Volume 18, Issue 1

The present study investigates the development of am in the speech of one English-speaking child, Scarlett (aged 4;6–5;6). We show that am is infrequent in the speech addressed to children; the acquisition of this form of BE presents a unique insight into the processes underlying language development because children have little evidence regarding its correct use. Scarlett produced a pervasive error where she overextended are to first-person singular contexts where am was required (e.g., I'm are trying, When are I'm finished? ). Am gradually emerged in her speech on what appears to be a construction-specific basis. The findings of the study are used in support of a usage-based, constructivisit approach to language development.

The distribution of the flap allophone [ɾ] of American English, along with the other allophones of /t/,[t h ,t = , ʔ, t] has been accounted for in various formal frameworks by assuming a number of different abstract mechanisms and entities. The desirability or usefulness of these formalisms is not at issue in the present paper. Instead, a computationally explicit model of categorization is used (Skousen 1989, 1992) in order to account for the distribution of the allophones of /t/ without recourse to such formalisms. The simulations that were carried out suggest that they are not needed because analogy to surface apparent variables such as phones and word boundaries is sufficient to predict allophony. In analogy, the particular allophone of /t/ (i.e. [ɾ, t h , t = , ʔ, t]) that appears in a given context is determined on the basis of similarity to stored exemplars in the mental lexicon. From an acquisitional standpoint, categorization by analogy to stored exemplars dispenses with the need for rule induction although it does suggest that speakers group functionally related sounds into mental categories, a process that is influenced to a great deal by orthography. Analogy also explains the stochastic nature of linguistic performance. In the present study, 3,719 tokens of the allophones of the phoneme /t/ were extracted from the TIMIT corpus and constitute the database from which analogs were chosen. The variables used included the three phones or boundaries on either side of /t/, and the stress of the syllables preceding and following /t/. The model proves quite successful in predicting the correct allophone, and the errors made are generally possible alternative pronunciations (e.g. moun[ʔ]ain, moun[t h ]ain). The success rate changes little when only small sub-samples of the database are incorporated. In addition, exemplar-modeling is found to be quite robust because even when a feature such as stress is eliminated, (a feature which is critical in most rule approaches), allophony is still highly predictable.

This article argues that lexical metaphors should be seen as graded: they differ in their conventionalized ability to activate concepts from the source domain. Such differences in metaphorical strength are analyzed, along with other (graded) dimensions of conventionality. Co-occurrence patterns for conventionalized metaphors from the WEIGHT domain in Swedish are investigated in some detail, making use of extensive corpus data. The results indicate large differences in metaphorical strength. This provides implications for the relation between conceptual and lexical levels of metaphor, which are found to be more dialectic than usually assumed, especially within Conceptual Metaphor Theory.

Günter Radden and Klaus-Uwe Panther (eds.), Studies in Linguistic Motivation. (Cognitive Linguistics Research 28.) Mouton de Gruyter: Berlin/New York, 2004, 390 pp, ISBN 3-11-018245-9 (cloth)(Réka Benczes) Jonathan Charteris-Black. Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis . Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 262 pages. ISBN: 1-4039-3292-1 hardback.(Christopher Hart) Andrea Tyler and Vyvyan Evans. The Semantics of English Prepositions. Spatial Scenes, Embodied Meaning and Cognition . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, xii+254pp., ISBN 0-521-81430-8.(Diana M. Lewis) Dmitrij Dobrovol'skij and Elisabeth Piirainen. Figurative Language: Crosscultural and Cross-linguistic Perspectives . Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005, xii+419 pp., ISBN: 0-08-043870-9 (hardcover).(Birte Lönneker-Rodman and Astrid Reining)