Volume 3, Issue 2

Relative clauses containing subject relative-pronouns (e.g. that go to Utah all the time ) are the prevalent type both across languages (Keenan and Comrie, Linguistic Inquiry 8: 63–69, 1977) and in conversation, accounting for 65% of relative clauses in the American National Corpus (Reali and Christiansen, Journal of Memory and Language 53: 1–23, 2007) and 67% of relative clauses in the corpus examined for this study, the Switchboard corpus. This fact appears attributable to parsing preferences, as per Hawkins (Language 75: 244–285, 1999, Efficiency and complexity in grammars, Oxford University Press, 2004), Gibson (Cognition 68: 1–76, 1998) and Gibson et al. (Cognitive Linguistics 16: 313–353, 2005): subject extractions are the most local filler-gap dependency and therefore impose the lowest burden on short-term memory. This explanation, however, not only lacks strong psycholinguistic support but also fails to explain a major pattern in Switchboard: subject relatives are not preferred across the board but only as modifiers of postverbal (object and oblique) nominals. We propose that the preference for subject relatives is an effect not of general-purpose interpretive or encoding constraints but rather of constructional licensing: the subject relative belongs to an entrenched syntactic routine, the Presentational Relative construction, e.g. I have friends that clip articles (McCawley, Lingua 53: 99–149, 1981; Lambrecht, Presentational cleft constructions in spoken French, John Benjamins, 1987, There was a farmer had a dog: Syntactic amalgams revisited: 319–33, 1988, Topic, focus, and secondary predication: The French presentational relative construction, John Benjamins, 2002). We investigate this hypothesis by examining the formal, semantic and pragmatic properties of relative-clause modifiers of postverbal nominals in the Switchboard corpus.

This paper explores the use of metaphorical expressions in the description of seizure experiences by patients with epilepsy and patients with psychogenic non-epileptic seizures. The paper addresses two main questions. First, what is the range of metaphorical expressions which patients use to describe their seizure experiences, and can these be related to conventional metaphors used by healthy individuals? Second, is the difference in the underlying cause of our patients' seizure experiences in any way reflected in their use of metaphorical expressions? The paper suggests that the answer to both of these questions is affirmative, which strengthens the embodiment hypothesis. Implications for our understanding of patients' experiences of seizures and of the difference between epileptic and non-epileptic seizures are also discussed.

This article provides some groundwork for applying the cognitive linguistic theory of force dynamics (Talmy, Cognitive Science 12: 49–100, 1988, Toward a cognitive semantics, MIT Press, 2000) to narrative discourse. It proposes that Talmy's analytic apparatus is suitable for revealing character-related dynamics in literature, especially by exploiting the previously unnoticed convergence with the notion of actancy proposed by the narratologist Greimas (Sémantique structurale, Larousse, 1966). Force imagery both in ordinary action descriptions and in metaphor opens a vista on how readers infer, stabilize, and elaborate narrative macro-representations of “who wants what” and “who does what to whom?” Hence, texts subtly encode aspects of higher-level story logic through forces, enabling readers (and scholars) to detect and scale up coherence patterns that shed light on character motives, protagonist interaction, and plot dynamics. A full-scale text linguistic analysis is proposed. My case study of about 500 text units found in Joseph Sheridan LeFanu's novella Carmilla (Oxford University Press, 1872) reveals a dynamic web of driving, penetrating, manipulating, attracting , and erupting forces between the two main protagonists, a beautiful girl vampire and her 19 year-old victim.

According to recent work on lexical pragmatics within the relevance-theoretic framework, grasping the intended meaning of a metaphorically used word requires a process of adjusting the linguistically encoded concept to derive an ad hoc concept whose denotation is broader than that of the lexical concept. Metaphorical uses are claimed to be one kind of loose use of language, on a continuum with approximations, hyperboles and other kinds of meaning extension. The question addressed in this paper is whether this account fully captures the processes involved in understanding metaphors and the kinds of cognitive effects they have. We tackle this question by examining the similarities and differences between metaphors and hyperboles and between metaphors and similes. The upshot of our analyses is two proposals, both requiring further investigation: (a) that a distinction should be drawn between the kind of ad hoc concepts derived for hyperbolic and other loose uses, on the one hand, and metaphorical uses, on the other, and (b) that the understanding of some metaphorical uses, in particular extended and/or novel creative cases, is achieved by a different mode of processing altogether, one which gives much greater weight to the literal meaning.

Adult speakers use verbs in syntactically appropriate ways. For example, they know implicitly that the boy hit at the fence is acceptable but the boy broke at the fence is not. We suggest that this knowledge is lexically encoded in semantic decompositions. The decomposition for break verbs (e.g. crack, smash ) is hypothesized to be more complex than that for hit verbs (e.g. kick, kiss ). Specifically, the decomposition of a break verb denotes that “an entity changes state as the result of some external force” whereas the decomposition for a hit verb denotes only that “an entity potentially comes in contact with another entity.” In this article, verbs of the two types were compared in a lexical decision experiment — Experiment 1 — and they were compared in sentence comprehension experiments with transitive sentences (e.g. the car hit the bicycle and the car broke the bicycle ) — Experiments 2 and 3. In Experiment 1, processing times were shorter for the hit than the break verbs and in Experiments 2 and 3, processing times were shorter for the hit sentences than the break sentences, results that are in accord with the complexities of the postulated semantic decompositions.