Cognitive Semantics And The Polish Dative

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 -- Beneficiaries and recipients in Toba (Guaycurú) / Marisa Censabella -- Benefactive and malefactive applicativization in Mapudungun / Fernando Zúñiga -- The benefactive semantic potential of 'caused reception' constructions: A case study of English, German, French, and Dutch / Timothy Colleman -- Beneficiary coding in Finnish / Seppo Kittilä -- Benefactives in Laz / René Lacroix -- Benefactive and malefactive verb extensions in the Koalib verb system / Nicolas Quint -- Benefactives and malefactives in Gumer (Gurage) / Sascha Völlmin -- A 'reflexive benefactive' in Chamba-Daka (Adamawa branch, Niger-Congo family) / Raymond Boyd -- Beneficiary and other roles of the dative in Taqshelhiyt / Christian J. Rapold -- Benefactive strategies in Thai / Mathias Jenny -- Korean benefactive particles and their meanings / Jae Jung Song -- Malefactivity in Japanese / Eijiro Tsuboi -- General index (names, languages, subjects)

Since antiquity, scholars have been fascinated by the phenomena of case. The explanation for this fascination is, as Hjelmslev already pointed out over fifty years ago, the fact that he who can unravel the meaning of case-relations, has the key to language structure as a whole.For over three years, a team of twenty scholars affiliated with the Linguistics Department of Leuven University in Belgium has concentrated on case phenomena in different languages, both Indo- and non-Indo-European. It is the first time that such a large scale investigation into case has been undertaken. Noteworthy is also its reliance on computer-stored corpora of authentic material.The results are published as a series ("Case and Grammatical Relations across Languages") of which the first volume, a bibliography, appeared in 1994.The first volume on the dative case contains 13 articles, each of which gives a detailed syntactic-semantic description of the dative or its counterparts in a particular language. In addition to the lexico-syntactic frames in which they occur, a number of textual and extra-linguistic factors are taken into account. Languages investigated are English (K. Davidse), German (L. Draye), Dutch (W. Van Belle & W. Van Langendonck), Afrikaans (L.G. de Stadler), Latin (W. Van Hoecke), French (L. Melis), Spanish (N. Delbecque & B. Lamiroy), Portuguese (R. de Andrade), Polish (B. Rudzka-Ostyn), Hungarian (G. Toth), Pashto (W. Skalmowski), Hebrew (P. Swiggers) and Orizaba Nahuatl (D. Tuggy).

“This volume takes up the challenge of assessing the present state of Cognitive Linguistics on the cutting edge between universality and variability. Claims of universality have never been explicitly articulated by cognitive linguists but studies on embodiment, motivation and cognitive processes such as metaphor, metonymy, and conceptual integration rely on general cognitive abilities and hence tacitly assume cross-linguistic commonalities. Variability within a language and across languages has received growing attention, especially in contrastive and corpus-based studies. Both perspectives are given ample space in the articles collected in the volume. “The present volume is the first to address the important issue of the position of Cognitive Linguistics between the poles of universality and variability. The editors’ insightful introduction draws compelling awareness to this as a yet unresolved question. At the same time, the fine contributions collected in the volume reflect state-of-the-art research in Cognitive Linguistics and point to innovative avenues for future research. The interdisciplinary range of subject areas, the new approaches pursued and the various methodologies employed makes this volume particularly valuable. It should be of great interest to scholars working in the fields of Cognitive Linguistics and in specific languages, particularly English and Slavic linguistics.” – Günter Radden, University of Hamburg

This volume contains selected papers from the 5th ICLC, Amsterdam 1997. The papers present cognitive analyses of a variety of constructions (phrasal verbs, prepositional phrases, transitivity, accusative versus dative objects, possessives, gerunds, passives, causatives, conditionals), in a variety of languages (English, German, Dutch, Polish, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Thai, Fijian). Besides analyses of ‘objective construal’, the volume reflects the increasing interest in subjectivity (grounding and speaker involvement). It also includes, lastly, contributions on the acquisition and agrammatic loss of constructions.

Review text: "Overall, this volume is an important contribution to the development of empirical Cognitive Semantics. This collection of high-quality papers provides the reader with an insight into the most important empirical approaches in corpus-driven semantic research."Natalia Levshina in: Linguist List 20.3011.

The book testifies of the great tolerance of Cognitive Linguists towards internal variety within itself and towards external interaction with major linguistic subdisciplines. Internally, it opens up the broad variety of CL strands and the cognitive unity between convergent linguistic disciplines. Externally, it provides a wide overview of the connections between cognition and social, psychological, pragmatic, and discourse-oriented dimensions of language, which will make this book attractive to scholars from different persuasions. The book is thus expected to raise productive debate inside and outside the CL community. Furthermore, the book examines interdisciplinary connections from the point of view of the internal dynamics of CL research itself. CL is rapidly developing into different compatible frameworks with extensions into levels of linguistics description like discourse, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics among others that have only recently been taken into account in this orientation. The book covers two general topics: (i) the relationship between the embodied nature of language, cultural models, and social action; (ii) the role of metaphor and metonymy in inferential activity and as generators of discourse ties. More specific topics are the nature and scope of constructional meaning, language variation and cultural models; discourse acts; the relationship between communication and cognition, the argumentative role of metaphor in discourse, the role of mental spaces in linguistic processing, and the role of empirical work in CL research. These features endow the book with internal unity and consistency while preserving the identity of each of the contributions therein.

This cognitive contrastive study of ten languages (Chinese, Dalabon, English, French, Spanish, Romanian, Kurdish, Khmer, Polish, Tibetan) focuses on the concept of giving from six main points of view, namely argument structure, lexical semantics and event structure, role marking in the three argument construction and in other constructions, lexicalization, grammaticalization and constructionalization of the verb from a cognitive construction grammar point of view, and central and extended meanings. It is proposed that a continuum approach to grammar and lexicon is needed in order to describe the typological and historical facts. The volume argues for a concrete and abstract transfer ‘cluster model’ involving coverage of lexical and grammatical extension or bleaching phenomena and that the semantic extensions (metaphorical and otherwise) exploit various portions of this schema. The volume is deeply anchored in the Cognitive Construction Grammar theoretical movement, and proposes analyses of constructional phenomena to illustrate a grammar to lexicon continuum, in synchrony and diachrony: language change, grammaticalization chains, constructionalization analysis, and an invariant hypothesis of giving as a basic activity in human cognition.