edited by Alan Cienki, Barbara J. Luka, and Michael B. Smith
What can we learn about the human mind by studying language? The predominant approaches in American linguistics use theoretical assumptions about the formal nature of grammar to answer this question. But these studies are restricted to unapplied models of language, not how language functions in actual speech situations--and as a result, their power to reveal the workings of the human mind is limited.
This book overcomes those limitations by examining data on naturally occurring language usage, not simplified theoretical examples. The cognitive and functional arguments made here start from psychologically realistic principles and arrive at perspectives of linguistics that unveil mechanisms of the mind--based on how language is actually used.
Moving within a cognitive and functional framework, this volume focuses on the motivations for linguistic patterning in human social and cognitive experience, and on the dynamic properties of language construal, use, and development. Among the main research avenues represented are first language acquisition, metaphor, language processing and discourse, and conceptual structure and grammar.
Alan Cienki is associate professor of Russian and linguistics at Emory University. Barbara J. Luka was a postdoctoral research associate in psychology at the University of Arizona at the time of this publication. Michael B. Smith is associate professor of linguistics at Oakland University.
- Contributors
- Preface
- The Syntax of French Raising Verbs
Michel Achard
- A Cognitive Linguistics Approach to the Layperson's Understanding of Thermal Phenomena
Tamer G. Amin
- Voilà, voilà: Extensions of Deictic Constructions in French
Benjamin K. Bergen and Madelaine C. Plauche
- Perspective, Deixis and Voice
Nancy Budwig
- Semantic Influences on Attributions of Causality in Interpersonal Events
Roberta Corrigan
- The Cognitive Basis of Visual Evidentials
Ferdinand De Haan
- The Processing of Fixed Expressions During Sentence Comprehension
Dieter Hillert and David Swinney
- Constructional Grounding: On the Relation Between Diectic and Existential there-Constructions in Acquisition
Christopher Johnson
- What WH Means
Ronald W. Langacker
- Deixis and the FRONT/BACK Opposition in Temporal Metaphors
Kevin Ezra Moore
- Linking Early Linguistic and Conceptual Capacities
Anna Papafragou
- Copula and Time -Stability
Regina Pustet
- Prosodic Integration in Spanish Complement
Ivo Sánchez
- Some Aspects of Path-Like Iconicity in German Separable Verb Constructions
Michael B. Smith
- Access Path Expressions in Thai
Kiyoko Takahashi
- Switch Reference and Zero Anaphora
Liang Tao
- Index
6/1/2001