Cognitive Semantics

Scientific and Technical Translation (STT) is a highly complex and knowledge-intensive field of translation and cognitive linguistics is a usage-based linguistic framework which provides powerful theoretical tools for modelling knowledge organisation and representation in discourse. This book explores the interface between scientific and technical translation studies and cognitive linguistics by discussing the epistemological, contextual, textual and cross-linguistic dimensions of scientific and technical translation from a cognitive linguistic perspective. Particular emphasis is placed on explicitation and implicitation as indicators of the interaction between text and context in STT. The corpus-based investigation of the two phenomena illustrates the complex knowledge requirements pertaining to scientific and technical translation and demonstrates the explanatory power of cognitive linguistics with regard to important textual and contextual aspects of STT.

Suspendus aux lèvres d’un conteur, incapables d’interrompre la lecture d’un roman, captivés par un film haletant, nous faisons tous l’expérience quotidienne de ce plaisir apparemment paradoxal que nous tirons de notre insatisfaction provisoire face à un récit inachevé. Bien qu’une mode esthétique et théorique ait tenté de nous convaincre que ce plaisir était honteux, on peut néanmoins avoir l’intuition que le cœur vivant de la narrativité réside précisément dans ce nœud coulant, toujours plus serré à mesure que nous progressons dans l’histoire, qui nous attache à l’intrigue et creuse la temporalité par l’attente impatiente d’un dénouement. Si le récit a quelque chose à voir avec la manière dont nous éprouvons le temps, cette expérience n’apparaît jamais avec autant d’éclat que dans le suspense, la curiosité ou la surprise qui font la force des intrigues fictionnelles. La compréhension des fonctions narratives engage donc non seulement l’analyse littéraire, linguistique et sémiotique, mais aussi l’analyse cognitive et la psychologie des émotions.

This paper investigates how large multinational corporations use multimodal meaning-making resources to communicate a trustworthy corporate identity. It combines insights from Forceville’s work on pictorial and multimodal metaphor (Forceville 1996, 2002; Forceville and Urios-Aparisi, 2009) and key features of Fuoli and Paradis’ (2014) model of trust-repair discourse to examine the discursive dynamics of trust- building in a corpus of promotional corporate videos produced by some of the world’s largest corporations. The analysis shows that multimodal metaphors are deployed as key persuasive devices to promote three fundamental attributes of the companies’ trustworthiness, i.e. ability, integrity and benevolence.

This paper sheds some light on how trustworthiness is constructed through multimodal resources in corporate discourse and contributes to our understanding of the discursive dynamics of trust, which is still limited and fragmentary (Fuoli and Paradis, 2014; Linell and Keselman, 2011). But the study also carries implications for cognitive linguistic theory, in particular for conceptual metaphor theory. Three theoretical issues requiring further discussion are highlighted: (i) the distinction between conventional and novel metaphor and the question of ‘deliberateness’ (Steen, 2008), (ii) the usefulness of the notion of metaphor scenario (Musolff, 2006) as a descriptive tool in the realm of multimodal discourse, and (iii) the adequacy of Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) model versus Blending Theory (Fauconnier and Turner, 1996, 1998; Grady et al. 1999) for describing novel multimodal metaphors and accounting for the evaluative function they can perform in persuasive multimodal discourse.

Keywords: pictorial and multimodal metaphor, conceptual metaphor theory, blending, trust, corporate multimodal discourse

В настоящей статье, основываясь на принципе формально-семантического единства языковых элементов, мы попытались представить 34 значения двух разновидностей предлога ЗА как единую систему, развившуюся из генетически первичного пространственного предлога со значением «сзади».  Возможности и направления семантических переходов интерпретируются с помощью структурного и когнитивного подходов. Полученная система, которую лучше называть «концептуальным пространством» предлога ЗА, может быть соотнесена и с лексической полисемией, правда, в диахроническом аспекте.

