socialization in East Asia. Following a brief survey of the translation history of the tales, I analyze their structure in relation to the characteristics of children’s thinking, and suggest that the prototype experience of the fictional world corresponds to the conceptual structure of narrative patterns in the reader’s mind. I argue that this interaction derives from embodied cognition, which acts as one of the roots of universal understanding of narratives. The results from an empirical study of cross-cultural reading responses demonstrate how plot prediction and, especially, spatial imagination about Grimms’ tales display this embodied cognition.
Verbal irony in Shakespeare’s dramatic works
Authors: Müller Wolfgang G.
Published: March 2014

The present study of Shakespeare’s use of irony refers to two theories, first, the echoic mention theory, which assumes that a speech act is ironic when the speaker mentions or echoes an earlier utterance in order to express an attitude of contempt or ridicule towards it, and, second, the theory of irony according to which the ironic speaker pretends to be an injudicious person speaking to an uninitiated audience, intending the addressees of the irony to discover the pretence. Passages I analyze are taken mainly from Shakespeare’s early comedy The Taming of the Shrew and from his Roman tragedy Julius Caesar. Having looked at literary irony from the angle of cognitive theory, two fundamental questions are discussed: (i) whether the recourse to Cognitive Linguistics provides insight into the phenomenon of literary irony and, (ii) what the study of literary irony can contribute to the discussion of irony in Cognitive Linguistics.
How does the mind do literary work?
Authors: Thoms Gary , Versace Stefano
Published: March 2014

In this chapter we present a number of examples regarding literary forms and the way the mind processes them, ranging from meter to deviant syntactic structures in avant-garde literature. In particular, we look into the mismatches between these forms and language. Arguing against traditional positions in literary and linguistic criticism, we show the advantages of divorcing functional and structural relations between language and literary structures. Instead we suggest that the complex relations between literary form and language are best accounted for by building on a modular approach to cognition (Fodor 1983), thus developing a more theoretically and empirically coherent theory of literary forms (e.g. Fabb 2009).
Cognitive linguistics as a cognitive science
Authors: Stefanowitsch Anatol
Published: March 2014

Cognitive linguistics is on its way to becoming a cognitive science, but a number of problems remain. The relationship between cognitive linguistics and the core cognitive sciences (psychology and neurology) must be clarified: cognitive linguists can selectively import models and methods from these disciplines as a foundation for their linguistic theories, they can export their own models to these disciplines for empirical testing and integration, or they can transform linguistics into a core cognitive science in its own right. The latter requires a number of changes to the models and practices of cognitive linguistics: it must refocus on its linguistic heritage, adopt a more scientific outlook, gain a higher degree of methodological awareness and restrict its models to linguistic constructs and hypotheses that can be operationalized and falsified.
Dynamic body parts in Estonian figurative descriptions of emotion
Authors: Vainik Ene
Published: March 2014

This study applies cognitive metaphor and metonymy theory to Estonian descriptions of emotion that reference body parts. Body parts like the chest and heart are conceptualized as containers for emotion. More common is the figurative exploitation of the dynamic, changeable parts of the head, in particular the face, the eyes, and lips. No correspondence seems to hold between specific emotions and specific body parts. Most are used to refer to both positive and negative emotions, the latter found to be more frequent. Interestingly, the conceptual metaphors good is up and bad is down are not always applicable: up does not always convey good in Estonian body part expressions, but rather means activated, with either a positive or negative evaluation. It is proposed that conceptualizations are made from either an Emoter’s or an Observer’s perspective and are found to correlate with metaphorical and metonymic codings, respectively.
Speech organs and linguistic activity/function in Chinese
Authors: Yu Ning
Published: March 2014

This chapter investigates the Chinese cultural understanding of speech and language based on the metonymic chain from speech organ to language as proposed by Radden (2004): speech organ → speaking → speech → language. The focus is on three metonymies, speech organ for speaking, speech organ for speech, and speech organ for language. It is found that the first two are abundant in conventionalized expressions, but speech organ for language, widely attested across languages (Radden 2004), is not realized lexically in Chinese. While speech organ for language is not manifested in the Chinese lexicon, it is nevertheless realized in its logographic writing system as components of the characters. Chinese characters representing ‘language’ and ‘speech’ contain within them the ‘mouth’ radical as a semantic component. This finding provides an interesting and telling example of how the general cognitive principle of embodiment can be realized in and embraced by a culture-specific environment.
Inner and outer body parts
Authors: Nagai Tomokazu , Hiraga Masako K.
Published: March 2014

