Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2008

Historical dictionaries have not yet incorporated prototype theoretical principles, from which singular enhancements might be obtained in historical lexicography. Revisiting diachronic definitions from a prototypical standpoint underlines how salience-based definitions comply more accurately with the cognitive constraints of the human mind. Upon this realization, the paper presents a template for reorganizing historical definitions according to the principles of prototype theory. The resulting definitions depict the semasiological profile of terms in a more transparent way while stressing the mutual interface between linguistic and extralinguistic data and between synchrony and diachrony. At the same time, the paper shows how the theoretical tenets of cognitive linguistics can be put to use in the field of applied linguistics, viz. lexicography.

Applying concepts of Cognitive Linguistics to dialectological data of a traditional kind, the present paper addresses the question whether differences of culture and conceptualization could be detected language-internally, not just across languages. At the same time, it shows that the traditional methodology of evaluating dialectological data at the level of language structure can be challenged by a usage-based cognitive linguistic analysis. The language variant in focus is the Moldavian Southern Csango, an archaic Hungarian dialect. We investigate the conceptualization of forty internal qualities (emotions and character traits) on the basis of two usage-based types of analysis: one in which we try to determine the entrenchment of the investigated concepts, and one in which we have a look at the semantic relationships between them. The two approaches provide converging evidence that negative concepts are more elaborated in the mind of the Csangos and that the most crucial factor organizing their conceptual system is “morality”.

This paper deals with a prosecutor’s closing argument in a murder trial I did fieldwork on in California in 2000. This discourse is analyzed through the conceptual blend of the deceased victim ‘testifying’ through legal evidence. The emergence and argumentative power of this blend is examined vis à vis the participants’ knowledge of the embedding discourse and trial as well as their conceptualizations of what a trial is. I suggest a definition of a trial as a ‘semantic network’ (Langacker, 1987), which combines lawyers’ common definitions with the nature of factive and fictive interaction in Western courts (Pascual, 2002, 2006). The claim is that language users (meta)operate with intertwined layers of context conceptualization, constraining conceptual blending operations. The paper integrates cognitive linguistics with cognitive sociology (Cicourel, 1973) and cognitive and linguistic anthropology (Hutchins, 1990; Duranti, 1997). It also calls for the qualitative study of language through in-depth enthnography that ensures data validity.

This paper proposes a new solution to the age-old problem of defining the sentence and sentence types. Arguing against traditional definitions, we propose that the category SENTENCE exhibits a complex prototypical structure on the levels of morphosyntactic form, conceptual content, and pragmatic function. By positing that the central member of the category SENTENCE is the declarative sentence type, we can show how imperative sentences are related to the prototypical declarative sentence type and that imperatives exhibit an internal prototypical structure of their own. Finally, using a scenario approach, we show how the conceptual and pragmatic functions of declarative and imperative sentences may overlap.

Research in Construction Grammar assumes no strict separation between syntax and the lexicon. However, recent work by Goldberg (1995, 2006) shows that there is indeed a separation between lexical entries and grammatical constructions, including constraints regulating the fusion of grammatical constructions with verbs. This paper argues that Goldberg’s characterization of the interactions between lexical entries and grammatical constructions faces some of the same difficulties as the interactions between lexical entries and transformational rules in the Chomskyan framework (Chomsky, 1965, 1981, 1995). Drawing on a variety of corpus data this paper presents specific proposals that should be considered in order to arrive at a solution that overcomes difficulties inherent to Goldberg’s approach. Based on a discussion of the concepts of analogy, collocational restrictions, frequency, and productivity this paper proposes to encode different types of semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic information in such a way that it is possible to account for a given utterance from a comprehension perspective, as well as a production perspective.

This corpus-based study examines the resolution of coreference between formally singular epicene antecedents and their anaphoric pronouns within the framework of Cognitive Grammar. These antecedents are expected to most directly evoke a singular conceptual entity, and, consequently, coreference is assumed to be most effectively established by using a singular pronoun, whereas the plural anaphor would have to be accounted for by metonymic antecedence. Yet, the high frequency of they found in the study suggests that epicene generics are predominantly conceptualized as referring to plural entities, despite their morphological singularity. This conceptual plurality proves to be salient enough to persist even if the gender of the referent(s) is known. Finally, a small portion of tokens evincing coreference between notionally singular antecedents and they can only be accounted for by acknowledging that the anaphor actively contributes information to its anchor, thus refuting the claim that pronouns merely resume their antecedents.

Despite its popularity in and outside cognitive linguistics, cognitive metaphor theory (CMT) has received a wide range of criticisms in the past two decades. Several metaphor researchers have criticized the methodology with which metaphor is studied (emphasizing concepts instead of words), the direction of analysis (emphasizing a top-down instead of a bottom-up approach), the category level of metaphor (claiming its superordinate status instead of basic level), the embodiment of metaphor (emphasizing the universal, mechanical, and monolithic aspects instead of nonuniversal, nonmechanical, and nonmonolithic aspects of embodiment), and its relationship to culture (emphasizing the role of universal bodily experience instead of the interaction of body and context). In the paper, I respond to this criticism largely based on my own research and propose a view on these issues that can successfully meet these challenges and that can be regarded as an alternative to the “standard theory.”

This paper aims to show how a clear perspective on the cognitive systems and processes involved in language production can help to solve a number of persistent problems in the analysis of TAM and related categories, and particularly of the semantic categories of deontic modality, volition, intention and directivity, notions which raise the issue of the relationship between qualificational categories and illocutionary categories, and what these stand for/how these should be represented in a model of the human linguistic faculty.

This paper reports on ongoing work on a large sample of bahuvrihi compounds in English and Spanish. After a brief characterization of bahuvrihi compounds, distinguishing them from a similar type of exocentric compounds (V+O compounds), the goal of the paper is clearly stated, namely to answer a number of questions, especially these two: (a) Does the metonymy CHARACTERISTIC PROPERTY FOR CATEGORY motivate the exocentric nature of all the compounds in the sample?; (b) Are other metonymies or metaphors also involved? If so, which are the metonymic or metaphoric patterns observable in conceptualizations underlying these compounds? The bulk of the paper is devoted to the detailed conceptual analysis of a large set of representative bahuvrihis in both languages. The results show that the above metonymy is responsible for the exocentric nature of all the compounds in the sample and that the characteristic property mapped by that metonymy is conceptualized in one of these three ways: literally, metonymically or metaphorico-metonymically. These three conceptualization patterns constitute the three major types of bahuvrihis in both languages; various further subtypes are proposed for each type. The paper ends with some tentative remarks on the Cognitive Grammar representation of the semantic structure of these compounds, on the connection between their semantic structure and their grammar and prosody, on a blending account of these lexemes, and on the contrasts identified between both languages.