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- Volume 13, Issue, 2015
Review of Cognitive Linguistics. Published under the auspices of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association - Volume 13, Issue 1, 2015
Volume 13, Issue 1, 2015
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Constructional meaning representation within a knowledge engineering framework
Author(s): Ricardo Mairal-Usónpp.: 1–27 (27)More LessFunGramKB is a multipurpose lexico-conceptual knowledge base for natural language processing systems, and more particularly, for natural language understanding. The linguistic layer of this knowledge-engineering project is grounded in compatible aspects of two linguistic accounts, namely, Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) and the Lexical Constructional Model (LCM). RRG, although originally a lexicalist approach, has recently incorporated constructional configurations into its descriptive and explanatory apparatus. The LCM has sought to understand from its inception the factors that constrain lexical-constructional integration. Within this theoretical context, this paper discusses the format of lexical entries, highly inspired in RRG proposals, and of constructional schemata, which are organized according to the descriptive levels supplied by the LCM. Both lexical and constructional structure is represented by means of Attribute Value Matrices (AVMs). Thus, the lexical and grammatical levels of FunGramKB are the focus of our attention here. Additionally, the need for a conceptualist approach to meaning construction is highlighted throughout our discussion.
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‘I’m dying on you’
Author(s): Ruti Vardipp.: 28–58 (31)More LessA specific type of intensification in the domain of love/desire/adoration is conveyed in Hebrew through the use of the idiomatic construction [X PRD al Y] [‘X die/crazy/ill/devastated on Y’] which deviates from the basic patterns of the grammar at both the morphosyntactic and the semantic levels. The present paper examines both the process of emergence and the accessibility of the construction: it explains how pragmatic needs drive a metonymy-based metaphorical mapping between dissociative conceptual domains, and how the mechanisms of negativity bias and embodiment are involved in this mapping. Subsequently the present paper shows how these pragmatic-driven processes are realised within a grammatical construction with a fixed, accessible idiomatic meaning. The paper additionally argues that emotive intensification is not limited to (adverbial) modification, but instead can be expressed by more complex constructions.
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Accent-induced coder bias
Author(s): Marjoleine Sloospp.: 59–80 (22)More LessRecent research has shown that speech perception can easily be influenced by the overall accent of the speaker. This paper investigates whether such accentinduced bias also occurs in speech transcription by professional and linguistically trained coders and to what extent such a bias may affect linguistic analyses. We compare the transcriptions of the Bären vowel in Standard German with the acoustic values of these vowels, as well as sociolinguistic analyses based on both of these. The results of the two analyses turn out to be considerably different. Further examination shows that the coders only partly relied on the acoustic values. The residual does not consist of random errors, but correlate with the degree of accentedness of the speakers. We conclude that this accent-induced coder bias led the coders to transcribe the codings according to their expectations about the pronunciation in the local dialect – expectations that were quite different from the acoustic reality.
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Medical term formation in English and Japanese
Author(s): Carlos Herrero-Zorita, Clara Molina and Antonio Moreno-Sandovalpp.: 81–105 (25)More LessThis paper presents a translingual study of medical lexicology in English and Japanese that compares the meaning and usage of three suffixes often found in medical discourse: -gram, -graph and -graphy. By means of an in-depth observation of frequency counts and semantic profiling in actual usage, we present a proposal regarding which roots each of the suffixes allow, together with an analysis of the meaning subtleties of the affixes. This work, informed by both cognitive and corpus linguistics, advances the presence of a concurrent pattern in English-Japanese morphology within medical discourse. After presenting a number of parallelisms and differences within the corpora, the work concludes with an explanation of how and why the three suffixes under inspection display quite distinct meaning nuances that restrain them from being used at random, both in English and in Japanese.
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Conceptual metaphor in the complex dynamics of illocutionary meaning
Author(s): Annalisa Baicchipp.: 106–139 (34)More LessThis article aims to illustrate the role that conceptual metaphor plays in the complex dynamics of interpersonal communication, with the focus being placed upon the synergistic relationship that metaphor holds with other Idealized Cognitive Models (Lakoff, 1987) in the construction of illocutionary meaning. This goal is pursued under the scope of the Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model(Baicchi & Ruiz de Mendoza, 2010), which has been elaborated to overcome the shortcomings of traditional relevance-theoretic approaches and to ground illocutionary activity within the constructionist strand of Cognitive Linguistics. The qualitative analysis of Webcorp data retrieved for the suggesting high-level situational cognitive model offers an exemplification of the interplay that metaphor holds with frames, image schemas, and metonymy.
