Cognitive Linguistics

How are we to understand digital objects? How are we to relate ‘cyberspace’ to physical space? This chapter attempts to provide a set of theoretical tools to understand ‘spaces’ of online interaction and what happens within them without resorting to filamentous constructions of ‘disembodied’ online interaction or to the underlying idealistic Cartesian dualism that pervades many of the theoretical positions that ostensibly refute it. To do so, I make connections between cognitive processes of human subjectivity, the embodied, gestural enactments of physical social spaces, and the social interactions that take place in online environments. The crux of the argument is that like identity, meaning and subjectivity are social phenomena: individual cognition requires social interaction. Similarly, social interaction, mediated or immediate, defines our spaces of subjectivity. This connecting of online ‘spaces’ to embodied cognition may provide a way to understand digital objects and the online interactions they enable through a reconsideration of the concept of space.

The relationship between landscape and culture seen through language is an exciting and increasingly explored area. This groundbreaking book contributes to the linguistic examination of both cross-cultural variation and unifying elements in geographical categorization. The study focuses on the contrastive lexical semantics of certain landscape words in a number of languages. The aim is to show how geographical vocabulary sheds light on the culturally and historically shaped ways people see and think about the land around them. Notably, the study presents landscape concepts as anchored in a human-centred perspective , based on our cognition, vision, and experience in places. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach allows an analysis of meaning which is both fine-grained and transparent. The book is aimed, first of all, at scholars and students of linguistics. Yet it will also be of interest to researchers in geography, environmental studies, anthropology , cultural studies, Australian Studies, and Australian Aboriginal Studies because of the book's cultural take.

Scientific and Technical Translation (STT) is a highly complex and knowledge-intensive field of translation and cognitive linguistics is a usage-based linguistic framework which provides powerful theoretical tools for modelling knowledge organisation and representation in discourse. This book explores the interface between scientific and technical translation studies and cognitive linguistics by discussing the epistemological, contextual, textual and cross-linguistic dimensions of scientific and technical translation from a cognitive linguistic perspective. Particular emphasis is placed on explicitation and implicitation as indicators of the interaction between text and context in STT. The corpus-based investigation of the two phenomena illustrates the complex knowledge requirements pertaining to scientific and technical translation and demonstrates the explanatory power of cognitive linguistics with regard to important textual and contextual aspects of STT.

In the last decade or so, Cognitive Poetics has received increasing scholarly interest as a self-standing subfield in cognitive scientific research (Brone 2009; Gavins and Steen 2003; Semino and Culpeper 2002; Stockwell 2002; Tsur 2008). In this field, research along the cross-linguistic dimension has started to gather momentum, but so far limited attention has been given to constructional approaches (e.g. Boas ed. 2010). In view of the existing gap, we propose to examine the form-meaning pairings in a poetic text and its translations. The poem we choose is Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll, its Ukrainian translations by M. Lukash and V. Korniyenko and by V. Narizhna and its Czech translations by J. Cisař and A. and H. Skoumals, and we focus on only the first stanza. In the current paper, we in particular look at compounding and lexical blending (Kemmer 2003; Renner et.al ed. 2012 and the references therein), a morphological strategy of abridging and combining various lexical roots to fo...

This essay was published in The Bible and Early Trinitarian Theology, edited by Christopher A. Beeley and Mark E. Weedman, for the CUAP Studies in Early Christianity (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018); this is the uncorrected proofs. Exploring the humanity and divinity of Jesus, the Son's relation to the Father, and the agency of the Holy Spirit, it is one of five essays suggesting Johannine contributions to trinitarian discussions in the early church.

The interesting thing about things that evolve, is that they rarely recall what they evolved from.  Nativist or empiricist, innate grammars or reinforced learning, every time a child is born, that child must start over and reacquire a language its forebears have spoken for millennia.  This paper argues that humans seem innate with respect to language acquisition, because we have forgotten how far back it was learned.  Perhaps we, as humans with needs like commerce and the need to record transactions, discovered that our infinite diversity of subjective perceptions required a similar diversity of ways to express it, which we call language.  The bonobo Kanzi evinced that when learning is intrinsic to the species and motivated by group need and peer exchanges, animal language limits begin to vanish.  Humans are not special, only familiar with how we have conversed for millennia, yet somehow amnestic about how this came to be familiar.  The advent of machines capable of mimicking human verbal responses raises the age-old question of whether humans are simply machines.  Yet all that speech technology has taught us, is that knowledge acquisition is a conscious effort to comprehend and express; no machine can equal what a conscious urgency can surprise us with.  Building machines that can talk to one another has not resolved the nature-nurture debate, but taught us that it is in our nature to need nurture, and it is during nurture we need language to help us find it.  This paper will evince that innateness is the amnestic part of nurture, and nurture the amnestic part of nature; speech technology only reinforces the insight that we learn and grow through this struggle to remember—then we forget the struggle, preserving only the learning.  Each new life learns to recall what was lost, by reliving the struggle.

