Review of Cognitive Linguistics. Published under the auspices of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association - Volume 14, Issue 2, 2016

This paper addresses the usage, development and motivation of the Finnish mennä V-mA-An [go V-inf-ill] construction. In this construction, the literal motion sense of ‘going’ has been grammaticalized to evoke an affective meaning: the activity expressed in the construction’s infinitival element is considered as unwished (e.g. Johtaja-t men-i-vät lakkautta-ma-an ohjelma-n [manager- pl.nom go-pst-3pl shut.down-inf-ill show-acc] ‘Managers shut down the show [though they should not have]’). This paper uncovers the different ways the construction is used (for example, projecting the disapproving stance onto a specific element, such as the manner, objective or result of the activity, that the speaker finds especially inappropriate when compared to the desired course of events, or creating an ironic tone for the description of an event) and reveals its lexical profile in modern language. The role of the context in the interpretation of the construction as well as its grammaticalization process are also dealt with. It is argued that the affective meaning of the construction is metaphorically motivated by a previously undiscovered image-schematic pattern “deviant path – erroneous goal”. In this schema the trajector is conceived of abstractly deviating from a projected path and ending up at an unwished ending point, and this constitutes a contrast to the desired course of events, the core meaning of the construction. The analysis supports a tenet in cognitive semantics that linguistic structures are often motivated by general cognitive processes such as metaphor and image-schema patterns.

This paper, based on the idiomatic expressions, examines the metaphoric conceptualization of happiness in English and Vietnamese and brings insights into the relevant cross-linguistic and cross-cultural similarities and dissimilarities in the articulation of happiness. The discussion falls into two categories: conceptual metonymy and conceptual metaphor of happiness. The former involves physiological, expressive, and behavioural responses of happiness. These are regarded as metonymies in a sense that there is a ‘stand-for’ relationship between the responses and the emotion of happiness as the whole (i.e., the part stands for the whole) (Kövecses, 2000, 2008). The latter involves the metaphorical conceptualization of happiness, in which the abstract concept of happiness as target domain is structured in terms of a nonabstract domain as a souce domain. The data analysis suggests that metaphors and metonymies involved in the conceptualization of happiness have a strong link not only to physiological, but also to cultural, influences.

This study examines the conceptual semantics of human locomotion verbs in two languages – English and German – using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach. Based on linguistic evidence, it proposes semantic explications for English walk and run, and their nearest counterparts in German, i.e. laufen (in two senses, roughly, ‘run’ and ‘go by walking’), rennen (roughly, ‘run quickly’), gehen (roughly, ‘go/walk’), and the expression zu Fuß gehen (roughly, ‘go on foot’). Somewhat surprisingly for such closely related languages, the conceptual semantics turns out to be significantly different in the two languages, particularly in relation to manner-of-motion. On the other hand, it is shown that the same four-part semantic template (with sections Lexicosyntactic Frame, Prototypical Scenario, Manner, and Potential Outcome) applies in both languages. We consider the implications for systematic contrastive semantics and for lexical typology.

This paper explores the polysemy of the Croatian verbal prefix od- ‘(away) from’ from a Cognitive Grammar perspective (Langacker, 1987, 1991, etc.; Taylor, 2002). Despite the seemingly inordinate semantic heterogeneity of od-prefixed verbs, we argue that the different uses of od- are semantically motivated and that this has at least as much to do with the existence of a single abstract sanctioning schema as it does with the motivated extensions from the prototype, viz. spatial ablativity, or other category members. In this way we depart not only from the deep-rooted Croatian tradition, which tends to ignore any semantic motivation among different uses of a single prefix (e.g. Babić, 1986), but also from those cognitive linguistic approaches which rely on meaning chains, i.e. categorization by extension, to account for the polysemy of prefixes, prepositions and particles (e.g. Janda, 1985, 1986, 1988; Šarić, 2006a, 2006b, 2008, etc.).

