Volume 10, Issue 1

Despite diering theoretical views within cognitive semantics there appears to be a consensus on certain fundamental theoretical constructs: (i) the basic semantic unit is a mental concept; (ii) concepts cannot be understood independent of the domain in which they are embedded; (iii) conceptual structures represent a construal of experience, that is, an active mental operation; and (iv) concept categories involve prototypes and are organized by (at least) taxonomic relations. Although the basic constructs of ``concept'', ``domain'', ``construal'', and ``category structure'' go by dierent names, they are essentially the same among researchers in cognitive linguistics. We examine a fth theoretical construct, that of ``image schemas'' (recurring basic conceptual structures), and argue that image schemas are a subtype of domain. We begin with the theory of domains proposed by Langacker, which is similar to Fillmore's theory of frame semantics. Langacker distinguishes two types of domains, locational and congurational; we argue that it is concepts in domains that are locational or congurational, not the domains themselves. We then analyze image schemas and show how they function like domains, in which are found both locational and congurational concepts.

Basque possesses a number of complex and very productive alternations aecting vowel sequences. In generative phonology these alternations have been considered a textbook example of extrinsic rule order (cf. Kenstowicz and Kisseberth 1979; Kenstowicz 1994). Lako (1993) shows that the Basque facts can be analyzed within his cognitive phonology model without employing the psychologically highly problematic mechanism of rule order. Lako's model, however, contains abstract levels of representation for which there appears to be no empirical evidence. In this article I argue that the generalizations that Basque speakers must make can and should be expressed as correspondences among surface forms. Both derivations and underlying representations can be dispensed with. I furthermore show that postulating abstract underlying representations results in both incorrect predictions and contradictory analyses of the Basque alternations. Recent work within the generative phonological tradition has demonstrated that some of the most complex mechanisms of this theoretical model, such as the cycle and underspecication, lack all empirical justication (see Cole 1995; Steriade 1995). The fundamental construct of underlying representations with assumed psychological reality would appear to be no better motivated on empirical grounds.

This article is a contrastive analysis of how dierently hitting events are provided linguistic expression in languages like Spanish on the one hand, and English on the other. However, the emphasis in the analysis is laid on Spanish data. The data are judged to have internal structure by virtue of a special grammatical construction, which I have termed the ``hitting construction''. The proposal is innovative in seeing these data for the rst time as forming a unied and motivated lexical network. The construction advocated in the article bears both semantic and syntactic structure, and motivates the pervasive hitting semantics found in the items treated throughout. The data come from Peninsular Spanish, althou1gh the structural phenomenon applies to Spanish as a diasystem, disregarding dialectal lexical dierences.