Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research

The book introduces the concept of asymmetric events, an important concept in language and cognition, which, for the first time in linguistic literature, is identified in a more systematic way and analyzed in a number of different languages, including typologically or genetically unrelated ones. Asymmetric events are two or more events of unequal status in an utterance and papers in the volume present ways in which a linguistic description of main events in a sentence is different (morphologically, syntactically, discursively) from a description of backgrounded events. The prototypical asymmetries involving perception, cognition, and language are identified in subordination, nominalization and modification of various kinds but they extend to coordinate structures, serial verbs, spatial language and viewing arrangement, as well as part - whole relations. The perspective is broadly cognitive and functional, the authors use different though complementing methodologies, some include corpus data, and the asymmetries are shown to have a variety of stylistic and ideological implications.An in-depth analysis of manifold asymmetries in structure and function of diverse languages makes this volume of interest to linguists of different persuasion, philosophers, cognitive researchers, discourse analysts and students of language and cognition.

The book focuses on the question of how and to what extent cognitive semantic approaches can contribute to the new field of the cognitive science of science. The argumentation is based on a series of instructive case studies which are intended to test the prospects and limits of the metascientific application of both holistic and modular cognitive semantics. The case studies show that, while cognitive semantic research is able to solve problems which have traditionally been the domain of the philosophy of science, it also encounters serious limits. The prospects and the limits thus revealed suggest new research topics which in future can be tackled by cognitive semantic approaches to the cognitive science of science.

This monograph develops a new socio-cognitive theory of sense-making for analyzing the creative management of situated social meaning. Drawing on cognitive-linguistic and social-interactional heuristics in an innovative way, the book both theorizes and demonstrates how embodied cognizers create complex situated conceptualizations of self and other, which guide and support their interactions. It shows how these sense-making processes are managed through the coordinated social interaction of two (or more) communicative partners.
To illustrate the theory, the book draws on two distinct data sets: front-desk tourist-information transactions and online-workgroup discussions. It scrutinizes how the communicative partners use verbal humour as a powerful strategy to creatively establish a situated social image for themselves.
This book addresses specialists and advanced students in the areas of cognitive linguistics as well as interactional approaches to language. Moreover, it will be of great value to readers interested in verbal humour, business communication, and computer-mediated communication.

Many studies on the language of food examine English or adopt discourse analysis. This volume makes a fresh attempt to analyze Japanese, focusing on non-discursive units. It offers state-of-the-art data-oriented studies, including methods of analysis in line with Cognitive Linguistics. It orchestrates relatable and intriguing topics, from sound-symbolism in rice cracker naming to meanings of aesthetic sake taste terms. The chapters show that the language of food in Japanese is multifaceted: for instance, expressivity is enhanced by ideophones, as sensory words iconically depicting perceptual experiences and as nuanced words flexibly participating in neologization; context-sensitivity is exemplified by words deeply imbued with socio-cultural constructs; creativity is portrayed by imaginative expressions grounded in embodied experience. The volume will be a valuable resource for students and researchers, not only in linguistics but also in neighboring disciplines, who seek deeper insights into how language interacts with food in Japanese or any other language.

Metaphor is a topical issue across a number of disciplines, wherever researchers are concerned with how speakers and writers package and process messages. This book is addressed at readers from diverse academic backgrounds who are interested in ways of researching metaphor from different perspectives, and especially through corpus linguistics. A number of approaches to and exploitations of metaphor, including conceptual metaphor theory and cognitive approaches more generally, text and spoken discourse analysis, and CDA, are discussed, explored and critiqued using corpus data. The book also includes corpus linguistic studies of different aspects of metaphor, which investigate its linguistic and semantic properties and relate them to current theoretical views. The book demonstrates the need for naturally-occurring language data to be used in the development of metaphor theory, and shows the value of corpus data and techniques in this work.

Sverker Johansson has written an unusual book on language origins, with its emphasis on empirical evidence rather than theory-building. This is a book for the student or researcher who prefers solid data and well-supported conclusions, over speculative scenarios. Much that has been written on the origins of language is characterized by hypothesizing largely unconstrained by evidence. But empirical data do exist, and the purpose of this book is to integrate and review the available evidence from all relevant disciplines, not only linguistics but also, e.g., neurology, primatology, paleoanthropology, and evolutionary biology. The evidence is then used to constrain the multitude of scenarios for language origins, demonstrating that many popular hypotheses are untenable. Among the issues covered: (1) Human evolutionary history, (2) Anatomical prerequisites for language, (3) Animal communication and ape "language", (4) Mind and language, (5) The role of gesture, (6) Innateness, (7) Selective advantage of language, (8) Proto-language.