The questions of whether aspects of language (spatiotemporal metaphor and/or orthography) shape temporal cognition in general and whether English and Mandarin speakers think about time differently in particular have attracted considerable attention and controversy. Focusing on these controversial issues, the present study examines and refines the findings from previous work with some new evidence. Experiment 1 used a card arrangement task in which participants were asked to arrange in order a series of cards depicting temporal sequences of natural events. Experiment 2 included the card arrangement task (the same as in Experiment 1) and a video judgment task. In the video judgment task, the stimulus presented a horizontal or a vertical array of pictures depicting a temporal sequence of natural events, and participants were asked to verify if the temporal sequence described in the pictures was in the correct order. Converging results yielded from the two experiments demonstrate that most Mandarin speakers (approximately 80%) may be identical to English speakers with regard to their salient horizontal bias for temporal cognition. Only approximately 20% of Mandarin speakers, who overwhelmingly rely on the vertical axis to reason about time, may differ from English speakers. The evidence suggests that there might be a possible relationship between language and temporal cognition, but the relationship is far more complicated and indefinite than a simple or absolute causal one. The issue of whether language plays a powerful and critical role that shapes people’s thought remains uncertain and is subject to further examinations and clarifications. Implications for theoretical and empirical issues concerning the language-thought relationship are discussed.

This paper discusses everyday expressions of anger in Kiswahili, a Bantu language spoken in Eastern Africa. Following Lakoff and Kövecses (1987), linguistic expressions of anger, collected from both written and oral discourses, were analyzed for metaphoric and metonymic content. Our findings reveal that Kiswahili manifests some striking differences in conceptualization of anger. A notable difference is found in the locality in which anger is perceived to originate, or the conceptualized “originating locality” of anger. The onset of anger, or stage at which a person ‘becomes angry’, is depicted via predicates such as shik-w-a ‘catch.PASS’ and ingi-w-a ‘enter.PASS’. A participant is seen as having been ‘caught’ or ‘entered’ by anger, thus construing anger as an externally-originating emotion. Consequently, we propose a prototypical cognitive model that appears to reflect the anger scenario in Kiswahili.

This article argues that certain phenomena concerning metaphor that have been studied largely separately are in fact strongly interrelated, to the extent of forming an indivisible complex that should ideally be addressed in a unified way. The phenomena addressed here are metaphor compounding, metaphor elaboration (often called metaphor extension), metaphor replacement, metaphor strength-modification, and unrealistic source-domain situations. The interrelationships between phenomena that the article discusses include: the potential for unrealism and partial forms of replacement to be implicated in compounding; the way strength-modification can arise from compounding and replacement; and the affinity between elaboration and weak forms of replacement. The article also sketches how the author’s ATT-Meta approach to metaphor, which has previously been presented as handling elaboration and compounding, and hence some types of strengthening, is suitable also for handling the other phenomena.

On the basis of corpus data and in consonance with cognitively-oriented constructionist approaches to language, mainly the work by Goldberg (1995, 2006) and the developments in Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal (2008, 2011), we offer a fine-grained analysis of some specific instantiations of the resultative pattern based on the prepositional phrase to death. The analysis starts off from the classification of verb classes made by Levin (1993). The verbs in some of these classes are readily available for fusion into the resultative configuration. Others call for reconstrual in terms of high-level metaphor and/or metonymy before they can conform to the requirements of the pattern mentioned above. Thus, we focus on the way in which the resultative pattern overwrites the properties of some lexical groups of verbs through the licensing activity of such cognitive mechanisms as high-level metaphor and metonymy. Additionally, the prepositional phrase to death is shown to perform two key communicative functions from among those put forward by Boas (2003): placing emphasis on an end point or rendering a vague point clear. Finally, the paper examines the hyperbolic load of the PP to death in some contexts where this PP is seen as converting an argument-structure construction into an implicational one conveying the speaker’s (usually negative) reaction to a given state of affairs.

A good number of lexical and grammatical models make use of systems of meaning representation which are based on a theory of event structure. Theories of event structure quite often take aspectual features as the backbone for the semantic representation of symbolic units, i.e predicates and constructions. One of the most comprehensive and detailed proposals for the aspectual characterization of both lexical units and argumental constructions can be found in the Lexical Constructional Model, which in turn is based on the system for semantic representations from Role and Reference Grammar. However, such a system presents some drawbacks, which stem mainly from not establishing a neat distinction between what is properly lexical and what is contributed by higher constructional units in the denotation of specific events. Taking such a distinction as a basic premise for a sound characterization of events, in this paper a reassessment of the typology of aspectual classes from these models is made; this critical revision is followed by a hierarchical reorganization of such aspectual classes.