Arguing the case against coercion

This work studies two related phenomena in human language: the ability of verbs and other lexical items to describe how a situation (event or state) develops or holds in time (sc LEXICAL ASPECT) and the view some verbal auxiliaries and affixes present of the development or result of situations at a given time (sc GRAMMATICAL ASPECT). Through this investigation I reveal a formal situation structure represented by aspectual phenomena, a structure to which other linguistic elements refer, particularly tense. I examine data in a variety of languages, taking particular care to distinguish between aspect semantics and cancellable pragmatic implicatures associated with aspect forms. The semantic-pragmatic distinction provides a tool for determining what properties need to be accounted for in the semantic representation and what may be adduced as evidence for these properties. In particular, I show that oppositions generally assumed to be semantically equipollent ($+/-$) are semantically privative ($+$/unmarked), with unmarked forms interpreted in accordance with pragmatic principles. Lexical aspect semantics is represented by the privative features ($+$telic), ($+$dynamic), and ($+$durative). These features define the Event Time (ET) as a situation structure consisting of a nucleus and a coda. Grammatical aspect oppositions, also represented privatively, crucially interact with this structure: ($+$imperfective) views situations intersecting a Reference Time (RT) at the nucleus, and ($+$perfective) views them at the coda. The conception of grammatical aspect as a view of the ET-RT intersection allows the representation of tense to be limited to a relation between a RT and the deictic center (C). Complex temporal phenomena--perfect and extended tenses--are shown to be interactions between grammatical aspect and tense. The privative analysis allows aspect semantics to be built up monotonically--from the lexical aspect ET features, the grammatical aspect view of the ET, and tense. The semantics restricts pragmatic interpretation in principled ways, based on marked and unmarked features. Chapter 1 introduces theoretical issues and assumptions. Chapters 2-4 outline the semantic structure of lexical aspect, grammatical aspect, and tense, respectively. Chapters 5-6 apply the analysis to the aspect and tense systems of English and New Testament Koine Greek.

Poetry as a discourse is arranged by grammatical and lexical aspects. Therefore, to know what grammatical and lexical aspects are used by the author in writing the poem Papua, this study uses a method called the descriptive method. The grammatical aspects contained in the poem Papua, namely referential (reference) consist of (1) reference persona (first person singular, first person singular bound form, second person singular, and second person singular bound form), (2) demonstrative reference and (3) comparative reference and coupling (conjunctions) and conjunctions (conjunctions) consist of addition conjunctions (additives) and causal conjunctions. The lexical aspects contained in the poem Papua, namely repetition consist of epizeuksis repetitions and anaphora repetitions, synonym phrases with phrases, and absolute antonymy. Both of these aspects, grammatical and lexical aspects, are used by poets to compose word by word to produce a cohesive and coherent poetic text.

This article is concerned with viewpoint-related phenomena in academic texts. Traditionally regarded as a highly impersonal type of communication, academic prose has recently drawn the attention of researchers exploring manifestations of author subjectivity and a growing body of linguistic research has demonstrated that research articles, monographs, university textbooks, etc. are far from objective or “faceless” acts of communication. Since Cognitive Linguistics is particularly well suited to the study of subjective aspects of linguistic meaning, this paper argues for a Cognitive Linguistics approach to the study of viewpoint in academic texts and proposes a model of viewpoint based on Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar designed specifically for the study of academic discourse. The model encompasses three aspects of viewpoint: vantage point, subjectivity and the conceptualizer’s identity. The discussion is illustrated with linguistic material from Cognitive Linguistics articles and monographs and, hopefully, demonstrates the relevance of Cognitive Linguistics research into viewpoint-related conceptual phenomena in academic discourse.

