Review of Cognitive Linguistics. Published under the auspices of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association - Online First

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) uses metaphor extensively in its exercises with clients (Hayes et al., 2012). This paper analyzes a corpus of ACT defusion exercises to identify the patterns of construal they typically evoke. Findings show frequent use of the Divided-Person metaphor (Lakoff, 1996), with the two aspects of the mind (the Self and Subject) operating within an actual or potential force dynamic (FD) configuration (Talmy, 2000). Two main types of configurations emerge. Deliteralization exercises show shifts in the balance of strength between the Subject and Self. Observation exercises draw a contrast between a steady-state FD configuration involving a coerced Agonist and a secondary steady-state FD pattern in which a potentially coercing force was no longer impinging on the Agonist. The results demonstrate how FD and the Divided-Person metaphor systematically combine to construe mental phenomenology and dispositions. The analysis thus sheds light on the conceptual structures underlying therapeutic discourse in ACT.

The study provides a critical overview of metaphor identification methodologies and suggests further improvements to one of the most common procedures known as MIPVU. It presents the theoretical background to two major tasks of metaphor identification: the segmentation of text into linguistic units and determining their metaphoricity. The latter includes the demarcation of senses and the specification of source and target domain meanings. Difficulties involved in annotation include the establishment of boundaries to delimit metaphorical meaning-carrying elements, metaphoricity associated with word sequences rather than individual lexis, the treatment of compounds, particles and nominal inflections, as well as conflating or overlapping sense descriptions in the dictionary. Many of these issues are illustrated with a detailed analysis of Hungarian examples. A flexible but principled application of the procedure is recommended depending on the specific research agenda. The study advocates the utilization of the notion of decomposability in determining the metaphorical status of idiom-internal words and suggests a modification in MIPVU’s treatment of compounds. Decisions taken early in the process of metaphor analysis have repercussions in later stages when source domains and mappings are identified or quantitative analysis is conducted.

This study investigates whether Russian onomatopoeias can generate multisensory mental imagery and evoke synaesthetic sensations going beyond sound depiction. The experiment with Russian native speakers identified six word clusters linked to a specific set of sensory associations involved in depicting extralinguistic phenomena: (1) words reflecting delicate body movements with moderate kinetic and subtle visual and auditory sensations; (2) one word referring to flatulence formed its own cluster triggering strong auditory, olfactory and kinetic sensations; (3) words depicting food consumption uniquely activated associations with taste; (4) words linked to movements evoked strong visual and kinetic sensations with no auditory focus; (5) words representing environmental sounds spatially remote from the observer triggered auditory, visual and kinetic sensations; (6) words for human bodily sounds generated auditory, visual and kinetic sensations, with tactile and interoceptive implications. The results indicate that Russian onomatopoeias elicit vivid, multisensory mental imagery, some with synaesthetic properties, akin to ideophones.

This paper revisits the constructional and functional properties of the Korean causal connective -(u)n nameci. The paper argues that -(u)n nameci is used when the speaker is reconstructing and evaluating past situations; focal situations that have already occurred and/or been processed are reviewed and framed as causally related by a narrator (Subject of Consciousness) who construes the situations from a conceptual distance. A usage-based investigation supports this argument, demonstrating that -(u)n nameci subjectively encodes conceptual distance, often conveyed through quotation or emphasis, between the speaker and the focal situations. It uses the framework of the Basic Communicative Spaces Network (BCSN; Sanders et al., 2009) to model the construal process of -(u)n nameci in examples with various degrees of subjectivity, and further demonstrates that it conveys higher degrees of subjectivity than the prototypical Korean causal connective -ese.

In this paper, we investigate the cartoons of high bride price in China. Through an integrated approach of multimodal metaphor analysis, metaphor scenario analysis, and feminist critical discourse analysis, we focus on how metaphors are discursively employed to convey and resist the practices of high bride price, which reflects the intricate power relations and gender ideologies embedded in these representations. Having examined 105 verbal-pictorial cartoons retrieved from Baidu Images as one of China’s most popular image-search platforms, we find that three metaphor scenarios are often used to represent high bride price practices, including (1) the weighing scenario that compares brides to unaffordable commodities; (2) the burdening scenario that depicts brides as insurmountable pressure; and (3) the demanding scenario that equates bride as insatiable money grabbers. We argue that these metaphor scenarios, despite serving as shorthand for resisting the practice of high bride price, in effect, scapegoat brides(-to-be) and other women in general, as the primary or even sole culprits of the social problem. This discursive representation, therefore, leaves the (neo)patriarchal marriage system and other deep-rooted socio-cultural factors that cause the social problem of high bride price unchallenged. In contrast to the above-mentioned stereotyping representations, we also examine alternative counter-scenarios that positively address marriage and family issues, demonstrating the potential of such counter-discourse to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment in contemporary China.

