Recent embodied theories of meaning known as ‘simulation semantics’ posit that language comprehension engages, or even amounts to, mental simulation. What is meant here by ‘language comprehension’, however, deviates from the perspectives on interpersonal communication adhered to by researchers in social psychology and interactional linguistics. In this paper, we outline four alternative perspectives on comprehension in spoken interaction, each of which highlights factors that have remained largely outside the current purview of simulation theories. These include perspectives on language comprehension in terms of (i) striving for inter-subjective conformity; (ii) recognition of communicative intentions; (iii) prediction and anticipation in a dynamic environment; and (iv) integration of multimodal cues. By contrasting these views with simulation theories of comprehension, we outline a number of fundamental differences in terms of the kind of process comprehension is assumed to be (passive and event-like versus active and continuous), as well as the kind of stimulus that language is assumed to be (comprising unimodal units versus being multimodal and distributed across conversational turns). Finally, we discuss potential points of connection between simulation semantics and research on spoken interaction, and touch on some methodological implications of an interactive and multimodal reappraisal of simulation semantics.

This study reports a methodological itinerary aimed at developing a statistically supported investigative procedure useful for the empirical verification of hypotheses in Cognitive Linguistics research. It targets motion–emotion construals and explores the possible conceptual link between upward-oriented movements encoded in some motion verbs and the emotional state of happiness. The results emerging from the observation of two typologically different languages (English and Italian) lend empirically verified evidence for basic hypotheses in cognition and language research regarding the conceptualization of emotions and also for findings in cross-linguistic research on emotion representation.

This paper studies the principles according to which spatial and motion concepts metaphorically structure temporal concepts in some languages. There are two types of space–motion metaphor of time, distinguished by whether or not the metaphor is structured by a person’s perspective. “Christmas is approaching” and “We are approaching Christmas” are perspectival. “New Year’s follows Christmas” is not. This contrast in deixis and frame of reference is linguistically relevant whether the contrast has to do with imagination or external reality. Study of experiential motivations and analysis into primary metaphors helps reveal the particular ways spatial and motion concepts function in each type of metaphor. One focus is accounting for the contrasting temporal meanings that words for in-front and behind can have. For example, “Ahead of us” is later than Now, while “ahead of Christmas” is earlier than Christmas. We find that the temporal ‘directions’ expressed in the contrasting frames of reference are not opposites. Rather, they are motivated by different kinds of temporal experience. This project investigates the fundamental spatial relations that structure temporal concepts; for example co-location vs. separation. But since motion involves time, purely spatial structure is limited. Conceptual blending analysis reveals that the source and target frames of the perspectival metaphors share an aspectual – i.e., temporal – generic structure. Thus a dichotomy between ‘space’ and ‘time’ is of limited utility in describing space–motion metaphors of time. Instead, the analysis has to deal with the specific spatial and temporal concepts that function in each metaphor.

This paper examines how gesturers and signers use their bodies to express concepts such as instrumentality and humanness. Comparing across eight sign languages (American, Japanese, German, Israeli, and Kenyan Sign Languages, Ha Noi Sign Language of Vietnam, Central Taurus Sign Language of Turkey, and Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language of Israel) and the gestures of American non-signers, we find recurring patterns for naming entities in three semantic categories (tools, animals, and fruits & vegetables). These recurring patterns are captured in a classification system that identifies iconic strategies based on how the body is used together with the hands. Across all groups, tools are named with manipulation forms, where the head and torso represent those of a human agent. Animals tend to be identified with personification forms, where the body serves as a map for a comparable non-human body. Fruits & vegetables tend to be identified with object forms, where the hands act independently from the rest of the body to represent static features of the referent. We argue that these iconic patterns are rooted in using the body for communication, and provide a basis for understanding how meaningful communication emerges quickly in gesture and persists in emergent and established sign languages.

The present ERP study investigates the neural correlates of pictorial context effects on compositional-semantic processing. We examined whether the incremental processing of questions involving quantifier restriction is modulated by the reliability of pictorial information. Contexts either allowed for an unambiguous meaning evaluation at an early sentential position or were ambiguous with respect to whether a further restrictive cue could trigger later meaning revisions. Attention was either guided towards (Experiment 1) or away from (Experiment 2) the picture–question mapping. In both experiments, negative answers elicited a broadly distributed negativity opposed to affirmative answers as soon as an unambiguous truth evaluation was possible. In the presence of ambiguous context information, the truth evaluation initially remained underspecified, as an early commitment would have resulted in the risk of a semantic reanalysis. The negativity was followed by a late positivity in Experiment 1, but not in Experiment 2, suggesting that attention towards the mismatch affected semantic processing, but only at a later time window. The current results are consistent with the notion that an incremental meaning evaluation is dependent on the reliability of contextual information.

