V CONGRESO INTERNACIONAL DE LA ASOCIACIÓN ESPAÑOLA

DE LINGÜÍSTICA COGNITIVA (AELCO)

La Lingüística Cognitiva como parte de las ciencias cognitivas

Murcia, 19-21 octubre 2006

V INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE SPANISH COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS

ASSOCIATION (AELCO)

Cognitive Linguistics as a cognitive science

Murcia, 19-21 October 2006

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PROGRAMA / CONFERENCE PROGRAM

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Jueves 19 de octubre / Thursday 19 October

9:00-10:00 Inscripción y recogida de material / Registration

10:00-10:30 Hemiciclo: Apertura del congreso / Conference Opening ceremony

10:30-11:30 Hemiciclo: Conferencia Plenaria / Plenary Lecture: Benjamin Bergen

11:30-12:00 Hemiciclo: Presentaciones resumidas de los pósters (A y B) / Presentation of poster abstracts

12:00-12:30 Hemiciclo: Ruiz de Mendoza & Mairal

Sala Jorge Guillén: Ekberg

Sala Mariano Baquero: Gómez

12:30-1:00 Sala Mariano Baquero: Verhaert Sala Jorge Guillén: De Saeger

1:00-2:00 Posters A

2:00-4:00 Comida / Lunch

4:00-4:30 Hemiciclo: Delbecque Sala Jorge Guillén: Oncins

Sala Mariano Baquero: Turkay

4:30-5:00 Hemiciclo: Gonzálvez Sala Jorge Guillén: Zinken & Evans

Sala Mariano Baquero: Piquer

5:00-5:30 Hemiciclo: Vázquez-Rozas Sala Jorge Guillén: Sánchez

5:30-6:30 Posters B

6:30-7:30 Hemiciclo: Conferencia plenaria / Plenary Lecture: Maria Josep Cuenca

Viernes 20 de octubre / Friday 20 October

9:00-10:00 Hemiciclo: Conferencia plenaria / Plenary Lecture: Julio Santiago de Torres

10:00-10:30 Hemiciclo: Bretones & Cortés de los Ríos

Sala Jorge Guillén: Romano, Molina & Hidalgo

Sala Mariano Baquero: Raukko

10:30-11:00 Hemiciclo: Steenberg Sala Jorge Guillén: Hougaard Sala Mariano Baquero: Paradis & Willners

11:00-12:30 Posters A

12:30-1:00 Hemiciclo: Marín Arrese Sala Jorge Guillén: Ibarretxe Sala Mariano Baquero: Delorge & Colleman

1:00-1:30 Hemiciclo: Jarque Sala Jorge Guillén: Kopecka Sala Mariano Baquero: Castañeda

1:30-2:00 Hemiciclo: Colleman Sala Jorge Guillén: Cifuentes

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2:00-4:00 Comida / Lunch

4:00-4:30 Hemiciclo: García-Miguel Sala Jorge Guillén: Mateu, Curell & Capdevla

Sala Mariano Baquero: Howard

4:30-5:00 Hemiciclo: Acuña Fariña Sala Jorge Guillén: Molsing Sala Mariano Baquero: Chang

5:00-6:00 Hemiciclo: Conferencia plenaria / Plenary Lecture: Dan Slobin

6:00-8:00 Hemiciclo: Reunión AELCO / General AELCO Meeting

Sábado 21 de octubre / Saturday 21 October

9:00-10:00 Hemiciclo: Conferencia plenaria / Plenary Lecture: Anatol Stefanowitsch

10:00-10:30 Hemiciclo: Valenzuela & Hilferty Sala Jorge Guillén: Kraljevic

10:30-11:00 Hemiciclo: Comesaña Sala Jorge Guillén: Mittelberg

11:00-12:30 Posters B

12:30-1:00 Hemiciclo: Muñoz Sala Jorge Guillén: Gaytan

1:00-1:30 Hemiciclo: Kupersmitt Sala Jorge Guillén: Enríquez

1:30-2:00 Hemiciclo: Peña Sala Jorge Guillén: Klavan

2:00-4:00 Comida / Lunch

4:00-4:30 Hemiciclo: Marks

4:30-5:00 Hemiciclo: Kristiansen Sala Jorge Guillén: Porto

5:00-5:30 Hemiciclo: Cucatto, M & Cucatto, A Sala Jorge Guillén: Blanco

5:30-6:30 Hemiciclo: Conferencia plenaria / Plenary Lecture: Antonio Barcelona

6:30-7:30 Hemiciclo: Mesa Redonda: La lingüística cognitiva como ciencia cognitiva Round Table: Cognitive linguistics as a cognitive science

7:30-8:00 Hemiciclo: Clausura del congreso / Closing Ceremony

9:30- Cena del Congreso / Conference Dinner (Hotel NH Amistad)

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Posters A Posters B

• Conrad Johansson • Marta Genís Pedra • Sandra Peña Cervel & Lorena Pérez

Hernández • Josep Ribera i Condomina • Andrea Cucatto & Mariana Cucatto • Asunción Villamil Touriño • Jorge Fernández Jaén • Nuria Calvo Cortés • Amy Gregory • Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza & José

Luis Otal Campo • Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza & Javier

Herrero Ruiz • María Del Mar Robisco Martin • Antonio José Silvestre López • Marta Andersson • Marta Coll Florit & Salvador

Climent • Ana Rojo López & Javier

Valenzuela Manzanares

• María Enriqueta Cortés de los Ríos & Carmen Bretones Callejas

• Rosario Caballero & Ernesto Suárez Toste • Margarita Goded Rambaud • María Dolores López Maestre • Marian Pérez Bernal • Nasher Rahbar & Manizheh Alami • Jesús Sánchez García & Olga Blanco Carrión • Marian Amengual Pizarro, Honesto Herrera

Soler, Beatriz Villacañas & Michael White • Carmen Maíz Arévalo • Ana Laura Rodríguez Redondo, Manuela

Romano Mozo & Eugenio Contreras Domingo • Elisa Ramón Sales • Marika Kalyuga • Cristina Soriano Salinas & Javier Valenzuela

Manzanares • Elena Kurinski • Pilar Mompeán & Jose Antonio Mompeán

Los pósters se expondrán en el hall de la primera planta de la Facultad de Letras Posters will be presented in the hall on the first floor of the Facultad de Letras building

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Jueves 19 de octubre / Thursday 19 October

9:00-10:00: Inscripción y recogida de material / Registration 10:00-10:30: Hemiciclo: Apertura del congreso / Conference Opening ceremony 10:30-11:30: Hemiciclo: Conferencia plenaria / Plenary lecture: Benjamin Bergen: “Mental Simulation and Embodiment” 11:30-12:00: Hemiciclo: Presentaciones resumidas de los pósters (A y B) / Presentation of poster abstracts (A & B) 12:00-1:00 Hemiciclo: Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza & Ricardo Mairal Usón: “Internal and external constraints on lexical and constructional meaning” Anne Verhaert: “El gerundio no perifrástico: su función discursiva” Sala Jorge Guillén: Lena Ekberg: “The emergence of a new grounding element in Swedish” Bram De Saeger: “Usos representacionales y argumentacionales de los verbos de actitud proposicional en español actual” Sala Mariano Baquero: Marian Gómez: “Syntactic and semantic interaction in the description of the English gerund-participle with physical perception verbs” 1:00-2:00: Posters A Marta Andersson: “Cognitive strategies for presupposition resolution” Nuria Calvo Cortés: “Welcome on board, Welcome aboard the semantic-syntactic” Marta Coll Florit & Salvador Climent: “Desambiguación semántica verbal: aspecto léxico y focalización de la atención” Andrea Cucatto & Mariana Cucatto: “¿Existe la conexión espacial? Un enfoque desde la Lingüística Cognitiva para el estudio del uso anómalo del conector "donde" en textos académicos” Jorge Fernández Jaén: “Del viaje a la caída: prototipicidad diacrónica de acostarse” Marta Genís Pedra: “La construcción del estereotipo de edad en la publicidad” Amy Gregory: “El nexo entre la sintaxis de la referencia y la de la subordinación” Conrad Johansson: “Blending theory, primary metaphor and to surf the Internet”

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Sandra Peña Cervel & Lorena Pérez Hernández: “The bounded region image-schema: a notion embrancing other dependent experiential constructs” Josep Ribera i Condomina: “Textual deixis in narrative sequences” María del Mar Robisco Martín: “The Preposition Over and Above in Radiotelephony Communications” Ana Rojo López & Javier Valenzuela Manzanares: “Moving entities fictitiously: some experimental data” Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza & José Luis Otal Campo: “Pragmatics, discourse principles, and cognition” Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza & Javier Herrero Ruiz: “Overstatement revisited: a cognitive perspective” Antonio José Silvestre López: “Topology, Dynamics, and Function in the semantics of In and On as the prepositional component of English prepositional verbs” Asunción Villamil Touriño: “The “teaching” semantic field and peripherical cases of the grammar category “indirect objects” in English and Spanish” 2:00-4:00: Comida / Lunch 4:00-5:30 Hemiciclo: Nicole Delbecque: “(De)queísmo: una cuestión de perspectiva y alternancia parte/todo” Francisco Gonzálvez García: “That’s a construction for you/Las construcciones es lo que tiene: Grammaticalization via subjectification in attributive clauses in English and Spanish” Victoria Vázquez-Rozas: “Construcciones con completivas en español. Gramática, discurso y cognición” Sala Jorge Guillén: José Luis Oncins: “The Language of Pain: Where the brain and the mind meet” Jörg Zinken & Vyv Evans: “Imagining for speaking” Jesús Sánchez García: “The interdependence of language, discourse and cultural cognition in the study of English violence-related emotion scenarios” Sala Mariano Baquero: Feyza Turkay: “The Developmental Paths in Turkish Children's Early Lexical Composition” Ana Piquer Píriz: “Young EFL learners’ understanding of polysemy in the domains of body parts and temperature terms” 5:30-6:30: Posters B

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Marian Amengual Pizarro, Honesto Herrera Soler, Beatriz Villacañas & Michael White: “The role of grammar patterns in metaphoric headlines in the business press” Rosario Caballero & Ernesto Suárez Toste: “Synaesthetic metaphors in wine description” María Enriqueta Cortés de los Ríos & Carmen Bretones Callejas: “Pervasiveness and polifunctionality of short story: A cognitive perspective” Margarita Goded Rambaud: “Some physiological, psychological and cognitive background for

wine tasting metaphors” Marika Kalyuga: “Mixed emotions and semantic derivations” Elena Kurinski: “Perception of conceptual gender by beginning Spanish learners” María Dolores López Maestre: “Men beware of the hook: women fishing” Carmen Maíz Arévalo: “To marry or not to marry: Cognitive Metaphor and the Conceptualisation of Marriage” Pilar Mompeán & Jose Antonio Mompeán: “Intrusive /r/ Usage in RP: The Case of BBC newsreaders” Marian Pérez Bernal: “¿Por qué al final el hombre siempre está arriba y la mujer abajo? Análisis de las metáforas de la vida cotidiana desde una perspectiva de género” Nasher Rahbar & Manizheh Alami: “The textual metafunctions of metaphor in legal texts” Elisa Ramón Sales: “A consideration of the cognitive metaphor SEEING IS KNOWING in J. Saramago's novel Blindness” Ana Laura Rodríguez Redondo, Manuela Romano Mozo & Eugenio Contreras Domingo: “Socio-cognitive Approach to Historical Phraseology: HEAD and EYES in Old and Middle English” Jesús Sánchez García & Olga Blanco Carrión: “Emotion as motion: violence-related emotion scenarios as event-frames” Cristina Soriano Salinas & Javier Valenzuela Manzanares: “Is CONTROL really UP? An experimental investigation” 6:30-7:30: Hemiciclo: Conferencia plenaria / Plenary lecture: Maria Josep Cuenca: “Construcciones idiomáticas idiomáticas: repetición consecutiva e idiomaticidad” Viernes 20 de octubre / Friday 20 October 9:00-10:00: Hemiciclo: Conferencia plenaria / Plenary lecture Julio Santiago de Torres: “Conceptual Metaphors: A Review and a Theory” 10:00-11:00:

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Hemiciclo: Carmen Bretones & María Enriqueta Cortés de los Ríos: “Pervasiveness and polifunctionality of short story: A cognitive perspective” Mette Steenberg: “The Meaning of Non-Sense: The Cognitive Function of Dynamic Schemas in surrealist texts” Sala Jorge Guillén: Manuela Romano, Clara Molina & Laura Hidalgo: “Towards a cognitive account of speaker-solidarity” Anders Hougaard: “Social cognitive linguisitcs: How?” Sala Mariano Baquero: Jarno Raukko: “Categorization, extension, and negotiation: Offline and online tasks in the experimental study of polysemy” Carita Paradis & Carolina Willners: “Polarity, scalarity and boundaries: a sycholinguistic experiment” 11:00-12:30: Posters A 12:30-2:00 Hemiciclo: Juana Marín Arrese: “Passive and Construal: Non-optionality in agentive passives” M. Josep Jarque Moyano: “PODER como modal de posibilidad en la Lengua de Signos de Cataluña (LSC): ¿predicación de anclaje? Timothy Colleman: “Verb disposition in the Dative alternation: a corpus-based study of Dutch” Sala Jorge Guillén: Iraide Ibarretxe: “Manner of motion in (some) verb-framed languages” Anetta Kopecka: “Lexicalization of manner of motion: typology and lexical diversity” Paula Cifuentes: “Human locomotion in English and Spanish” Sala Mariano Baquero: Martine Delorge & Timothy Colleman: “Constructions with verbs of dispossession in Dutch: a corpus-based study” Alejandro Castañeda: “Aspecto, perspectiva y tiempo de procesamiento en la oposición imperfecto/indefinido del español. Ventajas explicativas y aplicaciones pedagógicas” 2:00-4:00 : Comida/ Lunch 4:00-5:00

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Hemiciclo: Jose María García-Miguel: “Volver. La polisemia léxica vista desde las construcciones” Carlos Acuña Fariña: “Close Apposition as a Constructionist Network” Sala Jorge Guillén: Jaume Mateu Fontanals, Hortensia Curell & Monserrat Capdevila: “Frogging from L1 Catalan to L2 English: A study of event conflation in SLA” Karina Molsing: “The Place of Linguistic Relativity in Cognitive Science: The Case of Time” Sala Mariano Baquero: Harry Howard: “Cognitive Linguistics, an efficient encoding of language” Vicent T. Chang: “Visual meaning in multimodal discourse: an experimental pragmatic approach” 5:00-6:00 Hemiciclo: Conferencia plenaria/ Plenary lecture: Dan Slobin: “Typology and usage: Explorations of motion events across languages” 6:00-8:00 Hemiciclo: Reunión AELCO/ General AELCO meeting Sábado 21 de octubre / Saturday 21 October 9:00-10:00: Hemiciclo: Conferencia plenaria / Plenary lecture. Anatol Stefanowitsch: “From Corpus to Mind: Corpus-Based Methods in Cognitive Linguistics” 10:00-11:00: Hemiciclo: Javier Valenzuela & Joseph Hilferty: “Music, Modularity, and Syntax” Susana Comesaña: “Propuesta de herramienta de tratamiento y representación de información en entorno tridimensional con base en el Análisis de Semántica Latente (LSA)” Sala Jorge Guillén: Blanca Kraljevic: “Linguistic and pictorial metonymy in advertising” Irene Mittelberg: “Metonymy in co-speech gesture” 11:00-12:30: Posters B 12:30-2:00 Hemiciclo:

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Claudia Muñoz: “Efectos de Prototipo en la Categorización de Peticiones. Modelo Cognitivo Idealizado y Contenido Semántico” Judy Kupersmitt: “The impact of grammaticized aspect on the temporal texture of personal-experience narratives: A comparative study of Spanish, English, and Hebrew” Sandra Peña: “Transformaciones imagístico-esquemáticas, metáfora y metonimia: un caso específico de motivación conceptual” Sala Jorge Guillén: Eddie Gaytan: “Image Schemas: The Spanish preposition en” Araceli Enríquez: “Uso de las locuciones prepositivas espaciales delante de/delante de” Jane Klavan: “Taking the Adpositional Meaning Between the Teeth: The Estonian vahel 'between'” 2:00-4:00: Comida / Lunch 4:00-5:30 Hemiciclo: Emilia Marks: “Monolingual and bilingual children's abilities to distinguish novel languages” Gitte Kristiansen: “Lectal Varieties and Language Acquisition: An Empirical Study” Mariana Cucatto & Adriana Cucatto: “¿Existe la conexión espacial? Un enfoque desde la Lingüística Cognitiva para el estudio del uso anómalo del conector "donde" en textos académicos” Sala Jorge Guillén: Maria Dolores Porto: “Blue is the new black. When colour terms do not mean colours” Olga Blanco: “Mental processes and mental states: A contrastive study (English-Spanish) of verbal complementation from a Frame Semantics perspective” 5:30-6:30: Hemiciclo: Conferencia plenaria / Plenary lecture: Antonio Barcelona: “The recurrent operation of conceptual metonymy in grammar and discourse: A case study of an authentic text portion” 6:30-7:30: Hemiciclo: Mesa Redonda: La lingüística cognitiva como ciencia cognitiva / Round Table: Cognitive linguistics as a cognitive science 7:30-8:00: Hemiciclo: Clausura del congreso / Closing ceremony 9:30-: Cena del Congreso / Conference Dinner (Hotel NH Amistad)

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PLENARIOS / PLENARY SPEAKERS

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The recurrent operation of conceptual metonymy in grammar and discourse: A case study of an authentic text portion

ANTONIO BARCELONA

Universidad de Murcia abs@um.es

This talk is devoted to the presentation and the partial discussion of one of a series of

case studies carried out by the author on the recurrent operation of metonymy in discourse. All of these case studies provide ample evidence for these claims: - The regular operation of several metonymies at the same or different analytical levels in the same utterance, very often even in the same sentence.

- The primacy of the inferential role of metonymy, and the fundamental role of metonymy in pragmatic inferencing. - The frequent chaining of metonymies in the comprehension of a text or text- portion.

The case study selected for this talk consists of the detailed analysis of the randomly chosen first paragraph of a narrative text, which was also chosen at random. Its “internal meaning”, some aspects of its form, and its connection to the text which it initiates is shown to be largely motivated and / or guided by metonymy, particularly by metonymic chaining.

Although the ubiquity of metonymy in language and cognition is finally beginning to be really appreciated by the CL community, analyses of authentic text portions like the one used for this case study are useful in that they forcefully show that the claim that metonymy is ubiquitous does not simply mean that it is present at many cognitive and linguistic structures; it also means that it can be regularly expected to operate at some level (normally at more than one) of analysis in the same usage event.

These case studies are also useful for discovering new phenomena where metonymy is relevant and for showing that metonymies often encapsulate and reflect the interaction of cognition, linguistic structure and culture.

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Mental Simulation and Embodiment

BENJAMIN BERGEN University of Hawaii bergen@hawaii.edu

One of the core tenets of cognitive linguistics is the embodiment of linguistic

knowledge in the human body and in human experience. But the field has predominantly produced static, post hoc, verbal models of linguistic and other conceptual representations, rather than the dynamic models of psychological processing that would be required to explain the processes of language use in empirically testable ways. In response to this state of affairs, a line of research has recently emerged, which weds the experimental methods of psycholinguistics with a cognitive linguistic focus on embodied language knowledge and use. This work on the simulation semantics hypothesis investigates the possibility that language understanding depends upon the comprehender mentally simulating, or imagining, the content of utterances, using modality-specific brain systems. Related work on Embodied Construction Grammar proposes a computationally precise model of how language hooks into this capacity for mental simulation.

In this talk, I will outline the Embodied Construction Grammar framework and the simulation semantics hypothesis, and describe experiments that address key aspects of this framework. The experimental evidence demonstrates that language understanders automatically and unconsciously mentally simulate the entities and events described by language they process. First we will see that content words like nouns or verbs influence the content of mental simulation. For example, a verb of hand motion like "punch" demonstrably results in motor imagery revolving around moving the hand away from the body in a sentence like "John punched the wall" (Bergen and Wheeler 2005). Similarly, a subject noun like "shoes" in "The shoes stink" results in imagery using the lower part of the understander's visual field (Bergen 2005). We will then see that, as predicted by the Embodied Construction Grammar model, grammatical structures, like argument structure constructions and aspectual constructions, modulate how such a mental simulation is constructed (Glenberg & Kaschak 2002, Bergen & Wheeler In Prep).

In combination, the work described in this presentation provides a new empirical orientation for cognitive linguistics – we formulate detailed, embodied models of actual language use, then test their predictions using laboratory methods. This strategy produces persuasive results, showing the importance of embodiment in understanding language.

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Construcciones idiomáticas idiomáticas: Repetición consecutiva e idiomaticidad

MARIA JOSEP CUENCA

Universitat de Valencia Maria.J.Cuenca@uv.es

En esta ponencia, estudiamos un tipo de repetición léxica aparentemente ilógica o

irrelevante: la repetición de una palabra consecutivamente, como en (1a), y, por extensión, la repetición separada por la conjunción y (1b): (1) a. Se fue lejos, lejos

b. Hay hombres y hombres

Este tipo de repeticiones desafían la concepción logicista del lenguaje, según la cual no tiene sentido volver a decir una misma palabra. Por ello desde muchas perspectivas, este fenómeno sería considerado un caso evidente de anomalía carente de interés para el lingüista. Pero lo cierto es que estas construcciones son habituales en muchas lenguas y nadie las entiende como defectuosas. Aún más, tienen efectos semánticos y pragmáticos asociados a la estructura formal que demuestran una sistematicidad en el funcionamiento y una utilidad lingüística innegables.

Desde la concepción de la lingüística cognitiva, la paradoja desaparece. Podemos tratar estas estructuras como construcciones en las que la aparente anomalía se vincula a un efecto de sentido y a unos contextos de uso que, aún siendo icónicos, no son predictibles a partir del significado de los componentes. Así, no es igual decir (2a) que (2b): (2) a. El barco era muy grande

b. El barco era muy muy grande

En nuestra intervención, tras una presentación del tratamiento de la repetición en general y de la repetición consecutiva en particular, analizamos estructuras de repetición de una palabra consecutivamente y repeticiones coordinadas con y. El análisis muestra, además, que estructuras de repetición aparentemente idénticas responden a construcciones idiomáticas diferenciadas.

A partir de ejemplos en catalán, español e italiano, extraídos principalmente de recopilaciones de cuentos populares, identificamos y caracterizamos estas construcciones y los subtipos formales y interpretativos que manifiestan. Así, comprobamos que la repetición consecutiva y coordinada vehiculan significados vinculados la intensificación o el incremento (de grado, número o duración) y en algunos casos se asocian a efectos de prototipicidad (identificación con el prototipo o disociación referencial). Bibliografía básica Cuenca, M. Josep (en prensa): «Repetició consecutiva i idiomaticitat», Zeitschrift für

Katalanisch 20. Hilferty, Garachana & Valenzuela (e. p.): “Construcciones gramaticales y composicionalidad”. Jucker, Andreas (1994): «Irrelevant repetitions: A challenge to relevance theory», en: Fischer,

Andreas. (ed.), Repetition, Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 7, Tübingen, Gunter Narr 47-60.

Persson, Gunnar (1974): Repetition in English. Uppsala: Universitetsbiblioteket.

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Conceptual Metaphors: A Review and a Theory

JULIO SANTIAGO DE TORRES Universidad de Granada

santiago@ugr.es

This talk will review the available experimental evidence for the psychological reality of (mainly spatial) conceptual metaphors, identifying the problem of flexibility as one of the key questions that remains to receive a satisfactory answer, and will present a psychologically plausible model that offers such an answer. The model proposed is grounded on basic spatial cognition principles, working memory representations and attentional processes. This framework integrates prior results and licenses several new predictions. Direct test of some of these predictions is provided by a prior study of our lab and two new experiments. Finally, I will discuss the implications of this framework for the issues of manifestation of conceptual metaphors in behabiour, the acquisition of conceptual metaphors, and their cross-cultural variation.

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Typology and Usage: Explorations of motion events across languages

DAN I. SLOBIN Universidad de California (Berkeley)

slobin@berkeley.edu

Typological approaches have generally not been concerned with patterns of language use, except for seeking data from texts and corpus materials. However, psycholinguists have found typologies to be useful in exploring usage patterns in particular languages. This has been evident, for example, in crosslinguistic studies of child language (e.g., Nijmegen-based studies of Bowerman, Choi, and others) and of narrative organization (e.g., frog story studies of Berman, Slobin, and others). Such studies, though, run up against issues not covered in a particular typological description, such as the lexicon, morphosyntactic structures, frequency of use in various genres and social settings, and the cognitive consequences of frequency.

