Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language Conference

Ebru Türker (Pittsburgh)

Saturday, May 19th
Buchanan A hallway on the 2^nd floor

Earlier studies have already argued that metaphors are not just a phenomenon of verbal language (c.f. Cienki 2005, 2008; Cienki & Müller, 2008; Gibbs, 2008; Müller & Cienki,2009); rather the interaction between metaphoric language and gesture plays an important role in providing plausible evidence for cognitive semantics, namely, the embodied nature of meaning and the grounding of abstract conceptions in perceptual and motor experience (Langacker, 2008). Accordingly, Lakoff (2008) notes that metaphorical gestures provide evidence – independent of words – for the theory of conceptual metaphors. This study examines the metaphoric gestures for three emotion concepts, namely ANGER, HAPPINESS and SADNESS in Korean. I examined the metaphorical expressions of these emotions in Korean based on a detailed corpus-based analysis. This earlier research presented central and submetaphors of emotion concepts and provided a detailed analysis of source vs. target domains of each emotion metaphor. I claimed that, although Korean emotion metaphors manifest significant similarity to English in the source vs. target domains via universal metaphors, their specificity in relation to each other can nevertheless be assessed with the help of a quantitative distributional analysis of the frequencies as well as productivity occurrence of metaphorical expressions associated with each of the concepts under study. The results of the earlier study indicated that to a considerable extent Korean emotion metaphors support the universality of conceptual metaphor theory; however, such emotion domains also have individual features with their own characteristics governed by the Korean cultural model. Building on the earlier research analysis, the aim of the present study is to provide further non-linguistic evidence for the emotion metaphors by investigating Korean gestures. I specifically concentrate on the kinds of relations that appear in speech and/or gesture in case of emotion metaphors. In particular, I identify Korean gestures which have developed fixed meanings in the culture for expressing emotions, rather than the ones produced spontaneously and are highly dependent on context. The research questions are i) what type of gestures does Korean employ in expressing ANGER, HAPPINESS and SADNESS; ii) to what extent these gestures coincide with emotion-related conceptual metaphors which I have identified with the corpus analysis of emotion metaphors; iii) to what extent do Korean co-verbal gestures represent or indicate the source domain of emotion metaphors. The data is collected from Korean native speakers through an interview for gesture identification, and will be coded in terms of the different types of features that can describe a gesture for each emotion metaphor. Each gesture is examined from the moment articulators begin to depart from a position of rest or completion until the moment when they return to rest, thus accounting for what Kendon (2004) calls a “gesture unit.” Identified gestures are coded in terms of the different types of features that can describe a gesture for each emotion metaphor. The results indicate that Korean gestures can be a source of conceptual emotion metaphors which are motivated by the universal embodied experiences and cultural understandings, and may or may not appear in verbal expression in speech.

(See the attached PDF for references)

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Paul Sambre (Lessius)

Friday, May 18th
Buchanan B215

This paper deals with the expression of newness and creativity in instrumental processes. Not only is the ability to reflect upon our future central to human cognition, but human intentionality also involves planning and therefore acting causally on the future by means of old and new instruments. From a linguistic point of view, only limited work has been done on the expression and semantics of thinking this instrumental future in different types of (nominal and verbal) predications (Gross 2009, Gross et al. 2005). The goal of this paper is to better understand the conceptual and linguistic relation between causality (Sanders and Sweetser 2009), instrumentals and futurity in authentic discourse.

Instrumentals are parts of global causative action chains (Langacker 2008): in causing events, agents (intentionally) use instruments in order to achieve effects and goals (Talmy 2000), which appear in caused events. Here, the patient undergoing the transfer of energy performed by the agent is subject to change. This paper is part of a research line in which we examine the interaction between the instrumental role and causality in Romance languages (Sambre & Wermuth 2009, 2010, Sambre fc.).

We examine grammatical patterns which make reference to new and/or creative (use of) instruments. In these linguistic patterns for expressing “newness” at least three conceptual dimensions meet.

1. These expressions set up analogical or counterfactual spaces (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, Sambre 2005) where new instruments and new uses of existing tools are contrasted with existing uses of conventional instruments. In Langackerian terms, novel distinctions between the old, existing and the other or new “vertically” or spatially elaborate upon nominal instrumental types.

2. The instrumental role entails a “horizontal”, temporal dimension: (new, creative and/or future) instruments are parts of causing processes and frequently refer to (new) consequences or (new) goals set by agents (Ferrari 2004). Both instruments and goals can be situated in the conceptualizer’s present, or, more importantly, in the future. Creative thinking about the use of new instruments is therefore closely connected with strategies to foretell or forecast the future.

3. As a result of the prospective causing character of newness in instrumentals, future effects (on the long or short term) may be epistemically organized on a modal axis leading from projected reality, over probability and potentiality, to consequences labeled as unreal or unrealistic (Langacker 1991, 2008, Sambre 2012).

The corpus consists of collocations surrounding mainly nominal or verbal (Stukker et al. 2008) strings referring to “new/creative” “instruments and use” based on the Italian La Repubblica corpus (Baroni et al. 2004), e.g. nuov(o|i) strument(o|i), strumento|uso creativo, user(à|anno), utilizzer(à|anno) [English translation: new instrument(s), creative use(s), he|they will use]. These collocations we transcribe, following CxG conventions (Fried and Östman 2004, Sambre fc), as clausal and transphrastic patterns surrounding the creative, future and/or new instrumental core. As a result, we present a conceptual template for thinking the (future-oriented) causality of new/ creative instruments and use, as well as some correspondent constructional grammatical patterns for saying so in Italian.

