Motivation In Grammar And The Lexicon

Language structure and use are largely shaped by cognitive processes such as categorizing, framing, inferencing, associative (metonymic), and analogical (metaphorical) thinking, and – mediated through cognition – by bodily experience, emotion, perception, action, social/communicative interaction, culture, and the internal ecology of the linguistic system itself. The contributors to the present volume demonstrate how these language-independent factors motivate grammar and the lexicon in a variety of languages such as English, German, French, Italian, Hungarian, Russian, Croatian, Japanese, and Korean. The volume will be of great interest to students and scholars in cognitive and functional linguistics.

Language structure and use are largely shaped by cognitive processes such as categorizing, framing, inferencing, associative (metonymic), and analogical (metaphorical) thinking, and mediated through cognition by bodily experience, emotion, perception, action, social/communicative interaction, culture, and the internal ecology of the linguistic system itself. The contributors to the present volume demonstrate how these language-independent factors motivate grammar and the lexicon in a variety of languages such as English, German, French, Italian, Hungarian, Russian, Croatian, Japanese, and Korean. The volume will be of great interest to students and scholars in cognitive and functional linguistics."

How much of language is motivated? Recently, cognitive and functional linguists have proposed new solutions to this intriguing question. The thirteen articles collected in this volume cover various aspects of motivation in grammar and in the lexicon. The phenomena discussed in the contributions can be grouped into four types of motivation, which, along with other types, are explicated in the introductory chapter: ecological motivation, i.e. motivation of a linguistic unit due to its place, or "ecological niche," within a system; genetic motivation, i.e. motivation of present-day linguistic behavior or structure due to historical factors; experiential motivation, i.e. motivation that is based on embodied experience; and cognitive motivation, i.e. motivation that is based on human knowledge and cognitive operations such as metonymy and metaphor. The languages studied in some detail include Afrikaans, Croatian, Dutch, English, French, German, Hausa, and Hungarian. This volume makes a strong case for the pervasiveness of motivation in natural language. It will be of interest to teachers, researchers and students of linguistics, especially of functional and cognitive linguistics.

This volume contributes to the now one-century old question, ‘Is the link between forms and meanings in language essentially arbitrary, as Saussure put it, or is it on the contrary also considerably motivated?’ The greater part of the papers (Sections 1–3) analyze linguistic phenomena in which not arbitrary, but cognitively motivated links between form and meaning play a role. As such, the contributions in Section 1 examine selected aspects of motivation in the continuum between lexicon and grammar; the contributions in Section 2 study the factors underlying the range of (semantic) variants that attach to a particular lexical item; and papers in Section 3 look at motivating factors in linguistic items situated in and conceptualizing the socio-cultural domain. A smaller set of papers in Section 4 point to the role which learner motivation and attitudinal motivation may play in applied linguistics domains.

The volume focuses on semantic shifts and motivation patterns in the lexicon. Its key feature is its lexico-typological orientation, i.e. a heavy emphasis on systematic cross-linguistic comparison. The book presents current theoretical and methodological trends in the study of semantic shifts and motivational patters based on an abundance of empirical findings across genetically, areally and typologically diverse languages.

The leitmotif, but not exclusive theme, of the present volume is Ronald Langacker’s (1987) thesis that “lexicon, morphology, and syntax form a continuum of symbolic units serving to structure conceptual content for expressive purposes”. The concept of the lexicogrammar continuum contrasts especially with mainstream generative grammar, but also, although less radically, with other cognitive linguistic paradigms, such as Construction Grammar. The contributors to this volume explore the lexicogrammar continuum and other issues of the architecture of language mostly from a cognitive linguistic perspective. A wide range of theoretical and methodological themes is covered such as the integration of discourse and interactional phenomena into Cognitive Grammar, the status of introspective data, figurative language and thought (i.e. metaphor and metonymy), morphosyntactic constructions, and phonological structure. Besides English (including Old English), languages analyzed in some detail include Polish, Czech, Dutch, Estonian, Georgian, German, Danish, and Portuguese. The volume will be of interest to scholars and graduate students in cognitive linguistics, especially Cognitive Grammar, Construction Grammar, metaphor and metonymy, and corpus linguistics.

This volume has its origins in a theme session entitled: “Lexical and Grammatical Classification: Same or Different?” from the Fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. It includes theme session presentations, additional papers from that conference, and several invited contributions. All the articles explore the relationship between lexical and grammatical categories, both illustrating the close interaction, as well as questioning the strict dichotomy, between them. This volume promotes a holistic view of classification reflecting functional, cognitive, communication, and sign-oriented approaches to language which have been applied to both the grammar and the lexicon. The volume is divided into two parts. Part I, Number and Gender Systems Across Languages, is further subdivided into three sections: (1) Noun Classification; (2) Number Systems; and (3) Gender Systems. Part II, Verb Systems and Parts of Speech Across Languages, is divided into two sections: (1) Tense and Aspect and (2) Parts of Speech. The analyses represent a diverse range of languages and language families: Bantu (Swahili), Guaykuruan (Pilagá), Indo-European (English, Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Spanish) and Semitic (Hebrew).