Hausa phraseologisms as a structural property of language and cultural value

The paper discusses phraseological units in Hausa as combinations of lexical units which have grammatical and cultural motivations. Its purpose is to identify language-specific types of structural phraseologisms and their culture-specific meanings. At the structural level, the most productive patterns of verbal phrases and nominal compounds are being presented. Special attention is devoted to various types of verb-based nominal phrases which refer to perceiving the surrounding world through instances of people’s behavior. The structural phraseologisms are also seen as a means of abstract conceptualization and a source of grammaticalization processes. The cultural background of the Hausa phraseologisms is referred to culture key-words and the traces of cultural experience which determine the meaning of the whole phrase. This approach includes a comparative perspective in studies on phrasal expressions in the Hausa language. The examples are taken from lexicographic sources and from descriptive works, they are also extracted from literary texts, the text of “Magana Jari Ce” [Speech is an Asset] by Abubakar Imam in particular.

Noun Composition in Mapudungun: Conceptual Patterns in the Naming of Places

This study intended to identify which referent features are more frequently selected in the naming of the concept class of places and, in turn, determine which are the preferred conceptualizations in Mapudungun. This language is mainly spoken by Mapuche people in central and southern areas of Chile and in the Central-West area of Argentina. To identify the features of this conceptualization, a cognitive-semantic analysis of the conceptual patterns of 112 nominal compounds pertaining to the concept subclasses of natural places (intervened and non-intervened) and non-natural places (installations and territorial divisions) was conducted. Results show that, for non-intervened natural places, an entity present in the natural place is preferably selected in the name, whereas for intervened places, an agricultural activity or an animal associated to the place is preferably chosen. Concerning installations, the preferred conceptual pattern specifies, by means of the constituent ruka ‘house’, the man-made nature of the place. Regarding territorial divisions, the preferred naming pattern combines two place concepts. This information is crucial for the creation of neologisms in Mapudungun because it guarantees that newly formed lexical units are coherent with the Mapuche worldview and do not import foreign models.

Cognitive operations of plant meat construal in Engish media discourse

This paper examines discursive representation of the concept PLANT MEAT in English mass media. The study discusses cognitive operations of categorization, conceptual integration, focus shift involved in conceptualization of a trendy meatless food product. The focus is made on nominal compounds like meatless meat and fake meat in terms of conceptual integration. The study of the relations between formally integrated linguistic structures and conceptually integrated structures supports the claim that the meanings of the compounds are not predictable from their parts. The conclusion is made that the compounds prompt for a specific complex mapping scheme and conceptual blending. Conceptual blends meatless meat and fake meat are viewed as alternative construals of the concept PLANT MEAT and as a result of focus shift mechanism in the semantic structure of the blends. Conceptual blend meatless meat highlights the property ‘absence of meat’ while conceptual blend fake meat focuses on the property ‘imitation’. The concept PLANT MEAT is a way of understanding food made from plants with the appearance similar to meat. The paper reveals pragmatic potential of the conceptual blend PLANT MEAT in shaping health and environmental benefits of a meat-free food style in media discourse.

The distribution of constituent words in nominal compounds and its impact on semantic interpretation: an empirical study1

The paper explores factors that influence the distribution of constituent words of compounds over the head and modifier position. The empirical basis for the study is a large database of German compounds, annotated with respect to the morphological structure of the compound and the semantic category of the constituents. The study shows that the polysemy of the constituent word, its constituent family size, and its semantic category account for tendencies of the constituent word to occur in either modifier or head position. Furthermore, the paper explores the degree to which the semantic category combination of head and modifier word, e.g., x=substance and y=artifact, indicates the semantic relation between the constituents, e.g., y_consists_of_x.

The phonological and grammatical status of Murui ‘word’

Different sorts of phonological and grammatical criteria can be used to identify wordhood in Murui, a Witotoan language from Northwest Amazonia. A phonological word is determined on entirely phonological principles. Its key indicators include prosody (stress) and segmental phonology (vowel length). A phonological word is further produced by applying relevant phonological processes within it and not across its word boundaries. The further criterion is moraicity which requires that the minimal phonological word contains at least two moras. A grammatical word, determined entirely on grammatical principles, consists of one lexical root to which morphological processes (affixation, cliticization, and reduplication) are applied. The components of a grammatical word are cohesive and occur in a relatively fixed order. Although Murui grammatical and phonological words mostly coincide, the ‘mismatches’ include nominal compounds (that is, one phonological word consisting of two grammatical words), verbal root reduplication (one grammatical but two phonological words), and clitics.

Word in Yalaku

This chapter focuses on phonological and grammatical word in Yalaku, a minority language from the Ndu family in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea. The phonological word in Yalaku is characterized by one single stress, and a number of phonological processes, including voicing of stops and the post-alveolar affricate, and k-fortition word-internally. The usual length of a phonological word is two syllables. One grammatical word corresponds to two or more phonological words in case of echo-compounds, nominal compounds, serial verb constructions, and full reduplication of non-cohering type. Cohering reduplication which produces one phonological word. One phonological word corresponds to more than one grammatical word if it contains clitics. All clitics in Yalaku can occur as independent phonological words if in focus. Monosyllabic third person cross-referencing markers are anticipatory clitics which form one phonological word with the constituent preceding their host, unless that constituent contains three syllables or more.

An onomasiological approach to nominal compound semantics

This paper addresses the semantics of compounding from an onomasiological point of view. It reports on the results of a corpus-based study of 500 English N+N compounds, the primary goal of which is to delimit a set of onomasiological structure rules on the basis of the admissible and inadmissible combinations of cognitive categories at the onomasiological level. The question of the semantics of nominal compounds has been considered in a number of theoretical frameworks; nevertheless, the difficulties related to the interpretation of N+N compounds have not been satisfactorily clarified. The application of the onomasiological approach to nominal compound semantics proves powerful as it sheds more light on the meaning relationships between constituents of these units. At the same time, it allows for the identification of the tendencies for the coinage of N+N compounds based on their internal semantic structure and narrows down the number of possible combinations of semantic categories thereby increasing the meaning predictability of this compound type.

Novel conceptual combination can dynamically reconfigure semantic memory networks

We do not simply have concepts; we use concepts. And, the way in which we use concepts can dynamically change the relations among them. One way to shed light on this dynamic nature is to examine how the novel processing of concepts—in our case, interpreting unfamiliar nominal compounds—might reconfigure semantic memory networks. We used network science tools to characterize properties of participants’ semantic networks (e.g., connectivity), and we compared these networks before and after participants constructed novel conceptual combinations. Furthermore, we contrasted combinations in which one attribute of one concept is used to describe another (attributive) with those in which a relation is identified to link two concepts (relational). We found that relational, but not attributive, combinations increased connectivity and lowered structure in the network. We suggest that constructing relational interpretations of compounds requires the generation of novel contexts, thus leading to greater restructuring of the semantic network.