How “things” inhibit control: MONO- clausal connective constructions in Japanese

Nina Azumi Yoshida (UCLA) Saturday, May 19th Buchanan A hallway on the 2nd floor Download PDF

The Nature of Coercion: A Usage-based Approach with Empirical Data

Soyeon Yoon (Rice) Saturday, May 18th Buchanan A hallway on the 2nd floor This study examines the nature of coercion, which has been used as theoretical explanation about the resolution of semantic incompatibility between a construction and a lexical item that occurs in it (Michaelis 2005), through empirical data derived from frequency, processing time, and […]

Constructing a Novel Blend Through Gesture

Robert F. Williams (Lawrence) Friday, May 18th Buchanan A201 Creativity is widely viewed as involving the combination of mental representations. Koestler (1964) claims that creative insights derive from the ‘bisociation’ of conceptual ‘matrices’. Fauconnier and Turner (1998, 2002) present a detailed account of ‘conceptual blending,’ a cognitive mechanism for combining content in distinct mental spaces […]

When interlocutors get pushy: Space management gestures and communicative force

Eva Elisabeth Wehling (UCB) Friday, May 18th Buchanan A201 Research shows that pragmatic gestures often rely on the same embodied concepts that structure thought and language (McNeil 1992; Müller 2004; Sweetser 1998). Pragmatic gestures that serve to control discourse events have been noted (Kendon 1995, 2004; Calbris 1990), and the majority of pragmatic gesture research […]

Bigram attraction reflects prosodic boundaries: Evidence from some old and one new collocation measure(s)

Alexander R. Wahl (UCSB) Saturday, May 19th Buchanan A hallway on the 2nd floor. Recent work in psycholinguistics has examined how language users possess “rich memory representations” of prior linguistic experiences (Bybee, 2010). These representations are considered to reflect the distributional regularities with which different words co-occur. A cooccurrence of particular words, or collocates, that is […]

The embodiment of speaker subjectivity in modals and evidentials in ASL

Barbara Shaffer (New Mexico) & Terry Janzen (Manitoba) Friday, May 18th Buchanan A201 Inherent in the conceptual domain of epistemic modality is the potential for the speaker to express a level of commitment, from weak to strong, to the situation encoded by the proposition. On another axis, a modal construction may be either agent-oriented or […]

Metaphor and Iconicity in two Mexican writers: Inés Arredondo and Amparo Dávila

Xitlally Rivero Romero & Claudia Reyes Trigos (Tecnológico de Monterrey) Friday, May 18th Buchanan B213 This paper aims to analyze the relationship between metaphor and iconicity in the narratives of two Mexican writers: the short stories “Los inocentes”, by Inés Arredondo, and “Griselda”, by Amparo Dávila. The proposal builds on the idea that certain literary […]

The Neural Substrates of Creative Thinking

Jake Kurczek & Melissa Duff (Iowa) Friday, May 18th Buchanan B213 Creativity has long fascinated artists, philosophers and psychologists alike. More recently, the cognitive components and neural underpinnings of creativity have become of considerable interest in cognitive neuroscience. From a neuroscience perspective, creativity requires the rapid combination and recombination of existing mental representations to create […]

The Systematicity of Narrative Space: A Cognitive Construction?

Elizabeth Finnigan (Strathclyde) Saturday, May 19th Buchanan A hallway on the 2nd floor I argue that narrative space is systematically constructed by demonstrating that there are core patterns of representation when the spatial categories of landscape, people and rooms are investigated. These patterns appear to eschew cultural and temporal boundaries and therefore, may illustrate cognitive […]

The genesis of Picasso´s Guernica and its possible interpretations in the light of Conceptual Blending Theory

Álvaro Corral (Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano) Saturday, May 19th Buchanan A201 How can we understand creative processes in the genesis and comprehension of the works of art? We will try to answer both questions with the help of Conceptual Blending Theory (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002). The underlying hypothesis here is that the cognitive processes which […]