A Systemic Functional Analysis of English and Persian Creative Advertising Discourse

By Serina on April 16, 2012

Pardis Zaferani (Islamic Azad)

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

Advertisement as influential mode of discourse is a good instance of the creative use of persuasive strategies which can be demonstrated through language; accordingly, it is still language that forms the crucial part and distinctive function of advertising. The present comparative work aims to provide the analysis of language of advertising from systemic functional point of view and identifies linguistic means used in selected samples of Persian and English advertising texts. Since advertising texts take advantage of using made-up or modified words and expressions in order to bear the creative characteristic of this mode of discourse, for the purpose of text analysis, the work focuses on Halliday´s theory of textual metafunction to investigate realization of the clause constituents in terms of textual systems. For this end, the descriptive statistics, here specifically, the total frequency and percentage of different types of Theme in English and Persian advertising texts were conducted across two languages. The findings show how ingenious selection of textual elements by copywriter calls attention to the way meaning is constructed so as to impress audience. While indicating structural differences between English and Persian, the findings comparatively supported the rationale behind different grammatical information occurrences to justify structural differences and similarities between English and Persian advertisements. Bearing in mind the fact that creativity is an important principle in both languages and regarding cohesive features applied, more diversity is examined in the ways of expressing the content of English ads in comparison with Persian ads.

Key words: Advertisement, Systemic Functional Grammar, Creative Discourse

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More is bigger: Physical size in mental arithmetic

By Serina on April 16, 2012

Bodo Winter & Teenie Matlock (UC, Merced)

Saturday, May 19th
Buchanan B213

In our everyday lifes, we constantly add and subtract quantities, for example when checking whether we have enough money in our pocket to do the grocery’s. How do we perform these mental calculations? One view contends that the process of mental arithmetic can be likened to amodal symbol manipulation, which meshes with the view that mathematics is entirely abstract. However, more and more evidence is showing that major parts of mathematics are in fact grounded in our everyday bodily experience (Lakoff & Núñez, 2000). Within the framework of embodied mathematics, mental arithmetic is thought to be based on the conceptual metaphor ARITHMETIC AS OBJECT COLLECTION. This metaphor states that our experiences of routine physical interactions with object collections map onto the relatively more abstract domains of addition and subtraction. On this view, addition is construed as putting a number of objects into a container, and subtraction, as removing a smaller collection from a larger collection (see Núñez, 2009).

Because “adding” physical objects necessarily leads to an increase in the size of a collection, this conceptual metaphor predicts that people should readily conceptualize addition as increased physical size and subtraction as decreased physical size. We tested this prediction with two drawing studies in which participants were given a simple mathematical problem to solve, such as “7-2=5” or “3+2=5”. Participants were asked to replace each numeral by drawing circles on a sheet of paper (e.g., 5 circles to depict the number “5”). In Experiment 1, 203 participants drew circles for either addition or subtraction in a constrained setting, where the operator and equal sign were presented at a fixed position on the page. In Experiment 2, 306 participants drew the whole operation and were free to place it in any position on the page.

In both experiments, the circles that people generated in depictions of addition problems were larger than those circles produced in depictions of subtraction problems. Overall, these results lend support to the idea that mathematics is conceptually structured through physical experiences, and that mathematics is not in fact abstract, but associated with concrete notions such as physical size.

References

Lakoff, G., & Núñez, R. (2000). Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. New York: Basic Books.

Núñez, R (2009). Numbers and arithmetic: Neither hardwired nor out there. Biological Theory, 4:1, 68-83.

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Reconstructing Water metaphor in portraying modern China and its minorities in Zhang Yang’s “Shower.”

By Serina on April 16, 2012

Julia Vorontsova (UBC)

Thursday, May 17th
The Coach House, Green College – 6201 Cecil Green Park Road

This paper discusses the issue of Chinese minority representation. Minorities are generally viewed as Chinaʼs “own internal Other”. While the concept of family is often applied to present the relationship between the minorities and a probably illusory1, Han majority, this “family” relationship does not mean equality. This paper focuses on representation of Chinese minorities in Zhang Yangʼs film “Shower” (“Xi Zao”) and use of water metaphor in constructing the power relationship within the state.

Throughout the film, “minority” is described explicitly in total less than five minutes, but the representations have a crucial effect on forming Chinese modern identity. Father-son, male-female, owner and owned and other oppositions showing the political hierarchy within China are described. As Gladney (1994, p. 93) notes, that the “process of representation of “minority”…suggests the following parallels: Minority is to the majority as the female is to male, as “Third” World is to “First”, and as subjectivized to objectivized identity.” Learning about the representations of minorities in China we learn more about the socio-political atmosphere in China and the construction of its “majority” Han identity.