This study applies Conceptual Metaphor Theory to examine how the term ləbb ‘heart’ in Amharic is metaphorically extended to mental activities. By examining the figurative uses of ‘heart’ in fixed expressions from Amharic monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, and utilising the lexical method, this study finds that ləbb ‘heart’ is a central organ in the conceptualisation of mental activities in Amharic. Ləbb ‘heart’ is associated with general intellectual or mental effort rather than being confined to a specific set of mental activities. Typologically, Amharic is predominantly cardiocentric (Niemeier, 2011); in Amharic, mental faculties are primarily associated to the body part corresponding to heart.

This paper examines, from a Cognitive Linguistics perspective, the meaning and grammar of the experiential construction (EC) in Assamese, an Indo-Aryan language of Assam, India. This construction, which exclusively encodes experiential situations, marks the experiencer subject with either the dative or genitive case. Thus, it differs from the subject-verb (SV) intransitive construction, where the subject, whether a doer or an experiencer, is marked by nominative, absolutive, or ergative case, based on how the language organizes its subject and object marking.

This construction, a characteristic feature of many Southeast Asian languages, is commonly referred to as the ‘non-nominative subject construction’ (see e.g., Subbarao, 2012). However, we prefer ‘experiencer construction’ because it functions as a distinct structure specifically encoding experiential situations, rather than a secondary or irregular form. The current paper argues that the construction is grounded in a distinct conceptualization, including metaphorical mappings, that shapes its grammatical structure. This underlying conceptualization presents a fundamentally non-agentive perspective for the experiencer. The Assamese examples presented in this paper come from the authors themselves, who are native speakers of Assamese.

Studies on body parts are pervasive in many languages and cultures. The current research selects for study head metaphors and metonymies in Saudi Arabic (SA), and compares them to their Tunisian Arabic (TA) counterparts (Maalej, 2014). The objective of the study is to test whether SA and TA as belonging to the same Arab-Islamic civilization, show the same head metaphors and metonymies. To do so, data for SA are collected from various sources by the researcher while data for TA were available in Maalej (2014). The framework is a combined one, consisting of the Cognitive Metaphor Theory (CMT) as developed by Lakoff & Johnson (1980) and the Cognitive Theory of Metonymy (CTM) as developed by Radden & Kövecses (2007), together with two views of cognition: embodied cognition (Gibbs, Lima, & Francozo, 2004; Foglia, & Wilson, 2013) and cultural cognition (Sharifian, 2011). Results show that, in conformity with Maalej’s (2014) claim about the marked use of metonymy more with character traits and cultural values than the mental faculty, metonymy is embodied and more frequent than metaphor. Results also show that although these two dialects of Arabic belong in the same Arab-Islamic culture, they show major differences in making changes to the head in sense-making. These outcomes, together with other results arrived at by Zibin et al (2024), point to the fact that in some Arab-Islamic sub-cultures language and embodiment seem to be under pressure and overridden by cultural cognition.

Passive sentences featuring absent agents are prevalent in both Chinese and English, yet the cognitive motivations behind these agents have not received sufficient attention. To fill the gap, the current study investigates the differences in comprehension difficulty metrics between passive sentences with and without agents in both languages. Using mixed-effects logistic regression and conditional inference tree models, we find that in Chinese passives, the inaccessibility of subjects and the low predictability of subject dependencies pose comprehension difficulty. Consequently, agents are absent to alleviate the difficulty by reducing the memory burden of subject dependencies. In English passives, the inaccessibility of subjects and the heavy memory load of subject dependencies cause comprehension difficulty. Therefore, agents are absent to mitigate this difficulty by eliminating the memory burden of processing the dependencies between verbs and agents. In conclusion, overall efficient comprehension drives the absence of agents in passive sentences across both Chinese and English.

Subordinate clauses to emotive predicates are usually regarded as one of the most challenging contexts in the study of mood. Recently, within the framework of cognitive linguistics, it has been shown that the use of the subjunctive in the complements of volitive, causative, and wish predicates results from adopting the antagonist’s viewpoint within a force dynamics pattern. This paper demonstrates the suitability of this same model to account for (1) subjunctive use in subordinate clauses to emotive predicates, as constructions also associated with force dynamics patterns, and (2) the systematicity of certain phenomena of double choice and polysemy exhibited by some related predicates. Additionally, this paper suggests the model’s capacity to incorporate sociolinguistic and stylistic mood variation.