The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns that is generally taken to reflect a semantic distinction. There are three approaches to what such a semantic distinction may consist in: an extension-based approach, an object-based approach, and a more recent grammar-based approach. The paper will pursue the grammar-based approach, on which count categories convey a notion of unity at a level of 'grammaticized individuation' to use Rothstein's (2017) term. It will argue that verbs with respect to their Davidsonian event argument position exhibit the diagnostics of mass, rather than count. This is correctly predicted by the grammar-based approach, but not object- or extension-based approaches. The paper will account for the mass diagnostics of verbs in terms of semantic selection.

Abstract: This paper examines words and constructions that Koromu speakers in Papua New Guinea (PNG) use to talk about tare ‘hurt/pain’ and other painful sensations. It also reflects on links to cultural and environmental influences in daily life, key life events, environmental knowledge and traditional health care. Terms such as warike ‘be/feel bad’, tare ‘hurts/pains’, perere ‘hurts: stings, cuts, burns’, and kaho ‘aches: burns, pierces’ are used in different constructions with varying emphases. These constructions are among the most typologically interesting in Koromu grammar. They are related to, but also distinct from, constructions found in other Papuan language. They include experiencer object constructions, serial verb constructions with the grammaticized valency-increasing verb here/he ‘PUT’, and nominal constructions with, or without, prominent noun phrase marking.

Introduction. Current demand for practicing intercultural dialogue in the educational space is of strategic importance for the future professional in today's convivial world. Purpose: This article describes psychological and pedagogical techniques for acquiring linguistic and cultural information in order to use it as an object of research and to form ideas or conceptions (to ideate) about this object in a cross-cultural context. Materials and methods: Logical analysis and interpretive case study based on the cognitive approach to creating learning specifications become the main methods in developing principles for incorporating idea generation, or ideation into academic practice. The material of the study was the analytical data of practical work on different sources of cultural heritage. The article provides examples of consideration of ideative objects "scream/cry" as authorial concepts in the visual language of E. Munch, V. Kandinsky and the story by I. Bunin and "punishment" in F. Dostoevsky. Results: Interpretations of ideation vary and will continue to vary. Here, ideation as dealing with the ideative object is a bridge to the "frame alignment" of the conceptual category, schematization, formative recovery of the idea, or conceptualisation. As an educational component, ideation is a multicyclic process involving students' actions (goal configuration, object field recognition, object localisation, object adaptation) triggered by the teacher's corresponding actions (purposefulness, problem situation modelling, object contingencies analysis, object fulfilment orientation). Conclusion: Education is the space where the foundations are laid for intercultural dialogue and thus for the interaction of cultures.

a presente comunicación constituye una propuesta metodológica y didáctica sobre el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje de las unidades fraseológicas (UFs) en las segundas lenguas. Las características formales y semánticas de estas construcciones lingüísticas generan una serie de dificultades y problemas en lo que respecta al procedimiento de su adquisición y aprendizaje. Para facilitar su presentación y descripción al profesor y su reconocimiento, aprendizaje y uso al alumno, se propone que el tratamiento de las UFs se haga de forma transversal y progresiva en clase de ELE.

This study adopts a lexicon-based approach to address violence on social media. It uses FrameNet 1.7 (fn) and WordNet 3.1 (wn) to build a hierarchical domain-specific language resource of violence. The proposed lexicon tethers fn’s innovative integration of linguistic and paralinguistic knowledge to wn’s hierarchically-organized database. This tether alleviates the need to gather all paralinguistic violence-associated scenes and organize their linguistic realizations hierarchically. The proposed methodology can be internationally applied, given the multilingual availability of fn and wn, to cognitively and quantitatively explore a concept or a phenomenon. The lexicon is applied, then, to a corpus representing posts and comments retrieved from Donald Trump’s Facebook public page. Results reveal that the proposed lexicon recalls 92.68 of the total violence-related words in the corpus with a 76.31 precision (F-score= 83.7). More important, relating wn to fn inspires the creation of new...

