scholarly journals A Cognitive Approach to Semantic Disorientation in Mandarin I —Theoretical Prerequisites and a Case Study

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 942-951
Author(s):  
Ting Yang

Semantic disorientation refers to the phenomenon where sentence constituents with direct syntactic relations have no direct semantic linkage. The phenomenon is ubiquitous in Mandarin and related structures have been frequent research topics in the field of Chinese language study. However, there’s no systemic description of their syntactic and semantic features, nor in-depth exploration of the linguistic and non-linguistic motivations. From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, the current study approaches this phenomenon with a usage-based and non-derivational language view. The phenomenon is defined and categorized on the cognitive and psychological basis and a descriptive and explanative frame-work is built for a more accurate and adequate account of the phenomenon. The syntactic and semantic features, as well as the linguistic and non-linguistic motivations of the disoriented verb-complement constructions are addressed as a case study.

2021 ◽  
pp. arabic cover-english cover
Author(s):  
لعبيدي بو عبد الله ◽  
شيماء عبد الله عبد الغفور

تُعَدُّ ظاهرةُ الاشتراكِ الدلاليّ ظاهرة مركزية في جميع اللغاتِ الإنسانيّةِ، فهي تستمدُ كينونتها من الهيكل المفاهيمي للإنسان، ومن تفاعل إدراكه مع العالم الخارجي. وقد جاءَتْ هذه الورقة لتقارب ظــاهرة الاشتراك الدلاليّ إدراكيًّا في المعجم العربي -وفق منهج وصفي تحليلي-، متخذةً من كلمة (الرأس) أنموذجًا. وتهدفُ هذه الدراسة للإجابة عن التساؤلات الآتية: ما البنية الإدراكية الكامنة وراء حدوث ظاهرة الاشتراك الدلاليّ في ألفاظ أجزاء الجسد عامة وكلمة (رَأْس) خاصةً؟ وما الحقول الدلاليّة التي امتد إليها واتساعاتها الاستعارية والكنائية؟ كما تعمل الدراسة على الكشف عن البنية الإدراكية التي تجمع المعاني المتعددة للفظ (الرأس) بالإضافة إلى الكشف عن شبكة العلاقات الدلاليّة بين المعاني المتعددة التي يضمها. وقد خَلُصَتْ هذه الورقة البحثية إلى كون التوسعاتِ الدلاليّةِ، والاستعمالاتِ الاستعاريّةِ، والكنائيّةِ لكلمة (رَأْس) تتصلُ بنسقنا التصوّري، وبالتفاعل الدائم بين تجاربنا اليوميّة مع رؤوسنا والعالم الخارجي. الكلمات المفتاحية: (الاشتراك الدلاليّ، اللسانيات الإدراكية، تاريخ اللسانيات الإدراكية، الجسد، رأس) Abstract Polysemy is a central phenomenon in all languages. It shows the interaction between human cognition and human environment. This paper aims to answer the following questions: what is the language mechanisms that is used among Arabs and makes sense of body part terms extend to a new semantic domain? And What are the semantic domains that the word ‘head’ extended to? To achieve the objectives this paper, the researchers adopted the cognitive approach. As well as the descriptive and analytical approaches using the word ‘head’ as a case study and traced its meaning as it developed through metaphor and metonymy. Also, it crossed over from one semantic field to another. It will show that demonstrate of ‘head’ and its semantic extensions derive directly from conceptual patterns that were created as a result of experiences and interaction between our heads, and the outside world. Key words: (polysemy, cognitive linguistics, the history of cognitive linguistics, body, head).


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Faber ◽  
Arianne Reimerink

Abstract Legal language and its translation are considerably more complex than scientific and technical translation because the legal object is a text that performs an action. For this reason it is not only necessary to consider the legal terminology but also the structure of the text itself as well as the verbs used and their performative act. In this paper, we explore how the analysis of terminological meaning in legal texts can be addressed from the perspective of Frame-Based Terminology (FBT), a cognitive approach to domain-specific language, which directly links specialized knowledge representation to cognitive linguistics and cognitive semantics. In a case study on international agreements in the context of environmental law, we analyze the argument structure of verbs as well as the conceptual categories of their semantic arguments providing insights into the semantic profile of this text type. The representation of the verb class and its semantic arguments can be considered a type of interlingua that could be used as a basis for translation.