Geoeengineering the climate by reflecting sunlight or extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere has attracted increasing attention from natural scientists, social scientists, policy makers and the media. This article examines promotional discourse related to geoengineering from the 1980s to 2010. It asks in particular how this option for dealing with the problems posed by climate change were framed through the use of conceptual and discourse metaphors and whether one can argue that these are metaphors we ‘live by’ or metaphors we might ‘die by’. Findings show that an overarching argument from catastrophe was bolstered by three conceptual master-metaphors, namely The Planet is a body, The Planet is a machine and The planet is a patient/addict, linked to a variety of discourse metaphors, older conceptual metaphors and clichés. This metaphorical landscape began to shift while the article was being written and will have to be closely monitored in the future.

An examination of Rahner’s theology and cognitive linguistics
shows that the two are basically in accord concerning sacramental efficacy. This article also puts cognitive linguistics into conversation with Rahner’s theologies of expression. In Rahner’s theology of the symbol, he argues that all beings express themselves in that which is not themselves. Furthermore, Rahner noted the existence of uniquely powerful “primordial words” (Urworte), which mediate the reality to which they point. Cognitive linguistics sees all human knowing as mediated by the “embodied mind,” and characterized by concept integration, wherein a given thing comes to be known in terms of another. This understanding of embodied mind, poses a significant challenge to the Christian tradition. This challenge is answered, though, by Rahner’s distinctive anthropology and christology.

This paper attempts to offer a state-of-the-art review of recent works that address crosslinguistic influence at the conceptual level from the viewpoint of cognitive linguistics. The recent interest in and growth of empirical evidence of a cognitive-oriented analysis of crosslinguistic influence has led to the emergence of an entirely new line of research on mother tongue influence. This review presents points of divergence between cognitive linguistics on the one hand and conceptual transfer on the other, thereby surveying numerous notions within cognitive linguistics that can aid transfer research. The notions that are paid attention to are conceptualisation, categorisation and construal. This also gives an idea of what cognitive linguistics is able to contribute to research on second language acquisition more generally. The second aim of the paper is to point to empirical works that investigate crosslinguistic influence through the lens of cognitive linguistics, thereby highlighting how and to what extent speakers' conceptual representations and cognitive patterns that are prevalent in their L1 influence the acquisition and use of conceptual structures in their L2. Taken collectively, the empirical findings of these studies give rise to the advantageous effect of employing a comprehensive and sophisticated account of language to the study of how conceptualising systems in speakers who use two or more languages influence one another.

Mark Haddon’s Polar Bears (2010) and Nick Payne’s Constellations (2012) are two recent plays of the British stage exploring the minds of women suffering from a psychological or neurological disorder: in Haddon’s play, Kay, an artist, is bipolar; in Payne’s play, Marianne, a scientist, has a brain tumour. Both pieces question the protagonists’ freedom of self-determination and highlight our sense of reality as a construct, using poetic structures which break with the traditional dramatic linearity of the conventional play. Indeed, instead of providing a chronological succession of scenes, they allow the drama to emerge from a random alternation of parallel scenarios to be read as probabilities. The contradictory, disordered fragments that make up the plays thus invite the reader-spectator, in a suggestive way, to imagine the dramatic possibilities of a story which is never set or decided, instead of merely registering a given narrative. As a result, in providing structural metaphors for the female characters’ pathological states, these plays not only reflect on the tentative process of their own writing, they also encourage us to question our perception of reality as a unique object – a view contradicted by the paradigm shift of quantum physics. While Marianne explains the scientific theory that "In the quantum universe, every choice, every decision you’ve ever and never made exists in an unimaginable vast ensemble of parallel universes", Kay seems to experience Everett’s many-worlds interpretation from a first-person perspective, exclaiming, "We think there’s only one world. […] But there are so many worlds, aren’t there, one laid over the other. […] It’s so beautiful it makes me want to cry." This study aims to look at how these two plays, as instances of a “Theatre of Possibilities”, to use Jean-Pierre Sarrazac’s expression, explore mind and brain disorders to open a dramatic space which allows for a subversive form of realism to develop, based on the quantum principle of uncertainty. They resort to tropes – quantum principles and phenomena used as thematic and structural metaphors – as a means to portray our cognitive processes and, more specifically, to conjure up the hidden reality of pathological subjective experience, paralleled by the most mind-blowing theories of modern science. I argue that in Payne’s and Haddon’s plays, the dramatic space becomes a place where quantum descriptions of reality and psychopathological distortions of reality tend to converge to form a consistent landscape/mindscape, making room for theatrical realism to be reinvented from the very matter of what should intuitively appear as the most delusional imaginings.