“Shower,” produced in 1999, by Zhang Yang. Sometimes called “nostalgic” (Hongwei Lu 2008, p. 122), it tells the story of an old bathhouse and its old owner. The discussion of the value and importance of water parallels the approaching reconstruction of the old city. The elder son of the old man and a successful businessman Da Ming comes to visit his elderly father having received a confusing postcard from his retarded young brother. During his stay, a qualities of water are demonstrated, while the rumors about approaching reconstruction become more and more common.

Water metaphor has been used in multiple Chinese philosophical texts. Clear and still water was at times compared to the perfected heart-mind, it was associated with rule, power and life. Zhang Yang re-constructs the central metaphor in such a way that it gives preference to modernization and reconstruction of China. It justifies the demolishing of the city and destroying its culture and traditions. It also places Chinaʼs “minority” at the bottom of political and social hierarchy.

“Shower” is a widely known film in China and abroad. It is often included in Chinese Cinema course in institutions in Europe and North America. Therefore understanding the representation of “minority-majority” relationship is necessary for an objective understanding of Chinese nation. Questions like metaphor of water constructed to promote Han-Chinese power, feminization and erotization of minorities, portrayal or modernity and its incompatibility with traditional life are discussed in this paper. Reconstructing Water metaphor in portraying modern China and its minorities in Zhang Yang’s “Shower.” (Vorontsova Julia

1 See Gladney 1994 and Prasenjit Duara 1993 for the discussion of the origins of Han nationality.

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Imagined English: The language of the future sections in David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas

By Serina on April 16, 2012

Lieven Vandelanotte (Namur)

Friday, May 18th
Buchanan B213

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Ad hoc concept as source domain in novel metaphor

By Serina on April 16, 2012

Esther Romero & Belén Soria (Granada, Spain)

Saturday, May 19th
Buchanan B215

An ad hoc concept is one that is made up on the spot, that the speaker is most unlikely to have had ready-made before the occasion of the utterance (Barsalou 1983). An example of ad hoc concept is GOOD THINGS TO STAND ON TO CHANGE A LIGHT BULB.

The idea of a concept being made up on the spot has led some authors to argue that metaphor interpretation is just as any other case of ad hoc concept formation (Glucksberg and Keysar 1990, Sperber and Wilson 1986/95, Carston 2002). We agree that metaphor involves an ad hoc concept construction but we argue that metaphorical ad hoc concepts have peculiar characteristics (Romero and Soria 2010).

Indeed, the aim of this talk is to account for the differences between several types of ad hoc concepts specifying the peculiar characteristics of metaphorical ad hoc concepts as distinct from non-metaphorical ad hoc concepts. Interpretation of novel metaphor involves a special type of ad hoc concept formation that requires a cross-domain mapping (from source to target domain). In addition, we will draw attention to special cases of metaphor in which the source domain is ad hoc. For example, the ad hoc nonmetaphorical concept AN ISLAND WHICH IS SUN-DRENCHED, TROPICAL AND CONSIDERED ATTRACTIVE BY YOUNG SWEDISH TOURISTS can be made explicit literally and then be used as source domain for the metaphorical utterance:

(1) I like to think that perhaps I am that kind of island. (…) I like to think I’m Ibiza.

(From the film About a boy)

This view opposes the proposal by Relevance theory both with respect to their view of metaphor as a case of ad hoc concept construction involving loosening and with respect to the most recent proposal of two routes for metaphor interpretation (Carston 2010) in which creative, literary or extended metaphors cannot be explained in the same way as more spontaneous, spoken and conversational cases. For Carston, only the latter are said to involve ad hoc concept construction for their interpretation. We propose a homogeneous account of novel metaphor interpretation instead. From this interaction proposal the most creative and extended metaphors are also explained as involving a pragmatic process of ad hoc concept construction. It also allows an account of the type of novel metaphor in which the source domain is ad hoc.

References

Barsalou, L.: 1983, “Ad hoc categories”, Memories and Cognition 11: 211-27. Carston, R.: 2002, Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford: Blackwell.

Carston, R.: 2010, “Metaphor: Ad hoc concepts, literal meaning and mental images” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. 110 (3): 295-321.

