Cognitive Linguistic Studies - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2016

The X itself

is a nominal construction that has not received much attention within cognitive linguistics despite it having a quite interesting function, as it serves to select a core part in a partonomy and thus specify lexical relations within a text. Apart from being mentioned in passing in Croft & Cruse (2004), one of the few treatments of this construction in cognitive linguistics is Jensen (2014) who builds on the comments in Croft & Cruse (2004) and proposes a hypothesis pertaining to the cognitive and discursive function of the construction. However, that hypothesis does not take into account an important aspect of the reality of language — namely, variation. This article investigates, within the framework of usage-based construction grammar, the X itself in the Open American National Corpus (OANC) to see whether the construction displays variation across the nine domains that the data in OANC are divided into. Applying quantitative techniques, including lexical diversity measures and multidimensional scaling, this article explores aspects of the discursive behavior of the X itself across these domains and addresses the extent to which the construction interacts with the registers associated with the domains. Focusing on use-based varieties (McArthur 1992, see also Quirk 1989 and Halliday et al. 1964: 77), the present article argues that the X itself is not a constructional monolith, but that it is characterized by register-sensitive functional variation and that its core selection function very likely serves a information-structural discourse-pragmatic purpose.

This paper is about gradation of meaning in English, the situation in which the degree of the quality of a word increases or decreases, caused conceptually by communicative demands and expressed lexically by other words called degree adverbs. The choice of a degree adverb reflects the speaker's viewpoint and influences the listener’s reception of the message. With reference to this phenomenon, the paper explores three fundamental tenets of Cognitive Grammar. The first is that a linguistic item forms a category of interrelated senses. On this basis, degree adverbs are argued to acquire new senses relative to context of use. The second is that the meaning of a linguistic item is best understood in terms of the domain to which it belongs. On this basis, degree adverbs are argued to form sets in which they highlight different facets. The third is that the use of a linguistic item is motivated by the particular construal imposed on a scene. On this basis, the use of a degree adverb is argued to result from the particular construal the speaker chooses to describe a situation. Degree adverbs are found to be linguistic devices used to fine-tune a stance. A change in a stance requires a change in a degree adverb.

This article defends the position taken by Talmy that Mandarin Chinese is satellite-framed, and thus argues against Slobin and Chen and Guo that Mandarin is ‘equipollently-framed’. The approach we take is constructional and cognitive in that we draw insights from Construction Grammar and Cognitive Grammar, though it is not restricted to either of them. A more unconventional view of the clause structure in Chinese is first presented, examining the so-called ‘complex sentences’ from a cognitive perspective. The consequence of this view is that the notion of ‘equipollent-framed language’ for Chinese can be abandoned and thus tidying up Talmy’s original typology. It is further argued that the constructional-cognitive view of Chinese captures the structural intuitions more appropriately than a traditional generative account, and that the motion-directional structure in Chinese has been constructionalized to the extent that individual verbs in the construction merge but produce a structure with more than their total properties.

Research on cross-linguistic categorization reveals that there were universal principles constraining the categorization of motion events across languages, and variations only distributed in a limited range. However, this finding has not been widely verified across languages and semantic domains. In this paper, we will address whether the universal constraints exist in the cross-linguistic categorization of throwing events, with the data collected with a behavioral approach. We asked 79 adult native speakers of English(12 male, 17 female), Chinese(15 male, 15 female), and German(18 male, 12 female) to perform actions denoted by near-synonymous ‘throw’ verbs in their native languages. Then we coded the features of their actions and compared them across individuals and languages. The results support the finding of previous studies that event categorization is constrained across languages. In addition, the top-down approach we adopted in this study allowed us to capture the focal and extensional semantic range of each verb involved, which advanced our knowledge of event categories and different semantic representations of a class of near-synonyms.