--

Polar Bears de Mark Haddon (2010) et Constellations de Nick Payne (2012) sont deux pièces britanniques récentes qui explorent la psyché de personnages féminins souffrant soit d’un trouble psychiatrique soit d’une maladie neurologique : dans la pièce de Haddon, Kay, une artiste, est bipolaire ; dans la pièce de Payne, Marianne, une scientifique, déclare une tumeur cérébrale. En faisant dialoguer santé mentale, fonctionnement cognitif et mécanique quantique, les deux pièces interrogent la liberté et la capacité des protagonistes à s’autodéterminer malgré la maladie et, à travers la mise à mal des fonctions cognitives, mettent en lumière notre perception de la réalité comme construction subjective en utilisant des structures poétiques qui rompent avec la linéarité traditionnelle du drame conventionnel. En effet, au lieu de proposer un enchaînement chronologique de scènes déterminantes dont le déroulé crée progressivement l’univers de la fiction sur le mode indicatif, Polar Bears et Constellations se tissent toutes deux autour d’une alternance aléatoire de scénarios parallèles qui s’appréhendent sur un mode conditionnel comme autant de probabilités décrochées de la flèche du temps. Les fragments contradictoires et désordonnés qui les constituent invitent ainsi le lecteur-spectateur, par touches suggestives et non successives, à imaginer les possibilités d’une histoire sans résolution, qui n’est jamais fixée ou déterminée, au lieu d’enregistrer simplement les avancées d’un récit donné. Cet article vise à montrer que les hésitations et oscillations qui s’élaborent autour des états pathologiques des personnages féminins (et dont elles sont le résultat et le symptôme) mettent non seulement en abyme le processus même d’écriture (dimension métadramatique), elles nous encouragent également à interroger notre rapport au réel (dimension philosophique) non pas tant comme objet unique et extérieur au sujet qui l’observe, mais comme onde de probabilités ou écosystème d’états superposés dans lequel l’observateur lui-même joue un rôle déterminant. Ce changement de paradigme introduit par la physique quantique rencontre ainsi l’instabilité ou l’indécidabilité psychologique. Tandis que, dans Constellations, Marianne explique la théorie scientifique selon laquelle « dans l’univers quantique, chaque choix que l’on fait, chaque décision que l’on prend existe dans un ensemble infiniment vaste d’univers parallèles », dans Polar Bears Kay semble faire l’expérience directe, à la première personne, de la théorie des mondes multiples d’Everett (many-worlds interpretation) lorsqu’elle s’exclame, en proie à une phase maniaque : « On croit qu’il n’existe qu’un seul monde. […] Mais il existe tellement de mondes (so many worlds), n’est-ce pas, empilés les uns sur les autres. […] C’est si beau que ça me donne envie de pleurer. » Ce travail s’intéresse à la manière dont ces deux pièces illustrent ce que l’on pourrait appeler, avec Jean-Pierre Sarrazac, un « Théâtre des Possibilités » et explorent les maladies de l’esprit et du cerveau pour ouvrir un espace dramatique dans lequel se développe une forme subversive de réalisme postdramatique fondé sur le principe quantique d’incertitude (Heisenberg). Les tropes qui s’y déploient – principes et phénomènes quantiques utilisés comme métaphores thématiques et structurelles – permettent de rendre compte de nos processus cognitifs et, plus précisément, de la réalité cachée de l’expérience intime de la maladie, tout en mettant ces expériences en relation avec les théories les plus révolutionnaires de la science moderne. Chez Payne comme chez Haddon, l’espace dramatique devient le lieu où les descriptions quantiques et les distorsions psychopathologiques de la réalité tendent à converger pour former un paysage étonnamment cohérent dans sa relativité et permettre au réalisme théâtral de se refonder à partir de cela-même qui s’apparente intuitivement aux délires d’une imagination malade et à des dysfonctionnements cognitifs, pour finalement poser la question essentielle de notre libre-arbitre.

