On traditional accounts, word meanings are entries in a mental lexicon. Nonsense words lack such entries, and are therefore meaningless. Here, we show that under some circumstances nonsense words function indistinguishably from conventional words. The ‘nonsense’ words foove and crelch led participants to select systematically different clusters of adjectives and were reliably matched to different species of alien creatures (e.g., ‘crelches’ were pointy and narrow and ‘fooves’ were large and fat). In a categorization task in which participants learned to group two species of aliens primarily on the basis of roundness/pointiness, these novel labels facilitated performance as much as conventional words (e.g., round, pointy). The results expand the scope of research on sound symbolism and support a non-traditional view of word meaning according to which words do not have meanings by virtue of a conventionalized form−meaning pairing. Rather, the ‘meaning’ of a word is the effect that the word form has on the user’s mental activity.

Many attempts have been made to discover some systematicity in the semantics of phrasal verbs. However, most research has investigated the semantics of particles exclusively; no study has examined how the multiple meanings of the verb also contribute to the meanings of phrasal verbs. The current corpus-based (COCA) study advances the research on phrasal verbs by examining the interaction of the polysemy networks of both the verb and the particle in four phrasal verb constructions: get up, take up, get out, and take out. Following the Cognitive Linguistics (CL) based methodology set out by Tyler and Evans (2003) for analyzing the semantics of particles, in conjunction with Langacker’s (1991) analysis of the semantics of verbs, a replicable polysemy analysis of the semantics of get and take was established. The polysemy networks for both the verbs and the particles laid the foundation for investigating the multiple meanings of the phrasal verbs found in the corpus. The CL-based analysis of the semantics of the phrasal verb constructions provides evidence for the compositional nature of phrasal verbs, showing that the multiple meanings can be systematically accounted for through the interaction of the polysemy networks of the component verbs and particles.

Usage-based theories hold that the sole resource for language users’ linguistic systems is language use (Barlow & Kemmer, 2000; Langacker, 1988; Tomasello, 1999, 2003). Researchers working in the usage-based paradigm, which is often equated with cognitive-functional linguistics (e.g., Ibbotson, 2013, Tomasello, 2003), seem to widely agree that the primary setting for language use is interaction, with spontaneous face-to-face interaction playing a primordial role (e.g., Bybee, 2010; Clark, 1996; Geeraerts & Cuyckens, 2007; Langacker, 2008; Oakley & Hougaard, 2008; Zlatev, 2014). It should, then, follow that usage-based models of language are not only compatible with evidence from communication research but also that they are intrinsically grounded in authentic, multi-party language use in all its diversity and complexities. This should be a logical consequence, as a usage-based understanding of language processing and human sense-making cannot be separated from the study of interaction. However, the overwhelming majority of the literature in Cognitive Linguistics (CL) does not deal with the analysis of dialogic data or with issues of interactional conceptualization. It is our firm belief that this is at odds with the interactional foundation of the usage-based hypothesis. Furthermore, we are convinced that an ‘interactional turn’ is not only essential to the credibility and further development of Cognitive Linguistics as a theory of language and cognition as such. Rather, CL-inspired perspectives on interactional language use may provide insights that other, non-cognitive approaches to discourse and interaction are bound to overlook. To that aim, this special issue brings together four contributions that involve the analysis of interactional discourse phenomena by drawing on tools and methods from the broad field of Cognitive Linguistics.

As one of the Austronesian languages spoken in Taiwan, Amis exhibits abundant lexical items for describing odors. This paper investigates the lexical representations of olfaction across the Amis dialects, showing that Amis possesses more than a dozen abstract odor terms, and uses the proclitic hala=/hali=/ha= plus reduplication of a noun as the source-oriented construction for manifesting olfactory perception. This study also incorporates controlled elicitation by using the booklet of ‘The Smell Identification Test™’ to elicit spontaneous descriptions for the perceived odors. The methodology provides further information to shed light on the categories of verbal responses for odors and the degree of perceptual consistency based on culturally dependent experiences.

Communicating information about our affective states is an important aspect of utterance meaning. Affective meanings can be expressed either explicitly or in an implicit way, for example by using particular linguistic structures like Creative Total Reduplication (CTR), the intentional and immediate repetition of a word (“It’s a little little cat”). We claim that, in addition to its explicit meaning (‘very little’), CTR conveys an affective meaning reflecting the speaker’s evaluation of the world as good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant (“It’s a cute little cat”). The experiment reported here used a verification task with judgments of consistency. It aimed at verifying two hypotheses: first, the presence of CTR generates valued affective inferences; second, affective inferences are generated faster with CTR than with the simplex (i.e., non-reduplicated) form. Results strongly confirm the first hypothesis and disconfirm the second.

