Cognitive foundations of linguistic usage patterns

✍ Scribed by Hans-Jörg Schmid; Susanne Handl

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 287
• Series: Applications of cognitive linguistics, 13
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

There is an increasing awareness in linguistics that linguistic patterns can be explained with recourse to general cognitive processes. The contributions collected in this volume pursue such a usage-based cognitive linguistic approach by presenting empirical investigations of lexical and grammatical patterns and probing into their implications for the relations between language structure, use and cognition.

Content: Introduction / Hans-Jörg Schmid and Susanne Handl --
Part I. Lexical patterns: A computational model of the ambiguity-vagueness spectrum / George Dunbar --
Questions of life and death: Denotational boundary disputes / Olaf Jäkel --
Breakthroughs and disasters: The politics and ethics of metaphor use in the media / Brigitte Nerlich --
Synonymy, lexical fields, and grammatical constructions: A study in usage-based cognitive semantics / Dylan Glynn --
Collocation, anchoring, and the mental lexicon: an ontogenetic perspective / Susanne Handl and Eva-Maria Graf --
Part II. Grammatical patterns: The mean lean grammar machine meets the human mind: Empirical investigations of the mental status of linguistic rules / Ewa Dabrowska --
Motivating grammatical and conceptual gender agreement in German / Klaus-Michael Köpcke, Klaus-Uwe Panther and David A. Zubin --
Computed or entrenched? The French imparfait de politesse / Ulrich Detges --
Valency constructions and clause constructions or how, if at all, valency grammarians might sneeze the foam off the cappuccino / Thomas Herbst --
What exactly is the question-assertion distinction based on? An exploration in experimental speech act theory / Patric Bach and Dietmar Zaefferer.
Abstract:

There is an increasing awareness in linguistics that linguistic patterns can be explained with recourse to general cognitive processes. This title features contributions that pursue such a usage-based cognitive linguistic approach by presenting empirical investigations of lexical and grammatical patterns. Read more...