Este trabalho se propõe a refletir sobre a representação linguística de aspecto a partir de um estudo de caso duplo, com dados de aquisição da linguagem sobre a associação entre aspecto lexical e aspecto gramatical. Seu objetivo principal é avaliar a hipótese da primazia do aspecto, segundo a qual a marcação de tempo-aspecto seria limitada pelo aspecto lexical dos verbos. Para tanto, coloca-se à prova a hipótese de que, no processo de aquisição de aspecto, a associação entre aspecto lexical e aspecto gramatical se baseia na relação entre telicidade e perfectividade. A partir da análise dos dados, a hipótese da primazia do aspecto não pôde ser refutada completamente. Todavia, abarcando diferentes propostas teóricas sobre as propriedades semânticas do VP (sintagma verbal), refuta-se a hipótese de que a primazia do aspecto estaria ancorada na relação entre telicidade e perfectividade. Demonstra-se, ainda, a compatibilidade dos dados com a proposta de telicidade dizer respeito à sintaxe interna ao VP. Por fim, argumenta-se que não haveria leitura composicional de aspecto nas etapas iniciais de aquisição.

Toqabaqita (an Oceanic language) has two types of valency-rearrangement whereby the grammatical relations of two object noun phrases are interchanged. One type is lexically severely restricted: it applies only to a small number of verbs, but there are no syntactic conditions on it. The other applies to any transitive verb that has an instrument noun phrase in addition to a direct object, but only under certain syntactic conditions. The focus of the present study is on the latter type, referred to as “instrument inversion”. In instrument inversion the instrument oblique object of the basic structure becomes the direct object in the inverted structure, and the patient/theme direct object becomes an oblique object. While the grammatical relations of the two noun phrases change, their thematic roles do not. Nevertheless, the same preposition is used with both types of oblique object. Although the grammatical evidence for instrument inversion is relatively limited, it is unequivocal. It is argued that instrument inversion is motivated by pragmatic factors, specifically by the relatively high information prominence of the instrument noun phrase. There are some parallels between instrument inversion in Toqabaqita and locative inversion in Chicheŵa (Bresnan and Kanerva 1989).

The overall aim of this article is to explain why researchers working in Systemic Functional Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics would benefit from dialogue with people working in psycholinguistics, and with each other. After a brief introduction, the positions on cognition taken in the Sydney and Cardiff models of Systemic Functional Linguistics are reviewed and critiqued. I then assess the extent to which Cognitive Linguistics has honoured the ‘cognitive commitment’ which it claims to make. The following section examines compatibilities between Systemic Functional and Cognitive Linguistic approaches, first outlining existing work which combines Hallidayan and cognitive perspectives, then discussing other potential areas of contact between the two, and finally examining the Cardiff model in relation to Cognitive Linguistics. The final section presents a collaborative view, suggesting that the ultimate aim of functionally-oriented (including cognitive) linguistics should be to attempt to answer the question ‘How does the natural language user work?’, and pointing out that collaboration between proponents of different linguistic models, and between linguists and researchers in other disciplines which study language, is crucial to this enterprise. Suggestions are made for ways in which dialogue across the areas of Systemic Functional Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics and psycholinguistics could contribute to such a project.

Nominal and verbal semantic structure: analogies and interactions

This book illustrates the ways that cognitive linguistics, a relatively new paradigm in language studies, can illuminate and facilitate language research and teaching. The first part of the book introduces the basics of cognitive linguistic theory in a way that is geared toward second language teachers and researchers. The second part of the book provides experimental evidence of the usefulness of applying cognitive linguistics to the teaching of English. Included is a thorough review of the existing literature on cognitive linguistic applications to teaching and cognitive linguistic-based experiments. Three chapters report original experiments which focus on teaching modals, prepositions and syntactic constructions, elements of English that learners tend to find challenging. A chapter on “future directions” reports on an innovative analysis of English conditionals. Pedagogical aids such as diagrams and sample exercises round out this pioneering and innovative text.

The study of “tense and aspect” includes three distinct but related concepts, tense , grammatical aspect , and lexical aspect . In nonspecialist and pedagogical literature, they are often conflated under the term tense . Tense locates an event or situation on the time line. Grammatical aspect provides a means of expressing one's view of a situation or event. Both tense and grammatical aspect refer to categories of verbal morphology. In contrast, lexical aspect deals with the semantics of a predicate. For example, a predicate may express a state or an action (compare John seems happy and John swims ) or an action with duration ( John changed the tire ) or without duration ( John recognized Mary ). This entry presents the general characteristics of the acquisition of second language tense–aspect systems and then considers the aspect hypothesis that links tense, grammatical aspect, and lexical aspect in three predictions concerning the emergence and spread of perfective past, imperfective past, and morphological progressive across lexical aspectual categories as well as in narrative foreground and background. The four main variables investigated with regard to the aspect hypothesis—proficiency, language transfer, input, and task effects—are also reviewed.

