Motivation offers a viable middle ground to extreme positions that are clearly untenable. Here I consider the semantic motivation of grammar, as exemplified by the English auxiliary. Properly characterized in terms of systems of elements serving particular semantic functions, the auxiliary is seen as being efficient and highly motivated. Its apparent idiosyncrasies reflect the functions served and the meanings of the elements employed.
Working within the cognitive linguistics theoretical framework (Langacker 1987, 1991; Talmy 2000a, 2000b) and based on the Ground-before-Figure (GbF) model developed in Chen (2003), this paper argues that the there-existential construction presents a ground before a figure. As such, the construction is motivated by perceptual considerations (Radden & Panther 2004), resulting in the kind of cognitive efficiency that aids the processing of information for the hearer.
This paper discusses participant-oriented uses of adverbs and tries to motivate their conceptual flexibility within a framework largely inspired by Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar. Usually, at least two types of participant-oriented adverb are identified, manner and transparent adverbs. It is argued here that they define a network where both a schema and a prototype can be recognized and that the difference between manner and transparent adverbs results from a difference in vantage point. Transparent adverbs, which code either cause or result, imply an internal vantage point while manner adverbs imply an external vantage point. The prototype is identified with those (manner) adverbs which involve some (external) evaluation of the clausal event on the part of the conceptualizer. The schema is regarded as merely coding temporal coextension between the verbal event and the property hinted at by the adjectival base of the adverb. Finally, the relation between participant-oriented adverbs, on the one hand, and depictive adjectives and resultative adverbs is also briefly addressed.
Dangling participles are considered incorrect usage in written Standard English. Nonetheless, dangling participles enjoy widespread usage, particularly in spoken English. This paper argues that the use of dangling participles is semantically and cognitively motivated. In adopting a usage-based view and analyzing attested data from the British National Corpus, this study shows that constructions with a dangling participle describe a coherent “cognizance scenario” as their constructional meaning. The dangling participial construction evokes a conceptualizer who conceives the situation described in the main clause. Thanks to its constructional semantics, the dangling participle is especially common in text genres which focus on the interaction with the hearer.
The present article proposes both theoretical and empirical explanations for the semantic shift from the meaning temporal/spatial overlap to the meaning contrast/concessive, observable across genetically and geographically unrelated languages (e.g. English while, Japanese -nagara). The shift involves metonymic inference (Traugott & König 1991). However, our three experiments show that this inference is further motivated by a temporal/spatial overlap of two situations, which largely corresponds to perceptual overlap in Langacker’s viewing arrangement. Therefore, among Radden and Panther’s (2004) language-independent factors of motivation, perceptual motivation (perceptual overlap) is more fundamental to the semantic change in question than cognitive motivation (metonymic inference).
Aspect expresses information about how events unfold in time. In English, imperfective aspect is known to widen the temporal scope of the event described, but little is known about how such imperfective descriptions are processed or what motivates their use. This chapter investigates the conceptual impact of aspect, especially imperfective descriptions of past events, and argues that it shapes our understanding of events, and that its use and function is motivated by our everyday experience of perceiving and simulating events.
This chapter is concerned with the use of non-motion verbs in the caused-motion construction. Their literal or figurative motional interpretation is claimed to be motivated by high-level conceptual metaphors. Typically, these non-motion verbs are lexically intransitive and coerced into transitive verbs in the caused-motion construction. The goal of the paper to identify the constructional meanings of these verbs resulting from processes of metaphorization. These meaning constructions are analyzed within the theoretical frameworks of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the Lexical-Constructional Model.
