Article Frontmatter was published on May 1, 2021 in the journal Cognitive Linguistics (volume 32, issue 2).

Spatial metaphors of affect display remarkable consistencies across languages in mapping sensorimotor experiences onto emotional states, reflecting a great degree of similarity in how our bodies register affect. At the same time, however, affect is complex and there is more than a single possible mapping from vertical spatial concepts to affective states. Here we consider a previously unreported case

This paper investigates the effects of 10 factors on the choice between alternative ba sentences and SVO sentences in Mandarin Chinese. These factors are givenness, definiteness, animacy and pronominality of NP2s, NP2 length, VP length, verb sense, syntactic parallelism, dependency distance, and surprisal. Using corpus data and mixed-effects logistic regression modeling, we find that on the one hand

This study has two aims. First, it lays out the synchronic patterning of four constructions that express static location in Secoya (Tukanoan). Each construction licenses different semantic verb types: topological verbs, postural verbs, an existential verb, and a copula. Second, this study explores the different construals encoded by these constructions and highlights the ways speakers use them creatively

The paper investigates the interaction of lexical and constructional meaning in valency coercion processing, and the effect of (in)compatibility between verb and construction for its successful resolution (Perek, Florent & Martin Hilpert. 2014. Constructional tolerance: Cross-linguistic differences in the acceptability of non-conventional uses of constructions. Constructions and Frames 6(2). 266–304;

Following a usage-based approach to language acquisition, lexically specific patterns are considered to be important building blocks for language productivity and feature heavily both in child-directed speech and in the early speech of children (Arnon, Inbal & Morten H. Christiansen. 2017. The role of multiword building blocks in explaining L1-L2 differences. Topics in Cognitive Science 9(3). 621–636;

Article Frontmatter was published on February 1, 2021 in the journal Cognitive Linguistics (volume 32, issue 1).

Within the framework of Viewpoint Spaces (Dancygier, Barbara. 2012. The language of stories: A cognitive approach . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), this paper investigates viewpoint interactions in a mobile game’s plot to show how the game’s structural framing leads to meaning construction, specifically the construal of irony. The notion of (meta-)Ground Viewpoint Space is proposed not only

Research has shown that it requires less time to process information that is part of an objective causal relation describing states of affairs in the world ( She was out of breath because she was running ), than information that is part of a subjective relation ( She must have been in a hurry because she was running ) expressing a claim or conclusion and a supporting argument. Representing subjectivity

When athletes make significant plays in sporting competitions, such as scoring a goal in soccer, a touchdown in American football, they often immediately express their joy by performing some bodily action for others to see and understand. Many sports celebrations are staged pantomimes that express metaphorical meanings as a part of athletes’ pretending to perform certain source-path-goal sequences

This paper analyzes symmetric NPN constructions (e.g., day to day, face to face, step by step ) qualitatively and quantitatively by examining data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, Mark. 2008–. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 570 million words, 1990–present. http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/). The constructions’ frequency and productivity, as well as their semantics

This paper reports a case study on a family of American English constructions that will be called the family of approximate comparison constructions. This family has three members, all of which follow the syntactic pattern about as X as Y with X being an adjective, but which allow three related functions: literal comparison, simile and irony. Two cognitive frameworks concern themselves with irony,

Se constructions designate a set of polysemous constructions along a transitivity continuum marked by the clitic se that perform various functions: reflexive/reciprocal, middle, anticausative, passive, and impersonal. A counterpart of these constructions without the clitic – the null se construction – is also attested. Based on an extensive usage-feature and profile-based analysis, and using multivariate

Abstract This study aims to find out whether speakers of different language backgrounds (English, French, Spanish, and Macedonian) are sensitive to semantic associations (‘fluid’ and ‘forcible contact’) attached respectively to two purported phonaesthemes (/fl-/ and /tr-/). Participants completed the task in oral and written conditions. They had to match phonaestheme-related definitions with either

Abstract This paper investigates the ways English speakers employ the predicates like, similar, and resemble to express similarity in natural speech. A corpus of 450 instances was created and manually coded, and an acceptability rating experiment was conducted. Converging evidence from the corpus analysis and the experiment shows that the three predicates occur with the same range of uses, but differ

Abstract This paper investigates frequency effects in the L2 acquisition of the catenative verb construction by German learners of English from a usage-based perspective by presenting findings from two experimental studies and a complementary corpus study. It was examined if and to what extent the frequency of the verb in the catenative verb construction affects the choice of the target-like complement