"Words and Phrases, Unchanged for Centuries.

Containing a rich glossary and in excess of 300 words and phrases, the texts demonstrate the strength of the Macedonian language through preservation.

Following is a comparison of sentences between the texts and the Macedonian
dialect of Bitola as spoken today.

16th cent., Kostur dialect
21st cent., Bitola dialect

Gospodine, brate, da si zdrav, da si prost, ostavi ni da spime, ela da jame, i da pieme, dol da pojdime, da rabotime.
Gospodine, brate, da si zdrav, da si prost, ostai ne da spiame, ela da jaime, i da piame, dolu da pojdime, da rabotime.

Imate hljap-o da kupime, imate vino da kupime, ot koja strana da pojdime vo
Bogasko.
Imate lep da kupime, imate vino da kupime, od koja strana da pojdime vo
Bogatsko.

As can be clearly noticed, most of the vocabulary and grammar is identical.
All of the elements that would later be required to rejuvinate the Macedonian people as they were shaking off centuries of subjugation, were present during this period. The language of the people had solidified, a tradition of heraldry and symbolism had developed which incorporated the emblem of a rapant lion and historical figures from Macedonia's past, and the churches continued preserve the local customs and serve as cultural centres for the population. The significance of all these elements together cannot be overstated, the language of medieval Macedonia is the same as the language of the Macedonians today. Unfortunately, only a small portion of the larger amount of Macedonian literature from the Middle Ages has survived, much of it being looted and destroyed by Greek-speaking officials, clerics and teachers. Nevertheless, Macedonian as a language reached its current form centuries before the creation of the Balkan states in the 19th and 20th centuries. "

Suspendus aux lèvres d’un conteur, incapables d’interrompre la lecture d’un roman, captivés par un film haletant, nous faisons tous l’expérience quotidienne de ce plaisir apparemment paradoxal que nous tirons de notre insatisfaction provisoire face à un récit inachevé. Bien qu’une mode esthétique et théorique ait tenté de nous convaincre que ce plaisir était honteux, on peut néanmoins avoir l’intuition que le cœur vivant de la narrativité réside précisément dans ce nœud coulant, toujours plus serré à mesure que nous progressons dans l’histoire, qui nous attache à l’intrigue et creuse la temporalité par l’attente impatiente d’un dénouement. Si le récit a quelque chose à voir avec la manière dont nous éprouvons le temps, cette expérience n’apparaît jamais avec autant d’éclat que dans le suspense, la curiosité ou la surprise qui font la force des intrigues fictionnelles. La compréhension des fonctions narratives engage donc non seulement l’analyse littéraire, linguistique et sémiotique, mais aussi l’analyse cognitive et la psychologie des émotions.

O objetivo desta pesquisa é analisar o estatuto do formativo agro-, por meio de diferentes enfoques: histórico, morfológico e semântico. Essas perspectivas são utilizadas, uma vez que, pela observação dos dados, são reconhecidas, na Língua Portuguesa, duas formas de diferentes origens, agro- e agri-, do grego e do latim, respectivamente, com significados comuns, coexistindo no Português, a exemplo de agricultura e agronomia. Por isso, as implicações históricas dessas origens são verificadas na atual sincronia.
A análise do estatuto morfológico dos formativos é feita a partir do continuum composição e derivação, como proposto por Bauer (2005) e Kastovsky (2009) e o modelo baseado no uso (BYBEE, 2005, 2010), (LANGACKER, 2008) é o referencial linguístico que orienta esta pesquisa, uma vez que as estruturas investigadas são compreendidas como resultado de atividades cognitivas e sociais que se manifestam em mudanças linguísticas

The research draws on the concept of ‘cultural capital’ as well as assumptions of critical discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics to argue that the Covid-19 pandemic may be viewed as a global turning point. The article explores the context and the means that have facilitated the transformation of cultural capital during the coronavirus outbreak. The dramatic changes to culture have been successfully pushed through due to the public’s incessant exposure to institutionalized, governmental and mass media discourses, which have been urging people to adopt new communicative and cultural practices with a varying degree of argumentation and imposition. The changes entail reviewing social structure, spatial and relational stereotypes and standards, which in the long run transforms cultural capital. The global scope of the pandemic and the relatively identical regulations imposed by governments on their citizens generate a tentative tendency to cultural convergence: individuals are mad...