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Beyond compare
Author(s): Maria Josep Cuencapp.: 140–166 (27)More LessThis paper deals with the formal properties and discourse features of “A és com B” (“A is like B”) similes in Catalan. In contrast with most previous approaches, the examples are naturally-occurring and the whole text has been analyzed so that their context, and not only the similes, is considered. The analysis of similes in interaction puts forward that: (i) a simile is a three-slot comparative construction, including a target and a source belonging to different conceptual domains, and an optional but frequent and highly significant elaboration; (ii) a simile is a figurative comparison between a source and a target (grammatically expressed by noun phrases or clauses) generally considered completely distinct or non-comparable; (iii) similes are powerful mechanisms to catch the addressee’s attention and put in a nutshell someone’s opinion, and (iv) they tend to have a prominent text status and are often found as headlines.
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Visualization and conceptual metaphor as tools for the teaching of abstract motion in German
Author(s): Sabine De Knoppp.: 167–190 (24)More LessThe case study explores German examples of metaphorical motion events as in (1) einen Text ins Deutsche übersetzen (‘to translate a text into German’) or (2) Er war bei uns über die Feiertage (‘He was with us over (during) the holidays’) in the wider context of verb-framed and satellite-framed languages (Slobin, 1996, 2000; Talmy, 1985). Starting from a general description of the components of motion events (Talmy, 1985) the examples help illustrate the German preferences in the lexicalization of such motion events and also concretize the challenges for the learning tasks of foreign language learners related to the German case-marking. Traditionally, German case-marking constitutes one of the major difficulties for foreign learners, especially in expressions of abstract motion events in which so-called “two-way prepositions” (Smith, 1995) can be used. The learner has to make a decision of whether to use an accusative (for the expression of a dynamic motion event with a path and a goal) or a dative (for the expression of a location) according to the meaning conveyed. The empirical study conducted with intermediate French-speaking students of German shows that the teaching of German motion events with their case-alternation can be facilitated by a methodology which deals with language-specific concepts (Boers & Lindstromberg, 2008), visualization (Paivio, 2001) and metaphor (Littlemore & Low, 2006). The visual support may offer the basis for a potential link with underlying conceptual metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), e.g. abstract is concrete or knowing is seeing. Spatial distinctions such as those between containers and surfaces are extended to more abstract areas of experience, especially in the context of situations describing abstract changes. Here one of the main issues for the learner is to find out whether the abstract goal is conceptualized as a container, a surface or still another basic spatial relation.
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Intonation unit boundaries and the storage of bigrams
Author(s): Alexander Wahlpp.: 191–219 (29)More LessMuch recent work on language and cognition has examined the psychological status of collocations/formulas/multi-word expressions as mentally stored units. These studies have used a variety of statistical metrics to quantify the degree of strength or association of these sequences, and then they have correlated these strengths with particular behavioral effects that evidence mental storage. However, the relationship between intonational prosody and storage of collocations has received little attention. Through a corpus-based approach, this study examines the hypothesis that boundaries between successive intonation units avoid splitting word bigrams that exhibit high statistical association, with such high association taken to be an index of mental storage of these bigrams. Conversely, bigrams exhibiting lower statistical association ought to be more likely to be split by intonation unit boundaries under this hypothesis.
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Cross-linguistic variation in metonymies for PERSON
Author(s): Weiwei Zhang, Dirk Speelman and Dirk Geeraertspp.: 220–256 (37)More LessThis paper investigates metonymies for person in Chinese and English in the framework of Cognitive Linguistics with an emphasis on cross-linguistic variation. Our central goal is to highlight the important role of cultural elements on the use of metonymy. Three main types of cross-linguistic variation were found at different degrees of granularities of metonymies: variation in metonymic patterns for the general target category person, variation in metonymic patterns for a specific kind of person, and variation in metonymic sources in a specific pattern. The variation was examined against its cultural background, and we conclude that some cross-linguistic differences are to a large extent rooted in culturally relevant factors. The findings suggest that although bodily experience as the general cognitive basis for metonymic pattern/source selection implies the universality of metonymies across different languages, cultural elements contribute to the language-specific preferences for metonymies of a given target.
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