Abstract This paper adopts a cognitive linguistic framework to explore the influence of spatial and social factors on the use of Spanish demonstratives esta ‘this’ and esa ‘that’. Twenty adult Spanish speakers in Monterrey, Mexico, were asked questions prompting the selection of puzzle pieces for placement in a 25-piece puzzle located in the shared space between the participant and an addressee. Although

Abstract Previous studies claim there are few olfactory metaphors cross-linguistically, especially compared to metaphors originating in the visual and auditory domains. We show olfaction can be a source for metaphor and metonymy in a lesser-described language that has rich lexical resources for talking about odors. In Seri, an isolate language of Mexico spoken by indigenous hunter-gatherers, we find

Abstract Elicitation materials like language portraits are useful to investigate people’s perceptions about the languages that they know. This study uses portraits to analyse the underlying conceptualisations people exhibit when reflecting on their language repertoires. Conceptualisations as manifestations of cultural cognition are the purview of cognitive sociolinguistics. The present study advances

Abstract De Smet et al. (2018) propose that when functionally similar constructions come to overlap, analogical attraction may occur. So may differentiation, but this process involves attraction to other subnetworks and is both “accidental” and “exceptional”. I argue that differentiation plays a considerably more significant role than De Smet et al. allow. My case study is the development of the dative

Abstract Present day anti-refugee and anti-immigrant rhetoric both in European countries and in the USA makes reference both to shared tropes and to culture-specific rhetoric devices. The paper analyzes four instances of Polish rabid anti-refugee rhetoric that is eminently country specific: they invoke Holocaust scenario as the means of dealing with the refugee question, should they appear on Polish

Abstract For a long time, linguists more or less denied the existence of individual differences in grammatical knowledge. While recent years have seen an explosion of research on individual differences, most usage-based research has failed to address this issue and has remained reluctant to study the synergy between individual and community grammars. This paper focuses on individual differences in

Abstract While many linguists view language as either a cognitive or a social phenomenon, it is clearly both: a language can live only in individual minds, but it is learned from examples of utterances produced by speakers engaged in communicative interaction. In other words, language is what (Keller 1994. On language change: The invisible hand in language. London: Taylor & Francis) calls a “phenomenon

Abstract This study investigates the extent to which there is individuality in how structural variation is conditioned over time. Earlier research already classified the diachronically unstable gerund variation as involving a high fraction of mixed-usage speakers throughout the change, whereby the proportion of the conservative variant versus the progressive variant as observable in the linguistic

Abstract This paper examines, on the basis of a longitudinal corpus of 50 early modern authors, how change at the aggregate level of the community interacts with variation and change at the micro-level of the individual language user. In doing so, this study aims to address the methodological gap between collective change and entrenchment, that is, the gap between language as a social phenomenon and

Abstract This paper explores the added value of studying intra- and inter-speaker variation in grammaticalisation based on idiolect corpora. It analyses the usage patterns of the English let alone construction in a self-compiled William Faulkner corpus against the backdrop of aggregated community data. Vast individual differences (early Faulkner vs. late Faulkner vs. peers) in frequencies of use are

Abstract We investigate the order in which speakers produce the proper names of couples they know personally in English and Japanese, two languages with markedly different constituent word orders. Results demonstrate that speakers of both languages tend to produce the name of the person they feel closer to before the name of the other member of the couple (N = 180). In this way, speakers’ unique personal

Abstract In Modern Standard Russian (MSR), the prefix/preposition pair u-/u is peculiar with respect to other similar pairs, due to the meaning mismatch between the two. While the prefix u- has an ablative meaning, as shown when it is prefixed to motion verbs, the prepositional phrase u+gen occurs in locative constructions, and other related constructions, such as predicative possession that is expressed

Abstract Taboo terms offer a playground for linguistic creativity in language after language, and sign languages form no exception. The present paper offers the first investigation of taboo terms in sign languages from a cognitive linguistic perspective. We analyze the linguistic mechanisms that introduce offense, focusing on the combined effects of cognitive metonymy and iconicity. Using the Think

Abstract This paper explores the role of metonymy in determining a syntactic argument alternation (“conductor-vehicle alternation”) which occurs in English and Portuguese: o piloto acelerou a Ferrari “the driver speeded up the Ferrari”/a Ferrari acelerou “the Ferrari speeded up/sped away”. Since the verbs in the conductor-vehicle alternation have conductor and vehicle arguments (controller and controlled

