This opening essay delineates the conceptual structure of cognitive linguistics and provides a reference framework for the other essays, which address and develop particular aspects of the theory. The two principal conceptual points emphasised by the author are the non-reducibility of linguistic expressions to truth conditions, and the predominant role played by perceptive, mental and even motor conceptualization in natural language.
The essay concentrates in particular on the main forms of construal, or the ability to conceive and portray the same situation in alternate ways (through specificity, different mental scanning, directionality, vantage point, figure-background). In this respects this essay closely relates to Croft and Wood’s contribute. The focal role assumed in cognitive linguistics by the construal of figure-ground also implicitly suggests a theory of semantic categories (profiled relationships through time as ‘verb’ and profiled individual as ‘noun’). Other aspects of this point concern the logical grammatical relations of subject and object. Here Langacker argues the thesis that the critical factors do not pertain to logic, objective truth or strict compositionality: a topic also explored by Peruzzi’s essay later in the book. In his discussion of the various forms of construal, Langacker highlights also the difference between a cognitive and a formal conception of semantics. With particular regard to Montague semantics, Marconi’s essay in the book can be viewed as a complementary treatment of this difference, particularly as regards the relationship between syntax and semantics. Various other issues addressed by Langacker are also considered in Albertazzi’s Introduction (the foundational contribution of the perceptive structures to the natural language, the spatio-temporal forms of conceptualization, the difference between formal semantics and cognitive semantics). Moreover, his treatment shares with Albertazzi’s and Kövecses’ essays a concern to provide a dynamic description of the scanning of the situation and analysis of fictive motion. Finally, it also has a number of aspects in common with Geeraerts’s discussion of the concept of structure and cross-linguistic distribution.
2023. Metaphorical conceptualization of beauty in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History: translation perspectives. Neohelicon 50:2 ► pp. 687 ff.
Mondal, Prakash
2023. Towards a unified representation of linguistic meaning. Open Linguistics 9:1
Mondal, Prakash
2024. Bridging the Chasm Between Cognitive Representations and Formal Structures of Linguistic Meanings. Cognitive Science 48:5
Yang, Wenhui
2020. News Discourse and Cognitive Studies. In A Cross-Cultural Study of Commercial Media Discourses, ► pp. 9 ff.
Yang, Wenhui
2020. Introduction. In A Cross-Cultural Study of Commercial Media Discourses, ► pp. 1 ff.
Kamoen, Naomi, Maria Baukje Johanna Mos & Valerio Capraro
2019. A good tennis player does not lose matches. The effects of valence congruency in processing stance-argument pairs. PLOS ONE 14:11 ► pp. e0224481 ff.
Carretero, Abigail, Juliana De la Mora & Ricardo Maldonado
2018. Tampoco evaluativo: marca subjetiva de inadecuación en el español de México. Forma y Función 31:2 ► pp. 51 ff.
Dam, Lotte
2018. The Semantics of the Spanish Adjective Positions: a Matter of Focus. Research in Language 16:2 ► pp. 223 ff.
Deleau, Michel
2016. Jerome Seymour Bruner (1915-2016) : Une vie d’exploration de l’esprit humain. Enfance N° 4:4 ► pp. 349 ff.
Deleau, Michel
2016. Jerome Seymour Bruner (1915-2016) : Une vie d’exploration de l’esprit humain. Enfance 2016:04 ► pp. 349 ff.
Kosetzi, Konstantia
2012. (Challenges to) Hegemonic Masculinity in Greek Fictional Television. Culture, Society and Masculinities 4:2 ► pp. 107 ff.
Oltramari, Alessandro
2011. An Introduction to Hybrid Semantics: The Role of Cognition in Semantic Resources. In Modeling, Learning, and Processing of Text Technological Data Structures [Studies in Computational Intelligence, 370], ► pp. 97 ff.
Ibbotson, Paul & Michael Tomasello
2009. Prototype constructions in early language acquisition. Language and Cognition 1:1 ► pp. 59 ff.
Langacker, Ronald W.
2005. Dynamicity, Fictivity, and Scanning: The Imaginative Basis of Logic and Linguistic Meaning. In Grounding Cognition, ► pp. 164 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 8 august 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.