The role of language in facilitating national development can never be over-emphasised because the national understanding and cohesion that run on the wheels of language create opportunities for sustainable development. An integral aspect of language that typifies this is translation which serves as a key contributing force towards the consolidation of understanding while creating opportunities for personal, group and national development. The study and practice of French Translation now increasingly offer more opportunities for creative and constructive engagement of Nigerian youth as student translators empowered to meet  French Translation/Interpretation needs in canned/preserved food and drug sectors of the country. Suffice it to add, these initiatives carry the prospects of reducing Nigeria's double-digit unemployment rate, curb youth restiveness, banditry and militancy, provide credible alternatives to crime, prostitution and illegal migration, thereby contributing to national development in quantum leaps and bounds. This paper, aspires to initiate ways in which the teaching of French Translation in Nigeria Universities can include Translation Quality Assessment (TQA) with a view to unleashing the productive capacity of Nigerian translation students as well as channel their energies towards worthy ventures in sustainable growth and national development through TQA of the French Translation in canned/preserved foods and drugs. The paper provides fresh insights on how Nigerian universities can increase their contributions to national development by maximally leveraging on TQA of French Translations of canned/ preserved foods and drugs to access funding for initiatives that fall under current donor mappings.

This paper investigates how large multinational corporations use multimodal meaning-making resources to communicate a trustworthy corporate identity. It combines insights from Forceville’s work on pictorial and multimodal metaphor (Forceville 1996, 2002; Forceville and Urios-Aparisi, 2009) and key features of Fuoli and Paradis’ (2014) model of trust-repair discourse to examine the discursive dynamics of trust- building in a corpus of promotional corporate videos produced by some of the world’s largest corporations. The analysis shows that multimodal metaphors are deployed as key persuasive devices to promote three fundamental attributes of the companies’ trustworthiness, i.e. ability, integrity and benevolence.

This paper sheds some light on how trustworthiness is constructed through multimodal resources in corporate discourse and contributes to our understanding of the discursive dynamics of trust, which is still limited and fragmentary (Fuoli and Paradis, 2014; Linell and Keselman, 2011). But the study also carries implications for cognitive linguistic theory, in particular for conceptual metaphor theory. Three theoretical issues requiring further discussion are highlighted: (i) the distinction between conventional and novel metaphor and the question of ‘deliberateness’ (Steen, 2008), (ii) the usefulness of the notion of metaphor scenario (Musolff, 2006) as a descriptive tool in the realm of multimodal discourse, and (iii) the adequacy of Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) model versus Blending Theory (Fauconnier and Turner, 1996, 1998; Grady et al. 1999) for describing novel multimodal metaphors and accounting for the evaluative function they can perform in persuasive multimodal discourse.

Keywords: pictorial and multimodal metaphor, conceptual metaphor theory, blending, trust, corporate multimodal discourse

В настоящей статье, основываясь на принципе формально-семантического единства языковых элементов, мы попытались представить 34 значения двух разновидностей предлога ЗА как единую систему, развившуюся из генетически первичного пространственного предлога со значением «сзади».  Возможности и направления семантических переходов интерпретируются с помощью структурного и когнитивного подходов. Полученная система, которую лучше называть «концептуальным пространством» предлога ЗА, может быть соотнесена и с лексической полисемией, правда, в диахроническом аспекте.

Se indaga el sentido de la conferencia de Sloterdijk
“Normas para el Parque humano” así como las
polémicas por ella suscitada. Se realiza un diagnóstico
de la capacidad crítica del humanismo tradicional. En el
marco del naufragio del humanismo como escuela y
utopía domesticadora humana -marco en el que
Sloterdijk reclama una revisión genético-técnica de la
humanidad- se indaga ¿qué criterios pueden
establecerse para normar las inevitables luchas por los
derechos de la crianza humana? ¿Quiénes y sobre qué
bases debieran hoy detentar el derecho a la crianza?
¿Cómo determinar quiénes son los que educan y los que
son educados? Se proponen nuevos caminos que
tienen en la mediación de la técnica su formulación
discursiva y sus orígenes en las disidencias que, desde
la propia tradición filosófica, reducían la estancia del
hombre en el mundo a su expresión leída y escrita.

