Bøker i Cognitive Linguistics Research [CLR]-serien

How do speakers vary established patterns of language use and adapt them to novel contexts of application? This study presents a usage-based approach to linguistic creativity: combining detailed qualitative with large-scale quantitative analyses of corpus data, it traces the emergence of partial productivity in clusters of conventional collocations. Focusing on English and German intensification constructions, it proceeds in three steps: having first inventoried the lexical means (of a given semantic type) that are recruited for signalling intensity in both languages, collostructional analysis is then used to identify entrenched intensity collocations involving these formatives in three different syntactic constructions. Third, multi-rater manual classification methods as well as distribution-based automatic classification methods are employed to uncover semantic generalisations over the attested types on different levels of abstraction. Collocational expansion is shown to proceed through local analogies within sets of semantically similar stored instances of a construction. Synthesising insights from research on language acquisition, variation and change, it is thus argued that creative extensions of linguistic conventions are intrinsically bound up with aspects of memory and repetition.

Given that we lack sensory-motor experience for abstract concepts, how do we find out what they mean? How far can we get by tracking frequency distributions in input? The volume tackles the question of what language has to offer the language learner in his/her quest for meaning, and explicitly addresses how semantic knowledge may be distributed along the continuum from "e;grammar"e; to "e;lexicon"e;. Focus is on the synonymy of constructions and lexemes, a meaning relation that has been largely ignored in Western linguistics. Frequency in all its guises plays a major part in this book. Approaching meaning from a usage-based perspective, a radically distributional approach to quantifying meaning is proposed that encompasses both the constructional and lexical level. Statistical data analysis, relatively new in the field of linguistics, yields a cognitively realistic, clustered model that encourages re-evaluating existing accounts of near-synonymy. Theoretical concepts spanning a range of cognitive linguistic frameworks, i.e. Cognitive Grammar, Radical Construction Grammar and Prototype Theory, account for the complexity of the data and lead to a re-appraisal of traditional semantic theory. Built on a solid empirical foundation, this network account of synonymy at the constructional and lexical level enriches our understanding of established aspects of the cognitive model of language, serving as catalyst for their further development and refinement. The theoretically informed combination of descriptive accuracy and methodological innovation makes the book a worthwhile read for cognitive linguists and psycholinguists alike.

Cognitive Linguistics has given a major impetus to the study of semantics and the lexicon. The present volume brings together seventeen previously published papers that testify to the fruitfulness of Cognitive Linguistics for the study of lexical and semantic topics. Spanning the period from the late 1980s to recent years, the collection features a number of papers that may be considered classics within the field of cognitive linguistic lexicology. The papers are grouped in thematic sections. The first section deals with prototypicality as a theoretical and practical model of semantic description. The second section discusses polysemy and criteria for distinguishing between meanings. The third section tackles questions of meaning description beyond the level of words, on the level of idioms and constructions. The following section casts the net even wider, dealing with the cultural aspects of meaning. Moving away from the theoretical and descriptive perspective towards applied concerns, the fifth section looks at lexicography from the point of view of Cognitive Linguistics. The final section has a metatheoretical orientation: it discusses the history and methodology of lexical semantics. Each paper is preceded by a newly written introduction that situates the text against the period in which it was first published, but that also points to further developments, in the author's own research or in Cognitive Linguistics at large. The variety of topics dealt with make this book an excellent introduction to the broad field of lexicological and lexical semantic research.

