Mapping Conceptual Variation through A Thesaurus of Old English and Evoke

The topic of figurative language in Old English (OE) has recently become the focus of substantial research. In this article, the authors will describe work on the semantic description of the lexicon of shame words in OE and in particular the taxonomical organisation of this lexicon on the basis of different kinds of semantic mappings (metonymic, metaphorical). Next, they will explore the use of the Evoke platform as a means of visualising and navigating this lexicon and show how it can be used to enrich A Thesaurus of Old English (TOE). The authors also describe ongoing work on the modelling and publication of this data as a linked data resource consisting of a lexicon and a taxonomy in SKOS of different kinds of metaphoric/metonymic sense shifts.

Ælfric’s Expressions for Shame and Guilt: A Study in Intra-Writer Conceptual Variation

This research focuses on the analysis of onomasiological variation in Old English texts written by Ælfric; more specifically, I am interested in the study of the different motifs that shape the linguistic expressions of shame and guilt used by this Anglo-Saxon monk across different textual genres. Through the fine-grained analysis of the whole set of shame and guilt expressions recorded in the entire corpus of Ælfrician texts, a network of literal and figurative conceptualizations for each emotion is proposed here. Based on this network, I have reconstructed and analysed patterns of conceptual variation in Ælfric’s English in order to show the existing tension between literal, metonymic and metaphoric expressions for these two emotions. As shall be seen here, the introduction in Anglo-Saxon England of Augustinian psychology by Ælfric and other highly educated authors favoured (i) the progressive neglect of the Germanic concept of shame and guilt as instruments of social control, (ii) the dissemination of new shame-related values, and (iii) the growing use of a new set of embodied conceptualizations for the two emotions under scrutiny here, most of which have become common figurative expressions of shame and guilt in later varieties of English. The new expressions (e.g., SHAME IS SOMETHING COVERING A PERSON, GUILT IS A BURDEN) illustrate the shift towards a progressive embodiment of the new emotional standards brought by Christianization. According to these standards, rather than an external judgment or reproach, shame and guilt involve a negative evaluation of oneself.

Shifting Concepts

Concepts stand at the centre of human cognition. We use concepts in categorizing objects and events in the world, in reasoning and action, and in social interaction. It is therefore not surprising that the study of concepts constitutes a central area of research in philosophy and psychology. Since the 1970s, psychologists have carried out intriguing experiments testing the role of concepts in categorizing and reasoning, and have found a great deal of variation in categorization behaviour across individuals and cultures. During the same period, philosophers of language and mind did important work on the semantic properties of concepts, and on how concepts are related to linguistic meaning and linguistic communication. An important motivation behind this was the idea that concepts must be shared, across individuals and cultures. However, there was little interaction between these two research programs until recently. With the dawn of experimental philosophy, the proposal that the experimental data from psychology lacks relevance to semantics is increasingly difficult to defend. Moreover, in the last decade, philosophers have approached questions about the tension between conceptual variation and shared concepts in communication from a new perspective: that of ameliorating concepts for theoretical or for social and political purposes. The volume brings together leading psychologists and philosophers working on concepts who come from these different research traditions.

Introduction

Concepts stand at the centre of human cognition. We use concepts in categorizing objects and events in the world, in reasoning and action, and in social interaction. It is therefore not surprising that the study of concepts constitutes a central area of research in philosophy and psychology. Since the 1970s, psychologists have carried out intriguing experiments testing the role of concepts in categorizing and reasoning, and have found a great deal of variation in categorization behaviour across individuals and cultures. During the same period, philosophers of language and mind did important work on the semantic properties of concepts, and on how concepts are related to linguistic meaning and linguistic communication. An important motivation behind this was the idea that concepts must be shared, across individuals and cultures. However, there was little interaction between these two research programmes until recently. With the dawn of experimental philosophy, the proposal that the experimental data from psychology lacks relevance to semantics is increasingly difficult to defend. Moreover, in the last decade, philosophers have approached questions about the tension between conceptual variation and shared concepts in communication from a new perspective—that of ameliorating concepts for theoretical or for social and political purposes. The volume brings together leading psychologists and philosophers working on concepts who come from these different research traditions.

Gender at the interface of culture and language: Conceptual variation between Italian, Dutch, and English

Gender can be considered an embodied social concept, encompassing physical, biological, and concrete aspects, as well as cultural, linguistic, and abstract dimensions. In this study we explored whether the conceptual structure of gender—as expressed in participants’ free-listing responses and ratings—varies as a function of different cultural and linguistic norms and gender-related experiences. Specifically, we compared Italian, Dutch, and English speaking participants, three communities that vary in their social treatment of gender-related issues and in how they linguistically encode gender. Additionally, we assessed the impact of differential gender-experiences by comparing participants that varied by gender-normativity in each sample. Within each community there were considerable individual differences in the representation of gender with heterogeneous associations ranging from more strictly physical and concrete ones (e.g., male, female) to more social and abstract (e.g., feminism, performativity). Nevertheless, we also found stable cross-cultural differences in the concept of gender. For example, Italian participants mainly focused on abstract, social, and cultural features (e.g., discrimination, politics, power), whereas Dutch participants produced more concrete features related to the corporeal sphere (e.g., hormones, breasts, genitals). Our results show that gender is a composite and flexible concept that can be represented in more abstract or concrete terms depending on cultural context. Importantly, this suggests that in the conceptual representation of gender both aspects are relevant, but that culture differentially shapes the concept of gender making some aspects more salient than others.

Exploring the cultural conceptualization of emotions across national language varieties

Supporting the hypothesis that emotions are culturally constructed, this article compares the cultural conceptualization of pride in European and Brazilian Portuguese (EP/BP). Individualistic/collectivistic as well as other cultural influences that determine the conceptual variation of pride in pluricentric Portuguese are examined. Adopting a sociocognitive view of language and applying a multifactorial usage-feature and profile-based methodology, this study combines a feature-based qualitative analysis of 500 occurrences of orgulho ‘pride’ and vaidade ‘vanity’ from a corpus of blogs with their subsequent multivariate statistic modeling. The multiple correspondence analysis reveals two clusters of features, namely, self-centered pride and other-directed pride. Logistic regression confirmed that EP appears to be more associated with other-directed pride, which is in line with the more collectivist and restrained Portuguese culture, whereas BP is more connected with self-centered pride. Accordingly, morally good pride is salient in EP. Brazil’s high power distance can also explain the prominence of negative and bad pride in BP.

Kausalkonstruktionen mit Adjektiv im freien und fixierten Gebrauch

The study describes the semantic and conceptual variation of causal constructions with an adjective as they are realized in German, French and Italian. In the framework of Goldberg’s (cf. 1995 and 2006) Construction Grammar, it discusses some defining properties of the analyzed constructions, like the formal and semantic (non-)predictability and their possible phraseological status based on metonymy or metaphor. Several constructions can be identified which convey different meanings, i. e. causality and/or excessiveness. The instantiations of the causal construction are linked to each other by inheritance links which make it possible to describe the variation as a network of constructions. The description of the examples’ variation with their defining properties allows us to advocate a continuum between free and fixed instantiations of the constructions and accordingly between Construction Grammar and Phraseology.