Volume 25, Issue 4

The present study explores the processing of temporal information in event knowledge by focusing on the transition from an earlier, source state to a later, goal state. Participants were presented with an event verb followed by antonymous adjectives or adverbs denoting an earlier state and a later state. The states were presented either chronologically (to cook: cold – hot) or inversely (to cook: hot – cold) with regard to the denoted event. Participants were asked to identify either the earlier or the later state. We found that later states are identified faster and more accurately than earlier states. Later states presented chronologically were identified even more quickly than later states presented inversely. We attribute our results to the fact that directedness towards the goal state is a general principle of cognition which plays a fundamental role in language and in simulation, whereby language processing provides faster and more direct access to goals even than simulation.

Within the model of Cognitive Grammar, the concept of dominion is fundamental to the analysis of the conceptualizer's attitude toward an event or a proposition. However, the concept has, first and foremost, been understood in epistemic terms, whereas there has been less concern with the conceptualizer's efforts to influence and manipulate the course of events in the world. This being so, the present paper shows that the conceptualizer's dominion of effective control is relevant in a number of linguistic contexts. The analysis provides evidence for this particular feature in factive contexts, deontic contexts, contexts of volition and causation, and in adverbial clauses of purpose, manner and condition. The analysis further shows that the conceptualizer's dominion of effective control is capable of providing a conceptually grounded explanation for the occurrence of the Spanish and the Portuguese subjunctive mood in these grammatical contexts.

In recent years, there has been a growing consensus that speakers store large numbers of preconstructed phrases and low-level patterns, even when these can be derived from more abstract constructions, and that ordinary language use relies heavily on such relatively concrete, lexically specific units rather than abstract rules or schemas that apply “across the board”. One of the advantages of such an approach is that it provides a straightforward explanation of how grammar can be learned from the input; and in fact, previous work (e.g. Dąbrowska and Lieven 2005) has demonstrated that the utterances children produce can be derived by superimposing and juxtaposing lexically specific units derived directly from utterances that they had previously experienced. This paper argues that such a “recycling” account can also explain adults' ability to produce complex fluent speech in real time, and explores the implications of such a view for theories of language representation and processing.

In this paper we address lexical polysemy in a constructional perspective, arguing that each of the conversational meanings we identify for Modern Greek ela (2 nd person singular imperative of the verb erxome ‘come’) is appropriately modeled as a conceptual gestalt of formal (including prosodic) and semantic-pragmatic properties. In turn-initial position, ela is used to challenge a preceding utterance; we show that the variations in the kind of challenge expressed are systematically tied to the word that follows ela , the speech act force and the sentence type of the preceding utterance, and finally prosodic and textual cues. To the extent that these varieties of conversational challenge are conditioned by particular contextual features, we treat them as a family of related constructions whose common features can be captured in the form of a generalized ela construction abstracted from the different sub-patterns. Our analysis thus demonstrates the appropriateness of a constructional framework for dealing with the different kinds of parameters involved in dialogic meaning and strongly suggests that at least some of the variation inherent in discourse is amenable to a grammatical description, so that sentence-level and supra-clause patterns can be analyzed in a uniform way.

Crosslinguistic studies of expressions of motion events have found that Talmy's binary typology of verb-framed and satellite-framed languages is reflected in language use. In particular, Manner of motion is relatively more elaborated in satellite-framed languages (e.g., in narrative, picture description, conversation, translation). The present research builds on previous controlled studies of the domain of human motion by eliciting descriptions of a wide range of manners of walking and running filmed in natural circumstances. Descriptions were elicited from speakers of two satellite-framed languages (English, Polish) and three verb-framed languages (French, Spanish, Basque). The sampling of events in this study resulted in four major semantic clusters for these five languages: walking, running, non-canonical gaits (divided into bounce-and-recoil and syncopated movements), and quadrupedal movement (crawling). Counts of verb types found a broad tendency for satellite-framed languages to show greater lexical diversity, along with substantial within group variation. Going beyond most earlier studies, we also examined extended descriptions of manner of movement, isolating types of manner. The following categories of manner were identified and compared: attitude of actor, rate, effort, posture, and motor patterns of legs and feet. Satellite-framed speakers tended to elaborate expressive manner verbs, whereas verb-framed speakers used modification to add manner to neutral motion verbs.