Meaning is embodied - but it is also social. If Cognitive Linguistics is to be a complete theory of language in use, it must cover the whole spectrum from grounded cognition to discourse struggles and bullshit. This book tries to show how. Cognitive Linguistics knocked down the wall between language and the experiential content of the human mind. Frame semantics, embodiment, conceptual construal, figure-ground organization, metaphorical mapping, and mental spaces are among the results of this breakthrough, which at the same time provided cognitive science as a whole with an essential human dimension. A new phase began when Cognitive Linguistics started to see itself as part of the wider movement of 'usage-based' linguistics. Bringing about an alliance between mind and discourse, it complemented the conceptual dimension that had been dominant until then with a 'use' dimension - thereby living up to the explicit 'experiential' commitment of Cognitive Linguistics. This outward expansion is continuing: The focus on 'meaning construction', which began with the theory of blending, highlights emergent, online effects rather than underlying mappings. Cognitive Linguistics is integrating the evolutionary perspective, which links up individual and population-based features of language. The empirical obligations incurred by this expansion have led to greatly increased attention to corpus and experimental methods, especially in relation to sociolinguistic and language acquisition research. The book describes this development and goes on to discuss the foundational challenge that it creates for Cognitive Linguistics as it begins to cover issues that are also central to types of discourse analysis focusing on social processes of determination. The book argues for a synthesis based on a renewed Cognitive Linguistics, which can accommodate everything from bodily grounding to deconstructible floating signifiers in an integrated complete picture, which also covers the roles of arbitrariness and structure.

This volume makes accessible a substantial range of recent research in Cognitive Grammar. From disparate sources, it brings together a dozen innovative papers, revised and integrated to form a coherent whole. This work continues the ongoing program of progressively articulating the theoretical framework and showing its descriptive application to varied grammatical phenomena. A number of major topics are examined in depth through multiple chapters viewing them from different perspectives: grammatical constructions (their general nature, their metonymic basis, their role in grammaticization), nominal grounding (quantifiers, possessives, impersonal it), clausal grounding (its relation to nominal grounding, an epistemic account of tense, a systemic view of the English auxiliary), the "e;control cycle"e; (an abstract cognitive model with many linguistic manifestations), finite clauses (their internal structure and external grammar), and complex sentences (complementation, subordination, coordination). In each case the presentation builds from fundamentals and introduces the background needed for comprehension. At the same time, by bringing fresh approaches and new descriptive insights to classic problems, it represents a significant advance in understanding grammar and indicates future directions of theory and research in the Cognitive Grammar framework. The book is of great interest to students and practitioners of cognitive linguistics and to scholars in related areas.

The volume focuses on semantic shifts and motivation patterns in the lexicon. Its key feature is its lexico-typological orientation, i.e. a heavy emphasis on systematic cross-linguistic comparison. The book presents current theoretical and methodological trends in the study of semantic shifts and motivational patters based on an abundance of empirical findings across genetically, areally and typologically diverse languages.

This volume offers new insights into figurative language and its pervasive role as a factor of linguistic change.

Explores the uses of quantitative, in particular corpus-driven, techniques for the study of meaning. This title shows how these techniques contribute to the core theoretical issues of Cognitive Semantics as well as how they inform semantic analysis.

The papers in this volume introduce and elaborate upon the concept of sociocultural situatedness, understood broadly as the way in which minds and cognitive processes are shaped, both individually and collectively, by their interaction with culturally contextualized structures and practices;

The field of constructionist linguistics is rapidly expanding, as research on a broad variety of language phenomena is increasingly informed by constructionist ideas about grammar.

Taking a broad view on Cognitive Sociolinguistics, the volume covers three main areas: corpus-based research on language variation, cognitive cultural models, and the ideologies of sociopolitical and socio-economic systems.

Cognitive Paths into the Slavic Domain presents an overview of recent cognitive linguistic research on Slavic languages. The analyses are couched in a variety of cognitive linguistic frameworks, making the volume a worthwhile read for Slavic and cognitive linguists alike.

Explores key convergences between cognitive and discourse approaches to language and language learning, both first and second. This volume places emphasis on the role of language as it is used in everyday interaction and as it reflects everyday cognition.

The volume focuses on the concept of embodiment, understood in most general terms as "the bodily basis of phenomena such as meaning, mind, cognition and language".

Testifies of the great tolerance of Cognitive Linguists towards internal variety, within itself and towards external interaction with major linguistic subdisciplines. Of interest to scholars, this book provides an overview of the connections between cognition and social, psychological, pragmatic, and discourse-oriented dimensions of language.

The papers also investigatewhether we have a continuum from highly subjective to more objective, whether subjective need be opposed to objective, or whether subjective may also be understood in contrast to neutral, which is often the case in Traugott's examples of grammaticalization.

The internal bootstrapps for establishing the grammatical system of a human language build an essential topic in language acquisition research. The discussion of the last 20 years came up with the Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis which assigns lexical development the role of the central bootstrapping process.

