Volume 16, Issue 3

This paper examines early syntactic development from a usage-based perspective, using transcripts of the spontaneous speech of two Englishspeaking children recorded at relatively dense intervals at ages 2;0 and 3;0. We focus primarily on the children’s question constructions, in an effort to determine (i) what kinds of units they initially extract from the input (their size and degree of specificity / abstractness); (ii) what operations they must perform in order to construct novel utterances using these units; and (iii) how the units and the operations change between the ages of two and three. In contrast to nativist theories of language development which suggest that children are working with abstract syntactic categories from an early point in development, we suggest that the data are better accounted for by the proposal that children begin with lexically specific phrases and gradually build up a repertoire of increasingly abstract constructions.

This paper explores the complex relationship between the meaning of predicates and the morphosyntactic expression of their arguments, as manifested in the swarm-class alternations in Czech. One way of getting at the nature of the alternations is to take a frame-semantic approach, which allows us to introduce the notion of scene as an important factor in linking relationships. It is proposed that linking patterns are organized in a network of generalized scene types, each of which represents a particular role configuration structured in such a way that one of its roles can be singled out as the vantage point from which that event type is conventionally presented in a particular diathesis; the analysis argues for the notion of viewpoint as an event-structuring concept (distinct from discourse-based topicness) that is directly reflected in certain conventionalized linking patterns. The results of the investigation show that what may appear to be hard-to-predict variations in subject selection can be treated as instances of regular linking relations.

This article presents a unified theory of irony which claims, with the help of Fauconnier’s (1985) mental space theory, that an ironical utterance refers to the mental space of a mutually manifest expectation. According to this view, what a typical ironical speaker does is to say without any distinct space builders that something is the case in the mental space of expectation in order to make it mutually manifest that it is not so in the initial reality space. This expectation space theory of irony integrates the explanatory power of Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) echoic interpretation theory with the descriptive power of the view of irony as relevant inappropriateness.

The hypothesis was tested that transfer and facilitation of learning in early syntactic development does not rely on semantic analogy among the items. The study focused on the verb-indirect object (VI) construction. Longitudinal naturalistic speech corpora of 14 Hebrew-speaking children (1;04–2;08) were analyzed, 9 females and 5 males, White and predominantly middle class. There was facilitation of learning among the first 10 verbs in the VI pattern, as evidenced by the accelerating growth curves. However, there was much semantic variability among the 10 indirect objects, and most had no semantically similar antecedents in the same construction. The results indicate that facilitation of learning of early syntax is most probably not mediated by semantic similarity.

One purpose of this article is to support the universalist claims of conceptual blending theory by documenting its application to an ancient Chinese philosophical text, and also to provide illustrations of complex multiple-scope blends constructed over the course of conceptual blending by suggesting that, in many cases, the primary purpose of achieving human scale is not to help us apprehend a situation, but rather to help us to know how too feel about it. This argument is essentially an attempt to connect the insights of conceptual blending theorists with those of neuroscientists such Antonio Damasio who argues for the importance of somatic states and emotional reactions in human value-creation and decision-making.

Hubert Cuyckens and Britta Zawada (eds.), Polysemy in Cognitive Linguistics. Selected Papers from the Fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference . Reviewed by Brigitte Nerlich Jean Harkins and Anna Wierzbicka (eds.), Emotions in Crosslinguistic Perspective . Reviewed by Penny Lee Martin Pütz, Susanne Niemeier and René Dirven (eds.), Applied Cognitive Linguistics I: Theory and Language Acquisition. II: Language Pedagogy . Reviewed by Richard A. Sprott