В статье психоделическая тема в романе Пелевина «Generation П» рассматривается как стратегия, воссоздающая для читателя элементы психоделического опыта. Гипостазирование визуально воспринимаемых элементов является характерной чертой неопсиходелической прозы Пелевина. Концентрация внимания на отдельной составляющей, невосприятие «картинки» окружающей действительности в ее целостности, невозможность рационального осмысления и иерархического выстраивания организующих «картинку» элементов – эффект, производимый многими психоактивными веществами (ПАВ). Внимание фиксируется на одной из деталей сеттинга, которая как бы вынимается из общей системы. В результате подробного анализа данной текстовой стратегии в романе Пелевина делается вывод, что психоделическая тема у Пелевина продиктована стремлением выйти за привычные логические рамки, освободить интуитивное сознание и открыть внутреннее зрение. Реализуясь на уровне структуры текста, она, в результате, становится ключом – одной из практик расширения сознания и открытия внутреннего зрения.

This book constitutes another step of the linguistic community in translating cognitive linguistics research into a set of guidelines applicable in the foreign language classroom. The authors, language scholars, and experienced practitioners discuss a collection of both more theoretical and practical issues from the area of second and foreign language pedagogy. These are matters that not only enhance our comprehension of particular grammatical and lexical problems, but also lead to the improvement of the efficiency of teaching a foreign language. The topics range from learners’ emotions, teaching grammatical constructions, prepositions, and vocabulary, to specific issues in phonology. The observations concern the teaching of three different languages: English, French, and Italian. As a result, the book is of interest to scholars dealing with further developments of particular linguistic issues and practitioners who want to learn how to improve the quality of their classroom work.

The paper endeavors to investigate the conceptual metaphor awareness via a psycholinguistic experiment done by Serbian grammar school and EFL students. The analysis is carried to determine the extent to which the students are aware of the differences between metaphor identification processes in the two languages and whether, in an attempt to offer satisfactory solutions, they resort to applying the mother tongue knowledge in case of not being able to interpret foreign language metaphors. The psycholinguistic experiment conducted in this research is composed of 28 metaphorical and non-metaphorical sentences in Serbian and English taken from the available corpora. The experiment was conducted by presenting the participants with equal stimuli,, where they were supposed to determine whether there is metaphorical content present in the sentences or not. In the final section of the research the results of the two analyses are compared to reveal that the assumptions we set off with were mo...

The paper reviews and complements existing knowledge about the acquisition of proper names. On the basis of research into children's language, it seems obvious today that the process of acquisition of proper names (anthroponyms) is simultaneous to the acquisition of common nouns. However, the underlying mechanisms explaining the separation of the two groups of nouns are controversial. Compared to the case of anthroponyms, learning toponyms is a more complicated and a longer-lasting process. In connection with this topic, researchers dealing with spatial cognition are focusing on spatial orientation, on the localisation of spatial information in the brain and on spatial language. They study neither the way children get to know the wider geographical environment, nor the way they acquire toponyms. The author seeks to obtain more information about the beginning of this process based on the study of two small children's toponymic knowledge in connection with their acquisition of geographical common nouns and the development of spatial orientation. This makes it possible to draw preliminary conclusions about the specificity of the cognitive mechanisms ensuring the knowledge of geographical environment. The author suggests that the meaning of early toponyms is typically under-generalised — children tend to interpret the names of cities/towns or streets by restricting them to a certain house. It has also been made evident that, at the age of 2–4 years, the relationship between places and persons is very tight (for instance, children connect the names of places to specific persons). The semantic contingencies can be explained by the fact that, in the case of children, the place concepts themselves (what is a city/town?, what is a street?, etc.) have not been fully constructed yet, and that the elements of space are still not distinct entities.