Abstract The present study investigates the types of verb and symbolic representational strategies used by 10 deaf signing adults and 13 deaf signing children who described in Italian Sign Language 45 video clips representing nine action types generally communicated by five general verbs in spoken Italian. General verbs, in which the same sign was produced to refer to several different physical action

Abstract The theoretical notion of ‘construal’ captures the idea that the way in which we describe a scene reflects our conceptualization of it. Relying on the concept of ception – which conjoins conception and perception – we operationalized construal and employed a Visual World Paradigm to establish which aspects of linguistic scene description modulate visual scene perception, thereby affecting

Abstract Do children’s single words related to motion and change also encode aspects of environmental events highlighted by Talmy’s motion event analysis? If so, these meanings may predict children’s early verb meanings. Analyzing the kinds of meanings expressed in single “dynamic event words” through motion event semantics yields links between early true verbs in sentences and the semantics encoded

Abstract This paper presents a study of modality in Iranian Sign Language (ZEI) from a cognitive perspective, aimed at analyzing two linguistic channels: facial and manual. While facial markers and their grammatical functions have been studied in some sign languages, we have few detailed analyses of the facial channel in comparison with the manual channel in conveying modal concepts. This study focuses

Abstract Frequently used linguistic structures become entrenched in memory; this is often assumed to make their consecutive parts more predictable, as well as fuse them into a single unit (chunking). High frequency moreover leads to a propensity for phonetic reduction. We present a word recognition experiment which tests how frequency information (string frequency, transitional probability) interacts

Abstract The idea that conventionalized general knowledge – sometimes referred to as a frame – guides the perception and interpretation of the world around us has long permeated various branches of cognitive science, including psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. In this paper we provide experimental evidence suggesting that frames also play a role in explaining certain long-distance

Abstract Linguistic categories such as aspect are not identical across languages, and cross-linguistic differences can reveal differences in construal and conceptual categorization, which are key concepts in cognitive linguistics. Spanish-Russian parallel data diverge in situations where Spanish uses a Perfective Past tense form, while the Russian translation equivalent is an Imperfective Past tense

Abstract The experiential, embodied nature of primary metaphors endows them with a universal flavor of interest to the present-day global advertising needs. Based on the analysis of 500 printed advertisements corresponding to the top ten fast food brands currently in the market, this paper investigates the visual representation and functions of primary metaphors within this advertising genre. In contrast

Abstract The current study examines the effectiveness of a CL-based force dynamic (FD) lesson relative to a more conventional approach that seeks to convey the target semantics through corresponding L1 forms. Exp. 1 (N=67) examined Japanese EFL students’ acquisition of the English verbs force, get, have, help, let, make, and prevent, comparing the effectiveness of force dynamic explanations with dynamic

Abstract This paper investigates the effect of the high frequency of occurrence of a verb in a syntactic frame on speakers’ selection of that syntactic frame for other verbs. We hypothesize that the frequent co-occurrence of a syntactic frame and a particular verb (what we call an anchor verb) leads to a strong association between the verb and the frame analogous to the relationship between a category

Abstract This article presents a Mental Space model for analyzing linguistic patterns in news narratives. The model was applied in a corpus study categorizing various linguistic markers of viewpoint transfers between the mental spaces that readers must conceptualize while processing news narratives: a Reality Space representing the journalist and reader’s projected here-and-now viewpoint; a News Narrative

Abstract The relationship between construal and redundancy has not been previously explored empirically. Russian aspect allows speakers to construe situations as either Perfective or Imperfective, but it is not clear to what extent aspect is determined by context and therefore redundant. We investigate the relationship between redundancy and open construal by surveying 501 native Russian speakers who

Abstract The reason which is generally given in the usage-based literature to account for the retention of irregularity in high frequency items during analogical change is entrenchment: a frequently occurring irregular linguistic unit resists analogical levelling because it is highly entrenched in speakers’ mental lexicons through its repeated use. Although previous research similarly suggests that

Abstract In American Sign Language (ASL) narratives, signers map conceptualized spaces onto actual spaces around them that can reflect physical, conceptual, and metaphorical relations among entities. Because verb tenses are not attested in ASL, a question arises: How does a signer distinguish utterances about past events from utterances within a present conversational context? In narratives, the story-teller’s

Abstract This paper proposes an approach to narrative deixis which offers a coherent analysis of the respective roles of proximal and distal deictic expressions (demonstratives as well as temporal and locative adverbs). The paper starts by arguing that fictional narratives require an approach to deixis which modifies a number of broadly held assumptions, especially as regards the interaction between