Glucksberg, S. and Keysar, B.: 1990, Understanding metaphorical comparisons: Beyond similarity. Psychological Review, 97, 3-18.

Romero, E. and Soria, B.: 2010, “Phrasal Pragmatics in Robyn Carston’s Programme”. In B. Soria and E. Romero (eds.), Explicit Communication, Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 183-98.

Sperber, D. and Wilson, D.: 1986/95, Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.

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A story-prefacing resource in conversational English

By Serina on April 16, 2012

Russell Lee-Goldman (UCB)

Sunday, May 20th
Buchanan B213

Stories are a key component of everyday conversation, but are difficult to execute successfully (Labov 1972, 1981, 1997; Jefferson 1978, Norrick 2005). Storytelling requires a combination of meta-discursive and semantic techniques: the speaker must hold the floor for an extended period, maintain the recipients’ attention, and ensure that the recipients understand the “point” of the story and react in the desired way(s) (Labov and Waletzky 1967, Schegloff 1997, Labov 1997). It should therefore come as no surprise that language would provide resources tuned to telling stories. I present such a grammatical resource in English: a predicative copular clause with a cataphorically-interpreted it as subject. I argue that this pattern constitutes a grammatical construction which simultaneously projects (Auer 2005, Hopper and Thompson 2008) and evaluates (Labov 1997) an upcoming extended-turn narrative. It is, in other words, a grammaticalized story preface (Sacks 1974)

The construction, it-be-[evaluation] (IBE) is illustrated in (1). It is both discourse-functionally and formally notable.

(1) Marie: Oh it was so funny one day.
Um .hh (.) hh uh Kent was (..) at the (.) store hh
And me and Cassie were talking and I was just like (..) that’s before he fired Barry.

IBE is dual-functional. It notifies the listener that a story is coming, orienting them to behave as story recipients and not interrupt the unfolding narrative. It also describes the story so as to capture the listeners’ attention. Thus, mentions of time and place (i.e., Labov’s orientations) are usually not interpretable as story prefaces: *It was last night/at the diner. By evaluating the story before any of it is even told, IBE prepares listeners to react at the right time and in the right place. For instance, the most common reaction to Marie’s story was laughter.

IBE is syntactically and semantically idiosyncratic. First, though it normally cannot accomplish cross-sentential cataphora, in this syntactic pattern it can (Couper-Kuhlen and Thompson 2008). Syntactic, semantic, and information-structural comparisons with predicates known to have so-called expletive subjects (weather predicates (2a), clefts (2b), extraposition (2c)) indicate that IBE is referential, not an expletive. Second, as a cataphor, it must appear in a copular clause; otherwise, the interpretation as a preface/evaluation disappears, even if the semantic content is in principle construable as an evaluation (3a,b).

(2) a. It was raining.
b. It was Sue that had the idea.
c. It was embarrassing that no one recognized me.
(3) [not interpretable as a story preface]
a. It embarrassed me.
b. I was horrified by it.

I present a construction-grammatical analysis (following Fillmore and Kay 1999, Sag 2011) of IBE that integrates the construction’s formal and the functional properties. It makes explicit the connections to other syntactic resources of English as well as to the types of conversational actions intrinsic to storytelling. This provides further support for the tight integration of grammatical and discourse analysis: the two must be carried out in tandem, and generalizations about linguistic structures and social actions are not separate but interdependent.

References

Auer, P. (2005). Projection in interaction and projection in grammar. Text, 25(1), 7–36.

Couper-Kuhlen, E., & Thompson, S. A. (2008). On assessing situations and events in conversation: ‘extraposition’ and its relatives. Discourse Studies, 10(4), 443-467.

Hopper, P. J., & Thompson, S. A. (2008). Projectability and clause combining in interaction. In R. Laury (Ed.), Studies of clause combining: the multifunctionality of conjunctions (pp. 99-124). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Comany.

Jefferson, G. (1978). Sequential aspects of storytelling in conversation. In J. Schenkein (Ed.), Studies in the organization of conversational interaction (pp. 219-248). New York: Academic Press.

Kay, P., & Fillmore, C. J. (1999). Grammatical Constructions and Linguistic Generalizations: The What’s X Doing Y? Construction. Language, 75, 1–33.

Labov, W. (1972c). The transformation of experience in narrative syntax. In Language in the inner city (pp. 354–405). University of Pennnsylvania Press.

Labov, W. (1981). Speech actions and reactions in personal narrative. In D. Tannen & J. Alatis (Eds.), Analyzing discourse: text and talk (pp. 219-247).

