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- Volume 16, Issue, 2018
Review of Cognitive Linguistics. Published under the auspices of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association - Volume 16, Issue 1, 2018
Volume 16, Issue 1, 2018
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Taking cognisance of cognitive linguistic research on humour
Author(s): Marta Dynelpp.: 1–18 (18)More LessThis article is meant to give a state-of-the-art picture of cognitive linguistic studies on humour. Cognitive linguistics has had an immense impact on the development of humour research and, importantly, humour theory over the past few decades. On the one hand, linguists, philosophers and psychologists working in the field of humour research have put forward proposals to explain the cognitive processes underlying specifically humour production and reception (e.g. the incongruity-resolution framework and its refinements). On the other hand, humour research has drawn on theories and concepts advanced in contemporary cognitive linguistics taken as a whole (e.g. mental spaces, conceptual blending, salience or conceptual metaphor). The different notions and approaches originating in these strands of research are in various ways interwoven in order to give new insights into the cognitive workings of humour.
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Strongly attenuating highly positive concepts
Author(s): Rachel Giora, Inbal Jaffe, Israela Becker and Ofer Feinpp.: 19–47 (29)More LessWhat are the constraints rendering stimuli, such as Alert he is not; He is not the most organized person around; Hospitality is not his best attribute; Do you really believe you are sophisticated? sarcastic by default? Recent findings ( Filik, Howman, Ralph-Nearman, & Giora, in press ; Giora et al., 2005 , 2013 , 2015a , 2015b , in progress a ) suggest that strongly attenuating a highly positive concept, e.g., alert, sophisticated, most organized, best attribute (associated here with hospitality), induces sarcastic interpretations by default. To be interpreted sarcastically by default, items should be construable as such in the absence of factors inviting sarcasm. 1 They should, thus, be (i) novel, noncoded in the mental lexicon, (ii) potentially ambiguous between literal and nonliteral interpretations, so that a preference is allowed, and (iii) free of specific and biasing contextual information. Online and offline studies, collecting self-paced reading times, eye-tracking data during reading, sarcasm rating, and pleasure ratings, alongside corpus-based studies, further support this view. 2
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Perceptual opposites and the modulation of contrast in irony
Author(s): Carla Canestrari and Ivana Bianchipp.: 48–71 (24)More LessThis paper proposes a new way of analyzing the contrast between an ironic comment and the referent context by focusing on the structure of the dimension which the contrast belongs to. This new approach was stimulated by previous experimental studies demonstrating that dimensions are perceptually made up of two opposite poles and an intermediate region consisting either of point or range properties. Applying this schema it became clear that, on the one hand what previous evidence-based literature mostly focuses on is the idea that for an ironic meaning to be detected there must be a contrast between two poles or within a pole; on the other hand, that there is room for new investigations concerning whether it is possible to make ironic comments containing poles to refer to intermediate situations (i.e. situations perceived as neither one pole nor the other) or, vice versa, to make ironic comments containing intermediates to refer to polarized situations.
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Humor, irony, and the body
Author(s): Raymond W. Gibbs, Patrawat Samermit and Christopher R. Karzmarkpp.: 72–96 (25)More LessIrony has traditionally been studied as a purely pragmatic phenomenon, one in which a speaker says one thing and means another, often by commenting on the contrast between expectation and reality. However, as cognitive linguists have discerned for many other aspects of language, much of the ways that people speak and understand one another is motivated by people’s pervasive bodily experiences. Ironic humor provides another compelling phenomenon in which to understand the embodied foundation of both linguistic meaning and multimodal expression, particularly in terms of rough-and-tumble play. Many forms of humor arise from different benign violations of the body in play fighting. We describe cognitive linguistic and psychological evidence on the importance of bodily experience, and benign violations of the body, in linguistic expressions referring to teasing and humor. Variations of rough-and-tumble play help explain some of the instabilities in the ways ironic humor unfolds in interpersonal interactions.
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Mental models, humorous texts and humour evaluation
Author(s): Henri de Jongstepp.: 97–127 (31)More LessThis paper investigates how a mental-model theory of communication can explain differences in humorous texts and how aesthetic criteria to evaluate humour are dependent on the way mental models are exploited. Humour is defined as the deliberate manipulation by speakers of their private mental models of situations in order to create public mental models which contain one or more incongruities. Recipients can re-construct this manipulation process and thereby evaluate its nature and its quality. Humorous texts can be distinguished in terms of ownership of the manipulated mental model, the relationship between the speakers’ private and their public (humorous) mental model, as well as the speed required in the humorous mental model construction. Possible aesthetic criteria are the quality of the mental model manipulation, the pressure under which the humorously manipulated mental models have been constructed and the quality of the presentation of humorous mental models.
