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- Volume 10, Issue, 2012
Review of Cognitive Linguistics. Published under the auspices of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2012
Volume 10, Issue 1, 2012
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Optimizing the analysis of metaphor in discourse: How to make the most of qualitative software and find a good research design
Author(s): Michael Kimmelpp.: 1–48 (48)More LessThis article presents a software-based methodology for studying metaphor in discourse, mainly within the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). Despite a welcome recent swing towards methodological reflexivity, a detailed explication of the pros and cons of different procedures is still in order as far as qualitative research (i.e. a context-sensitive manual coding of a text corpus) is concerned. Qualitatively oriented scholars have to make difficult decisions revolving around the general research design, the transfer of linguistic theory into method, good workflow management, and the aimed at scope of analysis. My first task is to pinpoint typical tasks and demonstrate how they are optimally dealt with by using qualitative annotation software like ATLAS.ti. Software not only streamlines metaphor tagging itself, it systematizes the interpretive work from grouping text items into systematic/conceptual metaphor sets, via data surveys and checks, to quantitative comparisons and a cohesion-based analysis. My second task is to illustrate how a good research design can provide a step-wise procedure, offer systematic validation checks, keep the code system slim and many analytic options open. When we aim at complex data searches and want to handle high metaphor diversity I recommend compositional coding, i.e. tagging source and target domains separately (instead of adopting a “one mapping-one code” strategy). Furthermore, by tagging metaphors for image-schematic and rich semantic source domains in parallel, i.e. two-tier coding, we get multiple options for grouping metaphors into systematic sets.
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Throwing results: A corpus-based account of four Spanish verbs
Author(s): Emma Skallmanpp.: 49–89 (41)More LessThis article explores synonymy and polysemy in the interaction of meaning and the elements that a verb combines with. It presents a corpus-based analysis of four Spanish verbs (tirar, lanzar, arrojar and echar) whose primary meaning is ‘to throw.’ A four-hundred sentence sample extracted from the Corpus del Español 1900s subcorpus serves as the basis for this study. Statistical tests are used to compare the verbs’ behavior across several factors: morphological markings such as mood, tense and person, the types of subjects (human versus nonhuman), the types of objects (concrete versus nonconcrete), and the interaction of subject and object in full constructions. The tests are accompanied by semantic analysis of the sample sentences. The result of the statistical and descriptive analyses is a radial categorization that highlights the types of metaphoric and metonymic extensions that each verb uses, and where and how the verbs overlap semantically.
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The role of sound-symbolic forms in Motion event descriptions: The case of Japanese
Author(s): Kiyoko Toratanipp.: 90–132 (43)More LessThis article discusses the role played by sound-symbolic forms (SSFs) in Motion event descriptions, focusing on the case of mimetics — SSFs — in Japanese. An examination of literary texts shows that mimetics occur not only as the secondary element to another Co-event specifying form but also as the sole Co-event specifying element of the clause. As the latter, mimetics express Manner, Concomitance and Concurrent Result, i.e., three out of the eight relations a Co-event can have with the main Motion event (Talmy, 2000). This limited capability suggests that they are not the principal Co-event specifying form of Japanese. Nevertheless, they play an important role in Motion event descriptions as they: (i) supply indispensable lexical semantic information, being laden with rich meanings (e.g., rate in Manner) that parallel Basque movement imitatives (Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 2006); (ii) add nuances to a scene by combining with a diverse range of verbs/predicates, going beyond oft-cited collocational pairs such as yotiyoti aruku [toddling walk] ‘toddle’.
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Acquiring verbs in Spanish: An evaluation of two proposals
Author(s): Elisabet Serrat, Mònica Sanz-Torrent, Sara Feijóo, Silvia Maria Chireac and Joseph Hilfertypp.: 133–155 (23)More LessThe objective of the present study focuses on exploring two proposals about the acquisition of the grammatical category of verb. On the one hand, the study aims at analyzing whether the acquisition of a given mass of verbal lexical items occurs before the emergence of productive verbal morphology. On the other hand, the study also explores the possibility that the acquisition of negative structures emerges before productive verbal morphology as well. The study presents longitudinal data based on the linguistic production of a monolingual Spanish-speaking girl at the age of 19 to 27 months. These data show that the amount of verbal vocabulary is a good indicator of productivity as far as verbal morphology is concerned, but such vocabulary development occurs simultaneous to morphological development. The data also show that the learning and productive use of negation occurs before productivity in verbal morphology. These results are discussed in connection to the approach that claims that distributional analysis is a good mechanism for the acquisition of grammatical categories.
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Metaphor-metonymies of joy and happiness in Greek: Towards an interdisciplinary perspective
Author(s): Maria Theodoropouloupp.: 156–183 (28)More LessIn this paper I examine the idiomatic metonymic expressions denoting joy and happiness in Greek, focusing on their experiential grounding. I first argue for an interdisciplinary approach to the relationship between body, emotion and language, which allows for a holistic perspective to the meaning of these expressions and makes explicit the analogical experiential elements of the particular emotions. As a case study, I look at instances of metaphor within metonymy, which appear to require an interdisciplinary analysis. Drawing on corpus examples, I examine metonymies of joy and happiness with special emphasis on the neurobiological evidence (i.e. the expressive and physiological component of the emotion); the results of the analysis account for how happiness and joy are experienced by the subject.
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The situated common-sense knowledge in FunGramKB
Author(s): Carlos Periñán-Pascualpp.: 184–214 (31)More LessIt has been widely demonstrated that expectation-based schemata, along the lines of Lakoff’s propositional Idealized Cognitive Models, play a crucial role in text comprehension. Discourse inferences are grounded on the shared generalized knowledge which is activated from the situational model underlying the text surface dimension. From a cognitive-plausible and linguistic-aware approach to knowledge representation, FunGramKB stands out for being a dynamic repository of lexical, constructional and conceptual knowledge which contributes to simulate human-level reasoning. The objective of this paper is to present a script model as a carrier of the situated common-sense knowledge required to help knowledge engineers construct more “intelligent” natural language processing systems.
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Surprise as a conceptual category
Author(s): Zoltán Kövecses
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Figures and the senses
Author(s): Francesca Strik Lievers
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