Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2005

The association that has been made between the discourse notion of grounding (viz. the foreground-background semantic structure) and the Gestalt notions of figure and ground has led to equating foreground with prominence — a surface structure property of discourse. Sorting out the terminological confusion, this article distinguishes grounding from the prominent ways in which it is signalled and shows that prominence is the textual counterpart of the perceptual distinction between figure and ground. It focuses on foregrounding-backgrounding as one manifestation of surface organization that makes linguistic structures more or less prominent, capturing the writer’s choice of a vantage point from which events and states of affairs are perceived and encoded.

In this paper, grammatical blending is presented as an alternative to the conventional, linear overlap models of grammaticalization when it comes to conceptualizing complex cases of overlaps. The choice of the ‘emerging modal’ want to/wanna as a case study is motivated precisely by its interpretational complexity. For it appears that the grammaticalization of want to/wanna has been shaped by the compositional interaction of form and meaning. In this configuration, the linear model has to be modified for two reasons: being exclusively semantic, it does not take the form of the expression into account; being linear, it does not lend itself to a treatment of constructional compositionality. Grammatical blending, understood as the blend of constructions as defined in the Construction Grammar framework, is one way of altering the linear model so as to enable the representation of non-linear (i.e. compositional) constructional overlaps.

My purpose is to study two forms of creation of (fictitious) entities: by metamorphosis and by metaphor. Though these operations are not situated at the same ontological level (being respectively phenomena of observable — or imaginable — transformation vs discursive evolutions), the fact remains that they have the following point in common, that they modify identities, by mixing, exchanging or changing properties, and thus by their integration into a new category. My purpose will therefore be to prolong this conceptual analysis by a comparison of the textual sequences and the referential expressions where these two types of change appear; this will enable us to see that, though they often coexist, these operations have distinct semantic bases and therefore induce different interpretations — but sometimes only up to a certain point.

In this paper it is argued that Langacker’s definition of grounding predications is problematic for languages other than English. The idea that in English tense and modal auxiliaries are mutually exclusive grounding elements leads Langacker (1990, 2003) to consider both deontic and epistemic modal auxiliaries as grounding predications, whereas he excludes German modals from being so on the basis of their tense inflection. In this paper I contend that, unlike the deontic modal verbs, and despite their tense marking, Spanish epistemic modals deber ‘must’, poder ‘may’ and tener que ‘have to’ are certainly appropriate for modal grounding due to their reference point function and to the subjectification they undergo. I show that deontic modality is more affected by temporal grounding than epistemic modality. Moreover, the impossibility of inserting an inchoative verb such as ir a ‘to be going to’ corroborates the theoretical underpinning that Spanish epistemic modals effect an epistemic grounding similar to that of the grounding predications in English.

Cognitive Linguistics has developed many insights into language but no systematic formalism. This article proposes that the discipline can benefit from standard geometrical formalisms. It outlines an approach called Discourse Space Theory (DST) that uses coordinate geometry and vector spaces. It describes how vectors have been used by several scholars to characterise the semantics of spatial prepositions, extending this approach to an abstract, deictically centred discourse space. Vector geometry comes with standard properties and operations that can serve to describe many linguistic and discourse phenomena. One of these is transformation of axes, which can be used to represent the phenomenon of viewpoint shift in discourse. The paper illustrates how DST can systematically describe viewpoint shift in foreground-background shifts, deictic verbs, tense, complement clauses and conditional constructions, especially counterfactuals.

This paper analyses the idiomatic expression “can’t make head nor tail” both in Latin and English. The cognitive analysis of these expressions (syntactic variations and use of other body parts in English), their content (these expressions involve spatial and ontological metaphoric schemata to indicate the abstract idea of coherence, generally referred to discourse) and their context (the tone is quite often colloquial) together with the study of the differences and common aspects between the Latin expression and the English one will allow us to inquire into the origin and development of each expression.

The speaker of language is primarily conceived of as locutionary subject (or ‘sujet parlant’), i.e. as a person who exchanges linguistic messages with his/her counterpart — typically in dialogic situations where the two alternate in their roles as speaker and hearer. In this setting, the speaker and the hearer are equal as speech-act participants and thus the contrast is ‘first/second person’ vs. ‘third person’ (or ‘speech-act participant’ vs. ‘non-speech-act participant’). There is, however, another aspect of the speaker — the speaker as cognizing subject, i.e. as a person who, prior to his/her locutionary act, construes the situation to be encoded, being engaged in the monologic cognitive activity of choosing what to encode and how to encode what is to be encoded. In this capacity, the speaker is contrasted with everything he/she may want to encode and thus the contrast here is ‘first person’ vs. ‘second/third person’ — or better, ‘ego’ vs. ‘alter’. Language may manifest features that count as indices of either of these two types of linguistic subjectivity. But individual languages may differ in the extent to which they manifest more features indicating one type of subjectivity than the other. I propose to discuss these two contrasting typological orientations by referring to my native language, Japanese, which seems to be an eminently ego-centered, or subjectivity-prominent, language.

This article presents the results of a cognitive analysis of metaphors used in conceptualisation of Particle Physics and shows how they shape our knowledge of the field. Taking as a starting point Lakoff’s Theory of Metaphor (1993), it assumes that human beings observe physical reality through their own models of experience, not as independent phenomena, many aspects of our thought and our language falling beneath cognitive awareness (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). Hence, the language that emerges to conceptualise Physics reflects historical, emotional factors that characterise the authors of this language as witnesses of a given period of time. Examples provided contribute to demonstrate that metaphor constitutes a fundamental part of our conceptual system (Gleitman & Lieberman, 1995; Smith & Osherson, 1995), even in science.