Finnish existential clauses are known for the case marking of their S arguments, which alternates between the nominative and the partitive. Existential S arguments introduce a discourse-new referent, and, if headed by a mass noun or a plural form, are marked with the partitive case that indicates non-exhaustive quantification (as in ‘There is some coffee in the cup’).  In the literature it has often been observed that the partitive is occasionally used even in transitive clauses to mark the A argument. In this work I analyze a hand-picked set of examples to explore this partitive A. I argue that the partitive A phrase often has an animate referent; that it is most felicitous in low-transitivity expressions where the O argument is likewise in the partitive (to indicate non-culminating aspect); that a partitive A phrase typically follows the verb, is in the plural and is typically modified by a quantifier (‘many’, ‘a lot of’). I then argue that the pervasiveness of quantifying expressions in partitive A phrases reflects a structural analogy with (pseudo)partitive constructions where a nominative head is followed by a partitive modifier (e.g. ‘a group of students’). Such analogies may be relevant in permitting the A function to be fulfilled by many kinds of quantifier + partitive NPs.

В статье затрагивается проблема грамматического (системного) значения английского инфинитива, которое остается неопределенным как в теоретических, так и в практических грамматиках. Делается предположение, что когнитивный подход в рамках когнитивной теории времени и вида сможет помочь лучшему пониманию значения и функции инфинитива.

It is argued that the grammatical (systemic) meaning of the English infinitive remains unspecified in current theoretical and applied grammar studies. It is suggested that a cognitive approach in the framework of the Cognitive Theory of Tense and Aspect may facilitate a better understanding of the meaning and function of the infinitive.

This paper is based on the author's Master's thesis in Linguistics, which was conducted at the University of Pisa. The study employs corpus linguistics methods, specifically a distributional approach based on the Vector Space Model (VSM) and cosine similarity. The primary objective of this research is to investigate the quantitative and qualitative differences between abstract and concrete nouns.

Two main goals guide this study:

Firstly, the research aims to demonstrate the significant role emotions play in the conceptualization of abstract nouns. By analyzing collocational patterns, we establish that abstract nouns are more frequently associated with emotions, indicating the presence of strong emotional connotations in the use of abstract language.

Secondly, we seek to provide evidence supporting the processing disadvantage of abstract nouns compared to concrete nouns, which arises due to the inherent variability in the meanings of abstract nouns. To explore this, we conduct an in-depth context analysis using the distributional properties of VSM and cosine similarity.

Through two distinct analyses—the emotive analysis and the context analysis—we shed light on the relationship between emotions and abstract nouns. The emotive analysis, based on collocation comparisons, confirms the prevalence of emotions in the usage of abstract language. Meanwhile, the context analysis, utilizing the measurement of cosine similarity within the Vector Space Model, uncovers the processing disadvantage faced while dealing with abstract nouns, attributed to the availability of diverse contextual associations.

In conclusion, our findings support the view that emotions play a crucial role in shaping the conceptualization of abstract names. Additionally, this research provides valuable insights into the processing dynamics of abstract nouns, contributing to the broader understanding of lexical semantics and cognitive mechanisms involved in language comprehension.

The current research presents an attempt to identify the influence of Slavic languages
(Russian, Belarusian, Polish) on Vilnius County toponymy at the name formation level.
The following toponym formation features were identified: Slavic suffixes derivatives
from Lithuanian origin proper names and appellatives; Lithuanian suffixes and inflections
derivatives from Slavic proper names and appellatives; Toponyms of Slavic origin, i.e., Slavic
affixes derived toponyms from Slavic proper names and appellatives. Language contacts are
also reflected in Slavic toponyms transliterated into the Lithuanian language, i.e., toponyms
that originated from Slavic appellatives or onyms through onimization or transonymisation.
In a number of cases, it is difficult to identify whether a toponym is of Slavic or Lithuanian
origin. Also, the distribution of these derivatives by toponym classes and Vilnius County
districts is presented.