Вопросы ономастики. 2016. Т. 13. № 2. С. 7–22

RESUMO O presente trabalho teve por meta analisar práticas didáticas para o desenvolvimento da linguagem em estudantes dos anos iniciais, suportadas por mecanismos de interlocução dialógica, aprofundada e frequente entre professores e alunos e alunos, em detrimento da aplicação de inúmeros projetos pedagógicos que intentam imprimir um sentido de eficiência ao atual sistema de ensino escolar brasileiro, dado que pesquisas indicam que há, no Brasil, 27% de analfabetos funcionais, isto é, incapazes de compreender textos de média complexidade, assim como preencher fichas que demandam variadas informações, necessárias para a inserção social. ABSTRACT The present study had the goal to analyze teaching practices for the development of language in the early years students, supported by mechanisms for interlocution dialogic, thorough and frequent between teachers and students and students, at the expense of application of numerous educational projects that attempt to print a sense efficiency of the current system of Brazilian school education, as research indicates that there is, in Brazil, 27% were functionally illiterate, ie, unable to comprehend texts of medium complexity, as well as fill out forms that require a variety of information required for insertion social.

Although “metaphors” are usually associated with the frills of literary writing, they feature extensively in our everyday language, and play a significant role in shaping our thought processes. In fact, we use concrete concepts to grasp of more abstract ideas (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Kövecses 2010). For example, psychological tests have demonstrated that our understanding of TIME (abstract, and difficult to grasp) is partly structured by our cognition of SPACE (more concrete; Boroditsky 2000; Casasanto 2010). This manifests itself in language, e.g. when we speak of the future as something “ahead” or “in front” of us, and of the past as “behind” us, but also in our graphical habits, e.g. we draw so called “timelines”. As historians of science have repeatedly pointed out, metaphors play an important role in natural sciences as well, not only in the context of scientific divulgation, but also by shaping scientific research (Kuhn 1979; Keller 2002). For example, Brandt (2005) showed how the metaphor of the genetic code – the idea that DNA could be “read” as a written text of sorts – reshaped experimental practises in the 1950s and 1960s’ biology.

However, metaphors are not “neutral” tools. They often embody cultural tenets that transcend science, and they can be value laden. I propose a case study from the field I specialize in, the representation of kinship in Ancient Greece. I focus on a metaphor depicting genealogical relations in vegetal terms: the “family tree”. Geneticists, for example, are familiar with the usage of tree-like figures as tools for classifying family members; they translate quite easily into language (e.g. when we speak of the “branch” of a lineage). However natural this may seem, vegetal images of genealogical relations in Greece worked on quite a different register (for instance, they were not concerned with classification). Furthermore, although they played a role in the development of medical thought, they were at least partly underpinned by widespread cultural tenets on what society should be like. By comparison, the case of ancient vegetal images draws our attention to the ways that metaphors we use in science today are equally liable to shape our thought in unnoticed and non-neutral ways.

