1,721,125 research outputs found
The Building Blocks of Meaning
No full textThe review reports on the thirteenth release of Benjamins' Human Cognitive Processing, where the author, Michele Prandi, offers an indepth exploration of complex meanings. In the foreword, the idea of a philosophical grammar is introduced and programmatically described as the complementing interaction between grammar of conceptual structures. A study of this interaction allows for a deeper comprehension of how the linguistic system works so as to construct and to communicate complex meanings
The Building Blocks of Meaning
No full textThe review reports on the thirteenth release of Benjamins' Human Cognitive Processing, where the author, Michele Prandi, offers an indepth exploration of complex meanings. In the foreword, the idea of a philosophical grammar is introduced and programmatically described as the complementing interaction between grammar of conceptual structures. A study of this interaction allows for a deeper comprehension of how the linguistic system works so as to construct and to communicate complex meanings
Voices on Translation. Linguistic, Multimedia and Cognitive Perspectives
No full textThe volume collects a number of papers which discuss three different strands in Translation Studies: linguistic, multimedia and cognitive perspectives, from which the act of translating is seen as a multifaceted activity in the transfer of complex meanings from one language and semiotic horizon into another one
Teaching English Worldwide
No full textThe article critically reports on the volume Teaching English Worldwide written by Paul Lindsay. Designed as a comprehensive introduction to the field of teaching English as a second or foreign language, it is a helpful instrument for both those who need a basic self-training in teaching English and those who are planning to take a pre-service training course in the profession. Not only does the book provide the main points of the theoretical knowledge that would-be teachers need, but it constantly supports theory with procedures, techniques, and activities useful for the teaching of all aspects of the English language. On the whole the book serves as a practical guide suitable for providing would-be teachers with the basic knowledge and techniques needed for the teaching of most aspects of foreign language. I would no doubt suggest this book to my teacher trainees. What I would like to find, even in a book which explicitly claims to be practical, is a wider discussion of the different cognitive styles and cognitive plus meta-cognitive strategies that students put into use in their learning (Rubin & Wenden, 1997; Ellis & Sinclair, 1989). The teaching of a language is comparable to a re-shaping of mental processes as far as communication is concerned. And this cannot be done, in my opinion, without a constant reflection on the way in which the mind of each student attending our classes works and on the preferential cognitive paths he or she follows. This profound familiarity with all students' cognitive resources enables us to choose among techniques and procedures suitable for each of them individually, and to group students in a way that proves helpful for better and more complete learning. It goes without saying that the author does know very well how important the recognition of cognitive styles in language teaching is. What I want to say is that a constant correlation between activities and cognition is essential even in practical guides, so that would-be teachers are always encouraged to reflect on the particularity that their difficult profession involves
The Ontological Status of Constructions in the Mind of Italian University Learners of English: Psycholinguistic Evidence from a Sentence-sorting Experiment
No full textWith reference to the psychological and pedagogical commitments of the LCM, this paper discusses and compares the verb-centered view and the construction-centered view in second language acquisition. It contributes to providing the notion of construction grammar with further psychological validity by showing (a) that we store in our mind higher-level argument configurations instantiated by lower-level configurations (e.g. verbal predicates and their associated arguments), and (b) that the ontological reality of argument structure configurations plays a relevant role not only in the mind of native speakers of English, but also in that of Italian learners of English, thus adding observations of typological nature which would inform the pedagogical practice.
Taking the veil from Bencini & Goldberg’s experiment (2000), the paper reports on one sentence-sorting experiment of a series of experiments that the author is developing with a view to assessing a cline of "Constructional Complexity" in second language acquisition and to designing updated teaching materials
Conceptual metaphor in the complex dynamics of illocutionary meaning.
No full textThis article illustrates the role that conceptual metaphor plays in the complex dynamics of interpersonal communication, with the focus being placed upon the synergistic relationship that metaphor holds with other Idealized Cognitive Models (Lakoff, 1987) in the construction of illocutionary meaning. This goal is pursued under the scope of the Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model (Baicchi & Ruiz de Mendoza, 2010), which has been elaborated to overcome the shortcomings of traditional relevance-theoretic approaches and to ground illocutionary activity within the constructionist strand of Cognitive Linguistics. The qualitative analysis of Webcorp data retrieved for the suggesting high-level situational cognitive model offers an exemplification of the interplay that metaphor holds with frames, image schemas, and metonymy
Teaching English Worldwide
No full textThe article critically reports on the volume Teaching English Worldwide written by Paul Lindsay. Designed as a comprehensive introduction to the field of teaching English as a second or foreign language, it is a helpful instrument for both those who need a basic self-training in teaching English and those who are planning to take a pre-service training course in the profession. Not only does the book provide the main points of the theoretical knowledge that would-be teachers need, but it constantly supports theory with procedures, techniques, and activities useful for the teaching of all aspects of the English language. On the whole the book serves as a practical guide suitable for providing would-be teachers with the basic knowledge and techniques needed for the teaching of most aspects of foreign language. I would no doubt suggest this book to my teacher trainees. What I would like to find, even in a book which explicitly claims to be practical, is a wider discussion of the different cognitive styles and cognitive plus meta-cognitive strategies that students put into use in their learning (Rubin & Wenden, 1997; Ellis & Sinclair, 1989). The teaching of a language is comparable to a re-shaping of mental processes as far as communication is concerned. And this cannot be done, in my opinion, without a constant reflection on the way in which the mind of each student attending our classes works and on the preferential cognitive paths he or she follows. This profound familiarity with all students' cognitive resources enables us to choose among techniques and procedures suitable for each of them individually, and to group students in a way that proves helpful for better and more complete learning. It goes without saying that the author does know very well how important the recognition of cognitive styles in language teaching is. What I want to say is that a constant correlation between activities and cognition is essential even in practical guides, so that would-be teachers are always encouraged to reflect on the particularity that their difficult profession involves
Exploring the cognitive motivation of figurativity
No full textThe chapter foregrounds the relationship that holds between literalness and figurativity in meaning construction, emphasise the role of conceptual metonymy and metaphor as the main cognitive tools at work in inferential activity and as generators of discourse ties, and illustrate the import of cognitive models in the production and interpretation of multimodal communication. In addition, a number of more specific topics are addressed from different perspectives such as language variation and cultural models, discourse acts, the argumentative role of metaphor in discourse, the role of empirical work in Cognitive Linguistics, the import of cognitive operations in the language of emotions, the relations holding between multimodality and cognitive modelling
Illocutionary constructions and conceptual metonymies
No full textThis chapter aims to contribute to the discussion of indirect speech acts by describing how constructionist approaches to language (Boas 2003; Goldberg 2006; Ruiz de Mendoza and Galera 2014) are suitable to depict the interplay of illocutions with Idealised Cognitive Models (Lakoff 1987), in particular with conceptual metonymy. I conceive of speech acts as illocutionary constructions, which are “entrenched, productive and replicable form-function pairings characterised as constructional procedures capable of jointly activating parts of illocutionary scenarios in connection with relevant elements from the context of situation” (Baicchi 2012)
Cognitive and constructional analysis of the act of offering.
No full textWith the aim of providing an exemplification of the way in which the Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model accounts for illocutionary meaning, in this article we will focus on the qualitative analysis of the offering high- level situational cognitive model. Data have been retrieved from the WebCorp3. We will pin down the main constructional procedures that instantiate the speaker’s commitment to carrying out a course of action that is beneficial for the hearer, we will describe the semantic make-up in terms of high-level and low-level structures, and finally we will identify some conceptual metonymies that motivate the performance of the offering ICM
- …
