Getting a Foot in the Door

Author(s):  
Stephanie Peña-Alves

This chapter explores sociocultural frames of metaphor in the case of door metaphors to highlight the cognitive sociology of access. Bridging and building on insights in cognitive linguistics and cognitive sociology, it contends that metaphorical projection involves generic sociomental processes. To illustrate this theoretical claim, the chapter analyzes how social structures of relevance and markedness in the built environment pattern the conceptual structures of door metaphors. It also analyzes individuals’ strategic use of door metaphors to shape metaphorical politics of access in the abstract. Attempting to broaden both the cognitive sociology of metaphor and the sociology of access, it concludes with a discussion of the promise of a distinctly cognitive sociology of access.

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Aleksandra Paliczuk

The conceptualization of space is manifested in language through diverse linguistic structures. Space, one of the most significant analytical categories not only in linguistics, introduces a variety of senses and conceptual relations in the construction of communicative meaning. While there are several approaches to linguistic studies, the most obvious choice for this type of analysis seems to be Cognitive Linguistics, with some of its theoretical currents and the Cognitive Grammar of Ronald W. Langacker (1987, 1991a, 1991b, 1995, 2008) in particular. In his works, Langacker often refers to spatial and visual relationships that provide useful illustrations to depict different conceptual structures and relationships. Indeed, the relations between visual perception and conceptualization concerns numerous aspects of the semantics of natural language (E. Tabakowska, 1999: 59). The paper aims to analyse the concept of the Italian verb ‘mettere’ (‘to put’), apparently simple and yet, as it will be shown, rich and varied in meaning.


Author(s):  
S.G. Vinogradova ◽  

The article opens with a brief overview of approaches to the study of secondary phenomena in the linguistic worldview. In particular, the author indicates the main reasons for secondary meaning formation including linguistic economy based on minimum of efforts aspiration and the associative and creative nature of human thinking. The author argues that in the framework of cognitive linguistics secondary meanings result from interpretation and the accompanying conceptual derivation and metarepresentation as processes of cognition. Such processes reflect a new understanding of the previously acquired knowledge, generating secondary conceptual structures, and choosing best ways of their anchoring in language considering cognitive dominants of linguistic consciousness as certain templates for construing reality through language. In the context of the above processes, the author examines secondary phenomena of the linguistic worldview analysing the examples of lexical and grammatical units of the English language. The discussion is focused on the outcomes of word formation in lexis, secondary interjections, secondary predicative structures, composite sentences.


2019 ◽  
pp. 17-27
Author(s):  
S. Zhabotynska

A cognitive turn in contemporary methodologies of teaching foreign languages is primarily associated with employment of the brain / mind covert potential (memory capacities, emotional responses, particulars of the individual’s perceptions, etc.) in language learning. Meanwhile, the cognitive approach to language teaching takes little notice of such powerful tool as conceptual structures that underpin linguistic structures and, therefore, facilitate their understanding and acquisition. The nature of relations between linguistic and conceptual structures is focused on in Semantics of Lingual Networks (SLN) — a theoretical conception extended into the felds of applied cognitive linguistics, with lexicography and language teaching among them. This article demonstrates how SLN 18 ISSN 2311-2425 (Print) ISSN 2412-2491 (Online) Філологічні студії. Збірник наукових праць • Випуск 13, 2019 contributes to developing the Linguacon (Lat. Lingua + Conscientia) system of teaching English via application of conceptual schemas and conceptual ontologies. The paper proposes a brief discussion of the SLN issues, demonstrates their projection upon the Linguacon system, and describes the procedure of compiling a combinatory thesaurus which is the pivot of this system. In the Linguacon system, the combinatory thesaurus performs several functions: (1) it structures information within the topic of discussion, (2) it provides systematized sets of phrasal linguistic expressions necessary for this discussion, (3) it links teaching grammar to a thematically homogeneous vocabulary, (4) it changes the traditional “text → lexicon” vector of teaching a foreign language to the “lexicon → text” vector, when the lexicon (in its phrasal version least conspicuous in conventional teaching practices) is adopted for text production. An illustration is provided by the “SCHOOL” combinatory thesaurus. It exemplifes the data which are applied in the classroom to teach grammar and develop texts relevant for the discussed topic. Presumably, the described principles of compiling combinatory thesauri used in teaching English are applicable for compiling similar thesauri for teaching other foreign languages.


