Functions of Language - Volume 23, Issue 3, 2016

The present article presents a corpus-based study of two near-synonymous verbs in Spanish: the locative verbs of putting poner and meter. Starting from the universal principle of linguistic economy, the paper aims to empirically identify potentially influencing variables that determine the native speaker’s choice between the two verbs. It is investigated whether and to what extent the choice is governed by a set of variables related to the nature of the locative movement itself and the characteristics of the participants taking part in the event. The difference between the near-synonyms is shown to be determined mainly by the direction of the locative movement, the semantic nature of the participants (animacy, concreteness), the reflexiveness of the event, as well as the cognitive construal of the locative event (the possibility of a container-reading).

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has long been characterized by its openness towards contributions from other fields. However, it has remained virtually uninformed by neuroscience. Such a disconnection has become all the more unfortunate since SFL ventured into the cognitive domain (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999). Opening a new avenue of disciplinary interaction for SFL, this paper reviews experimental studies on the neurocognitive basis of processes and verbs of doing, highlighting their manifold implications for the theory. Available data corroborates the SFL assumptions that these processes and verbs are (i) conceptually different from participants and nouns, (ii) functionally distinguishable from other process and verb types, and (iii) non-arbitrarily related to each other. Moreover, the evidence shows that (at least some of) the conceptual distinctions within semantics are naturally grounded in more basic (motor and perceptual) neurocognitive distinctions. This, we propose, calls for an elaboration of the stratified SFL model via the inclusion of a sensorimotor stratum. More generally, the article seeks to foster an empirically sound and theoretically relevant dialogue between SFL and promising approaches within cognitive neuroscience.

This paper analyzes the discourse of academic quality audit reports by drawing upon Appraisal Theory (Martin & White 2005). It focuses on the evaluative prosodies in the discourse leading up to the three main components of the reports, namely commendations, affirmations, and recommendations. These reports are prepared by the audit panels formed by the Quality Assurance Council of the University Grants Committee of Hong Kong upon the completion of academic quality audit visits to each of the city’s eight publicly-funded tertiary institutions. This paper argues that such evaluative prosodies, or the pattern of use of evaluative language, are strategically employed by the audit panels in an attempt to strike a balance between three needs: (1) to discharge their quality assurance responsibilities with their power vested by the Hong Kong Government through the University Grants Committee; (2) to maintain and/or reinforce a credible ethos for the panels themselves; and (3) to attend to the face wants of the institutions and the stakeholders concerned.

This article deals with impersonal clauses in Chinese (ICiCs) (e.g. Táishàng chàngzhe xì, 台上唱着戏). These are called pseudo-existentials in the literature, as they resemble typical existentials both in form and in meaning. I argue that ICiCs are impersonal, ergatively oriented, and existential. They are impersonal in that the actor of the process is typically demoted to the end position or completely omitted; ergatively oriented in that they express the meaning of happening instead of doing, and existential in that they present the existence of events with reference to some location realized by the initial locative nominal group. These three semantic aspects are in tune with each other and are realized by the structure NGL ^ VG ^ NG, in which VG ^ NG constitutes the event, whose existence is expressed through its configuration with the initial NGL.