The influence of semantic context on verb argument structure processing was investigated in two experiments using both ERP and behavioral measures. Participants were presented with sentences ending with syntactically and/or semantically congruous or incongruous noun phrases and they were asked to judge the overall acceptability of the sentences. Syntactically incongruous sentences contained an intransitive verb followed by a direct object (e.g., *L’ennemi a conspiré (INTR) un complot *‘The enemy conspired a scheme’). In line with our hypothesis, results showed that the processing of syntactic incongruities was influenced by the degree of semantic congruency between the different sentence constituents (strong in Experiment 1 and weak in Experiment 2). Thus, the same syntactic incongruity was processed differently depending upon the semantic context of the sentence, thereby demonstrating the influence of semantic context on syntactic processing. We propose a linguistic account of the differential effects of verb transitivity as a function of the semantic context based upon Cognitive Construction Grammar and Frame Semantics.

Drawing upon Paul Chilton’s (2005) approach to manipulative discourse analysis, this paper looks into how the ideas of risk and blame, as shifted from Yeltsin and his team of ‘reformers’ in the pursuit of restoring Yeltsin’s political credibility, were propagated through the media news management during the presidential election of 1996. By applying the Conceptual Integration or Blending framework (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002) to a case study of the Russian news story about an airport strike, the paper reveals how the mass media was manipulated at an almost invisible level, which has not been explored so far. The paper argues that conceptual integration can be successfully used as a core cognitive linguistic research method for elucidating culturally specific and historically changing cognitive frames and analysis of counter-factuality in manipulative news discourse.

Physical contact with hot vs. iced coffee has been shown to affect evaluation of the personal warmth or kindness of a hypothetical person (Williams & Bargh, 2008). In three studies, we investigated whether the manipulation of social context can modulate the activation of the metaphorical mapping, kindness as warmth. After priming participants with warm vs. cold temperature, we asked them to evaluate a hypothetical ad-hoc ally or adversary on the kindness dimension, as well as on other qualities used as a control. We expected more extreme evaluations of kindness in the adversary than in the ally condition, and no effects on other ratings. We thus replicated the classical effect of physical warmth on kindness ratings and generalized it to a German-speaking population. In addition, when the two German studies were combined, we found evidence suggesting a contextual modulation of the temperature effect: only out-group members, namely adversaries, were judged as more kind when participants had experienced physical warmth; the effect was not evident in the ally (i.e., in-group) condition. These studies suggest that context can modulate metaphorical activation; they therefore represent an initial attempt to add nuance to our understanding of when embodied metaphors affect our decisions.

Although spatial understanding by human beings tends to be universal, the linguistic system to represent one’s spatial experience varies significantly across languages. This study explores implications of this contrast in the field of second language acquisition by examining how adult Chinese learners of English express caused motion in an experimental situation in which they are asked to describe animation clips showing caused motion with varied types of Manner and Path to an imaginary remote addressee. Our findings showed that across proficiencies, L2 learners acclimated to the target system very rapidly and produced responses that were target-like with respect to the selection of motion components and the syntactic means to organize selected information components over an utterance. These results suggest that the acquisition process of caused motion can be facilitated when L1 and L2 share some typological properties and the target system to be acquired is the simple and unambiguous one of the two typological patterns concerned.

The current study investigates the conceptual hierarchy of humans−animals−plants−non-animate objects by using novel hybrids. Three experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, twenty-one participants were presented with a grammatically asymmetrical phrase, in which the two components are associated with different linguistic properties, (e.g., a man with a horse’s head) followed by a visual hybrid, and were asked to judge whether the phrase described the hybrid. In Experiment 2, thirty participants were presented with a visual hybrid and were asked to categorize it according to one of its visually presented components in a forced-choice judgment task. In Experiment 3, twenty-nine participants were presented with a visual hybrid that followed a grammatically symmetrical phrase, in which both components carry similar grammatical properties (e.g., half-human half-horse), and were asked to judge whether the phrase described the hybrid. A conceptual hierarchy effect was found in Experiment 1 but not in the other two experiments. These findings show that the hierarchy effect occurs only in verbal tasks that involve asymmetrical grammatical constructions. We suggest that the pragmatic tendency to map the hierarchically higher concept onto the higher grammatical function applies to asymmetrical constructions but not to symmetrical constructions.

Embodied theories of language posit that the human brain’s adaptations for language exploit pre-existing perceptual and motor mechanisms for interacting with the world. In this paper we propose an embodied account of the linguistic distinction between singular and plural, encoded in the system of grammatical number in many of the world’s languages. We introduce a neural network model of visual object classification and spatial attention, informed by a collection of findings in psychology and neuroscience. The classification component of the model computes the type associated with a visual stimulus without identifying the number of objects present. The distinction between singular and plural is made by a separate mechanism in the attentional system, which directs the classifier towards the local or global features of the stimulus. The classifier can directly deliver the semantics of uninflected concrete noun stems, while the attentional mechanism can directly deliver the semantics of singular and plural number features.

