Volume 3, Issue 1 - Volume Editors: Peter Uhrig and Thomas Herbst

Languages are subject to change, but they are also stable. The linguistic knowledge of the members of speech communities is similar, but also differs in many ways. Language use affects individual linguistic knowledge and contributes to linguistic conventionality. The present paper outlines a model of how language works that strives to do justice to these commonsensical observations. The model consists of cognitive processes and social processes and shows how these interact under the influence of usage events and a range of different types of forces.

In the cognitive linguistic literature, sentences like Nixon bombed Hanoi have long been explained in terms of metonymy, either ‘referential’ (i.e. the NP Nixon metonymically refers to the bomber pilots controlled by President Nixon), or ‘predicative’ (i.e. the verb bomb metonymically refer to the ordering of the bombing). More recently, it has been suggested that such sentences may be better analyzed as slightly untypical literal instances of the transitive construction. In this paper, a corpus-based analysis of the verb bomb is presented, which shows that the usage of this verb is very different and much more heterogeneous than the constructed examples cited in the literature suggest. It is argued that this heterogeneity cannot be coherently analyzed in terms of referential or predicative metonymy. Instead, a non-metonymic account is sketched out based on a general characterization of causative transitives and verb frames from which logical subjects are selected based on salience. This account provides a unified analysis of the phenomenon that even allows us to recognize additionally the existence of referential metonymies in certain cases. The paper contributes to a growing body of research literature that takes the idea of a ‘usage- based’ cognitive linguistics seriously by attempting to test and develop analyses empirically on the basis of authentic usage data.

This paper aims to shed light on the influence that metaphors of war as used in Pauline writings had on early English literature. The particular metaphorical exploitation of the semantic field of war fell on fertile ground in English contexts. For instance, the motifs of genuine English heroic poetry lent themselves well to be a canvas for a ‘religious turn’ in metaphor interpretation. To illustrate this process, selected examples from Old to Present-Day English are discussed from a cognitive linguistics perspective. The findings suggest that the forging of an English poetry tradition was accompanied by a continually recontextualising use of war metaphors. Finally, the analysis of the text samples is embedded into a model of general metaphor incorporation in literature.

This paper proposes an alternative account of the historical development of saburafu, a humiliating honorific marker in Japanese. Traugott and Dasher (2002) established a theory called Invited Inference Theory of Semantic Change (IITSC), in which saburafu is employed as a supporting case study. By inspecting saburafu’s semantic changes, including aspects not discussed in IITSC, the compelling difference between IITSC and the analysis I propose is that, firstly, inspired by Keller’s theory of communication (1998), it proposes semiotic ways of communication in place of pragmatic inferencing; and secondly, it shows that the ways in which the viewer and the viewed, the construct central to Langacker’s viewing arrangement, are fundamental to the apprehension of honorification. This new, yet preliminary, account will be enriched by select examples especially from Old/Late Old Japanese.

In this paper, I focus on loanwords, and more specifically on the process known as loanword adaptation, namely the process by which a word’s original phonetics is altered to phonologically fit the borrowing language. More precisely, I seek to determine whether release bursts after the word-final coda in an English input might be responsible for final vowel epenthesis in the corresponding Korean output. To test this hypothesis, I compiled an original database listing English words that entered Korean until very recently. The analysis of that database actually supports the hypothesis. In a final conclusion, I discuss what this demonstration tells us about loanword adaptation and the process of borrowing from a psycholinguistic point of view. In particular, I emphasize the importance of both perception and native phonology in the process of loanword adaptation and conclude that Korean speakers seem indeed to be subject to the ‘perceptual magnet effect’, seeking (phonological) prototypes from various acoustic cues, and that so-called fine-grained phonetic detail has to be explored for a better understanding of phonological processes from a cognitive point of view.

This paper investigates the hypothesis of the preference of Goals over Sources in the representation of Change of Possession events. Applying a corpus- based methodology, we analyse two verbs belonging to this event type, namely BUY and SELL, in German and Modern Greek, two languages that differ with respect to the patterns they use to encode motion events (i.e. a Satelliteand a Verb-framed language respectively). We find that both languages conform to the general tendency reported across languages to give prominence to the Goal: SELL is more likely to occur with the optional Goal Prepositional Phrase than BUY is with the optional Source Prepositional Phrase. Additionally, we address the question as to whether languages showing different patterns regarding the encoding of the Path differ with respect to the predominance of the Goal over the Source in events that express non-prototypical dislocation. Our findings indicate that the typological difference of the two languages has an indirect effect on the representation of Path elements for these particular verbs: German expresses the optional Prepositional Phrase (the TO- and the FROM-Phrase) more often than Greek, the critical factor for the observed difference being the Goal optional element in German (the TO-Phrase). Therefore, we conclude that the degree of robustness of the Goal bias is higher in German than it is in Greek.

