Frege argued for the force-content distinction not only by appealing to the logical and fictional contexts which are most closely associated with the “Frege point", but also based on the fact that an affirmative answer to a yes-no question constitutes an assertion. Supposedly this is only intelligible if the question contains a forceless thought or proposition which an affirmative answer then asserts. Against this I argue that this fact more readily supports the view that questions operate on assertions and other (...) forceful acts themselves. Force is neither added to propositions as on the traditional view, nor is it cancelled as has recently been proposed. Rather higher-level acts such as questioning, but also e.g. conditionalizing, embed and present assertoric or directive acts that are forceful and committal, while suspending commitment to them. The Frege point confounds different varieties of force and the question whether something is merely presented for consideration with the question what is so presented. Force is representational: through assertoric and directive force indicators subjects non-conceptually present positions of theoretical or practical knowledge, while interrogative acts indicate positions of wondering which strive for such knowledge. (shrink)

The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns that is generally taken to have semantic content. This content is generally taken to reflect a conceptual, cognitive, or ontological distinction and relates to philosophical and cognitive notions of unity, identity, and counting. The mass-count distinction is certainly one of the most interesting and puzzling topics in syntax and semantics that bears on ontology and cognitive science. This volume aims to contribute to some of the gaps in the research on the (...) topic, in particular the relation between the syntactic mass-count distinction and semantic and cognitive distinctions, diagnostics for mass and count, the distribution and role of numeral classifiers, abstract mass nouns, and object mass nouns (furniture, police force, clothing). (shrink)

In the Indian philosophical debate, the relationship between the structure of knowledge and external reality has been a persistent issue. This debate has been particularly prominent in Buddhism, as evidenced by the earliest Buddhist attestations in the Pāli canon, where reality is described as a perceptual defection. The world (loka) is perceived through cognition (citta), and the theme of designation (paññatti) is central to the analysis of the Abhidhamma. Buddhism can be viewed as navigating between nominalism and cognitive normativism, as (...) it deconstructs language, which is seen as an obfuscating element that separates the subject from the world. In this article, we explore these issues through a philosophical dialogue between Early Buddhism, Abhidhamma, and Madhyamaka, utilizing methodological tools from Western philosophical traditions, both ancient and modern. We engage in a clash between nihilism and absolutism, in search of the substantiality of entities, which, behind the emptiness of conventional designations, conceals a complex fractal network of pansematism. (shrink)

The current paper expands on previous work done on the influence of learners’ language and preexisting knowledge on understanding physics terminology by exploring the concept of ACCELERATION in Arabic and English. The study attempts to answer two questions: (1) what are the similarities and differences between the polysemy of Arabic تَسَارُع (tasāruʿ) (acceleration) and the polysemy of English acceleration, and (2) to what extent do prototypes and factors motivating the conceptualization of تَسَارُع (tasāruʿ) and the conceptualization of acceleration converge or (...) diverge? To this end, Arabic and English dictionaries and corpora, the ArabiCorpus (Arabic Corpus Search Tool) and the British National Corpus (BNC), were employed. The dictionaries were surveyed to explore the various meanings of تَسَارُع (tasāruʿ) and acceleration, while the ArabiCorpus and the BNC were employed to investigate the senses and to identify the most frequent collocates and so the prototypes of these terms. The meaning extension of the terms is examined on the basis of the cognitive mechanisms which appear in the corpora. Theoretically, the paper is informed by the prototype theory (Rosch, 1973; 1975), image schemas (Johnson, 1987), and conceptual metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980/2003). The results show that تَسَارُع (tasāruʿ) (acceleration) and acceleration generally overlap in terms of polysemy, prototype, and images schemas as well as conceptual metaphor that organize the conceptualization of these terms. It was also found that both Arab and English speakers mix ACCELERATION up with SPEED and so misunderstand them in a scientific setting. The present findings have several implications for science curriculum design, education, and research on universal and culture-specific properties of language. (shrink)

This book offers substantial insight into students’ conceptualization of scientific terminology. The current book explores the commonalities and distinctions between Arabic and French physics terms, and the impact of the language disparities on students’ understanding of physics terms. This book adopts a novel approach to the problem of scientific terminology by exploring physics terms’ polysemy, prototypical meanings, and conceptual metaphor and metonymy, which motivates their extension of meaning. The book also investigates how the linguistic discrepancies and other variables affect the (...) learning of physics by Arab students (Moroccan students, in this book). Concepts in Physics: A Comparative Cognitive Analysis of Arabic and French Terminologies, whether you are a student of science, a science teacher or lecturer, a translator, or a linguist, is what you need. The book will help you comprehend the linguistic and cultural differences between western and non-western physics terminologies (in this book, French and Arabic physics terminologies) and the factors influencing the learning of physics concepts, and thus address the multiple challenges in learning scientific terms and concepts. (shrink)

