Emotion Metaphors in New Englishes: A Corpus-Based Study of Emotion Concepts in Institutionalized Second-Language Varieties of English

The present study examined emotion metaphors in the so-called “New Englishes”. New Englishes have emerged worldwide as varieties (in regions like West Africa, East Africa, South Asia and South-East Asia) that have developed or are in the process of developing their own variety-specific features and preferences. Emotion metaphors are understood in this study as conceptual metaphors in accordance with Conceptual Metaphor Theory by Lakoff & Johnson (1980). Conceptual metaphors are the stuff of cognition, language and behavior and provide insight into the fundamentally metaphorical nature of our conceptual systems. The central assumption of the present study concerned how the diverse linguistic and socio-cultural aspects surrounding the New Englishes could potentially motivate the manner in which these varieties conceptualize the emotions, i.e. New English emotion metaphors will vary in a culturally specific way. Although emotional experience belongs to basic human experience (including bodily experience), which would speak to a more universal tendency in the conceptualization of emotion, it was, nevertheless, assumed that emotion concepts have the potential to be filtered via the unique cultural aspects underlying these varieties. Furthermore, this would then be visible on the linguistic level in the form of metaphors, acting as a good indicator for the presence of cultural-specific conceptualizations of emotions, especially when emotion metaphors attributable to New English varieties are compared to emotion metaphors attributable to a (former) norm-providing variety, like British English. In order to determine to what extent New English emotion metaphors differ from or are similar to British English emotion metaphors, a corpus-based study was conducted with the GloWbE corpus (Corpus of Global Web-Based English). On the basis of “Metaphorical Pattern Analysis” (Stefanowitsch 2006) and the “Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit” (Steen et al. 2010), a method was developed to aid the extraction and identification of linguistic metaphors in the corpus data. The linguistic metaphors were assumed to reflect conceptual metaphors in the conceptual systems of the individual speakers and, as such, were classified according to the source domain involved (e.g. ANGER IS FIRE (I burned with rage)). This step also involved multiple levels of granularity. The corpus-based data from six New English components (Nigeria, Kenya, India, Singapore) of the GloWbE corpus were compared with each other and with data from a reference variety, i.e. British English. The empirical part of the present study was divided into three case studies. Each case study was devoted to the exploration of one emotion concept and its metaphors in the New Englishes. The first case study explored the concept of ANGER, while the second and third delved into the concepts of FEAR and HAPPINESS, respectively. The results of the case studies demonstrated that the initial assumption concerning emotion metaphor variability does not entirely hold for the New Englishes. There were no significant indicators that the varieties act differently when it comes to metaphorizing emotion concepts. This was particularly true for very frequent metaphors, e.g. ANGER IS A PERSON or ANGER IS A FLUID IN A CONTAINER. Therefore, it was concluded that the motivational basis for most of the New English and British emotion metaphors could be explained in reference to the embodiment hypothesis, which views our physical and bodily experience as the basis for conceptualization. Nevertheless, some differences emerged with regard to very infrequent metaphors, e.g. ANGER IS FOOD / DRINK, which due to their small numbers did not lend themselves well to statistical analysis. Yet, it is perhaps the case that it is their infrequency that necessitates creativity, which, in turn, would lend itself more readily to cultural filtration as a motivational basis

Word knowledge and word usage - Representations and processes in the mental lexicon

The final NetWordS Conference, held on the 30th and 31st of March, and 1st of April 2015 in Pisa, was convened by Prof. Pier Marco Bertinetto, Dr. Vito Pirrelli and Dr. Claudia Marzi, and brought together 91 participants (scholars, Post-Docs, PhD students) from numerous European, and some non-European, countries. A 3-day schedule involved all participants in a focused, cross-disciplinary discussion on representations and processes in the mental lexicon. People are known to understand, memorise and parse words in a context-sensitive, opportunistic way, by caching their most habitual and productive processing patterns into routinized behavioural schemes, similarly to what we observe for sequences of coordinated motor acts. Speakers, however, do not only take advantage of token-based information such as frequency of individual, holistically stored words, or episodic memories of word usage, but they are also able to organise stored word forms through abstract paradigmatic structures (or word families) whose overall size and distribution are important determinants of lexical categorisation, inference and productivity. Lexical organisation is, in fact, not necessarily functional to descriptive economy and minimisation of storage, but appears to be influenced by more dynamic, communicationoriented functions such as memorisation, prediction-based recognition and production. Lending support to this view, usage-based approaches to word processing have recently offered novel explanatory frameworks that capitalise on the stable correlation patterns between lexical representations on the one hand and process-based operations that make representations functional to communicative exchanges on the other hand. By focusing on the battery of cognitive functions supporting verbal communication (ranging from input recoding to rehearsal, access, recall and coactivation) and by exploring their psycholinguistic correlates and neuroanatomical substrates, these approaches promote a new view of language architecture as an emergent property of the interaction between language-specific input conditions and low-level, domain-specific cognitive predispositions