Previous research has demonstrated that the scope of speakers’ planning in language production varies in response to external forces such as time pressure. This susceptibility to external pressures indicates a flexibly incremental production system: speakers plan utterances piece by piece, but external pressures affect the size of the pieces speakers buffer. In the current study, we explore internal constraints on speech planning. Specifically, we examine whether individual differences in working memory predict the scope and efficiency of advance planning. In our task, speakers described picture arrays to partners in a matching game. The arrays sometimes required speakers to note a contrast between a sentence-initial object (e.g., a four-legged cat) and a sentence-final object (e.g., a three-legged cat). Based on prior screening, we selected participants who differed on verbal working memory span. Eye-movement measures revealed that high-span speakers were more likely to gaze at the contrasting pictures prior to articulation than were low-span speakers. As a result, high-span speakers were also more likely to reference the contrast early in speech. We conclude that working memory plays a substantial role in the flexibility of incremental speech planning.

The Russian prefix pod- has several meanings, both concrete ones having to do with approaching or being under or down, and a series of seemingly unrelated abstract meanings such as imitating, ingratiating, or doing in secret. This paper approaches the polysemy of pod- from the viewpoint of the Theory of Lexical Concepts and Conceptual Models (LCCM) that sees word meaning not as a permanent property of words, but as a dynamic process in which context and accessed non-linguistic knowledge representation play an important role. This approach uses the notion of lexical concepts to describe the mediating unit between concrete linguistic examples and cognitive models that these examples are connected to. The 505 verbs analyzed bring up the lexical concepts [UNDER], [VERTICAL MOVEMENT], [CLOSE], and [CONTACT]. The connection of these lexical concepts with certain metaphorical and metonymical models is also discussed. Twelve of the 505 verbs are examined more closely in different contexts with the help of twenty-nine illustrative examples from the spoken corpus of the Russian National Corpus.

Using eye-tracking as a window on cognitive processing, this study investigates language effects on attention to motion events in a non-verbal task. We compare gaze allocation patterns by native speakers of German and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), two languages that differ with regard to the grammaticalization of temporal concepts. Findings of the non-verbal task, in which speakers watch dynamic event scenes while performing an auditory distracter task, are compared to gaze allocation patterns which were obtained in an event description task, using the same stimuli. We investigate whether differences in the grammatical aspectual systems of German and MSA affect the extent to which endpoints of motion events are linguistically encoded and visually processed in the two tasks. In the linguistic task, we find clear language differences in endpoint encoding and in the eye-tracking data (attention to event endpoints) as well: German speakers attend to and linguistically encode endpoints more frequently than speakers of MSA. The fixation data in the non-verbal task show similar language effects, providing relevant insights with regard to the language-and-thought debate. The present study is one of the few studies that focus explicitly on language effects related to grammatical concepts, as opposed to lexical concepts.

Long-distance dependencies are notoriously difficult to analyze in a formally explicit way because they involve constituents that seem to have been extracted from their canonical position in an utterance. The most widespread solution is to identify a gap at an extraction site and to communicate information about that gap to its filler, as in What_FILLERdid you see_GAP? This paper rejects the filler−gap solution and proposes a cognitive-functional alternative in which long-distance dependencies spontaneously emerge as a side effect of how grammatical constructions interact with each other for expressing different conceptualizations. The proposal is supported by a computational implementation in Fluid Construction Grammar that works for both parsing and production.

Many studies in cognitive linguistics have analyzed the semantics of over, notably the semantics associated with over as a preposition. Most of them generally conclude that over is polysemic and that this polysemy is to be described thanks to a semantic radial network, showing the relationships between the different meanings of the word. What we would like to suggest, to the contrary, is that the meanings of over are highly dependent on the utterance context in which its occurrences are embedded, and consequently that the meaning of over itself is under-specified, rather than polysemic. Moreover, to provide a more accurate account of the apparently wide range of meanings of over in context, we ought to take into account the other uses of this unit: as an adverb and particle, and not only as a preposition. In this paper, we provide a corpus-based description of over which leads us to propose a monosemic definition.

