Studies in linguistics and cognition

ODISEA. Revista de estudios ingleses, 2017

In the Cognitive Linguistics paradigm it is well known that conceptual metaphor and metonymy, among their various functions, are two important tools of lexical creation. Nevertheless, the literature on the topic is almost exclusively concerned with the analysis of well-established and formal varieties of language to the detriment of informal speech. This paper attempts to fill this void by describing some current informal speech expressions in Spanish which may be considered the result of these two cognitive operations; additionally, whenever possible, we offer their English counterparts. We thus explore the way in which these analytic tools play a crucial role in the proper understanding of expressions such as "estoy de bajón" (UNHAPPY IS DOWN), "vas ciego esta noche" (KNOWLEDGE IS VISION), "ya vienen los pitufos" (COLOUR OF UNIFORM FOR POLICEMAN), "esa chica está cañón" (BEING ATTRACTIVE IS HAVING PHYSICAL FORCE), etc. The expressions under consideration have been mainly obtained on the basis of Google searches and from Spanish newspapers.

DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada, 2006

An important reason for the tremendous interest in metaphor over the past 20 years stems from cognitive linguistic research. Cognitive linguists embrace the idea that metaphor is not merely a part of language, but reflects a fundamental part of the way people think, reason, and imagine. A large number of empirical studies in cognitive linguistics have, in different ways, supported this claim. My aim in this paper is to describe the empirical foundations for cognitive linguistic work on metaphor, acknowledge various skeptical reactions to this work, and respond to some of these questions/criticisms. I also outline several challenges that cognitive linguists should try to address in future work on metaphor in language, thought, and culture.

DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística …, 2006

Jezikoslovlje, 2005

2013

2007

We all know that language is not possible without a mind. However, there are different ways in which language involves mental activity. The focus of the volume presented here will be precisely on one of those ways, in which the lexicon is the guiding principle of linguistic activity. This volume presents a selection of contributions around the topic of 'language, mind and the lexicon' which were part of the discussions at the fourth biannual conference of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association, held in Saragossa (Spain) in 2004. The main topic of the conference was lexical meaning and different approaches to its study, and this choice was a consequence of the study that at the time the organizers were carrying out within the research project sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology entitled "Contrastive lexical categorization, with special emphasis on English" (ref. BFF2002-168). The main lines of this research project are described in the first chapter of the book, and are a good starting point for the discussion of many related issues that are presented by all the contributors in the following pages.

European Journal of English Studies, 2004

the plausibility of claiming a metonymic motivation for conceptual metaphor', in Metaphor and Metonymy a t the Crossroads, ed.

Revista Espanola De Linguistica Aplicada, 2010

This paper provides a detailed analysis of some of the most frequent proverbs and sayings in English and Spanish from a cognitive point of view. In our study we show the necessity to further develop conventional metaphoric and metonymic analysis into more complex patterns of interaction between the two. Furthermore, this paper stresses the relevance of subjectivity in cognitive conceptualizations; crosslinguistic differences arise in most of the expressions analysed, which show that cultural differences mark the choices of language. A more refined view of image metaphors is also provided in this paper, which claims the existence of a continuum ranging from oneshot purely imagistic to those that resemble image-schematic metaphors.

1996

Eve Sweetser, From etymology to pragmatics: Metaphorical and cultural aspects of semantic structure.

2004

This paper examines the interaction between verb meaning and construction meaning using as an example a group of so-called cognition or propositional attitude verbs in Spanish (saber, creer, pensar, considerar, juzgar, estimar, imaginar, suponer, etc). These verbs share some semantic and conceptual features that partly condition the constructional schemas in which they can appear. Our point of departure agrees with Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995) in the assumption that, on the one hand, verbs involve frame-semantic meanings, and on the other hand, constructions have cognitive abstract meaning partly independent of verbs instantiating them. Thereby, the final meaning is the result of the interaction between verb meaning and construction meaning. The frame activated by cognition verbs involves a conceptualizer and a conceptual content, but each construction proposes a specific construal of the scene. The more relevant differences have to do with the relative prominence of entities that can serve as reference-point in the mental access path from the conceptualizer to the propositional content