Perspective Of Cognitive Linguistics Research Articles

The Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying the Concept of سرعة (Speed) in Arabic

Despite the wide range of studies on how students’ past knowledge influences their understanding of scientific terminology, few studies were conducted to compare non-scientific language with scientific language, or rather everyday language with scientific language, from a cognitive linguistic perspective. The present paper aims to determine the cognitive mechanisms, i.e., image schemas, conceptual metaphor, and conceptual metonymy, which underpin the conceptualisation of the Arabic term سرعة (speed), using a conceptual metaphor theory framework. Thus, the research question guiding this study is: What cognitive mechanisms underlie the concept of سرعة (speed) in Arabic? The findings of this study will shed light on how Arab speakers conceptualise this term, demonstrating their background knowledge of the term compared to its scientific meaning. The article adds to the growing body of cognitive linguistics research on the conceptual processes behind physics terms. The data was collected from the Arabic Web Corpus (arTenTen) using the Sketch Engine. The findings demonstrated that VERTICATLITY and SCALE schemas are the most dominant image schemas that anchor the conceptual meaning in Arab speakers’ perceptions of the term under investigation and the discourse in which it is employed, as well as offer the concrete basis for conceptual metaphors. The conceptual metaphor CHANGE IS MOTION (LOCATION) was also shown to be active in motivating the conception of SPEED in Arabic.

Implementation of Japanese Sociocultural Values in Japanese Kotowaza: A Cognitive Linguistics Perspective.

Kotowaza were created by gaining experience and through recurring events over the years of existence of the Japanese people. The purpose of this study is to conduct a qualitative analysis of Japanese kotowaza in cognitive-linguistic discourse to divide idioms into categories and groups with specific sociocultural features. The paper focuses in detail on the semantic features of 20 kotowaza that use animal symbols as an idiomatic metaphor. In this paper, 10 proverbs with the central animal visualization, neko, were analyzed. Visionary metaphors are developed based on the comparison of cat's body parts and behavior with human qualities or characteristics of objects and phenomena. The analysis of the remaining 10 kotowaza showed that the meaning of imagery could originate from Chinese tradition and then change under the influence of Japanese style. Hence, it follows that the meanings of some kotowaza, or the animals they use, can be interpreted differently depending on context. However, the key meanings of proverbs are engrained in the national consciousness of native speakers. It was also observed that kotowaza used oxymoron. It is possible to gain a correct understanding of what kotowaza means through analyzing literal and idiomatic relations in the proverb. Each proverb has an animal symbol, the meaning of which is engrained and originates from the cultural and historical development of the Japanese nation. The practical application of the study lies in the fact that these findings can be used for further study of the special aspects of manifestation of sociocultural heritage at the linguistic level within the phraseology of the Japanese language.

The Role of Language in Organizational Sensemaking: An Integrative Theoretical Framework and an Agenda for Future Research

Despite the rapid growth of research on organizational sensemaking and an acknowledgment of the critical role of language in the sensemaking process, the literature on sensemaking and language is fragmented. In particular, there is no systematic review that explains the roles and functions of different linguistic elements in meaning construction. The purpose of this review paper is to develop an integrative theoretical framework that organizes existing research in a way that allows us to better understand how different linguistic processes shape the construction of meaning in sensemaking. First, we explain how a cognitive linguistic perspective elucidates how language provides the cognitive associations, schema, and frames used in sensemaking. Second, we discuss how a focus on the social practices of language use, as in rhetorical, narrative, or interactionist approaches, illuminates the patterns of meaning-making among organizational members in social interaction. Third, we explain how a focus on discourse helps us to understand how discursive structures enable or constrain sensemaking and thereby reproduce or transform systems of thought. This leads us to turn to the differences in these perspectives and suggest how they can be brought together in an integrative theoretical framework. Finally, we discuss the contributions of our framework and propose an agenda for future research focusing on the multifaceted role of language in sensemaking, intertextual and multimodal links in the language of sensemaking, the agentic and structural role of language in sensemaking, episodic and latent aspects of language use in sensemaking, and the role of power in discursive sensemaking.

Conceptual Metaphor “WOMEN ARE ANIMALS” In 20th-century Vietnamese Literature

From the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics, the paper analyzes the conceptual metaphor WOMEN ARE ANIMALS in 20th-century Vietnamese literary works. The theoretical framework for this study includes the Conceptual Metaphor Theory of Lakoff and Johnson (1980), the Great Chain of Being model of Lakoff and Turner (1989), and the Metaphor Identification Procedure of Pragglejaz Group (2007). Through a survey of 50 short stories and novels written by famous Vietnamese authors, 6 low-level metaphors as well as the mapping mechanism from the source domain to the target domain, is discovered and explained. The findings reveal that women are mainly portrayed as wild animals, livestock, pets, or birds. Metaphorical linguistic expressions, then, convey a biased view towards the low and inferior role and position of women in the family and society. Negative ideological values in the representation of women are explored to show that women are considered to be small, weak, dependent on men, and serve as their recreation. Vietnamese people's thinking and cultural characteristics are also reflected in this metaphor.

