Volume 27, Issue 2 -

This study analyzes the linguistic patterns via both qualitative and quantitative data that manifest the underlying conceptual metaphor life is a show in Chinese. It starts with an analysis of the performing arts frame as the source domain of the show metaphor. The frame comprises three major aspects: people, performance , and venue , and each of them has a focal element, respectively role, opera , and stage . It argues that the second one, opera , which refers to “Chinese opera”, a prominent form of performing arts in traditional Chinese culture, is the central element that dominates the whole frame. A systematic qualitative analysis of linguistic data shows that, because its source domain centers on Chinese opera , the life is a show metaphor generates a large number of culture-specific linguistic instantiations in Chinese. A quantitative perspective supported by corpus data reinforces the argument that this metaphor plays a central role in the Chinese conceptualization of events and phenomena in various domains of life, constituting a core component of the Chinese cultural model of life. The study concludes that the show metaphor has a salient subversion life is an opera in Chinese, in contrast with its sister life is a play found salient in English.

Embodied approaches to comprehension propose that understanding language entails performing mental simulations of its content. The evidence, however, is mixed. Action-sentence Compatibility Effect studies (Glenberg and Kaschak 2002) report mental simulation of motor actions during processing of motion language. But the same studies find no evidence that language comprehenders perform spatial simulations of the corresponding locations. This challenges simulation-based approaches. If locations are not represented in simulation, but are still understood, then simulation may be unnecessary for understanding. We conducted a Location-sentence Compatibility experiment, to determine whether understanders mentally simulate locations. People did indeed simulate locations, but only when sentences used progressive (and not perfect) grammatical aspect. Moreover, mental simulations of locations differed for language about concrete versus abstract events. These findings substantiate the role of mental simulation in language understanding, while highlighting the importance of the grammatical form of utterances as well as their content.

Vietnamese speakers can describe the future as behind them and gesture forwards to indicate the past, which suggests they use a conceptual model of Time in which the future is behind and the past is in front. This type of model has previously been shown to be pervasive only among older speakers of Aymara in the Andes (Núñez and Sweetser 2006. With the future behind them: Convergent evidence from Aymara language and gesture in the crosslinguistic comparison of spatial construals of time. Cognitive Science 30. 401–450). Whereas Time in the Aymara model does not “move”, the present data show that Time in Vietnamese can “approach” from behind the Ego and “continue forward” into the past. To our knowledge, no other language has been identified with a model where Time moves from behind Ego to in front. Recognition of this model in Vietnamese will open up new research opportunities, particularly since the model does not seem to be endangered in Vietnamese.

This paper is a quantitative multifactorial study of the near-synonymous constructions let +V, allow + to V and permit + to V based on the British National Corpus. The study investigates the differences between these constructions with the help of 23 formal, semantic, social and collostructional variables. A Bayesian multinomial mixed-effects model reveals a remarkable alignment of the variables that represent different dimensions of variation, namely, the linguistic distance between the predicates, the conceptual distance between the events they represent, the distance between the speaker and the Permitter and Permittee on the animacy/entrenchment/empathy hierarchy, the social and communicative distance between the interlocutors, as well as the strength of collostructional attraction between the constructions and second verb slot fillers. The paper offers several possible explanations for this alignment from a cognitive, functional and historical perspective.

This paper builds on Langacker’s (in press. How to build an English clause. Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics 2(2)) analysis of subject-auxiliary inversion (SAI) as involving “existential negotiation”. Langacker’s account is completed by relating it to full verb inversion (FVI). In FVI, non-core elements are fronted, resulting in inversion without an auxiliary, as in Into the room walked Mary ; however, non-core elements are also frontable in SAI, as in Bitterly did we regret our decision . Do is treated as denoting full actualization and SAI is accounted for by focus on an exceptionally intense mode of actualization, whence the use of do to explicitly express what is focused on. The role of into the room in the FVI example is to define a locus into which an entity is introduced. Since this does not involve focus on the fact or manner of the verbal event’s actualization, do is not used. This leads to a different division of inverted structures than that of Chen (2013. Subject auxiliary inversion and linguistic generalization: Evidence for functional/cognitive motivation in language. Cognitive Linguistics 24. 1–32), who distinguishes those that merely reverse subject and auxiliary (argued to denote non-indicative mood) from those where the inverted auxiliary-subject order is accompanied by fronting of a non-subject element (treated as involving focus on the fronted item). It is argued here that fronting do -auxiliary marks focus on the actualization of the verbal event itself.