English speakers expressing futurity have the choice of two primary verb forms, will or be going to (BGT). Previous studies establish that BGT has multiple meanings not associated with will. Langacker (1987) rejected a metaphoric analysis of BGT (time is motion) as inadequate and offered a binary feature analysis. Brisard (2001) expanded on this analysis and argued that manipulating the configurations of binary features explains the semantic differences between will and BGT. However, Brisard’s analysis overlooks the semantic overlap among will, BGT, and the simple present. Moreover, it does not provide a framework that treats will and BGT as part of the larger English modal verb system. Finally, it lacks a persuasive explanation of how the meanings associated with will versus BGT arose. We address these gaps by proposing a polysemy-based explanation that emphasizes invited inferences (e.g., Bybee, Perkins, & Pagliuca, 1994) and embodied experience; a particularly novel aspect of the analysis is that all the meanings of BGT are related straightforwardly to components of the human walk cycle. Further, we argue that the shared future meaning of will and BGT represent inter-lexical polysemy (Evans, 2015b), thus providing additional evidence for the Theory of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive Models (LCCM).

This paper presents an algorithm for learning the construction grammar of a language from a large corpus. This grammar induction algorithm has two goals: first, to show that construction grammars are learnable without highly specified innate structure; second, to develop a model of which units do or do not constitute constructions in a given dataset. The basic task of construction grammar induction is to identify the minimum set of constructions that represents the language in question with maximum descriptive adequacy. These constructions must (1) generalize across an unspecified number of units while (2) containing mixed levels of representation internally (e.g., both item-specific and schematized representations), and (3) allowing for unfilled and partially filled slots. Additionally, these constructions may (4) contain recursive structure within a given slot that needs to be reduced in order to produce a sufficiently schematic representation. In other words, these constructions are multi-length, multi-level, possibly discontinuous co-occurrences which generalize across internal recursive structures. These co-occurrences are modeled using frequency and the ΔP measure of association, expanded in novel ways to cover multi-unit sequences. This work provides important new evidence for the learnability of construction grammars as well as a tool for the automated corpus analysis of constructions.

Recent psycholinguistic studies on the reality of alternative sets in processing focus NPs have shown that focus particles like ‘only’ play a special role in activating the mental representation of alternatives to focused nouns. In this paper we present a new corpus study which provides converging evidence to support psycholinguistic findings and suggests that alternatives preceded by a focus particle are not only more activated in experimental contexts, but are also more likely to be discussed in the subsequent context. To this end we develop and evaluate inter-annotator agreement on two novel annotation tasks in naturally occurring German corpus data: recognition of nominal alternatives in general without any context, and recognition of alternatives in the context of sentence pairs. We show that while annotators agree poorly on the first, they agree strongly on the second. We also develop a concept of ‘alternative density’, the number of alternatives realized in a sentence following a target NP, and present a mixed-effects model showing a very significant rise in density after the presence of German nur ‘only’ independently of other factors.

Does the way we talk about events correspond to how we conceptualize them? Three experiments (N = 135) examined how Spanish and Swedish native speakers judge event similarity in the domain of caused motion (‘He rolled the tyre into the barn’). Spanish and Swedish motion descriptions regularly encode path (‘into’), but differ in how systematically they include manner information (‘roll’). We designed a similarity arrangement task which allowed participants to give varying weights to different dimensions when gauging event similarity. The three experiments progressively reduced the likelihood that speakers were using language to solve the task. We found that, as long as the use of language was possible (Experiments 1 and 2), Swedish speakers were more likely than Spanish speakers to base their similarity arrangements on object manner (rolling/sliding). However, when recruitment of language was hindered through verbal interference, cross-linguistic differences disappeared (Experiment 3). A compound analysis of all experiments further showed that (i) cross-linguistic differences were played out against a backdrop of commonly represented event components, and (ii) describing vs. not describing the events did not augment cross-linguistic differences, but instead had similar effects across languages. We interpret these findings as suggesting a dynamic role of language in event conceptualization.

In recent years proponents of usage-based linguistics have singled out ‘categorization’ as possibly the fundamental cognitive operation underlying the acquisition and use of language. Despite this increasing appeal to the importance of categorization, few researchers have yet offered explicit interpretations of how linguistic categories might be represented in the brain other than vague allusions to prototype theory, especially as implemented in connectionist-like frameworks. In this paper, I discuss in some detail the implications of superimposing the theoretical representations of linguistic structures onto domain-general models of categorization. I first review the evidence that instance-based, or exemplar-based, models of categorization provide empirically and theoretically better models of both domain-general categorization and of linguistic categorization than do the most commonly cited alternative models. I then argue that of the three exemplar-based models currently being applied to linguistic data, Skousen’s Analogical Model (AM) appears to provide the simplest, most straightforward account of the data and that it appears to be fully compatible with our current understanding of the psychological capabilities and operations that underlie categorization behavior.

