Search

This paper aims to present an outline of some major types of language contact and conflict situations encountered worldwide by making reference to two models of language policy: the rationalist model, which focuses on the ideological role of language such as English as an instrument for wider communication and education; and the romantic model, in which for example post-colonial English is generally perceived as a threat to the ecolinguistic situation in multi-ethnic and multilingual societies. First the notion of ‘conflict' will be situated within its socio-historical context with reference to Fishman's earlier harmony model and a critique thereof. Reference to various older types of language conflict situations in Europe (France, Wales, Spain) will show that communities and language planners alike made different uses of the two models in question, each with different outcomes for the various parties and language groups involved. Moving from the ‘inner circle' (Europe) to the ‘outer circle' of ‘exported' European languages (i.e. to the USA, Africa, India), it will be argued that language conflict often arises as a result of the imposition by European powers of one dominant language and the marginalisation or even neglect of indigenous languages. The paper concludes by suggesting that language conflict situations are not to be understood as mechanistic, self-fulfilling developments but rather as a complex result of ideological, attitudinal and policy-driven evaluations, measures and implementations . Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 2007, 25(3): 303–317

A union of Cognitive Linguistics and Sociolinguistics was bound to happen. Both proclaim a usage-based approach to language and aim to analyse actual language use in objective ways. Whereas Sociolinguistics is by nature on the outlook forlanguage in its variety, CL can no longer afford to ignoresocial variation in language as it manifests itself in the usagedata. Nor can it fail to adopt an empirical methodology thatreflects variation as it actually occurs, beyond the limitedknowledge of the individual observer. Conversely, while CL canonly benefit from a heightened sensitivity to social aspects,the rich, bottom-up theoretical framework it has developed islikely to contribute to a much better understanding of themeaning of variationist phenomena. This volume brings together fifteen chapters written by prominent scholars testifying of rich empirical and theoretizing research into the social aspects of language variation. Taking a broad view on Cognitive Sociolinguistics, the volume covers three main areas: corpus-based research on language variation, cognitive cultural models, and the ideologies of sociopolitical and socio-economic systems.

The lexicon has long been assumed to be the source of all conceptual content expressed by sentences. Syntactic structures have correspondingly been seen only as providing instructions for the assembly of the concepts expressed by words. Under this view, sentences have meaning, but the syntactic structures which sentences instantiate do not. This paper challenges this view: it uses the phenomenon of implicit type-shifting to demonstrate that constructions have meanings distinct from those of words and that, in cases of conflict, construction meaning overrides word meaning; and it argues that such overrides are predictable by-products of the general mechanism of construction-word integration. This mechanism will be described with respect to three different kinds of constructions: argument-structure constructions, which specify linkings of thematic roles to grammatical functions; aspectual constructions, which encode the situation type denoted by the verb or verb phrase; and sentence types, which pair a discourse function with a clausal structure. On the basis of these three short case studies, I will argue that appeal to constructional meaning greatly enhances the descriptive power of a theory of sen

This book provides a representative survey of early and more recent concerns in cognitively inspired lexical semantics. As such, it focuses on the issue of polysemy vs. monosemy, it offers fresh perspectives on prototypicality in lexical categories, it sheds light on the development of lexical items in child language acquisition and in diachrony, and it looks at issues going beyond the individual lexical item (onomasiology, synonymy, the relationship between lexical and syntactic meaning).

In1 1985 Wolf Paprotte and I published our collective volume The Ubiquity of Metaphor: Metaphor in Language and Thought, which was largely based on papers presented during a highly successful 3-day Lakoff seminar in Trier in 1983. In those days the scientific community was beginning to discover the enormous possibilities opened up by the cognitive approach to metaphor as developed in Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live by (1980). The cognitive approach was revolutionary. Yet it was also too narrow in two respects. First, it did not see the equally innovative function of metonymy. Though a brief chapter in Metaphors We Live by discusses metonymy, it was only ten or fifteen years later that the serious investigation of metonymy came about. A second problem was the strict two-domain mapping proposed by Lakoff and Johnson, only providing for the source domain to be mapped onto the target domain. This is now replaced by the multi-space approach developed by Fauconnier and Turner (see below).

