This qualitative study analyses exaggeration in natural conversation from a dialogic perspective using data from the London-Lund Corpus 2 (LLC-2). We define exaggeration as an extreme degree on a scale, e.g., my bag weighs a ton. degree is central to our definition of exaggeration, which involves scaling a gradable property up, or down, to a level that comes across as counterfactual or inappropriate. The referent may be construed either as a point on a scale, e.g., excellent vs. disastrous, or as an either-or contrast that highlights opposite poles, e.g., dead vs. alive. We analyse the constructions (i.e., form-meaning pairings) speakers use in order to overemphasise a point and how they negotiate exaggeration in spoken interaction. Approaching exaggeration from an interactive perspective, we use the dialogic sequence as the identifier of exaggeration taking into account the hearer's response, which must express skepticism or incredulity towards the previous speaker's assertion. We adopt a Cognitive Linguistics and dialogic Construction Grammar approach, and we draw on resonance to account for how speakers negotiate exaggeration. We show that speakers in our data use nine constructions when they exaggerate. Exaggeration occurs more frequently in conversations among equals, which contain more direct challenges compared to conversations among disparates where speakers use exaggeration not to offend. The dialogic approach provides insight into how speakers exploit degree and construe scale, which is the basis of exaggeration, by building on each other's contributions.

This study explores how listeners use verb constructions to describe everyday sounds. It considers (i) how the verb constructions provide Gestalt to events in the form of activities, processes and states, and (ii) how the constructions correspond to different aspects of a soundscape (sound sources, acoustic properties, and listener reactions). We found that verb constructions primarily describe sound sources and that these are portrayed as dynamic events. Acoustic properties were rarely described through verb constructions. When they were, the constructions primarily conveyed static properties of sound as in the sound is loud as opposed to dynamic events as in the sound comes closer. Listener reactions were primarily expressed through comparative constructions such as it sounds like and justifications such as I can hear. The upshot of the study is that speakers conceptualise sounds according to highly dynamic Gestalts for which the main focus is the source of the sound.

Situated at the junction of Cognitive Semantics and Experimental Phenomenology, this study investigates how participants perceive the structure of 18 perceptual dimensions of opposites across the visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory and olfactory sensory modalities. The structures include three components: two poles (high; low) and an intermediate (neither high nor low). Participants were asked to provide examples of contexts for each dimension for which they could experience the five sensory modalities and then describe their experiences of the structures with respect to whether the poles were experienced as a single property (Point), or a range of properties with or without a precise limit (Bounded Range or Unbounded Range respectively). For the intermediate region, they described if they experienced a single property (Point) or many (Range) or none (No Intermediates). The study centres on two main questions. Is the perceptual structure invariant across the sensory modalities? If not, how do the structures differ? The study shows that the overall structure of all dimensions was stable in at least two of the modalities, and many structures were stable across more than two modalities. Stability was particularly pertinent across the visual and tactile modalities, and the gustatory and olfactory modalities.

This study reviews the literature on touch to establish an analytical framework for the study of touch in communication through language. Two questions are at the heart of the study - an ontological and a methodological one: What counts as touch, and how can we investigate the way we talk about touch? Within the broad framework of cognitive semantics, we offer a general approach to touch and identify two main types of Gestalt profiles related to the dynamicity in the Gestalt formation, namely activity and experience, in which case the former is related to external stimulation only, while the latter may be the result of external or internal stimulation.

Common proposals for classifying metonyms build on the contiguity of the meaning of a metonym compared to its original meaning. In contrast, this article offers a model of metonymisation that focuses on the cognitive underpinnings and sees metonymisation as an attentional process. By using event structure as a framework, we present a cognitive model of events that consists of four elements: actor, patient, force vector and results vector. We propose that metonymisation can be accounted for on three levels. The first level involves shifts of attention within event elements; the second level shifts between event elements; and the third level shifts between entire events and their components.