Speakers’ linguistic experience is for the most part experience with language as used in conversational interaction. Though highly relevant for usage-based linguistics, the study of such data is as yet often left to other frameworks such as conversation analysis and interactional linguistics (Couper-Kuhlen and Selting 2001). On the basis of a case study of salient usage patterns of the two German motion verbs kommen and gehen in spontaneous conversation, the present paper argues for a methodological integration of quantitative corpus-linguistic methods with qualitative conversation analytic approaches to further the usage-based study of conversational interaction.

In everyday encounters, interactants have to keep track of a wide range of parameters which are relevant for a successful conversation: They have to 'address' the communicative genre that is (or is about to be) activated as well as the immediate and general situation the interactants are in. Furthermore, interactants have to tailor their utterances in such a way that they meet the supposed local needs of their partners-in-talk and make sure that their talk rests on the assumed shared knowledge of all interactants. On the basis of everyday spoken German conversations it will be shown that speakers have to design their utterances in such a way as to be adapted to their recipients' knowledge as well as to address situational and genre-related parameters. By analyzing utterance design it becomes possible to reveal the cognitive processes of the interactants.

Weather expressions can be seen as a relevant topic in foreign language (FL) teaching. Traditional teaching methodology focuses on fixed FL expressions like impersonal verbs discarding both the rich array of verbal and nominal constructions for typical weather states, as well as the learners’ needs for their production. Construction grammar may fill this gap in two respects, by focusing on weather expressions produced by second language learners (L2). This study describes: (1) the variation in the preferred L2 constructional patterns for weather forecasts in three samples of non-native speakers of German (French, Italian and Dutch); (2) an inventory of constructional and associated lexical deficits in German-L2, compared to the participants’ L1. Descriptive results lead to constructional recommendations for language pedagogy of L2 German. From a contrastive perspective, we explore the influence of L1- on L2- constructions, in order to show possible learner interferences. More specifically, we contrast the Dutch learners as representatives of a Germanic language, with the speakers of the Romance languages. Finally, we propose some guidelines for construction-based teaching as an alternative to the conventional lexical approach to meteorological expressions.

This paper presents an empirical investigation of Löbner’s (2011) theory of concept types and determination (CTD). The theory is based on the assumption of four basic types of nouns (sortal, relational, individual, functional) and their congruency with certain modes of determination. Löbner predicts that incongruent uses are less frequent than congruent uses. Horn and Kimm (2014) present a first text-based pilot study on this topic. They investigated two German fictional texts and found results that support Löbner’s prediction. However, the restricted text basis and the preliminary annotation procedure employed in their pilot study call for an improvement of the method and an extension of the texts investigated. The study presented here provides an enhanced annotation procedure and amends the text collection with a choice of German newspaper texts. This text type is expected to contain less subsequent mentions than fictional texts and a greater variety of individual nouns, e.g. proper names, and, thus, contribute to a wider picture. The results of the investigation corroborate these expectations and provide further evidence for the noun type distinction. The paper is structured as follows: Section 1 provides a brief summary of the theoretical background of the study, i.e., primarily the theory of concept types and determination. In Section 2, I report the method and results of the pilot study by Horn and Kimm (2014). The improved method and the case study are presented in Section 3, followed by the conclusion in Section 4.

This paper demonstrates that syntax-external factors at the level of pragmatics are responsible for certain constraints on word order variation in phrasal idioms. I propose a new constraint in this context by referring to the fact that idioms can be distinguished by the criterion of having either a plausible or a ‘bizarre’ literal reading. Since this constraint on topicalization of subparts of idiomatic strings cannot be accounted for in syntactic terms, this paper contributes to an understanding of how to approach marked word order options from a pragmatic perspective in general.

The English go-VERB construction as in I go get the paper every morning is said to be subject to the BARE STEM CONDITION, which states that neither verb can bear inflection (thus resulting in the ungrammaticality of *she went see/saw a doctor). Studies that address the constraint attribute it to underlying formal parameters, without paying attention to functional properties and/or usage events. The fact that we find occasional violations of the constraint in large amounts of data raises the question of the systematicity of this data and how to account for it. Arguing from a usage-based perspective, this paper assumes that the entrenched schema of go-VERB is hortatory (e.g., commands, advice, invitations), which make inflectional variants increasingly unlikely for semanticfunctional reasons. But where exceptions do occur, they are assumed to occur in contexts predicted by the construction’s semantics. These assumptions are borne out by data from a large corpus of web data. Potential counterexamples are tested for systematicity vs. random noise in (web) data using collostructional analysis and simple correlation measurements. The central arguments are thus (i) that the BARE STEM CONDITION is better conceived of as the result of go- VERB’s constructional semantics, and (ii) that rare exceptions can be framed in terms of likelihood of occurrence and distance from the licensing schema.