This paper looks at a hitherto unexplored aspect of taxonomically organized concepts which has to do with word distributions in corpora of actual language use. In parallel to the psychological informativeness claim of the differentiation explanation, the question is addressed if concepts are internally more similar than their higher-ranked taxonomical relatives. This internal similarity is measured by making use of token-based vector space models. For each occurrence of a concept in the corpus a context vector can be calculated, which then serves as input for the internal similarity measure. Experiments are conducted for taxonomies taken from the Dutch counterparts of the English semantic domains animal and means of transportation. Results do not wholeheartedly agree with the imposition of a strict taxonomical order, but give rise to a new behavioural measure of the basic level.

Three quasi-experimental studies were conducted to investigate the relationship between the evaluative (i.e., agree/true) and the meta-cognitive (i.e., understand) response, and to determine which type of response people are more likely to provide when responding to one-sentence assertive statements. In Studies 1 and 2, participants performed two separate tasks in which they were asked to indicate the levels of: (i) understanding and (ii) agreement / perceived truthfulness of 126 one-sentence statements. The results indicated that participants were likely to provide a negative evaluative response (i.e., disagree/false) to a statement that they did not understand. In Study 3, participants were asked to evaluate the same 126 statements and choose between four response options: agree, disagree, understand, do not understand. The results indicated that people are more likely provide an evaluative response regardless of the understandability of a statement. The results of these studies are discussed in relation to (i) pragmatic perspective of how people infer speakers’ meaning, and (ii) cognitive processes underlying evaluative and meta-cognitive response.

As an explicitly usage-based model of language structure (Barlow & Kemmer, 2000), cognitive grammar draws on the notion of ‘usage events’ of language as the starting point from which linguistic units are schematized by language users. To be true to this claim for spoken languages, phenomena such as non-lexical sounds, intonation patterns, and certain uses of gesture should be taken into account to the degree to which they constitute the phonological pole of signs, paired in entrenched ways with conceptual content. Following through on this view of usage events also means realizing the gradable nature of signs. In addition, taking linguistic meaning as consisting of not only conceptual content but also a particular way of construing that content (Langacker, 2008, p. 43), we find that the forms of expression mentioned above play a prominent role in highlighting the ways in which speakers construe what they are talking about, in terms of different degrees of specificity, focusing, prominence, and perspective. Viewed in this way, usage events of spoken language are quite different in nature from those of written language, a point which highlights the need for differentiated accounts of the grammar of these two forms of expression taken by many languages.

The main aim of the present work is to demonstrate that the semantic pole of ditransitive constructions manifests itself as a multidomain matrix, consisting basically of a set of conceptual metaphors integrated through the mechanism of blending. The metaphors that participate in these multidomain matrices are, in principle, metaphors that already exist in our conceptual structure. As we shall demonstrate in the course of the analysis, these often involve primary metaphors, conceived of as metaphors that have a direct, independent, experiential base. In other cases, the starting point for the construction of such multidomain matrices is complex metaphors already existing in our conceptual structure, understood as an autonomous conceptual complex of a metaphorical nature, created through the integration of various primary metaphors. Our concrete object of analysis consists of the semantic pole of different types of ditransitive constructions. The data analyzed include examples from Romance (Catalan, French, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish) and Germanic (English and German) languages.

Any approach to interaction is confronted with the dilemma of reconciling the empirical fact that meaning is locally and interactionally managed, as shown by conversation analysis, with the fact that conversations are subject to genres that impose conventionalized expectations for allowable contributions and inferences, as advocated by the ethnography of communication. This theoretical paper attempts to overcome this challenge by integrating Langacker’s current-discourse-space model with Barsalou’s dynamic model of situated conceptualization. With reference to these frameworks, the paper sketches a grounded socio-cognitive model of meaning construction in context that combines the situated interactional negotiation of meaning with the discursive knowledge that underlies speech genres in the form of genre-simulators. To substantiate and illustrate the theoretical considerations, the paper draws on two extracts from spoken tourist-information transactions.