To examine whether processing of negated meanings is facilitated in highly predictable contexts and proceeds incrementally rather than with a delay, we asked participants to read highly constraining sentences containing negated adjectives (e.g., awake/responding/commercial) that were either strongly expected in a high-cloze condition (awake), weakly expected in a low-cloze condition (responding), or contextually inappropriate in a semantic violation condition (commercial). In accordance with findings for affirmative sentences, a smaller N400 was elicited for the high-cloze condition than for the low-cloze one, and for the low-cloze condition than the violation condition. The smaller N400 for the high-cloze condition suggests facilitated processing for strongly expected continuations. Furthermore, in the post-N400 time-windows, two distinct post-N400 positivities (PNPs) were elicited for the two weakly expected and unexpected continuations compared to strongly expected continuations. Firstly, a larger anterior PNP was observed for weakly expecting, but plausible, continuations in the low-cloze condition, suggesting inhibitory processes suppressing initial predictions to allow for the integration of the new information. Secondly, a larger posterior PNP was observed for unexpected and implausible, continuations in the violation condition, indexing contextual integration difficulties. Together, these findings suggest that negation can be processed incrementally in highly constraining contexts where predictions can be made, engaging similar neural mechanisms as predictive processing in affirmative sentences in such contexts. In sum, our results are consistent with previous ERP research on prediction processing in both affirmative and negated contexts but inconsistent with previous research using behavioral methods.

Within the framework of Construction Grammar, this study examines constructions with a cleft form containing everything , e.g., that’s everything that’s happened , in spoken British English, using the London-Lund Corpora and the British National Corpora. We trace the development of everything -clefts in recent history and make comparisons with all -clefts since both all and everything express totality . Our aim is to determine the form-meaning properties of everything -clefts, to examine whether everything -clefts too express the smallness and exhaustiveness readings associated with all -clefts, and whether everything -clefts are also dialogically contractive. The frequency per million words of everything -clefts, however, is 3.3, which is lower than for all -clefts. Also, based on the distinction between regular predicational, reverse predicational and reverse specificational everything -clefts, we find that most everything -clefts are predicational and express quality and that only a small number of reverse specificational everything -clefts express exhaustiveness and are dialogically contractive. Moreover, an even smaller number of everything -clefts also express smallness . We argue that exhaustiveness in everything -clefts stems from a metonymic link to the boundary involved in the totality meaning of everything in analogy with reverse all -clefts. The reverse exhaustive specificational everything -clefts are similar to all -clefts and clearly deserve a place in the constructional network of English specificational cleft constructions.

Abstract Adjectives that are used to describe sensory experiences are often used to express more than one modality. The adjective sweet, for instance, may primarily be associated with taste (i.e., taste is the dominant modality of sweet), but it can also be used for smell, sound or sight, and possibly even for touch. It has also been shown that some sensory modalities combine more easily than others. Many adjectives that are used to describe taste, for instance, can also be used for smell, but, less likely, for sound. These associations between sensory modalities as they are expressed in language are the topic of this study. We looked at the distribution of the combinations of dominant modalities in pairs of antonymic sensory adjectives (e.g., sweet–sour), and how the dominant modality of the adjectives in these pairs differed from that of the adjectives in isolation. In our dataset, there was a sizeable number of pairs consisting of adjectives with differing dominant modalities. Within those pairs, we observed that adjectives with the dominant modality sight can also be used for touch and vice versa. Similarly, adjectives with the dominant modality of smell can also be used for taste and vice versa. Finally, adjectives with the dominant modalities sight and touch can both also be used for hearing and for taste, but not the other way around. These results contribute to our understanding of how language is used to describe sensory experiences, and, with that, how sensory experiences may be shaped by the words that we use to describe them.

AbstractThis entry offers a short description of basic research questions, different theories, and topics in lexical semantic research. At the beginning, it states five fundamental questions that all lexical semantics theories need to attend to in descriptions and explanations of their observations and findings. A brief presentation of past and present theoretical approaches on lexical semantics follows, in the light of their answers to the fundamental questions. The focus in the remaining sections is on central issues in lexical semantics. This account is primarily within the cognitive semantic framework, even though the issues are key in any theory of lexical semantics. The issues concern the relation between words and concepts and lexical semantic relations such as polysemy, synonymy, and antonymy. The entry concludes with some words on the nature of meanings of words in language in use.