Despite the wide range of studies on how students’ past knowledge influences their understanding of scientific terminology, few studies were conducted to compare non-scientific language with scientific language, or rather everyday language with scientific language, from a cognitive linguistic perspective. The present paper aims to determine the cognitive mechanisms, i.e., image schemas, conceptual metaphor, and conceptual metonymy, which underpin the conceptualisation of the Arabic term سرعة (speed), using a conceptual metaphor theory framework. Thus, the research question guiding this study is: (...) What cognitive mechanisms underlie the concept of سرعة (speed) in Arabic? The findings of this study will shed light on how Arab speakers conceptualise this term, demonstrating their background knowledge of the term compared to its scientific meaning. The article adds to the growing body of cognitive linguistics research on the conceptual processes behind physics terms. The data was collected from the Arabic Web Corpus (arTenTen) using the Sketch Engine. The findings demonstrated that VERTICATLITY and SCALE schemas are the most dominant image schemas that anchor the conceptual meaning in Arab speakers’ perceptions of the term under investigation and the discourse in which it is employed, as well as offer the concrete basis for conceptual metaphors. The conceptual metaphor CHANGE IS MOTION (LOCATION) was also shown to be active in motivating the conception of SPEED in Arabic. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt at exploring the possibility of reconciling the two interpretations of biolinguistics which have been recently projected by Koster(Biolinguistics 3(1):61–92, 2009). The two interpretations—trivial and nontrivial—can be roughly construed as non-internalist and internalist conceptions of biolinguistics respectively. The internalist approach boils down to a conception of language where language as a mental grammar in the form of I-language grows and functions like a biological organ. On the other hand, under such a construal consistent with Koster’s (Biolinguistics (...) 3(1):61-92, 2009), the non-internalist version does not necessarily have to be externalist in nature; rather it is a matter of mutual reinforcement of biology and culture under the rubric of a co-evolutionary dynamics. Here it will be argued that the apparent dichotomy between these two conceptions of biolinguistics can perhaps be resolved if we have a richer synthesis that accounts for both internalism and non-internalism. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 25 Heft: 4 Seiten: 617-653.

This article presents the results of the analysis of a number of linguistic metaphors found in a corpus of opinion articles published in the Spanish newspaper El País. The authors included in the corpus, who tend towards the left of the political spectrum, use metaphor to express moral judgements on the actions and decisions of the conservative, centre-right People’s party, which governs Spain with an overall majority. With the aim of describing this discourse, we have undertaken a qualitative analysis with (...) a conceptual framework deriving from CDA and cognitive linguistics. First, therefore, we have made use of the methodology developed by Steen and the Pragglejaz group to extract the discourse units that could be considered as the lexical expression of an underlying mapping between domains, that is, the metaphors; second, according to the descriptions of Talmy, Croft, Sweetser, Sullivan, and Dancygier and Sweetser, we have verified that the different types of grammatical structure in which the lexical items appeared also indicated the existence of a metaphorical thought process; and third, in the words of van Dijk, we have studied the ideological semantics underlying conceptual structures and conceptual content. As we have demonstrated, all the samples of linguistic metaphors found led readers to construct the same interpretation of the meaning: The Spanish People’s party government is the past, a past that provokes rejection and which was thought to be definitively ended. (shrink)

This paper presents the notion that verbal discourse is structured, in form and contents, by metaphorical reasoning. It discusses the concept of “metaphorical network” as a framework for relating the parts of a speech act to each other, since such an act seems to cohere into a meaningful text on the basis of “domains” that deliver common concepts. The basic finding of several research projects on this concept suggest that source domains allow speakers to derive sense from a verbal interaction (...) because they interconnect the topic of discussion to culturally-meaningful images and ideas. This suggests, in turn, that language is intertwined with nonverbal systems of meaning, reflecting them in the contents of verbal messages. Overall, the concept of metaphorical networks implies that human cognition is highly associative in structure. (shrink)

Word problems in mathematics seem to constantly pose learning difficulties for all kinds of students. Recent work in math education (for example, [Lakoff, G. & Nuñez, R. E. (2000). Where mathematics comes from: How the embodied mind brings mathematics into being. New York: Basic Books]) suggests that the difficulties stem from an inability on the part of students to decipher the metaphorical properties of the language in which such problems are cast. A 2003 pilot study [Danesi, M. (2003a). Semiotica, 145, (...) 71–83] confirmed this hypothesis in an anecdotal way. This paper reviews the implications of that study and of a follow-up one that is described here as well, in the light of how the metaphorical analysis of word problems allows learners to overcome typical difficulties in word problem-solving by teaching them how to flesh out the underlying concepts and convert them into appropriate representations. (shrink)

