Volume 34, Issue 2

Unlike previous studies which generally seem to focus more on Hausa metaphorical expressions, this study investigates a wide range of uses of ίdὸ ‘eye’ in its constructional metonymy patterns in the language by exploring corpus data that contain over 300 eye-related expressions. We observe that some constructional metonymies maintain a set of fixed words and syntax in activating conceptual shifts and producing eye metonymies while others have semi-fixed patterns and produce the same metonymies. Lexical items like tsόkάlế , kὰn , ὰ , dὰ , and bὰsίrὰ among others are constant constituents in the constructional metonymies in which they appear. In the metonymic chaining, the basic mapping of eye metonymies occurs via the part for part relation under E-metonymies and the sub- for supercategory relation under C-metonymies. We also observe that E→E→C coding has the highest chained metonymic structure in the creation of the eye metonymies. Both attributive and predicative colligates motivate metonymic senses in the language. Finally, our analysis reveals that the eye is metonymically conceptualized and semantically extended to various target domains and produces metonymic conceptualizations that make the eye stand for vision, desire, envy, control, attention, perception, person, meeting, brain, intelligence, and so on.

Disruptions in theory of mind faculties and the ability to relate to an intersubjective reality are widely thought to be crucial to schizophrenic symptomology. This paper applies a cognitive linguistic framework to analyze spontaneous perspective-taking in two corpora of stories told by people with a schizophrenia diagnosis. We elicited natural narrative language use through life story interviews and a guided storytelling task and analyzed the linguistic construal of viewpoint in these stories. For this analysis, we developed a reliable and widely applicable viewpoint model that allows for the categorization and quantification of speakers’ linguistic presentation and navigation of spatiotemporal domains. We found that our participants skillfully presented, navigated and embedded different narrative viewpoints through a variety of linguistic viewpoint devices. They presented complex viewpoints of other people in both the here-and-now of the interaction and the there-and-then of a narrative, and made use of transition markers to demarcate spatiotemporal discourse domains. We found no differences in viewpoint variables when comparing their guided stories to a control group. If problems with intersubjectivity are indeed an essential part of schizophrenia, an explanation of how this group can take on and navigate complex linguistic viewpoints in natural narrative interaction is called for.

This paper introduces Chinese synthetic verbs and analyses their contributions to debates in manner/result complementarity studies and cognitive typology studies. Chinese synthetic verbs simultaneously express manner information and path/result information, but encode them into separate root slots under Beavers and Koontz-Garboden’s (2012. Manner and result in the roots of verbal meaning. Linguistic Inquiry 43(3). 331–369) scopal modifier test, so they differ from English “manner+result verbs” and further challenge the manner/result complementarity hypothesis. Synthetic verbs followed by redundant path/result verbs constitute double-framing structures that twice encode the framing information, and the non-motion case, i.e., the “synthetic verb+result verb” structure, supplements Croft et al.’s (2010. Revising Talmy’s typological classification of complex event constructions. In Hans C. Boas (ed.), Contrastive studies in construction grammar , vol. 10, 201–235. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company) classification that only includes the motion case, so that Chinese synthetic verbs complement the discussion on double-framing structures. This paper thereby further falsifies the manner/result complementarity hypothesis and provides an overall illustration of the double-framing structure in cognitive typology. This paper also illustrates the diachronic changes of manner, which might be universal and await further investigation.

According to the (in)famous fourth law of Kuryłowicz (K4), when a morphological doublet arises in a language, the newer form becomes associated with the prototypical, basic meaning, while the old form takes a secondary meaning. This paper takes a first attempt at a more thorough inquiry of K4 to assess whether prototypicality of meaning has an effect on morphological change. Three studies on historical Dutch are taken on: - en versus - s plurals, the apocope of schwa and the apocope of - de. The effects of prototypicality are analysed both on a token level (differences in meaning within lemmas) as well as on a type level (differences between lemmas). As proxies for prototypicality of meaning (psycho)linguistic predictors are used, such as concreteness, age of acquisition, chronology of meaning, meaning frequency and metaphor. Results show no clear effect of prototypicality on a token level, but they do suggest an effect on a type level: more concrete meanings tend to show up more often with the newer variant. Yet these results may also be ascribed to iconicity as the newer variants in these cases are the shorter ones and concrete meanings tend to be represented by shorter words than abstract ones.

This paper investigates three morphosyntactic alternations in Estonian – those between the exterior locative cases allative, adessive and ablative and the corresponding postpositions peale ‘onto’, peal ‘on’ and pealt ‘off’. Based on the Complexity Principle (e.g., Rohdenburg, Günter. 2002. Processing complexity and the variable use of prepositions in English. In Hubert Cuyckens & Günter Radden (eds.), Perspectives on prepositions , 79–100. Tübingen: Niemeyer), we expect cognitively more complex constructions to use more explicit (i.e., morphologically more substantial) marking by means of a postposition. Further, we expect variation to be conditioned similarly in all three semantic categories. For each of the three alternations, a random sample of the two outcomes (case vs. postposition) from the Estonian National Corpus is used, resulting in 3,000 data points. Using properties of the Landmark phrase as independent variables in Bayesian mixed-effects logistic regression models, we predict the choice of postpositions over case-marked realisations. Of the patterns found, only the frequency-related one supports our complexity-related hypothesis. We conclude that the Complexity Principle, in its general form, has little explanatory power for the Estonian constructions at hand and, in particular, that the derived principle of ‘analytic support’ is not generally applicable. We show, however, that the grammatical knowledge of Estonian exterior locative cases and the corresponding postpositions is regulated by our three factors in a relatively uniform way.