Pub Date : 2023-06-12DOI: 10.1163/23526416-bja10052
Zeki Hamawand
This study investigates the significance of the construal of specificity in syntax, particularly in modification. In Cognitive Grammar, conceptualizing a situation can be either specific or conversely schematic. Namely, the two conceptualizations focus attention on greater or lesser detail of certain aspects of a situation. Each conceptualization describes the same content but in a peculiar way, and thus results in a distinct meaning. Making use of the language resources, the speaker can map the conceptualizations into different modes of modification: syntactic device by which a noun is accompanied by preceding and/or following modifiers. The aim of the study is to show that the use of a linguistic expression is motivated by the particular construal imposed on its conceptual content relative to communicative purposes. One of the key findings of the study is that specificity intensifies a description and makes it concrete, whereas schematicity attenuates a description and makes it abstract.
{"title":"The Construal of Specificity in Modification in English","authors":"Zeki Hamawand","doi":"10.1163/23526416-bja10052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526416-bja10052","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This study investigates the significance of the construal of specificity in syntax, particularly in modification. In Cognitive Grammar, conceptualizing a situation can be either specific or conversely schematic. Namely, the two conceptualizations focus attention on greater or lesser detail of certain aspects of a situation. Each conceptualization describes the same content but in a peculiar way, and thus results in a distinct meaning. Making use of the language resources, the speaker can map the conceptualizations into different modes of modification: syntactic device by which a noun is accompanied by preceding and/or following modifiers. The aim of the study is to show that the use of a linguistic expression is motivated by the particular construal imposed on its conceptual content relative to communicative purposes. One of the key findings of the study is that specificity intensifies a description and makes it concrete, whereas schematicity attenuates a description and makes it abstract.","PeriodicalId":52227,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Semantics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42621133","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-21DOI: 10.1163/23526416-bja10045
L. Talmy
Language is often approached as a self-contained system, one with its own specifically linguistic elements of organization, generally independent of other systems in cognition. But by the analysis here, language shares parts of its organization with other systems in cognition and could not function without their participation. For this analysis, cognition is heuristically divided into a number of cognitive faculties, each judged to perform some integrated function. Some faculties, including language, are treated as “cognitive systems” and others as “cognitive organizers”. Language is examined both in its evolutionary relation to other faculties and as an interface among them.
{"title":"Relations across Cognitive Faculties: An Addition to the Taxonomy of Cognitive Semantics","authors":"L. Talmy","doi":"10.1163/23526416-bja10045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526416-bja10045","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Language is often approached as a self-contained system, one with its own specifically linguistic elements of organization, generally independent of other systems in cognition. But by the analysis here, language shares parts of its organization with other systems in cognition and could not function without their participation. For this analysis, cognition is heuristically divided into a number of cognitive faculties, each judged to perform some integrated function. Some faculties, including language, are treated as “cognitive systems” and others as “cognitive organizers”. Language is examined both in its evolutionary relation to other faculties and as an interface among them.","PeriodicalId":52227,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Semantics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44364533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-21DOI: 10.1163/23526416-bja10041
Maitê Moraes Gil, Augusto Soares da Silva
This study aims at understanding the conceptual structure of the use of prepositions (a ‘at’, para ‘to’, em ‘in’) in the complement of goal-oriented motion verbs (ir ‘go’, vir ‘come’, chegar ‘arrive’) in Brazilian Portuguese. Applying a corpus-based and profile-based methodology, within a Cognitive Grammar framework, this study combines a multifactorial usage-feature analysis of these prepositional constructions with their subsequent multivariate statistical modeling. The results point out the cognitive basis of this constructional variation and specifically show that the semantic features ‘profiling’ and ‘motion verb’ are the most important language-internal predictors in the use of the prepositions. This variation conveys alternative grammatical construals, i.e., the very high frequency of em ‘in’ in the complement of goal-oriented motion indicates nuances of meaning motivated by the superimposition of image schemas and the cognitive operation of profiling. Language-external features, such as register, also play a role in the variation.