A Metaphorical Analysis of the Main Characters in Beloved from the Perspective of Cognitive Linguistics

A Metaphorical Analysis of the Main Characters in Beloved from the Perspective of Cognitive Linguistics

Понятие стиля в свете разных теоретических подходов

Known since antiquity, the concept of style is widely used in various fields of human activity. Style is represented in language, in art, in sports, in fashion, etc. The article traces the history of the word stylein the Russian language and discusses various approaches to style in linguistics and semiotics. The definition of style as a way of activity and as a set of features characterizing the result of activity requires reference to the structure of the stylistic system and styles of texts, to the distinction of denotation and connotation. In the final part of the article, the concept of style is discussed from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.

The effect of fake news on the conceptualisation of the role of the face mask during the Covid-19 pandemic in Poland. A cognitive linguistic perspective

The effect of fake news on the conceptualisation of the role of the face mask during the Covid-19 pandemic in Poland. A cognitive linguistic perspective

Frames and political choice in Scottish election campaigns

The paper presents interdisciplinary research using the framework of cognitive linguistics based metaphor theory and nationalism studies of political science. Frames of movement are placed under scrutiny during the discourse analysis of the 2016 and 2021 election manifestos of the Scottish National Party and social media posts. In relation to metaphors of movement, images describing the future of an independent Scotland are also detected. The authors attempt to analyse and interpret findings both from the perspective of cognitive linguistics and ethno-symbolism. Apart from the texts of the manifestos, the timeframe of the research involved social media posts two months preceding and two months following the elections in both cases. Methodology was issue-driven and computer assisted but supervised: key words linked to movement were extracted from the manifestos and clustered. Their occurrence and frequency in the social media posts was checked. In the qualitative analysis phase, messages of the manifestos and of the posts were contrasted in order to answer our research question what kind of persuasive political discourse was used when options for the citizens were outlined.

Czy czas to pieniądz? Koncepcja czasu w mentalności współczesnego dorosłego Polaka

The aim of the paper is to enquire how a modern Polish man comprehends time . Taken from the cognitive linguistics perspective, the study evolves around time metaphors, extracted from the definitions and the language corpus in Polish. Metaphor is recognised as a useful tool within Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) to learn about motives, believes and ideologies. The results obtained in the research yield quantitative data. The metaphors Time is money, Time is a value and Time is a doctor and the best cure can be called ‘shared metaphors’, since they underlie both the dictionary definitions and corpus discourse. We may conclude that these metaphors are conventional, well-grounded in the awareness of contemporary Poles and inspire their ideological motives. Other time metaphors refer to moral and religious values (within the MORALITY and RELIGION frame) and an identity search (within the IDENTITY and PSYCHOLOGY frame). Finally, a few time metaphors derive from everyday functioning and duties of present people (within the DAILY LIFE frame).

Conceptual Metaphor of COVID-19 in New York Times

Conceptual metaphor is an important theory of cognitive metaphor. Its nature is recognized as a rhetoric within the scope of traditional metaphor research. It is a deliberate deviation of literal meaning and an optional discourse modifier. Cognitive metaphor holds that metaphor mechanism is the projection from the source domain to the target domain. In this process, the establishment of similarity is fundamental, and the similarity relationship can be divided into physical similarity and psychological similarity. Things can enter both ends of metaphor by virtue of these two similarity relationships to produce rich and complex conceptual metaphor, which makes metaphor everywhere in our life. As one of the important ways of information dissemination, news discourse has a strong ideological tendency and political motivation, which has a subtle impact on the psychology of readers. Therefore, from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, this paper uses conceptual metaphor theory to analyze the characteristics, types and cognitive mechanisms of conceptual metaphors in COVID-19 coverage in The New York Times. It provides ideas for discourse analysis of epidemic situation in the future.

METAPHOR AND METONYMY IN ACTION AND INTERACTION IN MEDICAL ENGLISH

In the present article, we offer a diachronic classification of the understanding of the role of metaphor in Medicine. We identify three periods, the first one of them being based on denial, Restrictive View, the second one – on affirmation, Descriptive View, and the last one – on manipulation, Proscriptive View. We also explain the surge of interest in metonymy from a cognitive linguistics perspective, and contrast the present perception of metonymy as intertwined with metaphor to the now classical idea of metonymy as a phenomenon that is separate and divergent from metaphor. We endorse the latest understanding of the interplay between metaphor and metonymy in Medical English as a difficult one to be dismantled: it is hard to clearly delimitate the realm of each one of the pair.Thus while it is clear that metaphor and metonymy act in scientific discourse, it is not equally clear what internal limits must be set to their interaction. We suggest that, by the time an objective and clear way of differentiating between the two is agreed upon, the greatest efforts should be directed at elucidating hidden metaphor and metonymy in Medical English.