Motion event descriptions have been a fruitful arena for cognitive and functional linguistic approaches concerned with usage. Talmy’s typology of verb-framed and satellite-framed languages has accounted, to some extent, for patterns of expression of path and manner in both narrative and experimental data. At the same time, not all usage patterns—either within or across the two typological groups—can be accounted for on this dichotomy.

The conference presentation focuses on the language user, rather than the linguist. Each language presents the user with a set of constructions for encoding concepts and communicative intentions in a particular domain of experience. Each available construction type specifies a collection of lexical items and morphosyntactic patterns. Frequency of usage entrenches particular patterns of expression in a language, with diachronic effects on the lexicon, and with pragmatic consequences for foregrounding and backgrounding of information.

The domain of intransitive, human motion will be explored on the basis of a systematic sampling of novels written in six languages: English, French, German, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. The critical interface between typology and usage lies in the means of expressing PATH. For one type of language (e.g., English), all paths can be expressed by a common construction type, in which path information is provided outside of the verb (“PIN” constructions: Path-in-Nonverb). These languages will be termed “unitary path system languages,” briefly, “unitary languages.” For another type of language (e.g., Spanish), users face a choice between two construction types: (1) the PIN type for paths that are not concerned with geometric features of the GROUND (Talmy’s “conformation”), and (2) constructions for paths that do include such features. For the second construction type, the verb conflates both direction (Talmy’s “vector”) and conformation (“PIV” constructions: Path-in-Verb). Languages with both PIN and PIV constructions will be termed “binary path system languages,” or “binary languages.” PIN and PIV construction types have different consequences for the encoding of both MANNER and PATH. Attention to components of events may differ for users of unitary and binary languages, as a consequence of psycholinguistic factors of use.

The picture is even more complex due to many sociocultural factors—because constructions and lexical items are also marked for genre and register (not to mention individual differences in personal style). Because so many different sorts of factors influence usage, cognitive linguistics cannot provide predictive models. The goal must be to formulate plausible explanations, considering linguistic, psycholinguistic, and sociocultural issues; and to seek additional factors when an established explanatory framework cannot be completely extended to another language or situation.

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From Corpus to Mind: Corpus-Based Methods in Cognitive Linguistics

ANATOL STEFANOWITSCH Universidad de Bremen

stefanowitsch@uni-bremen.de

Cognitive Linguistics generally recognizes two main factors influencing the (mental representation of) linguistic systems of individual languages: (i) general cognitive processes and (ii) patterns of linguistic usage. While cognitive processes are by now routinely investigated using a wide range of experimental psycholinguistic methods, usage patterns are typically still assessed on the basis of the researcher’s intuition or, at best, on the basis of small-scale raw frequency counts. In my talk, I will argue that quantitative corpus linguistics (and only quantitative corpus linguistics) can provide the methodological underpinning for usage-based models of language. Using case studies of phenomena from grammar, language change, and metaphor, I will show that simple frequency counts do not allow us to predict the linguistic behavior of speakers accurately. Instead, these frequencies must be evaluated statistically before they can serve as an adequate basis for modelling linguistic knowledge.

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RESÚMENES DE LAS COMUNICACIONES Y POSTERS / ABSTRACTS FOR ORAL AND POSTER

PRESENTATIONS

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Close Apposition as a Constructionist Network

CARLOS ACUÑA FARIÑA Universidad de Santiago de Compostela

iacanoe@usc.es

Even though apposition has figured prominently in traditional grammar, little has been done by modern linguistic frameworks to clarify this notion. As is usually employed today, apposition serves as a convenient jack-of-all-sorts that can be conveniently invoked whenever the description of more formalised pieces of linguistic structure reaches seemingly unresolvable gray areas. For instance, Taylor (2002: 424) treats it and that the earth is flat as being in apposition in it’s possible that the earth is flat and Meyer (1992) regards ‘colon structures’ as appositive too, irrespective of what figures after the colon. If to that variety one adds the plethora of close structures (eg. the river Thames, Huxley the man, the poet Burns, we doctors, etc.) recognised in traditional grammar, then the overall ‘denotation’ of the term ‘apposition’ is stretched to absurdity. Matthews (1981) and Burton-Roberts (1993) are sober reminders that such an ample view of apposition is virtually useless and, more intriguingly, that there does not seem to be much more that one can do about it.

In Acuña (2006) I defend the view that so-called loose appositions inhabit a conceptual space that is best understood in reference to the notions of family resemblance, prototype, and construction. A crucial characteristic of this conceptual region is the fact that its lack of strong formal codification leaves it at the mercy of frequent, palliative, pragmatic construal. Here I argue that close apposition can also be best captured in the form of a constructionist framework, but that palliative pragmatic construals are not necessary. It is shown that constructions inhabiting the close appositive space relate to one another in systematic and predictable ways, ways that compose a dynamic system, as opposed to a static inventory. Emphasis will be placed on the inheritance links (Godberg 1995) that interconnect the distinct templates. An interesting issue that arises in the grammar of close apposition is whether componentiality may actually yield internally unstable phrasal structure that is nevertheless externally stable. References Acuña-Fariña, J.C. 2006. A constructional network in appositive space. Cognitive Linguistics

17/ 1. Burton-Roberts, N. (1993). Apposition. In N. Asher (ed.) The encyclopaedia of language and

linguistics, volume I. Oxford: Pergamon. 184-187. Matthews, P.H. (1981). Syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meyer, Ch. F. (1992). Apposition in contemporary English. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press. Taylor, J.R. (2002). Cognitive Grammar. Oxford: O.U.P..

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The role of grammar patterns in metaphoric headlines in the business press

MARIAN AMENGUAL PIZARRO, MARIAN; HONESTO HERRERA SOLER; BEATRIZ VILLACAÑAS & MICHAEL WHITE

Universitat de les Illes Balears marian.amengual@uib.es

Universidad Complutense de Madrid herrera@filol.ucm.es white@filol.ucm.es

Previous work has identified and analysed metaphor patterns, mainly from the semantic

point of view. In the present study, we take grammar as our starting point. A major issue is where the focal point of metaphor is located, that is, on the verb or on the noun, which is to say, on entities or processes. In on-going research on this issue, we have been struck by the fact that many headlines are in fact verbless phrases. Further research has enabled us to quantify such use and to conclude that its incidence warrants the conclusion that it is in fact a pattern of headline use in general and of business press headlines evidencing metaphor use in particular.

Our methodology follows Deignan’s (2005) call for greater emphasis on naturally occurring language use, supported by corpus evidence, rather than on introspection. Hence, we have built up our own corpus of authentic business headlines, both from the Spanish and British press, over a six month period. This corpus comprises of 1.000 entries. All the cases of verbless phrases were then isolated, providing quantitative data for this paradigm. The major problem then arising was to pose the question as to whether such a headline pattern displayed specific characteristics. Addressing this issue leads to findings which support the claim that three distinct patterns predominate within the paradigm. In the first place, verbs colloquially termed “light” verbs, in other words, verbs of low semantic import and hence practically empty carriers – for example existential verbs and de-lexicalised verbs – could very easily be added to make the headline a conventional sentence. Secondly, the nouns appearing were often semantically dynamic and thus approximated in function towards verbs. Thirdly, idioms, near idioms and, in general, highly charged culturally specific terms that strongly call up shared knowledge tend to arise. Empirical evidence is provided for each pattern.

Finally, we examine the evidence from the point of view of the communication impact or potential of these kinds of verbless phrases. Our conclusion, in this respect, is that the absence of verbs seems to be compensated by the presence of elements which due to shared knowledge – for example, idioms, near idioms, salient culturally specific reference, embodiment and so on – are likely to have added communicative potential or impact and thus positively contribute to the persuasiveness of these headlines.

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Cognitive strategies for presupposition resolution

MARTA ANDERSSON Stockholm University

martabox@bedband.net

One of the biggest problems concerning presuppositions has been correctly dealing with their sensitivity to the context, i.e. why inferences triggered by certain expressions do not project out in all linguistic environments, even though the triggering words preserve their semantic content in different settings. The answer goes along with the principles of cognitivist theories, particularly: Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) within which mental processes involved in language comprehension play a prominent role. The theory is related to the representations of the entire discourse, not just individual sentences, which means that those representations can be updated or revised, i.e. information can be incrementally added or removed from them, moulding the cognitive models of both the speaker and the hearer.

As an extension to DRT van der Sandt (Sandt, R. A. van der, 1992. Presupposition projection as anaphora resolution. Journal of Semantics 9, 333-377) proposed the binding theory of presuppositions. According to this view, presuppositions can bind to an already existing antecedent in the previous discourse, exactly like anaphors and pronouns. However, due to their substantially richer semantic content presuppositions refer to already known information in a more sophisticated and efficient way than ordinary anaphors. There are, however, presuppositions which cannot be bound to any clear antecedent in the previous context. As van der Sandt claims, in such a situation the hearer needs to create a part of the speaker’s meaning by using inferences, which is feasible on the basis of “presumed common knowledge” that enables the speaker to surmise what the hearer possibly knows and introduce new information felicitously. The hearer, on his part, has to try to treat such information as discourse-given and modify his discourse representation by adding the presupposed information to his conceptual model and resolving the presupposition via accommodation.

This paper scrutinizes examples of presuppositions that act like discourse anaphors in the context of transcripts of three authentic therapeutic sessions, two of them borrowed from therapeutic books and the third one obtained thanks to the courtesy of an English-native-tongue therapist and her patient from The Institute of Psychodrama, Sociometry and Group Psychotherapy in Stockholm. Such sessions can be analyzed in the same way as ordinary spoken discourse; however, the significance of using presuppositions proves to be different in those two genres. As features related to the context, presuppositions disclose the speaker’s intentions and cause various reactions in the hearer, all of which make therapeutic discourse a particularly interesting subject for analysis, as the exchange of information in this genre has a specific pragmatic goal, unlike casual conversation analysed by Spenader (Spenader, J., 2004. Presuppositions in spoken discourse. Doctoral Dissertation, Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University). Thus the strategies of manipulating discourse representations are different in therapeutic talk and have different pragmatic goals; for instance: they may constitute a means to achieve more specific formulations of the patient’s problems or a sophisticated technique of challenging the patient’s generalized model of his situation. All this results in different frequencies of the two strategies for presupposition resolution in the two genres analyzed.

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Mental processes and mental states: A contrastive study (English-Spanish) of verbal complementation from a Frame Semantics perspective

OLGA BLANCO CARRIÓN

Universidad de Córdoba olgablanco@uco.es

The work presented in this paper is part of my doctoral dissertation. In it, I studied

mental perception and cognition from the perspectives of Frame Semantics and Construction Grammar. My study focuses on the conceptual nature of some cognition-mental perception verbs in English and Spanish, and implies research on the complementation patterns of two of those verbs: “know” (‘saber’ for Spanish), and “sense” (‘notar’ for Spanish) in order to unravel the differences in construal from the native speakers of each language. In order to locate those predicates in frames, I started by looking them up in the FrameNet database (henceforth FN). This first examination helped me to grasp the English native speaker´s view with regards to the predicates in question. I provide my own proposal of these predicates for the Spanish language, and indicate my points of convergence and divergence with the FN proposal with regards to the English language. The changes I introduce to the information presented in FN are supported by the use of corpora (BNC for English; CREA, and ADESSE for Spanish), as well as by a detailed study of the claims of cognitive science with regards to the issue of human cognition. The changes proposed include: the creation of new frames, modification of some of the frame definitions found in FN, and the new labelling of some FE. The analysis of the complementation patterns of “sense” (notar), and “know” (saber) highlights the importance of constructions as determinants of meaning construction. For instance, the presence or absence of a certain frame element (henceforth FE) within a complement construction may lead to that predicate belonging to one frame or another (e.g. the presence of the FE “evidence” within a complement construction for the predicate “sense” leads this predicate to belong to the Physical_Perception frame, whereas its absence usually leads it to belong to the Mental_Perception frame or, at least, to being considered a peripheral member of the latter).

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Pervasiveness and polifunctionality of short story: A cognitive perspective

CARMEN BRETONES & Mª ENRIQUETA CORTÉS DE LOS RIOS Universidad de Almería

cbreton@ual.es mecortes@ual.es

Stories are found in every culture and can be viewed as a basic human strategy for

coming to terms with reality, and more specifically with time, process, and change (Herman 2003:2). Most of our experience, knowledge, and thinking is organized as stories and short story can be considered a basic principle of mind (Turner 1996). In some cases stories are extended or blended with each other in order to get complex structures and complex effects. Parable, i.e., the projection of one story onto another (Turner 1996), is an example of these complex structures. Projection through blending, metaphor and synaesthesia (Faucconier & Turner 2000, Lakoff & Johnson 1999, Bretones 2005) are crucial for this principle of mind.

Each story event is indexed on: (1) the time frame in which it occurs, (2) the spatial region in which it occurs, (3) the protagonist (or protagonists) it involves, (4) its causal status with regard to the prior event (or events), and (5) its relatedness to a protagonist’s goals. From there the story can be updated or re-indexed (Zwaan, Magliano & Graesser 1995: 292, Herman 2005: 43). Such schemas help to provide at least two benefits: First, to delineate a scene with quick gestures. Second, schemas allow authors to call attention to departures from the norm (Herman 2005:41). The story’s general schema also influence subjects on the level and organization of free recall. There is a strong influence of the schema on recall of details, as well as recall for the story's gist. Finally, the schema's influence on the organization of memory holds over time and serves to buttress the more abstract and general elements of the narrative (Yussen et al 1988).

By way of illustration, everyday examples will be provided as well as Martin Amis’ short story “Heavy Water” from his collection of the same title (1998). In this story, Amis uses metaphoric expressions such as “the boiling sea”(p.150), synaesthetic expressions such as “echoes of colour and shape and tone”(p.149); and blends such as “the sun was loosing blood across the estuary” (p.138). These elements are crucial for understanding the story as a whole and allow Amis’ impulse to move from real and attested incidents to the cosmic lesson to be learned from them (Cape 1999).

The final aim of this paper is, thus, to show the importance of short story, not only as part of Literature but also as a literary capacity indispensable to human cognition. References Bretones, C. M.(2005). “Synesthesia”. In Keith Brown (ed.). Encyclopedia of Language and

Linguistics. 14-vol. Second Edition. Elsevier. Fauconnier, G. & Turner, M. (2002). The Way We Think. Cambridge: CUP. Hampe, B. (ed). (2005). From Perception to Meaning. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Herman, D. (ed). (2003). Narrative Theories and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford: CSLI. Lakoff, G & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh. New York: A Perseus Book. Turner, M. (1996). The Literary Mind. Oxford: OUP. Yussen, S. et al. (1988). “The Robustness and Temporal Course of the Story’s Schema’s

Influence on Recall”. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 14(1): 173-179.

Zwaan, Magliano & Graesser, A. (1995). “ Dimensions of Situation Model Construction in Narrative Comprehension.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 21: 162-197.

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Synaesthetic metaphors in wine description

ROSARIO CABALLERO & ERNESTO SUÁREZ TOSTE Universidad de Castilla La Mancha

MRosario.Caballero@uclm.es

In wine discourse, it is frequent to find a wine described as being “very pure and well-delineated, unfolding its slate, apple and citrus notes on a wave of bright acidity” or “still a bit jarring on the palate”, and as finishing “soft”, “chewy”, “velvety”, or “warm” –to list but a few of the adjectives used to evaluate the aftertaste of a wine. Together with being highly metaphorical, these examples show the ability of figurative language to convey disparate sensorial experiences (here those of sound, touch, and sight). Such language is variously referred to as synaesthetic metaphor (after the cross-modal physical experience known as synaesthesia), cross-modal or inter-sensory metaphor (Ramachandran & Hubbard 2001) or intersense metaphors (Ning Yu 2003).

Indeed, although everyday language is full of cross-sensorial descriptions (e.g., “loud skirt”, “strident colour”, “soft music”), wine discourse and, particularly texts devoted to describing and evaluating wines (i.e. tasting notes), is a case in point of both the high percentage of occurrence and the rhetorical potential of synaesthetic metaphor. The frequent use of this type of metaphor among wine critics arises from the need to communicate their sensorial experience of a wine and share it with others. In other words, the conspicuous presence of synaesthetic metaphor in tasting notes points to the difficulties of translating the sensations produced by wine into something intelligible and, above all, shareable –however obscure and mystifying their jargon may seem to the profane.

Our discussion draws upon the results of a research project in progress, which focuses on the presence and role of figurative schemas in a corpus of 12,000 tasting notes retrieved from eight specialized magazines. The present paper pivots on the following research questions: (1) Which are the source and target senses involved in the figurative language used in wine description? (2) Are the same metaphor(s) indistinctively used to describe red and white wines? and (3) When the same metaphor is used to describe a red and a white wine, does it articulate the same meaning?

The research data reveal a large amount of metaphors mapping information from the source domains of touch, sight, and sound onto the target domains of ‘smell’ and ‘taste’ (the latter, in fact, a combination of ‘touch’, ‘smell’ and ‘taste’ proper) all of which appear to be crucial for describing wine tasting experiences, yet are also constrained by the particular characteristics of the wine at issue.

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Welcome on board, Welcome aboard the semantic-syntactic

NURIA CALVO CORTÉS Universidad Complutense de Madrid

nuri_cc@hotmail.com

This paper analyses the evolution of the term aboard throughout the history of the English language. In present day English we are used to hearing and using on board and aboard interchangeably, but has it always been like that? While aboard is considered and archaic form, on board seems to be the original form. Therefore, the question that arises is, do they actually mean the same or have they evolved into different meanings? Both a semantic and a syntactic analysis will be carried out in order to find out the answer to such a question from a cognitive linguistics point of view, considering linguists such as Langaker (1991), Slobin (1996, 2000) and Talmy (1975, 1976, 1987, 1996, 1997, 2000)

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Aspecto, perspectiva y tiempo de procesamiento en la oposición imperfecto/indefinido del español. Ventajas explicativas y aplicaciones pedagógicas

ALEJANDRO CASTAÑEDA

Universidad de Granada acastro@ugr.es

En el presente trabajo nos proponemos abordar ciertos aspectos relacionados con la

oposición imperfecto/indefinido del español aplicando algunos conceptos de la Gramática Cognitiva. Partiendo del reconocimiento de la distinción aspectual terminado / no terminado como valor prototípico de la distinción, indagaremos la posibilidad de reinterpretar la oposición, de carácter privativo desde el punto de vista funcional estructural, en términos de “alcance de la designación” respecto del proceso referido (más abarcadora en el caso del indefinido, que incluye el término del proceso, y menos en el del imperfecto, que no especifica el término pero que no es incompatible con él). Por otro lado, entendemos que la comprensión cabal de la oposición y la posibilidad de superación de la discusión entre la concepción temporalista y la aspectual puede abordarse aplicando la noción de tiempo de procesamiento (processing time) de Langacker (1987). Defenderemos la idea de que el imperfecto adquiere su valor prototípico imperfectivo de forma equivalente a como el presente (tal y como se defiende en Langacker, 2001) adquiere el suyo a partir de la restricción de simultaneidad respecto del momento de la enunciación. La distribución forma simple / perífirasis progresiva (estar + GERUNDIO) con verbos imperfectivos y perfectivos respectivamente, que Langacker pone de relieve para el presente en inglés, se reproduce en el caso del español para el imperfecto.

Proponemos describir el imperfecto como un morfema temporal que localiza un proceso en el punto temporal de la reconstrucción mental de los hechos que coincide con el momento de la enunciación y el indefinido como un morfema temporal que abarca el recorrido interno del proceso de forma completa y que sitúa su término en el punto temporal de la reconstrucción que coincide con el momento de la enunciación. La validez de esta aproximación se argumentará sobre la base de las correlaciones reconocidas entre imperfecto y presente en todos sus usos típicos (habitualidad, descripciones de propiedades, situaciones momentáneas, presente gnómico, histórico, etc.) así como en la capacidad de dar cuenta de los casos en que el imperfecto alude a procesos que debemos dar por terminados (como en el caso del llamado imperfecto periodístico, correlato en pasado del llamado presente histórico).

Además de las ventajas descriptivas y explicativas, existen ventajas pedagógicas de esta aproximación. Expondremos algunos de los criterios de adaptación pedagógica para el aula de español/LE que nos parecen más relevantes. Entre ellos los que destacan las ventajas de una aproximación multidimensional al problema y la probabilidad de captación intuitiva de la oposición aspectual y temporal, no demasiado abstracta y suficientemente generalizable y productiva para el estudiante extranjero.

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Visual meaning in multimodal discourse: an experimental pragmatic approach

VICENT T CHANG. National Chengchi University, Taiwan

vthchang@ms32.hinet.net

Rationale: How does our knowledge of language and of context endow us to understand what we

are told, to resolve ambiguities, to grasp both explicit and implicit contents, and to appreciate non-literal expressions—metaphor, irony, pun, hyperbole, humour, poetic effects, and, non-verbal communication? These issues have often been approached within linguistic pragmatics and psycholinguistics, whilst with only limited interactions between the two. This paper thus aims to explore the audience's perception, comprehension and interpretation of visual image in multimodal communication1, reexamining the explanatory adequacy of Relevance framework (Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995) and exploring the significant novelty of experimental pragmatics (Noveck & Sperber 2005). Research questions: This paper attempts to investigate implicit meaning conveyed in multimodal discourse, trying to explain and render plausible interpretations to the following research questions: 1. What explicit and implicit information and cognitive contextual effects would be perceived

and inferred by the (different) receptors through the integration of the visual images and slogans employed within institutionalised discourse / specialised communication?

2. The implicit meaning, especially weak implicatures2 involving feelings, attitudes, emotions and impressions, will fall into an indeterminate range. Can we regard these as scalar implicatures with different functional loadings or weights?

3. Which inferred salient implicature of implicit meanings could possibly be served as default value?

4. Will the results of this study enhance the explanatory power of Neo-Gricean pragmatic theories in terms of language, cognition and communication, e.g. Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995; Noveck & Sperber 2005)?

Methodology

The current study is to conduct an experiment by randomly sampling one dozen students from different departments at NCCU to look into six captions designed for the Olympics 2008 released by Mainland China. The subjects are to watch (and hence process) the six captions (for around one to two minutes) first, as shown below; and then report/narrate the pictures they just perceived and processed respectively as much as they possibly can (for three to five minutes or so). These activated meanings are then tape-recorded for further analysis. Expected results:

1 'Multimodality' has been defined in semiotics as the co-existence of more than one mode, or sign system, within the same text. From advertising, film and television to websites, game environments and mobile technology, the texts that surround us today are increasingly multimodal. 2 Assumptions that are derivable from the proposition expressed by the utterance together with the context are called implicatures. (Tanaka 1994: 26-7) Also Tanaka notes (ibid.: 29), "…there is no clear cut-off point between assumptions strongly backed by the communicator, and the assumptions derived from the utterance on the addressee's sole responsibility." But both strong and weak implicatures are in accord with 'principle of relevance'.

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What the subjects have (actively, creatively and imaginatively) inferred are supposed to fall into a wide range of weak implicatures along with strong implicatures, depending on the different degrees of involvement and shared background knowledge in terms of cultural, social, political aspects etc. At the least case, the subjects could process and tell what is all about the slogan "奧運熱, 熱遍京城! (Olympic Fever Heats the Whole Beijing!)" — the explicit meaning. Or if unfortunately not, then the communication is unsuccessful, which somehow still conforming the principle of relevance. After all, by the same token, we couldn't expect that all the students in one class would understand one joke simultaneously, or would process therein at the same speed. Considering "…there is no clear cut-off point between assumptions strongly backed by the communicator, and the assumptions derived from the utterance on the addressee's sole responsibility," (cf. fn. 2) we group/classify the implicatures according to the order that they previously narrated. We compare then those implicatures inferred and derived by those subjects to see the overlapping (or quasi-overlapping/similar) parts to re-/organise and find the functional loadings — scalar implicatures (cf. Noveck & Sperber 2005). Also expectedly to assign the salient meaning(s) of them as default value accordingly. References Forceville, Charles J. (2005). Multimodal metaphors in commercials. Paper for "The pragmatics

of multimodal representations" panel at the 9th International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) Conference, July 10-15, Riva del Garda, Italy.

Noveck, Ira A. and Dan Sperber (Eds.). (2005). Experimental Pragmatics. (Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Languages and Cognition). Palgrave Macmillan.

Pilkington, Adrian. (1992). Poetic Effects. Lingua 87: 29-51. Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. (1986/1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 2nd

ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Tanaka, Keiko. (1994). Advertising Language: A Pragmatic Approach to Advertisements in

Britain and Japan. London: Routledge.

