Search results for "Cognitive Linguistics"
showing 10 items of 40 documents
Lexical-semantic configuration of ordinary relational identities in multicultural groups of university students
2020
The terms used to designate ordinary relational identities seem easy to learn and translate. However, these interpersonal identities reflect complex mental constructs that are very sensitive to the...
Hope and equilibrium in the dystopian world of The Hunger Games
2021
This paper provides evidence of the fruitfulness of combining analytical categories from Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis for the analysis of complex literary characterizations. It does so through a detailed study of the “tributes”, i.e. the randomly selected children who have to fight to death in a nationally televised show, in The Hunger Games. The study proves the effectiveness of such categories to provide an analytically accurate picture of the dystopian world depicted in the novel, which is revealed to include a paradoxical element of hope. The type of dehumanization that characterizes the dystopian society of Panem is portrayed through an internally consistent se…
Never saw one – first-person null subjects in spoken English1
2016
While null subjects are a well-researched phenomenon in pro-drop languages like Italian or Spanish, they have not received much attention in non-pro-drop languages such as English, where they are traditionally associated with particular (written) genres such as diaries or are discussed under a broader umbrella term such as situational ellipsis. However, examples such as the one in the title – while certainly not frequent – are commonly encountered in colloquial speech, with first-person singular tokens outnumbering any other person.This article investigates the linguistic and non-linguistic factors influencing the (non-) realisation of first-person singular subjects in a corpus of colloquia…
Metaphors in the mirror: The influence of teaching metaphors in a medical education programme
2016
Medical students often face problems in using and understanding metaphors when communicating with a patient or reading a scientific paper. These figures of speech constitute an interpretative problem and students need key strategies to facilitate metaphor comprehension and disambiguation of meaning. This article examines how medical students' strategies of metaphor comprehension could be improved by specific teaching on metaphors using a Cognitive Linguistics approach. Medical students' ability to comprehend mirror neuron metaphors was assessed comparing the performance of students who did not receive any instruction about metaphoric extension strategies after a lesson on mirror neurons wit…
Digging up the frequency of phrasal verbs in English for the Police: the case of up
2016
The present study focuses on the frequency of phrasal verbs with the particle up in the context of crime and police investigative work. This research emerges from the need to enlarge McCarthy and O’Dell’s (2004) scope from purely criminal behavior to police investigative actions. To do so, we relied on a corpus of 504,124 running words made up of spoken dialogues extracted from the script of the American TV series Castle shown on ABC since 2009. Based on Rudzka-Ostyn’s (2003) cognitive motivations for the particle up, we have identified five different meaning extensions for our phrasal verbs. Drawing from these findings, we have designed pedagogical activities for those L2 learners that stu…
Continuity and discontinuity in the semantics of the Latin preposition per: a cognitive hypothesis
2009
We intend to analyse the semantic network of the preposition ‘per’ (“through”, “across” etc.) in Early Latin and the role of its conceptual structure in the spread from basic/spatial to abstract meanings. Although prepositions in ancient languages have raised a great deal of attention, there is little regarding Latin, and an in-depth semantic analysis of Latin prepositions is still lacking. A cognitive-based investigation of Plautus’ comedies (254-184 BCE) shows that, unlike other Indo-European languages, the spatial value rests on a schema representing ‘motion along a path’ not necessarily involving a bounded Landmark. The spatial meanings are predominant in Archaic Latin; the only abstrac…
Toward a Cognitive Classical Linguistics. Introduction
2019
The article introduce a collective 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. It presents an overview of the studies in this recent field and highlights various open-ended issues.
Toward a Cognitive Classical Linguistics. The Embodied Basis of Constructions in Greek and Latin
2019
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.
Tracking down phrasal verbs: the case of up and down
2016
Since the frequency of phrasal verbs is register-specific, it is essential for L2 learners to be exposed to the most productive phrasal verbs in their field of study. Thus, English for Police learners should become familiar and practise the most recurrent phrasal verbs in the context of crime and police investigative work. In this study we determine the frequency and meaning extensions of phrasal verbs with the particles up and down in a spoken corpus of English for the Police on the basis of which we also generate teaching materials for L2 trainee police officers. This research extends McCarthy and O’Dell’s (2004) scope of analysis by encompassing not only phrasal verbs related to criminal…
How Body and Soul Interact with the Spiritual Mind: Multimodal Cognitive Semiotics of Religious Discourse
2008
Cognitive Linguistics as an enterprise provides new theoretical and methodological instruments in understanding the relationship between people's thoughts and the language they use. Spiritual and religious experiences (particularly the ones involving some type of revelation from or communication with a transcendent being) are especially interesting since they involve some type of external, physically invisible force or agent, contributing an "ineffable" quality to the phenomenon. However, people can and do describe such events, and metaphors and blends pervade the representations of certain concepts of the transcendental when attempting to talk about such abstract ideas. One of the main ten…