This paper proposes a gradient redefinition of the notion of factuality, here intended as a dynamic continuum unfolding through several epistemic levels. In this respect, the speaker/writer’s increasing certainty upon the realization of an event or situation is here as factualization. Factualization is a conceptual phenomenon determined by an embodied mechanism (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999; Lakoff, 1987, 2003; Grush, 2004; Gallese & Lakoff, 2005) of cyclic acquisition and control with respect to a new proposition P. Being a form of subjectification (Traugott, 1989, 1995, 2003, 2010, 2012; Traugott & Dasher, 2002), factualization occurs as the semasiological reanalysis of an epistemic construction. Drawing on Langacker’s (1991, 2008, 2009) notion of the ‘epistemic control cycle’ (see also Kan, Teubner-Rhodes, Drummey, Nutile, Krupa, & Novick, 2013, on cognitive control), I claim and demonstrate that epistemic predicates originally conveying weak certainty towards a proposition P diachronically develop an increasingly factual meaning conveying more and more frequently a subjected form of certainty. This phenomenon is first shown through a qualitative and quantitative corpus analysis from the BNC,1 which provides a measurable account of the various degrees of polysemy of the three epistemic predicates I think, I believe, and I reckon. In addition, I discuss the results of a diachronic corpus survey from the diaCoris on the factualization process of (Io) penso ‘I think’ in Modern Italian during the last 150 years, showing how the contemporary usage of (Io) penso is notably more oriented towards absolute factuality than it was 150 years earlier.

Labeled categories are learned faster, and are subsequently more robust than categories learned without labels. The label feedback hypothesis (Lupyan, 2012) accounts for these effects by introducing a word-driven top-down modulation of perceptual processes involved in categorization. By testing categorization flexibility with and without labels, we demonstrate the ways in which labels do and do not modulate category representations. In Experiment 1, transfer involved a change in selective attention, and results indicated that labels did not impact relearning. In Experiment 2, when transfer involved a change in the behavioral response to categories whose structures did not change, a reversal shift, learning the categories with labels speeded recovery. We take this finding as evidence that the augmentation of perceptual processes by words is on the one hand fairly weak without explicit reinforcement, but on the other allows for category representations to be more abstract, allowing greater flexibility in behavior.

It is well established that context plays a fundamental role in how we learn and use language. Here we explore how context links short-term language use with the long-term emergence of different types of language system. Using an iterated learning model of cultural transmission, the current study experimentally investigates the role of the communicative situation in which an utterance is produced (situational context) and how it influences the emergence of three types of linguistic systems: underspecified languages (where only some dimensions of meaning are encoded linguistically), holistic systems (lacking systematic structure), and systematic languages (consisting of compound signals encoding both category-level and individuating dimensions of meaning). To do this, we set up a discrimination task in a communication game and manipulated whether the feature dimension shape was relevant or not in discriminating between two referents. The experimental languages gradually evolved to encode information relevant to the task of achieving communicative success, given the situational context in which they are learned and used, resulting in the emergence of different linguistic systems. These results suggest language systems adapt to their contextual niche over iterated learning.

This paper offers the first general introduction to CODA (Cognitive Discourse Analysis), a methodology for analyzing verbal protocols and other types of unconstrained language use, as a resource for researchers interested in mental representations and high-level cognitive processes. CODA can be used to investigate verbalizations of perceived scenes and events, spatio-temporal concepts, complex cognitive processes such as problem-solving and cognitive strategies and heuristics, and other concepts that are accessible for verbalization. CODA builds on and extends relevant established methodologies such as cognitive linguistic perspectives, verbal protocol analysis in cognitive psychology and interdisciplinary content analysis, linguistic discourse analysis, and psycholinguistic experimentation.

Interactive language use inherently involves a process of coordination, which often leads to matching behaviour between interlocutors in different semiotic channels. We study this process of interactive alignment from a multimodal perspective: using data from head-mounted eye-trackers in a corpus of face-to-face conversations, we measure which effect gaze fixations by speakers (on their own gestures, condition 1) and fixations by interlocutors (on the gestures by those speakers, condition 2) have on subsequent gesture production by those interlocutors. The results show there is a significant effect of interlocutor gaze (condition 2), but not of speaker gaze (condition 1) on the amount of gestural alignment, with an interaction between the conditions.