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Human locomotion in English and Spanish

PAULA CIFUENTES FÉREZ Universidad de Murcia

paulacf@um.es

In this paper, we are interested in examining the way English and Spanish lexicalize human locomotion. A vast amount of research has been carried out inspired by the motion event typology established by Talmy (1985, 2000), that of, verb-framed and satellite-framed languages. However, hardly any research has been devoted to either deeply analyse motion verb lexicons or to explore manner of motion granularity between languages typologically different or similar (cf. Slobin (2003, 2006)). After compiling motion verb lexicons in English and Spanish by using monolingual dictionaries, thesauri and corpora, we concentrated on an important sub-domain of motion, specifically that of human locomotion. We carried out an empirical study: monolingual Spanish and English speakers rated on a scale each one of the human locomotion verbs selected from our lexicons in relation to Walk (Spanish Andar), Run (Sp. Correr) and Jump (Sp. Saltar). Our aims were (a) to find out both prototypical, peripheral and fuzzy verb members for those three categories, and (b) to establish relations between them. Once the prototypical verbs for the categories Walk, Run and Jump were found out, we investigated which semantic features are relevant for each category and for each language group with especial attention to fine-grained manner of motion. References Slobin, Dan I. 2003. Language and thought online: Cognitive consequences of linguistic

relativity. In Gentner, Dedre and Susan Goldin-Meadow (eds.), Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and cognition Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 157-192.

Slobin, Dan I. 2006. What makes manner of motion salient?. In Hickmann, M. and S. Robert (eds.). Space in languages: Linguistic systems and cognitive categories. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Talmy, Leonard. 1985. Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In Shopen, Timothy (ed.), Language typology and lexical descriptions: Vol. 3. Grammatical categories and the lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 36–149.

Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a cognitive semantics: Vol. II: Typology and process in concept structuring.Cambridge,MA:MITPress

.

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Desambiguación semántica verbal: aspecto léxico y focalización de la atención

MARTA COLL FLORIT & SALVADOR CLIMENT Universidad Oberta de Catalunya

mcollfl@uoc.edu scliment@uoc.edu

Una de las tareas fundamentales en el ámbito del Procesamiento del Lenguaje es la

desambiguación semántica. Nos encontramos, por lo tanto, ante la necesidad de disponer de criterios para identificar y representar sentidos de palabras. Aquí trataremos de los verbos, con el objetivo básico de demostrar que el Aspecto Léxico, entendido desde una perspectiva cognitivista, puede ser un criterio clave en el proceso de delimitación de los sentidos de una pieza léxica verbal. El Aspecto léxico o Aktionsart hace referencia a la estructura temporal interna del evento descrito por el verbo, e.g. Vendler (1967), quien clasifica las categorías aspectuales en Estados, Actividades, Realizaciones y Logros. Es sorprendente, no obstante, comprobar como la mayoría de autores han adoptado habitualmente la pieza léxica verbal, y no el sentido, como objeto de clasificación aspectual. Ahora bien, como es sabido, la mayoría de verbos son polisémicos y, de manera relacionada, pueden incluir sentidos que expresen diferente información aspectual. Nuestra propuesta plantea dos cambios de perspectiva básicos: en primer lugar, adoptar el sentido, y no el verbo, como objeto de estudio aspectual; en segundo lugar, adoptar una concepción cognitivista de las categorías aspectuales entendiendo que no hay clases aspectuales cerradas y estables, sino que las categorías aspectuales son diferentes focalizaciones de la secuencia temporal en que ocurre un evento: Actividad-Logro-Estado; es decir, un proceso dinámico que avanza hacia un límite temporal que implica un cambio de estado, como se representa en la Figura 1. ------------------------- Actividad Logro Estado Realización Figura 1. Secuencia aspectual Basándonos en el proceso de “windowing of attention” propuesto por Talmy (1996), hipotetizamos que, en muchos casos, cada sentido de una pieza léxica verbal focaliza una fase diferente de la secuencia temporal, creando en base a este criterio una categoría radial (Lakoff, 1987) respecto a uno o más sentidos prototípicos. Un ejemplo lo encontramos en los diferentes sentidos de ‘Conocer / Conèixer’, verbo clasificado tradicionalmente como Estado. Siguiendo nuestra hipótesis, potencialmente podría tener como mínimo tres sentidos, cada uno focalizando una sola fase de la secuencia aspectual Actividad-Logro-Estado (ejemplos extraídos de McDermott et al. 2000): • Conocer_1 (Actividad): transición o proceso hacia el estado de conocimiento Ej. El perro lo conoció por el olor • Conocer_2 (Logro): momento concreto en que se entra en el estado de conocimiento Ej. ¿Cuándo la conociste? • Conocer_3 (Estado): poseer información sobre alguien o algo Ej. Conozco muy bien el centro de Madrid Es sintomático, y puede ser una evidencia favorable a nuestra aproximación, comprobar que existen diferencias entre lenguas a la hora de lexicalizar estos sentidos. Por ejemplo,

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McDermot et al. (2000) dan en inglés ‘to recognize’ como traducción de Conocer_1, ‘to meet’ para expresar el sentido de Conocer_2 y ‘to know’ como sentido genérico de de tipo estativo, equivalente a Conocer_3. Por otro lado, este sistema de desambiguación tiene el efecto de limitar los múltiples sentidos posibles de ‘Conocer / Conèixer’ solucionando, así, uno de los problemas clásicos de las bases léxicas computacionales y de la teoría de las categorías radiales: la sobregeneración de sentidos.

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Verb disposition in the Dative alternation: a corpus-based study of Dutch

TIMOTHY COLLEMAN University of Gent, Belgium

Timothy.Colleman@UGent.be

Semantic accounts of the Dative alternation – or of other verb pattern alternations, for that matter – often rely on observations about verb disposition: the preference of verbs with particular lexical semantic characteristics for one of the two competing constructions is taken as a clue toward the semantic differences between both constructions. For instance, with regard to the English Dative alternation, it has been observed that verbs of refusal such as deny and refuse are perfectly acceptable in the ditransitive construction but much less so in the so-called prepositional-dative (compare They refused the convict a last cigarette to ?They refused a last cigarette to the convict), and this contrast has been presented as evidence for the hypothesis that the prepositional-dative highlights the actual movement of the theme toward the receiver (see Goldberg 1992, among others). Unfortunately, these observations are usually based exclusively on the linguist's own intuitions, a procedure which has a number of inherent dangers. Not only do such practices run the risk of misjudging the acceptability of certain verb-construction combinations, they may also – perhaps even more problematically – easily overlook counterexamples to the advanced semantic generalizations. In this paper, I will present the results of a corpus-based study of verb disposition in the Dutch Dative alternation, i.e. the variation between the ditransitive construction (e.g. Jan geeft Piet een boek 'John gives Pete a book') and its prepositional-dative paraphrase with the locative preposition aan (e.g. Jan geeft een boek aan Piet 'John gives a book to Pete'). On the basis of Gries & Stefanowitsch's (2004) method of "distinctive collexeme analysis", I will identify the verbs with a statistically significant preference for the ditransitive and those with a statistically significant preference for the prepositional-dative in a corpus of contemporary newspaper language. The results of this test provide the basis for a number of empirically valid generalizations about the semantic parameters driving the Dative alternation in Dutch. References Goldberg, A.E. (1992), 'The inherent semantics of argument structure: The case of the English

ditransitive', in: Cognitive Linguistics 3, 37-74. Gries, S. Th. & A. Stefanowitsch (2004), 'Extending Collostructional Analysis: a corpus-based

perspective on "alternations"', in: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9, 97-129.

34

Propuesta de herramienta de tratamiento y representación de información en entorno tridimensional con base en el Análisis de Semántica Latente (LSA)

SUSANA COMESAÑA

Universidad de Vigo susana@uvigo.es

Latent Semantic Analysis Theory has contributed to the developing of learning tools for

evaluating texts. It analyzed the internal coherence and the comprehension of the text. Due to these interesting characteristics, it has become an useful tool in academic institutions to evaluate students writings.

In the Investigation Department, we have developed a knowledge representation tool to analyse linguistic corpora based on Latent Semantic Analysis (LEXESP and others). For developing a Natural Language Processing System, we created a lexico-conceptual knowledge base. To generate this base of knowledge in a semi-automatic fashion we used a three-dimensional visual tool. This system constitutes a computer science development that allows the automatic analysis and evaluation of texts.

35

Análisis cognitivo del componente visual en la publicidad de automóviles

Mª ENRIQUETA CORTÉS DE LOS RIOS & CARMEN BRETONES CALLEJAS Universidad de Almería

mecortes@ual.es cbreton@ual.es

El objetivo de este artículo es analizar cómo se genera la construcción de sentido o

significación de los anuncios de automóviles a través de una imagen. Para tal fin, pretendemos estudiar los esquemas cognitivos y las estructuras conceptuales que subyacen al componente visual, es decir, a los elementos plásticos (color, luz y espacio) y los elementos icónicos (escenario, sujetos y objetos) (Rey, 1992), analizando un corpus de anuncios de coches. Más concretamente, estudiaremos los esquemas y estructuras cognitivas que hacen posible la abstracción del significado (Lakoff y Johnson 1999, Hampe 2005).

Atendiendo a los elementos plásticos, el color predominante en el corpus es el gris metalizado o gris perla por sus connotaciones en el contexto automovilístico de elegancia, frente al azul, verde y rojo, aunque los cuatro entren a formar parte del entramado visual que se presenta. Los colores suelen ser muy oscuros, si bien la luz siempre ilumina al producto que se anuncia, es decir al coche. Esto probablemente se deba a que la luz es una fuente de energía y guía la atención del individuo. En cuanto a la distribución espacial, resalta la disposición simétrica de la imagen para dar impresión de orden en la presentación del vehículo.

Con respecto a los elementos icónicos, el escenario donde se presenta al automóvil alude principalmente a dos contextos: la naturaleza o el concesionario. El primero por sus asociaciones con la libertad individual y accesibilidad a cualquier rincón del mundo. El segundo por ser el marco adecuado para mostrar este objeto de deseo. Resulta significativo que el coche se muestre sin conductor. Esto podría deberse a una estrategia publicitaria que se hace posible mediante un proceso conceptual de “blending” (Faucconier y Turner 2002). El receptor del anuncio podría conceptualizarse como conductor del mismo, por lo que se convertiría en el sujeto relevante. Por último, el objeto de este tipo de publicidad es el propio coche o sus piezas. No se toma otro objeto diferente para representar icónicamente al producto anunciado.

En cuanto a las imágenes, en general, prevalecen las estáticas frente a las dinámicas. Aunque los esquemas de imagen más representativos del corpus son dinámicos, como el esquema trayecto o viaje y el esquema delante-detrás. Los esquemas de imagen pueden ser definidos como representaciones mentales de unidades fundamentales de experiencia sensorial (Hampe 2005: 44). Dichas unidades fundamentales, y en este caso más por encontrarnos frente a un anuncio y su riqueza visual, nos conducen a la percepción de dimensiones que van más allá de esos esquemas, es decir, hacia una experiencia perceptiva mucho más rica. Es por eso la importancia del estudio de los esquemas de imagen y de estructuras como la metáfora EL OBJETO DESEADO ES UN OBJETO VALIOSO (Ungerer 2000), la metonimia EL ANUNCIO DEL COCHE POR EL COCHE o el blend de la metáfora EL COCHE ES UN SER VIVO y la metonimia LA COLUMNA POR EL CUERPO.

36

¿Existe la conexión espacial? Un enfoque desde la Lingüística Cognitiva para el estudio del uso anómalo del conector "donde" en textos académicos

ANDREA CUCATTO & MARIANA CUCATTO

Universidad Nacional de la Plata, Argentina cucatto@arnet.com.ar

macucatto@arnet.com.ar

El propósito de la siguiente ponencia consiste en reformular las bases para estudiar la conexión en los textos tomando como marco teórico y metodológico la Lingüística Cognitiva, y trabajando, en forma particular, el comportamiento textual/discursivo del conector “donde” en la escritura académica. A tal efecto se partirá de un conjunto de supuestos a partir de los cuales se plantearán algunas cuestiones generales relacionadas con lo que se denominará el “problema de la conexión”: su vinculación con los conceptos de dependencia conceptual, integración conceptual o mezclaje (Langacker, 1987, 1991; Maldonado, R., 1999; Fauconnier y Turner, 1998; Fauconnier, 1994; Schilperoord y Verhagen, 1998; Mathiessen y Thompson, 1998; Goldberg, 1996; Mandelblit, 2000; Dirven y Verspoor, 1998; Sweetser, 1999); los tipos y las formas de conexión y los usos especificados y subespecificados de la misma (Cucatto, A y Cucatto, M., 1998b; 2003; Cucatto, A. 2005; Pedersen, 2003; Cuenca, 1996). A continuación, estas categorías serán aplicadas al análisis del uso del conector “donde” en un corpus de textos académicos constituido por exámenes de alumnos de primer año de la facultad. Este análisis se centrará en la observación de los siguientes parámetros: -las formas que acompañan al relativo “donde”, 2-. el lugar que el conector adopta dentro de los segmentos textuales/discursivos en los que “donde” aparece, 3-. la función textual/discursiva que cumple el conector, esto es, el tipo de “conexión relacional” que establece (Moeschler, 1994; Bernárdez, 1995; Mann y Thompson, 1998; Sanders, Spooren y Noordman, 1992) y 4-. las características pragmático-cognitivas del uso “anómalo” o “subespecificado” del conector “donde”. Por último, se procederá a interpretar las motivaciones funcionales que subyacen al uso del conector “donde” en relación con el proceso de conceptualización lingüística del escrito postulando la existencia de un tipo de conexión específica llamada “conexión espacial” cuyo uso evidencia un tipo peculiar de escritura caracterizada por sus formas acumulativas, discontinuas, más espaciales que temporales y, principalmente, más cercana a la planificación, al boceto del escrito que a la textualización del mismo. Esta escritura indica la escasa competencia de los alumnos para elaborar conceptos lingüísticos, instalando, a través del “donde” una suerte de “palier” mental, y permite demostrar que el uso (y abuso) de formas de conexión espacial actualizada a través de “donde” informan acerca de modos de procesamiento particulares, por lo que el estudio del conector “donde” haría factible transferir los aportes de la Lingüística Cognitiva a la Lingüística Textual y a la Psicolingüística en forma decisiva.

37

La operación lingüístico-cognitiva de la “reificación“ y la conexión textual. Claves para su interpretación en el análisis de sentencias penales

MARIANA CUCATTO & ANDREA CUCATTO

Universidad Nacional de la Plata, Argentina cucatto@arnet.com.ar

macucatto@arnet.com.ar

Tomando como herramienta analítica la operación lingüístico-cognitiva que hemos denominado reificación (Allwood, 1999; Cucatto, M, 2002; Langacker, 1987, 1991; Pérez Juliá y Cucatto, A, 2003, Cucatto, M., 1995) se llevará a cabo un estudio de las diversas formas de conexión que reifican la información en un corpus de sentencias elaboradas en el fuero penal de la justicia argentina a fin de demostrar de qué manera los conectores coadyuvan a la elaboración de “líneas virtuales” de significación a través de las cuales se configuran los segmentos que conforman un texto/discurso, creando modos peculiares de construcción de las escenas representadas y, principalmente, formas especiales de integración conceptual por la que se elaboran vínculos o redes de interpretación que permiten inscribir dichas expresiones en marcos de predicaciones relacionales.

Se trabajará particularmente con cuatro dispositivos lingüístico-enunciativos: la utilización de relativos con función locativa, las formas subespecificadas con “que”, la aparición de pausas menores -adjunción, comas y punto seguido- y la combinación de formas no-finitas con formas finitas. Nuestro trabajo se sustentará en cuatro hipótesis:

1-. Pueden establecerse tipos y grados de reificación dado que no sólo disponemos de medios lingüísticos para abstraer y reificar información, sino también para empaquetar y recuperar en forma recursiva el material conceptual ya abstraído y reificado;

2-. El “construal” a través del cual se conectan segmentos textuales/discursivos reificados informa acerca de una forma de conceptualizar las situaciones simbolizadas: se trata, en general, de escenas incompletas, sesgadas, condensadas y no ancladas;

3-. Los modos diversos de conectar construcciones reificadas puede considerarse una estrategia textual/discursiva a través de la cual se “perspectivizan” las escenas, en virtud de que éstas no serán narradas en un sentido canónico sino, más bien, serán constatadas o simplemente nombradas, aspecto que permite redefinir el discurso jurídico y el género sentencia, en particular, en un espacio categorial que se extiende entre la narración y la descripción;

4- El efecto textual/discursivo que la reificación provoca incrementa el dramatismo de las escenas representadas pues la atenuación narrativa que se logra a través de la conexión de los segmentos textuales/discursivos, por ejemplo, hace posible la instalación de un montaje o puesta en escena que favorece la percepción y la cognición emocional, razón por la cual los textos/discursos jurídico no sólo logran un efecto epistémico sino también, en ocasiones, un efecto estético.

En suma, las líneas virtuales por las que se reifica la información puede ser explicadas como contornos elaborados por los sujetos que conciben –conceptual y verbalmente- la situación representada así como también de aquellos a quienes tal información va destinada. La reificación podría entenderse como parte de una teoría del reconocimiento de la forma de los objetos textuales/discursivos y, paralelamente, como una teoría visual o de la imagen, por lo que la conexión constituiría un dispositivo que ayuda a maniobrar la información empaquetando y recuperando material conceptual cada vez más concreto e incorporando dicho material en nuevas relaciones y procesos creando, así, entornos complejos de significación.

38

Usos representacionales y argumentacionales de los verbos de actitud proposicional en español actual

BRAM DE SAEGER

Universidad de Salamanca bram.desaeger@usal.es

Los verbos de actitud proposicional (creer, pensar, etc.) han suscitado tanto el interés

de filósofos como de lingüistas. La diferencia entre significado ‘no calificacional’ (el significado ‘original’ de creencia, pensamiento, etc.) y ‘calificacional’ (la expresión de modalidad epistémica) se ha traducido en varias teorías funcionales y cognitivas sobre significado ideacional e interpersonal, subjetividad, grounding y reference point constructions. Las denominaciones de este grupo de verbos subrayan los múltiples puntos de vista: verbos de cognición, de opinión, de estado mental. Las diferencias semánticas se han atribuido en primer lugar a los tipos de complementación (complemento directo, preposicional, subordinación sustantiva, predicación secundaria, infinitivo, verbo parentético). En lo que respecta a la subordinación sustantiva, Nuyts (2001) indica que al lado de la modalidad epistémica, se mantiene un aspecto evidencial en el significado del predicado. En la expresión de incertidumbre se ha destacado el papel de la subjetividad.

En lugar de definir las características semánticas inherentes a la subordinación sustantiva en comparación con otras construcciones, esta comunicación se centra en los diferentes modos de conceptualización dentro de esta estructura. Un extenso análisis de corpus de español actual ha revelado tres tipos de relación –frente a la tradicional dicotomía- entre el sujeto del predicado de actitud proposicional y el contenido proposicional de la subordinación. Estos tres tipos tienen funciones diferentes: representar (ej. de creer: antes de ganar una carrera tienes que creer que la vas a ganar), argumentar (ej.: yo creo que el gobierno ha llevado con gran habilidad la operación de reforma política), o expresar incertidumbre (ej.: el capitán era un hombre todavía joven, creo que de Bengasi); y comportamientos sintácticos distintos. Generalmente sólo se distingue modalidad epistémica como gramaticalización del predicado cognitivo (Traugott, etc.) pero los usos argumentacionales implican igualmente una reducción semántica y sintáctica: sólo se mantiene la relación epistémica entre conceptualizador y contenido proposicional, no se construyen con complementos circunstanciales, etc. Este uso no está limitado a la primera persona del presente, aunque en formas descriptivas compite con el uso representativo.

El objetivo de esta comunicación es elaborar un modelo de análisis que permite distinguir entre estos tres tipos a nivel sintáctico, semántico, funcional y cognitivo, con especial atención a los usos representacionales y argumentacionales, y determinar en qué medida y dónde son aplicables los conceptos de grounding y reference points. Referencias: NUYTS, Jan. 2000. Epistemic Modality. Language and Conceptualization. Amsterdam: John

Benjamins TRAUGOTT, Elizabeth C. 1989. “On the rise of epistemic meaning in English: an example of

subjectification in language change”. Language, 65: 31-35

39

(De)queísmo: una cuestión de perspectiva y alternancia parte/todo

NICOLE DELBECQUE University of Leuven, Belgium

Nicole.Delbecque@arts.kuleuven.be

Tradicionalmente considerados desviantes, el uso de que por el complementante de que (queísmo) y de que por que (dequeísmo) no presentan la estratificación social regular de las típicas variables sociolingüísticas (Bentivoglio & Galué 1998). Tampoco se dejan analizar satisfactoriamente en términos de evidencialidad (Schwenter 1999) o subjetivización (del Moral 2004).

Mi hipótesis es que la alternancia Ø que / de que manifiesta una diferencia de perspectiva congruente con la distinción parte / todo: la complementación mediante Ø que nos hace abordar la representación de un enunciado o pensamiento desde el punto de vista del sujeto de la cláusula principal, en términos de re-actuación, mientras que con de que se refleja la perspectiva intensional del hablante, quien selecciona la representación para fines comunicativos partiendo de su centro deíctico actual. Como corolario del rol de orden superior asumido por el hablante-conceptualizador, de que añade una dimensión derivativa que mengua la expresividad del conceptualizador ‘original’.

Las nociones de selección y derivación, conectadas con el significado esquemático de la preposición de, captan la diferencia de perfil relacional entre los dos constructos (“construals”), así como los efectos de prominencia (“saliency”) que cada uno es susceptible de producir.

Lejos de ser un factor perturbador, la alternancia provee cualquier tipo de cabeza con dos tipos de complementación: una instaura una perspectiva exclusivamente interna, mientras que la otra hace incumbir al hablante la gestión del perfil relacional de la representación. De ahí que incluso con cabezas nominales y adjetivales – a las que suele corresponder una visión partitiva (de) – es posible que el hablante-conceptualizador prefiera permanecer entre bastidores (Ø) en vez de apropiarse el acceso al dominio mental introducido por la subordinada sustantiva.

Con cabeza verbal, la distribución observada en cuanto a tipo, ocurrencia y frecuencia (corpus en línea de la RAE) corrobora la idea de que Ø es la opción no marcada tanto en términos probabilistas como en términos cognitivo-funcionales. Otra heurística consiste en acudir a la traducción, ya que es previsible que en otras lenguas la diferencia de conceptualización será marcada por el uso de predicados verbales distintos.

Al nivel discursivo y contextual pueden surgir inferencias adicionales en cuanto a la posición del hablante, en términos de aserción/ atenuación, certeza/ duda, evidencia directa/ indirecta. Como tales, sin embargo, estas inferencias no forman parte del significado gramatical del tipo de complementación propiamente dicho.

40

Constructions with verbs of dispossession in Dutch: a corpus-based study

MARTINE DELORGE & TIMOTHY COLLEMAN University of Gent, Belgium Martine.Delorge@UGent.be

Timothy.Colleman@UGent.be

As signalled by Newman (2005), among others, the verbs of giving constitute a more natural subclass of transfer of possession verbs than their counterparts, the verbs of dispossession. In this regard, it can be observed that the cognitive literature has mostly dedicated its attention to verbs of giving and the phenomena of dative alternation which can be observed in them. In this paper, I want to shift the attention to verbs of dispossession and show that their diversity in syntactic variation in the Dutch language proves to be a challenging area of investigation both from a synchronic and a diachronic point of view.

Synchronically, these verbs can occur with three different major syntactic constructions: (a) a construction with the theme as a direct object and the original possessor in an

(optional) prepositional constituent, usually with the ‘source’ preposition van (Hij stal veel geld van zijn vrienden ‘He stole a lot of money from his friends’). In some cases, however, the ‘contact’ preposition aan can be used as well (Prometheus ontstal het vuur aan Zeus ‘Prometheus stole the fire from Zeus’).

(b) a “reversed” construction with the original possessor as a direct object and the theme in an (optional) preposition constituent: e.g. Hij beroofde mij van al mijn bezittingen ‘He robbed me of all my belongings’.

(c) a ditransitive construction with both the theme and the original possessor as nominal object, e.g. Ze ontnamen hem al zijn privileges lit. They away-took him all his privileges ‘They took all his privileges away from him’. In present-day Dutch, this latter possibility is limited to a number of prefixed verbs with af- or ont-, but in earlier stages of the language, this type of construction also occurred with simplex verbs such as nemen ‘take’ and stelen ‘steal’.

