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 ‘fitting in’ holding between the predication ‘preceding’ the preposition and the one that ‘follows’. 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

Toward a Cognitive Classical Linguistics. The Embodied Basis of Constructions in Greek and Latin

The volume that gathers a series of papers bringing together the study of grammatical and syntactic constructions in Greek and Latin under the perspective of theories of embodied meaning developed in cognitive linguistics

Semantic categories underlying the meaning of ‘place’

This paper analyses the semantics of natural language expressions that are associated with the intuitive notion of ‘place’. We note that the nature of such terms is highly contested, and suggest that this arises from two main considerations: 1) there are a number of logically distinct categories of place expression, which are not always clearly distinguished in discourse about ‘place’; 2) the many non-substantive place count nouns (such as ‘place’, ‘region’, ‘area’, etc.) employed in natural language are highly ambiguous. With respect to consideration 1), we propose that place-related expressions should be classified into the following distinct logical types: a) ‘place-like’ count nouns (further subdivided into abstract, spatial and substantive varieties), b) proper names of ‘place-like’ objects, c) locative property phrases, and d) definite descriptions of ‘place-like’ objects. We outline possible formal representations for each of these. To address consideration 2), we examine meanings, connotations and ambiguities of the English vocabulary of abstract and generic place count nouns, and identify underlying elements of meaning, which explain both similarities and differences in the sense and usage of the various terms

Relativity and the Causal Efficacy of Abstract Objects

Abstract objects are standardly taken to be causally inert, however principled arguments for this claim are rarely given. As a result, a number of recent authors have claimed that abstract objects are causally efficacious. These authors take abstracta to be temporally located in order to enter into causal relations but lack a spatial location. In this paper, I argue that such a position is untenable by showing first that causation requires its relata to have a temporal location, but second, that if an entity is temporally located then it is spatiotemporally located since this follows from the theory of Relativity. Since abstract objects lack a spatiotemporal location, then if something is causally efficacious, it is not abstract

Quantitative analysis of properties and spatial relations of fuzzy image regions

Properties of objects and spatial relations between objects play an important role in rule-based approaches for high-level vision. The partial presence or absence of such properties and relationships can supply both positive and negative evidence for region labeling hypotheses. Similarly, fuzzy labeling of a region can generate new hypotheses pertaining to the properties of the region, its relation to the neighboring regions, and finally, the labels of the neighboring regions. In this paper, we present a unified methodology to characterize properties and spatial relationships of object regions in a digital image. The proposed methods can be used to arrive at more meaningful decisions about the contents of the scene