Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 4 Seiten: 479-491.

I will argue that the cognitive-linguistic enterprise should step up its efforts to embrace the social and pragmatic dimensions of language. This claim will be derived from a survey of the premises and promise of the cognitive-linguistic approach to the study of language and be defended in more detail on logical and empirical grounds. Key elements of a usage-based emergentist socio-cognitive approach known as Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model (Schmid 2014, 2015) will be presented in order to demonstrate how social (...) and pragmatic aspects can be integrated and operationalized in a cognitive-linguistic framework. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 4 Seiten: 603-618.

What is a ‘number,’ as studied within numerical cognition? The term is highly polysemous, and can refer to numerals, numerosity, and a diverse collection of mathematical objects, from natural numbers to infinitesimals. However, numerical cognition has focused primarily on prototypical counting numbers – numbers used regularly to count small collections of objects. Even these simple numbers are far more complex than apparent pre-conditions for numerical abilities like subitizing and approximate discrimination of large numerosity, which we share with other animals. We (...) argue that the leap to number concepts proper relies, in part, on two embodied, domain-general cognitive mechanisms: conceptual metaphor and fictive motion. These mechanisms were first investigated within cognitive linguistics, a subdiscipline of cognitive science, but are now thought to subserve cognition more generally. We review the proposal that these mechanisms structure numerical cognition – including PCNs, but also the positive integers and arithmetic – and survey the supporting empirical evidence. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 4 Seiten: 447-463.

Article CLIPS (Cognitive Linguistics in Publications) Survey of collective volumes, monographs, MA, doctoral and post-doctoral theses, articles, papers and book reviews. A selected and annotated bibliography of recent publications with a cognitive perspective was published on January 1, 1991 in the journal Cognitive Linguistics (volume 2, issue 4).

Article CLiPs (Cognitive Linguistics in Publications) Survey of collective volumes, monographs, MA, doctoral and post-doctoral theses, articles, papers and book reviews A selected and annotated bibliography of recent publications with a cognitive perspective was published on January 1, 1993 in the journal Cognitive Linguistics (volume 4, issue 1).

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought considerable death and economic hardship to populations around the world. Yet, its legacy may be in the form of Long COVID, a condition in which individuals who have had COVID infection continue to experience symptoms often for many months after their acute illness. One group of symptoms is described by sufferers as “brain fog”. This expression captures a constellation of complaints that are cognitive-linguistic in nature, with affected individuals reporting a significant impact of these (...) problems on their occupational functioning and daily lives. This chapter reports the findings of case studies of two adults with Long COVID. Both adults enjoyed good health prior to their COVID infection. Neither was judged to be unwell enough to require hospitalization during the acute phase of their illness. Yet, they each reported an incomplete recovery and the persistence of debilitating symptoms over many months. The case studies provide a detailed account of their pre-morbid functioning and lifestyle, the onset and progression of their COVID illness, and a comprehensive analysis of their language skills. Both adults had intact structural language skills in the presence of high-level discourse difficulties. Specifically, they struggled to harness their strong skills in structural language to produce informative discourse, the transmission of which is an important pragmatic function of communication. The language profile associated with these cases of Long COVID is discussed in relation to other conditions that are assessed and treated by speech-language pathologists. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the complexity in ironic echoic mention from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics. It builds on the scenario-based approach to irony where ironic meaning is treat...

A central goal of cognitive science is to understand how human beings comprehend, produce, and acquire natural languages. Throughout the brief history of modern cognitive science, the linguistic theory that has been most prominent in this endeavor is generative grammar as espoused by Noam Chomsky and colleagues. Generative grammar is a theoretical approach that seeks to describe and explain natural language in terms of its mathematical form, using formal languages such as propositional logic and automata theory. The most (...) fundamental distinction in generative grammar is therefore the formal distinction between semantics and syntax. The semantics of a linguistic proposition are the objective conditions under which it may truthfully be stated, and the syntax of that proposition is the mathematical structure of its linguistic elements and relations irrespective of their semantics. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

