Volume 30, Issue 3 -

The current study examines the effectiveness of a CL-based force dynamic (FD) lesson relative to a more conventional approach that seeks to convey the target semantics through corresponding L1 forms. Exp. 1 ( N =67) examined Japanese EFL students’ acquisition of the English verbs force, get, have, help, let, make , and prevent , comparing the effectiveness of force dynamic explanations with dynamic diagrams and a translation-based approach. Both groups showed significant learning on both the posttest and delayed posttest, but the FD group’s greater gains over the conventional instruction on both the posttest and delayed posttest did not reach significance. Exp. 2 ( N =97) replicated most of the Exp. 1 conditions but with a slightly altered instructional format to ensure participant’s focus on force dynamic relationships. The FD group’s greater gains on a posttest given three weeks following instruction fell short of statistical significance. Exp. 3 ( N =54) compared the effectiveness of a FD lesson using dynamic images with a lesson without such images and found no significant differences between the groups. The three experiments demonstrate that CL-based instruction on force dynamics provides a viable alternative to conventional instruction in which target semantics are conveyed through translation.

The relationship between construal and redundancy has not been previously explored empirically. Russian aspect allows speakers to construe situations as either Perfective or Imperfective, but it is not clear to what extent aspect is determined by context and therefore redundant. We investigate the relationship between redundancy and open construal by surveying 501 native Russian speakers who rated the acceptability of both Perfective and Imperfective verb forms in complete extensive authentic contexts. We find that aspect is largely redundant in 81% of uses, and in 17% of contexts aspect is relatively open to construal. We contend that anchoring in redundant contexts likely facilitates the independence of construal in contexts with less redundancy. However further research is needed to discover what makes contexts redundant since known cues for aspect are absent in the majority of such contexts. Native speakers are fairly consistent in giving the original aspect high ratings, but less consistent in rating the non-original aspect, indicating potential problems in testing the reactions of speakers to non-authentic data.

This article presents a Mental Space model for analyzing linguistic patterns in news narratives. The model was applied in a corpus study categorizing various linguistic markers of viewpoint transfers between the mental spaces that readers must conceptualize while processing news narratives: a Reality Space representing the journalist and reader’s projected here-and-now viewpoint; a News Narrative Space representing the newsworthy events from a there-and-then viewpoint; and an Intermediate Space representing the information of the news actors provided from a temporal viewpoint in-between the newsworthy events and the present. Viewpoint transfers and their markers were examined in a corpus of 100 Dutch crime news narratives published over a period of fifty years. The results reveal clear patterns, which indicate that both linguistic structures and narrative-based as well as genre-based inferences play a role in the processing of news narratives. The results furthermore clarify how these narratives have been gradually crystallizing into a genre over the past decades. These findings elucidate the complex yet fluent process of conceptually moving between mental spaces, thus advancing our understanding of the relation between the linguistic and the cognitive representation of narrative discourse.

The experiential, embodied nature of primary metaphors endows them with a universal flavor of interest to the present-day global advertising needs. Based on the analysis of 500 printed advertisements corresponding to the top ten fast food brands currently in the market, this paper investigates the visual representation and functions of primary metaphors within this advertising genre. In contrast to what has been reported to be the case with resemblance metaphors used in advertising, primary metaphors do not have the product as their source or target domains. The connection between the primary metaphor and the product is established in a specific way, which reveals a close interaction with other cognitive (i.e. hyperbole and metonymy) and pragmatic (i.e. derivation of explicatures) operations. In addition, the paper explores how primary metaphors combine with one another and with other resemblance metaphors. The study of these interplays reveals new patterns of conceptual interaction (i.e. one-target and multiple-target primary metaphor clusters) and opens a window onto the varied functions performed by primary metaphors in the narrative of advertising (i.e. enhancing the conceptual layout of the product, highlighting one aspect of it, motivating, constraining and/or enriching lower-level resemblance metaphors).

The reason which is generally given in the usage-based literature to account for the retention of irregularity in high frequency items during analogical change is entrenchment : a frequently occurring irregular linguistic unit resists analogical levelling because it is highly entrenched in speakers’ mental lexicons through its repeated use. Although previous research similarly suggests that the entrenchment of irregular and regularised forms competing during analogical levelling should be proportional to their frequency of use, evidence for this relation between frequency and entrenchment comes exclusively from corpus-based studies; what is missing, therefore, are behavioural tests contrasting the competing innovative and conservative forms. The present paper aims to provide converging evidence for an entrenchment-based explanation of frequency patterns in analogical change on the basis of data obtained from an experiment in which participants are presented with traditional and analogical variants of a variable currently undergoing analogical levelling. Differences in processing latencies obtained during the experiment are interpreted as differences in entrenchment. The results provide i) evidence in favour of the prevalent entrenchment-based explanation of the conserving effect of frequency in analogical change, and ii) evidence of the current state and spread of the change under investigation.

This paper investigates the effect of the high frequency of occurrence of a verb in a syntactic frame on speakers’ selection of that syntactic frame for other verbs. We hypothesize that the frequent co-occurrence of a syntactic frame and a particular verb (what we call an anchor verb) leads to a strong association between the verb and the frame analogous to the relationship between a category and its best exemplar. Our Verb Anchor Hypothesis claims that verbs that are more semantically similar to the anchor are more likely to occur in that syntactic frame than verbs that are less semantically similar to the anchor. We tested the Verb Anchor Hypothesis on the dative alternation which involves the meaning-preserving ditransitive and prepositional frames. A corpus study determined that give was the anchor verb for the ditransitive frame. We then examined whether high semantic similarity to give increases the likelihood of an alternating verb (e.g. to hand ) occurring in the ditransitive frame ( Mary handed the boy a book ) rather than in the prepositional frame ( Mary handed a book to the boy ). The results of several logistic regression analyses show that semantic similarity to give makes a unique contribution to predicting the choice of the ditransitive frame aside from other factors known to affect syntactic frame selection. Additional analyses suggest that the Verb Anchor Hypothesis might also hold for more narrowly-defined subclasses of alternating verbs.