Koncept EUROPA jest jednym z centralnych pojec ukrainskiego dyskursu
społeczno-politycznego. Ten aksjologiczny koncept jest wrazliwy na oddziaływanie
kontekstu socjokulturowego, zwłaszcza w okresach gwałtownych
zmian społecznych. Ukrainska Rewolucja Godnosci (2014) stała sie swiadectwem
istotnego znaczenia Europy dla ukrainskiej tozsamosci narodowej
i stała sie bodzcem dla uformowania sie szeregu dodatkowych jej sensów.
Stworzyło to potrzebe utrwalenia dynamiki zmian w konceptualizacji
pojecia EUROPA i jego wewnatrzjezykowej wariantywnosci. Podstawowa
baza materiałowa przeprowadzonej analizy były współczesne ukrainskie
teksty medialne, baza dodatkowa – dane systemowe (w tym słownikowe)
i ankietowe, pozyskane w latach 2012–2013 od studentów dwóch ukrainskich
uniwersytetów. Dane tekstowe i ankietowe, w duzej mierze zbiezne,
ilustrujace dwa zasadnicze dyskursy: polityczny i oswiatowy, pozwalaja
widziec Europe w trzech perspektywach: geogra1cznej, politycznej (instytucjonalnej,
unijnej) i aksjologicznej. Polityczny składnik konceptu został
tu wyrazony przy pomocy modelu zwiazków interpersonalnych z wyróznieniem
komponentu emocjonalnego. EUROPA postrzegana jest przez
Ukrainców w metaforycznych kategoriach nauczyciela, przywódcy, wzorca
postepowania i celu dazen, Ukraina natomiast – jako uczen, nasladowca,
istota garnaca sie do Europy, majaca jednak poczucie, ze jest przez nia
odtracana i pozostawiana poza granicami Zachodu.

This paper is a multifactorial usage-feature case study in the polysemy of /annoy/. The study demonstrates that, according to the usage-based model of language propounded by Cognitive Linguistics, neither semnatic structure or sociolinguistic variation actually exist. Instead of semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics, all meaning is part of socio-semantic continuum.

Sous la forte influence de l'école de Vienne, (Wüster 1993; Felber 1984) la discipline de la terminologie a été réduite à un ensemble de principes de normalisation. L'étude de la terminologie des sciences de la vie (microbiologie, ingénierie génétique, biologie moléculaire, biochimie, etc.) dans ...

Autotradução inédita do artigo escrito em francês: "À propos de la motivation phraséologique". que foi publicada em 2011 dentro do livro de Pamies, A. & Dobrovol'skij (eds.) Linguo-cultural competence and phraseological motivation. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verlag (Phraseologie und Parömiologie, Band 27) [ISBN 978-3-8340-0946-3]: 25-39.
Resumo: No presente trabalho investigamos o conceito de motivação na linguagem figurada, em contraste com outras noções da mesma esfera com as quais não deve ser confundida, tais como transparência ou composicionalidade. Este artigo trata também das especificidades da motivação diacrônica e sincrônica no campo das expressões idiomáticas. Trataremos ainda da distinção entre os vários tipos de motivação e suas relações, misturas e sobreposições mútuas. Palavras-chave: expressões idiomáticas, fraseologia, motivação, opacidade, idiomaticidade, arquimetáfora, culturema, simbolismo cultural. Abstract: In this work, we investigate the concept of motivation in figurative language, in contrast with other neighbouring notions that should not be confused with it, such as transparency or compositionality. The paper also deals with the specificity of diachronic and synchronic motivation in the field of idioms. We propose finally a distinction between several types of motivation and their mutual relations, blendings and overlaps. Introdução The uncovering of etymological origins of phrasemes is by no means an end in itself: rather they are to be seen as a way of discovering and understanding the processes of how phrasemes come into being and, thus, contribute to a theory of phraseology. 2 (Elizabeth Piirainen 2008: 223) Saussure (1916: I.1.1.2) define o arbitrário como A falta de qualquer ligação natural entre o significante e o significado, traço que caracterizaria-como tal-o signo linguístico 3. Saussure não negou, com isso, a motivação das onomatopeias, mas, em virtude da dicotomia entre sincronia e diacronia, ela seria de natureza puramente 1 Este trabalho foi desenvolvido no âmbito dos projetos espanhóis HUM 422 (Junta da Andaluzia, Espanha). 2 O descobrimento das origens etimológicas dos frasemas não é de modo nenhum um fim em si mesmo: conquanto, deve ser visto como um modo de descobrir e entender o processo de como os frasemas nascem e, assim, contribuir para uma teoria da fraseologia. (por uma questão de estilo sugiro-cortar conquanto e manter-deve ser visto, porém). Mas não está errado da forma que está. 3 Sapir (1921: 1/11) concebe também a linguagem como um sistema de símbolos que associa elementos cognitivos a estímulos psicossensoriais auditivos, de maneira consciente e arbitrária.