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Temporal-magnitudinal construal coding
Author(s): Mikołaj Deckert and Marek Molendapp.: 128–151 (24)More LessThis article looks into the interface of temporality and quantification. Drawing on the principles of Cognitive Linguistics, we use experimental as well as corpus methods to provide evidence on how the conceptual organisation and linguistic coding of content can play a role in meaning construction. With that broad agenda in mind, a major objective is to shed light on the construct of conventionalisation. For that purpose, construal coding variants are examined with a focus on nominal phrases that express time quantities. The examination involves two construal types (termed “cumulative” and “fractional”) that differ primarily in their prominence configurations, across three granularity levels of time conceptualisation. Our main finding – that the fractional and cumulative constructions are asymmetrically conventionalised – is contextualised through a qualitative analysis of naturally-occurring data to identify additional language use patterns and offer explanatory hypotheses.
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Some advances in the study of the translation of manner of motion events
Author(s): Teresa Molés-Casespp.: 152–190 (39)More LessManner of motion represents a translation problem, especially between languages that belong to different typological groups, since their users (in this case mainly authors and translators) address the semantic component of Manner in different ways. In order to give a full account of the translation of manner of motion events in a German>Spanish parallel corpus of children’s and young adult literature, this contribution describes an interdisciplinary study by resorting to the theory of ‘Thinking for Translating’ ( Slobin, 1997 , 2000 , 2005 ) and to the hypothesis of translation universals ( Baker, 1993 ; Mauranen & Kujamäki, 2004 ).
It presents a proposal of seven translation techniques adapted to Manner of motion, as well as quantitative data regarding these techniques. Qualitative and quantitative data on the semantic subcomponents of Manner (speed, sound, motor pattern, etc.) are also included. The findings confirm that, in terms of Manner of motion, the translation is simpler than the original text and that motor pattern is the semantic subcomponent of Manner that has been affected by translation to the greatest extent.
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Emotions in motion
Author(s): Ulrike Osterpp.: 191–228 (38)More LessThis paper outlines some of the challenges and possibilities of a corpus-based approach to the diachronic description of the semantics of emotion words. It analyses three German anger words (Wut, Zorn and Ärger) in two corpora: DTA (Deutsches Textarchiv, covering the period 1600–1899) and DWDS (Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache, which covers twentieth-century German). The study is based on two complementary approaches: a semantic and pragmatic analysis of co-occurrences ( Oster, 2012 ); and the use of semantic foci ( Ogarkova & Soriano, 2014 ). This allows for a detailed description of the semantic evolution of the three anger words for four aspects of emotion – Control, Lack of Control, Visibility and Internalization – while exploring the advantages of a combined quantitative and qualitative corpus analysis.
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Expressing i think that in Polish
Author(s): Iwona Kokorniak and Alicja Jajko-Siwekpp.: 229–253 (25)More LessThe paper investigates how four Polish mental predicates, signalling the subject’s of conception thinking process and representing the i think that conceptualisation, differ in usage and what motivates the difference. The verbs’ first person singular present tense forms, in an objective way, signal the speaker’s, i.e. the subject’s of conception, thoughts about the (ir)reality stored in their mind, whereas the content of clause complementation subjectively reveals the object of conception, namely the realm of one’s thoughts. A quantitative corpus-driven analysis implemented in the study presents how formal, semantic and extra-linguistic ‘usage features’ of the complementation interact with the verbs. The findings suggest that the i think that conceptualisation shows linguistic variation in Polish dependent on the temporal realm of the situation described in the complementation, the topic of discourse, and the evaluation of the event described.
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The effect of the Arab Spring on the use of metaphor and metonymy in Jordanian economic discourse
Author(s): Aseel Zibinpp.: 254–298 (45)More LessThis study aims to identify the metaphors and metonymies used to describe economic concepts in Jordanian economic discourse pre- and post-Arab Spring in order to examine whether the events of the Arab Spring have had an impact on these figurative devices. This study also examines whether metaphor and metonymy can be affected by the social and cultural setting in which they are used and by politico-economic factors. In addition, this study aims to explore the notion that economic discourse uses many of the same conceptual metaphors regardless of the language and culture. To achieve this, I compiled a corpus of economic articles published in 2005 and 2008 (i.e. pre-Arab Spring) and 2012 and 2015 (i.e. post-Arab Spring) from two daily Jordanian newspapers. Frequency counts of metaphorical expressions representing the source domains and metonymies were compared to assess their saliency in the two periods and the two newspapers.
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