An argument that makes use of a generalization activates the prototype for the category used in the generalization. We conducted two experiments that investigated how the activation of the prototype affects the persuasiveness of the argument. The results of the experiments suggest that the features of the prototype overshadow and partly overwrite the actual facts of the case. The case is, to some extent, judged as if it had the features of the prototype instead of the features it actually has. (...) This prototype effect increases the persuasiveness of the argument in situations where the audience finds the judgment more warranted for the prototype than for the actual case, but decreases persuasiveness in situations where the audience finds the judgment less warranted for the prototype than for the actual case. (shrink)

A fundamental goal of linguistic theory is to explain how natural languages are acquired. This paper describes some recent findings on how learners acquire syntactic knowledge for which there is little, if any, decisive evidence from the environment. The first section presents several general observations about language acquisition that linguistic theory has tried to explain and discusses the thesis that certain linguistic properties are innate because they appear universally and in the absence of corresponding experience. A third diagnostic for innateness, (...) early emergence, is the focus of the second section of the paper, in which linguistic theory is tested against recent experimental evidence on children's acquisition of syntax. (shrink)

The right of Australian Indigenous groups to own traditional lands has been a contentious issue in the recent history of Australia. Indeed, Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders did not consider themselves as full citizens in the country they had inhabited for millennia until the late 1960s, and then only after a long campaign and a national referendum (1967) in favour of changes to the Australian Constitution to remove restrictions on the services available to Indigenous Australians. The concept of terra nullius, (...) misapplied to Australia, was strong in the popular imagination among the descendants of settlers or recent migrants and was not definitively put to rest until the Mabo decision (1992), which also established a firm precedent for the recognition of native title.This path to equality was fraught and made lengthy by the fact that the worldviews of the Indigenous Australians (i.e. Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders) and the European (mainly British and Irish) settlers were so different, at least at a superficial level, this being the level at which prejudice is typically manifested. One area where this fact is particularly evident is in the area of the conceptualisation of property and especially the notion of land “ownership” and “use”.In this paper, we will focus on these terms, examining the linguistic evidence of some of the Australian languages spoken traditionally by Indigenous Australians as one means (the only one in many cases) of gaining an insight into their worldview, comparing it with that underlying the English language.We will show that the conceptualisations manifested in the two languages are contrasting but not irreconcilable, and indeed the ability of both groups of speakers (or their descendants in the case of many endangered Australian languages) to reach agreement and come to develop an understanding of the other’s perspective is reason for celebration for all Australians. (shrink)

Linguistic Deception Detection DD is a well-established part of forensic linguistics and an area that continues to attract attention on the part of researchers, self-styled experts, and the public at large. In this article, the various approaches to DD within the general field of linguistics are examined. The basic method is to treat language as a form of behaviour and to equate marked linguistic behaviour with other marked forms of behaviour. Such a comparison has been identified in other fields such (...) as psychology and kinesics as being associated with stress linked to the attempt to deceive, typically in such contexts as examined here. Representative authentic examples of some of the most common linguistic indicators of deception that have been identified are discussed, dividing them into two general categories which we here introduce: language as revealer and language as concealer. We will argue that linguistic analysis for DD should be conducted relative to the subject’s individual linguistic patterns of behaviour, not on absolutes related to broad generalisations about what is supposedly normal or unmarked in the population at large. We will also briefly discuss some structured methods for linguistic analysis for DD and the prospect that technology and artificial intelligence will provide the means to automate and digitalise the linguistic DD process. We maintain that caution is advisable when considering these, as DD will, in all probability, always remain a work in progress, with the need for a flexible human evaluator ready to take into account many different aspects of the individual subject and the case in question. (shrink)

We respond to Morris and Richardson 's claim that Pickering and Chater's arguments about the lack of a relation between cognitive science and folk psychology are flawed. We note that possible controversies about the appropriate uses for the two terms do not affect our arguments. We then address their claim that computational explanation of knowledge-rich processes has proved possible in the domains of problem solving, scientific discovery, and reasoning. We argue that, in all cases, computational explanation is only possible for (...) aspects of those processes that do not make reference to general knowledge. We conclude that consideration of the issues raised by Morris and Richardson reinforces our original claim that there are two fundamentally distinct projects for understanding the mind, one based on justification, and the other on computational explanation, and that these apply to non-overlapping aspects of mental life. (shrink)