In Construction Grammar, the ultimate grammatical unit is the construction, a conventionalized form-meaning pairing. We present interrelated evidence from three different methods, all of which speak in favor of attributing an ontological status to constructions for non-native speakers of English. Firstly, in a sentence-fragment completion study with German learners of English, we obtained a significant priming effect between constructions. Secondly, these priming effects correlate strongly with the verb-construction preferences in native speaker corpora: verbs which are strongly associated with one construction resist priming to another semantically compatible construction; more importantly, the priming effects do not correlate with verb-construction preferences from German translation equivalents, ruling out a translational explanation. Thirdly, in order to rule out an alternative account in terms of syntactic rather than constructional priming, we present semantic evidence obtained by a sorting study, showing that subjects exhibited a strong tendency towards a construction-based sorting, which even reflects recent explanations of how constructions are related.

In the present paper, we adduce further evidence for the reality of grammatical constructions by focusing on a highly idiosyncratic configuration from Spanish, which we call the reduplicative-topic construction. This construction is a productive syntactic pattern that functions as a “constructional hedge”. The grammatical behaviors of this construction cannot be captured by syntactocentric approaches to grammar. Instead, co-ocurring multiple constraints must be taken into account, including phonological (intonation and rhythm), morphosyntactic and semantic factors. The thrust of our argument is that only a constructional approach can explain the facts needed to characterize this grammatical pattern. We conclude the paper by considering the implications of the constructional approach to syntax for linguistic theory.

In this paper we propose an analysis of the metaphor “This surgeon is a butcher!” discussed in Grady, Oakley & Coulson (1999), introducing it into a mental space framework derived from conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), blending theory (BT) and cognitive semiotics. The method of analysis is to work backwards; we attempt to reconstruct the meaning of the butcher-surgeon metaphor by giving a step-by-step description of the cognition involved in understanding an occurrence of the metaphoric expression, and hypothesize a general framework for analyzing metaphoric blends and other kinds of rhetorically potent integrations of semiotically distinguishable conceptual contents (mental spaces) in expressive blends. It is argued that examples of expressive blends, such as metaphor, need to be accounted for in semiotic terms, since they occur in — intersubjective as well as private — communication, which is essentially semiotic in nature; expressive blends occur as signs and are therefore a natural subject of cognitive semiotics, the study of cognition in semiosis.

The paper makes the following novel claims: (1) the semantics of noun–noun compounds which is activated by metaphor and/or metonymy (often termed as “exocentric” compounds in linguistics and generally regarded as semantically opaque) can be accounted for within a cognitive linguistic framework, and the term “creative compound” is proposed for such linguistic phenomena; (2) there are regular patterns of creative compounds, depending on which constituent is affected by conceptual metaphor and/or metonymy. The second part of the paper presents one type of creative compounds: noun–noun combinations whose meaning is influenced by a metaphor-based semantic relationship between the two constituents. Such compounds seem to be quite frequent in English and come in all sorts of shapes and sizes: ranging from the “simpler” cases of image metaphors to the more elaborate single scope blends. The paper will give examples of the various types and will provide detailed analyses of each, within a cognitive linguistic framework.

The relation between Linguistics and Poetics has often been a controversial issue in Poetic Studies. With the advent of Cognitive Linguistics and its open disposition to consider any kind of discourse as interesting enough samples of human thought — and human thought being discovered to be of a figurative nature — doors have been widely opened to poetry. Despite the firm reluctance of some Literary sectors to move beyond traditional Poetics, the works by E. Semino, P. Stockwell, Gavins & Steen and M. Freeman are clear confirmation of the modern tendency to incorporate CL findings into poetic analysis. The present paper explores this relation once again. Based on the “unity-in-variety” aesthetic principle, it analyses the way Blending Theory provides the necessary resources to consider any single piece of the poem in the integration network. The paper also offers a systematic methodology — illustrated with a brief analysis of Seamus Heaney’s “Oracle” — which intends to make a contribution to the discipline of Poetics mainly in the educational field.

In this paper we analyze the semantics of the Spanish preposition desde. This analysis is developed within the cognitive linguistics framework. First, we establish the central uses of this category, using a corpus created from examples provided by Spanish speakers. Then, we examine the uses of this preposition that respond to a metaphoric extension. According to my working hypothesis, these metaphoric uses are derived from the topological schema that underlies all the uses of this preposition. The metaphoric extensions of this preposition have been gradually and only partially accepted by the ‘Real Academia de la Lengua’ and other linguistic authorities. However, there exits a use based on a metaphoric transfer which is ignored by traditional treatments. Furthermore, this use is explicitly defined as incorrect by the dictionary of the Spanish language Clave. We will show that this use is consistent with the topological schema that has given rise to the rest of the metaphoric uses of desde and thus should be treated as another valid use of this category.

This interview is the result of a series of email exchanges with Leonard Talmy from February to May, 2005. It was designed to cover Talmy’s research career from its beginning (the linguistic representation of conceptual structure, cf. 1972, 1985, 1991, 1996, 2000ab) to present day (sign language, cf. 2003, in press; the attentional system of language, cf. forthcoming). It was divided into two main parts: (i) a general overview of Talmy’s main ideas about language and cognition, both past and future, and (ii) a detailed discussion of one of Talmy’s most widely discussed and successful areas of study: lexicalisation and typology in motion events. In this ARCL issue we publish only the latter.