Mental Spaces: Processes for Establishing and Linking Spaces

This paper reviews the theory of mental spaces as expounded by Fauconnier (1994). In this work he posits a theory in which reference has a structural dimension. Within the theory, this structure is represented using spaces, connectors across the spaces and some general principles that are found to apply. The complexity lies in the interaction between the principles and in the contextual structures that feed into the principles for interpretation. Brugman, in her 1996 paper, makes use of insights from mental spaces theory to conduct an analysis of HAVE-constructions. She notes that Fauconnier has “elaborated a theory of partial possible worlds which speakers construct when talking/hearing about the entities and relations of perceived or imagined worlds. These partial models, called Mental Spaces, are not specifically linguistic in nature. Rather they are a manifestation of general cognitive abilities. Mental spaces may be representations of the speaker’s reality, or may be fictional or intensional, or may reflect past or future states of the ‘real’ world.

How Much Can Classifiers Be Analogous To Their Referents?

Sign Language poetry is especially valued for its presentation of strong visual images. Here, we explore the highly visual signs that British Sign Language and American Sign Language poets create as part of the \u27classifier system\u27 of their languages. Signed languages, as they create visually-motivated messages, utilise categoricity (more traditionally considered \u27language\u27) and analogy (more traditionally considered extra-linguistic and the domain of \u27gesture\u27). Classifiers in sign languages arguably show both these characteristics (Oviedo, 2004). In our discussion of sign language poetry, we see that poets take elements that are widely understood to be highly visual, closely representing their referents, and make them even more highly visual -so going beyond categorisation and into new areas of analogue

The Online LexiCOIN: Exploring the formation and use of English slang blends

This thesis aims to explore the manner in which English slang lexical blends are formed and used in computer-mediated communication. The focus is particularly on how blends are used on the social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. Portmanteau words, also referred to as lexical blends, are a common process by which new words are formed and introduced into a language, particularly regarding slang. The introduction of the Internet and its growing availability has acted as a catalyst for the introduction of new slang words to the English language, especially since language usage on the Internet is not moderated in the same way that printed texts have previously been. This allows linguists to study the changes in word creation and word formation as it is progressing, using the tools that have thus far been unavailable. Since there is a lack of consensus among linguists, this thesis explores the various definitions of the term ‘blend’. While substantial research efforts have been made to categorize and systematize blends, the blends that appear online and enter colloquial exchanges are hardly ever formally recorded and analyzed in detail. The aim of the study is to conduct a thorough investigation of online dictionaries and sources for lexical blends, and 220 of them are assembled in a list in the appendix. These were analyzed in terms of the formation process according to Lehrer's taxonomy. The investigation consists of 12 highlighted examples analyzed in-depth, which are classified as the ‘final sample’. The ‘final sample’ showcases the variety of different blend structures, domains and social media sources (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit) that have been consulted. Blends online are typically formed via merging of two words into one single word, usually with some degree of overlap. It is also common to create online slang blends from words that are already in slang usage. The thesis also concludes with the three main motivating factors as to why language users create new blends, recognizing the most commonly used online domains for lexical blend proliferation, and the potential of these domains to inspire further blend proliferation. These factors include effectiveness, or blends that are used online for the sake of quick delivery of information or for a quick punchline in humorous exchanges. The second factor listed is creativity and entertainment, the difference being that creativity is an aspect most commonly user-generated, while entertainment is more likely to be mass-produced for vast audiences. The final factor is the creation of identity online, or establishing a brand, which is commonly done by constructing a blend that would attract attention and serve the purpose of further distinguishing one’s online presence

Some new insights into the semantics of English N+N compounds

This thesis focuses on English N+N compounds and the primary purpose of the study is to investigate the way in which compounded structures acquire their meaning and to check the way in which the semantics of each of the constituents contributes to the overall meaning of the structure. The way in which such contributions are made should be inferable from the linguistic analysis of the structure and meaning of compounds. In order to do this, the thesis looks first at the morphological productivity of the constituents comprising a compound. The second aim is to identify whether the productivity of a compound constituent on the morphological level coincides with the productivity of the semantic relation realised in the constituent family. The discussion of the results obtained from a corpus study provides plausible explanations for the regularities noted in the course of the analysis by using some of the relevant principles from the complex of approaches including the Construction Grammar and Cognitive Grammar approaches. Examples of compounds were collected from the printed media (NZ broadsheets) and the BNC. The analysis of the data used both quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative analysis of the data confirms two hypotheses: (1) that a constituent is more productive in just one of the positions (modifier or head), and (2) the more productive a constituent is, the more likely it is to realise a single semantic relation in a constituent family. The qualitative analysis involves consideration of the semantic content of the concepts in each constituent in order to see how this content is reflected in the semantic relations realised by a constituent. It is discovered that the semantic content of the head is a stronger predictor of the relation realised in a compound than that of the modifier. The study is important in order to better understand the factors that govern the formation of compounds and the patterns that speakers use in the process of coining complex lexical items ..

An Exegetical Study of 1 Corinthians 15:42-49 Theological and Historical Contexts

An Exegetical Study of 1 Corinthians 1542-49 Theological and Historical Context

Meaning construction in popular science : an investigation into cognitive, digital, and empirical approaches to discourse reification

This thesis uses cognitive linguistics and digital humanities techniques to analyse abstract conceptualization in a corpus of popular science texts. Combining techniques from Conceptual Integration Theory, corpus linguistics, data-mining, cognitive pragmatics and computational linguistics, it presents a unified approach to understanding cross-domain mappings in this area, and through case studies of key extracts, describes how concept integration in these texts operates. In more detail, Part I of the thesis describes and implements a comprehensive procedure for semantically analysing large bodies of text using the recently- completed database of the Historical Thesaurus of English. Using log-likelihood statistical measures and semantic annotation techniques on a 600,000 word corpus of abstract popular science, this part establishes both the existence and the extent of significant analogical content in the corpus. Part II then identifies samples which are particularly high in analogical content from the corpus, and proposes an adaptation of empirical and corpus methods to support and enhance conceptual integration (sometimes called conceptual blending) analyses, informed by Part I’s methodologies for the study of analogy on a wider scale. Finally, the thesis closes with a detailed analysis, using this methodology, of examples taken from the example corpus. This analysis illustrates those conclusions which can be drawn from such work, completing the methodological chain of reasoning from wide-scale corpora to narrow-focus semantics, and providing data about the nature of highly-abstract popular science as a genre. The thesis’ original contribution to knowledge is therefore twofold; while contributing to the understanding of the reification of abstractions in discourse, it also focuses on methodological enhancements to existing tools and approaches, aiming to contribute to the established tradition of both analytic and procedural work advancing the digital humanities in the area of language and discourse

Music made visible in time and space : concepts of simultaneity in tone-eurythmy choreography

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 105-113).Eurythmy is an art of movement that expresses music and speech. This dissertation explores eurythmy's musical field, called tone-eurythmy, in its multifaceted appearances, background and within its philosophical context. Tone-eurythmy, carried out by performers moving in space and time, makes music visible. It transforms music into a new movement-art form, that of audible-visible music, by expressing musical components as well as the artistic intentions within a composition and those held by the performing artists. The dissertation examines how musical concepts are seen by eurythmists to integrate ideas of wholeness and to understand music as both audible and inaudible. It draws on studies and findings from music psychology to show distinct effects of musical elements on the human being, and to indicate the similarities between those and the qualitative expressions of music through tone-eurythmy