Investigating the lexico-grammatical resources of a non-native user of English:The case of can and could in email requests

Individual users of English as a first or second language are assumed to possess or aspire to a monolithic grammar, an internally consistent set of rules which represents the idealized norms or conventions of native speakers. This position reflects a deficit view of L2 learning and usage, and is at odds with usage-based approaches to language development and research findings on idiolectal variation. This study problematizes the assumption of monolithic ontologies of grammar for TESOL by exploring a fragment of genre-specific lexico-grammatical knowledge (the can you/could you V construction alternation in requests) in a single non-native user of English, post-instruction. A corpus sample of the individual’s output was compared with the input he was exposed to and broader norms for the genre. The analysis confirms findings in usage-based linguistics which demonstrate that an individual’s lexico-grammatical knowledge constitutes an inventory of constructions shaped in large part by distributional patterns in the input. But it also provides evidence for idiosyncratic preferences resulting from exemplar-based inertia in production, suggesting that input is not the sole factor. Results are discussed in the context of a “plurilithic” ontology of grammar and the challenges this represents for pedagogy and teacher development

‘Love’ encoding in Swahili: a semantic description through a corpus-based analysis

Several studies have described emotional expressions used by speakers from different linguistic and cultural areas all around the world. It has been demonstrated that there are universal cognitive bases for the metaphorical expressions that speakers use to describe their emotional status. There are indeed significant differences concerning the use of emotional expressions, not only across languages but also language-internally. Quite a number of studies focus on the language of emotions in several European languages and languages of West Africa, whereas not enough research has been done on this regard on Eastern African language

The Next Generation: Aspects of Grammatical Variation in the Speech of some London Preadolescents

PhDThis thesis is a sociolinguistic investigation into aspects of non-phonological variation in a group of preadolescents recorded in outer east London. Focusing on the analysis of selected grammatical variables, it aims to explore the nature and development of linguistic variation in an age group which has not figured prominently in the foundational sociolinguistic literature. The study is embedded within a variationist framework, and examines how the distribution of vernacular variables selected from different levels of the grammar can provide important insights into the maturing sociolinguistic competence of preadolescent speakers. The distribution of specific grammatical variables is correlated with the broad social dimensions of age and gender in order to examine the social and linguistic constraints which operate on aspects of variation in this age group. Furthermore, the findings which emerge from this study are contextualized in relation to patterns of variation used by older speakers, and are more broadly situated with regard to related patterns of variation in other dialects of English. Another primary aim of the study is to contribute to empirical characterisations of grammatical variation in southeastern England, an area in which there has been little systematic quantitative investigation of non-phonological variation. Given that London has been identified in the sociolinguistic literature as the site of considerable dialect levelling and a major locus of linguistic innovation, the study explores preadolescents' active participation in some of the burgeoning linguistic changes that are affecting not only southeasten dialects, but also other contemporary varieties of English

A guide to the methodology

Corpora are widely used in linguistics, but not always wisely. This book attempts to frame corpus linguistics systematically as a variant of the observational method. The first part introduces the reader to the general methodological discussions surrounding corpus data as well as the practice of doing corpus linguistics, including issues such as the scientific research cycle, research design, extraction of corpus data and statistical evaluation. The second part consists of a number of case studies from the main areas of corpus linguistics (lexical associations, morphology, grammar, text and metaphor), surveying the range of issues studied in corpus linguistics while at the same time showing how they fit into the methodology outlined in the first part

Corpus linguistics: A guide to the methodology

Corpora are widely used in linguistics, but not always wisely. This book attempts to frame corpus linguistics systematically as a variant of the observational method. The first part introduces the reader to the general methodological discussions surrounding corpus data as well as the practice of doing corpus linguistics, including issues such as the scientific research cycle, research design, extraction of corpus data and statistical evaluation. The second part consists of a number of case studies from the main areas of corpus linguistics (lexical associations, morphology, grammar, text and metaphor), surveying the range of issues studied in corpus linguistics while at the same time showing how they fit into the methodology outlined in the first part