Conceptualization of emotions in the novel The Slynxby Tatyana Tolstaya

Abstract The language of emotions is culturally conditioned and a conceptualization of emotions is determined by the value systems adopted in given cultures, as well as by personal experiences in recognizing, valuing, and communicating those emotions. It is believed that sometimes certain emotions have no lexical equivalents in particular languages. Even within one culture and one language, we can observe a gray area in the meaning of terms from this field. This is not surprising, given the subjective perception of the world by each member of a specific community, as well as the multitude of emotions themselves. Although most information about other people’s emotions comes to the recipients through language, talking or writing about them is not simple. Emotions are among the concepts that are not very clearly delineated in our experience and therefore other, more comprehensible concepts, such as spatial orientations or objects, should be used when referring to them. In the novel The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya, emotions are conceptualized and represented for instance by liquids, small animals, natural forces, and substances with some specific taste (sour, bitter, etc.). Our goal was to figure out which emotions and their linguistic instantiations are only typical for the Russian language and which ones would fall in the universal category. The paper will focus on the description and the way emotions are conceptualized from a cognitive linguistic perspective, drawing on CMT (Conceptual Metaphor Theory), conceptual metonymies, and cognitive models.

In the mind’s eye: Mental conceptualization of floods by the British and the Bulgarian media

From a cognitive linguistics perspective, the present study is aimed at the analysis of manifestations of metaphorical mental conceptualizations of flooding events in terms of war in the language used by the British and the Bulgarian journalists and the extent to which the implementation of the cognitive metaphor FLOODING CRISIS IS WAR differs in the media representations of the two countries. The corpus used for the research consists of 19 articles extracted from the electronic databases of four newspapers – two for the British discourse (the Guardian and the Independent) and two for the Bulgarian discourse (Monitor and Standart). A total of 33 example sentences have been extracted from the corpus (21 from the British media and 12 from the Bulgarian media) and they have been coded with respect to the mappings between the source and target domain of the cognitive metaphor. The results of the research show that the media both in the UK and Bulgaria rely on metaphorical projection from the domain of war when flooding crises are reported, which confirms the notion that metaphorical projection is a universal structural element of cognition.

The Metaphor of Light – Perspectives on Conceptual Metaphors

Abstract The language of perception, regarded from the perspective of the sensory modality principle, is common to all humans within similar cultural backgrounds. Its conceptualization, from a semantic standpoint is, however, language-specific. With this view in mind, the prime objective of this study is to investigate, from a cognitive linguistic perspective, various kinds of visual properties experienced in connection with the perceptual metaphor of LIGHT. Its cultural and emotional dimensions will be approached as an integrative part of the context provided by Anthony Doerr’s novel All the Light We Cannot See (2014). The present investigation attempts to shed “light” upon the potential embodiment of meaning assigned to the metaphors of perception in a twofold, intrafield (Matisoff 1978, Evans & Wilkins 2000) and transfield standpoint. The conceptualization of the metaphor of light is observed in a contextualized approach of a single language (English), its secondary objective being that of providing the basis for a larger cross-linguistic investigation of similar matters on English–Romanian corpora.

Discourse Analysis of Selected Memes during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Cognitive Linguistics Perspective

Discourse Analysis of Selected Memes during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Cognitive Linguistics Perspective

Mapping musical dynamics in space. A qualitative analysis of conductors' movements in orchestra rehearsals

In this contribution, we examine the way in which orchestra conductors use the space around them to convey aspects of musical dynamics. In music,dynamicsrefers to the intensity of volume of notes and sounds and its interpretation is highly context-bound. We approach dynamics as a phenomenon of emergent and construed meaning in interaction, induced by the music score and the interpretationin situby musicians and the conductor. Conductors' movement-based instructions on dynamics result in highly complex usage events. This study aims at disentangling these instances by asking how conductors move and use the space around them to instruct on (un)desired aspects of musical dynamics, zooming in on movement direction as a central formal feature. We find ourselves at the crossroads of cognitive and interactional linguistics, aligning with existing studies on the interactional and contextually embedded nature of music interaction. From a cognitive linguistic perspective, this endeavor translates as the identification of the construal mechanisms (metaphor, specificity and viewpoint) that underlie and therefore motivate movement directions in the specific instances under examination. The analysis is based on 10h of video data from a corpus recorded during rehearsals of five conductors instructing their respective orchestras in Dutch. Our data reveal that conductors use different movement patterns, some of which appear to involve opposite movement directions for expressing a similar music dynamical aspect, e.g., depending on the usage event, a vertical upward movement can mean both a request for playing louder and softer. By taking into account different construal mechanisms, we are able to provide an encompassing multimodal analysis, in which these allegedly deviating oppositional movements appear as consistently motivated (metaphorical) expressions, which profile a similar target concept involving different viewpoints.