This study investigates the link between the personality profiles and socio-demographic characteristics of wine consumers and the sensory characteristics of the wines they prefer. This was measured in terms of a self-reported list of the wines they like and buy. The 1176 Italian adults who participated were asked to complete an online form. Information was collected regarding certain socio-demographic details and the participants' personality profile (established by means of the Big Five Inventory 2 by Soto & John, 2017). The participants were then asked to specify their favorite types of wines (open response: "Which wines do you like the most? Please list the wines that you like and buy"). The sensory profiles of the 258 wines in total listed by the participants were described by four of the experimenters (based on official reviews) in terms of eight variables: the degree of Alcohol, Acidity, Sweetness, Body, Tannicity, Sapidity, Persistence and Complexity of bouquet. Various associations were found between the sensory characteristics of the wines listed and the socio-demographic characteristics analyzed (gender, age and wine expertise), and between the sensory characteristics of the wines and the participants' personality traits. For example, we found that extroverts prefer more acidic wines, sociable people like wines characterized by a high alcohol content and with a more complex bouquet, people with high emotional stability prefer tannic, persistent, full-bodied wines and open-minded people favor wines with a persistent flavor and high levels of tannicity while they don't like sapidity. Almost all of these associations were consistent across gender. The study contributes to academic research on the relationships between consumers' characteristics and their wine preferences, and it provides insights which are interesting for the wine industry and other wine distribution channels in terms of market orientation.

Abstract This entry offers a short description of the fundamental assumptions of grammar within the broad framework of Cognitive Linguistics. It presents the principles of usage‐based cognitive grammar (CG), classic works in the framework, and more recent treatments of grammatical structure and content in the form of examples of grammatical notions. Central to the CG approach is the meaningful functioning of language in all its guises and uses in text and discourse in speech and writing. The entry is structured around three main tenets, namely, (a) the primacy of meaning in the analysis of grammatical phenomena in language, (b) the encyclopedic nature of meaning in language, and (c) the perspectival nature of language in use.

The aim of this article is to shed light on how sensory perceptions are communicated through authentic language. What are the language resources available to match multimodal perceptions, and how do we use them in real communication? We discuss insights from previous work on the topic of the interaction of perception, cognition, and language and explain how language users recontextualise perception in communication about sensory experiences. Within the framework of cognitive semantics, we show that the complexities of multimodal perception are clearly reflected in the multifunctional use of words to convey meanings and feelings. To showcase the language resources employed, we base our findings on research on how architects convey their perceptions of built space. Two main patterns emerge: they use multimodal expressions (soft, bland, and jarring) and descriptions of built space through motion (the building reaches out, or routes and directions such as destination, promenade, route, or landscape in combination with verbs such as start and lead) in which case the architect may either be the observer or the emerged actor. The important take-home message is that there is no neat and clear a priori link between words and meanings, but rather "unforeseen" patterns surface in natural production data describing sensory perceptions.

The focus of much sensory language research has been on vocabulary and codability, not how language is used in communication of sensory perceptions. We make a case for discourse-oriented research about sensory language as an alternative to the prevailing vocabulary orientation. To consider the language of sound in authentic textual data, we presented participants with 20 everyday sounds of unknown sources and asked them to describe the sounds in as much detail as possible, as if describing them to someone who could not hear them. We explored how the participants use language to describe these sounds. Do they describe their listening experiences (stressful), sound properties (intermittent beeping), and/or the events that caused the sounds (eating an apple)? The results show that out of these three soundscape elements, events are the most frequent and most indispensable element. We let the results from the study illustrate the need for more discursive data in studies of sensory language and argue that there is no designated language of sound. Our study highlights that in order to account for sensory language use, we need an analytical framework that accommodates discursive language in a non-trivial way beyond stable couplings between individual words and meanings.

Negation is frequently used in natural language, yet relatively little is known about its processing. More importantly, what is known regarding the neurophysiological processing of negation is mostly based on results of studies using written stimuli (the word-by-word paradigm). While the results of these studies have suggested processing costs in connection to negation (increased negativities in brain responses), it is difficult to know how this translates into processing of spoken language. We therefore developed an auditory paradigm based on a previous visual study investigating processing of affirmatives, sentential negation (not), and prefixal negation (un-). The findings of processing costs were replicated but differed in the details. Importantly, the pattern of ERP effects suggested less effortful processing for auditorily presented negated forms (restricted to increased anterior and posterior positivities) in comparison to visually presented negated forms. We suggest that the natural flow of spoken language reduces variability in processing and therefore results in clearer ERP patterns.