The aim of this chapter is to consider the relationship between the outer and inner body as sources of motivation for metonymy and metaphor. We base our discussion on examples of Japanese expressions that use outer and inner areas of the body centered around the abdominal region: hara ‘belly’ and koshi ‘lower back’, respectively. Figurative expressions with koshi, which are linked to a human possessor, are strongly related to motion or attitude, while the ones with hara are related to mental or spiritual states or activities. Moreover, there is a tendency for the two words to differ in the way that their core meanings are tropically extended: koshi-related expressions are mainly extended metonymically, whereas hara-related expressions are extended metaphorically. However, this tendency of motivation by metonymy and metaphor does not hold when koshi and hara are figuratively used with non-human referents in the external world.
Figurative dimensions of 3ayn ‘eye’ in Tunisian Arabic
Authors: Maalej Zouheir
Published: March 2014

In Tunisian Arabic (TA), ‘heart’ is the most productive body part term in the conceptualization of emotions, cultural values, character traits, and mental faculties (Maalej 2004, 2008). Next in productivity is the outer body part 3ayn ‘eye’. The eye offers the following imaginative configurations: (i) image schema-based metaphors, (ii) metonymy-motivated metaphors, (iii) metaphors, and (iv) metonymies. The goal of the chapter is to show how TA embodies the mind via a cultural ‘eye’ model in the conceptualization of various mental faculties (knowing, understanding, thinking, speaking), physical states (sleep, death, passage of time), emotions (love, desire, anger, guilt, envy), character traits (ambition, greed, naiveté, insolence), and cultural values (respect and hospitality). The findings point to the dominance of metaphors and image schemas in the conceptualization of experience embodied through 3ayn ‘eye’ in TA, and the prevalence of culture-specific embodiment, i.e. embodiment that is not universally attested.
The apocalypse happens when the feet take the position of the head
Authors: Aksan Mustafa
Published: March 2014

Terms for the body parts head and feet appear in various conceptual metonymies and metaphors in Turkish. This chapter investigates the role of these body parts in the embodied conceptualization of social stratification in Turkish, exploiting the image schema of verticality (up-down). The head (up) profiles the cultural metonymies head for order, head for ruler, head for talent. The foot (down) profiles conceptual metaphors such as less is down, low status is down, and being subject to control or force is down. As a consequence of these metaphoric and metonymic folk models, ‘head’ most often implies positive cultural values whereas ‘foot’ is evaluated negatively. Cases are analyzed in which terms for ‘head’ and ‘feet’ combine in a number of metonymies and metaphors. In such expressions, the position of body parts on the verticality scale is used to conceptualize contrasts in social stratification.
Pattern versus process concepts of grammar and mind
Authors: Nuyts Jan
Published: March 2014

This chapter focuses on one element dividing cognitive linguistics and more traditional functional linguistic approaches to grammar, viz. the contrast between the construction oriented approach predominating in the former and the rule or process oriented approach prevailing in the latter. It offers a ‘conceptual analysis’ of the issue, arguing (i) that a process concept of grammar is not misguided (pace suggestions to the contrary by some cognitive linguists) but needs to integrate certain insights from the constructional approach, and (ii) that in some version the two model types are largely compatible, reflecting different perspectives on the same phenomena.
Emotion and desire in independent complement clauses
Authors: Panther Klaus-Uwe , Thornburg Linda L.
Published: March 2014

We advocate the use of theoretical tools from both cognitive linguistics and contemporary pragmatics to analyze complement clause constructions that are syntactically dependent but independent in terms of their illocutionary force, as exemplified in English by That it should have come to this! Such apparent mismatches between syntactic form and illocutionary function raise important questions about how much of meaning is compositional and how much is inferential, i.e. to be derived through metaphoric, metonymic and/or pragmatic elaboration. The focus of this study is on German complement clauses headed by the complementizer dass, but data from other languages are also adduced, attesting to the fact that this speech act construction is not an isolated and quirky phenomenon restricted to one language.
The conceptual motivation of bahuvrihi compounds in English and Spanish
Authors: Barcelona Antonio
Published: March 2014

