Volume 36, Issue 2

This article provides evidence via a statistical analysis of corpus data that defectivity in Portuguese constitutes a psychological reality for speakers. It then argues that the morphome-based explanation for Spanish defective verbs is the most appropriate to explain defectivity in Portuguese. Morphomes are abstract distributional patterns of allomorphy based on form-form correspondences alone. The importance of these patterns has not been fully recognised within cognitive linguistics due to their lack of reference to meaning. Morphomes may not be ‘meaningful’ in the narrow sense, i.e. relating to ‘system-external information’, however, they are in the broader sense of them being ‘informative’. Morphomes are extremely informative since they exhibit systematic patterns of form that have a high predictive value within the morphological system. Within such a broader conception of meaning, morphomes have essentially the same predictive value as ‘meaning-driven’ patterns. In this article I present further evidence in favour or morphomes and I argue that Cognitive Linguistics should be open to the possibility of the importance of form-form relationships.

Idioms are phrases like English [hit the sack], meaning ‘go to bed’. For linguists working with sign languages, a question arises: “What do idioms look like in a sign language?” This paper proposes a definition of idiom that can be used to identify idioms across languages. Idioms are affective constructions, they are phrasal units, and they are conventional expressions for members of a language community. This definition is used to identify idioms in ASL such as [keep.quiet hard] ‘just have to accept it’. This approach to idioms motivates a constructionist approach to ASL grammar in general, in which all aspects of linguistic knowledge can be represented as meaning-form pairs that vary in their complexity and schematicity.

Ideophones are marked words which depict sensory imagery and are usually considered iconic by native speakers (i.e., ideophones sound like what they mean). Owing to shared cross-linguistic characteristics of expressive prosody, reduplication, and unusual phonological structure, ideophones have been likened to meaning performed. Iconic hand gestures frequently occur alongside ideophones choreographed to the timing of syllables. Given the visual modality’s richness in iconic affordances, these gestures have been supposed to help interlocutors infer semantic nuances and contextualize utterances, especially when an ideophone is polysemous, and may even inform speakers’ mental representations of spoken language as imitative. Such gestures should therefore be learnable and replicable like any unit of language. This is what we indeed find. Using a linear iterated learning paradigm, we investigated the stability of iconic gestures from Japanese and Korean ideophones transmitted across five generations. Despite noise in the visual signal, participants’ hand gestures converged, speaking to the emergence of phonological targets. Handshape configurations over time exhibited finger coordination reminiscent of unmarked handshapes observed in phonological inventories of signed languages. Well-replicated gestures were correlated with well-guessed ideophones from a spoken language study, further highlighting the complementary nature of the visual and spoken modalities in formulating mental representations.

This study explores the diachronic development of the Mandarin complex directional complement guòlái ‘come over’ from the macro-event perspective. By analyzing data retrieved from the CCL corpus spanning 15 Chinese dynasties (1046 BCE-1920s), this study reveals that guòlái ‘come over’ can be initially traced back to the pattern guò N ( ér ) lái , where guò and lái functioned as distinct motion verbs. It then served as a motion verb, which subsequently grammaticalized into a directional complement. The diachronic evolution of the macro-event types represented by the V guòlái construction can tentatively be described as: Motion Event > Event of Realization > Event of State Change / Event of Action Correlating (> Event of Temporal Contouring). This study further proposes the Unidirectional Progression Hypothesis concerning the entire closed set of directional complements, suggesting that Mandarin directional complements evolve both in form and meaning along a unidirectional trajectory, becoming syntactically tighter and semantically more abstract.

Speakers constantly align with one another in interaction (Pickering, M. J. & S. Garrod. 2022. Priming, prediction, and the psychological foundations of dialogue. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 37(1). 15–37). They mirror and adjust to what others say to engage cognitively and socially. One common way to do so is through dialogic resonance, that is when speakers re-use the constructions produced by their interlocutors (Du Bois, J. W. 2014. Towards a dialogic syntax. Cognitive Linguistics 25(3). 359–410; Tantucci, V. 2023a. Resonance and recombinant creativity: Why they are important for research in Cognitive Linguistics and Pragmatics. Intercultural Pragmatics 20(4). 347–376). This paper focuses on how Chinese speakers resonate with one another’s imperfective constructions in naturalistic interaction. We found that increasing linguistic material between the resonated and the resonating construction inhibits durative imperfectivity (aspectually vaguer) in contrast with focal imperfectivity (more detailed and time-bound). This suggests that working memory in dialogue does a better job at encoding specific, ongoing phases of an event ( she was just entering the apartment ) rather than generic, durative states ( she lived in that apartment for years ). We found that resonance increases with constructional complexity: the longer the imperfective construction, the higher an interlocutor’s engagement with that construction. Information structure also plays a role: imperfectives with transitive or locative objects show a stronger priming effect than objectless imperfectives. Finally, we found sociolinguistic correlations among imperfective construction types, as the postverbal 着 zhe , sentence-final 呢 ne are used distinctively by Northern speakers, while Southerners show a preference for preverbal 在 zài used alone or as part of a larger construction.

Markedness in language has been a perpetual fascination for linguists of all persuasions, but a unified account of it has proven elusive. In this paper, I propose a figure-ground gestalt (FGG) hypothesis, arguing that markedness is a mechanism for speakers to manipulate figure-ground arrangement in cases where the unmarked figure-ground organization is found wanting. There are three parts to this hypothesis. The first is the physio-anatomical basis of FGG, i.e., FGG is a biological reality rooted in the anatomy of the human eye and the neurology of attentional limitation. The second part of the hypothesis is the assumption that FGG has a heavy and prevalent bearing on the major architecture of language (the “unmarked” version of language). Thirdly – which is the essence of the hypothesis – when the default FGG organization in language cannot fulfill specific needs arising from context, the speaker rearranges FGG presentation. The result of this FGG manipulation is linguistic markedness. Four key marked constructions – subject auxiliary inversion, passive voice, it -cleft, and anticipatory it  – are analyzed to support the proposed hypothesis.