Cognitive Linguistic Studies - Volume 12, Issue 2, 2025

Abstract

Cognitive Linguistics has had an important mission in showing how conceptual formations — frames, idealized cognitive models, metaphorical mappings, etc. — play an essential role in our understanding of society, including political decisions. Most of that literature is focused on the way humans conceive and speak of society and politics, i.e., the conceptual aspect that was central to the mission of Cognitive Linguistics itself. This article goes beyond the linguistic and mental aspects, focusing on the role of conceptual models in social reality — in the way the world works. Causal relations are typically not in focus for cognitive or discourse-oriented studies — but they are essential in order to understand the role of conceptualization in the world: conceptualization works by feeding into the causal structure of the social world. A foundational point is the need for a multi-perspectival approach to social phenomena: The description of individual minds, the description of discourse processes, and the description of societies are not rivals competing for the same turf but necessary aspects of the same full story. Cognitive Linguistics shares concerns and issues with social constructionism, but differs in its emphasis on grounding, the importance of which is a key point in the discussion. More generally, an exclusive focus on mental phenomena may combine with idealist views of democracy and thereby create a risk of taking for granted a ‘let-there-be-light’ model of political change: To assume that once we agree on the idea, all that remains is to transform reality so as to conform to the ideal — which radically underestimates the difficulties both of getting there and making it work. The anthropological work of Arlie Russell Hochschild is used to illustrate how narratives, emotions, and hard social facts combine to create complex social reality.

Abstract

The paper focuses on image-schematic dynamic complexes as constituent elements of conceptual construction and meaning generation in language. More specifically, it studies the deployment of schematicity in the journalistic register of political discourse, viewed from a comparative-contrastive perspective. A two-component 400,000-word corpus of English and Serbian politico-economic newspaper articles is used for a quantitative analysis that examines schematicity, scalarity and the degree of affectiveness, and bias as a correlative of text topic and newspaper type. The results indicate that although the number of schemas involved need not be significant for an increase in figurativeness in political language, the marked variation in scalarity points to increased or attenuated affectiveness leading to biased reporting. This pertains particularly to the topic of war in tabloid newspapers. Moreover, such an increase/attenuation may be shown to operate in both English and Serbian newspaper articles.

Abstract

The present study introduces a method that can be used to explore in a quantitatively rigorous yet less demanding way (both in terms of data and statistical requirements) how constructional templates and their lexical preferences (lexico-syntactic transference) diffuse in language contact situations. The study investigates the influence of Mexican Spanish similative-pretence constructions on Huasteca Nahuatl similative-pretence constructions as a proof-of-concept kind of application for our method. Speakers of Huasteca Nahuatl have borrowed the markers komo ‘like’ and komo si ‘as if’ from Mexican Spanish to express similative (e.g., she swims like a fish) and pretence meanings (e.g., she swims as if she were a fish), respectively. Using a conditional inference forest, the paper demonstrates that speakers of Huasteca Nahuatl have not only borrowed these markers from Mexican Spanish, but also lexical preferences (e.g., verb lemmas) of the constructions in which these markers occur. These findings show that the rigid partition of structural levels that has been adopted by traditional models of language contact proves inadequate for describing complex language situations. The method introduced here provides an integrative, non-modular way to explore language contact from a Usage-Based Construction Grammar perspective.

Abstract

This study sheds light on how Japanese children conceptualize taxation through creative metaphors, offering insights into their cognitive development and societal understanding. Specifically, the research investigates the most prevalent metaphor, tax is support, identified through the analysis of 712 postcards collected from a prefecture-wide children’s competition in Akita, Japan. The study addresses two core questions: (i) How do Japanese children conceptualize the metaphor of tax is support? (ii) What does the metaphor reveal about their understanding of tax and the nature of cognitive effort involved in metaphor interpretation? Drawing on multimodal metaphor analysis (Charles J. Forceville & Eduardo Urios-Aparisi 2009), the study examines how children’s visual and verbal representations complement each other, reflecting deeper conceptual structures. The analysis is also framed by L. S. Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory (Vygotsky 1978; Robert W. Rieber & Aaron S. Carton 1987), which emphasizes the role of social interaction and cultural tools in shaping cognitive development. Through these lenses, the study explores how Japanese children aged 11 to 12 internalize complex societal concepts like taxation and transform them into meaningful metaphors, reflecting both personal interpretation and the sociocultural values embedded in the competition context.

Abstract

This paper investigates metaphors, idioms, and proverbs that relate to the polysemous word nsuo ‘water,’ in Akan and concentrates on water, rain, and river. It uses Farzad Sharifian’s (2015) Cultural Linguistics and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s (1980) conceptual metaphors (CMs). The paper emphasizes that Akans see water as indispensable in all aspects of their undertakings; therefore, they apply metaphors, idioms, and proverbs to comment on the functions of water. Akans use metaphors, idioms, and proverbs to depict their indigenous knowledge, spiritual life, philosophy, worldview, and environmental knowledge about water. This study is purely qualitative, and focuses on library studies, internet sources, and interviews with renowned Akan scholars, folklorists, folksong composers, and broadcasters. The paper compares water metaphor in Akan, Chinese, English, Hindu, Javanese, and Syrian cultures. It is another interdisciplinary research in Akan language, cognition, worldview, environmental studies, and culture in the areas of cultural linguistics, cognitive linguistics, ethnography of communication, anthropology, and oral literature.

Abstract

Although it is well-documented in the literature that semantic congruence positively impacts memory in general and incidental memory in particular, it is unknown whether this effect extends to frame-semantic congruence. The primary objective of this study was to reveal whether frame-semantic congruence has a positive effect on incidental memory. This was an experimental study using a timed judgment task and a subsequent free recall task. 248 participants judged 30 food labels — of which 2 were frame-semantically congruent and 2 were frame-semantically incongruent, and the rest were distractors — with regard to their realness as quickly as possible. Next, participants listed as many of the items from the timed judgment task as possible in a free recall task. A Poisson mixed model showed no significant effects of frame-semantic (in)congruence on memorability of food labels. However, a McNemar’s test showed a significant difference between the two frame-semantically congruent food labels: crispy chips significantly outperformed crunchy lettuce, a pattern which was also observed in the reaction times. Frame-semantically congruent food labels may enhance incidental memory when applied to some but not all types of foods. However, this remains to be corroborated by further studies.

Abstract

This study examines linguistic synesthesia in collocations, which has rarely been addressed in the field. The synesthetic collocations data are gathered from Korean, which is a less studied language in the literature. The study addresses two issues. The first issue is whether the Korean collocation synesthesia has a particular directionality of synesthetic mappings, and whether it shares the same patterns with synesthetic metaphors in Indo-European languages. The second issue is whether linguistic synesthesia in Korean collocations shows a rule-based or frequency-based directionality if it has a certain transfer directional pattern. The results reveal that the Korean synesthetic collocations confirm the synesthetic mapping hierarchy analyzed based on Indo-European languages, assuming its cross-linguistic universality from the perspective of rule-based unidirectionality. In addition, the collocation synesthesia in Korean shows particularities. For instance, the visual domain is maximized as sources, but neither olfaction nor audition functions are identified as source. Finally, this study discusses sensory verbs containing auxiliary verbs, wherein grammaticalization is clearly identified for the Korean collocational synesthesia.

This article reviews Construction Grammar: The Structure of English978-1-107-01349-0$ 120.00

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