The aim of this paper is to find motivation (and perhaps also some of its limits) in grammatical structures associated with the English modal must and its Hungarian equivalent kell. Motivation is seen as coming from various ingredients of a conceptual structure associated with the modals that is assumed to be far more complex than was suggested in previous analyses of the 1990s. The view of modality offered here is more fine-grained in including participants and matching forces associated with them, especially in the deontic senses. The roles attributed to participants in conceptual structure can be seen as motivating alternative grammatical structures and, conversely, the presence of these structures can be taken as indirect evidence that the conceptual structure is valid. The correlation, however, has its limits as well. Some of the radical changes in conceptual structure resulting from the root to epistemic extension are at best marginally represented in grammatical structure. The paper also offers suggestions as to why this may be the case.
The highly developed honorific systems in Korean and Japanese are functionally similar but differ with respect to non-subject referent honorifics, which indicate the speaker’s deference toward a non-subject referent participant in the event described. Korean expresses non-subject referent honorifics lexically, whereas Japanese expresses them morphologically. Moreover, the Korean pattern of non-subject referent honorifics is limited to a handful of verbs while the Japanese pattern is fairly productive. This paper compares expressions of honorifics for objectively identical situations in the two languages and argues that their different usages and productivities are motivated by socio-cultural factors.
Reference-point reasoning is a pervasive cognitive phenomenon intrinsic to many domains of human activity. However, very little is known about linguistic aspects of this phenomenon. This paper elaborates the reference-point model by applying it to lexical semantics and, more specifically, to the semantics of dimensional adjectives. It is argued that a panoply of reference points may be used to anchor conceptual specifications of adjectives, prototypes being only a special case of the reference-point mechanism. For example, dimensional adjectives may be interpreted vis-à-vis an average value of the property (norm), endpoints of the scale and dimensions of the human body (ego). Each of these reference points motivates crucial semantic and functional properties of dimensional adjectives.
A series of corpus-based case studies on the availability of metonymically used proper names in the language of media, where the name of a capital is used to refer indirectly to the government, shows that this particular type of metonymy is available in Hungarian and Croatian but underused in comparison with English and German. The picture is all the more puzzling because the distribution of metonymies is very uneven in Hungarian and Croatian – some texts exhibiting hardly any such metonymies while they abound in some other texts. When examined along the temporal dimension, the data reveal a cyclic variation in the availability of these metonymies, with productivity regularly peaking at the weekend. These contrasts appear to be ultimately motivated by the workings of a cultural model whose essential ingredient is a correlation obtaining between two very general conceptual metaphors: time is space and social and mental world is physical world.
This paper is concerned with motivation and transparency in the lexicon. After a theoretical discussion of motivation, the author presents an empirical study that focuses on the motivation of formally simple and complex polysemous Italian words. It is shown that the motivatability of polysemous words does not depend on formal complexity alone, but also on the cognitive relation (metaphor vs. metonymy) that connects the meanings of a polysemous word.
The notion motivational network is proposed to describe the existence of various possibilities of motivation for a given form. As shown in questionnaire studies, this phenomenon is quite common for non-linguist native speakers. But the notion of motivational network is also justified from a cognitive perspective: in the mental lexicon, words in a word family are structured as multidirectional networks, resulting in the co-activation of all family members. Thus, the coexistence of various equally salient motivational partners should not be regarded as exceptional but rather as the default case in lexical motivation.
It is widely believed that only a small part of the English vocabulary is analyzable into constituents that are both formally and semantically related to the meaning of the complex word. De Saussure (1916) already described English as a langue lexicologique, a phenomenon that Leisi (1955) attributes to the large proportion of Romance words that have become part of the originally Germanic English language. Leisi concludes that, in contrast to German, many words of contemporary English are not integrated into any word family.This paper presents the results of a research project in which the motivatability of the 2,500 most frequent English and German words is investigated. The approach adopted here distinguishes the four categories of ‘fully motivatable’, ‘partially motivatable’, ‘unmotivatable but transparent’ and ‘fully unmotivatable’ words. The two most important findings of the study are: (i) the German vocabulary is in fact more motivatable than the English vocabulary – if only marginally so, and (ii) the non-native origin of a word has no negative effect on its motivatability.