In this paper I will focus on the constructional evolution of six Dutch verbs of dispossession: the simplex verbs stelen ‘steal’ and roven ‘rob’ and their be- and ont- prefixed variants, bestelen, beroven, ontroven and ontstelen. A comparison will be made between these verbs in present-day Dutch and the syntactic flexibility displayed in them with data from earlier linguistic stages. One of the findings gained from the comparative data analysis reveals that prefixed verbs with be- and especially ont- have manifested themselves in the double object constructions at the expense of the simplex verbs.

41

The emergence of a new grounding element in Swedish

LENA EKBERG Lund University

Lena.Ekberg@nordlund.lu.se

In my talk I will argue that the Swedish pronoun sån ‘such’ used among adolescents in multilingual city areas is developing into a grounding predication, viz. an indefinite determiner. (Following the tradition within Cognitive Grammar, the term grounding is used for relating a designated entity to the ground, i.e. the speech event, its participants, and its immediate circumstances.) This means that sån, just like the indefinite article, is able to turn a noun into a nominal (noun phrase) by identifying a grounded instance of the type designated by the noun. This is shown by the fact that the otherwise obligatory indefinite article en/ett ‘a’ can be omitted when sån is present, cf.: (1) Det var sån man… it was such man… There was this man…

This development is interesting since nominal grounding predications are usually taken to be either definite or quantificational (Langacker 2002: 30). For English, as well as for Swedish, these grounding predications are the articles, the demonstratives and certain quantifiers (e.g. some, most, all). Sån is however indefinite, and the primary meaning is not quantificational but comparative. In present day standard Swedish the comparative meaning is often bleached and sån is used in a purely deictic function, e.g. actualizing (“mentally pointing to”) a referent that is known to the participants, although it has not been mentioned in the discourse. (2) Jag har sån svart tröja du vet. I have such black sweater you know

In the language use among adolescents the meaning and function of sån has further extended, in that the identification of the noun has become offstage and subjectively construed (Langacker 2000: 220). In this function sån must be unstressed. Thus sån is obviously going through a process of grammaticalization, resulting in what seems to be a new grounding element.

References Langacker, Ronald W., 2000. Grammar and conceptualization. Berlin/New York: Mouton de

Gruyter. Langacker, Ronald W., 2002. Remarks on the English grounding systems. In Grounding. The

Epistemic Footing of Deixis and Reference, ed. by Frank Brisard, 29-38. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

42

Uso de las locuciones prepositivas espaciales delante de/adelante de

ARACELI ENRIQUEZ OVANDO Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, México

araenriquez@yahoo.com.mx

En este trabajo analizaremos las locuciones prepositivas delante de/adelante de que expresan relaciones proyectivas (Frawley, 1992) en el eje frontal. Aunque las gramáticas del español (Seco, 1992; Alarcos, 1994, Pavón, 1999, entre otros) señalan que en ciertos dialectos hispanoamericanos suele neutralizarse su uso, nuestros datos demuestran que en el español de la Ciudad de México la elección de delante de o adelante de obedece a diferentes maneras de conceptualizar una escena.

Las características de las relaciones espaciales que se dan en el eje frontal, aunadas a un análisis componencial de las locuciones prepositivas aquí tratadas, permite explicar sus distintos usos. Adelante de tiene un prefijo a- que conserva de su origen prepositivo, la capacidad de poner en perfil su trayectoria o su meta implícitas; en cambio, delante, posee el prefijo de- que sólo indica origen o procedencia (Esbozo, 1973:440).

De acuerdo con nuestros datos, la trayectoria implícita en adelante de se pone en perfil cuando se conceptualiza un evento como de movimiento real o abstracto (sigue conduciendo adelante del carro verde); en tanto que si la escena es estática, pero el punto de referencia (PR) tiene orientación intrínseca, es altamente probable que éste se vuelva prominente y se ponga en perfil la meta del prefijo a- (el árbol está en la parte de adelante de la casa).

Por otro lado, dado que el prefijo de- no indica meta, sino origen, la locución delante de se prefiere cuando hay PR sin orientación intrínseca, particularmente cuando éste es abstracto (sus intereses están delante de los de la empresa).

Finalmente, encontramos que los parámetros TRAYECTORIA y PR PROMINENTE operan ante un estímulo escrito, pero no ante uno visual. En el constructo mental que se realiza a partir de una imagen visual no rastreada en forma secuencial (Langacker 1991) se da prominencia a la relación espacial entre trayector y PR y no al movimiento. En este caso, el visualizador codifica únicamente la disposición topológica básica entre los participantes; la preposición con prefijo de- se convierte entonces en el término no marcado.

43

Del viaje a la caída: prototipicidad diacrónica de acostarse

JORGE FERNÁNDEZ JAÉN Universidad de Alicante Jorge.Fernandez@ua.es

La semántica histórica ha sido, desde siempre, una de las especialidades de la

Lingüística Histórica más desatendidas; de hecho, se puede considerar que esta disciplina nace en sentido estricto (es decir, como modelo científico sistemático) en el siglo XX, Cuando E. Coseriu publica en 1964 su famoso artículo “Pour une sémantique diachronique structural” en el que explica cómo se pueden aplicar al análisis del cambio semántico los postulados de la semántica estructural. Este trabajo de Coseriu despertó gran interés y comenzaron a desarrollarse gracias a él muchas investigaciones que intentaban explicar la evolución semántica de determinados campos léxicos a partir de las ideas estructuralistas. Sin embargo, pronto se comprobó que la explicación del cambio semántico sólo se puede acometer utilizando conocimientos y criterios que se escapan del dominio estrictamente lingüístico, tales como hechos históricos o datos relativos al medio en el que se desenvuelven los hablantes, algo que ya habían intuido semantistas del siglo XIX como Bréal o Darmesteter. Así, se observó que muchas evoluciones semánticas se pueden explicar gracias a determinados efectos metafóricos (motivados por el entorno y por la capacidad cognitiva general del Ser Humano) por lo que intentar establecer la evolución semántica de cualquier elemento lingüístico obligaba a tener en cuenta circunstancias mentales imprevisibles y poco sistematizables.

Partiendo de estas ideas, D. Geeraerts publicó en 1997 (tras muchos años de trabajo) su libro Diachronic prototype semantics. A contribution to Historical Lexicology, en el que desarrolla un modelo para explicar el cambio semántico a partir de la teoría cognitiva de los prototipos (significados más primarios de una categoría) y de la configuración metafórica del lenguaje, según el cual los significados evolucionan a partir de una serie de significados prototípicos centrales de los que surgen con el paso del tiempo proyecciones metafóricas y metonímicas que configuran nuevos significados. Por ello, la semántica histórica debe reconstruir las redes semánticas que, siglo a siglo, van surgiendo tomando como origen los significados básicos.

Con esta comunicación pretendemos mostrar esta teoría a partir del análisis del verbo acostarse, estudiando su evolución semántica desde su significado latino de costilla (que genera un prototipo direccional) hasta su polisemia actual (con el prototipo de tumbarse), explicando a su vez el origen de significados hoy en desuso como el de llegar a la costa.

44

Volver. La polisemia léxica vista desde las construcciones

JOSÉ MARÍA GARCÍA-MIGUEL Universidad de Vigo

gallego@uvigo.es

El objetivo de esta comunicación es reexaminar la polisemia léxica que manifiesta un verbo del español, volver, desde las perspectivas de la Lingüística de corpus y la Gramática de Construcciones. El trabajo descriptivo se basa en un corpus que contiene 946 ocurrencias del verbo volver. Este corpus contiene anotación sintáctica y semántica.

Al nivel más alto de esquematización, encontramos tres sentidos básicos de volver que se asocian típicamente cada uno con un esquema construcccional: a) ‘regresar al punto de partida’ – < SUJ volver a algún lugar>; b) ‘dar la vuelta, girar[se]’ - <SUJ volverse hacia alguien/algo>; y c) ‘cambiar de estado’ - <SUJ volverse PRTVO>. Otras construcciones usuales con volver pueden relacionarse fácilmente con alguno de esos esquemas. El significado del esquema construccional, que puede comprobarse en su instanciación con otros verbos, puede motivar parcialmente el sentido del verbo, aunque en ningún caso lo predice por completo. Además de considerar los esquemas construccionales en que encontramos el verbo, debemos considerar construcciones menos esquemáticas, aunque no menos convencionalizadas (tipo volverle la espalda a alguien), y descender hasta los ejemplares individuales investigando también qué lexemas son habituales o raros en cada hueco funcional de cada esquema construccional. En última instancia, es la repetición de combinaciones específicas como volver a casa, volver la cabeza / los ojos o volverse loco lo que contribuye a conformar el significado de un verbo y diferenciarlo de verbos similares que pueden aparecer en los mismos esquemas construccionales.

En conjunto se intentará demostrar que más allá de la posibilidad de agrupar las instancias de usos en una lista más o menos cerrada de sentidos convencionales (que podrían organizarse en una red semántica como extensiones a partir de un prototipo) deben entenderse los significados verbales en función de sus combinaciones tanto con construcciones sintácticas como con elementos léxicos específicos, de modo que el significado está motivado por los esquemas sintáctico-semánticos en que aparece un verbo y por la naturaleza de los elementos léxicos que se combinan con él. La aproximación utilizada da la vuelta en buena medida a la perspectiva, bastante extendida, que sostiene que las estructuras sintácticas están determinadas por el significado léxico.

45

Image Schemas: The Spanish preposition en

EDDIE GAYTAN Chicago State University e-gaytan@sbcglobal.net

The Spanish preposition en ‘at, in, on’ can be used to describe spatial relations between

a trajector (TR) and a landmark (LM) that in other languages, such as English, would require the use of different prepositions: 1. a. There is milk in the cup. b. Hay leche en la taza. 2. a. There is dew on the grass. b. Hay rocío en el césped. 3. a. I’ll meet you at the door. b. Nos vemos en la puerta.

Following the theory of Image Schemas (Lakoff, 1990), in this paper I propose image schemas which describe the semantics of en ‘at, in, on’. I propose that there is a very abstract image schema which instantiates a relation of COINCIDENCE (C) between a TR and a LM: C(TR, LM). I also propose that there is a second level of schematization with two image schemas which are the basis for other more elaborated schemas: COINCIDENCE WITH MEDIUM (C.M) and COINCIDENCE WITH HALO (C.H). These schemas are exemplified by the following sentences: 7. Había una taza en la mesa ‘there was a cup on the table’ (C.M). 8. La carta estaba en el cajón ‘the letter was in the drawer’: (C.M). 9. La chica está en el mostrador ‘the girl is at the counter’ (C.H.).

The MEDIUM LANDMARK CONFIGURATION is well known in the literature (Hawkins, 1984). The conceptualization HALO is not a LM configuration, but the space that immediately surrounds the LM. The image schema C.M, in turn, is the basis for other schemas which add dimensionality and orientation to the LM configuration: 10. Había una taza en la mesa ‘there was a cup on the table’(C.M2D.HR). 11. Había una mosca en la pared ‘there was a fly on the wall’ (C.M2D.V). 12. La carta estaba en el cajón ‘the letter was in the drawer’: C.M3D.HR. The image schema CM2D.HR adds two-dimensionality and horizontal orientation to the medium configuration. The image schema C.M2D.V adds vertical orientation to the two-dimensional medium configuration, and the image schema C.M3D adds three-dimensionality to the medium configuration, with no orientation highlighted. Finally, I hypothesize that the abstract schema C(TR,LM) is elaborated into more complex schemas to meet the requirements for a more exact location of a TR in relation to a LM.

46

La construcción del estereotipo de edad en la publicidad

MARTA GENIS PEDRA Universidad Antonio de Nebrija

mgenis@nebrija.es

En las investigaciones sobre la vejez, se han utilizado fundamentalmente dos enfoques, la investigación de tipo sociológico centrada en el estudio de las características de la sociedad y las condiciones de vida de los mayores, y el estudio de la psicología del individuo, esto es, la manera en que las personas enfrentan su propio envejecimiento dentro de un contexto social concreto. No obstante, últimamente, los estudios sobre los mayores y los medios de comunicación han comenzado a ver la luz. Los medios de comunicación ofrecen una fuente inagotable de información y constituyen un campo muy amplio, y de creciente interés, para múltiples especialidades de investigación. En Lingüística los estudios se centran fundamentalmente en la imagen de los mayores en los medios, área de la que nos ocuparemos, concretamente en la publicidad en televisión, uno de los medios de comunicación más poderosos. Dentro de este panorama, los estudios existentes sobre el tema, principalmente en Estados Unidos, indican que la publicidad genera estereotipos negativos que luego adopta la población. No obstante, también se dice que la publicidad ejerce una influencia decisiva en las actitudes de la audiencia y produce, poco a poco, gracias a estrategias de motivación, consolidación y persuasión, cambios en los estereotipos. A partir de esta perspectiva abordamos la cuestión de los estereotipos de los mayores en la publicidad televisiva, ya que, si bien estamos de acuerdo con el valor axiológico de la publicidad, no compartimos la presunción de que la publicidad cree estereotipos negativos. Por ello, nuestro principal objetivo es establecer que la publicidad, al mostrar un panorama ideal, mejorado con respecto al mundo real, ejerce una influencia positiva en el entramado social que impulsa un cambio gradual de los estereotipos de las personas mayores.

Los estereotipos, elementos conceptuales que estructuran la realidad, forman parte de nuestro sistema de categorización cognitiva, ayudándonos a interpretar los estímulos perceptivos previamente seleccionados y organizados. En publicidad, igual que en la vida diaria, los estereotipos se emplean como esquemas informativos que anticipan la comprensión de la información. Además, se busca propiciar en el público un comportamiento o una actitud determinada, creando una imagen en la mente del receptor que pueda ser interpretada en la forma prevista.

El estereotipo de edad se considera una categoría básica de tipo social construida mediante una estructura que considera a las personas mayores según diferentes modelos. Basándonos en Lakoff y sus categorías complejas, el concepto de persona mayor está constituido por cinco modelos cognitivos metonímicos entre los cuales el concepto prototípico es el de nivel básico, es decir, una subcategoría representa a la totalidad de la categoría.

Así, se señala el aspecto cognitivo del estereotipo como marco en el que integrar las generalizaciones que nos permiten asociar significados de una manera más eficaz y rápida, haciendo hincapié en el carácter mudable del mismo, y se hace ver que la publicidad no es ajena a la creación, establecimiento y perpetuación de los estereotipos, siendo uno de los agentes de cambio de los mismos en la sociedad actual.

47

Some physiological, psychological and cognitive background for wine tasting metaphors

MARGARITA GODED RAMBAUD

UNED, Madrid Margarita.goded@flog.uned.es

Our cognitive representation of the external word as long as it is based on perception, is

primarily dependant on the sense of vision. However other senses also contribute to the building up of this representation.

In this analysis I will first describe some aspects related to the sensory bases of wine description and later I will be explaining the psychological and linguistic bases for the use metaphors in wine description. In particular, the connections between visual and olfactory experiences will be explored from a biological and physiological perspective.

Later on certain cognitive and experiential motivations for the metaphoric mappings in the sense of smell will be explained and finally some connections between sensory experiences and language expressions will be presented as a possible motivated explanation for certain cognitive linguistic structures.

The analysis is based on a number of well established Spanish expressions used in wine tasting description. After Popova’s description of the semantic field of perception verbs in the five sense modalities (sight (vision), hearing, touch, taste and smell) which constitute the most important field-specific components of this semantic field, a number of examples will show how these connections operate when we put them into words. Also based on Popova’s analysis of synaesthesia a number of wine descriptors in Spanish wine tasting expressions are also explored.

48

Syntactic and semantic interaction in the description of the English gerund-participle with physical perception verbs

MARIAN GÓMEZ

University of Leuven, Belgium marian.Gomez@arts.kuleuven.be

In order to provide the functional-cognitive description of the English gerund, there are

three questions to be taken into account: i) the distinction between gerunds and participles; ii) the different types of the English gerund; and lastly iii) some forms in -ing sharing gerundial / participial properties. i) Gerunds and participles are both -ing forms. From a morphological point of view, the term "gerund" refers to the forms in -ing that appear in nominal positions, for example behind preposition or in direct object position in contrast to the present participle that appears in adjectival positions or in the progressive forms of the verb or in adverbial positions. (Declerck 1991; Swan 1986: 455)

Cognitively speaking, the participle represents a single or series of states of an event, the -ing participle symbolizes an imperfective atemporal relation viewed from an “internal perspective” (Langacker 1990: 92), it provides a close-up view of an event; while the gerund due to the effect of nominalization (a single or series of events are profiled collectively, as an abstract region) represents an unbounded event. (Langacker 1990: 98) ii) There are two types of English gerund: gerund phrase (GP) and gerund clause (GC). GP (the signing of the contract by Zelda) (Langacker 1991: 31) is a NP whose head is a gerund, is nominal in character; from a cognitive point of view, it represents a process type (Langacker 1991: 33) and in this sense we could assume that it objectifies the event. On the other hand, GC (Zelda’s signing the contract) (Langacker 1991: 33) can take a subject NP, and any verbal complements: it has the same syntactic potentialities as a finite verb form, except for the aspect and tense; from a cognitive point of view, it is an instance of the type. iii) Finally, some forms in -ing share gerundial / participial properties. The -ing denotes events. The more concrete the event, the more participial the -ing structure is and the more abstract, the more gerundial. (Verspoor 1996: 417-454) There are factors favouring a more concrete, close-up interpretation of an event, as well as others imposing a more general, abstract one. When dealing with concrete data, there are contexts in which the interpretation is unclear (concrete / abstract): there is a certain contextual fluctuation (e.g.: To the sound of rain pattering, he made love to her).

In order to provide the functional-cognitive description of the English gerund and be able to understand the mechanism of the “gerundial / participial property sharing” we propose the study of the semantic and syntactic relations between governing elements (GE) (main verb, adjective, and noun) and the English gerund.

49

That’s a construction for you/Las construcciones es lo que tiene: Grammaticalization via subjectification in attributive clauses

in English and Spanish

FRANCISCO GONZÁLVEZ GARCÍA Universidad de Almería

fgonza@ual.es

This paper is concerned with a constructionist analysis of the English and Spanish configurations in boldface illustrated in (1)-(2) below:3

(1) "Oh dear! She is stuck in an infinite loop and he is an idiot! Well, that's love for you." (http://www.gotfuturama.com/Multimedia/EpisodeSounds/3ACV15/)

(2) Est-aba viendo una serie en TV y me be.imppret.3sg watch.ger indf show in TV and pronomclitic.1sg

he levant-ado del sofá para hacer esto en 2 auxpfv.1sg get.up-ptcp from.def sofa to-purp do-inf this in 2

segundo-s. Es lo que tien-e ver la tele!

second-pl be.prs.3sg def.n.sg rel have- prs.3sg watch.inf def telly (http://www.mondadientes.net/?p=389) ‘I was watching a TV show and I have got up from the sofa to do this in just a couple of seconds. That’s watching telly for you!’

The focus of this paper is two-fold. First, it shows that the configurations in question

exhibit an early stage of grammaticalization, characterized by an increase in pragmatic significance and subjective expressiveness (Traugott 2003). Evidence for grammaticalization via subjectification (i.e. “the development of a grammatically identifiable expression of Speaker’s belief or Speaker’s attitude towards what is said”, Traugott 1995a: 32) in the configurations under scrutiny here stems from: (i) the extraordinary degree of flexibility regarding the semantico-pragmatic profile of the (nominal) lexical filler, (ii) the obligatorification of the that’s…for you and es lo que tiene strings regarding gender, number, aspect, and tense, and (iii) the impossibility of adding further complementation for is and/or es (‘is’) and tiene (‘has’) in these configurations. Second, this paper demonstrates that the morphosyntactic and semantico-pragmatic characterization of these configurations in English and Spanish lends further credence to the Traugottian context-based view of grammaticalization as two distinct but by no means mutually exclusive subtypes involving: (i) pragmatic strengthening in discourse, which gives rise to syntax with a different function (cf. Traugott 1995b: 15), viz. a shift from identifying (hence reversible) attribution to a characterizing (hence non-reversible) attribution expressing a positive or negative evaluation on the part of the subject/speaker regarding the entity/person encoded in the lexical filler, and (ii) the development of textual or discourse markers (Traugott 1982: 256). Crucially, this second subtype is exclusive to the Spanish configuration which, unlike its English counterpart, can occur by itself without the lexical filler, its summative function being particularly well-suited for its use as e.g. a headline, as in (3) below: (3) Es lo que tien-e be.prs.3sg def.n.sg rel have-prs.3sg (http://www.espacioglog.com/veoveo/post/2005/12/12/es-que-tiene)

3 The interlinear morpheme-by-morpheme glosses provided here for the Spanish examples follow the Leipzig Glossing Rules (see http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/pdf/LGR04.09.21.pdf). The following abbreviation has been added: PRONOMCLITIC (pronominal clitic).

50

El nexo entre la sintaxis de la referencia y la de la subordinación

AMY E. GREGORY University of Tennessee

aegreg@utk.edu

A través de esta investigación se planteará un análisis alternativo pragmático de la alternancia indicativo/ subjuntivo en cláusulas subordinadas del español. A pesar que durante la historia lingüística se ha aferrado al análisis en el cual se destaca la contribución semántica de la morfología subjuntiva, ahora por medio del análisis discursivo se puede reubicar la discusión dentro de la gramática cognitivo-funcional. Apoyándonos en las investigaciones lingüísticas de los últimos treinta años, las cuales han identificado el papel que desempeña la presuposición pragmática en el contraste modal, es posible señalar dónde se sitúa esta alternancia en el abanico de estrategias pragmática-deíctica referenciales. Más específicamente, el contraste modal se incluye dentro de los mecanismos que le orientan al oyente en cuanto a 1) lo dicho, 2) los elementos extra-lingüísticos, y 3) lo que queda por decir. A través de este análisis, se ve que el nexo pragmasintáctico surge de los procesos cognoscitivos. En este análisis, el cual pretende profundizar el nexo entre la sintaxis y la semántica/ pragmática del español, argumentaré que la morfología subjuntiva en cláusula subordinada tiene una funciona deíctica, es decir, un cargo referencial que puede ser anafórica, catafórica, o exofórica.

La unidad que se comprende por cláusula subordinada más subjuntivo refiere anafóricamente a una proposición, ya sea identificable en el texto o que se pueda inferir del contexto discursivo, o alude a algo que se obviará más adelante. O sea, su referente proposicional se encuentra entre los enunciados anteriores, en el contexto extra-lingüístico o en subsiguiente discurso. Este fenómeno tiene un reconocido paralelo en la referencia nominal a través de las nociones de específico/ noespecífico que parcialmente coincide con el uso de los artículos definidos e indefinidos. En general, con excepciones que surgen de la naturaleza de la locución (Langacker, 1991; Rivero, 1975), los definidos designan referentes sustantivales/ nominales ya presentes en el contexto discursivo o por lo menos identificables. En cambio, los indefinidos introducen referentes al discurso o declaran la existencia de ellos; por ende, son mecanismos catafóricos que advierten al oyente de lo que viene en el discurso subsiguiente. En fin, el efecto de anclaje producido por la anáfora, tradicionalmente relacionado con los sustantivos/ frases nominales y sus pronombres anafóricos, se extenderá en el presente trabajo a las proposiciones representadas en cláusulas nominales, adjetivales o adverbials (circunstanciales) y marcadas con el subjuntivo.

Nos apoyaremos en el precedente establecido por Givón (1987: 183) al reconsiderar él la distinción entre primera plana y fondo en la narración. Givón aborda las proposiciones representadas en las cláusulas subordinadas circunstanciales en inglés en términos de catáfora, poniendo en relieve el rol del orden de palabras (o organización de componentes sintácticos) en desempeñar su función de anclaje -- o reorientación – en el discurso. Por último, se considerará la distribución de proposiciones explícitas comparada con la de las representaciones pronominales de las mismas. Se reconocerá que las normas respecto a la pronominalización de proposiciones se distinguen de las que rigen en la pronominalización de sustantivos/ frases nominales. En conclusión, demostraré que, de la misma manera en que hay una relación entre los pronombres anafóricos y sus antecedentes nominales, la hay entre las cláusulas subordinadas marcadas por el subjuntivo y las proposiciones que representan.

Referencias

Givón, T. 1987. Beyond foreground and background. In R. S. Tomlin (Ed.), Coherence and grounding in discourse, 175-188. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Langacker, R. W. 1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol. II. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Rivero, María Luisa. 1975. Referential properties of Spanish Noun Phrases. Language 51 (1): 32-47.

51

Social cognitive linguisitcs: How?

