Cognitive Linguistic Studies - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2020

It is well-established that the linear ordering of words in a sentence is influenced by a variety of factors that are typically labelled as grammatical, discourse or cognitive constraints. The aim of the present study is to determine whether frequency effects are visible in the sequencing of words in a sentence. In other words, do “more frequently used units tend to be placed before less frequently used units” (Fenk-Oczlon 2001: 443)? Using a corpus of newspaper articles, we examine the frequency of words in different positions in sentences. That is, using data from thousands of sentences, we investigate the median value for the frequency or rank of words in first position in a sentence, compared with second position, and so on. We find that there is a frequency effect in English: the first element in a sentence has the highest frequency and last element in a sentence has the lowest frequency, with the middle of sentences having a more or less flat frequency profile. We also find that the overall shape of the frequency profile for sentences is rather consistent even when sentence length is taken into account.

In Modern Standard Chinese, word order patterns and constructions are motivated by factors and restrictions connected to different levels of linguistic organization, including not only semantics and syntax, but also pragmatics, information-structure, and the conceptual domain. The functional and the cognitive paradigms have offered distinct but complementary perspectives capable of accounting for word order patterns and regularities related to either the topic-prominent nature of Chinese or the iconic dimension of its grammar. This article shows how cognitive and functional aspects are in fact tightly intertwined and display significant and not yet fully explored parallelisms. Specifically, it looks into the notions of ‘frame’, ‘scope’, and ‘part’, features shared by both functional accounts of topic-comment structures and conceptually motivated word order principles. It proposes a qualitative corpus analysis of such notions and shows that first, Chinese topics are better defined in terms of frames; second, a number of word order regularities can be accounted for with a single cognitive-functional schema, which I refer to as frame-part, or frame-participant, which is connected to the image schema of containment. This article hopes to contribute to bridging the gap between functional studies on information structure in Chinese and perspectives offered by the cognitive approach to linguistic structures, and to offer effective tools for Chinese as a second language acquisition.

The present study explores the viewpointing function of word order inversion and associated stylistic strategies across languages, comparing English-Chinese multiple parallel texts as illustration. In particular, I investigate whether the cognitive strategy of inverting the word order to create a subjective construal is similar in both languages, to what extent, and if the languages differ, what systematic contingency plans there are. To answer the question, I examined selected excerpts with inversion written in English and their multiple translations in Mandarin Chinese, to see how the subjective construals in the English originals are rendered. I find that in addition to inversion, the English samples exhibit a zoom-in effect through use of punctuation, the participial clause, and an ad hoc schema of [some] – [X] with the middle three instantiations sharing an identical phonological schema. The identical phonological schema and the shared narrative viewpoint makes the three instantiations iconic. In comparison, the Chinese renditions employ the presentative construction and a focus particle to approximate the character-based viewpoint, but the zoom-in effect is not present in any of the Chinese versions. Another important difference is the generally longer iconic part in the Chinese versions, due to the productivity of four-character templates at the phonological pole in Mandarin Chinese.

The article deals with sentence-initial time adverbials in English declarative sentences. Theoretically, it is grounded in functionally-oriented and discourse-based studies, trying to combine the study of syntactic structure, information structure, information flow, and cognitive-pragmatic aspects of discourse construction and interpretation. The aim is to examine some regularities regarding the interplay of their syntactic and pragmatic characteristics and their textual and pragmatic discourse functions. The corpus-based research includes several parameters: (1) syntactic – the form and functional subtype of initial time adverbials, and the syntactic structure of the sentences containing them; (2) pragmatic – related to the information status of initial time adverbials; (3) textual – dealing with semantic, formal and functional similarities between the initial time adverbials and the sentences containing them, and other adverbials and structures in the relevant language segment, as well as with the position of the initial time adverbials in the text. The identified discourse functions (textual and pragmatic) of the initial placement of time adverbials include linking with the previous and following text, rearranging the functional elements within a sentence, temporal scene-setting, creating two especially prominent positions in a sentence, signaling segment boundaries of textual units, etc. It is suggested that particular discourse functions, rather than being associated with one of the parameters examined, actually depend on the interrelatedness of several of them.

The emphatic function of italics has largely been ignored by linguists despite the value its understanding clearly has for written discourse studies. This paper aims to fill this gap. It is inspired by the types of relationship between the degrees of communicative dynamism and the degrees of prosodic prominence which the theory of functional sentence perspective has established for spoken language and applies them to written communication. At the same time, it maintains the distinction between the two modes of communication and suggests that it is only through covert prosody that any real parallels may be sought. The study uses two versions of a small corpus of written fiction. In the first version the original emphatic italics are preserved. In this instance the author’s intended covert prosody is partially accessible to the reader. The second version is one from which emphatic italics were removed. In this case the reader can only rely on their own covert prosody for interpretation. The versions were analyzed separately, and the analyses were then compared. Three relational types between the plain and italicized versions are identified: typographically amplifying, typographically revaluating, and typographically disambiguating. The paper concludes by suggesting some further avenues of research.

The Chinese ditransitive construction expresses the ‘bidirectional’ transfers: the movement of the patient either (a) from the subject to indirect object or (b) from the indirect object to subject, a feature that has not been identified in other languages. This construction is thus different from the ditransitive construction in English and other languages whose ditransitive constructions can express only a ‘single-direction’ transfer: the movement of the patient from the subject to indirect object only. This article addresses the reason for the unusual functions of the ditransitive construction in Chinese. A parallel difference between these two languages is found in the semantic structures of those ditransitive verbs: Chinese coins a single verb to express the same type of ‘transfer’ action with opposite directions, but English usually invents two distinct verbs to denote the two antonymous meanings whose directions are opposite; e.g., the Chinese verb jiè subsumes the meanings of both borrow and lend in English. This article argues that the different meanings of the ditransitive constructions of Chinese and English result from the different conceptualizations of their ditransitive verbs. In construction grammar, the following question remains unanswered: where does the meaning of the construction come from? The present analysis provides evidence that the meanings of the verbs within the construction are capable of determining the meaning/function of the whole construction.