Polskie liczebniki główne w świetle gramatyki kognitywnej

Artykuł analizuje semantykę polskich liczebników głównych z zakresu 5-10 i 100. Analiza wykorzystuje model gramatyki kognitywnej proponowany przez Ronalda Langackera. Główna teza artykułu głosi, że ewolucja tych liczebników polegała na przesunięciu aspektu relacyjnego (tj. przymiotnikowego) do profilu liczebnika, w wyniku czego liczebniki stopniowo traciły swój rzeczownikowy charakter. Proces ten nie zaszedł jednak w pełni, gdyż niektóre liczebniki zachowały pewne gramatyczne własności rzeczownika. Takie przesunięcie profilu rozpatrywać można z kategoriach metonimii pojęciowej, a było ono możliwe dzięki wysokiej żywotności relacyjnego aspektu znaczenia względem aspektu rzeczownikowego. Polish cardinal numbers in light of Cognitive Grammar Summary: The article discusses the semantics of Modern Polish adjectival numerals from the range 5-10 and 100. The theoretical background for the analysis is Ronald Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar. The main assumption in the article is that the evolution of numerals consisted in shifting the relational (adjectival) aspect to the profile of the numeral, which resulted in the numerals gradually losing their nominal character. The process, however, has not been completed, since the numerals under discussion retain some of their original nominal properties. This profile shift, best accounted for in terms of conceptual metonymy, was facilitated by the high vitality of the relational aspect of meaning in relation to the nominal aspect.

Complexity in Syntax with the Use of an Adverbial Clause of Concession

The present study explores the use of adverbial clause of concession as a syntactic complexity measure among the National University of Lesotho (NUL) students. The research subjects were NUL fourth year students across the seven faculties namely, the Faculty of Agriculture (FOA), the Faulty of Education (FOE), the Faculty of Health Sciences (FOHS), the Faculty of Humanities (FOH), the Faculty of Law (FOL), the Faculty of Social Sciences (FOSS) and the Faculty of Science and Technology (FOST). Data was collected from their past examination papers (2016/2017). This paper employed the interpretivist paradigm and has analysed the data qualitatively. The study has also employed the descriptive and case study designs. The students’ continuous writing was the focus of this study since Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG) and Cognitive Grammar (CG) are the theoretical frameworks which the present paper was based on and therefore require continuous writing. The findings of the present paper reveal that NUL students have a relatively low level of syntactic complexity in their writing as shown by how they used adverbial clauses of concession. The study therefore concludes that NUL students have a moderately low level of syntactic complexity demonstrated by how they used this feature.

Metonymy and Croatian adverbial clauses

In this article I examine some metonymic aspects of the semantics of Croatian connectives introducing adverbial clauses of cause, condition, purpose, and concession. The analysis leans on the theory of conceptual metaphor and metonymy and, to a lesser extent, on cognitive grammar. It is also informed by grammaticalization scholarship within typological functionalism. I explore metonymic mappings between the categories of time and cause, manner and cause, cause and condition, purpose, cause and concession, condition and concession, time and condition, and metonymic mappings operating at the level of speech acts. The goal is to contribute to the growing, though still arguably small, body of cognitive linguistic research into the relevance of metonymy for the semantics of complex sentences, specifically the role it plays in subordination, and to expand this analysis to subordinate constructions in Croatian. Some attention is given to grammaticalization studies, where metaphor and metonymy are seen as two types of pragmatic inferencing facilitating interactions between the mentioned semantic categories in complex sentences.

A new look at word classes in Cognitive Grammar

Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar aims to offer a conceptual characterization of word classes. Pivotal to this endeavor is the distinction between a “thing” and a “relation” as well as the claim that relations can be scanned either sequentially or summarily. The difference between the two scanning modes is essential to separate, for example, enter as a finite verb from the dynamic preposition into. In this paper, the debate on the status and relevance of the two scanning modes is revisited and the very notion of relation is subjected to close scrutiny, thus revealing its potentially problematic nature. A new way of looking at word classes based on the notions of evolving vs. non-evolving categorization sequences, extrinsicality vs. intrinsicality, and anchorability is developed, which constitutes a radical departure from Cognitive Grammar despite being compatible with its fundamental assumptions.

Ditransitive Construction in English, Hungarian, Turkish, and Indonesian Language

Every language shows a different way of expressing ditransitive construction. Thus, the present study aims to investigate and compare the important elements exhibit in the languages under discussion in constructing ditransitive sentences. This paper is a qualitative study. The data comes from detailed written grammar texts, corpora, and interviews with native language speakers. The results show that the languages play with the word order to weigh the focus of sentences. English and Indonesian language do not apply any case-marking to mark the function of the noun phrase. However, in the basic prototypical ditransitive construction, Hungarian and Turkish languages apply an accusative marker to mark the theme and a dative marker to mark the recipient. On the other hand, the verbs’ affixation also affects the semantic property of the ditransitive verbs in the Indonesian language. It is also revealed that the languages use the same ditransitive construction to express genuine transfer and beneficial transfer.Keywords: ditransitive construction, cognitive grammar, comparative study.

Image Schemas in Diasporic Visual Discourse: Peripheral Voices in the Selected Photographs of Afghan Migrants Living in Pakistan

This study explores the socio-cognitive dynamics of the photographic representation of Afghan Refugees residing in Pakistan. It aims to reveal counter discursivity present in the images of Afghan refugees and accentuate the visual nature of this counter discourse. Data sets taken for analysis consist of five photographs of Afghan refugees retrieved from the album collection of an international photographer Muhammad Muheisen. By adopting an interdisciplinary perspective based on three schools, i.e. Critical Discourse Studies, Social Semiotics and Cognitive Linguistics, the study proposed a Cognitive Grammar approach to traditional Transitivity Analysis. Cognitive transitivity analysis explored the discursive strategy of Structural Configuration by highlighting the cognitive systems such as image schemas, narrative structures and processes in both visual representations and textual taglines assigned to the images by the photographer. The findings of the study revealed the employment of CONTAINER, FORCE, SPACE, and SOURCE- PATH Schemas and dominant presence of agentive and transactional roles of Afghan refugees. The taglines of photographs revealed material processes dominating the discourse, thus, coinciding with agentive representation of Afghan refugees. The findings revealed that image schemas, narrative structures and processes, being embodied sources, preconceptual and mimetic structures, project Afghan photographic discourse as marginalized in the face of Pakistan’s Refugee Policies.

La concettualizzazione del verbo ‘mettere’ in italiano

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.

Sprache, Genres und Diskurstraditionen. Kognitionslinguistische Modelle im Lichte der romanistischen Theoriebildung

This paper provides an overview of the recent developments in genre-related studies within the frameworks of Construction Grammar and Cognitive Grammar and compares them to the notion of discourse traditions, which is well-established in Romance linguistics but remains mostly unknown outside of it. It will be shown that, whereas the notion of discourse traditions finds its origins in Coseriu’s full-fledged general theory speaking, recent constructionist approaches to linguistic genres (communicative genres, discourse genres, sedimented patterns, discourse patterns) are merely on the verge of developing into an integrated theory of language. Conversely, this paper will point to those aspects of more recent theories that offer the advantage of focusing on the cognitive dimension of the production, reception and interpretation of linguistic genres. Finally, it will be argued that despite their similarities, each notion provides a distinct perspective on its object.