ANDERS HOUGAARD University of Southern Denmark

hougaard@language.sdu.dk

In recent years more and more scholars within the field of cognitive linguistics have in, different ways, articulated the need for a genuinely cognitive approach to take into consideration both cultural and social aspects of language and cognition (cf. Sinha 1999 & 2001, Harder 1999, Hougaard 2005, Geeraerts 2005). Some have even argued that cognitive linguistics ought to embed itself within a larger social enterprise (Croft 2005). Others who have not explicitly placed on their research agenda an incorporation of social and cultural aspects of language, seem to believe that this is a more or less trivial issue which is already built into the very foundations of cognitive linguistics. However, as well-thought, necessary, and timely as these proclamations are, it must at the same time be realized that they introduce (at least) two major problems.First, typically active promoters and passive appreciators of a social turn in cognitive linguistics have not yet come to a point where they have begun to explain or consider what exactly is meant by “cultural” or “social”. Often it just seems more or less taken for granted that we know what these terms refer to and that whatever is meant by “social” and “cultural” are domains that are readily available for us to enter. Alas, both the term “cultural” and the term “social” evoke long research traditions which reveal great complexity and depth with respect to the issues of what constitutes culture and what constitutes social life (as well as language in them), let alone how we can even begin to inquire into their nature.Secondly, many central theories and basic beliefs and concepts within cognitive linguistics grow out of a linguistic tradition which has basically been ignorant of or disinterested in viewing language and thought in those natural (social and cultural) environments which they are contingent upon. The consequence of this is that those theories and beliefs would either have to be thoroughly rethought or simply rejected if pushed into the social wild. Hence, if a part of the cognitive science community decides to go social and has success with it, an unbridgeable gap will emerge between the “traditional” parts of cognitive linguistics and the new socially adapted parts. There will be two communities which will have to go their separate ways. As easy as it is to say that cognitive linguistics should go social at least as hard it is to imagine how that is going to happen. In this paper I elaborate and illustrate the problems listed above by discussing prominent theories and ideas within cognitive linguistics informed by the empirical, micro-sociological discipline of ethnomethodological conversation analysis (Garfinkel 1967, Sacks 1992, Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974).

52

Cognitive Linguistics, an efficient encoding of language

HARRY HOWARD Tulane University

howard@tulane.edu

Cognitive Linguistics, with its reliance on the philosophical underpinnings of Lakoff’s notion of experientialism, has shown itself to be more in accord with certain linguistic data than its alternatives. Yet one would like to go beyond these descriptive successes and take the explanatory leap to show why it is right, by deriving it from first principles. In this essay, we take the first steps towards this reduction, by extrapolating from recent results in computational modeling of the neurology of vision. Our guiding principle is simple: a smart intelligence, whether natural or artificial, encodes the information in its environment in the most efficient way possible (Attneave, 1954). Conversely, a dumb intelligence does not encode its environmental information efficiently. That higher animals encode the signals to which they are sensitive rather efficiently has recently become apparent in research into the environmental statistics of vision. Recordings of the electrical response of single neurons in the area of occipital cortex where the optic nerve terminates, known as V1, revealed them to be sensitive to lines and edges (Hubel & Wiesel, 1962). Yet this observation was not explained (i.e. reduced to general principles) until the late 1990’s, when statistical analysis of a sample of images of the natural world showed that their simplest components are lines and edges. Moreover, the shapes of these elemental statistical analyzers matched the shape of the receptive fields of V1 neurons that had been described more than 30 years earlier (Olshausen & Field, 1997). Thus it appears that the goal of visual perception is to produce an efficient representation of the incoming signal. How can the lessons learned from V1 apply to linguistics? First of all, despite the rather different ontologies of vision and language, neurologically, both faculties are subserved by architectonically similar six-layer isocortex. This leads to the expectation that the computations performed in linguistic cortex should be similar to those performed in visual cortex, just over different primitives. Thus we may ask, from what environmental information could linguistic cortex be extracting efficient representations? Besides the obvious answer of the ambient speech stream to which the child is exposed, which we take to be a separate issue, there is the child’s internal milieu: her conceptions of the world and her physical response to them. Thus by the simple method of finding an efficient representation of internal information, we are lead to expect linguistic meaning to be extracted from the child’s perception of and interaction with its environment. Moreover, we expect that whenever such first-hand experience fails to elucidate the meaning of a linguistic expression, the child should resort to some kind of abstraction from the regularities found in her first-hand information. The former expectation is consistent with the cognitive-linguistic notion of motor-image schema; the latter expectation is consistent with the cognitive-linguistic notion of conceptual metaphor. Yet note that we did not ‘find’ these notions within linguistic data, we deduced them from facts about V1 and the computations it performs. We therefore conclude that linguistics is nearing the day when it has the rigor of a natural science, in which observations are reduced to the interaction of independently-motivated primitives.

53

Manner of motion in (some) verb-framed languages

IRAIDE IBARRETXE-ANTUÑANO Universidad de Zaragoza

iraide@unizar.es

One of the main characteristics of motion events in verb-framed languages (Talmy 1991, 2000) is the lexicalisation of Manner of motion outside the main verb (e.g. Basque hegaka irten (flying exit) ‘fly out’). Several authors (McNeill 2000; Özcalışkan and Slobin 2003; Slobin 1996, 1997, 2000) have pointed out that, influenced by their lexicalisation pattern, speakers of this type of languages tend to describe Manner in less detail and less frequently—only in cases where this semantic component is absolutely necessary for the characterisation of the motion event—than satellite-framed speakers. There are at least two reasons that can explain this behaviour: (i) economy of cognitive effort and fluency in discourse, and (ii) a poor and not very expressive Manner of motion lexicon.

In general, these two reasons work well for verb-framed languages such as Spanish, but not so well for other verb-framed languages such as Japanese, Emai and Basque. The main problem is the following: these languages possess a large, rich, and expressive sound symbolic lexicon for the description of Manner (see Ohara 2003, Sygiyama 2005; Schaefer 1994; Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2006). Therefore, they contradict the second proposal.

In this paper, I describe the role that sound symbolic words play for the description of Manner in these languages. First, I offer a contrastive overview of the semantic information lexicalised in these words—a typology for different types of Manner information. Second, I focus on the use of these devices for the description of motion events and discuss it in relation to Slobin’s (2004: 237) Manner salience cline.

54

PODER como modal de posibilidad en la Lengua de Signos de Cataluña (LSC): ¿predicación de anclaje?

Mª JOSEP JARQUE MOYANO

Universidad de Barcelona mj_jarque@ub.es

El concepto de anclaje (grounding) propuesto por Langacker (1991) caracteriza las

predicaciones gramaticales que establecen una relación entre una entidad designada y el fondo (ground), que incluye el acto de habla, sus participantes y sus respectivas esferas de conocimiento. Las predicaciones de anclaje exhiben de forma obligatoria elementos gramaticales necesarios para convertir un verbo en una cláusula finita.

Langacker (1990, 1991) sostiene que los modales ingleses constituyen predicaciones de anclaje, pero no sus homólogos alemanes. Mortelmans (2000) matiza esta afirmación y Cornillie (2003) extiende el análisis a los modales españoles. Ningún estudio ha cuestionado el posible estatus de las predicaciones modales en una lengua de signos. Esta comunicación presenta un análisis de tres construcciones de posibilidad en la Lengua de Signos de Cataluña (LSC) en que aparece el modal PODER. El objetivo es dilucidar el posible carácter de predicación de anclaje dadas las propiedades observadas en los datos.

El corpus de datos incluye tres diálogos en LSC diseñados para elicitar escenarios modales, tanto deónticos como epistémicos. Las producciones fueron codificadas respecto a las categorías gramaticales de persona, tiempo y aspecto, así como con relación a su función discursiva y la distribución de la información en el discurso.

En la discusión, nos centramos en dos características principales de las predicaciones de anclaje. En primer lugar, abordamos el estatus gramaticalizado de estas construcciones, específicamente, su significado esquemático: si muestran dinámica de fuerzas (Talmy 2000) y presentan un carácter “relativístico”, es decir si no sitúan la entidad perfilada en términos absolutos sino siempre en relación al fondo (Langacker 1990). En segundo lugar, si el fondo permanece como un punto de referencia no perfilado y, por tanto, recibe una interpretación altamente subjetiva.

55

Blending theory, primary metaphor and to surf the Internet

CONRAD JOHANSSON University of Uppsala

julia.kolikova@comhem.se

I have studied how fictive motion on the Internet is described with verbs and prepositions. Analysing the instances, I soon arrived at the hypothesis that in phrases such as he’s surfing (on) the Internet, there is not only a source domain of representing movement (to surf) and a target domain consisting of the domain of Internet interaction. There is also a conventionalised domain indicated by (on) the Internet. This domain can be structured by using topology from the domain of the preposition on, and is used in a conventional fashion to localise information and users on the Internet, e.g. I found it on the Net, the pictures are on the Internet, etc. In English, there is also the possibility of using a transitive construction to surf the Net, to compare with to sail the seas, where the topology that structures the Internet domain is projected from the verb domain instead of the preposition domain.

In order to handle more than three domains that interact in the construction of meaning, I have used the theory of conceptual integration (Fauconnier & Turner 2002). According to this theory, the different domains are recruited in what is called mental spaces, which are “small conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of local understanding and action” (Fauconnier & Turner 2002:102).

Between these mental spaces are established counterpart connections, which can be conceptual metaphors. When such connections have been established by a projection, new projections takes place from these spaces towards a blended space, where elements from the input spaces are merged and form a new scenario.

I have used the primary metaphors that Grady lists in his dissertation (1997) to study these counterpart connections, and suggest that we can motivate the use of the expression to surf on the Internet with primary metaphors such as A SITUATION IS A LOCATION. This means that the location on the Internet, corresponds to the situation of surfing and the situation of interacting with a computer. Consequently, the three domains are connected by this correspondence. There is also the correspondence of BEING IN CONTROL IS BEING ABOVE, i.e. there is a correspondence between the control that the user has of his change of Web pages and the positions on top of the wave in the surfing domain and the trajector’s position on top of the Internet in the domain of on the Internet.

The analysis of the conceptual network of to surf on the Internet is supported by empirical corpus studies of French, German, Dutch, Swedish and Russian.

56

Mixed emotions and semantic derivations

MARIKA KALYUGA Macquarie University, Australia

Marika.Kalyuga@hum.mq.edu.au

The paper investigates the role of linguistic and pictorial metonymies in advertising. The study is based on e-business advertisements that appeared in the Western culture contemporary magazines. It seeks to demonstrate that the advertisers try by means of linguistic and pictorial metonymies to facilitate the understanding of their persuasive messages not only by the target audience in our culture but also at a global level, since metonymy as a conceptual phenomenon is viewed as even more basic to cognition than metaphor. In the discussion I argue that this is achieved principally by the advertisers’ frequent use of certain overarching metonymies (e.g. PART FOR WHOLE, PRODUCT FOR PRODUCER, EFFECT FOR CAUSE, etc.). Different types of linguistic and pictorial metonymies are identified and analyzed in order to show that metonymy contributes to the construction of cognitive space in the advertisement.

57

Taking the Adpositional Meaning Between the Teeth: The Estonian vahel 'between'

JANE KLAVAN

Tartu University, Estonia jane.klavan@ut.ee

Research carried out in Cognitive Linguistics has shown that many a linguistic

phenomena, considered idiosyncratic and arbitrary in traditional accounts, are in fact motivated and systematic. The demonstration that prepositional usage is highly structured has probably been one of the major achievements in the cognitive paradigm. Although during the years, quite a number of important and insightful studies have been conducted concerning spatial particles in various languages, not much has been said about such spatial particles as between, among, amid(st). The aim of the present paper is to give a Cognitive Grammar account of the Estonian adposition vahel, the equivalent of which in English in most cases is the preposition between. While clearly not as polysemous as the other adpositions in Estonian, for example peale (“onto”) or maha (“down”), vahel has also a number of abstract senses that derive from the original spatial scene – an object located between two other objects, as in standing between the two adults was a small child. It is hypothesised that the prototypical vahel codes two landmarks. In order to test this hypothesis and to see when exactly more than two landmarks are used, a corpus analysis and some experiments with native speakers are carried out.

Making use of such Cognitive Grammar notions as trajector and landmark (Langacker 1987, Taylor 2003) and the methodology developed by Tyler and Evans (2003), the semantic network for the Estonian vahel has been constructed. The primary meaning component of the semantic network involves the abstract mental idealization of the spatial relation, i.e. the trajector between two landmarks. This abstract idealization is referred to as the proto-scene (Tyler and Evans 2003) and it accounts for the spatial, temporal and abstract (including idiomatic) uses of the Estonian adposition vahel. Within this network, distinct but related senses of vahel can be highlighted, e.g. vahel for separating as in müür Ida- ja Lääne-Berliini vahel “the wall between East and West Berlin”, dividing jagasime raha endi vahel ära “we divided the money between us”, choosing kahe halva vahel valima “to choose between two bad things”, uniting Tallinna ja Tartu vahel käib rong “there is a train service between Tallinn and Tartu”, and expressing different relations mehe ja naise vahel on armastus “love between husband and wife”. The semantic network and the proto-scene also account for the numerous idiomatic expressions that vahel appears in, e.g. the idioms raamat on kaante vahel “the book is between covers” (the book is published), haamri ja alasi vahel olema “to be between the hammer and the anvil” (to be in a difficult situation) and the verb-particle constructions, where the lative form vahele of the locative vahel is used, e.g. vahele jääma “remain between” (to be caught), kedagi vahele võtma “take between” (to catch somebody).

58

Lexicalization of manner of motion: typology and lexical diversity

ANETTA KOPECKA Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Anetta.Kopecka@mpi.nl

It is a well-established fact that languages vary in their morphosyntactic mapping of path and manner of motion (Talmy, 1991, 2000). While some languages, such as Germanic and Slavic, express path in a satellite (a particle or a prefix) and manner in the main verb (satellite-framed languages), others, such as Romance, express path in the verb and manner, optionally, in a gerund (verb-framed languages). Slobin (2004, 2006) has proposed that the availability of an open verb slot in satellite-framed languages has led these languages to develop a rich lexicon of verbs conveying the meaning of manner.

In this paper, I would like to argue that the richness of the lexical repertoire of manner verbs depends on the sort of fine-grained notions associated with manner that a given language can lexicalize in the verb, rather than on the typological properties of the language and the availability of an open verb slot in satellite-framed constructions. For this purpose, I investigate two satellite-framed languages, English and Polish that differ from each other in the diversity of manner verbs. I will show that in contrast to English that has a very rich lexicon of manner verbs lexicalizing such notions as rate (e.g., pace, stride) or attitude (e.g., strut, swagger), Polish tends to express manner in a more distributed way, encoding the basic manner notion in the verb and the fine-grained manner notions in adverbial expressions (e.g., iść spokojnym krokiem ‘walk with a quiet step’, iść powolnym krokiem ‘walk with a slow step’).

The study will focus more specifically on the semantic granularity of verbs expressing different manners of walking and running. It will address the semantic features associated with these types of motion, and explore the sorts of fine-grained notions that these languages lexicalize in the verb.

59

Linguistic and pictorial metonymy in advertising

BLANCA KRALJEVIC Universidad Rey Juan Carlos

blanca.kraljevic@urjc.es

The paper investigates the role of linguistic and pictorial metonymies in advertising. The study is based on e-business advertisements that appeared in the Western culture contemporary magazines. It seeks to demonstrate that the advertisers try by means of linguistic and pictorial metonymies to facilitate the understanding of their persuasive messages not only by the target audience in our culture but also at a global level, since metonymy as a conceptual phenomenon is viewed as even more basic to cognition than metaphor. In the discussion I argue that this is achieved principally by the advertisers’ frequent use of certain overarching metonymies (e.g. PART FOR WHOLE, PRODUCT FOR PRODUCER, EFFECT FOR CAUSE, etc.). Different types of linguistic and pictorial metonymies are identified and analyzed in order to show that metonymy contributes to the construction of cognitive space in the advertisement.

60

Lectal Varieties and Language Acquisition: An Empirical Study

GITTE KRISTIANSEN Universidad Complutense de Madrid

gkristia@filol.ucm.es

One of the basic claims in Cognitive Linguistics is the relationship between a usage-based model of language and language acquisition: input to language acquisition is an encounter with actual linguistic expressions and generalizations are made over usage-based events. However, the rich theoretical framework developed in Cognitive Linguistics has not yet been sufficiently applied to structured variation at the level of sounds. The categorization of lectal varieties and their relationship with social categories thus constitute a new field of application. Briefly stated, if an active role is ascribed to hearer and speaker, it may also be assumed that social groups exploit the possibility of establishing minor (subphonemic) or major (transphonemic) salient acoustic-perceptual contrasts in order to effectively convey social differentiation by means of subtle linguistic cues. Linguistics stereotypes (complex clusters of distinctive features) thus come into existence as effective reference point constructions in social cognition, on the one hand allowing hearer to categorize and characterize (cf. Lambert 1960) an unknown speaker on the basis of his speech style, and on the other hand allowing speaker to position himself in more active ways. It is within this general framework that we now present the outline and first results of an empirical study on the acquisition of receptive and productive competence in children. So far empirical research on speech perception and accent-based speaker identification has concentrated on adults (Purnell et al. 1999; van Bezooijen & Gooskens 1999). We adopt a usage-based approach and assume that the acquisition of speech styles is experientially grounded; that phonetic detail is stored as such (Bybee 2001) and put to constructive uses. The study implements interviews and psycholinguistic experimental methods to investigate the following factors: - the degree to which children acquire receptive competence of accents and speech styles at different ages. - the relative precision with which accents are identified at different ages. - the relative degree of awareness regarding the features which allow hearer to proceed to lectal and social identification. - The degree to which hearer´s own repertoire of speech styles influcences the nature of features which are perceived as salient in a language-internal or foreign accent. - the relative capacity of children to imitate accents (productive competence of lectal varieties) at different ages. - the relative degree of awareness of children regarding the ways in which linguistic stereotypes relate to social stereotypes.

61

The impact of grammaticized aspect on the temporal texture of personal-experience narratives: A comparative study of Spanish, English, and Hebrew

JUDY KUPERSMITT

Haifa University. Oranim College of Education judykup@bezegint.net

The expression of temporality in the context of narrative discourse has been recently

explored from psycholinguistic and typological perspectives (Aksu-Koç & von Stutterheim, 1994; Bocaz, 1987; Hickmann, 1995; von Stutterheim and Carroll, 2003). The present study examines the effect of grammaticized aspect on the expression of temporal functions in personal-experience narratives produced in Spanish, English, and Hebrew.

Linguistic forms are analyzed from a global discourse perspective, considering grammatical tense and aspect in interaction with lexical encoding and syntactic connectivity. Tense is grammatically marked in all three languages, but only Spanish and English mark Aspect. Spanish obligatorily marks perfective/imperfective distinctions in the past, and both languages grammaticize progressive and perfect aspect in all tenses. Lexical means for expressing aspectual distinctions include inherent verb semantics or Aktionsarten, temporal adverbs, as well as language specific sets of aspectual verbs, and/or particles such as the Spanish se and a range of prepositions in English (up, on, around). In contrast to forms, which are language-specific, temporal functions are shared across languages, determined by largely universal, cognitive notions of time and temporality. These are categorized as sequential and non-sequential, the latter including different types of simultaneity, retrospection, and prospection. The data-base consisted of 320 texts on the shared topic of interpersonal conflict, written by native speakers of the three languages, in different age-groups (schoolchildren, adolescents, and adults) -- in the context of a largescale crosslinguistic project (Berman & Verhoeven, 2002).

Results show a diversification of forms and functions by language and age. Thus, when encoding core temporal functions such as sequentiality, Spanish speaker-writers across ages use a wide range of highly available aspectual verbs for specifying the initial or terminative phases of events , e.g., y en poco tiempo llegamos a ser buenas amigas ‘and in a short time we came to be good friends’ [sH02narr]. Also, non-sequential temporal functions such as simultaneity are easily expressed and highly elaborated in Spanish by means of the Perfective-Imperfective distinctions, as compared to the almost exclusive reliance on lexical aspect for this purpose in English and Hebrew. The mutual enrichment of forms and functions has an effect on the rhetorical functionality of forms (Berman and Slobin, 1994). For example, Spanish (and English as well) go beyond Hebrew in expression of retrospection, already from Grade 4. In discourse terms, both languages tend to present new information retrospectively creating parallel “mini-stories” in a retrospective view, whereas Hebrew uses retrospection mainly for recapitulating already presented information. This is interpreted in light of the ready available perfect forms and the arrangement of temporal information in combined finite and nonfinite clauses in the former languages.

In sum, the temporal textures of texts are clearly affected by the accessibility of particular grammatical forms in a given language and by the degree of obligatoriness of those forms. This has also an impact on the typology of text-embedded temporality, a notion that has received little attention in the context of personal-experience narratives.

62

Perception of conceptual gender by beginning Spanish learners

ELENA KURINSKI University of St. Tomas, Minnesota

zakx0033@umn.edu

This study is a part of a large study which investigated the impact of Spanish grammatical gender on learners’ perceptions of conceptual gender and also looked into teaching strategies for Spanish grammatical gender. The present investigation is the first longitudinal study on the acquisition of Spanish grammatical gender in progress, which examined its influence on conceptual gender perception by adult second language learners.

The objective was to examine potential conceptual changes associated with language learning within the framework of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (LRH), also known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

A significant effect of Spanish grammatical gender on conceptual gender was found, i.e. some conceptual changes in the gender attribution of inanimate entities were found throughout the two academic semesters in which the assessment took place. The present study contributed additional empirical evidence to the body of research on the influence of grammatical gender on categorization in foreign language learners. The acquisition of this critical grammatical element was explicitly documented at the same time as possible changes in concepts were examined, which was an innovative approach. An important implication is that to some extent learning a language changes the way one thinks regardless of whether one is a first or a second language learner.

63

Men beware of the hook: women fishing

Mª DOLORES LÓPEZ MAESTRE Universidad de Murcia

lmaestre@um.es

Cognitive linguistics and the associated theory of metaphor and metonymy have proved to be a particularly influential force in the contemporary linguistic panorama. The many publications on developments in this theory testify to its growing importance as an emerging approach for text and discourse analysis. An area which has received much attention from cognitive linguists is the conceptualization of love. Numerous publications have investigated how it is that human beings conceptualize this basic and inherently human concept in terms of a number of source domains which are in general experientially motivated (Kövecses 1986, 1988, 2002; Barcelona, 1992, 1995; Lakoff, 1987; Gibbs 1994 etc.). It has been shown how love is conceptualized as war (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), as a “bond, a collaborative work of art; a journey; a nutrient; a rapture; a unity; an economic exchange; closeness; fire; hunger; a magnetic force; a natural force; an incurable disease; blindness; magic; an illness” (Kövecses, 2002) etc. One of the source domains that can be added to this list is fishing. In this paper I am going to deal precisely with this source domain. I shall apply the principles of cognitive linguistics to the study of fishing as a unified source domain which generates many metaphorical linguistic expressions about love and related areas such as flirting and marriage. The figurative use of terms such as hook, bait, catch, to fish etc. is examined to see how they are used in connection with love relations through a number of metaphorical linguistic expressions which are not invented ad hoc but appear in both literary and non-literary texts. Examples from novels, poems, women magazines etc. are provided to illustrate how this conceptual domain operates. The ideological implications of the use of the fishing source domain will also be considered from a critical point of view, since metaphors may convey ideological values and assumptions that are negative and work to the detriment of both men and women. The danger with the metaphors we live by is that their usage is conventionalised to such an extent that the ideology behind them often passes unnoticed.

64

To marry or not to marry: Cognitive Metaphor and the Conceptualisation of Marriage

CARMEN MAIZ ARÉVALO

Universidad Complutense de Madrid cmaizare@filol.ucm.es

The recent issue of gay marriage has turned public attention to marriage in general. Far from taking a particular stance on this topic, the present paper is aimed at analysing the cognitive metaphors underlying the conceptualisation of marriage in English and how these metaphors may or may not coincide with the metaphors used to conceptualise the phenomenon of love. The analysis will therefore focus on the interplay of common metaphors to conceptualise both love and marriage together with the study of the marriage metaphors that depart from the phenomenon of love.

