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September 25, 2007
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Why is there grammar? The verbalization of experience can provide an explanatory model of the function of grammatical categories and constructions. Chafe's model of verbalization provides a model of how the unanalyzed, unique whole of experience is broken up into parts that are categorized into types, that is, the lexical roots of an utterance. We add further processes to Chafe's model, because the speaker also must convert the types represented by the lexical roots back to the particulars of the experience, and put the parts back together into the original whole. These additional processes express the aspects of experience that become grammaticalized. A functional classification of grammatical categories and structures in terms of their role in verbalization is outlined.
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The first half of this article presents a fairly standard cognitive-semantic account of the semantic variants of the English path expression around . Then it is argued that this account needs to be expanded to include a much more explicitly central role for an active conceptualizer in a construal relation. To begin with, the schematic meaning of around is not an objective relation between a trajector and a landmark. It is a scanning pattern in which the conceptualizer's attention moves in order to focus on the location of the trajector. That scanning pattern is the same whether the trajector is objectively moving or stationary. Another basic factor in the meaning of around is the conceptual viewpoint. That viewpoint is usually presumed tacitly to be synoptic and orthogonal to the plane of the trajector's path, but there are actually many possible viewpoints, and there are potentially significant distinctions between one viewpoint and another. There is good reason to think that some distinct semantic variants of around are linked to the choice of defining viewpoint, and that its meaning can change in objectively significant ways depending on which conceptual viewpoint is chosen on a given occasion.
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September 25, 2007
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The repeated confirmation of the hypothesis of a negativity bias in cognitive psychology invited an assumption that the general asymmetry in the automatic processing of affective information should bear linguistic consequences, for language is inseparable from human cognition and emotion. This paper shows that the lexical semantics of emotive intensifiers in German, English and Chinese can be best explained in a cognitive-affective model of negativity bias. The parallel between a higher sensitivity to potentially threatening events at the neural level and the predominance of emotive intensifiers based on threat-relevant negative emotions at the linguistic level provides further evidence of the embodiment of linguistic conceptualisation. Ultimately, because the negativity bias is a vital component of our adaptive behaviour, the corresponding linguistic behaviour must be viewed as part of our dynamic system of adaptation.
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Cognitive linguists have long been interested in analogies people habitually use in thinking and speaking, but little is known about the nature of the relationship between verbal behaviour and such analogical schemas. This article proposes that discourse metaphors are an important link between the two. Discourse metaphors are verbal expressions containing a construction that evokes an analogy negotiated in the discourse community. Results of an analysis of metaphors in a corpus of newspaper texts support the prediction that regular analogies are form-specific, i.e., bound to particular lexical items. Implications of these results for assumptions about the generality of habitual analogies are discussed.
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Joanna Gavins and Gerard Steen (eds.), Cognitive Poetics in Practice. London: Routledge, 2003, 188 pp., ISBN 0-415-27799-X. (Michael Sinding) Veronika Koller. Metaphor and Gender in Business Media Discourse: A Critical Cognitive Study. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, xii + 244 pp., ISBN 1-4039-3291-3. (Gerard Steen)