This paper stems from a broader research project entitled Analog-based Modelling of Meaning Representations in English (Skrzypczak 2006), and aims to present grammatical aspect and lexical aspect as two modes of encoding the temporal profiles within the conceptualisation of processes (terminologically, in Langackerian sense, imperfective and perfective processes, otherwise, variously labelled as stative and dynamic verbs, i. e. states vs. discrete ‘unitary’ events and nondiscrete ‘unbounded’ processes). It is assumed that aspect in both cases – as a process-profiling category – is analogous to the profiling of things and atemporal relations (in the sense of Langacker 1987, 1990, 2000), given the maximisation of the temporal domain in the characterisation of processes (perfective and imperfective, hence: dynamic and stative), and minimalisation of the temporal domain during the conceptualisation of things (conceptually independent entities) and atemporal relations (conceptually dependent atemporal configurations). The analogy between nouns and verbs in terms of ‘granularity’ has been so far variously addressed by Langacker (1990), Jackendoff (1991) and Talmy (2001), and also constitutes the core assumption in my research on topological modelling.

This paper treats the development of the expression of grammatical categories in German in the early second language acquisition of Turkish and German children attending a bilingual day-care center in a multilingual speech community in Berlin. We examine case and gender marking on noun phrases and pronouns and tense/aspect and agreement marking on verb phrases. These are examined in light of the following general issues: (a) Do grammatical markers develop from independent lexical items in child language as well as in diachronic development? (b) Do the markers initially mark pragmatic categories before being grammaticalized as syntactic functors? (c) Do grammaticalizations of the first language influence the development of the second language?We find no evidence that pragmatic precede syntactic categories; however, some evidence indicates that grammatical markers develop first as independent words—for example, pronominal use preceding definite article use ofder, die, das, and main verb use preceding auxiliary use ofsein(‘be’) andhaben(‘have’). Some evidence that the categories of the first language (Turkish) play a role in the development of German second language is found in compound verb constructions.

On the status of external evidence in the theories of cognitive linguistics: compatibility problems or signs of stagnation in the field? Or: why do some linguists behave like Fodor’s input systems?

Cognitive Linguistics, the branch of linguistics that tries to make one's account of human language accord with what is generally known about the mind and the brain, has become one of the most flourishing fields of contemporary linguistics. The chapters address many classic topics of Cognitive Linguistics. These topics include studies on the semantics of specific words (including polysemy and synonymy) as well as semantic characteristics of particular syntactic patterns / constructions (including constructional synonymy and the schematicity of constructions), the analysis of causatives, transitivity, and image-schematic aspects of posture verbs. The key characteristic of this volume is that all papers adopt the methodological perspective of Corpus Linguistics, the rapidly evolving branch of linguistics based on the computerized analysis of language used in authentic settings. Thus, the contributionsdo not only all provide various new insights in their respective fields, they also introduce new data as well as new corpus-based and quantitative methods of analysis. On the basis of their findings, the authors discuss both theoretical implications going well beyond the singular topics of the studies and show how the discipline of Cognitive Linguistics can benefit from the rigorous analysis of naturally-occurring language. The languages which are investigated are English, German, Dutch, and Russian, and the data come from a variety of different corpora. As such, the present volumewill be of interest to a wide range of scholars with many different foci and interests and should pave the way for further integration of usage-based techniques of analysis within this exciting paradigm.