In English, the Moving Ego metaphor conceptualizes the ego as moving forward through time and the Moving Time metaphor construes time as moving forward toward the ego. Recent research has provided evidence that people’s metaphorical perspectives on deictic time may be influenced by experiences—both spatial and non-spatial—that are connected to approach motivations (Moving Ego) and avoidance motivations (Moving Time). We extend this research further, asking whether there are differences in preferred temporal perspective between those who exhibit higher and lower degrees of power, as high power has been connected to approach motivations and low power, to avoidance motivations. Across two temporal tasks, participants in our study who adopted high-power poses demonstrated a greater preference for the Moving Ego perspective, compared to those adopting low-power poses. These results suggest an embodied connection between approach and avoidance motivations and the Moving Ego and Moving Time metaphors, respectively.

What factors motivate our understanding of metaphoric statements about time? English exhibits two deictic space–time metaphors: the Moving Ego metaphor conceptualizes the ego as moving forward through time, while the Moving Time metaphor conceptualizes time as moving forward towards the ego (Clark, 1973). In addition to earlier research investigating spatial influences on temporal reasoning (e.g., Boroditsky & Ramscar, 2002), recent lines of research have provided evidence that a complex of factors, such as personality differences, event valence, lifestyle, and emotional experiences, may also influence people’s perspectives on the movement of events in time – providing new insights on metaphor and its ability to reflect thought and feeling (e.g., Duffy & Feist, 2014; Duffy, Feist, & McCarthy, 2014; Margolies & Crawford, 2008; Richmond, Wilson, & Zinken, 2012). Probing these findings further, two studies were conducted to investigate whether the interpretation of a temporally ambiguous question may arise from an interaction between the valence of the event and aspects of the personality (Experiment 1) and lifestyle (Experiment 2) of the comprehender. The findings we report on shed further light on the complex nature of temporal reasoning. While this involves conceptual metaphor, it also invokes more complex temporal frames of reference (t-FoRs) (Evans, 2013), which are only partially subserved by space-to-time conceptual metaphors.

Metaphors are comparisons that link dissimilar conceptual domains. We hypothesized that the aptness of a metaphor is linked to the reader’s experience of beauty, and that age and expertise influence these aesthetic judgments. We had young adults, literary experts, and elderly adults rate metaphors for beauty or aptness. Experimental materials consisted of single-sentence novel metaphors whose familiarity, figurativeness, imageability, interpretability, and overall valence ratings were known. Results suggest that beauty and aptness of metaphors are linked for elderly adults but are orthogonal for young adults and literary experts. Elderly participants seem to conflate emotional content with aptness. Young adults are most swayed by a perceived feeling of familiarity when rating for aptness, but not for beauty. Literary experts are relatively unaffected by the psycholinguistic variables, suggesting an emotionally distanced approach to these sentences. Individual differences in literary training and life experience have varying effects on the aesthetic experience of metaphor in regard to beauty and aptness.

When describing motion in space, speakers of French and German are known to show different preferences. In French, the verb typically encodes the path, whereas in German the manner in which the figure moves is mapped onto the verb. In this paper, this difference between the two languages is investigated, drawing on the data produced by forty participants. All participants are multilinguals, with German and French as their two strongest languages. They described fifty video clips in two sessions, once in monolingual and once in bilingual mode. The critical stimuli were always described in German in both language modes, the fillers in German in monolingual mode but in French in bilingual mode. The analyses of the manner and path verb uses show that, in a bilingual mode, speakers significantly converge towards the French model, that is, they reduce the preference for manner verbs and increase the proportion of path verbs.

This paper provides a theoretical and methodological contribution to the heated debate on intersubjectivity and intersubjectification (Nuyts, 2001, 2012; Traugott & Dasher, 2002; Traugott, 2003, 2010, 2012; Verhagen, 2005; Narrog, 2010, 2012; Dancygier & Sweetser, 2012). I will argue that intersubjectivity, intended as a subject’s awareness of the other persona(s)’ feelings, knowledge, and beliefs, can be construed alternatively on an ‘immediate’ and on an ‘extended’ level. Immediate intersubjectivity (I-I) corresponds to the mutual awareness of the speech participants during the ongoing speech event, whereas extended intersubjectivity (E-I) includes an assumed third party (specific or generic) who has an indirect social bearing on the utterance (cf. Tantucci 2013, 2014). Along a unidirectional cline of change, extended intersubjectification constitutes a further stage of semantic and/or grammatical reanalysis with respect to its immediate counterpart. In order to empirically justify the diachronic continuum between the two, I provide some corpus-illustrated (cf. Tummers et al., 2005, p. 235) examples from Mandarin and corpus-based evidence about the constructions [you don’t want X] and believe it or not in American English.

