Books

This book proposes an extension of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987, 1991, 2008) towards a cognitive discourse grammar, through the unique environment that literary stylistic application offers. Drawing upon contemporary research in cognitive stylistics (Text World Theory, deixis and mind-modelling, amongst others), the volume scales up central Cognitive Grammar concepts (such as construal, grounding, the reference point model and action chains) in order to explore the attenuation of experience – and how it is simulated – in literary reading. In particular, it considers a range of contemporary texts by Neil Gaiman, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Safran Foer, Ian McEwan and Paul Auster. This application builds upon previous work that adopts Cognitive Grammar for literary analysis and provides the first extended account of Cognitive Grammar in contemporary fiction.

This volume represents the first comprehensive work on Japanese clause structure conducted within the framework of Cognitive Grammar. The author proposes schematic conceptual structures for the major constructions in the language and defines Japanese case marking and grammatical relations in purely conceptual terms. The work thus makes a convincing case for the conceptual basis of grammar, thereby constituting a strong argument against the autonomy of syntax hypothesis of Generative Grammar.

The volume should be of interest to any researcher wishing to know how Cognitive Grammar, whose primary focus has been on the non-syntactic aspects of language, can explain the clausal structure of a given language in a detailed, comprehensive, yet unifying manner. In addition to its theoretical findings, the volume contains a number of revealing analyses and interpretations of Japanese data, which should be of great interest to all Japanese linguists, irrespective of their theoretical persuasions.

This volume offers the first comprehensive description of English imperatives made from a Cognitive Linguistic perspective. It proposes a new way of explaining the meaning and function of the imperative independently of illocutionary act classifications, which allows for quantifying the strength of imperative force in terms of parameters and numerical values. Furthermore, the book applies the theory of Construction Grammar to account for the felicity of imperatives in complex sentences. The model of description explains explicitly a wide range of phenomena, including frequency of use, prototypical vs. non-prototypical uses of the English imperative and the choice between longer vs. shorter directives including the imperative. A Cognitive Linguistic Analysis of the English Imperative: With Special Reference to Japanese Imperatives is intended for both researchers and students interested in the English imperative and Directive Speech Acts at large and for the linguists working within the Cognitive Linguistics and/or Construction Grammar approach.

This monograph offers the first in-depth lexical and semantic analysis of motion verbs in their development from Latin to nine Romance languages — Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, Occitan, Sardinian, and Raeto-Romance — demonstrating that the patterns of innovation and continuity attested in the data can be accounted for in cognitive linguistic terms. At the same time, the study illustrates how the insights gained from Latin and Romance historical data have profound implications for the cognitive approaches to language — in particular, for Leonard Talmy’s motion-framing typology and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory. The book should appeal to scholars interested in historical Romance linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and lexical change.

The total body of papers presented in this volume captures research across a variety of languages and language groups, to show how particular elements of linguistic description draw on otherwise separate aspects (or fields) of linguistic investigation. As such, this volume captures a diversity of research interest from the field of cognitive linguistics. These areas include: lexical semantics, cognitive grammar, metaphor, prototypes, pragmatics, narrative and discourse, computational and translation models; and are considered within the contexts of: language change, child language acquisition, language and culture, grammatical features and word order and gesture. Despite possible differences in philosophical approach to the role of language in cognitive tasks, these papers are similar in a fundamental way: they all share a commitment to the view that human categorization involves mental concepts that have fuzzy boundaries and are culturally and situation-based.

A Cognitive Perspective on Spatial Prepositions: Intertwining networks is devoted to the issue of the relation between language and thought approached from the perspective of spatial relations encoded by four equivalent spatial prepositions – English to, German zu, Polish do and Russian к. Regarding these prepositions as path-prepositions, the authors show that the prepositional semantic structures are conceptually grounded in the PATH and the MOTION-EVENT frames and explain that prepositional senses emerge as a result of the PATH image schema transformations and metaphorical mappings related to the EVENT STRUCTURE metaphor. Based on their findings, the authors show how senso-motoric functioning, life experience, individual knowledge, imagery and different ways in which people conceptualize the world influence the relation between language and conceptualization.