While Deliberate Metaphor Theory is controversial from a psychological point of view, its advocates propose that the communicative notion of ‘deliberateness’ is valuable for structural-functional analyses of metaphors in the social world. Nevertheless, the inter-relationships between the linguistic, conceptual, and communicative dimensions of metaphor highlighted by Deliberate Metaphor Theory, and how these may vary across different discourse contexts, remains underexplored. This paper examines deliberate metaphor across four contrasting discourse categories of psychotherapy talk, news articles, popular science articles, and political speeches. 800 metaphor units were randomly sampled and coded under the variables DIRECT (direct/indirect), NOVEL (novel/conventional), DELIB (deliberate/non-deliberate), and CATEGORY. In the first part of the study, a hierarchical log-linear analysis identified three significant interaction effects: DELIB*DIRECT, CATEGORY*NOVEL*DIRECT, and CATEGORY *NOVEL*DELIB (χ2(7) = 0.0, p = 1). While generally reflecting the inter-relatedness of the three dimensions, the three-way interactions point towards underexplored patterns of variation which are discussed with respect to contrasting discourse objectives. In the second part of the study, six categories of deliberate metaphor features were inductively identified: elaboration, signal, analogy, stark novelty, topic-triggering, and repetition. They demonstrate diverse strategic ways in which ‘deliberateness’ is constructed across the four discourse categories.

Drawing on Cognitive Linguistic theories of metaphor and metonymy, in this paper we deal with the interaction between metaphor and metonymy in non-idiomatic Greek expressions. Data from (self-compiled and electronic) corpora show that metonymy functions together with metaphor as a realization of metaphtonymy, and the interaction patterns revealed here are closer to the ‘metaphor from metonymy’ type of interaction (Goossens 1995). It is also argued that a specific construction is instantiated in addition to metaphor and metonymy.

Cognitive linguistics as a disciplinary school of thought concerns itself with investigating the relationship between human language, the mind and socio-physical experience. It sees language as embedded in the overall cognitive capacities of man, places special emphasis on topics such as the structural characteristics of natural language categorization including, but not limited to, prototypicality, systematic polysemy, cognitive models, mental imagery, and metaphor. This study examined sexual euphemisms and dysphemisms in the Kenyan Dholuo within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics, specifically anchoring itself on Conceptual Integration Theory (Fauconnier and Turner 2002). The study had two objectives: to identify and explain the sex-related dysphemistic words and phrases in Dholuo and to account for the cognitive processes in the creation of sex-related euphemisms. To achieve its objectives, the study used a descriptive design in which the researcher identified the sex-related dysphemisms by asking native Dholuo speakers to name the male and female sexual organs and sex- related physiological processes associated with both males and females. In addition, the respondents were asked to give the alternative terms that were used to refer to the sex-related dysphemistic terms mentioned. The euphemisms collected were analyzed using Conceptual Integration Theory. They were mapped into the different kinds of conceptual mappings (also known as the mental spaces). The study found out that Conceptual Integration Theory adequately and appropriately accounted for the euphemisms in Dholuo in terms of their interpretation. It provides solid tools for understanding, interpreting and accounting for the euphemisms in Dholuo. It is also demonstrated that not only is there a gendered usage of both euphemisms and dysphemisms, but also that their use is socially and culturally constrained. It is concluded that, just like in other languages, Dholuo euphemisms and dysphemisms are analyzable from a cognitive linguistics perspective

The present pilot study compared the effects of cognitive and non-cognitive approaches on the development of Japanese learners’ knowledge about the different degrees of sureness attached to certain, probable, and possible items. The results showed that the cognitive approach group outperformed the non-cognitive approach and control groups in writing and comparison judgment tests, and that both the cognitive and non-cognitive approach groups performed better than the control group in the categorization judgment test. These results suggest that the cognitive approach with 3D image content through computers can promote L2 language learning because it may have made the target structures more salient and also enabled the participants to connect spatial concepts with different degrees of sureness attached to the certain, probable, and possible items, thereby facilitating deep processing of form-meaning pairings.