Volume 29, Issue 3 -

Apart from references to perception, words such as see and listen have shared, non-literal meanings across diverse languages. Such cross-linguistic meanings have not been systematically investigated as they appear in their natural home — informal spoken interaction. We present a qualitative examination of the semantic associations of perception verbs based on recorded everyday conversation in thirteen diverse languages. Across these diverse communities, spontaneous interaction provides evidence for two commonly-discussed extensions of perception verbs — perception~cognition, hearing~linguistic communication — as well as illustrating other meanings and functions (e.g., the use of perception verbs as discourse markers) that have been less appreciated heretofore. The range of usage that is readily observable in informal conversation makes it clear that this type of data must take center stage for the empirically grounded study of semantics. Moreover, these data suggest that commonalities in polysemous meanings may rely not only on universal cognition, but also on the universal exigencies of social interaction.

The paper examines the semantic effects of modification in phrases combining verbs with so-called short adverbs in French, that is, adjectives (A) used as modifiers of the verb (V), as in aller direct ‘to go direct’ (VA structures). For this purpose, a sample of over 3200 attested examples has been analyzed. Far from being simple verb modifiers in the sense of “manner” modification, the qualitative analysis shows that short adverbs also refer to other features of the event, e.g. participant, instrument, source, goal, result, circumstance, and the speaker’s attitude. These manifold modification scopes are then described by means of a newly created event-modification frame. The theoretical discussion of these results tackles the relationship between structure, construction, and baseline elaboration, constructions being conceived as cognitive developments of baseline VA structure. Baseline elaboration thus turns out to be a necessary complementary approach to construction grammar. However, neither construction nor baseline elaboration allows the full prediction of the meaning of a given VA structure since both ways of accessing meaning leave considerable space for inferential interpretation. The corpus also allows the quantification of the modified event features, that is, the frequency with which the slots of the frame are accessed by modification via VA structure. Quantification thereby provides the general modification profile of VA structures (as opposed to the individual modification profiling of a given VA structure in a single utterance).

The current study uses principles from Cognitive Grammar to better account for the symbolic integration of gesture and speech. Drawing on data collected from language use, we examine the use of two attention-directing strategies that are expressed through gesture, beats and pointing. It has been claimed that beats convey no semantic information. We propose that beat gestures are symbolic structures. It has also been noted that beats are often overlaid on other gestures. To date, however, no detailed explanation has been offered to account for the conceptual and phonological integration of beats with other co-expressed gestures. In this paper, we explore the integration of beats and pointing gestures as complex gestural expressions. We find that simple beat gestures, as well as beat gestures co-expressed with pointing gestures, are used to direct attention to meanings in speech that are associated with salient components of stancetaking acts. Our account further reveals a symbolic motivation for the apparent “superimposing” of beats onto pointing gestures. By closely examining actual usage events, we take an initial step toward demonstrating how the symbolic elements of both beats and points are integrated in multimodal constructions.

In spite of the growing body of research on frames of spatial reference, a number of important questions remain unanswered. This study explores reference frame use in Bashkir, based on a linguistic matching task and a nonverbal task. In the linguistic task, speakers relied freely on intrinsic and relative frames. In intrinsic descriptions, two different kinds of mapping were attested: a mapping based on the Ground’s function, and a mapping based on the Ground’s shape. Several factors were identified that affect the choice of linguistic description, including lexical choice, the chair’s orientation with respect to the viewer, and the speaker’s age. Interference from Russian was not a significant factor. The repair strategies speakers used when encountering misunderstanding suggest that they were not aware of the source of their difficulties. A number of previous studies reported, for different languages, a correlation between reference frame use in linguistic and nonlinguistic tasks, supporting the linguistic relativity hypothesis. The data from Bashkir shows no such correlation: nonverbal coding strategies did not correspond to the same individual’s linguistic strategies, but correlated with the use of Russian in linguistic descriptions. I interpret this finding tentatively as pointing toward a mediated relationship between spatial cognition and language.

Address inversion occurs in many languages of the world and involves figurative use of kinship terms in the “reversed” meaning. In pragmatically defined contexts, a son can be called ‘daddy’, a daughter ‘mummy’, etc. The article explains general cognitive mechanisms underlying this widespread linguistic behavior, drawing parallels to other strategies based on opposition and used to express positive emotions. A detailed case study of Swahili will demonstrate that the phenomenon of address inversion is best understood, when a cognitive analysis takes into account a full sociolinguistic and cultural context. In addition, variation observed in Swahili usage patterns of address inversion provides insights into paths of semantic change which some kinship terms have undergone evolving into general words of endearment or discourse markers. The article contributes to cognitive linguistic research on emotions and words of endearment, and to studies on polysemy of kinship terms. The results shed light on general issues of language-culture interface and sociolinguistic contexts of semantic change.

The two-way typology proposed by Leonard Talmy has been extremely influential in the past few decades, and has led to a large number of publications. But while the majority of the literature is devoted to the identification of the verb-framed or satellite-framed status of individual languages, relatively little (if any) research focuses on the foundation of this theory. This article addresses the nature of the macro-event, a fundamental concept for the Talmyan two-way typology, proposing a diachronic aspect of the macro-event, an aspect that seems to be under-appreciated or even neglected. It argues that a macro-event results from the integration of two simpler events through grammaticalization in Mandarin. This hypothesis is supported by the behavior of directional complements in Mandarin Chinese in that these directional complements in combination with the main verbs can express all the five types of the macro-events that Talmy has analyzed to establish his typology, and that these macro-events themselves represent an integration of two simpler events and exhibit various degrees of grammaticalization. This study brings together two seemingly unrelated areas of research, that is, the area of event structure and that of grammaticalization, thus providing a new perspective on the Talmyan typological paradigm. The result, though supported by the data in Mandarin Chinese, might have universal value and implications for other languages as well.