{"title":"A Study on the Conceptual Structure of the Use of Prepositions in the Complement of Goal-oriented Motion Verbs in Brazilian Portuguese","authors":"Maitê Moraes Gil, Augusto Soares da Silva","doi":"10.1163/23526416-bja10041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526416-bja10041","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This study aims at understanding the conceptual structure of the use of prepositions (a ‘at’, para ‘to’, em ‘in’) in the complement of goal-oriented motion verbs (ir ‘go’, vir ‘come’, chegar ‘arrive’) in Brazilian Portuguese. Applying a corpus-based and profile-based methodology, within a Cognitive Grammar framework, this study combines a multifactorial usage-feature analysis of these prepositional constructions with their subsequent multivariate statistical modeling. The results point out the cognitive basis of this constructional variation and specifically show that the semantic features ‘profiling’ and ‘motion verb’ are the most important language-internal predictors in the use of the prepositions. This variation conveys alternative grammatical construals, i.e., the very high frequency of em ‘in’ in the complement of goal-oriented motion indicates nuances of meaning motivated by the superimposition of image schemas and the cognitive operation of profiling. Language-external features, such as register, also play a role in the variation.","PeriodicalId":52227,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Semantics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49322176","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-21DOI: 10.1163/23526416-bja10038
K. Stocker
Visual experience encompasses both visual perception and visual imagery. Using cognitive-semantic analysis, it is outlined how visual experience can be characterized as involving (among other top-down processes) a basic top-down-processing system that is organized by fundamental aspects of the four main Talmyan concept structuring systems (fundamental aspects of configurational structure, perspective, attention, and—not in principle, but quite often—force dynamics). It is proposed that this visual concept structuring represents a thus far unidentified basic top-down-processing system of visual experience which structures the conceptual content of the visual/imagistic stimulus. While Talmyan concept structuring has in the literature thus far mainly been applied to language, the main conclusion of this paper is that Talmyan concept structuring is a basic component of visual top-down processing even when language is not involved. Implications for sensory modalities other than the visual one are discussed, and possible future research is formulated.
{"title":"Cognitive-Semantic Concept Structuring in Visual Perception and Visual Imagery: Identifying a New Basic Top-Down Processing System for Visual Experience","authors":"K. Stocker","doi":"10.1163/23526416-bja10038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526416-bja10038","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Visual experience encompasses both visual perception and visual imagery. Using cognitive-semantic analysis, it is outlined how visual experience can be characterized as involving (among other top-down processes) a basic top-down-processing system that is organized by fundamental aspects of the four main Talmyan concept structuring systems (fundamental aspects of configurational structure, perspective, attention, and—not in principle, but quite often—force dynamics). It is proposed that this visual concept structuring represents a thus far unidentified basic top-down-processing system of visual experience which structures the conceptual content of the visual/imagistic stimulus. While Talmyan concept structuring has in the literature thus far mainly been applied to language, the main conclusion of this paper is that Talmyan concept structuring is a basic component of visual top-down processing even when language is not involved. Implications for sensory modalities other than the visual one are discussed, and possible future research is formulated.","PeriodicalId":52227,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Semantics","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64618958","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-21DOI: 10.1163/23526416-bja10034
Jurga Cibulskienė
Metaphor may express a positive or negative evaluation (Charteris-Black, 2014; Musolff, 2016). The paper aims to study how the predicative function of metaphor is manifested in the discourse of contemporary social concerns. The study was carried out within the framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis (cma), which was employed in order to determine how metaphors reflect attitudes towards higher education reform in Lithuania. The results show that the concept quality is understood as an object and evaluated through bipolar oppositions where the first element of the opposition is positively connoted while the second acquires a negative connotation. The evaluation of the concept reform is carried out through the source domains of movement, living being, object and conflict and is based on whether metaphors are used by the proponents of the reform or by the opposition.
{"title":"Expressing the Evaluation of Socially Contested Issues through Metaphor: Higher Education Reform","authors":"Jurga Cibulskienė","doi":"10.1163/23526416-bja10034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526416-bja10034","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Metaphor may express a positive or negative evaluation (Charteris-Black, 2014; Musolff, 2016). The paper aims to study how the predicative function of metaphor is manifested in the discourse of contemporary social concerns. The study was carried out within the framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis (cma), which was employed in order to determine how metaphors reflect attitudes towards higher education reform in Lithuania. The results show that the concept quality is understood as an object and evaluated through bipolar oppositions where the first element of the opposition is positively connoted while the second acquires a negative connotation. The evaluation of the concept reform is carried out through the source domains of movement, living being, object and conflict and is based on whether metaphors are used by the proponents of the reform or by the opposition.","PeriodicalId":52227,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Semantics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42999287","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-21DOI: 10.1163/23526416-bja10035
S. Torres-Martínez
This paper starts out from a radical embodied analysis of German modals. The merit of this proposal is that it provides a framework for the conceptualization of these constructions as part of a broader continuity between perception, memory and consciousness. According to the interpretation and defense of this view offered here, I will argue that modal events in German are constructed as instances of the embodied information encoded by specific constructional attachment patterns. The results of the corpus study in the latter part of the paper reveal that syntactic content (rather than lexical information alone) is crucial for the reduction of both surprise and entropy, as it reflects cognitive processes associated with affordance mapping and the speakers’ need to increase epistemic capital. This shows that humans make use of stored perceptual maps, the combination of which allows us to construct and manipulate complex event representations.