RESUMEN
La relación interna entre filosofía, literatura y arte permite examinar con propiedad qué significan la pluralidad y complejidad en los usos de la razón. Posibilita la aproximación a esos usos y figuras desde un ángulo privilegiado. El interés por lo literario y artístico no tendría por qué significar un apresurado abandono del modelo discursivo y analítico -que es característico de la filosofía-, sino más bien el acceso a un punto de vista más completo, un nuevo método reflexivo, otro límite crítico. Esta perspectiva facilita la puesta al día de las tesis modernas sobre la filosofía como emancipación, esto es, como su salida de la minoría de edad.
Espacios ficcionales, campos de proyección de la experiencia, métodos y perspectivas trasdisciplinarias constituyen los distintos niveles a través de los cuales se trata de definir un nexo complejo entre discursos. La ficción como conocimiento, subjetividad y texto, así como la relación entre mundo y lenguaje pretenden acotar algunas dimensiones de esa relación.
A través de la literatura llegamos a estar familiarizados con situaciones, sentimientos, formas de vida, obteniendo así una mirada desde dentro -epistemológicamente empática-. Cada nueva visión del mundo constituye un nuevo tipo de conocimiento, un conocimiento que puede incluir aspectos cognitivos y emotivos y que demandará, probablemente, algún tipo de lógica paraconsistente. De modo que a la par que por nuestras narrativas creamos o descubrimos mundos (dependiendo del estatuto ontológico otorgado a la ficción) también establecemos o desentrañamos la legislación lógica, según la cual tal curso de sucesos o tal tipo de entidades son o no admisibles al interior de este particular mundo posible.
Precisamente, es en la constante re-creación de sus objetos, práctica que surge en una comunidad de problemas -un espacio de representación colectiva- el espacio en que se da la ciencia. Es, precisamente, en una particular forma de hablar y de referirse a objetos, creándolos con el habla, el que funda a la medicina -por ejemplo- como cuerpo autónomo de conocimientos, vale decir como ciencia de primer orden. Las disciplinas, pues, en tanto discursos, están, literalmente, constituidas por él. Por ello es necesario estudiar el discurso científico en tanto que discurso, hay que reflexionar sobre sus orígenes y modo de constitución, hay que aceptar que no es sólo un producto sino una fuerza productiva. La realidad es una narrativa exitosa. Es aquello que se hace hablando. Las comunidades científicas son comunidades de problemas y, sobre todo, de retóricas, reconstrucciones de objetos que sólo existen en tanto se habla de ellos de una determinada manera,
Hasta los mundos narrativos más imposibles tienen como fondo lo que es posible en el mundo que concebimos como real. Las entidades y situaciones que no son explícitamente nombradas y descritas como diferentes del mundo real son entendidas a partir de las leyes que aplicamos a la comprensión del mundo real.
Así, pues, la narración de ficción construye un modelo análogo del universo real, una proyección...lo que permite conocer la estructura y los procesos internos de la realidad y manipularla cognitivamente. Se otorga así un valor cognoscitivo a la ficción, de modo tal que todas las posibles connotaciones, no expresadas directamente por el texto, sino -más bien- mostradas implícitamente o implicadas contextualmente en lo allí dicho, iluminan aspectos de la realidad que sin estas extrapolaciones ficcionales permanecerían en penumbras.
La perspectiva crítica -propia de la filosofía- puede hallarse así implícita en escritos de ficción, de la misma manera como las teorías filosóficas pueden aceptar como suyos a los argumentos procedentes del discurso literario. La reflexión filosófica se articula, pues, desde distintos ámbitos y modalidades discursivas.
Dr. Adolfo Vásquez Rocca

This paper reports part of a project granted by Vietnam National University (VNU)Hanoi (project code: QG.13.13), carried out in an effort to enhance the quality of teaching English to International Standard Programme (ISP) students. The paper explores two related issues. First, it investigates the problems L2 learner groups of different levels of proficiency might encounter in their reading in the English language in terms of the factors relating to their metaknowledge of English information structure. Second, it attempts to find out whether a cognitive meta-linguistic approach can help the learners overcome their reading problems and develop their reading comprehension by first enhancing their meta-knowledge of English information structure. Analyses of the problems were based on learners’ responses to the pre-teaching phase questionnaire and interviews, their post-teaching phase meta-linguistic test scores, their preand post-teaching phase reading test scores, and while teaching p...

This article investigates prototypically attributive versus predicative adjectives in English in terms of the phonological properties that have been associated especially with nouns versus verbs in a substantial body of psycholinguistic research (e.g. Kelly 1992) – often ignored in theoretical linguistic work on word classes. Inspired by Berg's (2000, 2009) ‘cross-level harmony constraint’, the hypothesis I test is that prototypically attributive adjectives not only align more with nouns than with verbs syntactically, semantically and pragmatically, but also phonologically – and likewise for prototypically predicative adjectives and verbs. I analyse the phonological structure of frequent adjectives from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and show that the data do indeed support the hypothesis. Berg's ‘cross-level harmony constraint’ may thus apply not only to the entire word classes noun, verb and adjective, but also to these two adjectival subclasses. I dis...

A critical review of Wittgenstein's 'On Certainty' which he wrote in 1950-51 and was first published in 1969. Most of the review is spent presenting a modern framework for philosophy (the descriptive psychology of higher order thought) and positioning the work of Wittgenstein and John Searle in this framework and relative to the work of others. It is suggested that this book can be regarded as the foundation stone of psychology and philosophy as it was the first to describe the two systems of thought and shows how our unshakable grasp of the world derives from our innate axiomatic System 1, and how this interacts with System 2. It was a revolution in epistemology since it showed that our actions rest not on judgements but on innate undoubtable axioms leading directly to action. I situate the work of Wittgenstein and Searle in the framework of the two systems of thought prominent in thinking and decision research, employing a new table of intentionality and new dual syste...