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

This study examines the effects of L2 proficiency and manner salience on English learners’ verb lexicalization of spontaneous motion events. Three proficiency groups of L1 Korean learners of L2 English were asked to describe spontaneous motion situations, and their use of verbs was compared to that of native English speakers. Results indicate that L2 learners’ verb lexicalization was heavily influenced by the typological patterns of their native language, but the development of target-like lexicalization patterns occurred even though it plateaued at a certain acquisitional phase. Moreover, it was found that the degree of adopting target-like lexicalization patterns varied by manner-of-motion types (i.e., high-salience manner such as swim versus low-salience manner such as walk) in all three learner groups, implying that the inherent salience of manner has an impact on L2 lexicalization of spontaneous motion.

Cognitive Linguistics claims that language is not purely abstract and arbitrary, but meaningful and grounded in concepts arising from our embodied experiences ( Oakley, 2007 ). The potential of using imagery and bodily representations to explain the conceptual motivation of grammar has been widely recognized in the context of language acquisition and teaching. This study investigates whether an increase of learners’ bodily engagement through the performance of bodily movements and locomotion produces even greater learning outcomes. To this end, we refer to Talmy’s (2000) Force Dynamic System to conduct a pretest-posttest interventional study with two groups of learners dealing with the German modal verb system. Whereas the first group watched multimedia animations (low bodily engagement), the second group was asked to perform bodily movements in line with the force-dynamic notions underlying the different modal verbs (high bodily engagement). The results show that both groups produced similar learning gains and that an increased bodily engagement could not be associated directly with a significantly better performance.

The article deals with the role of metonymy in word-formation, specifically in naming extra-linguistic concepts. Its role is approached from an onomasiological perspective, i.e., the starting point in the analysis is the concept to be named. Within this approach, metonymy is seen as a cognitive process (in the dynamic sense) that is inherent in the act of coining any naming unit irrespective of its resulting form, as metonymy provides the perspective from which the concept is mentally accessed, and the morphological form is an outcome of the subsequent matching of the result of conceptualisation with a suitable constructional schema. This understanding of metonymy, however, does not lead to an unrestricted application of the term. The article suggests that if a consistent view of metonymy in coining words is applied, any formal restrictions on its use turn out to be irrelevant.

This article aims to develop a Cognitive Grammar (CG) analysis of three grammatical constructions in Korean, all of which employ the bound noun kes. The data under examination includes the Factive, Internally Headed Relative Clause (IHRC), and Cleft constructions. We propose a uniform treatment of the three types of kes by arguing that it denotes a schematic noun that profiles a thing (noun) and has some role in the process of the adnominal clause. Different interpretations of these constructions arise due to different types of conceptualizations involved in each instance. In so doing, we point out that previous proposals that deal with kes are neither general enough to capture the commonalities observed in all three constructions nor can account for the new observations we present.