This chapter investigates a representative sample of English and Spanish bahuvrihi compounds (BCs). The main thesis is that, although BCs are motivated by the overriding metonymy characteristic property for category, the property itself can be conceptualized “literally” (as in humpback or dos piezas), metonymically (as in acidhead or simpecado), or metaphtonymically, with two major types and several subtypes (fathead, cabeza cuadrada, featherweight, caradura). The analysis is followed by a brief discussion of the connection between the semantics of BCs and their grammatical and prosodic form, and by some remarks on the contrasts between the two languages.
Cognitive linguistics meets the corpus
Authors: Stefanowitsch Anatol
Published: March 2014

A first empirical turn in cognitive linguistics (CL) occurred in the mid–1990s, when researchers began to apply psycholinguistic methods to CL research questions, which quickly gained widespread acceptance in the field. More recently, a number of CL researchers have turned to corpus-linguistic methods, but these are not yet widely accepted. This is surprising, given the strong commitment in the CL community to ‘usage-based’ models of language. In this paper, I take up a number of ideas from construction grammar and cognitive linguistics and confront them with corpus data and corpus methods in order to show how such data may be used to address cognitive linguistic research issues that are difficult or impossible to address in other ways.
Oops blush!
Authors: Tissari Heli
Published: March 2014

In this chapter I relate the metonymic, embodied basis of emotion metaphors, illustrated, for example, by Zoltán Kövecses’s research in the 1980s and 1990s, to the concept of affect as discussed in a tradition founded by Silvan Tomkins. I focus on Tomkins’s claim that the responses of the body to stimulation constitute the affect itself. This can be seen as a challenge to the theory of conceptual metaphor: to what extent are emotion metaphors actually metaphorical, or is Tomkin’s claim itself a metaphor? Instead of attempting to resolve this puzzle, attention is given to shame in particular, in order to illustrate how work on conceptual metaphors and an understanding of affect as a fundamentally embodied phenomenon might cross-fertilize each other.
Conceptual construal and social construction
Authors: Harder Peter
Published: March 2014

This chapter focuses on what happens when “emerged” concepts acquire a role in the social process: where concepts go, rather than where they come from. Conceptual construal is seen as the mind-internal end of a process that also involves social ‘construction’. The relationship is discussed in relation to an evolutionary approach to language change (Croft 2000), and the discussion emphasizes the role of causal power as criterial for the distinction between conceptual and social constructions. The framework is contrasted with analysis in terms of ‘discourses’ and analysis in terms of ‘framing’ and is illustrated by an analysis of the so-called ‘cartoon crisis’, a salient example of how social processes involving contested concepts raise interesting conceptual as well as social-constructional issues.
The biblical story retold
Authors: Kövecses Zoltán
Published: March 2014

In this chapter I offer one, or a small set of, possible interpretation(s) of the basic story of the Bible. I suggest that the symbolic meaning of the story derives in large part from conceptual structures and conceptual mechanisms that are shared by a large number of speakers of English and other languages belonging to the European cultural sphere. My claim is that a large part of the dominant features of Christianity can be understood on the basis of people’s everyday conceptual system and that the understanding of these features does not require an entirely independently existing conceptual apparatus that is somehow unique to the interpretation of the sacred.
Perception and conception
Authors: Egan Thomas
Published: March 2014

This chapter revisits a construction discussed by Bolinger (1974), investigating whether his intuitive interpretation of it holds in the light of robust corpus data. Bolinger’s interpretation has been disputed, notably by Noël (2003), on the basis of what he takes to be diverging evidence from the British National Corpus. A careful examination of all instances of the ‘see x to be y’ construction in three large corpora provides converging evidence showing that Bolinger was basically correct when he stated that when followed by a to-infinitive complement, perceptual verbs are being used in a conceptual sense. This interpretation of the see construction with the to-infinitive complement is related to a more general schematic interpretation of the meaning of the to-infinitive form.
I am about to die vs. I am going to die
Authors: Höche Silke
Published: March 2014

This study portrays be about to as a construction which, although frequently described as nearly synonymous to be going to, falls somewhere in between the categories of futurate forms and ingressive aspectualizers. Constructional properties that distinguish be about to from be going to are worked out on the basis of several sources: The Oxford English Dictionary serves as testimony to the diachronic stages the two constructions passed through. For a detailed comparison of synchronic semantico-functional characteristics, large sets of data retrieved from the BNC are subjected to collostructional analysis. The results of these procedures converge in indicating that be about to has moved closer to ingressive aspectualizers, profiling the lead-up section to the onset of an event.
Studying syntactic priming in corpora
Authors: Gries Stefan Th.
Published: March 2014

