Review of Cognitive Linguistics. Published under the auspices of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association - Volume 14, Issue 1, 2016

In recent years, Cognitive Linguistics (CL) has established itself not only as a solid theoretical approach but also as an important source from which different applications to other fields have emerged. In this introductory article, we explore some of the current, most relevant topics in applied CL-oriented studies grouped into three main strands: Analyses of figurative language (both metaphor and metonymy) in use, constructions and typology. An outline of the contents of the eight chapters included in this special issue is provided, explaining their contributions to these research areas and highlighting their methodological rigour.

Twenty-seven semi-guided office hours’ consultations between lecturers and Spanish-speaking undergraduate students were recorded at five different universities in Europe where English is the medium of instruction. The linguistic data gathered show that metaphor plays a significant role in the way that lecturers explain to visiting Erasmus students how assignments, exams or course contents should be approached and understood. When mentoring their students, lecturers often frame the advice they are giving in metaphorical ways; occasionally this is done overtly, through establishing analogies or non-literal comparisons, but more often it is done covertly, through the use of conventional metaphorical expressions that are not accompanied by words or phrases that signal that the lecturers’ words should be understood as metaphors. This article examines extracts of talk from 5 academic conversations, looking at the different ways that ideas are framed metaphorically and the kind of responses they provoke in a conversational partner. The initial hypothesis was that overt metaphors would be a particularly effective means of communicating an idea in these cross-cultural mentoring sessions. However, when we compare this with covert uses of metaphor in the corpus, there is only weak evidence that it is so. Rather, the communicative success of any use of metaphor seems to depend very largely on the way that the conversational partners enact their roles as collaborative partners in an academic conversation.

Figurative language can present both difficulties and opportunities in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural communication. Previous studies have focused on difficulties in metaphor comprehension by speakers of different languages, but metonymy comprehension is a relatively under-researched area. In this paper, we describe a two-part study exploring metonymy comprehension by Japanese learners of English. In the first part of the study, ten Japanese learners of English were asked to explain the meanings of twenty expressions instantiating a range of metonymy types. Comprehension problems included: the missing of, or misuse of, contextual clues; positive and negative interference from Japanese; ‘underspecification’; and a tendency to interpret metonyms as if they were metaphors. The second part of the study focused on the functions performed by metonymy. Twenty-two Japanese learners of English were asked to interpret a set of twenty metonyms, each of which performed a particular function. Metonyms involving humour and irony appeared to be more difficult to understand than ones serving other functions, such as indirect reference and evaluation.

This paper explores the value of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) in the interdisciplinary study of emotion. The insights provided by a quantitative, corpus-based analysis of anger metaphors in three languages (English, Spanish, Russian) are compared to those obtained from two other methodologies of a more psycholinguistic kind: a feature-rating and a labelling task. The three methodologies are used to test in language several hypotheses on cross-cultural differences in anger experiences derived from earlier findings in emotion psychology. The three methods are found to be complementary and provide convergent evidence that support the hypotheses, with each method contributing additional pertinent data on some of the issues addressed. We discuss the contribution of CMT, its relative importance and specificity, and highlight several methodological and analytical adaptations that CMT studies should undergo for its results to become informative to other disciplines in the study of emotion.

Ellis, O’Donnell, and Römer (2014) used free-association tasks to investigate knowledge of Verb-Argument Constructions (VACs). They demonstrated that English speakers have independent implicit knowledge of (i) verb frequency in the VAC, (ii) VAC-verb contingency, and (iii) verb prototypicality in terms of centrality within the VAC semantic network. They concluded that VAC processing involves rich associations, tuned by verb type and token frequencies and their contingencies of usage, which interface syntax, lexis, and semantics. However, the tasks they used, where respondents had a minute to think of the verbs that fitted in VAC frames like ‘he __ across the….’, ‘it __ of the….’, etc., were quite conscious and explicit. The current experiments therefore investigate the effects of these factors in on-line processing for recognition and naming. Experiment 1 tested the recognition of VAC exemplars from very brief, masked, visual presentations. Recognition threshold was affected by overall verb frequency in the language, by the frequency with which verbs appear in the VAC, and by VAC-verb contingency (ΔPcw). Experiment 2 had participants successively name VAC arguments as quickly as possible: first the VAC and then the preposition. Preposition naming latency was a function of verb frequency in the VAC. We consider the implications for the representation and processing of VACs.

This paper examines the role of force dynamics and intentionality in the description of placement events by two groups of native speakers of typologically and genetically different languages, Danish and Spanish, and by two groups of intermediate adult learners, Danish learners of L2 Spanish and Spanish learners of L2 Danish. The results of the study showed that (a) force dynamics and intentionality are important semantic components in both languages, but their distribution and relative focus differed cross-linguistically, and (b) the two learner groups had difficulties in reconstructing the meanings of the L2 verbs involving these two semantic components. Learning difficulties were observed when moving from a less to a more complex L2 system, when moving in the opposite direction, i.e., from a more to a less complex L2 system and when moving to an L2 system that is as complex as the learners native one.

This paper analyses the interpretation of boundary-crossing events in second language acquisition (SLA) to determine whether L2 learners are able to select the target-like option for the interpretation of motion events or whether, on the contrary, their choice reflects cross-linguistic influence (CLI) of their L1. The two groups participating in the study – thirty Spanish learners of L2 English and sixteen English first language (L1) speakers – were subjected to an experiment involving an interpretation task with L2 boundary-crossing events pictures. Findings indicate that Spanish L2 learners selected three possible constructions (manner verb + path satellite, path in verb + manner in satellite and a combination of both) in clear contrast to English L1 speakers who only selected one construction (manner verb + path satellite). CLI has also been found to regulate the type of boundary-crossing event selected, primarily in cases of motion INTO a bounded space in the horizontal axis.

We analyze the expression of motion in translations of Tolkien’s The Hobbit into Polish and German within the framework of Talmy’s (1991, 2000) typology of macro-events and Slobin’s (1991, 1996) “Thinking for speaking” hypothesis. We show that although both languages pertain to the satellite-framed typological group, Polish provides less diversified Manner and Path descriptions than German, which exploits the satellite lexicalization pattern by far more productively. We relate these contrasts in the rhetorical style to the particular morpho-syntactic and semantic characteristics of the languages under discussion.

In this paper I provide a qualitative description of the verbs used to introduce Direct Speech (DS) in fictional narratives written in English and their Spanish translations in order to compare the way these two languages reconstruct speech events in texts by means of both speech verbs (e.g. say/decir, counter/argumentar, declare/manifestar) and non-speech verbs (e.g. grin/sonreír, scowl/fruncir el ceño). Using a corpus of popular fictional narrative genres and drawing upon typological research on motion after the work by Talmy (1985, 1988, 1991) and Slobin (1996a, 1996b, 2004, 2005, 2006). I look into the strategies used in English and Spanish for recreating speech events in order to explore whether the typological differences between these languages are replicated in the case of speech. The hypothesis is that, contrary to what happens with motion events, the differences between English and Spanish do not rest upon lexical availability but, rather, on the weight placed in different speech elements in agreement with two different agendas regarding speech events. While congruent with typological studies, this piece of research attempts to broaden their scope and explore a topic still underexplored.