The ability to combine words into novel sentences has been used to argue that humans have symbolic language production abilities. Critiques of connectionist models of language often center on the inability of these models to generalize symbolically (Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1988; Marcus, 1998). To address these issues, a connectionist model of sentence production was developed. The model had variables (role‐concept bindings) that were inspired by spatial representations (Landau & Jackendoff, 1993). In order to take advantage of these variables, a novel (...) dual‐pathway architecture with event semantics is proposed and shown to be better at symbolic generalization than several variants. This architecture has one pathway for mapping message content to words and a separate pathway that enforces sequencing constraints. Analysis of the model's hidden units demonstrated that the model learned different types of information in each pathway, and that the model's compositional behavior arose from the combination of these two pathways. The model's ability to balance symbolic and statistical behavior in syntax acquisition and to model aphasic double dissociations provided independent support for the dual‐pathway architecture. (shrink)

In his well-known essay, ‘What Is a Sign?’ (CP 2.281, 285) Peirce uses ‘likeness’ and ‘resemblance’ interchangeably in his definition of icon. The synonymity of the two words has rarely, if ever, been questioned. Curiously, a locus classicus of the pair, at least in F. M. Cornford’s English translation, can be found in a late dialogue of Plato, namely, the Sophist. In this dialogue on the myth and truth of the sophists’ profession, the mysterious ‘stranger’, who is most likely Socrates’ (...) persona, makes the famous distinction between eikon (likeness) and phantasma (semblance) (236a,b). For all his broad knowledge in ancient philosophy, Peirce never mentioned this parallel; nor has any Peircean scholar identified it. There seems to be little problem with eikon as likeness, but phantasma may give rise to a puzzle which this paper will attempt to solve. Plato uses two pairs of words: what eikon is to phantasma is eikastikén (the making of likeness [235d]) to phantastikén (semblance making [236c]). In other words, icons come into being because of the act of icon-making, which is none other than indexicality. Witness what Peirce says about the relationship between photographs and the objects they represent: “But this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature.” (Ibid.) Thus the iconicity which links the representamen (sign) and its object is made possible not only by an interpretant, but also by idexisation. Their possible etymological and epistemological links aside, the Peircean example of photographing and the Platonic discussion of painting and sculpturing in the Sophist, clearly show the physio-pragmatic aspect of iconicity. The paper will therefore reread the Peircean iconicity by closely analysing this relatively obscure Platonic text, and by so doing restore to the text its hidden semiotic dimension. (shrink)

What is the nature and function of mental representations in cognitive science, and in human language in particular? How do they come into existence and interact, and how is the information attributed to them stored in and retrieved from the human mind? Some theories treat constructions as primitive entities used for structure-building, central in both production and comprehension, while other theories only admit construction-like entities as devices to map the structure into semantics or to relate them to specific morphophonological exponents. (...) In this positional piece, we seek to elucidate areas of commonality across what have traditionally been divergent approaches to the role of constructions in language. Here we outline a robust specification of the differences in how chunks of structure containing information are treated in the two main approaches, and we seek to offer a path toward a more unified theoretical stance. (shrink)

In the present study we analyse a sample of Irish Child Directed Speech in terms of item-based constructions and the communicative intents which they express. The study is based on the speech of an Irish native speaker engaged in daily activities with her son (aged 1;9). The findings of the analyses indicate the high degree of lexical specificity attested in the sample; in total 35 item-based frames account for just under 70% of analysed utterances. In most cases there was a (...) one-to-one relationship between item-based frame and communicative intent. However, of particular interest was the clustering of structurally related frames around specific functions. We propose that this relationship highlights the role of communicative intent in the organisation of structural linguistic knowledge. (shrink)

The child directed speech of twelve English‐speaking motherswas analyzed in terms of utterance‐level constructions. First, the mothers' utterances were categorized in terms of general constructional categories such as Wh‐questions, copulas and transitives. Second, mothers' utterances within these categories were further specified in terms of the initial words that framed the utterance, item‐based phrases such as Are you …, I'll …, It's …, Let's …, What did … The findings were: (i) overall, only about 15% of all maternal utterances had SVO (...) form (most were questions, imperatives, copulas, and fragments); (ii) 51% of all maternal utterances began with one of 52 item‐based phrases, mostly consisting of two words or morphemes (45% began with one of just 17 words); and (iii) children used many of these same item‐based phrases, in some cases at a rate that correlated highly with their own mother's frequency of use. We suggest that analyses of adult–child linguistic interaction should take into account not just general constructional categories, but also the item‐based constructions that adults and children use and the frequency with which they use them. (shrink)