Something has meaning when it has the property of "information about" some part of the world with respect to an end or ends of some intentional system or agent.  Intentional systems are end-directed systems, but not all end-directed systems are intentional.  Not all end-directed systems require information about or meaning to determine their actions towards their ends. We need not invoke intenionality or meaning, for example, to explain the flow of a river down a slope, or the flow of heat down a temperature gradient from a hotter to a cooler region because these processes are explicable in terms of local physical potentials and laws.  MORE...

Previous literature on the classification of metonymy has mainly concentrated on the relationship between source and target (e.g. Radden & Kövecses 1999, Peirsman & Geeraerts 2006a). More recent, pragmatically oriented classifications are concerned with the role of conceptual metonymy in meaning construction, i.e. at which level of meaning construction a certain metonymy is applied as an inferential tool (e.g. Thornburg & Panther 1997, Panther & Thornburg 1999). At the heart of these latter approaches is the assumption that conceptual metonymy cannot be reduced to acts of reference. Interestingly enough, no classification of metonymy has been suggested which concentrates on the type of the mental content participating in the metonymic process. In this paper I outline such a content-based approach. According to the type of the target content the following classes of metonymy can be set up: THING-, EVENT-, PROPERTY-, PROPOSITIONand speech act metonymies, which can be further subdivide...

В статье, в опоре на анализ Н.А. Бернштейна, приводится трехуровневая структура основных человеческих локомоций – ходьбы и бега:

(1) главная цель движения =>
        динамика (координационно-силовая схема движения) =>
        кинематика (визуальный образ движения).

В этой схеме каждый нижеследующий уровень зависит от вышестоящего: от цели движения зависит его динамика, а от динамики – кинематика (визуальный образ, форма движения). Схема (1) позволяет дать эксплицитные определения классов ходьбы и бега человека и объяснения процессов их распознавания. Показывается, что ходьба и бег различаются всеми тремя компонентами этой  структуры. Подчеркивается  важность динамического уровня в структуре (1), на который особое внимание обращал Н.А. Бернштейн: именно  различие динамики (силовых схем движения) ходьбы и бега задает их строгую дифференциацию.

The Collection of Conference Proceedings “The Problems of Linguistic Semantics” focuses on the topical issues of Linguistic Semantics: Cognitive and Cultural Semantics, Contrastive Semantics, Phonetic, Lexical and Grammatical Semantics, Semantics and Pragmatics of Linguistic Items, Semantics of Text and Discourse, Semantics and Translation.

For the past five years I’ve been doing research on the cognitive abilities of African Grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus), attempting to document not only their remark-able linguistic abilities but also examining the way that they interact with their human caretakers, specifically Greys who have been home-raised and hence exposed to a language-rich environment. Given that literally no work has been done on the linguistic abilities of Greys raised in home environments, the research I’ve carried out to date and which will be discussed in this chapter must be viewed as preliminary, although not necessarily ground-breaking for that term needs to be applied to the outstanding research that Dr. Irene Pepperberg has carried out in her laboratory where she demonstrated the remarkable cognitive abilities of her Greys, Alex, Griffin and Arthur.
Pepperberg’s conclusion—which is accepted by animal behaviourists—is that the cognitive abilities of Greys allow them to be ranked as having reasoning skills equivalent to those of a 2- to 3-year-old human child and in some specific areas the tests showed that a Grey is capable of performing at the level of a 5-year old. Quite surprisingly, leaving aside the outstanding work of Pepperberg and her highly insightful commentaries on the speech production and verbal interactions that her Greys had with her and members of her laboratory staff (Pepperberg 2009), to my knowledge, there still has been no inquiry into how the proven cognitive abilities of these laboratory-trained birds relate to the way that home-raised Greys communicate verbally with humans. While there is a plethora of studies and speculations about how songbirds acquire their songs, no such similar work has been done on Greys in home settings. In any case, Pepperberg’s remarkable research results provide support for the following proposition: that there would be nothing inherently wrong with suggesting complex cognitive interpretations of the verbal performance of home-raised Greys given that the species in question has already been proven to have high intelligence (Waal 2016:41–42).