1. Preface (by Niemeier, Susanne) 2. Introductory comments (by Lucy, John A.) 3. Part 1. Evidence from Language: Production, Interpretation, and Change 4. Linguistic relativity in speech perception: An overview of the influence of language experience on the perception of speech sounds from infancy to adulthood (by Bohn, Ocke-Schwen) 5. Equivalence and mismatch of semantic features: Collocations in English, Spanish and Dutch (by Schroten, Jan) 6. Can grammar make you feel different? (by Maratsos, Michael) 7. Semantic change as linguistic interpretation of the world (by Gyori, Gabor) 8. (Micro-)categorization, semantic change, and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (by Rhodes, Richard A.) 9. Part 2. Evidence beyond Language: Cognition, Discourse, and Culture 10. Verbalized events: A dynamic approach to linguistic relativity and determinism (by Slobin, Dan I.) 11. Universal ontological knowledge and a bias toward language-specific categories in the construal of individuation (by Imai, Mutsumi) 12. Grammar and social practice: On the role of 'culture' in linguistic relativity (by Bickel, Balthasar) 13. "S'engager" vs. "to show restraint": Linguistic and cultural relativity in discourse management (by Peeters, Bert) 14. Grammar and the cult of the virgin: A case study of Polish religious discourse (by Tabakowska, Elzbieta) 15. Subject Index 16. Language Index

1. List of contributors 2. Introduction (by Athanasiadou, Angeliki) 3. Part I: The core of conditionals 4. Conditionals and counterfactuals: conceptual primitives and linguistic universals (by Wierzbicka, Anna) 5. Conditionality, hypotheticality, counterfactuality (by Athanasiadou, Angeliki) 6. The relation between past time reference and counterfactuality: a new look (by Dahl, Osten) 7. Mood, tense and the interpretation of conditionals (by Tynan, John) 8. Part II: Single conditional constructions 9. Unless and but conditionals: a historical perspective (by Traugott, Elizabeth Closs) 10. Conditional perfection (by Auwera, Johan van der) 11. Generics and habituals (by Langacker, Ronald W.) 12. Conditionals and restrictives on generics (by Ziv, Yael) 13. Part III: Basic dimensions of conditionality 14. Conditionality as cognitive distance (by Werth, Paul) 15. Conceptualization: conditionals as an instance of figure/ground alignment (by Tabakowska, Elzbieta) 16. Conditionals and polarity (by Taylor, John R.) 17. Conditionality in dimensional perspective (by Seiler, Hansjakob) 18. Part IV: Conditionals in use 19. Negative conditionality, subjectification, and conditional reasoning (by Akatsuka, Noriko) 20. The emergence of conditionals in child language: are they really so late? (by Katis, Demetra) 21. Speaking conditionally: some contexts for if-clauses in conversation (by Ford, Cecilia E.) 22. Subject Index

Introduction - language and the cognitive constructural of space, Martin Putz. Part 1 A space in language: pointing, exis and distance conceptualizing space in prepositions and morphology. Part 2 Space as a cultural artifact: can langauge use cope with space? variability in the conceptualization of space. Space as a bridge to other conceptuated domains: from one meaning to another from space to time, events and beyond. Part 4 Space as an organizing principle: discourse as space abstracts words as space.

For this volume, 30 well-known linguistics and researcher in related fields were invited to present an overview of their most important insights and theories as these have evolved over the past 30 years. Against the background of work done in other areas of study, the contributors reflect on the development of their ideas; the book shows what progress has been made, and how priorities have shifted these past decades. By placing current ideas in a wider historical perspective, "Thirty Years of Linguistics Evolution" will become a unique instrument for future generations of linguists to gain insight into the overall trends and problems that have dominated linguistics in the second half of the 20th century."The impressive contributions to this volume provide a glowing and appropriate testimonial to the many years of effort which Rene Dirven has devoted to linguistic research and to the forging of contacts between scholars all over the world. The topics are wide-ranging, the titles intriguing, the content challenging. The whole has been scrupulously edited by Martin Putz to provide a book which I am sure will be of considerable interest and value to scholars and students alike." David Crystal, Bangor, Wales.

Adjective sequences in attributive position tend to follow a fairly rigorous order, which was already observed in several structuralist approaches. Thanks to the insights of case grammar, iconicity studies and cognitive linguistics, these adjective sequences can now also be given a semantic, i.e. a conceptual basis. Adjective types that imply some semantic role such as agent, instrument, source, are conceptually and hence also syntactically in close proximity to the noun they modify. Next in proximity are the more “objective” adjective types denoting properties such as size, shape, age and colour. The internal sequence of these four properties can be explained by the principle of saliency, which is supported by observations in language acquisition and language typology research. More “subjective” qualifications such as nice, splendid, wonderful are least inherent to any entity denoted by the noun and consequently, iconically speaking, at the greatest distance from it.