Labov, W. (1997). Some further steps in narrative analysis. Journal of narrative and life history, 7 (1-4), 395–415.

Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1967). Narrative analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience. In J. Helm (Ed.), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts (Vol. 7, pp. 3-38). Seattle: University of Washington Press. (Reprinted from Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts, 1967, 12-44)

Norrick, N. R. (2005). The dark side of tellability. Narrative Inquiry, 15(2), 323-343.

Sacks, H. (1974). An Analysis of the Course of a Joke’s telling in Conversation. In R. Bauman & J. Sherzer (Eds.), Explorations in the ethnography of speaking (pp. 337-353). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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The Indefinite Article in Complex Quantifiers

By Serina on April 16, 2012

Ronald W. Langacker (UCSD)

Friday, May 18th
Buchanan A201

The meaning and grammatical status of the indefinite article in core English quantifiers—notably a few, a little, a lot of—are examined from the standpoint of Cognitive Grammar. Arguments are given that these expressions are analyzable, that the initial element grounds the quantifying noun, and that it represents a semantic variant of the indefinite article appropriate for the meaning of that noun. Supporting its article status are the myriad quantifying expressions, exhibiting various degrees of grammaticization and grammatical flexibility, where a alternates with one, with other numerals, and with unquantified plurality, as exemplified in (1).

The a appearing in grammaticized quantifiers grounds the quantifying noun rather than the quantified noun: a few beers (but *a beers), a lot of verbiage (*a verbiage). Like possessives (that boy’s shoes), which provide an indirect means of definite grounding, complex quantifiers provide an indirect means of indefinite grounding. The distinction between grounding and quantification is not a sharp one. Whereas “relative” quantifiers (e.g. all, most, some, every, each) are grounding elements, “absolute” quantifiers (many, few, several, three, etc.) would seem not to be because they co-occur with definite grounding (e.g. those three women, the many houses I have owned). However, they also occur separately (many houses, three women), in which case they are comparable to relative quantifiers in the degree of “epistemic control” afforded; (2)(a) and (2)(b) are comparable in this respect. The functions of identification and quantification figure in both grounding elements and absolute quantifiers, but with different degrees of prominence. For instance, a and one alternate because both are indefinite and specify the same quantity; the choice depends on discourse factors, as in (3).

In its canonical use, the indefinite article singles out an instance of some type but specifies its non-identifiability given the prior discourse context. With complex quantifiers, identification of a particular instance is generally not at issue: when buying a bag of mulch we are usually not concerned with the identity of the bag. Nouns recruited for quantifying use come to designate units of measurement, invoking their original physical referents only to indicate magnitude. Quantity thus prevails over identification for the a in grammaticized quantifiers. In expressions like a cup of flour, the measurement noun designates a single positive step along a scale of measurement; it represents a type with multiple instances only in that the scale comprises multiple, interchangeable increments of this sort. Identification is thus irrelevant.

In the most highly grammaticized cases, quantification is non-metric, so a merely indicates positive value. Lot specifies that the quantity is greater than some norm. For little and few the quantity is less than a norm, so they function as negative polarity items, e.g. they sanction any, as in (4)(a). The complex forms a little and a few do not, as seen in (4)(b). The reason is that a imposes a positive construal, viewing the same quantities as upward departures from zero.

Examples

(1)(a) {a / one} {handful / gob / cup / ton / box} of N

(b) two {handfuls / gobs / cups / tons / boxes} of N

(c) {lots / handfuls / gobs / cups / tons / boxes} of N

(2)(a) Most students did well, but some had problems.

(b) Many students did well, but a few had problems.

(3)(a) A student complained.

(b) One student complained—the others didn’t.

(4)(a) Few linguists have any common sense.

(b) *A few linguists have any common sense.

References

Langacker, Ronald W. 1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. 2, Descriptive Application. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Langacker, Ronald W. 2009. Investigations in Cognitive Grammar. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Cognitive Linguistics Research 42.

Langacker, Ronald W. 2010. A Lot of Quantifiers. In Sally Rice and John Newman (eds.), Empirical and Experimental Methods in Cognitive/Functional Research, 41-57. Stanford: CSLI.

Talmy, Leonard. 1988. The Relation of Grammar to Cognition. In Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn (ed.), Topics in Cognitive Linguistics, 165-205. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 50.