{"title":"A Radical Embodied Characterization of German Modal Constructions","authors":"S. Torres-Martínez","doi":"10.1163/23526416-bja10035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526416-bja10035","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This paper starts out from a radical embodied analysis of German modals. The merit of this proposal is that it provides a framework for the conceptualization of these constructions as part of a broader continuity between perception, memory and consciousness. According to the interpretation and defense of this view offered here, I will argue that modal events in German are constructed as instances of the embodied information encoded by specific constructional attachment patterns. The results of the corpus study in the latter part of the paper reveal that syntactic content (rather than lexical information alone) is crucial for the reduction of both surprise and entropy, as it reflects cognitive processes associated with affordance mapping and the speakers’ need to increase epistemic capital. This shows that humans make use of stored perceptual maps, the combination of which allows us to construct and manipulate complex event representations.","PeriodicalId":52227,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Semantics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48081146","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-21DOI: 10.1163/23526416-bja10044
Iksoo Kwon, Hanbeom Jung, A. Y. Kwon, Ji-in Kang
This paper compares the constructional and functional properties of I promise (you) + X and I guarantee (you) + X constructions, whose construal revolves around the speaker’s commitment to making a situation happen and/or to vouching for the validity of the embedded clause X. Taking a usage-based perspective, it analyzes 563 spoken tokens of I promise constructions and 398 tokens of I guarantee constructions from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (coca). Three types of construals were identified: commissive, epistemic modal, or both. While the I promise construction can have any of the three, the I guarantee construction never has the commissive construal alone. Working within mental-spaces theory, this paper contends that the speaker’s commitment to the occurrence of the focal situation is necessarily involved in the default conceptualization of I promise constructions, but not of the other. The frequency data indicate that the distinctive conceptual structures motivate their functional distributions.
{"title":"A Cognitivist Approach to I promise and I guarantee Constructions","authors":"Iksoo Kwon, Hanbeom Jung, A. Y. Kwon, Ji-in Kang","doi":"10.1163/23526416-bja10044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526416-bja10044","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This paper compares the constructional and functional properties of I promise (you) + X and I guarantee (you) + X constructions, whose construal revolves around the speaker’s commitment to making a situation happen and/or to vouching for the validity of the embedded clause X. Taking a usage-based perspective, it analyzes 563 spoken tokens of I promise constructions and 398 tokens of I guarantee constructions from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (coca). Three types of construals were identified: commissive, epistemic modal, or both. While the I promise construction can have any of the three, the I guarantee construction never has the commissive construal alone. Working within mental-spaces theory, this paper contends that the speaker’s commitment to the occurrence of the focal situation is necessarily involved in the default conceptualization of I promise constructions, but not of the other. The frequency data indicate that the distinctive conceptual structures motivate their functional distributions.","PeriodicalId":52227,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Semantics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48966451","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-25DOI: 10.1163/23526416-bja10040
Noam Chomsky
The goal of theoretical inquiry is explanation: Why this, and not that? In the study of language, search for explanatory theory proceeds at two levels: for individual languages (a generative grammar in the broad sense) and for the general faculty of language fl (ug), the latter apparently a true species property, common to humans and without significant analogue in the animal world. ug must meet several conditions: learnability, evolvability, coverage. These conditions appear to conflict, and are far more severe than had earlier been supposed. A solution to the conundrum would be satisfaction of smt for ug combined with recourse to language-independent principles of computational efficiency, with diversity sequestered in components of language subject to simple algorithmic search. For the first time, hopes for such an outcome seem to be on the horizon, with significant implications if the hopes can be realized. I will outline some current work on these topics.
{"title":"Genuine Explanation and the Strong Minimalist Thesis","authors":"Noam Chomsky","doi":"10.1163/23526416-bja10040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526416-bja10040","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The goal of theoretical inquiry is explanation: Why this, and not that? In the study of language, search for explanatory theory proceeds at two levels: for individual languages (a generative grammar in the broad sense) and for the general faculty of language fl (ug), the latter apparently a true species property, common to humans and without significant analogue in the animal world. ug must meet several conditions: learnability, evolvability, coverage. These conditions appear to conflict, and are far more severe than had earlier been supposed. A solution to the conundrum would be satisfaction of smt for ug combined with recourse to language-independent principles of computational efficiency, with diversity sequestered in components of language subject to simple algorithmic search. For the first time, hopes for such an outcome seem to be on the horizon, with significant implications if the hopes can be realized. I will outline some current work on these topics.","PeriodicalId":52227,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Semantics","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41848961","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-25DOI: 10.1163/23526416-bja10043
F. Li
{"title":"Introduction to Innovation in Linguistics","authors":"F. Li","doi":"10.1163/23526416-bja10043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526416-bja10043","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52227,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Semantics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41980296","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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