Volume 23, Issue 2

This paper explores the relationship between people's mental imagery for their experiences of paths and roads and the metaphorical use of path and road in discourse. We report the results of two studies, one a survey examining people's mental imagery about their embodied experiences with paths and roads, with the second providing a corpus analysis of the ways path and road are metaphorically used in discourse. Our hypothesis is that both people's mental imagery for path and road, and speakers' use of these words in metaphorical contexts are strongly guided by their embodied understandings of real-world events related to travel on paths and roads. The results of these studies demonstrate how bodily experiences with artifacts partly constrains not only how specific conceptual metaphors emerge, but how different metaphorical understandings are applied in talk about abstract entities and events.

The acquisition of the past tense has received substantial attention in the psycholinguistics literature, yet most studies report data from English or closely related Indo-European languages. We report on a past tense elicitation study on 136 4–6-year-old children that were acquiring a highly inflected Finno-Ugric (Uralic) language—Finnish. The children were tested on real and novel verbs (N = 120) exhibiting (1) productive, (2) semi-productive, or (3) non-productive inflectional processes manipulated for frequency and phonological neighbourhood density (PND). We found that Finnish children are sensitive to lemma/base frequency and PND when processing inflected words, suggesting that even though children were using suffixation processes, they were also paying attention to the item level properties of the past tense verbs. This paper contributes to the growing body of research suggesting a single analogical/associative mechanism is sufficient in processing both productive (i.e., regular-like) and non-productive (i.e., irregular-like) words. We argue that seemingly rule-like elements in inflectional morphology are an emergent property of the lexicon.

The article focuses on the gradient phonetic effects occurring at the prefix-stem boundary in Polish and their phonological interpretation. The environment of a consonant-final prefix followed by a vowel-initial stem exhibits remarkable variation as to the presence of specific phonetic cues, ranging from their being completely absent or very weak to the presence of strong ones, such as the occurrence of a glottal stop combined with partial devoicing of the prefix-final consonant and full glottalization of the stem-initial vowel. A significant correlation is observed between the number of the phonetic cues marking the morphological boundary and the lexical frequency, as well as certain other factors. The gradient character of the prefix-stem juncture in Polish is independently motivated by the speakers' attitudes as revealed in a psycholinguistic test, which demonstrates that the low-level phonetic features contribute to the mental representation of language grammar. The discussion of the data is conducted in the larger context of Polish sandhi, phonotactics and neighbourhood density effects, providing a functional explanation of the analysed problem and of certain prefix-suffix asymmetries. All the evidence in the article points to the importance of language usage criteria in shaping a language grammar and to the necessity of recognizing this fact in linguistic analysis.

In this paper I propose a new understanding of the often-noted phenomenon that much of our conceptualization and reasoning about moral propriety is framed by a set of metaphors that originate from a conceptual structure generated from our experiences with dirt and cleanliness. I argue that reliance on the dirty-clean dichotomy to conceptualize moral propriety or impropriety emerges from metaphorical extensions into various realms of experience (e.g., sports, governance, introspection) grounded in an idealized cognitive model in which dirt is conceptualized as matter out of place and clean is conceptualized as ordered arrangement. The analysis provides a unified framework with which to understand the use of dirty and clean as metaphors to categorize objects, events and actions in the moral domain. Finally, I suggest that the dirty-clean distinction is useful for understanding broader cultural issues (such as moral panics regarding media, immigration and disease), and I show that the conceptualization of certain non-moral properties can be understood using the same framework (e.g., the quality of being exceptional) of objects and actions.

This paper examines the lexical encoding of events of “cutting and breaking” in the Oceanic language Äiwoo. It shows that this language differs from previously described languages in this domain in several ways: in having complex “cut and break” forms consisting of two bound elements referring to distinct aspects of the cut and break event; in integrating these forms into a cline of lexicalisation vs. serialisation, arguably reflecting a conceptual-semantic continuum of event integration; and in violating previously suggested generalisations concerning the behaviour of verbs of cutting and breaking in inchoative alternations. It shows that lexicalisation may clearly be a matter of degree, and that the degree to which an event is construed as being constituted by independent subevents vs. subevents which cannot occur independently may be directly reflected in the type of formal expression a language provides to describe it. Furthermore, it suggests that the distinction between “cut” and “break” expressions, assumed in some of the literature to be a fairly straightforward bipartition, may in fact be more of a cline. The paper thus demonstrates the complexity of the cognitive domain of cutting and breaking events and the range of strategies that may be employed by a language in describing them.

This paper aims to provide a clearer understanding of the widely discussed topic of grammaticalization of constructions . One unresolved problem concerns the identification of the relevant constructional level of language change, i.e., either the substantial level of specific occurrences or the schematic level of generalizations. Another issue addressed in many current analyses is the degree of schematicity of analogical forces. The present case study addresses these questions in the context of Spanish binominal quantifiers, basing its claims on synchronic and diachronic corpus analysis. The synchronic layering of uses in Present-Day Spanish—which encompasses quantifying and premodifying uses in addition to literal head uses—will be argued to reflect the outcome of grammaticalization. The synchronic as well as diachronic semantic clustering of binominal quantifiers and the prototype function of high-frequency montón de ‘heap of’ are hypothesized to result from the close interaction between analogical thinking and conceptual persistence. In line with the usage-based approach to language change, the dramatic increase in frequency observed for quantifying montón de will lead me to distinguish several constructional levels of change and to establish a schematic ‘N1 de N2’ pattern linked to quantity as a driving force. The strong collocational preferences characterizing the individual binominal constructions, the systematicity of the premodifying use and the tendency to reinforce conceptual elements of the original head use will be accounted for by considering the quantity assessment of the (schematic) binominal string as just one possible realization of co-extensiveness, in addition to quality assessment.