Author(s):  
Tetiana Vechorynska ◽  
◽  
Alina Snisarenko ◽  

Based on the official data from Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing the present paper gives a comprehensive and clear idea of the current state of the cosmetics industry in China, thus, rising a question of advertising campaign efficiency focused on promotion of culture-oriented advertising texts. The paper explores linguistic and cognitive peculiarities of Chinese cosmetics advertising in the context of its functional specificity. By referring to such researchers as E. V. Medvedeva, U. V. Rozhdestvensky, and by tracing the etymological meaning of the word «advertising» the authors determine the influence function as the dominant one of the advertising text and conclude that influence function is performed through the following functional speech effects: clarity, emotional empathy effect, trust, dialogue and presence, i.e. all five featured in numerous verbal and non-verbal means of the language. The necessity of applying the linguistic and cognitive approach is thus determined. As part of this study, the linguistic and cognitive approach involves the analysis of lexical-semantic content, stylistic features, and cognitive, that is, national-specific, means of speech of advertising texts (slogans). The paper considers lexico-semantic features which include lexical transformations (loanwords and homonyms), wenyan vocabulary, expressive vocabulary, and the use of pronouns to address the potential consumer directly; stylistic features which include various figures of speech: parallelism and antithesis, rhyme and metaphors. The cognitive peculiarities refer to culture-specific national, philosophical and religious concepts, which emphasize the national identity and world view peculiarity of a Chinese customer. The paper presents the results of the investigation, and manifests the apparent relation between the above-mentioned features and the way a Chinese consumer percepts the advertising information. In other words, the paper determines the linguistic and cognitive peculiarities of the influence on a consumer, which is the dominant function of advertising. In conclusion, the authors outline the research prospects. It is supposed that the results of current investigation may contribute to the development of marketing strategies on promoting cosmetic products in China, as well as may be applied to designing specialized stylistics, lexicology, and cognitive linguistics courses. The data of this research may also provide some supplementary information for developing advertising and marketing courses.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
saber lahbacha

From polysemy to meaning change: lexical cognitive perspectivesSaber Lahbacha By:PhD. Arabic language and Literature, University of Manouba, Member of association of Arabic lexicology in TunisAbstract:Many essays to find a model to study polysemy in most words emerged in several semantic, lexical, cognitive and pragmatic perspectives. Diverse dimensions of this phenomenon are activated according to the requirements of each discipline. If the lexical treatment gives priority to distinguish between polysemy (one entry) and homonymy (many entries), the pragmatic approach includes the contextual non-linguistic operators in building polysemy. The cognitive approach considers that lexical concepts are sets of semantic complicated nuances built on polysemy. This cognitive approach considers that there is no way to distinguish between meanings and the boundaries between them are ambiguous.Key words: Semantics – Polysemy – cognitive linguistics – lexicology – homonymy. ملخصلم تنقطع محاولات إيجاد منوال لمقاربة الاشتراك الدلالي (تعدّد المعاني) في معظم الكلمات عن البروز ضمن منظورات دلالية ومعجمية وعرفانية وتداولية متعددة. وبحسب مقتضيات كلّ فرع لساني، يجري تنشيط الأبعاد المختلفة للظاهرة ويتم التركيز على مناحٍ دون أخرى. فإذا كانت المعالجة المعجمية تضع أولوية اهتمامها في توضيح التمييز بين الاشتراك الدلالي (مدخل واحد) والاشتراك اللفظي (مداخل متعددة)، فإن المقاربة التداولية تؤصل مشاركة العوامل السياقية غير اللغوية في تأسيس الاشتراك الدلالي. أما المقاربة العرفانية فترى أن المفاهيم المعجمية هي مجموعات من الفروق الدلالية المتراكبة التي تقوم على الاشتراك الدلالي ولا ترى أن التمييز بين المعاني ممكن بل إن الحدود بين المفاهيم المعجمية ضبابية.الكلمات المفاتيح: علم الدلالة - الاشتراك الدلالي – اللسانيات العرفانية – المعجمية - الاشتراك اللفظي.


Author(s):  
Andrew Kehler ◽  
Jonathan Cohen

A bedrock principle in pragmatics is that the linguistic signals produced by speakers generally underdetermine the meanings that are communicated to interpreters. For Grice, for instance, utterance meaning lies close to what is overtly encoded, allowing only for the resolution of indexicals, tense, reference, and ambiguity. Lepore and Stone (L&S) agree, but with a stunning twist: they analyze all extrasemantic content as being derived from ambiguity resolution, leaving no work for Gricean tools. Despite significant areas of concurrence with L&S, we ultimately find their analysis to be untenable. To establish this, we focus on a form of pragmatic enrichment that recruits coherence establishment processes to apply within the clause—‘eliciture’—for which we see no credible analysis in terms of ambiguity resolution. We argue that an adequate account of language understanding must recognize the robust roles of both ambiguity resolution and pragmatic enrichment, using tense interpretation as a case study.