On of the major concerns in the tradition of foreign language teaching has been the question of how FL learners learn new vocabulary. This issue comprises two questions, i.e. how are FL words grasped in their complex meanings and how are they remembered? In this paper this dual issue is tackled by proposing the notion of a didactic lexicon, which is seen as an optimal presentation of word meanings. This contribution discusses Fillmore's 'Scenes-and-frame semantics' and the contextual approach to vocabulary learning and describes an experiment in contextual vocabulary learning and testing. A didactic lexicon is defined as a variabele set of lexical items explained in ordinary language, possibly with the help of visual materials or trans-lations, enabling the learner to build up the strongest possible associations between FL words and their prototypical scenes, and revealing the underlying structure of the lexicon of the FL. Finally some strategies for developing a 'didactic' lexicon are presented.

The present situation in most foreign-language (FL) classes is, surely, that listening comprehension is under-represented. Against this background it is astonishing that a number of writers, especially in the USA, claim absolute priority for listening comprehension and want to have speaking delayed, even believing early attempts at oral proficiency to be prejudicial to mastery of the foreign language. I do not share this rather extreme view and will rather plead for an integration of listening and speaking skills.

1. Introduction (by Dirven, Rene) 2. Part 1. Metaphor and the system of languages 3. Semiotic aspects of metaphor (by Noth, Winfried) 4. "Conventional" and "dead" metaphors revisited (by Traugott, Elizabeth Closs) 5. Towards an explanatory theory of metaphor (by Muhlhausler, Peter) 6. Metaphor as a basic means for extending the lexicon (by Dirven, Rene) 7. polysemy, tropes and cognition or the non-magrittian art of closing curtains whilst opening them (by Jongen, Rene) 8. Context dependence and metaphor (by Bosch, Peter) 9. Part 2. Metaphor and language Use 10. Spatial metaphors underlying propositions of causality (by Radden, Gunter) 11. Metaphoric processes in word formation. The case of prefixed verbs (by Rudzka-Ostyn, Brygida) 12. Linguistic and extralinguistic aids for reconstruction and interpretation of metaphors in headlines (by Knop, Sabine De) 13. Metaphors and their aptness in trade names for perfumes (by Vorlat, Emma) 14. the translation of metaphor (by Newmark, Peter) 15. Part 3. Metaphor and psycholinguistic processes 16. Some implications of metaphor for philosophy and psychology of science (by Hoffman, Robert R.) 17. Representation in cognitive psychological theories of figurative language (by Honeck, Richard P.) 18. Metaphor and the first words (by Paprotte, Wolf) 19. A devlopmental analysis of metaphoric competence and reading (by Pickens, James D.) 20. Metaphoric productions and preferences in second language learners (by Trosbrog, Anna) 21. Metaphor production and comprehension in Aphasia (by Stachowiak, Franz-Josef) 22. Visual imagery and metaphor in british sign language (by Woll, Bencie)

1. By way of introduction (by Dirven, Rene) 2. I. 'Functional liguistics of Prague' and other functional approaches 3. On Prague school functionalism in linguistics (by Danes, Frantisek) 4. M.A.K. Halliday's functional grammar and the Prague school (by Davidse, Kristin) 5. Some principles of functional grammar (by Dik, Simon C.) 6. S.C. Dik's functional grammar: A pilgrimage to Prague? (by Gebruers, Rudi) 7. II. The theme-rheme (tpoic-comment) issue in the Praguian tradition 8. On the delimitation of the theme in functional sentence perspective (by Firbas, Jan) 9. Constitutive, informative and transformative models in modern English texts and sentences (by Nosek, Jiri) 10. Prague functionalism an topic vs. focus (by Sgall, Petr) 11. Functional sentence perspective and intensional logic (by Svoboda, Ales) 12. A functionalist approach to the acquisition of grammar (by Bates, Elizabeth) 13. Functional sentence perspective in discourse and language acquisition (by Paprotte, Wolf) 14. Processing strategies: A psycholinguistic neofunctionalism? (by Prideaux, Gary D.) 15. IV. Functionalism in general linguistics 16. The overestimation of functionalism (by Labov, William) 17. Function and structure in linguistic descriptions (by Haas, W.) 18. Communication and expressivity (by Hubler, Axel) 19. Functions of intonation (by Esser, Jurgen) 20. Written language seen from the functionalist angle (by Vachek, Josef) 21. V. Functionalism in linguistic description 22. Word-formation and poetic language: Non-lexicalized nominal compounds in the poetry of Kevin Crossley-Holland (by Boase-Beier, Jean) 23. On acceptable violations of parallelism constraints (by Grosu, Alexander) 24. A case of syntactic mimicry (by McCawley, James D.) 25. Functionalism in contrastive analysis and translation studies (by Ivir, Vladimir) 26. Index