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The contributions in this volume cover a wide range of theoretical and methodological issues and raise a number of new questions that indicate the future direction of grammaticalization studies. The volume focuses on issues such as grammaticalization and lexicalization; the unidirectionality hypothesis; the issue of the relevance of contexts for grammaticalization; the description of grammaticalization paths. Much of the current work concentrates on such categories, as discourse markers, honorifics or classifiers, which have not previously been central to works on grammaticalization. Other studies take a new perspective on known grammaticalization paths by applying concepts adopted from other linguistic fields, such as prototype theory, morphocentricity, or by discussing their findings from a comparative or typological angle, presenting data from a large number of languages, often based on extensive empirical investigations of written and spoken text corpora.
A cross-linguistic study of grammatical morphemes expressing spatial relationships that discusses the relationship between the way human beings experience space and the way it is encoded grammatically in language. The discussion of the similarities and differences among languages in the encoding and expression of spatial relations centers around the emergence and evolution of spatial grams, and the semantic and morphosyntactic characteristics of two types of spatial grams. The author bases her observations on the study of data from 26 genetically unrelated and randomly selected languages. It is shown that languages are similar in the way spatial grams emerge and evolve, and also in the way specific types of spatial grams are used to express not only spatial but also temporal and other non-spatial relations. Motivation for these similarities may lie in the way we, as human beings, experience the world, which is constrained by our physical configuration and neurophysiological apparatus, as well as our individual cultures.
The Body in Language: Comparative studies of Linguistic Embodiment provides new insights into the theory of linguistic embodiment in its universal and cultural aspects. The contributions of the volume offer theoretical reflections on grammaticalization, lexical semantics, philosophy, multimodal communication and - by discussing metaphorization and metonymy in figurative language - on cognitive linguistics in general. Case studies contribute first-hand data on embodiment from more than 15 languages and present findings on the body in language in diverse cultures from various continents. Embodiment fundamentally underlies human conceptualization and the present discussions reveal a wide range of target domains in conceptual transfers with the body as the source domain.
V.1 concept structuring systems -- V.2 Typology and process in concept structuring.
Preface -- List of contributors -- Introduction: benefaction and malefaction from a cross-linguistic perspective / Seppo Kittilä & Fernando Zúñiga -- Benefactive applicative periphrases: A typological approach / Denis Creissels -- Cross-linguistic categorization of benefactives by event structure: A preliminary -- Framework for benefactive typology / Tomoko Yamashita Smith -- An areal and cross-linguistic study of benefactive and malefactive constructions / Paula Radetzky & Tomoko Smith -- The role of benefactives and related notions in the typology of purpose clauses / Karsten Schmidtke-Bode -- Benefactive and malefactive uses of Salish applicatives / Kaoru Kiyosawa & Donna B. Gerdts -- ...
The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics presents a comprehensive overview of the main theoretical concepts and descriptive/theoretical models of Cognitive Linguistics, and covers its various subfields, theoretical as well as applied. The first twenty chapters give readers the opportunity to acquire a thorough knowledge of the fundamental analytic concepts and descriptive models of Cognitive Linguistics and their background. The book starts with a set of chapters discussing different conceptual phenomena that are recognized as key concepts in Cognitive Linguistics: prototypicality, metaphor, metonymy, embodiment, perspectivization, mental spaces, etc. A second set of chapters deals with ...
Presents an encyclopaedic investigation of indefinite pronouns in the languages of the world. This book shows that the range of variation in the functional and formal properties of indefinite pronouns is subject to a set of universal implicational constraints, and proposes explanations for these universals.