For various historical, political as well as economic reasons, the English language is favoured as the universal language of science over other languages including French and German (Tardy, 2004). This naturally entails that students who are conversant in English have an advantage over those who are not in the acquisition of scientific knowledge. In relation to this, research on the misunderstanding of scientific terms in different languages shows that students who are speakers of non-western languages in particular face difficulties in (...) conceptualising scientific concepts. There is evidence to suggest that these students’ pre-existing knowledge about scientific terms and the polysemous nature of such terms are factors that influence their conceptualisation of the terms. This finding is the motivation behind the present cognitive linguistic study of the term temperature and its equivalent in Arabic, the compound دَرَجَةُ الحَرَارَة (darajatu al-ḥarara). Using a cognitive framework, namely Lakoff’s Idealised Cognitive Models (ICMs), the study analyses the conceptual similarities as well as differences between the terms. The study also analyses the English term heat as the second free morpheme of the compound دَرَجَةُ الحَرَارَة is الحَرَارَة which is the Arabic rendering of heat. The meanings and different uses of the terms are examined to analyse the ICMs that are evoked in each language. The results of the analysis reveal that the ICMs of English and Arabic terms under study overlap, and interestingly, also differ. (shrink)

This paper argues that neurolinguistics has the potential to yield insights that can feed back into corpus-based Cognitive Linguistics. It starts by discussing how far the cognitive realism of probabilistic statements derived from corpus data currently goes. Against this background, it argues that the cognitive realism of usage-based models could be further enhanced through deeper engagement with neurolinguistics, but also highlights a number of common misconceptions about what neurolinguistics can and cannot do for linguistic theorizing.

The relationship between typology and Cognitive Linguistics was first posed in the 1980s, in terms of the relationship between Greenbergian universals and the knowledge of the individual speaker. An answer to this question emerges from understanding the role of linguistic variation in language, from occasions of language use to typological diversity. This in turn requires the contribution of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and evolutionary historical linguistics as well as typology and Cognitive Linguistics. While Cognitive (...) class='Hi'>Linguistics is part of this enterprise, a theory of language that integrates all of these approaches is necessary. (shrink)

Filozofska i, u manjem opsegu, lingvisticka debata oko problema imena traje vec duze vreme. Procesi iza imenovanja su predstavljani i objasnjavani na razlicite nacine. Rad ce pokusati da pruzi novi uvid u motivaciju za stvaranje novih imena vidjenu iz jezicke perspektive. Metafora, kao jedan od najvaznijih izvora motivacije u jeziku kako je vidi kognitivna lingvistika je jedna od osnovnih formi ljudske konceptualizacije. Prvi deo rada predstavlja pregled najvaznije teorije o imenu. Drugi deo rada opisuje osnovne principe kognitivne lingvistike i odnosa (...) prema metafori. Treci deo predstavlja prikaz ucesca metafore u originalnom nastajanju licnih imena, dok poslednji deo rada daje primere metafore u imenima u srpskom jeziku. (shrink)

This paper is aimed to analyze some grounds bridging the explanatory gap in philosophy of mind and linguistic sign theory. It's noted that the etymological ties between the notions of “consciousness", “cognition", “sign" are emphasized in the works on cognitive linguistics. This connection rises from the understanding of the symbolic nature of consciousness and the sign of semiosis as the key cognitive process. On the one hand, it is impossible to realize the communication procedures, knowledge, understanding, decisionmaking, (...) orientation and even navigation without the process of signification. On the other hand, the human mind has its unique ability to produce the meaning apart from the “signal markings" available to other living beings. The ontology of this ability should be considered as a part of the complex problem of consciousness which includes the mind-body problem, the free will problem, image memory, narrative worlds, introspection, etc. In this paper, special attention is paid to the ontological and epistemological aspects of linguistic sign within the context of the bio-semiotic approach. The author argues that the linguistic nature of consciousness is inseparably connected with the ontological properties of consciousness. The author makes an attempt to prove the link between the mind-body problem and the problem of the explanatory gap in the ontology of linguistic sign. The analysis is focused on the following question: Is it possible that the rank of random names could cause the behavior of the organism in changing environment? (shrink)

Effective teachers use mnemonic tools or mnemonic triggers to improve the students’ retention of the study material. This article discusses mnemonic triggers from a theoretical viewpoint based on Jerome S. Bruner’s writings. Fifty small linguistic–cognitive, constructive-, rhetorical-, and phonological mnemonic triggers are detected. These triggers may be the elements our brain use when “constructing the realities” in a Brunerian sense when ordering, differentiating, comparing, and handling information, stories and experiences in our brain. Many of these are small, hidden linguistic (...) elements in speech. This article discusses their usage in the educational talk and textbooks. (shrink)

Vādanyāya is one of the representative works of Dharmakīrti. It is concerned with debate logic and deals with win-or-lose reasoning rules in the broad sense of logic. In this paper, we will concentrate our discussion on Dharmakīrti’s theory of nigrahasthāna (fault) in his debate logic, a key issue in Vādanyāya. First, we point out that the justification of three logical reasons as proof conditions of debate constitutes the rational point of departure for Dharmakīrti’s debate logic. Second, we analyze the differences (...) between Dharmakīrti’s and the Naiyāyika’s notion of debate and point out that Dharmakīrti’s ‘debate’ involves two parties (the disputant and the opponent) attempting to rationally refute the other’s opinion to persuade the other to change their wrong ideas. Last, based on the discussion of Dharmakīrti’s concept of debate logic, we identify seven types of nigrahasthāna in Vādanyāya with regard to the two parties of a debate (the disputant and the opponent). (shrink)