Motivation offers a viable middle ground to extreme positions that are clearly untenable. Here I consider the semantic motivation of grammar, as exemplified by the English auxiliary. Properly characterized in terms of systems of elements serving particular semantic functions, the auxiliary is seen as being efficient and highly motivated. Its apparent idiosyncrasies reflect the functions served and the meanings of the elements employed.
Working within the cognitive linguistics theoretical framework (Langacker 1987, 1991; Talmy 2000a, 2000b) and based on the Ground-before-Figure (GbF) model developed in Chen (2003), this paper argues that the there-existential construction presents a ground before a figure. As such, the construction is motivated by perceptual considerations (Radden & Panther 2004), resulting in the kind of cognitive efficiency that aids the processing of information for the hearer.
This paper discusses participant-oriented uses of adverbs and tries to motivate their conceptual flexibility within a framework largely inspired by Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar. Usually, at least two types of participant-oriented adverb are identified, manner and transparent adverbs. It is argued here that they define a network where both a schema and a prototype can be recognized and that the difference between manner and transparent adverbs results from a difference in vantage point. Transparent adverbs, which code either cause or result, imply an internal vantage point while manner adverbs imply an external vantage point. The prototype is identified with those (manner) adverbs which involve some (external) evaluation of the clausal event on the part of the conceptualizer. The schema is regarded as merely coding temporal coextension between the verbal event and the property hinted at by the adjectival base of the adverb. Finally, the relation between participant-oriented adverbs, on the one hand, and depictive adjectives and resultative adverbs is also briefly addressed.
Dangling participles are considered incorrect usage in written Standard English. Nonetheless, dangling participles enjoy widespread usage, particularly in spoken English. This paper argues that the use of dangling participles is semantically and cognitively motivated. In adopting a usage-based view and analyzing attested data from the British National Corpus, this study shows that constructions with a dangling participle describe a coherent “cognizance scenario” as their constructional meaning. The dangling participial construction evokes a conceptualizer who conceives the situation described in the main clause. Thanks to its constructional semantics, the dangling participle is especially common in text genres which focus on the interaction with the hearer.
The present article proposes both theoretical and empirical explanations for the semantic shift from the meaning temporal/spatial overlap to the meaning contrast/concessive, observable across genetically and geographically unrelated languages (e.g. English while, Japanese -nagara). The shift involves metonymic inference (Traugott & König 1991). However, our three experiments show that this inference is further motivated by a temporal/spatial overlap of two situations, which largely corresponds to perceptual overlap in Langacker’s viewing arrangement. Therefore, among Radden and Panther’s (2004) language-independent factors of motivation, perceptual motivation (perceptual overlap) is more fundamental to the semantic change in question than cognitive motivation (metonymic inference).
Aspect expresses information about how events unfold in time. In English, imperfective aspect is known to widen the temporal scope of the event described, but little is known about how such imperfective descriptions are processed or what motivates their use. This chapter investigates the conceptual impact of aspect, especially imperfective descriptions of past events, and argues that it shapes our understanding of events, and that its use and function is motivated by our everyday experience of perceiving and simulating events.
This chapter is concerned with the use of non-motion verbs in the caused-motion construction. Their literal or figurative motional interpretation is claimed to be motivated by high-level conceptual metaphors. Typically, these non-motion verbs are lexically intransitive and coerced into transitive verbs in the caused-motion construction. The goal of the paper to identify the constructional meanings of these verbs resulting from processes of metaphorization. These meaning constructions are analyzed within the theoretical frameworks of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the Lexical-Constructional Model.