65

Passive and Construal: Non-optionality in agentive passives

JUANA I. MARÍN ARRESE Universidad Complutense de Madrid

juana@filol.ucm.es

According to agent-demotion approaches, defocusing of the agent phrase has been claimed to be the main function of the passive (Comrie 1977; Shibatani 1985, inter alia). In English, optional agent omission has been considered the prototypical phenomenon. Langacker (1991) notes that in the passive voice, the full action chain is profiled even though the agent is a non-focal participant and may thus be left unspecified. The optionality of the agent phrase has been explained in terms of the diachronic pathways through which the construction arose. Derived from an adjectival predicate construction, initially the English passive did not include the expression of the agent. The acquisition of the optional by-phrase would thus represent a shift toward a more eventive perspective (Givon 1990). As regards psycholinguistic evidence, it appears that agentless passives are acquired prior to agentive passives in English (Maratsos 1978), though use may be ultimately related to the type of discourse task at hand (Pinker et al. 1987; Slobin 1994). Crosslinguistic studies, as DeLancey (1981) notes, show that agentive passives, with unnatural patient-to-agent AF (Attention Flow), are highly marked and are much less frequent than agentless passives. In this paper we will examine cases in English where the agent is non-optional: obligatory insertion and obligatory omission. Passivisation is here viewed in terms of event construal, such that different construals involve changes in salience and profiling (Langacker 2000), that is, relative prominence of the subparts of the event, as well as differences in specificity at which the event is depicted, 'relative elaboration of events' (Kemmer 1993). Reference will also be made to the Spanish periphrastic passive as well as to the passive middle and related constructions. We aim to identify: (i) the abstract schema shared by the different passive constructions, and the possible extensions from the passive prototype(s); (ii) the interrelation between a series of event construal dimensions (participants, perspective, energy input,...) and certain semantic (animacy, perfective /imperfective processes, scope of negation,...) and discourse-pragmatic parameters (attention flow, identifiability, newsworthiness,...) involved in the obligatory expression of the agent phrase.

66

Monolingual and bilingual children's abilities to distinguish novel languages

EMILIA MARKS & NEKANE OROZ-BRETÓN Ohio University

markse@ohio.edu

When adults hear spoken samples of a language that they do not know, they can often identify it and discriminate between languages even when produced by the same talkers. Children have much less experience making metalinguistic judgments. How do children respond to languages which they do not know?

We have conducted three experiments examining the abilities of 4 year old and 8 year old children to discriminate between spoken samples of different languages produced by bilingual talkers. Our language samples came from two females. One of the females spoke Japanese and Korean; the other spoke French and Mbawa, a language from Cameroon. We constructed listening tests from 5-second phrases excerpted from fluent reading provided by the talkers.

In the three experiments, we progressively simplified the response mode employed by the children as well as the cognitive load of the task. The children found the task quite difficult. Even in the simplest version, only a third of the four-year-olds could do the task while the eight year old children performed above chance in all three experiments. The younger children tended to respond ‘different’ more than ‘same’, as if their criterion for ‘same’ was identify. Apparently, younger children had difficulty analyzing phrases into fine-grained properties which jointly specified a language. The pattern held for monolingual and bilingual children, both in the United States and in Spain.

67

Frogging from L1 Catalan to L2 English: A study of event conflation in SLA

JAUME MATEU FONTANALS, HORTENSIA CURELL & MONSERRAT CAPDEVILA

Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona Jaune.Mateu@uab.es

In this paper we present the basic hypotheses and first findings of our current research

project on how semantic components like path and manner of motion are dealt with by native speakers of Catalan and by Catalan speakers of L2 English of different levels. We draw heavily on both Talmy’s (1985, 1991, 2000) typological work on so-called lexicalization patterns and Slobin’s (1996, 1997, 2005)) theory of Thinking for Speaking in order to work out the most relevant differences between both kinds of subjects. Our analysis was carried out from elicited narratives (“frog stories”). Specifically, we video and tape-recorded 12 native speakers of Catalan, 12 Catalan speakers of English (with a level equivalent to the First Certificate in English), 12 Catalan speakers of English (with a level equivalent to the Proficiency in English), and 12 Catalan professors of English at Catalan universities.

Concerning L1 Catalan speakers, very few differences (if any) were expected from what has already been pointed out for L1 Spanish speakers (Slobin 1996, 1997), since, as all Romance languages, they are of the verb-framed type. Indeed, such a hypothesis was borne out. A more interesting finding, somewhat unexpected under Talmy’s typology, was that some hybrid verbs combining manner of motion with directionality were found in our corpus of L1 Catalan (e.g., Cat. enfilar-se ‘to climb up’). Talmy provides no clear definition of manner and these examples show that different dimensions of manner should be established. Moreover, we argue for the convenience of adopting Slobin’s (2005) distinction between “low manner verbs” and “high manner verbs”, the latter being much more frequent in English than in Catalan.

Concerning L2 English speakers, the main initial hypothesis was that the switch from a source verb-framed language (Catalan) to a target satellite-framed one (English) could be expected to be made gradually: i.e., in the first stages Catalan learners of L2 English would transfer their native pattern to the target language, the English pattern not being completely acquired (if at all) until a very advanced level. Indeed, the existence of an initial interlanguage stage is supported by our corpus, where manner of motion is expressed in the Romance way if informationally necessary, i.e., via adjuncts: an owl went out of the hole (flying). Another more interesting finding was that advanced speakers of L2 English produced complex constructions involving conflation of motion with manner plus a boundary-crossing path (Aske 1989; Slobin and Hoiting 1994), but only when the phrasal verbs used are lexicalized (e.g., he ran away from home). By contrast, few produced complex constructions containing a non-lexical phrasal verb (e.g., The frog hopped away) and even fewer used the typical satellite-framed strategy of accumulating and/or elaborating path expressions (e.g., the deer threw them off over a cliff into the water). Instead, most of them made use of their native Romance pattern when segmenting a complex journey: e.g., cf. he <the deer> took him away and dropped him in a lake. Finally, it is interesting to point out that even advanced learners of L2 English were found to use very few <high> manner of motion verbs when compared to native speakers of English (Slobin 2005).

Overall, no matter how advanced the level of L2 English speakers was, they were found to devote much less attention to path and manner of motion than native speakers. It leads us to conclude that for speakers of a verb-framed language like Catalan it is almost impossible to attain a productive use of the satellite-framed strategy.

68

Metonymy in co-speech gesture

IRENE MITTELBERG Cornell University Im33@cornell.edu

Building on previous indications that metonymy underpins gestural sign formation (Müller, Sweetser), this paper proposes a set of distinct metonymic modes that have emerged from spontaneous gestures accompanying naturalistic academic discourse. On the basis of video data collected in linguistics courses at two American universities, this research explores how the teachers’ verbal explanations and gestural illustrations jointly make grammatical concepts, functions, relations, and structures more graspable. Findings indicate that whereas conceptual metaphor is central to accessing abstract domains, conceptual metonymy also plays an important role regarding the referential practices hands engage in and also the differentiation of abstract spatial information.

Given that metonymy is, just as metaphor, a cognitive process that can find expression in both verbal and non-verbal modalities (Barcelona, Jakobson, Panther & Thornburg, Radden, Wilcox, inter alia), my goal is to show that gesture has the potential to support claims rooted primarily in linguistic inquiry. Applying traditional semiotics (Jakobson, Peirce) and contemporary cognitive-linguistic approaches to multimodal communication (Cienki, McNeill, Müller, Sweetser) resulted in a set of distinct metonymically motivated sign-object and sign-sign relationships: deixis (pointing), part for whole, whole for part, part for part, location for object, action for object involved in action, etc.

In particular, I propose that hand configurations and movements may serve as material, i.e. perceivable, reference points triggering cognitive access to the imaginary physical objects that speakers seem to manually manipulate when talking about abstract knowledge domains (Langacker 2001). For instance, a flat palm-up open hand extended toward the audience, and coinciding with the word ‘noun,’ does not directly, or iconically, signify its referent. While the abstract category ‘noun’ is metaphorically construed as an object sitting on the palm of the hand, the addressee has to metonymically infer the abstract entity (location for object) which is also part of a basic action model. These observations suggest that research on metaphor and metonymy in co-speech gesture may illuminate links between habitual bodily actions, abstraction, indirect reference, and pragmatic inferencing.

69

The Place of Linguistic Relativity in Cognitive Science: The Case of Time

KARINA MOLSING Pontificia Universidade Católia Rio Grande do Sul

Karinaveronica21@yahoo.com

The subject of linguistic relativity has gained increasing interest in the fields of Cognitive Science and Linguistics, in search of answers regarding effects between language and thought. Research has covered a wide range of structures including color concepts and numbers (Lucy 1992), space (Levinson 1996) and temporality (Boroditsky et al. 2002). Some studies have reached interesting conclusions about the extent to which variations in language structure can affect cognitive processes, and more particularly, “nonlinguistic” cognitive processes. While experimental methodology is often the prime focus for rigor and validity of results, theoretical methodology is at times grievously overlooked. The present paper focuses on how the dimension of time has been treated in this refreshed area of research. In particular, this study emphasizes the importance of semantics in formulating the theoretical foundations of linguistic relativity studies that focus on temporal expression. The main question in this subarea is to what extent do speakers of languages lacking verbal temporal morphology think differently about the dimension of time, when compared to speakers of languages that do possess verbal temporal morphology. While recent studies have shown some effects regarding performance on tasks aimed at testing “nonlinguistic” behavior in relation to temporality (Boroditsky et al. 2002), it is argued here that they are mostly invalid concerning the claims of “true” linguistic relativity. Moreover, besides debating the controversial nature of “nonlinguistic” cognitive testing, this paper defends that the object of study must be appropriately constructed according to the interface being assumed. That is, any experiment testing so-called cognitive processes with a focus on linguistic structures must involve more than experimental methodological rigor and traditional grammatical knowledge when contemplating an interface with Cognitive Science and Linguistics. A further interface must be constructed within the many subareas of each main area. This is the crucial point that is sorely neglected, particularly in those studies which focus on temporality. Where temporal expression is concerned, a further interface must be constructed with the Semantics of temporality. When semantics is appropriately taken into consideration, it is shown that the recent results claiming linguistic relativity for time are attenuated with respect to effects on fundamental cognitive processes. Moreover, the types of cognitive processes being tested must distinguish between “superficial” cognitive processes and deeper, more “fundamental” cognitive processes in order to adequately generalize the results and their possible repercussions, which can be either practical or theoretical. The repercussions of assuming these theoretical responsibilities will be discussed.

70

Intrusive /r/ Usage in RP: The Case of BBC newsreaders

JOSÉ ANTONIO MOMPEÁN GONZÁLEZ & PILAR MOMPEÁN GUILLAMÓN Universidad de Murcia

mompean@um.es pilar.mompen@alu.um.es

One consequence of the fact that cognitive linguistics investigates the relationship

between human language, the mind and socio-physical experience is that linguistic description/explanation should be based on authentic language data. Moreover, as far as the study of socio-physical experiential side of human language, there has been growing convergence between cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics over recent years. In the spirit of this convergence and the need for empirical data in linguistic description, the present study provides an account of the phenomenon known as intrusive “r”, i.e., an epenthetic r-sound found in non-rhotic English in intervocalic positions where, historically speaking, there was no /r/ in the pronunciation of the word and present day spelling does not contain an <r> (see e.g. Hay & Sudbury, 2005, for a review of this phenomenon). More specifically, the study provides evidence on the occurrence of intrusive “r” in the speech of over a hundred BBC newsreaders by analysing a corpus of over 40.000 words from the news archives of 2005 and 2004 (see URL1). The study looks at differences of intrusive “r” usage within and across speakers (including gender differences) as well as differences in usage depending on phonetic factors (vowel context and internal/external morpheme boundary context). Discussion of the results obtained emphasise the implications of the results for linguistic theory in the light of the two key commitments of Cognitive Linguistics, i.e. the Generalization Commitment and the Cognitive Commitment (Evans et al. in press). URL 1 BBC World Service website. Learning English section. http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/index.shtml

71

Efectos de Prototipo en la Categorización de Peticiones. Modelo Cognitivo Idealizado y Contenido Semántico

CLAUDIA MUÑOZ TOBAR

Universidad de Concepción, Chile claumuno@udec.cl

La ponencia presenta los resultados de una prueba de categorización de enunciados, con

respecto a la categoría ilocutiva de la “petición”. Dicha prueba se enmarca en el contexto de la tesis doctoral titulada: Efectos de categorización de actos verbales: Los directivos ‘pedir’, ‘ordenar’ y ‘preguntar’ del castellano de Chile (2004).

Los datos fueron obtenidos de hablantes chilenos. Se presentaron 28 enunciados bajo las modalidades imperativa, declarativa e interrogativa y que contenían verbos, nombres y modalizadores compatibles con propiedades idealizadas de la petición. Después de redactar una definición de esta categoría, los sujetos debían indicar el grado en que cada enunciado pertenecía a la misma. De esta manera establecimos la relevancia de las propiedades controladas en las decisiones de gradación y extrajimos conclusiones acerca de la importancia del contenido frente al modo oracional en el reconocimiento de las emisiones. La evidencia nos permitió referirnos, también, a la pertinencia del concepto de fuerza ilocutiva literal para dar cuenta de la clasificación e interpretación de enunciados no marcados por el contexto.

La prueba sigue en parte el modelo de experimentación utilizado por Coleman y Kay (1981). El análisis de resultados sigue también, en gran parte, el formato de esa misma investigación. Pero nuestro trabajo avanza hacia una propuesta acerca del modo en que ocurre la interpretación ilocutiva. Esta se basa en la existencia de un Modelo Cognitivo Idealizado de Petición, que sería activado por el nombre de la categoría y cuyas propiedades en particular lo serían por el contenido de los enunciados. Seguimos, en este caso, la perspectiva de Pérez (2000), que describe un Modelo Cognitivo de Órdenes en español, cuyos parámetros son activados en diversos grados por los enunciados, lo que explicaría la gradación directiva.

La participación de un referente conceptual de la categoría en la actividad de categorización podría entenderse a partir del concepto de perspectivización. Los contenidos enunciativos ponen en perspectiva alguna de las variables del modelo cognitivo de petición o de modelos asociados a él, como el de directividad, guiando de el proceso de categorización. Las definiciones de los sujetos fueron consideradas como idealizaciones de la categoría, y se evaluó su coherencia con los grados de pertenencia obtenidos en la prueba de categorización. Las diferentes hipótesis de interpretación que surgen de la asociación de un enunciado con alguna dimensión del modelo cognitivo, determinan el grado de inclusión de un enunciado en la categoría de la petición.

72

The Language of Pain: Where the brain and the mind meet

JOSÉ LUIS ONCINS MARTÍNEZ Universidad de Extremadura

oncins@unex.es

Emotions have figured prominently on the agenda of Cognitive Linguistics from its early days. As a result of this interest many studies have been published to date exploring emotions within and across cultures and languages, synchronically and diachrnonically (see e.g. Barcelona [1995], Kövecses [1990, 2000], Lakoff [1987] or Lakoff & Kövecses [1987]). In general, these works have tended to focus their attention on a limited number of emotion concepts considered basic or prototypical, such as fear, anger, sadness, joy or love. Thus, while the emphasis on these basic emotions has greatly contributed to deepening our knowledge of how they are linguistically organized it has left in relative neglect other emotion- or feeling-related phenomena that, in spite of being part of most –if not all– cultures and languages still remain unexplored. On the other hand, recent advances in other disciplines within the cognitive sciences like neurology are contributing now to the debate in ways that might change our conception of what emotions really are or help us understand the overlap between the vocabulary of certain emotions in English and other languages (see e.g. Damasio [2003] or Panksepp [1998; 2003]).

This paper deals with pain, and more specifically with mental or psychological pain, a less explored emotion on the periphery of the category. It proposes a preliminary approach to this complex phenomenon –both in its physical and psychological manifestations–, through an analysis of the vocabulary and figurative language used to deal with it in English. Thus, drawing mainly on data from the BNC the paper discusses, first of all, the connection between these two manifestations through a common vocabulary that includes terms like hurt, wound or pain itself. This overlap represents a paradigmatic example of what cognitive linguists have called “the mind-as-body metaphor”, in which a vocabulary of the mind (that of emotional pain) is connected to, and largely derives from, a vocabulary of the body (that of physical pain). The paper also takes account of recent research in the field of neuroscience that suggests reciprocal relationships between physical and emotional pain based on common neural systems (Eisenberger et al., 2003; 2005). Several issues are finally briefly discussed basing on these findings, such as the relationship between folk emotion theories as reflected in conventional language and scientific conceptions of emotions, or the validity of the boundary between the literal and the metaphorical in relation to the language of pain.

73

Polarity, scalarity and boundaries: a psycholinguistic experiment

CARITA PARADIS & CAROLINE WILLNERS Vaxjo University, Sweden

carita.paradis@vxu.se

In a recent publication, Paradis & Willners (2006) investigated the interpretation of twenty unbounded (scalar) antonymic adjectives with and without negation, e.g. (not) thin – (not) thick, and ten bounded antonymic adjective with and without negation, e.g. (not) dead – (not) alive, as well as their interpretations with approximating degree modifiers, fairly and almost respectively. The investigation was designed to test whether the negator was sensitive to the configuration of the adjective in terms of BOUNDEDNESS. The results of the experiments showed that negated unbounded adjectives did not evoke the interpretation of their antonyms, i.e. not thin did not equal ‘thick’ but rather had an attenuating function similar to that of the degree modifier fairly. For instance, fairly thin was interpreted as similar to ‘not thick’. The results of the unbounded adjectives were robust and the individual test items all behaved in the same way. The results of the experiments with bounded adjectives, however, were more complex and inconclusive. Out of the five pairs included in the experiment, four different types of interpretational patterns of the antonym pairs emerged. Only a couple of the negated adjectives were interpreted as synonyms of their antonyms, i.e. not alive equals ‘dead’ and others readily lent themselves to be laid out on a scale. Due to the fact that there were only five pairs in the experiment with bounded test items, the conclusions were necessarily cautious.

This paper addresses language users interpretations of bounded antonymic adjectives again. The purpose is to confirm or disprove Paradis & Willners’ findings and get a more comprehensive and conclusive picture of how these adjectives are interpreted with and without negation and with almost. The test set includes ten pairs, all of which are different from the ones used in Paradis & Willners’ experiment. The test items have been tested across six conditions: (not) (almost) adjective X and (not) (almost) adjective Y, i.e. adjective X and adjective Y with and without negation and with almost. Thirty participants took part in the experiment, which was carried out on line using E-Prime software. The statistical analyses have not yet been completed. The overall differences across the conditions will be tested in two separate analyses of variance using repeated-measures ANOVA: one by item and one by subject followed by Post Hoc comparisons using Tukey’s HSD procedure. Our hypothesis is that the outcome of this experiment will confirm the result of Paradis & Willners’ study, i.e. that there are four types of bounded adjectival antonyms which differ with respect to how they are interpreted in terms of boundaries and scales. A minority of the negated adjectives will be synonymous to their antonyms while most of them will not.

74

Transformaciones imagístico-esquemáticas, metáfora y metonimia: un caso específico de motivación conceptual

SANDRA PEÑA CERVEL

UNED, Madrid spena@flog.uned.es

Lakoff (1987, 1989) y Dewell (1994) han estudiado las transformaciones de esquemas

de imagen como relaciones naturales entre esquemas de imagen. Sin embargo, ninguno de ellos ha profundizado en la motivación conceptual que subyace a dichas operaciones. Dewell ha mencionado la importancia de la metonimia en la construcción de estas transformaciones pero no ha ido más allá. En esta propuesta nos proponemos motivar conceptualmente la transformación multiplicidad-masa. Se clasificarán los ejemplos de esta transformación en dos tipos: en el primero observaremos la motivación metonímica y metafórica subyacente. Por ejemplo, la realización lingüística del esquema de masa The juice poured out onto the tray tiene a su base una metonimia gramatical de tipo meta-en-fuente (PROCESO POR ACCIÓN) cuyas principales funciones son asignar a la entidad afectada un lugar privilegiado en la oración y cumplir con el principio de economía cognitiva. Por otro lado, la expresión People poured through the doors, que ejemplifica el esquema de mulitiplicidad, aunque similar al anterior, difiere de éste en que el sujeto sintáctico es volicional en este segundo caso. Primero hallamos la metáfora LAS PERSONAS SON LÍQUIDOS. A pesar del carácter volicional del sujeto sintáctico este ejemplo también responde a una motivación metonímica. La metonimia que subyace a People poured through the doors es asimismo PROCESO POR ACCIÓN y los Principios que Ruiz de Mendoza llama ‘Correlation Principle’ y ‘Mapping Enforcement Principle’ juegan un papel fundamental en la explicación de realizaciones de este tipo. Es decir, los ejemplos con verbos de movimiento como pour que ilustran la transformación multiplicidad-masa están motivados por constructos cognitivos varios, entre ellos la metáfora y sobre todo la metonimia gramatical de tipo fuente-en-meta PROCESO POR ACCIÓN cuya doble función es la de simplificar la estructura sintáctica de la oración y focalizar un elemento, la entidad afectada. Los ejemplos del segundo caso de la transformación multiplicidad-masa son aquéllos que contienen expresiones como too much. Veremos que en transformaciones del tipo There are too many chairs in this room (que ejemplifica el esquema de multiplicidad) y There is too many chair in this room (que es un ejemplo del esquema de masa) la base metonímica OBJETO POR MATERIAL QUE CONSTITUYE DICHO OBJETO (Kövecses & Radden, 1998) tiene también consecuencias gramaticales para la organización de la oración. Por un lado, un sustantivo contable se convierte en incontable. Esto es un caso claro de conversión subcategorial. Adicionalmente, las consecuencias sintácticas son evidentes puesto que toda oración con un esquema de masa ha de incluir un satélite (por ejemplo no podemos decir There is too much chair, sino que es necesario añadir in this room o algún otro satélite a la oración).

En resumen, esta propuesta pretende analizar la base conceptual que subyace a y motiva la transformación imagístico-esquemática conocida como multiplicidad-masa haciendo uso de los últimos avances en la teoría cognitiva de la metonimia llevados a cabo por Ruiz de Mendoza y sus colaboradores (Ruiz de Mendoza, 2005a, 2002b; Ruiz de Mendoza & Mairal, 2006).

75

The bounded region image-schema: a notion embrancing other dependent experiential constructs

SANDRA PEÑA CERVEL& LORENA PÉREZ HERNÁNDEZ

UNED, Madrid spena@flog.uned.es

Universidad de La Rioja lorena.perez@dfm.unirioja.es

Image-schemas have been defined as preconceptual knowledge structures which recur

in experience (see Johnson, 1987, Lakoff, 1987, 1989). Peña (2003, 2006) has put forward a typology of such cognitive constructs in which basic and subsidiary patterns have been distinguished. Rodríguez & Egenhofer (1998) assign the category of primary to the CONTAINER and SURFACE image-schemas on the basis that "in the complexity ranking of image schemata, container and surface appear to be the two most basic image schemata". A cover term for these experiential constructs can be BOUNDED REGION on the grounds that both surfaces and containers are bounded regions and their differences must be explicated in terms of a scale of boundedness. Thus, BOUNDED REGION is regarded as a basic image-schema which provides the blueprint for the development and understanding of two subsidiary constructs: CONTAINER and SURFACE. According to Johnson (1987: 22), bounded regions can be one-, two- and three-dimensional. One-dimensional bounded regions represent points in space, which can be a structural element of an image-schema like PATH. Two- and three-dimensional bounded regions license the activation of the SURFACE and CONTAINER image-schemas respectively. Two parameters play a crucial role in the definition and differentiation of these experiential patterns: enclosure and separation. Enclosure can be partial or total. Any entity lying on a surface will be partially enclosed by it. On the other hand, any entity located within a container can be totally enclosed by it. A two-dimensional region does not completely constrain the movement of an entity. Additionally, if an entity is only partially enclosed, its separation from surrounding entities is only relative. Any entity resting on a surface can interact with outside entities more easily than if it is subject to the constraints imposed by a three-dimensional container. In other words, we offer an account of the SURFACE and CONTAINER schemas in terms of the notions of enclosure, boundedness, separation, and control. We pay special attention to SURFACE, which has been largely ignored so far in the literature.

76

¿Por qué al final el hombre siempre está arriba y la mujer abajo? Análisis de las metáforas de la vida cotidiana desde una perspectiva de género

MARIAN PÉREZ BERNAL

Universidad Pablo de Olavide de Sevilla mdperber@upo.es

La epistemología feminista considera que un reto intelectual para el siglo XXI sería la

innovación y reinterpretación de la cultura acumulada durante el tiempo en el que las mujeres estuvieron ausentes de los lugares de producción del conocimiento. Al enfrentarnos a esta labor hay que reflexionar sobre la ciencia y sobre el lenguaje porque partimos de que la forma de nombrar prefigura ya en cierto modo la investigación posterior. Resulta ya aceptado que tanto en el lenguaje especializado, como en el divulgativo se usan metáforas. Considero que la epistemología feminista puede encontrar en la teoría de la metáfora de Lakoff y Johnson un interesante aliado. El objetivo de nuestra investigación es emplear su forma de análisis para rastrear posibles sesgos sexistas y androcéntricos en las metáforas que utilizamos. El análisis de las metáforas puede resultar una herramienta muy útil para desvelar hasta que punto las metáforas científicas sirven para consolidar, mantener e incluso reforzar las identidades de géneros de los hombres manteniendo a las mujeres en una posición de inferioridad. Las metáforas no son lentes transparentes sino que están teñidas de un color y nos llevan a ver la realidad con una marcada tonalidad muchas veces no elegida. Resulta evidente que el carácter inconsciente de muchas de las metáforas convencionales las hace especialmente útiles para fundamentar una concepción sexista de la realidad.