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The Emergence of Null Object Constructions in Child Acquisition of English

By Serina on April 16, 2012

Christina Galeano (SFU)

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

In English, null object constructions are identified by optionally or normally transitive verbs that show up without an overt object, often in “recipe” and instruction contexts like the examples below.

(1) –Mix well and bring to a boil
(2) -We have to get this car ready for the show tomorrow.
-Okay, you wash and I’ll wax.

Curiously, during the earliest stages of language acquisition, many English-speaking children go through a short period of object dropping that deviates from the adult null object target, producing phrases like “I drinking” to refer to contexts that denote “I am drinking x”. Overall, the rate of object omissability is higher in children than in adults. What do patterns in children’s early dropped objects tell us about how they acquire null object constructions in English? Are they able to learn this construction on the basis of cue frequencies in the input?

The present study examines the above questions by investigating how null object constructions are represented at two different time points in children’s grammars, relative to the frequency with which they appear in the adult input. Three different verbs (drink, eat, and draw) were selected based on their differential levels of optional transitivity in the adult input. The verbs were examined in a corpus study of child speech using the Sachs and Suppes corpora from the CHILDES database. Results indicate a strong correlation between child usage of individual verbs and their frequency in the adult input at the latest stage, which supports a usage-based model of acquisition.

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Convergence in Music and Language Syntactic Representations

By Serina on April 16, 2012

Christina Galeano (SFU)

Thursday, May 17th
The Coach House, Green College – 6201 Cecil Green Park Road

Hierarchical structure is one unique property of human language, setting it apart from other forms of animal communication. Similarly, the curious ability to produce music exists in all human cultures, also set apart from other species by its hierarchical structure and discrete combinatorial units used for infinite productivity. Because of the shared human-specific properties of music and language, many have explored the connection between the two from various angles. Compared to robust work in phonology, the syntactic literature in music-language connections is scant, with primary descriptive foundations resting on Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s 1983 work A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. However, little has been done to investigate the basis of structural parallels in music and language from a non-generative perspective. The purpose of this paper is to compile, review, and synthesize research that has been done on music-language syntactic connections, investigating the nature of syntactic “convergence points” between Western Tonal musical structure and linguistic syntactic structure. An overview of structural processing parallels is presented in the introduction, followed by a proposed model of music and language structural mental representations. Crucially, the model is not based on traditional generative accounts for syntax, but rather a construction-based account that explores the commonalities of creative phrase-building across language and music.

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How can a voice be velvety? Synaesthesia between metaphor and conceptual blending

By Serina on April 16, 2012

Maria Catricalà (Roma Tre University) and Annarita Guidi (Roma Tre University)

Friday, May 18th
Buchanan A201

Rhetoric represents an interesting field for the comprehension of the innovative potential of the cognitive paradigm, and the highlighting of the embodied nature of language and interconnections among experiential, neural, linguistic and cultural processes.

Within the reanalysis of the tangle of tropes, one of the most frequent question is that related to the specificity of figures of speech with respect to metaphoric and metonymic operations. In this paper, we propose some questions related to synaesthesia, whose complexity is due to the twofold phenomenology – linguistic and psychological – with which synaesthesia manifests itself as an apparent non-sense, an inter-sensory association (e.g., cold call; profumo dolce ‘sweet fragrance’).

Linguistic synaesthesia has been studied from different points of view, from rhetoric (Lausberg 1960) to pragmatics (Cinque 1972, Catricalà 2008), from psychology (Dogana 1990, Paissa 1995, Hubbard 2007, Cacciari 2008) to semiotics (Ullmann 1957, Williams 1976) and cognitive sociolinguistics, which has recently shown its importance for the survival of some expressions otherwise endangered (Berthele 2010). Many topics are debated, such as the definition of synaesthesia, the possible taxonomies, the directional (Shen & Gil 2007) and constructional (e.g., Noun-Adjective; Verb-Noun; Marotta in press) constraints. At the same time, several experimental results show the difference between: “concrete” and non-concrete synaesthesia (Catricalà 2009); “exocentric” and “endocentric” senses (Lakoff 1995, Catricalà in press).

The definition of synaesthesia is still problematic because inter-sensory can not always be represented as a mapping of correspondences between basic domains. Synaesthesia can, thus, be configured as a conceptual blending – the representation of a semantic structure which is, at least in part, emergent (input spaces do not include all the elements of such structure: Fauconnier & Turner 2001). Our analysis involves phenomena of lexicalization (data from dictionaries) and discourse configurations (corpora data) in two languages (Italian and English), with a focus on Noun Phrases.

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