In contrast to symbol-manipulation approaches, Cognitive Linguistics offers a modal rather than an amodal account of meaning in language. From this perspective, the meanings attached to linguistic expressions, in the form of conceptualisations, have various properties in common with visual forms of representation. This makes Cognitive Linguistics a potentially useful framework for identifying and analysing language-image relations in multimodal texts. In this paper, we investigate language-image relations with a specific focus on intersemiotic convergence. Analogous with research (...) on gesture, we extend the notion of co-text images and argue that images and language usages which are proximal to one another in a multimodal text can be expected to exhibit the same or consistent construals of the target scene. We outline some of the dimensions of conceptualisation along which intersemiotic convergence may be enacted in texts, including event-structure, viewpoint, distribution of attention and metaphor. We take as illustrative data photographs and their captions in online news texts covering a range of topics including immigration, political protests, and inter-state conflict. Our analysis suggests the utility of Cognitive Linguistics in allowing new potential sites of intersemiotic convergence to be identified and in proffering an account of language-image relations that is based in language cognition. (shrink)

Cognitive approach to critical discourse analysis (Cognitive CDA), or Critical Cognitive Linguistics (thereafter CCL), is an emerging interdisciplinary research area, which demonstrates the ‘social...

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

This study integrates corpus-assisted text analysis with frame semantics to study a social problem. Taking a cognitive-linguistic approach to critical discourse studies, in this article I examine the linguistic construction of minors in a corpus of 489 articles from the Uruguayan newspaper El País in the context of the so-called ‘Criminal Imputability Referendum’. Throughout, I focus on the construal operation of framing and identify a host of discursive patterns via which minors and adolescents are recurrently placed within the semantic (...) frame CRIME, and within this, they profile the frame elements of perpetrators of violent crimes rather than victims. I argue that, in the context of the referendum, these discursive strategies run the risk of facilitating the consolidation of a strong conceptual link whereby youth become readily associated with criminality, and are subservient to the political views of groups supporting a lower cut-off age for criminal responsibility and more stringent punishments. The observations arrived at in this instance set the foundations for a future experimental study testing whether the discursive patterns unearthed here have an effect on how readers conceptualize minors outside the texts. (shrink)

This paper is a qualitative usage-based treatment of merism from a cognitive-linguistic perspective. Considered a minor or non-basic figure of speech, especially if compared to the master tropes, m...

Clarifies the nature of a cognitive approach to human understanding and experience, and forestalls objections that cognitive linguistics is either too intellectualistic and subjectivistic, or too physicalistic in its treatment of understanding and meaning. The objection is addressed that conceptual metaphors are overly conceptual, that they are mentalistic to the detriment of a full-blooded account of the bodily, practical, and social dimensions of meaning and symbolic interaction.

An examination of Rahner’s theology and cognitive linguistics shows that the two are basically in accord concerning sacramental efficacy. This article also puts cognitive linguistics into conversation with Rahner’s theologies of expression. In Rahner’s theology of the symbol, he argues that all beings express themselves in that which is not themselves. Furthermore, Rahner noted the existence of uniquely powerful “primordial words” , which mediate the reality to which they point. Cognitive linguistics sees all human (...) knowing as mediated by the “embodied mind,” and characterized by concept integration, wherein a given thing comes to be known in terms of another. This understanding of embodied mind, poses a significant challenge to the Christian tradition. This challenge is answered, though, by Rahner’s distinctive anthropology and christology. (shrink)

Speakers often construct their utterances based on the immediately co-present utterances of dialogue partners. They array their linguistic resources parallel to their partners¿ and activate resonance. Based on the theories of dialogic syntax and cognitive linguistics, this study undertakes to explain how speakers activate resonance and how parallelism contributes to constructing linguistic forms as well as to shaping the ongoing flow of conversation. Three phases of resonance activation are illustrated in relation to cognitive processes: (a) parallelism constituted (...) with extension of multiple categories in synthesis; (b) parallelism meeting or failing the previous speaker¿s intention due to schematization; and (c) parallelism achieved as a consequence of priming through schematization and extension. It is concluded that linguistic forms develop in the ongoing flow of socially coordinated cognition, where patterns emerge through activation of mapping relations between linguistic elements. This process is anchored in speakers¿ concepts of grammatical equivalences, ability of categorization, and grasp of linguistic conventions. (shrink)