Parece cuanto menos curioso que los rasgos que Aristóteles atribuye a la mujer coincidan con los polos negativos de las metáforas convencionales de Lakoff y Johnson. En nuestro trabajo trataremos de mostrar cuáles son los mappings conceptuales que subyacen a distintas expresiones metafóricas científicas en principio asépticas. Una vez establecidos los mappings nuestro estudio pretende desvelar qué concepciones subyacen a ellos y de qué forma éstos condicionan nuestra forma de comprender la realidad. Se trata de mostrar hasta qué punto siguen activas metáforas patriarcales. Si conseguimos demostrar que los presupuestos sexistas están en la base de expresiones metafóricas en principio neutrales esto lleva a la necesidad de desvelar esos presupuestos preguntándonos quiénes se han podido ver favorecidos por esos planteamientos y quiénes han sido perjudicados y, al mismo tiempo, nos obligará a plantear la necesidad de formular nuevas metáforas que no tengan esa carga. Esta investigación permitirá, además, iluminar desde una perspectiva nueva y fructífera los planteamientos de la semántica cognitiva acerca de la metáfora.

77

Young EFL learners’ understanding of polysemy in the domains of body parts and temperature terms

ANA PIQUER PIRIZ

Universidad de Extremadura anapiriz@unex.es

Cognitive Semantics have revolutionised the understanding of the phenomena of

polysemy and semantic extension as motivated by the mental mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy and grounded in experiential correlations of a physical and a social nature. This view has given rise to models for lexical networks (Lakoff 1987 or Langacker 1990) based on the notion that the different meanings of a given lexeme form radially structured categories which consist of a central member connected to the others via metonymy, metaphor or image schemata. Thus, the ‘experiential motivation’ of metonymy and metaphor accounts for the systematicity of its products, that is, whole clusters of lexical items are linked in non-arbitrary relations. Taking this premise as their starting point, Applied Cognitive Linguists are exploring the pedagogical use of enhancing figurative awareness to facilitate the comprehension and retention of vocabulary in an L2 (Boers and Lindstromberg forthcoming). So far, this research has concentrated mainly on older (intermediate or advanced) learners (Ponterotto 1994; Kövecses and Szabò 1996; Lazar 1996, 2003; Deignan, Gabrys and Solska 1997; Boers and Demecheleer 1998; Boers 2000) or on figurative language used in specialised discourse, for example, ESP (Lindstromberg 1991, Charteris-Black 2000, Caballero Rodríguez 2003). However, EFL is expanding and introduced at ever younger ages in the educational systems of many countries and Applied Cognitive Semantics may have a contribution to make with younger learners.

This paper reports on the results of five studies designed to analyse young EFL learners’ understanding of some polysemous senses of body part and temperature terms. The results of these studies show that these young learners are able to understand the semantic extensions of core lexemes they are familiar with in English. Furthermore, these children often explain the links among the polysemous senses of these lexical items by resorting to metonymy and metaphor, as predicted by cognitive linguistics. These findings are discussed in relation to the possible pedagogical implications in the EFL classroom.

78

Blue is the new black. When colour terms do not mean colours

Mª DOLORES PORTO REQUEJO Universidad de Alcalá de Henares

mdolores.porto@uah.es

It is a major claim in Cognitive Linguistics that words do not contain meanings, they just evoke them (Fauconnier 1994, Langacker 1999, Talmy 2000). The meaning of a word must be seen rather as a semantic network formed by all its possible senses in different contexts, which are also connected to a great amount of cultural, social, as well as individual associations that speakers make to each single word. This is why a linguistic expression always means much more than is explicit. Besides, it is possible to provide a word with a new sense in a specific usage event. Novel uses of common terms occur everyday and speakers deal with them successfully most of the times.

Blue is the new black is an example taken from a magazine and it will be used in this paper to study the process of meaning construction beyond the mere addition of the meaning of the parts. There is an obvious ambiguity, typical of headlines, that only pragmatics can solve, which is a good starting point to discuss the impossibility of separate semantics and pragmatics in the traditional way, and the need to consider experience and culture as essential elements for the interpretation of the sentence.

The role of the context for the interpretation of a linguistic unit has long been considered, even if at various degrees: from the view of context as an extralinguistic feature, to the position that meaning is only meaning-in-use and so pragmatics and semantics are inseparable. Still, context, both linguistic and situational, is often considered a posteriori in linguistic analysis, as if language users would always access the “literal” or prototypical meaning first and only at a second stage would make the necessary adjustments to match the context. However, when language is studied in use, the context always comes first, and this is how speakers can access the right sense, even if it is a novel one, without going through all the possibilities stored in their mental lexicon.

Because “language users typically employ the conventional repertoire of linguistic units in non-conventional ways” (Evans 2005), this paper will analyse both the possible associations in the semantic network and the role of context in the reader’s interpretation of a non-conventional use of the word black.

79

The textual metafunctions of metaphor in legal texts

NASER RAHBAR FARSH & MANIZHEH ALAMI Tabriz Azad University, Iran alami_m2001@yahoo.com

Metaphor establishes a relationship at once. It is a shortcut to the meaning. It sets two

unlike things side by side and makes us see the likeness between them. Scientists, like writers, use metaphore . Sometimes a scientific metaphor - the chaperone molecule, parental investment, the invisible hand - is an intellectual tool a scientist uses as s/he works towards an account of a physical or social structure or kind. According to Systemic- Functional view, text is "actualized meaning poteintial" (Halliday 1994), a syntagmatic chain of slots to be filled with paradigmatic choices. The choice of these fillers depends on the text producer's identity, on the goal s/he wishes to achieve with that particular choice and on her/ his anticipation of reader response. The decision about filling particular text slots with particular metaphoric expressions to provide cohesion to the text refers to the textual metafunction of them. As metaphoric expressions tend to be organized in chains across texts, the question that " what textual functions those expressions serve in different parts of a text as well as in relation to each other " is raised in the mind of writer(s). The empirical part of this paper consists of the sample analysis of 100 legal texts selected from various sources. We first drew up a list with metaphoric expressions from our data pool. In the fist step , the frequency of these expressions through the texts is enumerated. The result showed that the textual function of metaphore is not confined to a particular section of the text ( the begining, mid-text, end), but can be seen as cutting across the three macroslots. In the second step , we tried to identify the various kind of relationship among metaphoric expressions . It is proved that, not only can these expressions elaborate on andextend each other, but they can also question, negate, exemplify,generalize and intensify each other.

80

A consideration of the cognitive metaphor SEEING IS KNOWING in J. Saramago's novel Blindness

ELISA RAMÓN SALES Universidad de Murcia

elisa@um.es

The cognitive theory of metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff and Turner, 1989) is the basis in this article for investigating the significance of the use of conceptual metaphors in José Saramago’s novel Ensayo sobre la ceguera. (Blindness)

The Nobel Prize José Saramago is considered today as one of the most important 20thC writers. His work Blindness presents us with an unsettling, provocative yet masterful analysis of the moral and social consequences of a distopian society were people suddenly lose the physical capacity to see. The novel shows a bleak vision of a deteriorating world where human beings degrade and descent to their lowest levels of humanity as a consequence of their becoming blind.

Blindness signals a lack of knowledge both at the physical and spiritual level. But José Saramago gives a new twist to the conventional metaphor SEEING IS KNOWING and uses it in an unconventional way.

In this paper I am going to examine specially this conceptual metaphor. I will apply the principles of cognitive linguistics to the study of this metaphor and consider how José Saramago exploits it in a literary way by introducing new elements, elaborating on existing ones or questioning aspects of the source domain. I will also consider the importance of this metaphor for the development of the plot, the story, the representation of characters and the stylistic elaboration of the language.

81

Categorization, extension, and negotiation: Offline and online tasks in the experimental study of polysemy

JARNO RAUKKO

University of Helsinki raukko@ling.helsinki.fi

There are a few researchers within cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics who have

studied polysemy with experimental methods. Some have focused on motivation behind semantic extension and tested how people figure meaning links within existing polysemy (e.g. Peter Koch’s project in Tübingen, see www page below) or whether people perceive polysemy in the first place (e.g. Baker 2000) or how embodiment links with such motivation (e.g. Gibbs & al 1994). Some of us have wanted to see how people would categorize meaning types within polysemy: for instance how detailed should a representation of polysemy be thought of as (Sandra & Rice 1995) or how prototypicality would show in experimental responses (some of my own work, e.g. 1999). Yet some other directions could be taken: we could see how flexibility as the driving force of semantic extension works in producing novel meanings, and we could observe negotiation over polysemy. Many of the above-mentioned issues can be tackled on the one hand with “softer”, offline methods, some of which might look like questionnaires and interviews and thus have a social-psychological flavor. Some of the same issues can also be approached with online methods used in the cognitive psychology laboratory. For instance, if we were more interested in the representation of polysemy, we could do with offline tasks, but if we needed to find out about processes of interpreting polysemous words in their context, we might find online tasks more useful. However, negotiation as a topic restricts our toolbox even more. We need to have at least two participants, and devise a controlled setting where, anyhow, the participants’ freedom to negotiate is guaranteed. One idea is to have the participants play a language game with a limited number of words. Yet when research wants to tackle categorization within polysemy and negotiation at the same time, we may need to emphasize creativity even more, and e.g. ask participants to produce or react to language play and jokes. Settings for such pilot studies will be introduced in the talk.

82

Textual deixis in narrative sequences

JOSEP RIBERA I CONDOMINA Universidad de Valencia

Joseph.Ribera@uv.es

This paper deals with demonstrative descriptions considered as a textual deictic procedure which contributes to weave discourse reference. From a cognitive perspective deixis and reference should be approached as a dynamic joint task by means of which the addressor and the addressee negotiate the strategies required to previously set up textual meanings and afterwards upkeep and/or actualize them in order to achieve communicative success. Thus the successful use of any indexical expression, in general, implies the necessity for the addressor to evaluate the epistemic status of the addressee in order to choose the suitable indexical and the requirement for the addressee to join the addressor’s presuppositions on his/her knowledge (cfr. Langacker 1987; Brisard 2002).

As for textual deixis, it will be argued that, although there are important differences in the linguistic literature as to consider a given demonstrative description with a textual antecedent-trigger (cfr. Cornish 1999) as a case of textual deixis or an example of anaphora (cfr. Lyons 1977; Cornish 1999; Cuenca 2000; Huddleston & Pullum 2002), what singularizes textual deixis as a referential device is its mapping the spaciotemporal ground of utterance onto the text itself by means of a metaphorical procedure.

My research is based on the data obtained from two double corpora which have in common the narrative genre. On one hand, I consider the textual deictic use of demonstrative descriptions in John Barrie’s Peter Pan in the original English version and those in its translation into Catalan. On the other hand, I take into account the use of demonstratives in film summaries written in Catalan by adult expert writers and by secondary school students. Firstly, from the Peter Pan’s corpus, which acts as a control corpus, I intend to establish differences in using demonstratives descriptions as textual deictics in English and Catalan through linguistic contrast. Secondly, from the film summaries, I will try to determinate the problems of the learners of Catalan as for the use of textual deixis in relation to both the adult expert writers and the Catalan translation of Peter Pan.

83

The Preposition Over and Above in Radiotelephony Communications

MARÍA DEL MAR ROBISCO MARTÍN Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

mariadelmar.robisco@upm.es

Effective radiotelephonic communication between air traffic controllers and pilots is vital in international air navigation in order to improve safety as it is claimed in the IATA Safety Report (2002). For this reason the ICAO (The International Civil Aviation Organisation) has encouraged the carrying out of research on the English language employed in these communications for the purpose of designing teaching materials to improve the linguistic competence of both traffic controllers and flight crew members.

This study follows the publications of cognitive linguists such as Brugman (1981,1988), Taylor (1989) and Tyler and Evans (2003, 2004) who deal with the polysemy and with the polysemous preposition over in particular. It is based on a corpus consisting of authentic material such as cockpit voice recordings, transcripts and air traffic control tapes, which has been processed using the Wordsmith tools. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that, in 69 aeronautical texts, the preposition over and above appear with more meanings than the ones proposed by radiotelephonic phraseology, and that these senses constitute a complex network of related meanings. A pedagogical implication is that polysemy constitutes a key element in the language used in these specific situations and, as such should be treated in the developing of the corresponding teaching materials. References Brugman, C. (1988). The Store of Over: Polysemy Semantics and the Structure of the Lexicon.

New York Garland Publishing Cuenca, M.J. & Hilferty, J. (1999). Introducción a la lingüística Cognitiva. Ariel Lingüística. Hinton, H, Paunero, N., Martinez, J., Velasco, A. & Gomez, F. (2002). Manual de

Comunicaciones Aeronáuticas. Cockpitstudio. Lakoff, G. (1979). “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor”. In Ortony (ed.), 202-251. Taylor, J.R. (1989). Linguistic Categorization. New York: Oxford University Press. Tyler, A. & Evans, V. (2003).”Reconsidering Prepositional Polysemy Networks: The Case of

Over”. In B. Nerlich, Z. Todd, V. Herman, & D. Clarke (Eds), Polysemy: Flexible patterns of meanings in mind and language (pp95-160). Reprinted from Language, 77, 4, 724-765. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Tyler, A. & Evans, V. (2004).”Applying Cognitive Linguistics to Pedagogical Grammar: The Case of Over”. In M. Achard and S. Niemeier. Cognitive Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, and Foreign Language Teaching, 257-280. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

84

Socio-cognitive Approach to Historical Phraseology: HEAD and EYES in Old and Middle English

ANA LAURA RODRÍGUEZ REDONDO, MANUELA ROMANO MOZO & EUGENIO CONTRERAS DOMINGO

Universidad Complutense de Madrid anlrodri@filol.ucm.es

eugenio.contreras@filol.ucm.es Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

manuela.romano@uam.es

This paper deals with the analysis of HEAD and EYES in Old and Middle English. The study comprises, firstly, an extension of lexical collocations of Old English HEAFOD and EAGE and their compounds, as well as the elaboration of lexical collocations of these body parts in Middle English. It also investigates the status of these collocations within an idiomaticity gradation and attempts to classify them into cultural conceptual categories. Secondly, and closely related to the first goal, we study the metaphorical and metonymical mappings of the lexemes in Old and Middle English in order to contribute to the reconstruction of the human conceptual system of these two periods and to find out, on the one hand, how much of the conceptual structure of the well-studied contemporary category of BODY PARTS is anatomical –and, thus, universal– and, on the other hand, the degree to which culture is specific of these periods of the language.

85

Moving entities fictitiously: some experimental data

ANA ROJO LÓPEZ & JAVIER VALENZUELA MANZANARES Universidad de Murcia

anarojo@um.es jvalen@um.es

Differences in the expression of motion verbs across different languages have been

studied by several authors (e.g. Aske 1989; Choi & Bowerman 1991; Naigles et al 1998; Slobin 1996). The most striking contrast concerns the expression of elements such as the “manner” or “path” of motion. This gives rise to two different language types: satellite-framed languages, which tend to conflate manner (e.g. English, slide) and verb-framed languages, which tend to conflate path (e.g. Spanish, subir –go up).

Our study focuses on “Fictive Motion” (a.k.a. abstract motion), a label that has been applied to those cases in which verbs of motion are used but no real, physical movement is conveyed. In these cases, the fictive motion expression (FME) signals “the direction of a mental scanning performed by the conceptualizer in building up the mental representation of the situation. The position of an elongated entity is represented gradually, as if mentally proceeding along the entity” (Huumo, 2001).

This paper is part of an on-going research (Rojo & Valenzuela 2002, 2004a, 2004b, 2005) which studies how different path and manner lexicalization patterns affect the expression of Fictive Motion in English and Spanish. The present study replicates in English a self-paced reading experiment carried out with Spanish subjects. It aims at gathering information specifically on which type of objects that are amenable to fictive motion description in English. Our results show that the travellable/non-travellable distinction established by Matsumoto does affect processing, but can be decomposed into finer dimensions in some cases. References Matsumoto, Yo (1996). Subjective motion and English and Japanese Verbs. Cognitive

Linguistics 7-2, 183-226. Naigles, L. R., Eisenberg, A.R., Kako, E.T., Highter, M., & McGraw, N. (1998). Speaking of

motion: Verb use in English and Spanish. Language and Cognitive Processes, 13, 521-549.

Rojo, Ana & Valenzuela, Javier (2002). Two ways to virtual travel: fictive motion in English and Spanish. VI AELCO-SCOLA Conference, Madrid 2002.

Rojo, Ana & Valenzuela, Javier (2004a). Fictive Motion in English and Spanish: experimental data from a self-paced reading task and elicitation from pictures. VII AELCO-SCOLA Conference, Zaragoza 2004.

Rojo, Ana & Valenzuela, Javier (2004b). Fictive Motion in English and Spanish. International Journal of English Studies (IJES), Vol 3.2., pp.

Slobin, D. I. (1996a). Two ways to travel: Verbs of motion in English and Spanish. In M. Shibatani & S. A. Thompson (Eds.), Essays in semantics (pp. 195-317). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Talmy, Leonard (2000). Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Vol I&II. Cambridge (Mass): MIT Press.

86

Towards a cognitive account of speaker-solidarity

MANUELA ROMANO, CLARA MOLINA & LAURA HIDALGO Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

manuela.romano@uam.es clara.molina@uam.es

This work is part of a broader project in which discourse markers are studied from a

socio-cognitive perspective, a new interdisciplinary approach to language that has been called “Cognitive Contrastive Analysis” and, more recently, “Socio-Cognitive Contrastive Linguistics”. According to this innovative line of research, which prefers the terms “languages & cultures” to “language & culture”, linguistic diversity is as important as linguistic universals. In addition, human cognition cannot be thoroughly understood without taking into account the social elements it interacts with, an assumption which is best summarized within the concept of embodied cognition (Slobin 1996, Bernárdez 2003, Geeraerts 2003).

SOLIDARITY, as a natural category lying within the semantic field of FEELINGS, overlaps with other concepts such as SYMPATHY, EMPATHY, RESPECT, TACT, AFFECT, among others. The meaning that comes closest to our study is “unity or agreement of feeling or action, especially among individuals with a common interest” (Oxford English Dictionary) or “…a reciprocal relationship characterized by similarities that make for like-mindedness or similar behaviour dispositions (Brown & Gilman 1978, Pickering 1990, Wouk 2001).

This paper concentrates on how SPEAKER SOLIDARITY is expressed in Spanish and English oral discourse, since it is this type of SOLIDARITY that has been less studied by discourse analysis and pragmatics. That is, we study the various linguistic means -discourse markers, lexis, grammar, intonation, repetition, silence, etc.-, speakers use in order to build a solidary relationship with hearer and secure a solidary response from him/her. Because of the wide variety of forms, their multi-functionality and because of the fact that they are so difficult to translate, an onomasiological approach to the expression of SOLIDARITY in English and Spanish has been undertaken in the analysis under study. That is, we follow a comprehensive approach in which we trace down all the forms and functions manifested in English and Spanish oral discourse related with the semantic field of SOLIDARITY, rather than concentrating on concrete marker.

The sources for our analysis are Spanish and English radio programmes in which people speak about their most intimate worries or problems. Programmes in which speakers feel free to talk about their worries in a natural, anonymous situation/setting and therefore contain spontaneous oral discourse (Spanish: Hablar por hablar, No es un día cualquiera, Géneros nocturnes and English: Late night love and Sunday Surgery.

By examining, then, the conceptual domain of SPEAKER SOLIDARITY in English and Spanish and by explaining how it is realized in each language (that is, the different sources, their development, frequency of usage and functions of markers), we show that the qualitative and quantitative differences between both languages are based on different cultural values which lead to differences in conversational style and, in the end, can enhance both the translation and the acquisition of pragmatic markers within a cross-linguistic framework.

87

Overstatement revisited: a cognitive perspective

FRANCISCO RUIZ DE MENDOZA & JAVIER HERRERO RUÍZ Universidad de La Rioja

francisco.ruiz@dfm.unirioja.es

The notion of overstatement has been defined in the recent pragmatics literature (cf. Norrick, 2004: 1728) as “any extravagant statement or amplification or attenuation used to express emotion and not to be taken literally.” Thus, the notion encompasses hyperbole and other phenomena related to amplification, excess, and superfluity such as extreme case formulations or ECFs and auxesis. However, understanding hyperbole merely in terms of only one cognitive operation (e.g. amplification) and its pragmatic effects does not do justice to the rich complexity of this phenomenon.

In this presentation we account for hyperbole in terms of the interaction of a number of cognitive operations. In order to do so, we first explore the way in which two of the cognitive operations described in Ruiz de Mendoza (2005), i.e. reinforcement (or strengthening) and mitigation, underlie both the production and interpretation ends of this phenomenon. These operations are then applied to the analysis of a collection of real expressions (e.g. What truly horrendous food!, Those kids are completely rotten!, This is absolutely tragic!) with instances of overstatement from sources like the BNC, Google searches and relevant literature on the topic (e.g. Carston, 1996; Colston, 1997, 2002; Mc Carthy & Carter, 2004). In our analysis we observe that overstatements are characterized by a reinforcement operation on the part of the speaker (e.g. “This suitcase weighs too much for me” –say, 30 kilos- > This suitcase weighs a ton) and by a mitigation operation on the part of the listener (e.g. This suitcase weighs a ton > “This suitcase weighs a lot for just one person”). However, reinforcement and mitigation operations are not enough to account for the full meaning impact of overstatements. Ruiz de Mendoza & Santibáñez (2003) have already suggested that underlying some cases of overstatement (especially, hyperbole) there may be a conceptual mapping, similar to the ones proposed by Lakoff and his associates for metaphor. Our analysis substantiates this hypothesis. Thus, we find it possible to explain the interpretation of hyperbole in terms of the combination of a mitigation operation and a conceptual mapping. This approach may provide us with the rationale to account for cases of both pure and metaphorical hyperbole within one single analytical framework. Thus, in I told you a million times not to do that, we make use of a figurative (and hardly conceivable) situation (repeating an instruction one million times), which conveys the idea of extreme excess and its effects, to understand relevant aspects of a real situation. In contrast, in metaphor used hyperbolically, the source is not a figurative situation. For example, in It was not a debate; it was nuclear war, the hyperbolic effect is obtained from the correspondence between the intensity of actual nuclear war and the intensity of the debate in question, as part of the ARGUMENT IS WAR conventional system.

Finally, we identify another process, scaled mitigation, which applies to hyperbole based on conventional scales. Scaled mitigation is regulated by an interpretation principle according to which the value literally conveyed by the linguistic expression may only be mitigated up to its closest point down the conventional scale on which it is based (e.g. in This steak is raw, ‘raw’ is understood as ‘underdone’ but never as ‘slightly underdone’). However, if the scalar concept involved is not conventional, as the ‘weighs tons’ example above, mitigation will stop at the most relevant place in terms of contextual requirements.

88

Pragmatics, discourse principles, and cognition

FRANCISCO RUIZ DE MENDOZA & JOSÉ LUIS OTAL CAMPO Universidad de La Rioja

francisco.ruiz@dfm.unirioja.es Universidad Jaume I

otal@ang.uji.es

In this paper, we will consider how achieving cohesion and coherence is influenced by pragmatic principles. Our main contention will be that some discourse principles pertaining to what is known as cohesion and coherence phenomena are grounded in pragmatics. Our discussion in this paper keeps pointing to the fundamental role played by pragmatic principles, discourse principles, and world knowledge when considering the question of (textual) cohesion. Through the study of some semantic factors, like the existence of metonimic mappings, we can claim that cohesion has a strong conceptual grounding. Since coherence is also based upon principles of comparable nature and exploits world knowledge, it may be legitimate to ask what the difference is, if any, between the two phenomena. Some forms of achieving connectivity seem to have greater dependency on the internal configuration of concepts. In contrast, ellipsis or substitution mechanisms, although ultimately conceptual, exploit world knowledge differently. How world knowledge is to be handled seems to be determining to a large extent the ellipsis or substitution mechanism, which has a procedural nature. It seems safe to preserve the distinction between cohesion and coherence and redefine it as a distinction between procedural versus lexical or conceptual connectivity. The distinction between procedural and conceptual (or lexical) connectivity ties in with the relevance-theoretic idea that lexical items encode concepts while grammatical words encode procedures.

