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This paper provides an analysis of transparent gerunds in Spanish, as in ¿Qué llegó [silbando ] Juan? 'What arrived [whistling ] Juan?', using a decomposition of Aktionsart in a series of syntactic heads. A traditional analysis of these secondary predicates as adjuncts would undermine well-established syntactic principles restricting movement and extraction. We argue that these transparent gerunds should be analyzed as syntactic constituents merged as part of the syntactic projections associated with Aktionsart. More precisely, they qualify as RhemePs - assuming Ramchand's First Phase Syntax system - thus allowing their arguments to be extracted. Well-attested differences between Spanish and English gerunds will be explained in our analysis by proposing that the Spanish gerund projects as PathP (given it carries a path preposition), whereas English gerunds are simply RhemeP (lacking any sort of preposition). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Actionality (also referred to by labels such as "lexical aspect" or "aktionsart") is the semantic dimension that encodes the constituent phases and boundaries of situations. Despite its central role in aspectual interpretation, careful language-specific descriptions and typological surveys of actional systems have been rare thus far. In this introduction, we describe the steps that lead to the compilation of the present special issue. We discuss several theoretical and methodological challenges that both field linguists and typologists face when investigating actional systems in the languages of the world and we point out some of the important insights to be gained from such endeavors. We then proceed to give an overview of the individual and varied contributions that make up this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigates the scope of metaphors evoked by the culinary term bake in American English and its Peninsular Spanish equivalent hornear. The data analysed was extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Corpus del Español: Web/Dialects. The target frames evoked and the frame elements involved in the metaphorical mappings were used to identify and analyse the metaphorical expressions. Furthermore, the type of process and thematic roles performed by the frame elements in the conceptual projections were examined to make divergences explicit. Our results suggest that metaphor diversity is broader in American English, as the source frame evoked by bake expresses metaphorically a larger number of target frames than hornear in Peninsular Spanish. Consequently, these lexical items are not exact equivalents. Each language seems to place the experiential focus on different frame elements and thematic roles to create their metaphorical mappings, which points to differential cognitive preferences between both cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive linguistics (CL) has, in recent years, seen an increase in appeals to include multiple modalities in language analyses. While individual studies have incorporated gesture, gaze, facial expression, and prosody, among other modalities, CL has yet to completely embrace the systematic analysis of face-to-face interaction. Here, I present an investigation of five aspect-marking periphrastic constructions in North American English. Using naturalistic interactional data (n=250) from the Red Hen archive, this study establishes a multimodal profile for auxiliary constructions headed by one of five highly aspectualized verbs: continue, keep, start, stop, and quit, as in The jackpot continued to grow and He quit smoking. Results show that gesture timing, the structure of the gesture stroke, and gesture movement type, are variables that iconically and differentially represent distinctive aspectual conceptualizations. This study enhances our understanding of aspectual representation in co-speech gesture and informs the ongoing debate within CL and construction grammar circles of what constitutes conventionalization, or what constitutes a construction (mono- or multimodal). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experiencer-object verbs are known to deviate from the prototype of transitive verbs. Previous studies have shown that a subset of these verbs is stative and non-agentive and argue that this semantic peculiarity accounts for particular non-canonical syntactic properties. This article shows that the stativity/non-agentivity of experiencer verbs is subject to typological variation. The empirical evidence comes from an experimental study on speaker's intuitions, which shows that some experiencer-object verbs in German and Modern Greek differ from canonical transitive verbs in agentivity and stativity, while experiencer-object verbs in Turkish, Yucatec Maya, and Chinese display the semanto-syntactic properties of canonical transitive verbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]