This chapter addresses syntactic priming (of the dative alternation) using corpus data from the ICE-GB corpus. Nearly 3,000 consecutive prime-target pairs were coded for their constructional choices as well as several other variables. The data are then analyzed on different levels of granularity: (i) cross-tabulation, (ii) with a binary logistic regression (including only fixed effects), and (iii) a generalized linear mixed-effects model (GLMEM) (including fixed and random effects). The GLMEM reduces the number of significant predictors most, but nevertheless yields the highest classification accuracy. Since contemporary cognitive linguistics assumes an item-based perspective on language acquisition, processing, and change, I argue that the GLMEM approach should be the method of choice for empirical cognitive linguistics.
Differences in the use of emotion metaphors in expert-lay communication
Authors: Beger Anke
Published: March 2014

In this chapter I traverse the empirical cycle to analyze the use of conceptual metaphors for anger, love, and sadness in authentic discourse between experts and laypersons. The results gained by examining corpus data of expert-lay communication in psychology guide me in formulating my hypothesis regarding the factors that account for the differences between experts and laypersons in metaphor use. Following the empirical cycle, this hypothesis is then tested by collecting evidence from a methodologically different study in which data are elicited in guided interviews with laypersons. Relating the evidence from the two studies leads to a refinement of my initial hypothesis about the aspects contributing to the differences in the use of emotion metaphors between experts and laypersons.
3. The semantics of the perfect progressive in English
Authors: Allan Keith
Published: March 2014

As chapters in these volumes clearly demonstrate, the grammaticalization of temporality varies enormously across languages. No other language has a construction exactly like the English perfect progressive – which, were it a combination of aspects as some claim, would be self-contradictory. The principal purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how a proper semantics for the English perfect progressive locates in time the event to which it applies. I examine the origins and meanings of the progressive and the perfect in English. I affirm that the progressive is an aspect and the perfect a tense, even though the perfect does have some aspectual traits. The default meaning of the progressive is that the activity (event) denoted by the predicate in the scope of the progressive operator prog is incomplete at the temporal deictic centre indicated by the tense used in the clause. The perfect is a retrospective tense, a past tense P relative to whatever time point is indicated by the deictic centre for the clause, be it P, N, or F. The perfect progressive locates an incomplete event as retrospective from the deictic centre for the clause. Given these assumptions there is no contradiction in the concatenation perfect progressive, have + been + Ving, such as would seem to arise if the perfect is analysed as an aspect.
4. Drowning “into” the river in North Sámi
Authors: Svenonius Peter
Published: March 2014

This chapter documents and analyzes an instance in North Sámi of spatial morphology (directional case and adpositions) interacting with temporal interpretation (change of state). In effect, in North Sámi one can sleep on a floor or swim in a river, but one falls asleep ‘onto’ the floor, and drowns ‘into’ the river. The analysis relates the phenomenon to the Talmian dichotomy of ­satellite-framed and verb-framed expressions of path in directed motion. Specifically, I provide an analysis in which the illative gives the location of result states, assuming a decomposition of complex events including motion events. This provides a unified analysis of different uses of the North Sámi illative, at the expense of a unified analysis of directed motion constructions across English and North Sámi.
8. More than “time”
Authors: Zeman Sonja
Published: March 2014

In the previous chapter, Vanek shows that cross-linguistic differences in organising temporal information can be traced back to different processes of time perspectivation. As space and time are considered to be conceptually intertwined, it seems natural in this respect to ask to what extent the spatial concept of ‘frame of reference’ (Levinson 2003) can serve as a template for comparison of spatial and temporal localisation in language. This question is pursued from a historical perspective by means of the Middle High German tense system. It is shown that the distinction of an ‘anaphoric’ vs ‘deictic’ reference system is a crucial factor for the binary constitution of the Middle High German tense system. Taking into account the underlying frame of reference not only allows an appropriate semantic description but is also capable of explaining register variation that cannot be handled within a pure temporal approach. Against this background, possible correspondences between grammatical and sociocultural developments as the medial shift from orality to literacy are discussed.
13. Spatial prepositions in Italian L2
Authors: Marotta Giovanna , Meini Linda
Published: March 2014