Two key issues in the study of idiom are the metaphorical status of idioms (whether or not underlying metaphors are active in the on-line processing of figurative idiomatic expressions) and the compositional status of idioms (whether or not the overall meaning of such expressions is analyzable from internal elements). This study addresses these questions from the perspective of emergent metaphor theory (Sanford, 2012, 2013), arguing that key properties of such expressions − idiosyncrasy of both form and meaning, the potential for idiom to be manipulated in discourse, and diachronic patterns in changes of idiomatic meaning − follow from the status of metaphorical idioms as highly entrenched instances of both conceptual and syntactic mappings. In the case of both types of schema, the interaction of type and token frequency effects predict the metaphoricity and analyzability of idioms.

The aim of this study is to see how and to what extent the Talmyan notion of fictive motion is realized in the conceptual frame of speaking. Drawing from a previous in-depth analysis of the speaking event Manner component in English (cf. Vergaro, Sandford, Mastrofini, and Formisano, unpublished observations),1 we investigate the realization of fictive path in 186 English manner of speaking (henceforth MoS) verb entries accessed through the Corpus of Contemporary American English (henceforth COCA). Fictive path is always involved in the conceptualization of the speaking event. Communication is elaborated through the conduit metaphor, which is, in turn, motivated by the embodied act of speaking. Fictive path is further considered in relation to image schemas and windowing. Different degrees of path windowing emerge from this study, illustrating how the speaker focuses attention on a specific portion of the speaking event. Image schema distribution and an implicational hierarchy of the various types of path elaboration also become evident in this study.

We present in broad outline a theory of document acts, using the influential Supreme Court opinion in Marbury v. Madison (1803) as our principal test case. Marbury has a superabundance of rhetorical questions. They make up a significant and stylistically prominent portion of the total linguistic material of the text, yet they all but disappear from Marbury’s citation history and thus its content as an enduring jurisprudential entity. To account for these facts, we examine Marbury as a whole text addressing a particular situation, as a pastiche of constructions, and as a tool of jurisprudential decision-making. The intersection and independence of these ‘modes of being’ call for an overarching theoretical framework capable of accounting for facets of documents’ existence at three distinct but interpenetrating strata: system, artifact, and construction. We base our theory on primordial cognitive capacities for joint attention and joint commitments, with the strata as consequences of embodied human minds born into and embedded in intersubjective environments filled with and shaped by documents and their circulation. The closed system of United States Supreme Court opinions makes an excellent case for a theory of document acts that will eventually be used to understand and explain more open-ended systems.

In certain English finite complement clauses, inclusion of the complementizer that is optional. Previous research has identified various factors that influence when native speakers tend to produce or omit the complementizer, including syntactic weight, clause juncture constraints, and predicate frequency. The present study addresses the question to what extent German and Spanish learners of English as a second language (L2) produce and omit the complementizer under similar conditions. 3,622 instances of English adjectival, object, and subject complement constructions were retrieved from the International Corpus of English and the German and Spanish components of the International Corpus of Learner English. A logistic regression model suggests that L2 learners’ and natives’ production is largely governed by the same factors. However, in comparison with native speakers, L2 learners display a lower rate of complementizer omission. They are more impacted by processing-related factors such as complexity and clause juncture, and less sensitive to verb-construction cue validity.

In this theoretical paper we propose three different kinds of cognitive structure that have not been differentiated in the psychological and cognitive linguistic literatures. They are spatial primitives, image schemas, and schematic integrations. Spatial primitives are the first conceptual building blocks formed in infancy, image schemas are simple spatial stories built from them, and schematic integrations use the first two types to build concepts that include non-spatial elements, such as force and emotion. These different kinds of structure have all come under the umbrella term of ‘image schemas’. However, they differ in their content, developmental origin, imageability, and role in meaning construction in language and in thought. The present paper indicates how preverbal conceptualization needs to be taken into account for a complete understanding of image schemas and their uses. It provides examples to illustrate this influence, the most important of these being the primacy of imageable spatial information.

Linguistic acceptability judgments are widely agreed to reflect constraints on real-time language processing. Nonetheless, very little is known about how processing costs affect acceptability judgments. In this paper, we explore how processing limitations are manifested in acceptability judgment data. In a series of experiments, we consider how two factors relate to judgments for sentences with varying degrees of complexity: (1) the way constraints combine (i.e., additively or super-additively), and (2) the way a comprehender’s memory resources influence acceptability judgments. Results indicate that multiple sources of processing difficulty can combine to produce super-additive effects, and that there is a positive linear relationship between reading span scores and judgments for sentences whose unacceptability is attributable to processing costs. These patterns do not hold for sentences whose unacceptability is attributable to factors other than processing costs, e.g., grammatical constraints. We conclude that tests of (super)-additivity and of relationships to reading span scores can help to identify the effects of processing difficulty on acceptability judgments, although these tests cannot be used in contexts of extreme processing difficulty.