Deviant marking of causality in a corpus of fictional prose and newspaper genres: stylistic effects and linguistic theory

Ninke Stukker (Leiden) Friday, May 18th Buchanan B215 Download PDF

Constantly shifting: How gesturing speakers use role shifted space

Kashmiri Stec (Groningen) Saturday, May 19th Buchanan B215 Co-speech gestures often represent some aspect of the accompanying speech (Kendon 2004; McNeill 1996). For example, they may direct attention to details, such as the spatial relations between entities or the trajectory a character takes (McNeill 1996). They may also embody those characters, such that the speaker […]

Metaphorical Riddles as Conceptual Blends: A Look at the Riddle Solving Process

Amanda Rapone (ODU) Saturday, May 19th Buchanan A hallway on the 2nd floor Throughout the years, riddles have been an object of interest for both linguists and anthropologists. This unique speech genre is independent of the surrounding discourse in which it is presented, and follows specific rules which both riddler (i.e. the person presenting the […]

Balancing acts: Felt qualities of meaning in descriptive gestures and artworks by Paul Klee

Irene Mittelberg (Aachen) Saturday, May 19th Buchanan A201 Based on a comparative semiotic analysis of static abstract works of art and dynamic gestural images, this paper explores the role of embodied conceptual structures as driving forces in the constitution and interpretation of visual signs. One of the underlying assumptions is that despite their metonymic “spareness”, […]

Conceptual Blending in Allegorical Political Rhetoric

William H. McKellin (UBC) Saturday, May 19th Buchanan A201 In this paper I will examine the ability of Blending Theory to represent the emergent mappings of the cognitive allegories (Harris and Tolmie 2011) used by the Managalase of Papua New Guinea to negotiate, create, and manipulate social and political relationships. Blending theory commonly focusses on […]

Frame-Shifting and Creative Adaptation: Anne Carson’s Sublime

Steven Maye (UBC) Friday, May 18th Buchanan B213 Drawing on Fillmore’s frame semantics (1982), Coulson introduced the notion of “frameshifting,” where the reader or listener of a discourse happens upon something that fails to make sense and will thus “search working memory for something that can be reinterpreted,” eventually settling on a new frame that […]

Favorable and Unfavorable Effects: A Typology of Benefactive and Adversative Constructions in Japanese, Korean, and Ainu

Katsunobu Izutsu (Hokkaido) and Takeshi Koguma (Miyazaki) Friday, May 18th Buchanan B215 The present paper attempts a conceptual analysis of Japanese, Korean, and Ainu benefactive and adversative constructions, demonstrating that their differences are identifiable as different stages in the grammatical development in which the speaker-oriented notion of (un)favorableness is extended to second- and third-person entities. […]

Conjunctions and sentence-final particles: two processes of grammaticalization

Mitsuko Narita Izutsu (Fuji Women’s) & Katsunobu Izutsu (Hokkaido) Saturday, May 19th Buchanan A hallway on the 2nd floor Observing the “final but” phenomena, Mulder and Thompson (2006, 2008) postulate a grammaticization continuum from “initial but” to “final but” with no “leap” (2008: 196). According to their account, “final but” is divided into three stages […]

Effects of gesture and motion type on word learning in Spanish

Samantha N. Emerson, Şeyda Özçalışkan, Gwen Frishkoff (Georgia SU), & Iria G. Romay-Fernández (Santiago de Compostela) Friday, May 18th Buchanan A201 Languages use different typological strategies to express different aspects of motion events. For example, Spanish typically expresses path of motion in the verb, while English expresses path information outside the verb (e.g., particles, prepositions) […]

When actions speak: Embodied effects on non-literal uses of spatial terms

Marlene E. Burke (Louisiana) and Michele I. Feist (Lafayette) Saturday, May 19th Buchanan B215 Embodied views of language suggest that spatial concepts, formed from our direct physical experience with our environment, are reflected in more abstract uses of spatial language (Bergen et al., 2007; Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002; Lakoff, 1987; Zwaan, 1999). These accounts find […]