Research on quotation has yielded a rich and diverse knowledge-base. Scientific interest has been sparked particularly by the recent emergence of new quotative forms in typologically related and unrelated languages (i.e. English be like, Hebrew kazé, Japanese mitai-na).The present collection gives a platform to research conducted within different linguistic sub-disciplines and on the basis of a variety of Western and non-Western languages. The introduction presents an overview of forms and functions of old and new quotative constructions. The nine chapters investigate quotation from different perspectives, from conversation analysis over grammaticalization and language variation and change to typological and formal approaches. The collection advocates a comprehensive approach to the phenomenon ‘quotation’, seeking a more nuanced knowledge-base as regards the linguistic properties, social uses and pragmatic functions than monolingual or single disciplinary approaches deliver. The cross-disciplinary nature and the wealth of data make the findings broadly available and relevant.

Sensory Adjectives in the Discourse of Food presents a frame-based analysis of sensory descriptors. This book investigates the identification and usefulness of conceptual frames in three respects: First, an analysis of scientific language use shows that a semantic interpretation of the adjectives is dependent on the operationalizations performed in the field of sensory science. Second, a systematic frame semantic analysis of the descriptors sheds light on how meaning is constructed with regard to the lexemes’ wider context, from the utterance to the text type. Third, a comparison with German descriptors tests the applicability of a frame from one language to another (English – German). Framing presents itself as a means to capture the knowledge representation that underlies a particular discourse. With its detailed linguistic analyses and its interdisciplinary treatment of framing across discourse (specialized vs. public discourse), this book is interesting for researchers working within cognitive linguistics, terminology, and sensory science.

One of the most fundamental capacities of language is the ability to express what speakers see, hear, feel, taste, and smell. Sensory Linguistics is the interdisciplinary study of how language relates to the senses. This book deals with such foundational questions as: Which semiotic strategies do speakers use to express sensory perceptions? Which perceptions are easier to encode and which are “ineffable”? And what are appropriate methods for studying the sensory aspects of linguistics? After a broad overview of the field, a detailed quantitative corpus-based study of English sensory adjectives and their metaphorical uses is presented. This analysis calls age-old ideas into question, such as the idea that the use of perceptual metaphors is governed by a cognitively motivated “hierarchy of the senses”. Besides making theoretical contributions to cognitive linguistics, this research monograph showcases new empirical methods for studying lexical semantics using contemporary statistical methods.

How is the universal, yet private and subjective, experience of pain talked about by different people in everyday encounters? What does the analysis of pain-related lexico-phraseological choices, grammatical structures, and linguistic metaphors reveal as to how pain is perceived and experienced? Are pain utterances primarily used to express or to describe this experiential domain? This is the first book that investigates such questions from both a functional and a cognitive perspective: it combines two converging usage-based theoretical models in a systematic linguistic inquiry of the construal of pain in everyday language. This work is based on a specialised electronic corpus of Greek naturally-occurring dialogues in a health care context, the underlying assumption being that in the absence of factual evidence intuition about language cannot reliably detect or predict patterns of usage. Comparing Greek with English data, this book significantly contributes to the development of this research field cross-linguistically.

Themes play a central role in our everyday communication: we have to know what a text is about in order to understand it. Intended meaning cannot be understood without some knowledge of the underlying theme. This book helps to define the concept of ‘themes’ in texts and how they are structured in language use.
Much of the literature on Thematics is scattered over different disciplines (literature, psychology, linguistics, cognitive science), which this detailed collection pulls together in one coherent overview. The result is a new landmark for the study and understanding of themes in their everyday manifestation.

Words are not just labels for conceptual categories. Words construct conceptual categories, frame situations and influence behavior. Where do they get their meaning?

This book describes how words acquire their meaning. The author argues that mechanisms based on associations, pattern detection, and feature matching processes explain how words acquire their meaning from experience and from language alike. Such mechanisms are summarized by the distributional hypothesis, a computational theory of meaning originally applied to word occurrences only, and hereby extended to extra-linguistic contexts.

By arguing in favor of the cognitive foundations of the distributional hypothesis, which suggests that words that appear in similar contexts have similar meaning, this book offers a theoretical account for word meaning construction and extension in first and second language that bridges empirical findings from cognitive and computer sciences. Plain language and illustrations accompany the text, making this book accessible to a multidisciplinary academic audience.