Professional Teacher Language: Its Contexts, Functions, and Potential to Further Teachers’ Professionalism

Much attention has been dedicated to the professional development of teachers and how their professional knowledge base is formed in teacher education, but little attention has been paid to the surface level of such measures, that is the professional language used and developed within teacher education. The first part of this article presents a definition of professional teacher language and provides overviews for its contexts and functions in order to conceptualise its role for teachers’ professional development and its potential for teacher education. To further illustrate this potential, a cognitive-linguistic perspective is applied to discuss the relationship of practical teacher knowledge and its verbalisation. This touches on the fundamental question of what proportion and aspects of teachers’ professional knowledge base can be made explicit through language and how language can help to form this knowledge base. The second part contextualises and discusses results from an empirical qualitative study of practitioner teachers’ discussing their practice in a professional learning group. This illustrates one methodological approach to exploring how practitioners verbalise their decision making in practice within professional discourse in a professional learning community.

Discourse Analysis of Chinese Hoof-shaped Gold Ingots

Chinese hoof-shaped gold ingots are cultural relics excavated from Haihunhou tomb of the Western Han Dynasty in recent years. From the perspective of social cognitive linguistics, this article aims at exploring the discourse essence and discursive construction of hoof-shaped gold ingots. Firstly on the level of discursive types, it is proposed that the ingots fall into the category of multi-modal discourses, and to be more specific, the cognitive category of materialized discourses. Then based on the social cognitive model of strong differentiation advanced by Wang (2019), it is found that the ingots are essentially a kind of materialized power discourses developed on the social cognitive model called strong differentiation model of power. Furthermore, it is discovered that the cognitive premise of the social cognitive model is that bestowals are power, which serves as an immediate motivation for the emergence of the ingots in Chinese history. The findings suggest that the cognitive motivation for discursive construction of hoof-shaped gold ingots is the rationalization of power stratification and the natural legitimation of imperial authority in Chinese feudal society.

BT+ Approach to the Meaning Construction of Metonymy-Based Chinese Cyber-Expressions

China has the biggest population of netizens in the world and more and more cybernauts often use cyber-expressions in their Internet communication and some cyber-expressions are even used in our daily life offline. With the increasing popularity of these cyber-expressions, they have caught the eyes of more and more scholars and these expressions’ formation and meaning construction are analyzed from many perspectives. From the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics, the Chinese cyber-expressions are formed with the help of such cognitive mechanisms as metaphor, icon iconicity, metonymy and metaphtonymy. While the metonymy-based e-terms account for a large proportion of all the new cyber-expressions, little is discussed about metonymy-based expressions in previous studies related to the Chinese cyber-expressions. In the present paper, 752 metonymy-based e-terms from a closed corpus will be studied exhaustively and the meaning construction of these kinds of expressions will be systematically analyzed based on the Blending Theory under the framework of Cognitive Linguistics with an attempt to fill the gap in the previous studies.

Philosophical and Cognitive Existence of Linguistic Subjectivity and Its Realisation Paths from the Perspective of Integrating Embodied Philosophy and Cognition

Language is the product of human’s discursive practice. It is bound to bear speakers’ feelings, attitudes and opinions toward events, that is, linguistic subjectivity (LS). However, the phenomenon of linguistic subjectivity (LS) cannot be fully unravelled by the existing single perspective of semantics, pragmatics, philosophy, or cognitive linguistics. To reveal the philosophical attribute and cognitive nature of linguistic subjectivity (LS), a model of integrating embodied philosophy and cognition of linguistic subjectivity (IEPCLS) was constructed, and a philosophical cognitive analysis framework of linguistic subjectivity (LS) was proposed. By integrating the embodiment and non-objectivity of language meaning in embodied philosophy and the speaker’s self-orientation in cognitive linguistics, the philosophical and cognitive existence of linguistic subjectivity (LS) was explored. The concrete realisation paths of the philosophical and cognitive existence of linguistic subjectivity (LS) were investigated on the basis of the framework, and the feasibility of the model and framework was verified by taking discourse constructions as examples. The results show that linguistic subjectivity (LS) is the attribute of speakers as subjects and exists in the speaker’s realistic experience, the speaker’s self, and the speaker’s interaction and perception of the social communication context (SCC). The realisation paths of the philosophical and cognitive existence of linguistic subjectivity (LS) include the speaker’s self-expressions, the speaker’s meaning assignment to social communication context (SCC), and the speaker’s meaning interpretation of social communication context (SCC). The study provides references for interpreting the subjective factors behind discourse.