Volume 28, Issue 2 -

Miller’s (1956, The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review 63(2). 81–97) working memory (WM) capacity of around seven items, plus or minus two, was never found by usage-based linguists to be a recurrent pattern in language. Thus, it has not figured prominently in cognitive models of grammar. Upon reflection, this is somewhat unusual, since WM has been considered a fundamental cognitive domain for information processing in psychology, so one might have reasonably expected properties such as capacity constraints to be reflected in language use and structures derived from use. This paper proposes that Miller’s (1956) number has not been particularly productive in usage-based linguistics because it turns out to have been an overestimate. A revised WM capacity has now superseded it within cognitive science, a “magic number four plus or minus one” (Cowan 2001, The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24(1). 87–185). This paper suggests, drawing on evidence from spoken language corpora and multiple languages, that a range of linguistic structures and patterns align with this revised capacity estimate, unlike Miller’s (1956), ranging from phrasal verbs, idioms, n-grams, the lengths of intonation units and some abstract grammatical properties of phrasal categories and clause structure.

The present article examines the usage of coordinators as subordinating devices. An investigation of a corpus of spoken American English reveals that and and but can occupy clause-final position and be used for marking syntactic and functional asymmetries. It has been pointed out that such final coordinators arise as a result of interactional contingencies (Barth-Weingarten 2014, Dialogism and the emergence of final particles: The case of and . In Susanne Günthner, Wolfgang Imo & Jörg Bücker (eds.), Grammar and dialogism , 335–366. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter). However, a cross-linguistic observation suggests that not all coordinators can be used as clause-final elements. Our research demonstrates that the emergence of clause-final and and but does not only come from interactional needs but also presupposes typological requirements. Head-initial (VO) languages like English, where adverbial clauses are marked by clause-initial subordinators, are subject to three competing motivations for the ordering of main and adverbial clauses (Diessel 2005, Competing motivations for the ordering of main and adverbial clauses. Linguistics 43(3). 449–470). Our study contends that clause-final coordinators serve as stopgap subordinators , which help to resolve such competition between the three motivating forces.

The paper combines the assumptions of Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar, Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar and Dependency Grammar, arguing for an analysis of clauses as multi-dimensional networks. The semantic pole of each dimension is a network of semantic relations, which stands in correspondence to formal aspects of clause structure such as case morphology, word order and prosody. The proposed approach is applied to the study of core phenomena of Hungarian. The D1 dimension of Hungarian finite clauses is concerned with frame semantic (“thematic”) relations and their coding (primarily by morphology) on the formal side. The D2 and D3 dimensions pertain to speech function and contextualization, respectively, with the semantic relations marked by word order and prosody. It is hoped that the proposed account of Hungarian may inform both cross-linguistic comparisons and theory development in cognitive linguistics.

What is the appropriate conceptual structure involved in conceptual metaphors? Various authors offer a large number of terms to discuss the issue. While domain is the most common term, many others are also used, including frame, image schema, cognitive model, idealized cognitive model, scene, schema, scenario, etc. The problem is compounded by the fact that the terms mean different things to different researchers. The main goal of the paper is to create some clarity in this terminological and theoretical confusion. I propose that conceptual metaphors simultaneously involve conceptual structures, or units, on four levels of schematicity: the level of image schemas, the level of domains, the level of frames, and the level of mental spaces. I call the resulting framework the “multi-level view of conceptual metaphor.” The multi-level view of metaphor can provide us with insights into a number of problems that have been raised and debated in the CMT literature. I show that the study of metaphor within such a framework can legitimately be pursued on the four levels of schematicity and that no level can be singled out as the only appropriate level of analysis.