2020 ◽  
pp. 159-196
Author(s):  
Kimberly Sumano Ortega ◽  
Joshua D. Englehardt

Despite the importance of Los Guachimontones within the larger Teuchitlán tradition of ancient west Mexico, little is known of its socio-political organization and underlying sociocultural structure. Departing from a dual–processual framework and utilizing spatial analysis, this chapter analyzes variability in the spatial syntax, formal characteristics, and distribution of architectural groups in the nuclear core and Loma Alta sectors of the site. Variability, in terms of differing degrees of openness and/or connectivity, suggests distinct functions of discrete areas within the site, and demonstrates how the socio–structural organization of the groups that occupied Los Guachimontones was negotiated, reflected, and reified in the built environment. Results of a comparison of architecture in these site sectors suggests that discrete physical spaces were utilized in diverse manners as architectural discourse to communicate distinct messages to different social groups, even when the built environment of these sectors presents a high degree of formal homogeneity and contains the same architectonic elements. This chapter thus adds a new analytic axis and alternate framework that provides insight on both architectural variability at Los Guachimontones and the social structures that gave rise to these architectonic configurations.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Sullivan

Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) aims to represent the conceptual structure of metaphors rather than the structure of metaphoric language. The theory does not explain which aspects of metaphoric language evoke which conceptual structures, for example. However, other theories within cognitive linguistics may be better suited to this task. These theories, once integrated, should make building a unified model of both the conceptual and linguistic aspects of metaphor possible. First, constructional approaches to syntax provide an explanation of how particular constructional slots are associated with different functions in evoking metaphor. Cognitive Grammar is especially effective in this regard. Second, Frame Semantics helps explain how the words or phrases that fill the relevant constructional slots evoke the source and target domains of metaphor. Though these theories do not yet integrate seamlessly, their combination already offers explanatory benefits, such as allowing generalizations across metaphoric and non-metaphoric language, and identifying the words that play a role in evoking metaphors, for example.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-188
Author(s):  
Alexander Bergs

Abstract Modern cognitive science and cognitive linguistics are characterized by a universalist perspective, i.e., they are investigating features and principles of cognition which can be found in all members of the human species. This in turn means that they should not only be relevant for present-day cognizers and language users, but also historically. This theoretical, programmatic paper first explores this notion of universalism in cognitive science and cognitive linguistics and suggests that the notion of cognitive universalism should be supplemented by perspectives from cognitive sociology and social cognition. These offer a middle ground in that they look at cognition as it is socially and culturally grounded, and hence inter-individual, but yet not universal. A final section on diachronic cognitive linguistics shows that in language history all three perspectives, individual, social, and universal, can have their place, and that one line of future research should explore this new perspective of social cognition in language history in order to arrive at a fuller picture of historical language users and their cognition.


2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 430-448 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benedikt Pirker ◽  
Jennifer Smolka

AbstractScholars today discuss international law from various methodological angles. This Article aims to add perspectives from cognitive science, namely cognitive sociology and cognitive linguistics, or, to be more precise, cognitive pragmatics. It briefly elaborates on these fields’ respective approaches, benefits, and limits. To clearly delineate the usefulness of the methodologies, this Article separately applies both approaches to the same example of a process of interpretation in international law. This Article concludes that the two cognitive approaches can help lawyers better understand and implement international law. This not only provides a description of the process of interpretation, but will hopefully enable a better practice of international law.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-60
Author(s):  
Clara Neary

This article uses Zbikowski’s theory of ‘musical grammar’ to analyse Radiohead’s song ‘Paranoid Android’ from their 1997 album OK Computer. Invoking the close structural and compositional parallels between language and music, Zbikowski’s approach appropriates some of the core elements of cognitive linguistics to provide a means of ‘translating’ music into meaning-bearing conceptual structures via the construction of ‘sonic analogues’, which are a type of conceptual construct formed when incoming perceptual information is compared to existing cognitive knowledge stored as image schemas. The result is an analysis of the interactions between the linguistic and aural constructions of a multimodal text that not only sheds new light on the text’s meaning-making devices, but also endeavours to unlock the strategies through which such distinctive semiotic modes act and interact within texts to create meaning potential.


Author(s):  
Zoltán Kövecses ◽  
Szilvia Csabi

The lexicon of a language is not an unstructured list of words. In this paper, we exemplify some of the basic conceptual structures that cognitive linguists work with and we discuss their potential applications to lexicographic work. Specifically, we focus on the possible advantages of using cognitive linguistics as a theoretical background in the structuring of entries, meanings, and idioms in dictionaries. In connection with these organizational issues, we discuss the knowledge-based organization of the mental lexicon (known as conceptual frames), and a type of organization of the mental lexicon that seems to be much more characteristic of Hungarian than of English: organization according to certain “root morphemes.” We also deal with the conceptualization of an element within a topic area through another element within the same topic area (known as conceptual metonymy), the conceptualization of a topic area in terms of another topic area (known as conceptual metaphor); and the internal organization of the various senses of a word-concept (known as polysemy). We devote a section to idioms and their role as well as possible arrangement in the dictionary. Such thematic structures have, on the whole, remained outside the focus of everyday lexicographic practice. Here, we hope to demonstrate their importance and usefulness.


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