Opinion discourse that contained in a rubric of mass media can become an alternative media of bahasa Indonesia learning in schools, especially in opinion discourse material . One of the elements which need to be researched in opinion discourse is cohesion aspect. Cohesive subject of discourse can be determined by grammatical and lexical aspect. Grammatical cohesion aspect is characterized by the conjunction, ellipsis, substitution, and the reference. Lexical cohesion among other aspects of the reiteration and collocation. In order to get maximum results, these studies only focuses on one of grammatical cohesion aspect, i.e. conjunction aspect. Based on the analysis of the data that has been carried out, from 16 opinion discourse, there is 48 paragraph of samples with 95 pairs of adjacent obtained the result that 10 pairs were using grammatical cohesion in the form of the conjunction is around 10.5% and 85 pairs of adjacent sentences that not use the cohesion in the form of the conjunction is about 89,4%. However, it doesn’t mean that the adjecent pair is not cohesive in grammatical basis, considering there were still 3 other factors grammatical cohesion forming beside the conjunction, i.e., reference, substitution and ellipsis.

Reviewed by: Lessons on the English Verb: No Expression without Representation John Hewson (bio) Walter Hirtle . Lessons on the English Verb: No Expression without Representation. McGill-Queen's University Press. 2007. x, 346. $85.00 Long years ago I taught English as a Second Language, as a graduate student, to francophone students at Université Laval. Although I had trained as a language teacher and had taught Latin, Greek, and French, [End Page 410] the students knew more about English grammar than I did - a situation that is quite common with native speakers, who, unless they have a vocation as a grammarian, remain largely unaware of the grammatical subtleties of the language they speak. Walter Hirtle taught a course on the grammar of the English verb to francophones at Laval for some thirty years, during which he researched modern linguistic works on questions of tense, aspect, mood, and voice, became thoroughly familiar with all the modern grammarians of English, and constantly collected examples, in both his listening and his reading, to teach students the variety of nuances each form of the verb can express. An early book (1967) was published from sections of his doctoral thesis and is still one of the best expositions of the difference between the simple and progressive forms of the English verb; he was one of the first to take into account the relationship of Aktionsart (lexical aspect) and grammatical aspect. The difference between simple and progressive (spoke, was speaking), is often difficult enough for non-native speakers: he shoots, he scores! but not He is shooting, he is scoring! The usage of these forms is complicated by the lexical sense of the verb: in He is talking on the phone right now, the simple form cannot be used in ordinary conversation, but the progressive form of a verb like know is equally unacceptable - I am knowing the answer - and a simple form must be used: I know the answer. A later book (1975) dealt with the use of the have-perfect forms of English, and now, in this latest volume, we have a book based on the long years of teaching the finer points of the grammar of the English verb to those who had already learned to speak the language, but were non-native speakers, and were seldom secure with the usage of the progressive (e.g. Every time I am seeing him he is telling me . . .) or the perfect (I am here since ten minutes, which should of course be I have been here ten minutes). Hirtle's subtle analyses, and endless examples of usage from real life, both spoken and written, are a massive contribution to appreciating and explaining the way the English verb functions. This book will be of immense value not only to those who speak English as a second language, but also to native speakers, especially those engaged in the task of teaching English as a second language. There are eighteen 'Lessons' (the teaching background!) covering the usual verbal categories, and also zeroing in on usage special to English. Readers will undoubtedly enjoy Lesson 10, 'What Does Do Do?,' and its extension, Lesson 11, 'Compounding with Do,' which examines the usage of the do auxiliary that became grammaticalized in the eighteenth century, being used in the negative and interrogative of the simple forms: I know; do you know? He doesn't know which replaced earlier Know you? and He knows not. The theoretical background used for these analyses is the Psychomechanics of the French linguist Gustave Guillaume. This is a [End Page 411] word-based, meaning-based theory that is ideal for examining usage and meaning of grammatical forms. Its basic premise is from Saussure: every morpheme has a sememe, a permanent underlying meaning, which produces allosemes in discourse in much the same way that a phoneme produces allophones in different contexts. The work is therefore of value to linguists, since it includes theories of aspect, mood, and tense, and hitherto unpublished theories of voice and of the auxiliaries do, be, and have. Both anglophones and francophones will find in this work a masterful parade of insights into the workings of the English verb. John Hewson John Hewson, Department...