Abstract This paper first develops a theoretically motivated view of narrative as a special form of inferential, cooperative human communication, of the role that the past tense plays in the intersubjective coordination of narrators and readers, viz. that of ‘curtailing’ the immediate argumentative applicability of the represented situation, and of its relation to viewpoint management. In three case

Abstract This article discusses the use of proximal deictic expressions to designate distal entities, focusing on the use of the present tense to designate past events. Cognitive approaches to this issue assume that such usages presuppose a special conceptual construal, in which the spatio-temporal distance between the ground and the designated event space is bridged in some way. In this paper, I argue

Abstract Verb tenses play an important role in managing deictic relations between the narrator, the audience and the events happening in the story world. Across languages, the Simple Past is considered the conventional story-telling tense, reflecting the prototypical deictic configuration of stories in which the narrator is positioned at some distance from the events unfolding in the story. The Simple

Abstract The paper discusses the role of tense and time from a cross-linguistic perspective by comparing English (a tensed language) and Mandarin (a language without formal tense marking). Multiple translations of the same literary piece are used to test the correspondence between the tense, the perfective aspect and temporal adverbials. In English, tense marking is found to work with at least two

Abstract In this introduction to the special issue on time and viewpoint in narrative discourse, we highlight the central contributions of the issue concerning the relation between the linguistic construal and cognitive representation of time and viewpoint. We explain how linguistic and gestural cues guide the representation of narrative time progression and argue that this representation involves

Abstract This study examines the linguistic construal and cognitive representation of time and viewpoint in the genre of news narratives. We present a model of mental spaces that involves a News Space in which the deictic center is construed of the news actors at the time the newsworthy events took place, and a Reality Space in which the deictic here-and-now center of journalist and reader is construed

Abstract This paper proposes a cognitive linguistic explanation of the unusual narrative construal of time as moving backwards. It shows that backwards time in narrative involves setting up an alternative space in which a second narrative is constructed simultaneously, resulting in a viewpoint hierarchy which postulates four viewpoints on each discourse statement. The paper draws together research

Abstract The prevailing assumption is that an Research underlying this study was conducted with support of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research grant #17-06-00460.agreement feature originates in one linguistic element, that is a controller, and is copied onto another one, a target. This form-to-form approach encounters massive difficulties when confronted with data, such as missing controllers

Abstract Lexical diversity, the amount of lexical variation shown by a particular concept, varies between concepts. For the concept drunk, for instance, nearly 3000 English expressions exist, including blitzed, intoxicated, and hammered. For the concept sober, however, a significantly smaller number of lexical items is available, like sober or abstinent. While earlier variation studies have revealed

Abstract This study concerns the distribution of metaphorical lexis in discrete syntactic constructions. Source and target seed language from established conceptual metaphors in economic discourse is used to catalogue the specific patterns of how metaphorical pairs align in five syntactic constructions: A-NP, N-N, NP-of-NP, V-NP, and X is Y. Utilizing the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies

Abstract Languages are complex systems that allow speakers to produce novel grammatical utterances. Yet, linguists differ as to how general and abstract they think the mental representation of speakers have to be to give rise to this grammatical creativity. In order to shed light on these questions, the present study looks at one specific construction type, English comparative correlatives, that turns

Abstract In this paper, we present our Construction Grammar account of light verb constructions in the Indo-Aryan language Odia (earlier known as Oriya). These light verb constructions are asymmetric complex verb predicates that combine a main verb (MV) with a light verb (LV). While the LVs are form-identical with a lexical verb, they are “light” because they have lost their lexical content as well

Abstract Grounding refers to expressions that establish a connection between the ground and the content evoked by a nominal or finite clause. In this paper we report on two grammatical implementations of nominal grounding in Argentine Sign Language: pointing and placing. For pointing constructions, we also examine distal-proximal pointing and directive force. We introduce the concept of placing, in

Abstract Cognitive linguistics (CL) has, in recent years, seen an increase in appeals to include multiple modalities in language analyses. While individual studies have incorporated gesture, gaze, facial expression, and prosody, among other modalities, CL has yet to completely embrace the systematic analysis of face-to-face interaction. Here, I present an investigation of five aspect-marking periphrastic

Abstract Categorization retains its key importance in research on human cognition. It is an intellectual area where all disciplines devoted to human cognition – psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and linguistics – intersect. In language, categorization is not only a central part of lexical structure but is also salient in systems of nominal classification, notably gender and classifiers. Recent