Typical spatial descriptions, such as “The car is in front of the house,” describe the position of a located object (LO; e.g., the car) in space relative to a reference object (RO) whose location is known (e.g., the house). The orientation of the RO affects spatial language comprehension via the reference frame selection process. However, the effects of the LO's orientation on spatial language have not received great attention. This study explores whether the pure geometric information of the LO (e.g., (...) its orientation) affects spatial language comprehension using placing and production tasks. Our results suggest that the orientation of the LO influences spatial language comprehension even in the absence of functional relationships. (shrink)

Summary Covert encoding is one of the strategies available to languages for the encoding of motion, in which, in accordance with the laws of Gestalt, the meaning of an expression encoding motion is not coincident with the mere sum of the meanings of each of its constitutive units, relying on the mediation of grammatical and co(n)text­established knowledge for its interpretability. Moving on from a data set gathered for a previous study and adopting a holistic, constructional approach, several strategies were found (...) in a diachronic corpus of Italian, French and Spanish for the covert encoding of motion in such languages, based on whether the motion­interpretation attributed to the covert construction is mediated by either linguistic or extralinguistic knowledge. The diachronic investigation also showed that the use of such patterns is diachronically consistent in frequency, thus proving that such patterns of interaction between language and cognition may be regarded as functional for speakers of all languages and time stages, also confirming that a holistic, constructional approach to language study can help shed light on linguistic–cognitive phenomena on the basis of language variation and change. (shrink)

Lexical concepts are viewed in the article as structures consisting of interrelated facets with different structural weight. The paper suggests a way to model the graded structure of lexical concepts by assessing the weight of each constituting facet according to its relevance for defining purposes, frequency of contextual profiling and salience in derivation processes. Thus, the approach taken exploits as many linguistic points of access to the concept as possible and uses three different dimensions to range its facets. The suggested (...) idea is verified with a case study of some common lexical concepts in English, which reveals both the advantages and the limitations of the approach taken. (shrink)

Most studies on verticality’s embodiment showed that up positions were related to positive emotions whereas down positions were related to negative ones. Research on motion perception found that a parabolic motion both induced animation attribution and implied negative feelings. We hypothesized that seeing a parabolic downward motion will increase both the memorization for words and the execution’s speed of a serial subtraction compared to a parabolic upward motion. Results showed that the downward motion had enhancing effects both on the serial (...) subtraction and on the number of recalled words, independently of their valence. These findings are interpreted as marking processes related to an adaptive behavior in response to a negative stimulus. (shrink)

The objective in the present paper is to analyze the aspect of subjectivity having to do with construing motion and change where no motion and change exists outside the representation, that is, in cases where the conceptualizer does not intend to convey the idea that these properties exist in the state of affairs described. In the process of doing so, I will elaborate on a critique of the notion of fictivity as it is currently being used in cognitive linguistics.

The topic is characterized by a highly interdisciplinary approach to the issue of action and language integration. Such an approach, combining computational models and cognitive robotics experiments with neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and linguistic approaches, can be a powerful means that can help researchers disentangle ambiguous issues, provide better and clearer definitions, and formulate clearer predictions on the links between action and language. In the introduction we briefly describe the papers and discuss the challenges they pose to future research. We identify (...) four important phenomena the papers address and discuss in light of empirical and computational evidence: (a) the role played not only by sensorimotor and emotional information but also of natural language in conceptual representation; (b) the contextual dependency and high flexibility of the interaction between action, concepts, and language; (c) the involvement of the mirror neuron system in action and language processing; (d) the way in which the integration between action and language can be addressed by developmental robotics and Human-Robot Interaction. (shrink)

Clahsen's claim that output forms of productive processes are never listed in the lexicon is a consequence of the rule/list fallacy, empirically incorrect, and not necessary for the hypothesis that the human language faculty has a dual structure, that is, a lexicon and a set of rules.

Cross-cultural differences in cognition are often related to one single cultural dimension. Whether this suffices even for simple tasks is examined in the context of causal attribution. Culture-specific attribution biases are well-established for the social domain, but under dispute for the physical domain. In order to identify and assess possible impacts on assigning physical causation, we conducted a cross-cultural experiment with participants from Germany, China and Tonga. Participants were required to identify which of two entities is the ultimate cause for (...) a physical interaction that was varied with regard to linguistic cues and content. Our data reveal overall cultural differences in attribution tendencies analogous to those in the social domain, but also an impact of linguistic cues and of the task-specific content. (shrink)