The aim of this paper is to develop a Cognitive Grammar-based analysis of English Copy-raising (CR) constructions such as Richard seems like he is dancing. We argue that the notion of reference-point plays a crucial role in licensing the matrix-subject of the construction. In CR, with the epistemic verbs seem and appear, the matrix-subject functions as a reference-point in relation to the pronominal copy (if a copy exists) in the embedded clause. The aboutness topicality of the matrix-subject in CR is expected, owing to its reference-point property. The epistemic CR construction is acceptable without a pronominal copy if the matrix-subject functions as a reference-point in relation to the complement clause. The same type of analysis is applied to the CR construction with perceptual resemblance (PR) verbs – sound, look, feel, and smell – leading to the conclusion that the strong dichotomy between epistemic and PR verbs is illusory. It is further demonstrated that expletive there-raising in CR is motivated by the same reference-point phenomenon. The difference between there-raising and other CR examples stems from the role of there as a setting subject. Our reference-point-based analysis predicts a metonymic interpretation of the matrix-subject, which we attribute to the connection between reference-point and metonymy.

In one type of Relative Clause Extraposition (RCE) in English, a subject-modifying relative clause occurs in a displaced position following the matrix VP, as in: Some options were considered that allow for more flexibility. Although RCE incurs a discontinuous dependency and is relatively infrequent in discourse, previous corpus and acceptability judgment studies have shown that speakers prefer RCE over adjacent ordering when the RC is long in relation to the VP, the subject NP is indefinite, and the main verb is passive/presentative (Francis, 2010; Francis & Michaelis, 2014; Walker, 2013). The current study is the first to relate these conditional preferences to online measures of production. For a spoken production task that required speakers to construct sentences based on visual cues, results showed that the same factors that modulate choice of structure – VP length, RC length, and definiteness of the subject NP – also modulate voice initiation time. That is, when the sentential context warrants a particular structure, that structure becomes easier to produce. Following the approach of MacDonald (2013), we explain these findings in terms of two production biases, one of which favors early placement of shorter, more accessible phrases and the other of which promotes rapid retrieval from memory of the most frequently used subtypes of a construction.

This study examined how native speakers of Spanish formulated sentences in English as a second language (L2) when randomly ordered words were orally presented. Participants included 206 adult literacy students (70 native Spanish speakers and 136 native English speakers) whose word reading equivalency was at third- through fifth-grade levels. The Word Ordering subtest of the Test of Language Development-3 was administered. Although they showed a similar pattern of performance in the sentence type (i.e., declarative, interrogative, or imperative sentence), the two groups showed a different pattern in the misuse of syntactic features. Pertaining to grammatical features, verbs were the most difficult item for the native speakers of Spanish. The findings of this study were explained through the intricate nature of English verbs as well as unique lexicalization patterns resulting from the typological difference between Spanish and English.

My goal in the paper is to examine the significance of a root morpheme in language and cognition in three interconnected areas; in the creation of words; in meaning making; and in conceptual structure. I use the Hungarian root es-, meaning ‘fall’, for demonstration – a root that occurs in over 100 Hungarian words. First, I examine the issue of the conceptual–semantic relationship between the various word meanings in which this root can be found. Second, I explore the potential cognitive status of the root in Hungarian, and possibly in other languages (such as English). Third, I compare the meanings in which es- occurs in Hungarian to the nearest counterparts of these words in English. Fourth, I investigate the potential role of the root es- in organizing conceptual structure.

During narrative retelling, speakers shift between different viewpoints to reflect how they conceptualize the events that unfolded. These viewpoints can be indicated through gestural means as well as through verbal ones. Studies of co-speech gestures have inferred viewpoint from gesture form, i.e., how entities are mapped onto the (primarily manual) articulators, but the merits of this approach have not been discussed. The present study argues that viewpoint is more than gestural form. Despite connections between the two, many other factors may influence a gesture’s form. Assessing viewpoint from gesture form alone limits the applicability of gestural viewpoint as a window onto speakers’ event conceptualization and introduces unnecessary differences in the categorization of viewpoint across gestures types. The present study examines iconic co-speech gestures in Danish narratives, and makes explicit the means used to infer gestural viewpoint. The approach advocated here ensures that the notion of viewpoint can be applied in a principled way to all or most iconic gestures.