Space is a core domain of human cognition. However, the linguistic variation in encoding spatial reference is immense. In our chapter we address the currently debated issue of the existence of universal conceptual categories and principles by investigating one of the most idiosyncratic linguistic category: adpositions, namely spatial prepositions in Italian L2. Our empirical data reveals that learners of Italian L2 develop a consistent microsystem of spatial prepositions, which is built mostly on the target language and only to a limited extent on the learners’ L1 system. The process of acquisition appears to be driven by universal principles, both cognitive and linguistic, but at the same time it is also affected by specific constraints of language as a formal system.
14. Expressing simultaneity using aspect
Authors: Saddour Inès
Published: March 2014

This cross-linguistic study examines the use of aspectual perspective in the L1 vs L2 expression of simultaneity in two typologically different native languages, Tunisian Arabic and French. We contrast the linguistic devices employed and study the interaction between Tunisian Arabic L1 and French L2 in the acquisition of this temporal relation. Strongly inspired by the categorisation of Schmiedtová (2004), we identify different aspectual styles used in native speakers’ and learners’ productions. We observe that the learners’ aspectual styles, as well as the types of adverbials selected, deviate from the French native speakers’ styles (see also Chan et al., this volume, on L2 acquisition of aspect). Rather, they are comparable to their aspectual perspectives in their L1.
15. Variation in motion events
Authors: Ibarretxe-Antuñano Iraide , Hijazo-Gascón Alberto
Published: March 2014

This chapter analyses the role of intratypological and dialectal variation in the lexicalisation of motion events (Talmy 1991, 2000) and its application to second language acquisition. The first part discusses intratypological variation with respect to the semantic component of Path and proposes a cline of Path salience on the basis of twenty-one languages. Then, it describes dialectal variation in Spanish and Aragonese. Results show that dialects within these two Romance languages differ in the type of linguistic resources they use as well as in their quality and quantity. The second part briefly reviews some L2 problematic areas that can benefit from these approaches such as conceptual transfer, deixis, and idiomaticity. Examples are drawn from L2 Spanish and L2 Basque.
2. Vagueness in event times
Authors: Huang Minyao
Published: March 2014

Vagueness in event times pertains to the observation that one usually finds it difficult to slice the continuous flux of space-time into a series of events with clear-cut temporal boundaries. I argue that such vagueness originates from our ignorance of discrete changing points wherein states of affairs begin or cease to obtain. Applying the epistemic view on vagueness (Williamson 1994) to vagueness in event times, I contend that the lagging nature of knowledge prevents one from knowing the abrupt changes taking place between contiguous minimal time intervals. In turn, vagueness in the conception of event times is construed in terms of epistemic modality (Jaszczolt 2009), viz. a gradation of a thinker’s epistemic certainty towards the occurrence of a physical change.
7. Koromu temporal expressions
Authors: Priestley Carol
Published: March 2014

This chapter examines different types of time expressed in Koromu (Kesawai), a Papuan language, to show the interaction of time expressions with cultural and environmental contexts and to investigate semantic description. Meanings are explicated in a metalanguage based on semantic primitives (cf. Wierzbicka 1996; Goddard 2008; Gladkova, this volume). The discovery of natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) temporal primes and investigation of semantic molecules, non-primitive meanings that occur within the meaning of other concepts, promotes comparative and contrastive semantic description. The finding of culture-specific concepts referring to ‘time-’ and ‘event-based’ time intervals (cf. da Silva Sinha et al., this volume), linear and cyclical time (cf. Charlier, this volume), suggests that a range of expressions need consideration when cultural perspectives are assessed.
8. Universals and specifics of ‘time’ in Russian
Authors: Gladkova Anna
Published: March 2014

This chapter addresses the question of universal and language- and culture-­specific traits in conceptualisation of ‘time’. It tests the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) hypothesis that semantic universals time and now should be found in Russian. It demonstrates that vremja and sejčas are Russian exponents of these primes, while the close-in-meaning terms pora, teper’, and nynče are semantically complex. The chapter formulates culturally salient attitudes to time in Russian, such as ‘change’, ‘persistence’, ‘things being outside people’s control’, on the basis of the analysed words. It argues that NSM can be regarded as an effective tool in the ‘time’-related linguistic research due to its universal character.
9. Linguistic manifestations of the space-time (dis)analogy
Authors: Langacker Ronald W.
Published: March 2014

