55,643 research outputs found
COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS AS A METHODOLOGICAL PARADIGM
A general direction in which cognitive linguistics is heading at the turn of the century is outlined and a revised understanding of cognitive linguistics as a methodological paradigm is suggest. The goal of cognitive linguistics is defined as understanding what language is and what language does to ensure the predominance of homo sapiens as a biological species. This makes cognitive linguistics a biologically oriented empirical science
UNDERSTANDING PREPOSITIONS THROUGH COGNITIVE GRAMMAR. A CASE OF IN
Poly - semantic nature of prepositions has been discussed in linguistic literature and confirmed by language data. In the majority of research within cognitive linguistics prepositions have been approached as predicates organising entities in space, with less attention paid to the search for a meaning schema sanctioning the numerous uses. Cognitive Grammar analytic tools allow for the analysis which results in discovering one meaning schema sanctioning the uses of the English preposition in. The present analysis is based on the assumption that the meaning schema of in profiles a relation of conceptual enclosure between two symbolic structures, one of which conceptually fits in the other. Accordingly, I argue that the speaker employs in to structure a real scene not because one element of the scene can physically enclose the other one, but due to conceptual âfitting inâ holding between the predication âprecedingâ the preposition and the one that âfollowsâ. In formal terms, the usage of in is conditioned and sanctioned by compatibility of active zones in the predications used to form the complex language expression involved. Peculiarities of physical organization may be ignored in such conceptualisation, though the speaker can choose to encode all peculiarities of physical organisation of real world objects employing different linguistic devices
Complex sentence as a structure for representing knowledge
Structural variations involving both morphological and syntactic features of the complex sentence of the type âWhen S, Sâ and their relevance for the interpretation of sentence meaning are analyzed. It is hypothesized that the constraints on certain sequences intuitively felt by native speakers are due to semantic contradictions that arise between the indexical content of the verbal tense and aspect and the syntactic structure of the sentence which iconically reflects the cognitive processing of perceptual data. The cognitive value of different syntactically acceptable sequences is assessed from the point of view of the relationship between the morphosyntactic categories of tense and as-pect and sentence iconicity
Grammaticalization and grammar
This paper is concerned with developing Joan Bybee's proposals regarding the nature of grammatical meaning and synthesizing them with Paul Hopper's concept of grammar as emergent. The basic question is this: How much of grammar may be modeled in terms of grammaticalization? In contradistinction to Heine, Claudi & HĂźnnemeyer (1991), who propose a fairly broad and unconstrained framework for grammaticalization, we try to present a fairly specific and constrained theory of grammaticalization in order to get a more precise idea of the potential and the problems of this approach. Thus, while Heine et al. (1991:25) expand â without discussion â the traditional notion of grammaticalization to the clause level, and even include non-segmental structure (such as word order), we will here adhere to a strictly 'element-bound' view of grammaticalization: where no grammaticalized element exists, there is no grammaticalization. Despite this fairly restricted concept of grammaticalization, we will attempt to corroborate the claim that essential aspects of grammar may be understood and modeled in terms of grammaticalization. The approach is essentially theoretical (practical applications will, hopefully, follow soon) and many issues are just mentioned and not discussed in detail. The paper presupposes a familiarity with the basic facts of grammaticalization and it does not present any new facts
Pursuing an Export Culture Through the Teaching of Asian Languages in Australian Schools - the Gap between Theory, Practice and Policy Prescription
In February 1994, the Coalition of Australian Governments (COAG) endorsed a report it commissioned in December 1992 on a policy prescription for the study of Asian Languages and Cultures in Australian schools. The acceptance of this report, Asian Languages and Australia's Economic Future (1994), referred to as the Rudd Report after the Chair of the Working Group, was significant. It offered a 15-year plan that aimed to produce an Asia-literate generation fluent and familiar with "export" Asian languages and cultures. In particular, students would have the opportunity to commence the study of one of four priority "export" Asian languages, namely, Korean, Japanese, Indonesian, and Chinese, in primary school. However, the Rudd Reportâs emphasis on prioritising Asian languages for utilitarian reasons was opposed by those who advocated the study of European languages. This paper examines some of the assumptions about second language acquisition that the Rudd Report made and argues that greater emphasis should have been placed on addressing those theoretical and pedagogical issues significant to LOTE teaching in Australia
The ontology of signs as linguistic and non-linguistic entities: a cognitive perspective
It is argued that the traditional philosophical/linguistic analysis of semiotic phe-nomena is based on the false epistemological assumption that linguistic and non-linguistic entities possess different ontologies. An attempt is made to show where linguistics as the study of signs went wrong, and an unorthodox account of the na-ture of semiosis is proposed in the framework of autopoiesis as a new epistemology of the living
Data-Oriented Language Processing. An Overview
During the last few years, a new approach to language processing has started
to emerge, which has become known under various labels such as "data-oriented
parsing", "corpus-based interpretation", and "tree-bank grammar" (cf. van den
Berg et al. 1994; Bod 1992-96; Bod et al. 1996a/b; Bonnema 1996; Charniak
1996a/b; Goodman 1996; Kaplan 1996; Rajman 1995a/b; Scha 1990-92; Sekine &
Grishman 1995; Sima'an et al. 1994; Sima'an 1995-96; Tugwell 1995). This
approach, which we will call "data-oriented processing" or "DOP", embodies the
assumption that human language perception and production works with
representations of concrete past language experiences, rather than with
abstract linguistic rules. The models that instantiate this approach therefore
maintain large corpora of linguistic representations of previously occurring
utterances. When processing a new input utterance, analyses of this utterance
are constructed by combining fragments from the corpus; the
occurrence-frequencies of the fragments are used to estimate which analysis is
the most probable one.
In this paper we give an in-depth discussion of a data-oriented processing
model which employs a corpus of labelled phrase-structure trees. Then we review
some other models that instantiate the DOP approach. Many of these models also
employ labelled phrase-structure trees, but use different criteria for
extracting fragments from the corpus or employ different disambiguation
strategies (Bod 1996b; Charniak 1996a/b; Goodman 1996; Rajman 1995a/b; Sekine &
Grishman 1995; Sima'an 1995-96); other models use richer formalisms for their
corpus annotations (van den Berg et al. 1994; Bod et al., 1996a/b; Bonnema
1996; Kaplan 1996; Tugwell 1995).Comment: 34 pages, Postscrip
Analysis of prepositions: near and away from Frames of reference.
XXII Jornades de Foment de la Investigació de la Facultat de Ciències Humanes i Socials (Any 2017)Traditional strategies and procedures to learn a foreign language
include the study of rules of grammar and doing exercises such as
filling the gaps, repetition of words, drills, memorization of irregular
verbs and sentences which may express usual expressions of
everyday life. Even if the array of exercises is adequate, polysemy in
prepositions causes difficulties in choosing the proper preposition
conveying the meaning required by different contexts.
Two prepositions of the horizontal axis (near and away from) are
taken into consideration in this paper. Approaching the problem
from the theory of polysemy and understanding, the use of these
prepositions is explored along the dimensions of function, topology â
which is the study of physical spaceâ, and force dynamics â
introduced in studies such as Navarro (1998)â, as well as the notion
of frame of reference (Levinson, 2004). Then, the different senses
and uses of these prepositions of the horizontal axis are
systematized, explained and examples are used to illustrate the
difficulties in learning a language and the doubts which students may
have in some situations
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