This study investigates all-cleft constructions in the London–Lund Corpora of spoken British English. It has two aims: an empirical and a methodological one. The empirical aim is to contribute to research on spoken discourse by analysing the form–meaning properties of all-clefts along with their pragmatic functions and their development since the 1950s drawing on insights from Cognitive Linguistics with special focus on Diachronic Construction Grammar. We show that all-clefts are used both as assertions and directives. They focalise an element that speakers find particularly relevant at the same time as they have the effect of blocking alternative perspectives and thereby contracting the discursive space for addressees. The methodological aim is to critically assess the comparability level of the diachronic corpora based on a detailed investigation of the distribution of all-clefts in the data. We show that there is a high degree of similarity between the designs of the corpora, which makes them suitable for diachronic investigations of recent change.

This corpus-based study examines how writers of tweets about organic food use hashtags to direct readers towards the preferred tweet interpretation while expressing their stance to organic food. Our aim is to identify the functions stance-conveying hashtags serve in these tweets. To this end, we draw on Du Bois’ ( 2007 ) approach to stance and Francis’ ( 1994 ) analysis of metalinguistic labels. We analyse the tweets in which the sixteen most frequent stance-conveying hashtags occur in our corpus. We carry out a qualitative analysis where we identify four stance-conveying hashtag functions: (1) taking a stance , (2) expressing the tweet writer’s feelings , (3) invoking the reader’s stance and (4) indicating the intended tweet interpretation , which includes (4.1) expressing a directive and potentially presenting it as being of a specific type (deontic hashtags) , and (4.2) commenting on the epistemic status of the information in the tweet (epistemic hashtags) . We evaluate the categorisation scheme based on two annotation rounds and measure inter-annotator agreement. The study highlights the role of deontic hashtags (e.g., #advice ) and epistemic hashtags (e.g., #truth ) in directing the readers towards a particular interpretation, which may cause readers to ignore certain tweet aspects, thus homing in on the interaction between stance-taking hashtags and what is conveyed by the tweet in their scope. We offer explanations for the different roles of these hashtags as meta-discursive instructions, whereby tweeters point out to their readers what they should do, think or feel in relation to the message of the tweet. Our findings illustrate how hashtags are strategically exploited by writers for communicative purposes.

Current visual text analysis approaches rely on sophisticated processing pipelines. Each step of such a pipeline potentially amplifies any uncertainties from the previous step. To ensure the comprehensibility and interoperability of the results, it is of paramount importance to clearly communicate the uncertainty not only of the output but also within the pipeline. In this paper, we characterize the sources of uncertainty along the visual text analysis pipeline. Within its three phases of labeling, modeling, and analysis, we identify six sources, discuss the type of uncertainty they create, and how they propagate. The goal of this paper is to bring the attention of the visualization community to additional types and sources of uncertainty in visual text analysis and to call for careful consideration, highlighting opportunities for future research.

Taking stance towards any topic, event or idea is a common phenomenon on Twitter and social media in general. Twitter users express their opinions about different matters and assess other people’s opinions in various discursive ways. The identification and analysis of the linguistic ways that people use to take different stances leads to a better understanding of the language and user behaviour on Twitter. Stance is a multidimensional concept involving a broad range of related notions such as modality, evaluation and sentiment. In this study, we annotate data from Twitter using six notional stance categories ––contrariety, hypotheticality, necessity, prediction, source of knowledge and uncertainty––¬¬ following a comprehensive annotation protocol including inter-coder reliability measurements. The relatively low agreement between annotators highlighted the challenges that the task entailed, which made us question the inter-annotator agreement score as a reliable measurement of annotation quality of notional categories. The nature of the data, the difficulty of the stance annotation task and the type of stance categories are discussed, and potential solutions are suggested

This Element is a contribution to a new generation of corpus pragmatics research by taking as its starting point the multifaceted nature of speech acts in conversation, and by adopting a mixed-methods approach. Through a unique combination of theoretical, qualitative, quantitative, and statistical approaches, it provides a detailed investigation of advice-giving and advice uptake in relation to (i) the range of constructions used to give advice in different discourse contexts and at different points in time, and (ii) their interaction with dialogic and social factors of advice uptake as key components of frames of advice exchanges in natural conversation. Using data from the London-Lund Corpora of spoken British English, the Element shows, firstly, that there are systematic differences in advising between discourse contexts over the past half a century, and, secondly, that who gave the advice and how they did it are the strongest predictors of the advisee's response. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.