As facets of interpreted experience, space and time are highly variable in their linguistic manifestation. Universal aspects of language structure reflect a more basic level of apprehension. Space and time have a foundational role in grammar. Objects and events, the prototypes for nouns and verbs, are primarily conceived, respectively, as spatial and temporal entities. The extensive noun-verb parallelism suggests that space and time merit unified treatment. However, certain asymmetries suggest that time has a special status. Time has multiple roles in language. It is always the medium of conceptualising activity and serves in various capacities as an object of conception. The dynamic conception of space, through time, makes possible the metaphorical conception of time itself, in terms of space.
10. Vectors and frames of reference
Authors: Bohnemeyer Jürgen , O'Meara Carolyn
Published: March 2014

Most linguistic and cognitive representations of space depend on frames of reference (FoRs). We show that FoRs play an equally important role in representations of the orientation of entities and representations of their location and direction of motion. We propose that orientation is conceptually encoded, not in terms of metaphorical path functions (Jackendoff 1983), but in terms of. Equipped with the notion of vectors, we introduce a distinction between two classes of FoRs: classical “angular-anchored” FoRs and the previously unrecognised “head-anchored” FoRs. In English, angular-anchored relative FoRs dominate in both locative and orientation descriptions. In contrast, in Seri and Yucatec, two indigenous languages of Mexico, object-centred angular-anchored FoRs dominate in locative descriptions, but head-anchored FoRs dominate in orientation descriptions.
12. Language-specific effects on lexicalisation and memory of motion events
Authors: Filipović Luna , Geva Sharon
Published: March 2014

We studied language as a factor in the construal of dynamic spatial relations, and addressed the question of whether different languages can have different effects on memory of motion events. In the “motion condition”, speakers had to describe what the person did in each video, while in the “colour condition”, speakers had to describe only the colours they noticed in the clips. English speakers showed better recognition of the motion event when asked to describe them directly (compared with the colour condition), and Spanish speakers performed equally on both conditions, with their performance being similar to the English speaker’s performance on the colour condition. We discuss the implications of these results for language processing and for memory of events.
13. Space and time in episodic memory
Authors: Russell James , Davies Jonathan
Published: March 2014

This chapter explores the nonconceptual roots of spatiotemporal abilities in the context of episodic memory. Episodic memory is the conscious recollection of an autobiographical episode. We argue (a) that if episodic memory is a form of re-experiencing then it must inherit that which is necessary for something to be an experience, and (b) that this is, following Kant, spatiotemporal content, in addition to its being as of the experience of a single person. We suggest that there is no reason why these minimal conditions should not be met by children too young to be credited with concepts of time and of mentality, and report, for the first time, data we have collected in support of this view.
15. From perception of spatial artefacts to metaphorical meaning
Authors: Johansson Falck Marlene
Published: March 2014

This chapter compares spatial constructs in mental imagery to spatial constructs in non-metaphorical and metaphorical language. The study is based on a psycholinguistic survey of people’s mental imagery for paths and roads, and a previous corpus-linguistic investigation of path- and road-instances from the British National Corpus (the BNC) (see Johansson Falck 2010). The aim is to investigate if spatial path and road constructs in mental imagery focus on similar aspects as those in metaphorical language. The study shows that mental imagery and metaphorical language are more restricted than non-metaphorical language, and typically are related to the specific anticipations for bodily action that paths and roads afford. The focus is on function, which influences both direction and manner of motion.
Chapter 2. Metaphor in discourse
Authors: Kaal Anna A. , Dorst Aletta G.
Published: March 2014

The lack of a reliable methodology for identifying metaphor in discourse prompted a group of metaphor researchers to create the so-called MIP (Metaphor Identification Procedure; Pragglejaz Group 2007), which aims at identifying metaphorically used words. In our research project at VU University Amsterdam, four analysts have applied the MIP to language data from four different registers in the BNC-Baby. Since the MIP only caters for indirect metaphor use, one important goal of this project was to determine how to annotate directly used words that express cross-domain mappings. This chapter presents examples from our analyses to illustrate some salient methodological issues concerning the application of the MIP to different manifestations of metaphor in natural discourse, suggesting possible additions to the MIP.