I use the Conceptual Blending Theory to discuss the application of familiar music themes in unexpected contexts, where the music assists the image and text in swaying viewers’ opinion. A new interpretation emerges in such examples after two-tier conceptual blending. The musical themes initially integrate with the original (visual) context in listeners’ long-term memory, creating stable blends with predictable connotations. In the changed context, these blends become inputs in a new integration process, where the creators consciously play with listeners’ expectations: either by enhancing them, creating what blending theorists call the vital relation of analogy, or by disappointing them, creating the relation of disanalogy. I therefore integrate insights from cognitive linguistics and musicology in discussing the persuasive potentials of music.
Key words: music, meaning, persuasion, conceptual blending, recursion, emergence.

The objective of this article is to investigate the contextual meanings of the preposition /kὲː/ in the Sukhothai period within the cognitive semantics approach. The 61 data were collected from the book “The Inscription Collection Vol. 8: the Sukhothai Stone Inscriptions,” published by the Fine Arts Department in 2005. It is found that the preposition /kὲː/ in the Sukhothai period had 8 different contextual meanings. That is to say, the preposition was used to indicate 1) GOAL: abstract entity, 2) GOAL: emotional target 3) GOAL: transfer source 4) RECIPIENT (of things) 5) ADDRESSEE 6) POSSESSION: interpersonal relationships 7) RECIPINENT (of action) and 8) RECIPIENT (of attention) These 8 conceptual meanings had a shared conceptual meaning of ALLATIVE or GOAL marking. The results of this study indicated that the preposition /kὲː/ in the Sukhothai period is a polysemous word; and the contexts in which it occurred are a contributing factor for its polysemous quality.

บทความเรื่องนี้มีวัตถุประสงค์เพื่อศึกษาความหมายตามปริบทของคำบุพบท แก่ ในสมัยสุโขทัยตามแนวอรรถศาสตร์ปริชาน โดยเก็บข้อมูลจาก“ประชุมจารึก ภาคที่8จารึกสุโขทัย”ของกรมศิลปากร พ.ศ.2548 รวมจำนวนการปรากฏ 61 แห่ง ผลการศึกษาพบว่าความหมายตามปริบทของคำ บุพบท แก่ ในสมัยสุโขทัยมีจำนวนทั้งสิ้น 8 ความหมาย ได้แก่1) ‘บ่งชี้จุดหมายนามธรรม’ 2) ‘บ่งชี้จุดหมายของความรู้สึก’ 3) ‘บ่งชี้จุดหมายของการรับเอามา’ 4) ‘บ่งชี้ผู้รับสิ่งของ’ 5) ‘บ่งชี้ผู้รับสาร’ 6) ‘บ่งชี้ผู้รับความสัมพันธ์’ 7) ‘บ่งชี้ผู้รับเหตุการณ์’ และ 8) ‘บ่งชี้ผู้รับความสำคัญ’ ทั้งนี้ความหมายตามปริบททุกความหมายสามารถเชื่อมโยงความสัมพันธ์เป็นมโนทัศน์เดียวกันได้คือ ‘บ่งชี้หมุดหมาย’ ผลการศึกษาชี้ให้เห็นว่าคำ บุพบท แก่ในสมัยสุโขทัยจัดเป็นคำ หลายความหมายโดยปัจจัยที่เอื้อให้คำ บุพบท แก่ เป็นคำ หลายความหมาย คือ “ปริบท” ที่คำ บุพบท แก่ ปรากฏร่วม