We also deal with another dimension of discourse connectivity, that of iconicity. According to this theory applied to our study, the iconic relation would be classified as a content relation, whereas the non-iconic relation would be considered an epistemic relation. This distinction also applies to examples of temporal iconicity where non-iconic formulations are ways of giving conceptual prominence to relevant parts of the representation thereby revealing the speaker's personal judgement about the relative prominence of each item of information. The present research claims that ellipsis and substitution are discourse phenomena subject to pragmatic constraints and argues for the existence of a discourse principle called the Conceptual Structure Selection Principle. This principle accounts for the semantic scope of ellipsis and substitution mechanisms: these have within their scope as much structure as is not cancelled out by the discourse unit that contains the cohesion device.

We then redefine the cohesion-coherence distinction as one between procedural and conceptual connectivity. Relevance theory pragmatics provides us with the theoretical underpinnings, with some constraints, to justify this redefinition. While ellipsis and substitution devices are procedural (they guide the hearer to a certain portion of previous discourse to make ties with it), discourse connectives seem to invoke generic-level cognitive models and may thus be considered conceptual rather than procedural.

Two further principles that have been found in connection to the issue of discourse connectivity are the Principle of Iconicity, that preserves the actual ordering of events in the world, and the Principle of Conceptual Prominence, that regulates the meaning import of non-iconic examples, where relative prominence is given to the second item in the sequence of events.

89

Internal and external constraints on lexical and constructional meaning

FRANCISCO RUIZ DE MENDOZA & RICARDO MAIRAL USÓN Universidad de La Rioja

francisco.ruiz@dfm.unirioja.es UNED, Madrid

rmairal@flog.uned.es

This paper grows out as an attempt to investigate the way lexical and constructional representations interact within the wider context of both functional models of language (especially, Van Valin’s (2005) Role and Reference Grammar) and the Cognitive Linguistics approach (especially, Lakoff’s cognitive model theory, Lakoff and Johnson’s 1999). In our view, the two approaches show clear explanatory weaknesses in those areas of enquiry where the competing perspective proves to have a more solid theoretical grounding. Thus, an account of syntactic motivation carried out exclusively on the basis of the information supplied by lexical representation systems, like those postulated in some functionalist circles, has a large degree of redundancy which should be avoided for the sake of parsimony. From a different angle, constructional representation is to be combined with lexical representation and the rules that determine the way the two representational layers interact should be specified somewhere in the grammar, an issue which has not been sufficiently explained in Cognitive Linguistics.

In order to fill this gap, we have formulated a new alternative provisionally termed the Lexical Construction Model (hereafter LCM). The LCM consists of an inventory of lexical conceptual representations called lexical templates and a number of constructional templates. A lexical template combines low-level and high-level semantic components: high-level elements are shared by items belonging to a number of lexical classes; low-level elements are specific (and therefore definitional) of the item in question. Constructional-conceptual representations, on the other hand, are based on combinations of high-level idealized cognitive models, including high-level propositional models (primitive and/or primary frame-like structures), grammatical metaphor, grammatical metonymy, and image schemas. This kind of formulation captures relevant features that lexical template representations share with constructional representations, which makes our description fully at home with the idea of a lexical-constructional continuum.

The LCM postulates that lexical templates are absorbed by constructions, thereby generating abstract semantic characterizations that are then instantiated by syntactic expressions whose elements have a realizational potential for one or more constructions. This takes place in the form of a fusion process that is governed by internal constraints (e.g. constructional requirements, as would be predicted by such notions as coercion and the Override Principle studied by Michaelis, 2003) and external constraints (e.g. high-level metaphorical and metonymic processes, Ruiz de Mendoza & Mairal, 2005), which license a number of subcategorial conversion processes and account for a relevant part of their meaning effects.

Among these processes we discuss the cognitive grounding of those based on the correspondences receiver-undergoer (e.g. He talked me into it; COMMUNICATIVE ACTION IS EFFECTUAL ACTION), reflexive object-undergoer (e.g. He drank himself into a stupor; A NON-EFFECTUAL ACTIVITY IS AN EFFECTUAL ACCOMPLISHMENT), and experiencer-undergoer (e.g. Peter laughed John out of the room; I was finally “listened” into existence; EXPERIENTIAL ACTION IS EFFECTUAL ACTION). Other cases of subcategorial conversion, such as those that give rise to the causative;/inchoative and the middle alternations, are more adequately accounted for in terms of the high-level metonymies PROCESS FOR ACTION and PROCESS FOR ACTION FOR (ASSESSED) RESULT respectively.

90

Emotion as motion: violence-related emotion scenarios as event-frames

JESÚS SÁNCHEZ GARCÍA & OLGA BLANCO Universidad de Córdoba

jsg39es@yahoo.es olga76@yahoo.com

The paper assumes that emotion can be conceptualized in terms of motion, as

established by the metaphor EMOTION IS MOTION (underlying such expressions as I was moved by the poem, I went into transports of joy, You send me), a metaphor related to EMOTIONS ARE REGIONS, STATES ARE LOCATIONS, CAUSED CHANGE OF STATE IS CAUSED MOTION (CHANGE OF LOCATION), as well as to the MOTION STANDS FOR EMOTION metonymy. Given that elements such as cause / force (both psychological -in emotion- and physical -in motion-) seem to be at play here, we intend to present an approach to emotion scenarios related to violence in terms of Talmy’s motion and causation event frames (relatable to his force dynamics theory and his general view of how situations are processed in our mind and linguistically rendered). All violence has three basic dimensions: emotive, behavioural and behavioural-evaluative. The paper discusses the first by focussing on emotive events (as in “after seeing the accident the woman was pale with fear”) that have been identified in a corpus of violence-related pop fiction data. Frames and framing are important tools for lexical and discourse analysis. It is argued that frame-semantic and event-frame analysis can shed light on propositional and figurative emotive schemata (insofar as particular kinds of knowledge schemata) structuring scenarios pertaining to emotionally-charged violent episodes. Therefore, they can illuminate ultimately such key aspects of emotion and action construal (violence) as cognitive representation and facilitation of cause-effect attribution. Examples will illustrate these and both intensional and extensional aspects of emotive expressions, as well as their links via frames--e.g. allowing for mappings between lexico-grammatical means and W-Y-X-Z frame-propositional emotive schemas [where W is the stimulus-cause (the accident), X the experiencer-undergoer (the woman), Y the kind of emotion (fear), and Z the bodily/behavioural effect (paleness)] (Martín-Morillas), which are in turn related to motion-emotion mappings of event-frame foregrounded / segmented conceptual structure (Talmy, Slobin).

91

The interdependence of language, discourse and cultural cognition in the study of English violence-related emotion scenarios

JESÚS SÁNCHEZ GARCÍA

Universidad de Córdoba jsg39es@yahoo.es

Emotion scenarios related to violence episodes are examined. First the linguistic-

conceptual make-up of such scenarios and the connection with event-frame structure is considered. Data come from pop fiction excerpts. Eexisting approaches to emotions in discourse are used and the interdependence of linguistic, textual and cultural factors shown. The discussion is then framed in the context of current views on emotions in discourse and cognitive-cultural linguistics. Emphasis is on the cognitive-cultural and cognitive-discursive construction of emotions, and on their instrumental role in motivating the action and reaction strategies attributed to characters.

Emotions are complex, ideologically-charged categorial phenomena with powerful motivational force. An emotion scenario is portrayed in terms of Talmy’s event-frames (as in Sánchez-García & Blanco-Carrión) and conceived as a structured co-evocation of elements triggering a web of emotions and cognitions that build up a whole dispositional mode prior to violent action. I look at (some interactions among) the various aspects (intensional, extensional, motivational and socio-pragmatic--Martin-Morillas) of such action- (i.e. violence-) and mood-related basic emotion categories as Fear, Sadness, Anger, Disgust/Hate, including the role played by metonymy and attribute activation, and also at the relevant construals for special textual effect, a process that is amenable to cognitive text/discourse analysis (as in Sánchez-García & Martín-Morillas). The importance of analysing the textual and contextual factors external to the emotion event-frame for a proper analysis of particular instantiations of emotional appraisal and conception is thus stressed. The cognitive-cultural, social-semiotic and interpretive-evaluative nature of such an analysis is acknowledged.

The paper ends by highlighting the need for cognitive-textual analyses of specific texts, and by invoking the instrumental mediating role played by the cognitive-cultural or motivational dimension. In this framework, emotionology and conflict studies are related to the interface between cognitive-cultural linguistics and discourse studies.

92

Topology, Dynamics, and Function in the semantics of In and On as the prepositional component of English prepositional verbs

ANTONIO JOSÉ SILVESTRE LÓPEZ

Universidad Jaume I asilvest@ang.uji.es

This paper analyses the semantics of In and On in English prepositional verbs. Unlike in

most studies on prepositional verbs wherein special attention is given to the verbal stem component, this paper focuses primarily on the role of prepositions and their semantic contribution to the whole prepositional-verb construction. This contribution is tackled in terms of three parameters; namely, the kinds of topological, dynamic, and functional patterns that characterise the Tr-Lm relationship yielded by the use a particular preposition in prepositional verbs.

The semantics of prepositions in previous studies has been accounted for in terms of either one or two of these parameters, but never in terms of all three simultaneously. In this regard, this research suggests, after Navarro (1998a, 1998b, 1999, 2000), that a full account of the semantics of prepositions and their contribution to prepositional verbs must necessarily rely on these three types of patterns.

In order to substantiate our claims, a series of prepositional verbs in which the prepositional element is either In or On (e.g. experiment in / experiment on) extracted from the Brown Corpus of American English (Francis and Kucera 1961) are analysed in this paper. Our results suggest that the semantic contrasts arising form the use of each preposition with a particular verb, as well as from different uses and senses of the same preposition can only be explained by means of an approach that caters for the interaction of topological, dynamic, and functional patterns. Eventually, a series of pedagogical implications for ESL/EFL learning are derived from the results of this study.

93

Is CONTROL really UP? An experimental investigation

CRISTINA SORIANO & JAVIER VALENZUELA University of Murcia

csoriano@um.es jvalen@um.es

The Cognitive Theory of Metaphor and Metonymy (CTMM) offers a coherent and complete account of mental issues such as the organization and functioning of abstract concepts (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999); as such the impact this theory has had on linguistics and several areas of cognitive science has been profound. However, it has also received criticisms by some psycholinguists (e.g., Glucksberg., Brown. & McGlone 1993; Murphy, 1996, 1997), who have cast some doubts on the role that conceptual metaphor plays in on-line language processing. This has generated a lively debate, which has not been completely settled yet. New experiments are currently adding to the issue (e.g., Boroditsky, 2000, 2001; Boroditsky & Ramscar, 2002; Gibbs, Gibbs, Lima & Francuzo, 2004; Meier & Robinson, 2004; Schubert, 2005; Torralbo, Santiago & Lupiáñez, in press). Of all the different types of metaphor, primary metaphors (Grady, 1997) are a good place to look into the psycholinguistic existence of metaphors. Primary metaphors are based on universal correlations of experiences; for example, the co-occurrence in real life of an “increase in quantity” and “an increase in verticality” gives rise to the primary metaphor MORE IS UP. Primary metaphors are thus less culture-specific, and better candidates for universals. In this work, we want to look at one of these primary metaphors, namely, CONTROL IS UP. In this metaphor, the domain of POWER or CONTROL is conceptualized by means of a vertical axis, in such a way that powerful entities are conceptualized as being higher up than less powerful ones, which are construed as being down. This gives rise to many linguistic expressions, such as “he has complete control over her”, “he’s under my supervision”, etc. We want to test whether vertical organization is present in the on-line processing of relationships of control. To this end, we have adapted a paradigm introduced by Zwaan and Yaxley (2003), in the following way: a number of subjects were shown pairs of words. Their task was to say whether both words were related semantically or not. Word-pairs were presented one on top of the other; sometimes the “powerful” member of the pair was on top and the less powerful one below (a position coherent with the metaphor CONTROL IS UP); some other times it was the other way round: the powerful member was down and the less powerful one up. Our prediction was that subjects would take a longer time to respond to non-canonical positions, and that canonical positions would elicit a quicker response. Most of the cases our hypothesis was confirmed, except for some exceptions we will comment on.

94

The Meaning of Non-Sense: The Cognitive Function of Dynamic Schemas in surrealist texts

METTE STEENBERG

University of Aarhus romms@hum.au.dk

Cognitive linguistics has recently witnessed a “cultural orientation” according to which

pragmatic factors such as “situated embodiment” and “the intersubjective nature of meaning” - context at large - are seen as the ultimate grounding of meaning. In this paper I shall analyze a collection of surrealist texts (García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York) which deliberately violate basic pragmatic functions of language but nevertheless continue to make sense.

The questions I ask are these: How come that surrealist poetry produce sense rather than non-sense? To what extent does the mind compensate for lack of information? And by what means does it fill in the gaps?

My hypothesis is that the less contextual information there is available, the more eagerly the mind will compensate and create meaning, drawing on what I call dynamic schemas. I shall argue that these schemas are constituted by patterns of body-world interaction (e.g sensori-motor experiences and emotional responses to these, as suggested by J. Grady, 1997 in his theory on primary metaphors) which, in the process of making sense, unfold as force-dynamic narratives (P. Aa. Brandt, 2004).

Aesthetics offers a particularly promising set of tools for understanding the workings of the human mind, insofar as the cognitive analysis of art raises problems that cognitive scientists do not normally confront in everyday discourse, but which, in many cases, turn out to be relevant for understanding the construction of meaning in general. One of these problems concerns the ability to signify by means of symbolic expressions that are not necessarily derived from an immediate communicative situation or perceptual environment, but rather are linked up with hard-wired processes of symbolization and affect. Art -- also when it is constituted by language, as in poetry -- differs from other means of expression in that it is not intended to be understood just within a specific communicative situation. This means that the act of making sense is constrained not by the actual context but, more basically, by the mental schemas that the mind brings to bear. Poetry offers an eminent opportunity to investigate the mental processes involved in making sense, because, in default of a situated communicative setting, it gives access to what it is that the mind does when presented with as few contextual constraints as possible. This process is further emphasized in surrealist poetry, in which our ordinary expectations of semantic networks are disrupted. The fact that we do come up with coherent readings of surrealist poetry -- even coherent among various readers -- suggests that the mind activates mental schemas that are themselves not dependent on any immediate contextual or perceptual information. Aesthetics, therefore, offers an unique opportunity to study the workings of the mind on the basis of the most uncompromised information possible: a sort of “naked” cognition upon which other cognitive processes evolve.

95

The Developmental Paths in Turkish Children's Early Lexical Composition

FEYZA TURKAY Université Lumaière Lyon 2

fturkay@hotmail.com

This specific research deals with two complementary perspectives of children’s early lexical development in Turkish: the pattern of noun/verb growth and the developmental changes in Turkish speaking children’s early lexicon. These two main focuses in children’s lexical development have been referred to explain child conceptual development. Therefore; we can understand the cognitive bases children stand on (Gentner, 1982; Nelson, 1973; Gentner & Boroditsky, 2001). The interaction between language growth and conceptual development highlights the cognitive paths children go through. A significant body of research has accumulated in the related field both in individual and cross linguistic studies concerning the parallel objectives (Choi, 1997; Choi & Gopnik, 1995; Tardiff,1996). The Turkish children’s language growth patterns were also evaluated in the light of the related findings to observe whether there were shared patterns with French, German and English children’s language development mentioned by leading researchers in the field (Kauschke, & Hofmeister, 2002; Bassano et al, 1998; Bates et al, 1994). The overall aim of this study is to see whether Turkish speaking children’s early lexical composition follows the three waves (from reference to predicates then to grammatical items) identified by Bates et al, regarding the pattern of English speaking children’s lexicon, then by Bassano et al, on French children. With these mentioned aims in mind, the longitudinal data of five Turkish children in their routine interactions with their mothers were analysed. The Turkish findings are generally in keeping with Bates et al, (1994), Bassano et al, (1998) and Kauschke & Hofmeister, 2002). As the data from different languages accumulate in terms of understanding children’s lexical map, we will be more tended to acquire a cognitive insight into children’s conceptual development.

96

Music, Modularity, and Syntax

JAVIER VALENZUELA MANZANARES & JOSEPH HILFERTY Universidad de Murcia

jvalen@um.es Universidad de Barcelona

hilferty@ub.edu

First generation cognitive science has always maintained that the mind/brain is a modular system. This has been especially apparent in linguistics, where the modularity thesis goes largely unquestioned in the linguistic mainstream. Cognitive linguists have long disputed the reality of modularity architectures of grammar. Instead of conceiving syntax as computational system of a relatively small set of formal principles and parameters, cognitive linguists take the notion of grammatical construction to be the basic unit of syntax: syntax is simply our repertoire of form-meaning pairings. On such a view, there is no a-priori reason to believe that semantics and phonology cannot affect syntax.

In the present paper, we want to take things a step further and suggest, more generally, that language is not a module of cognition in any strict sense. Here we present preliminary results from research in progress concerning the effect of music on grammatical constructions. More specifically, our experiment compares reaction times between two grammatical constructions that differ in semantics and intonational curves but share lexical material: 1. A Pepe le gusta mucho leer; en su casa hay libros y libros. (target structure A: enumerative) (Pepe likes to read; in his house there are books and more books). 2. No todos los libros que se publican son igual de buenos; hay libros y libros. (target structure B: contrast) (Not all books that get published are equally as good; there are books and books).

Each version of “hay libros y libros” has a different intonation and a different interpretation; the version indicating enumeration (1) has a rising intonation, whereas the version indicating contrast (2) it has a rise-fall intonation. With this in mind, we asked subjects to read a short text biasing them towards Structure A or Structure B. Immediately thereafter, subjects heard a musical phrase (played by a synthesizer) resembling the intonation of Structure A or Structure B, after which they read the target phrase which takes the form of hay x y x. Our data so far shows that subjects take less time reading these phrases when the semantic bias and intonation match than in non-matching cases. This, we argue, suggests not only that semantics, phonology and syntax form an information bundle (i.e. a construction in the cognitive linguistic sense), but that perceived similarity of music can influence linguistic cognition. Bibliography Goldberg, Adele E. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Goldberg, Adele E. 2006. Constructions at work: the nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press Hilferty, Joseph. 2003. In Defense of Grammatical Constructions. Ph.D. thesis. Universitat de Barcelona. Langacker, Ronald W. 1987/1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vols. I&II. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

97

Construcciones con completivas en español. Gramática, discurso y cognición

VICTORIA VÁZQUEZ ROZAS Universidad de Santiago de Compostela

fevvazq@usc.es

En la comunicación se aborda, desde una perspectiva cognitiva y discursiva, el análisis de las construcciones que integran cláusulas completivas en español. El objetivo es defender una propuesta alternativa al enfoque dominante que enfatiza las concomitancias entre las completivas y los constituyentes nominales en función de objeto directo (o sujeto, o complemento preposicional) (cf., por ejemplo, Moreno Cabrera1991: 646-657; Alarcos 1994: 324-330; Delbecque-Lamiroy 1999). Frente a este planteamiento, en los últimos años algunos autores han señalado, a partir sobre todo de datos del inglés (incluidos datos de adquisición), que las denominadas “complement clauses” presentan características gramaticales y discursivo-funcionales que no se explican adecuadamente atribuyéndoles una función sintáctica como constituyente clausular (objeto directo, sujeto, etc.) (cf. Halliday 1985 [2004: 198-199], Biber et al. 1999: 384; Diessel y Tomasello 2001; Thompson 2002, Verhagen 2005), sino que deben ser analizadas teniendo en cuenta su aportación a la construcción del discurso en relación con la cláusula matriz.

Por lo que atañe al español, aunque ya se han apuntado ciertas limitaciones del enfoque tradicional (cf. Delbecque 2000), parece necesario aportar datos basados en un corpus suficientemente representativo que permitan profundizar en el análisis de las construcciones y ofrecer argumentos en uno u otro sentido. En este trabajo nos proponemos analizar las características de las cláusulas matrices con predicados cognitivos de actitud proposicional (pensar, creer, suponer…) a partir de los datos de la BDS (cf. www.bds.usc.es) para determinar en qué medida la construcción de estos verbos con una completiva reduce su estatus proposicional (o sus posibilidades de designar un evento) y, paralelamente, se restringen las posibilidades de variación morfosintáctica y de estructura argumental.

98

El gerundio no perifrástico: su función discursiva

ANNE VERHAERT HIVT (Amberes) – KULeuven (Lovaina)

a.verhaert@ha.be

Las construcciones gerundivas no perifrásticas (=CG) han recibido un tratamiento algo particular en la literatura existente: los análisis esencialmente normativos machacan en las mismas clasificaciones y los mismos ejemplos. Además se centran en tres temas : i) ¿qué función sintáctica desempeña la CG dentro de la oración compleja?, ii) ¿qué relación semántica la une a la oración matriz? y iii) ¿cuáles son los indicios contextuales que juegan un papel decisivo en la atribución de uno u otro valor semántico?

Sin embargo, la realidad del uso lleva a poner en tela de juicio la pertinencia de esta aproximación tradicional e impone un examen detenido de las correlaciones entre una serie de factores formales, funcionales y semánticos con el fin de descubrir los mecanismos de inferencia que pone en marcha una CG.

Un enfoque que considera las manifestaciones lingüísticas como espejo a la cognición permite estudiar la CG desde una perspectiva innovadora. Mi análisis cognoscitivo-funcional se organiza fundamentalmente entorno a las preguntas siguientes: ¿cómo codifica la CG la escena que describe?, ¿cuáles son las modalidades que rigen su uso? y ¿en qué sentido difiere la CG de las estructuras -finitas o infinitivas- vericondicionalmente equivalentes?

El análisis partirá de la naturaleza imperfectiva del G -que deriva del punto de vista particular impuesto sobre la escena conceptualizada- y se detendrá en las consecuencias discursivas que dicha imperfectividad acarrea, a saber su anaforicidad y la redundancia semántica entre CG y oración matriz. La CG posibilita centrar la atención en un aspecto ya contenido en la oración matriz, efectuando una especie de zooming in. Se defenderá además que la ampliamente reseñada infradeterminación de las CGs va más allá de lo que tradicionalmente se ha venido suponiendo: no sólo afecta al sujeto y a la relación semántica con la oración matriz sino también a la perspectiva desde la cual se relata la escena. La CG permite una estratificación a varios niveles. Todo ello acabará con una presuposición fuertemente arraigada, la supuesta equivalencia entre una serie de estructuras finitas - o infinitivas- y la CG.

99

The “teaching” semantic field and peripherical cases of the grammar category “indirect objects” in English and Spanish

ASUNCION VILLAMIL TOURIÑO Universidad Complutense de Madrid

asunvt@yahoo.es

This paper provides a general view of the contrast between English and Spanish in the category “OBJECT”. Despite the fact that transitivity is an often-discussed topic, in-depth contrastive work is still needed, so as to clarify the correspondences and different meanings of central and especially peripheral cases of Objects in English and Spanish. The departure point of the paper is a cognitive-functional perspective which is applied to the description of some peripheral cases of Indirect Objects in both languages. A corpus was created included examples from the semantic field of “teach, know and learn” taken from BNC and COREC. Through the analysis of this corpus, a typology of peripheral Indirect Objects is established (introduced by for / para, Indirect Prepositional Object, Datives, etc.), paying special attention to their syntactic and grammatical features as well as to the link between form and meaning. It will be shown how the grammatical category of Indirect Object is in general more peripherically realized in Spanish, which triggers a higher number of differences between English and Spanish than in the case of other Objects, as the Direct or Prepositional Object. Foreign language teaching can benefit from a study of this type by the clarification of the choice of different kinds of Objects and its consequences in meaning.

100

Imagining for speaking

JÖRG ZINKEN & VYV EVANS University of Portsmouth Joerg.zinken@port.ac.uk

University of Sussex vyv@sussex.ac.uk

Figurative thinking is attuned to the conventions of the semiotic system that the thinking

is carried out for. In the context of verbal behaviour, figurative thinking is attuned to the semantic conventions of the particular language. We call this process ‘imagining for speaking’, since it can be studied as a special case of the general phenomenon of ‘thinking for speaking’ as described by Slobin (e.g., 2003).

We review the present evidence supporting the contention that figurative thinking is based on the semantic conventions of a particular language. We further discuss a model of figurative meaning construction which aims to capture the nature of the relation between convention and innovation in the context of verbal behaviour.

While speakers of all languages can in principle go beyond the conceptualisations favoured or required by their language, the time-constraints of online meaning construction mean that novel conceptualisations are most successful, i.e. most likely to be replicated, when they do not stray too far from conventional conceptualisations. This distance can be described in terms of ‘optimal innovation’ (Giora et al., 2004).

We discuss imagining for speaking across different speech genres, with different time constraints. In particular, we discuss imagining for speaking in guided meditation and in everyday conversation.