Readers actively construct representational models of meaning when reading text, and they do so by drawing on a range of kinds of information, from the specific linguistic forms of the sentences to knowledge about how the world works (Ferretti, Kutas, & McRae, 2007; Madden & Zwaan, 2003). The present set of studies focused on how grammatical aspect is integrated into a situation model and how it is connected to other dimensions of model construction. In three experiments, participants were asked to complete sentences with a choice of grammatical aspect form (perfective or imperfective). The test sentences systematically varied four dimensions of the sentence that were linked to grammatical aspect in different ways: telicity and transitivity (both linked through their semantic representations), subject animacy (linked through an inference over semantic representations), and related location information (linked through an inference grounded in world knowledge). In addition, to examine the influence of discourse function (backgrounding vs. foregrounding) on aspectual choice different construction types were varied across experiments – specifically a fronted locative construction and the presence of a generic narrative opener (Once upon a time). The results found that aspectual choice depends on information linked to the semantic representation of grammatical aspect; however, in contrast to previous work (e.g., Ferreti et al., 2007) information grounded in world knowledge (location information) did not influence aspectual choice except when it was integrated in a specialized discourse construction.

Recent developments in grammatical theory seem to invite an integration of grammar and interaction; nevertheless, there are reservations on both sides. While some of these reservations can be traced to misconceptions, others are deeply rooted in the theoretical premises of each approach. The differences are, however, not very well understood; especially theoretical premises regarding the role of cognition in language use have been hindering a fruitful collaboration. Reinterpreting the results of Conversation Analysis (CA; cf. Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974; Sacks, 1992) in terms of Construction Grammar (Goldberg, 1995, 2006; Croft, 2001, Langacker, 2008) recasts the discursive practices identified in CA in terms of participants’ cognitive construals of the communicative situation, making the speaking subjects apparent in their strategies and conceptualizations of the interaction.

It has been said that mirror neurons are “the most hyped concept in neuroscience” (Jarrett, 2012). In his book The myth of mirror neurons: the real neuroscience of communication and cognition (2014), Gregory Hickok does the field a great service by cutting through this hype and showing that, contrary to the views of many laypeople as well as some experts, mirror neurons are not the fundamental ‘basis’ of action understanding. I argue here, however, that he takes his critique too far by effectively denying that the motor system plays any significant role at all in the perception and interpretation of actions. In fact, a large literature strongly supports the hypothesis that motor regions in the frontal and parietal lobes not only subserve the execution of actions, but also contribute to the comprehension of actions, regardless of whether they are directly observed or linguistically represented. In addition, recent research suggests that although the articulatory system is involved primarily in speech production, it enhances speech perception too, even when the auditory stimuli are not explicitly attended.

Studies on gaze allocation during sentence production have recently begun to implement cross-linguistic analyses in the investigation of visual and linguistic processing. The underlying assumption is that the aspects of a scene that attract attention prior to articulation are, in part, linked to the specific linguistic system and means used for expression. The present study concerns naturalistic, dynamic scenes (video clips) showing causative events (agent acting on an object) and exploits grammatical differences in the domain of verbal aspect, and the way in which the status of an event (a specific vs. habitual instance of an event) is encoded in English and German. Fixations in agent and action areas of interest were timelocked to utterance onset, and we focused on the pre-articulatory time span to shed light on sentence planning processes, involving message generation and scene conceptualization. Findings are threefold: (i) English speakers mark the status of an event as specific in relation to the action, with progressive aspect marking on the verb in each utterance. German speakers do so by elaborating specific characteristics of the agent; (ii) participants display significantly different gaze allocation patterns to agent and action regions although the sentences produced in both languages follow the same subject−verb word order; and (iii) the analysis of gaze patterns during sentence production given dynamic scenes provide complementary results from a more naturalistic paradigm, to those obtained in studies with still images.

Recent years have seen rapid developments in automated text analysis methods focused on measuring psychological and demographic properties. While this development has mainly been driven by computer scientists and computational linguists, such methods can be of great value for social scientists in general, and for psychologists in particular. In this paper, we review some of the most popular approaches to automated text analysis from the perspective of social scientists, and give examples of their applications in different theoretical domains. After describing some of the pros and cons of these methods, we speculate about future methodological developments, and how they might change social sciences. We conclude that, despite the fact that current methods have many disadvantages and pitfalls compared to more traditional methods of data collection, the constant increase of computational power and the wide availability of textual data will inevitably make automated text analysis a common tool for psychologists.