Presents a survey of image-schema theory, and offers a collection of essays on major issues in research on image-schemas. This book is useful to linguists of a cognitive orientation, philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists interested in language, and to those studying the embodied mind.

How much of language is motivated? Recently, cognitive and functional linguists have proposed new solutions to this intriguing question. The thirteen articles collected in this volume cover various aspects of motivation in grammar and in the lexicon. The phenomena discussed in the contributions can be grouped into four types of motivation, which, along with other types, are explicated in the introductory chapter: ecological motivation, i.e. motivation of a linguistic unit due to its place, or "ecological niche," within a system; genetic motivation, i.e. motivation of present-day linguistic behavior or structure due to historical factors; experiential motivation, i.e. motivation that is based on embodied experience; and cognitive motivation, i.e. motivation that is based on human knowledge and cognitive operations such as metonymy and metaphor. The languages studied in some detail include Afrikaans, Croatian, Dutch, English, French, German, Hausa, and Hungarian. This volume makes a strong case for the pervasiveness of motivation in natural language. It will be of interest to teachers, researchers and students of linguistics, especially of functional and cognitive linguistics.

This book presents a semantic analysis of a set of four functionally related discourse markers that are particularly frequent in conversational Colombian Spanish. A corpus of four hours of spontaneous conversation is used to study the markers bueno 'well, OK', pues 'well, then', o sea 'I mean, that is to say' and entonces 'so, then'. Through a detailed analysis of numerous examples drawn from the corpus, and employing both quantitative and qualitative techniques, it is demonstrated that, contrary to popular belief, discourse markers are not just functional particles with indeterminate or context-based semantics. Rather, they have inherent meanings which can be identified and exhaustively defined with an appropriate semantic methodology, such as is provided by the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach. This study illustrates that this approach, which has been widely applied to the semantics of the lexicon and the grammar, can be extended to the semantics of discourse-based features, supporting the notion that meaning of all aspects of language forms one semantic system. This research also has implications for the study of polysemy, in that it operationalizes the little understood, but classical definition of polysemy of items with 'a shared element of meaning', and it demonstrates that the polysemous relations of discourse markers are centered around an invariant core that can be identified on the basis of their use in discourse. As one of the first corpus-based studies to present a semantic account of the multifunctional nature of discourse markers this book makes an important contribution to research on the relationship between semantics and discourse-pragmatics, and polysemy in discourse.

The volume offers a number of representative papers on cognitive models that are invoked when people deal with questions of social identity, political and economic manipulation, and more general issues such as the genomic discourse.

This book applies the theory of cognitive linguistics to the analysis of a variety of grammatical phenomena in non-Indo-European languages. In previous studies of languages from non-Indo-European families, cognitive linguistics has been remarkably useful in explaining non-prototypical structures as well as more common ones.

As a usage-based language theory, cognitive linguistics is predestined to have an impact on applied research in such areas as language in society, ideology, language acquisition, language pedagogy.

As a usage-based language theory, cognitive linguistics is predestined to have an impact on applied research in such areas as language in society, ideology, language acquisition, language pedagogy.

This volume aims to enrich the current interdisciplinary theoretical discussion of human emo-tions by presenting studies based on extensive linguistic data from a wide range of languages of the world.

The papers in this book are all written within a cognitive linguistics framework, concentrated around different linguistic aspects of the verb. The two keynote papers serve as an introduction to this main theme, providing a broad perspective and a general, theoretical background.

Focusing on a wide range of linguistic structures, the articles in this volume explore the explanatory potential of two of the most influential cognitive-linguistic theories, conceptual metaphor and metonymy theory and conceptual blending theory.

Addresses aspects of language change using the semantics-based theory of Cognitive Linguistics, and focuses on the lexicon and metaphor, the semantics of syntax, and language evolution. This title considers various approaches to questions of the mental organization of meaning and its expression.

All languages of the world provide their speakers with linguistic means to express causal relations in discourse. This book discusses parameters of categorization that shape the use of causal connectives and auxiliary verbs across languages like English, Dutch and Polish.