This book sets out a framework for investigating audience responses to political discourse. It starts from the premise that audiences are active participants who bring their own background knowledge and political standpoint to the communicative event. To operationalise this perspective, the volume draws on concepts from classical rhetoric alongside contemporary research in cognitive stylistics and cognitive linguistics (including schema theory, Text World Theory, Cognitive Grammar, and mind-modelling, amongst others). It examines the role played by the speaker’s identity, the arguments they make, and the emotions of the audience in the – often critical – reception of political text and talk, using a diversity of examples to illustrate this three-dimensional approach – from political speeches, interviews and newspaper articles, to more creative text-types such as politicised rap music, television satire and filmic drama. The result of this wide-ranging application is a holistic and systematic account of the rhetorical and ideological effects of political discourse in reception.

Toward the end of the 20th century, there is both a dissatisfaction with existing formal semantic theories and a wish to preserve insights from other semantic traditions. Cognitive semantics, the latest of the major trends which have dominated the century, attempts to do this by focusing on meaning as a cognitive phenomenon. This book provides different perspectives on meaning as a cognitive phenomenon. Jens Allwood presents an approach where meaning is analyzed in terms of context sensitive cognitive operations. Peter Gärdenfors examines the relationship between cognitive semantics and standard formal extensional and intensional semantics. Peter Harder discusses the relation between functionalism and cognitive semantics. Sören Sjöström and +ke Viberg extend a cognitive semantic approach to new empirical domains like vision and physical contact. Elisabeth Engberg Pedersen extends the use of cognitive semantics even further in order to analyze deaf sign language and, finally, Kenneth Holmqvist and Jordan Zlatev discuss two different possibilities of implementing a cognitive semantic approach using computer programs.

The variety of perspectives on cognitive semantics make this book suitable as course material.

This volume is intended to be a contribution to the rapidly growing field of research into Cognitive Sociolinguistics which draws on the convergence of methods and theoretical frameworks typically associated with Cognitive Linguistics and Sociolinguistics. The papers in this volume, written by internationally renowned scholars in the fields of sociolinguistics (e.g. Labov) and cognitive sociolinguistics, seek to explore and systematize the key theoretical and epistemological bases for the emergence of this socio-cognitive paradigm. More specifically, the papers, originally published in Review of Cognitive Linguistics 10:2 (2012), focus on terms and concepts which are foundational to the discussion of Cognitive Sociolinguistics such as the role of cognition in the sociolinguistic enterprise; the social recontextualization of cognition; variability in cognitive systems; usage-based conceptions of language; pragmatic variation and cultural models of thought; cultural conceptualizations and lexicography as well as cognitive processing models and perceptual dialectology. All the papers are anchored in instrumental empirical data analysis.

The volume provides a welcome contribution to the field for anyone interested in Cognitive Linguistics and its new developments. The seven papers included in this book were originally presented at the 34th International LAUD Symposium on Cognitive Sociolinguistics, which took place in March 2010 at the University of Koblenz-Landau (Germany).

This study is based on the writings and teaching of Gustave Guillaume (1883-1960), one of the earliest proponents of what is today called Cognitive Linguistics. It offers (1) a much needed presentation in English of Guillaume’s view of the French system, (2) the clarifications added by his successors, and (3) much empirical detail added by the author from his own extensive experience with the material.

The word system in this work, as explained in the very first chapter, is intended in the Saussurian sense of a closed set of contrasts. The method is first briefly applied to English, in order to familiarize the reader with the methodological concepts and terminology, and comparisons are made with the general outline of the French system.

The major sub-systems of the French verb are analysed in the four central chapters (4-7) entitled Aspect, Voice, Tense, Mood, followed by a chapter on systemic comparison, and two final chapters of detailed analysis of the verbal morphology and its relevance to the cognitive system.