Volume 26, Issue 2 -

By using the concept of ‘multiple grammars,’ this paper develops the view of an individual speaker’s cognitive organization of grammar. Although conversation, one type of spoken language environment, plays a crucial role in the emergence of grammar, for some speakers in a literate society, the written language environment may also contribute to developing a grammar. The two language environments are expected to provide unique incentives to shaping grammar differently as they diverge greatly in terms of media types (sound vs graph), constraints (online processing vs detachment), and purposes (interaction vs ideational formation), among others. At the same time, speakers may come in contact with and acquire additional sets of grammar for specific genres. Though the grammars acquired in different genre environments may be merged at the most abstract level, each grammar contains genre-specific formulaic expressions and grammatical resources with varying degrees of granularity. Speakers may conduct their routine linguistic activities in an informal conversation by employing reusable formulaic expressions of various types and rudimentary combinatory algorithms, but when they engage in more complex verbal tasks (politicians engaging in a debate, interviewees reconstructing past experiences), they may employ more abstract grammatical resources including those that were acquired from written language. The paper explores these suggestions by performing text and statistical analyses of several Japanese discourse samples.

In a small group of deaf sign language users from different countries and with no shared language, the signers’ initial conversational interactions are investigated as they meet in pairs for the very first time. This case study allows for a unique insight into the initial stages of pidginisation and the conceptual processes involved. The participants use a wide range of linguistic and communicative resources, and it can be argued that they construct shared multilingual-multimodal cognitive spaces for the purpose of these conversations. This research explores the nature of these shared multilingual-multimodal spaces, how they are shaped by the signers in interaction, and how they can be understood in terms of conceptual blending. The research also focuses on the meta-linguistic skills that signers use in these multilingual-multimodal interactions to “make meaning”.

This article reports on a linguistic study examining the use of real space blending in the tactile signed languages of Norwegian and Swedish signers who are both deaf and blind. Tactile signed languages are typically produced by interactants in contact with each other’s hands while signing. Of particular interest to this study are utterances which not only consist of the signer producing signs with his or her own hands (or other body parts), but which also recruit the other interactant’s hands (or another body part). These utterances, although perhaps less frequent, are co-constructed, in a very real sense, and they illustrate meaning construction during emerging, embodied discourse. Here, we analyze several examples of these types of utterances from a cognitive linguistic and cognitive semiotic perspective to explore how interactants prompt meaning construction through touch and the involvement of each other’s bodies during a particular type of co-regulation.

This paper introduces an innovative method to aid the study of conceptual onomasiological research, with a specific emphasis on diachronic variation in the metonymic patterns with which a target concept is expressed. We illustrate how the method is applied to explore and visualize such diachronic changes by means of a case study on the metonymic patterns for woman in the history of Chinese. Visualization is done with the help of a Multidimensional Scaling solution based on the profile-based distance calculation (Geeraerts et al. 1999; Speelman et al. 2003) and by drawing diachronic trajectories in a set of MDS maps, corresponding to different metonymic targets. This method proves to be effective and feasible in detecting changes in the distribution of metonymic patterns in authentic historical corpus data. On the basis of this method, we can show that different targets exhibit different degrees of diachronic variation in their metonymic patterns. We find diachronically more stable targets (e.g. imperial woman ), targets with a dominant trend in diachronic variation (e.g. a woman ), and targets with highly fluctuating historical variation (e.g. beautiful woman ). Importantly, we can identify the cultural and social changes that may lie behind some of these changes. Examining the results uncovered by the method offers us a better understanding of the dynamicity of metonymic conceptualizations.

Although investigations of linguistic relativity originated in cultural anthropology, the role of culture in the interplay of language and cognition has rarely been addressed. The debate on whether the grammatical gender of nouns affects how people represent the entity denoted by the respective noun is a typical example of this. A common research strategy has been to compare the gender associations for non-animate entities as a function of their grammatical gender between two languages spoken in different cultural groups. In the study reported here, we try to disentangle linguistic and cultural effects on such gender associations, by focusing on members of one cultural group speaking two language variants that differ in whether or not they distinguish masculine and feminine gender. Participants were asked to assign a male or female voice to nouns from a broad range of semantic categories (animates, allegories and artefacts). Our findings indicate that the gender system does indeed have an impact on voice assignment. However, this grammatical effect is small compared to the variation induced by culturally conveyed associations within and across the semantic domains. In conclusion, we discuss some implications and guidelines for future research on how to control for culture as a problematic confound in cross-linguistic studies.

Ambridge and Goldberg (2008) found that long distance dependency (LDD) questions (e.g., Who did she mumble that she saw? ) do not seem to be formed by analogy with similar, more frequent sentences of the same type (e.g., What do you think X?; What did he say X? ), but, rather, that such questions are acceptable to the extent that the main verb backgrounds the complement clause (e.g., say > mumble ). Kalyan (2012) argued that this finding is compatible with a similarity-based account, provided that similarity between the verb and say/think is defined as similarity in the extent to which the verb backgrounds the complement clause. In the present article, I argue that Kalyan (2012) is correct, and that this phenomenon can be seen as an instance of a broader phenomenon whereby the fit between the properties of a particular item (e.g., a verb) and those of a particular construction slot (e.g., the VERB slot in the LDD question construction) is the primary determinant of the degree of (un)grammaticality of a possible generalization.