The aim of this paper is to find motivation (and perhaps also some of its limits) in grammatical structures associated with the English modal must and its Hungarian equivalent kell. Motivation is seen as coming from various ingredients of a conceptual structure associated with the modals that is assumed to be far more complex than was suggested in previous analyses of the 1990s. The view of modality offered here is more fine-grained in including participants and matching forces associated with them, especially in the deontic senses. The roles attributed to participants in conceptual structure can be seen as motivating alternative grammatical structures and, conversely, the presence of these structures can be taken as indirect evidence that the conceptual structure is valid. The correlation, however, has its limits as well. Some of the radical changes in conceptual structure resulting from the root to epistemic extension are at best marginally represented in grammatical structure. The paper also offers suggestions as to why this may be the case.
The highly developed honorific systems in Korean and Japanese are functionally similar but differ with respect to non-subject referent honorifics, which indicate the speaker’s deference toward a non-subject referent participant in the event described. Korean expresses non-subject referent honorifics lexically, whereas Japanese expresses them morphologically. Moreover, the Korean pattern of non-subject referent honorifics is limited to a handful of verbs while the Japanese pattern is fairly productive. This paper compares expressions of honorifics for objectively identical situations in the two languages and argues that their different usages and productivities are motivated by socio-cultural factors.
Reference-point reasoning is a pervasive cognitive phenomenon intrinsic to many domains of human activity. However, very little is known about linguistic aspects of this phenomenon. This paper elaborates the reference-point model by applying it to lexical semantics and, more specifically, to the semantics of dimensional adjectives. It is argued that a panoply of reference points may be used to anchor conceptual specifications of adjectives, prototypes being only a special case of the reference-point mechanism. For example, dimensional adjectives may be interpreted vis-à-vis an average value of the property (norm), endpoints of the scale and dimensions of the human body (ego). Each of these reference points motivates crucial semantic and functional properties of dimensional adjectives.
A series of corpus-based case studies on the availability of metonymically used proper names in the language of media, where the name of a capital is used to refer indirectly to the government, shows that this particular type of metonymy is available in Hungarian and Croatian but underused in comparison with English and German. The picture is all the more puzzling because the distribution of metonymies is very uneven in Hungarian and Croatian – some texts exhibiting hardly any such metonymies while they abound in some other texts. When examined along the temporal dimension, the data reveal a cyclic variation in the availability of these metonymies, with productivity regularly peaking at the weekend. These contrasts appear to be ultimately motivated by the workings of a cultural model whose essential ingredient is a correlation obtaining between two very general conceptual metaphors: time is space and social and mental world is physical world.
This paper is concerned with motivation and transparency in the lexicon. After a theoretical discussion of motivation, the author presents an empirical study that focuses on the motivation of formally simple and complex polysemous Italian words. It is shown that the motivatability of polysemous words does not depend on formal complexity alone, but also on the cognitive relation (metaphor vs. metonymy) that connects the meanings of a polysemous word.
The notion motivational network is proposed to describe the existence of various possibilities of motivation for a given form. As shown in questionnaire studies, this phenomenon is quite common for non-linguist native speakers. But the notion of motivational network is also justified from a cognitive perspective: in the mental lexicon, words in a word family are structured as multidirectional networks, resulting in the co-activation of all family members. Thus, the coexistence of various equally salient motivational partners should not be regarded as exceptional but rather as the default case in lexical motivation.
It is widely believed that only a small part of the English vocabulary is analyzable into constituents that are both formally and semantically related to the meaning of the complex word. De Saussure (1916) already described English as a langue lexicologique, a phenomenon that Leisi (1955) attributes to the large proportion of Romance words that have become part of the originally Germanic English language. Leisi concludes that, in contrast to German, many words of contemporary English are not integrated into any word family.This paper presents the results of a research project in which the motivatability of the 2,500 most frequent English and German words is investigated. The approach adopted here distinguishes the four categories of ‘fully motivatable’, ‘partially motivatable’, ‘unmotivatable but transparent’ and ‘fully unmotivatable’ words. The two most important findings of the study are: (i) the German vocabulary is in fact more motivatable than the English vocabulary – if only marginally so, and (ii) the non-native origin of a word has no negative effect on its motivatability.