Author(s):  
Ekaterina Savitskaya ◽  

In the field of cognitive linguistics it is accepted that, before developing its capacity for abstract and theoretical thought, the human mind went through the stage of reflecting reality through concrete images and thus has inherited old cognitive patterns. Even abstract notions of the modern civilization are based on traditional concrete images, and it is all fixed in natural language units. By way of illustration, the author analyzes the cognitive pattern “сleanness / dirtiness” as a constituent part of the English linguoculture, looking at the whole range of its verbal realization and demonstrating its influence on language-based thinking and modeling of reality. Comparing meanings of language units with their inner forms enabled the author to establish the connection between abstract notions and concrete images within cognitive patterns. Using the method of internal comparison and applying the results of etymological reconstruction of language units’ inner form made it possible to see how the world is viewed by representatives of the English linguoculture. Apparently, in the English linguoculture images of cleanness / dirtiness symbolize mainly two thematic areas: that of morality and that of renewal. Since every ethnic group has its own axiological dominants (key values) that determine the expressiveness of verbal invectives, one can draw the conclusion that people perceive and comprehend world fragments through the prism of mental stereo-types fixed in the inner form of language units. Sometimes, in relation to specific language units, a conflict arises between the inner form which retains traditional thinking and a meaning that reflects modern reality. Still, linguoculture is a constantly evolving entity, and its de-velopment entails breaking established stereotypes and creating new ones. Linguistically, the victory of the new over the old is manifested in the “dying out” of the verbal support for pre-vious cognitive patterns, which leads to “reprogramming” (“recoding”) of linguoculture rep-resentatives’ mentality.


2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 431-444
Author(s):  
Anna Peak

A drastic shift in British perceptions of China took place between the beginning and end of the nineteenth century. Up through the first decades of the nineteenth century, China and its ideals as well as its art and aesthetic were widely admired. Yet by the end of the century, the discourse surrounding China had become very different: no longer were the Chinese admired for their art or their morals; instead, they were castigated as amoral, pitiless, inscrutable liars. Why and how this change took place has not yet been explored in part because scholars have tended to focus on either the beginning of the nineteenth century or the beginning of the twentieth, rather than on the years between these periods. Yet those years saw the rise of sinology, which became established as a field of scholarship in precisely the period (from roughly 1870 to 1901) that has so far been neglected. This scholarship, highly specialized though it might seem (and was), was not confined to the Ivory Tower; it made its way to the educated, upper-middle-class reading public through periodicals. If we look at what British periodicals were teaching their readers about China and the Chinese language during this gap period, we can see – perhaps surprisingly – a concerted and earnest effort being made to avoid assumptions that the Chinese need British help and to avoid pro-Christian judgments, in favor of an attempt to learn the workings of the Chinese language as the first step towards understanding the Chinese on their own terms. What scholars learn and what periodicals teach about the Chinese language, however, leads these very same would-be enlightened people, in the end, to see the Chinese as cunning children incapable of complex thought or basic feeling, and therefore incapable of progress or morality. In other words, the increasing British prejudice against the Chinese originated to an important degree in the work of the first scholars of sinology, rather than in the fears of the ignorant or the culturally-marginalized. Examining this process challenges a paradigm dominant in postcolonial studies, in which modern scholars decry the supremacy of Western systems while problematically replicating a narrative in which the concept of Western systemic supremacy is not challenged and the existence of non-Western systems is not acknowledged. In the case of China, the complexity of its written and spoken language systems helped frustrate Western efforts at colonization, and this systemic resistance to Western domination was constructed by Western scholars in such a way as to create and justify sinophobia.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1(14)/2020) ◽  
pp. 143-149
Author(s):  
Natalia Grushina

The aim of this paper is to study different time representations in language and text. Time is an abstract category firmly connected to human life, it can be considered to be the fourth dimension of reality, used to describe events in three-dimensional space. Time has been studied from different points of view and in different aspects. The perception of time can vary depending on the social and cultural environment. That is why it is so important to pay special attention to a variety of time representations when studying a foreign language. In this article I consider different time markers represented in language (English and Russian) and contextual time markers we can find in texts for reading comprehension activities at advanced levels when studying Russian as a foreign language. I compare language and contextual time markers using a cognitive approach to text units. As an example, I take time markers from the texts published in a popular Russian literary magazine Novy mir at the turn of the 21 century. Novy mir is a very famous in Russia for its liberal position and history within the dissident movement during Soviet epoch Keywords: concept of time, time markers, text and discourse, cognitive linguistics


Author(s):  
Thomas Broden

Summary The initiatives to publish an English translation of the influential Sémantique structurale (1966) by linguist and semiotician A. J. Greimas (1917–1992) provide an instructive case study for the reception of a work in new contexts. The efforts underscore the importance of (dis)connections between cultures’ intellectual traditions and trends, putting in play the relations between continental and American linguistic structuralism, generative semantics, cognitive linguistics, and “French” (post)structuralism throughout the human sciences. The projects also point up the significance of timing and of standards for translation quality – and the possibilities for controversy. In addition to published research, this study draws from archival documents and personal communications with Greimas, his translators and editors, and other principals involved.


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