This book advances the prototype theory of categorisation within a legal context. The work adopts a multidisciplinary approach and draws on insights from cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics and analytic philosophy to discuss semantic problems present in law. Designed as a bridge between cognitive linguistics and legal theory, it argues that categorisation is a crucial cognitive operation for the application of law and that theories of categorisation are relevant to legal theory. It makes the case (...) that the prototype approach is better suited than more formal approaches usually utilised in jurisprudence to explaining many familiar linguistic problems found in law, such as vagueness, polysemy, the flexibility of meaning, the generality of language, context-dependence of meaning, linguistic indeterminacy, and so on. The book focuses on problems of semantic analysis in law, both in concrete cases, that is, particular cases before courts, and, at the theoretical level, on methods of statutory interpretation. It will be a valuable resource for academics and researchers working in the areas of Law and Language, Legal Theory, Legal Philosophy and Legal Linguistics. (shrink)

Where do we recruit novel and unconventional conceptual materials from when we speak, think and act metaphorically, and why? This question has been partially answered in the cognitive linguistic literature but, in my view, a crucial aspect of it has been left out of consideration or not dealt with in the depth it deserves: it is the effect of various kinds of context on metaphorical conceptualization. Of these, I examine the following: (1) the immediate physical setting, (2) what we (...) know about the major entities participating in the discourse, (3) the immediate cultural context, (4) the immediate social setting, and (5) the immediate linguistic context itself. I suggest that we recruit conceptual materials for metaphorical purposes not only from bodily experience but also from all of these various contexts. Since the contexts can be highly variable, the metaphors used will often be variable, novel, and unconventional. The phenomenon can be observed in both everyday forms of language and literary texts. (shrink)

Most research on image schema examined the meaning configuration of words connotation. However, previous studies of adjectives are meaningful in cognitive linguistics because they provide insight into how those adjectives are involved with psychological movement. In this sense, from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, one’s conceptualization and cognition are closely associated with their bodily experience and surroundings; adjectives are no exception. The varieties of transformations of image schemas lay the foundation for the conception and perception. Accordingly, (...) this study is an investigation into the perception of adjectives and psychological activities associated with image schema. Data in this study come from adjectives in the novel The Great Gatsby, which were tagged and calculated with the help of software Python and the NLTK package. The results demonstrate that a significant amount of adjectives were used in the novel. Moreover, Nick’s psychological activities changed significantly from the SOURCE to the DESTINATION schematic stage, which is uncovered by his expression of adjectives. Finally, the results further suggest that transformations of image schema as BALANCE, CONTAINER, and PATH work together to motivate one’s linguistic expression of adjectives. The present findings have several implications for research on lexicons and literacy interpretation from cognitive linguistics. (shrink)

Barsalou's contribution converges with basic ideas and empirical findings of cognitive linguistics. They posit the same general architecture. The perceptual grounding of conceptual structure is a central tenet of cognitive linguistics. Our capacity to construe the same situation in alternate ways is fundamental to cognitive semantics, and numerous parallels are discernible between conceptual construal and visual perception. Grammar is meaningful, consisting of schematized patterns for the pairing of semantic and phonological structures. The meanings of grammatical (...) elements reside primarily in the construal they impose on conceptual content. This view of linguistic structure appears to be compatible with Barsalou's proposals. (shrink)

Disruptions in theory of mind faculties and the ability to relate to an intersubjective reality are widely thought to be crucial to schizophrenic symptomology. This paper applies a cognitive linguistic framework to analyze spontaneous perspective-taking in two corpora of stories told by people with a schizophrenia diagnosis. We elicited natural narrative language use through life story interviews and a guided storytelling task and analyzed the linguistic construal of viewpoint in these stories. For this analysis, we developed a reliable and (...) widely applicable viewpoint model that allows for the categorization and quantification of speakers’ linguistic presentation and navigation of spatiotemporal domains. We found that our participants skillfully presented, navigated and embedded different narrative viewpoints through a variety of linguistic viewpoint devices. They presented complex viewpoints of other people in both the here-and-now of the interaction and the there-and-then of a narrative, and made use of transition markers to demarcate spatiotemporal discourse domains. We found no differences in viewpoint variables when comparing their guided stories to a control group. If problems with intersubjectivity are indeed an essential part of schizophrenia, an explanation of how this group can take on and navigate complex linguistic viewpoints in natural narrative interaction is called for. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 4 Seiten: 559-572.