(See the attached PDF for references)

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Bert Oben & Geert Brône (Leuven)

Saturday, May 19th
Buchanan A201

This paper ties in with two recent developments in cognitive-functional approaches to language. First, there is a growing interest in explicitly incorporating dialogicity in cognitive discourse models (Langacker 2001, Verhagen 2005, Fried & Östman 2005, Du Bois 2011). Second, there is growing awareness that usage-based models in linguistics need to adopt a multimodal perspective (Mittelberg 2007, Sweetser 2007, Cienki & Müller 2008). Both strands serve as an empirical operationalization of the non-reductionist foundation of cognitive-functional linguistics, which holds that all aspects of the linguistic usage event that contribute to the meaning potential (including intonation, gesture, posture, etc.) should in principle be incorporated.

In this paper we focus on the process of synchronization where interlocutors engaged in face-to-face interaction continuously and increasingly use and reuse each others’ linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour. This process has been approached from different theoretical perspectives (e.g. mechanistic processes vs. joint actions) and has alternatively been labelled interactive alignment (Pickering & Garrod 2004), conceptual pact (Brennan & Clark 1996), resonance (Du Bois 2011), and mimicry (Kimbara 2006). In the majority of studies, however, the perspective on this phenomenon has been largely monodimensional (focus on alignment behaviour in one semiotic channel or on one linguistic level) and restricted to minimal contexts (pairs of utterances rather than longer stretches of resonance). In order to arrive at a more fine-grained multimodal picture, we conducted a corpus study using the MIMIC-corpus (MultIModal Interaction Corpus, Brône & Oben 2011). This allowed us to incorporate various meaning-making cues, ranging from intonation in the acoustic channel, to gesture from the visual channel, and gaze generated by eye-trackers.

The focus of this paper is on how multimodal alignment sequences emerge, persist and ‘die out’ in the interaction. First, we deal with the differences in distribution between the linguistic and non-linguistic channels in forming alignment sequences. We address questions such as “is non-linguistic alignment more restricted to simple pairs than linguistic alignment?” and “can linguistic alignment more easily cross the boundaries of one conversational sequence than non-linguistic alignment?”. Second, we look at distributional patterns within each of the semiotic channels, and the role of different levels of representation. For instance, for the linguistic channel we address whether different levels of linguistic alignment (lexical, morphological, syntactic) behave differently, both in terms of frequency and persistence in and across conversational sequences. The results of the corpus-based study reveal both high degrees of interaction between channels/levels (what we label ‘clustered alignment’) and significant differences in durability or persistence.

(See the attached PDF for references)

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Siva Kalyan (Australian NU)

Saturday, May 19th
Buchanan A hallway on the 2^nd floor

Much has been written about how to determine which of the various contextual meanings of a word are part of its lexical representation—which of them count as “senses”, as opposed to mere “uses” (Cruse 1986; Evans 2009; Geeraerts 1993). However, to my knowledge, no one has discussed the more basic issue of how to determine what the contextual meanings of a word are in the first place. In this poster, I suggest some criteria for identifying the semantic contribution of a word in a given context of use. In particular, I propose that a word exhibits a particular semantic property in the context of a given expression, to the extent that:

1. The semantic property is compatible with the meaning of the expression as a whole; and either

2. The word is used frequently as part of a phrase whose referent exhibits that property; or

3. The property is being used contrastively.

While this proposal can (and should) be tested experimentally, the following observations (among others) seem to support (and illustrate) it:

1 and 2 are consistent with Glucksberg’s (2003, i.a.) findings on metaphor comprehension. Consider a sentence such as My lawyer is a shark. Although shark occurs most frequently as part of a noun phrase referring to a kind of fish (as opposed to a kind of person), this property is inconsistent with the referent of a shark in this context (a certain type of person). The only properties that satisfy both criteria are those that apply to both sharks and the type of person being described (viciousness, aggressiveness, etc.); hence, these are the only semantic properties contributed by the word shark in this context (in accordance with Glucksberg 2003: 93–95).

Further support is provided by tests of sensehood, which can now be understood as contexts in which a word is “forced” to have a certain contextual meaning; the acceptability of this usage—its “sensehood”—can then be understood as an indication of how typical this meaning is among the attested contextual meanings of the word. For example, to test whether expire has a sense that is schematic for both “die” and “become invalid”, one uses a sentence such as ?John and his driving licence expired last Thursday (Cruse 1986: 61). Here, both “die” and “become invalid” would have properties incompatible with the meaning of the sentence (violating criterion 1). Hence the only possible meaning of expire in this context is one that is schematic for these two readings. The oddness of this sentence indicates that such a schematic meaning is not typical of the contextual meanings of expire.

To take another example: to test whether horse has the sense “male horse” (just as dog has the sense “male dog”), one uses a sentence such as ?Mary likes mares better than horses (Cruse 1986: 60). In this context, horse has the property “male” as part of its semantic contribution (even though it does not usually occur in a phrase referring specifically to a male horse—criterion 2 is thus inapplicable), because it is being used in contrast with female horses (criterion 3). The oddness of this sentence indicates that such a specific meaning of horse is atypical of its attested range of contextual meanings.

References 

Cruse, D. Alan (1986) Lexical Semantics. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Evans, Vyvyan (2009) How Words Mean. New York: Oxford University Press.

Geeraerts, Dirk (1993) Vagueness’s puzzles, polysemy’s vagaries. Cognitive Linguistics 4(3), 223–272.

Glucksberg, Sam (2003) The psycholinguistics of metaphor. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences 7(2), 92–96.

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Michael Israel (Maryland)

Friday, May 18th
Buchanan B215

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