This study explores some specific aspects of compatibility between cognitive models. Robert E. MacLaury's theory of vantages as arrangements of coordinates and Lakoff's concept of radial categories are mutually reinforcing to an analysis of semantic polysemy. Vantage Theory (VT) includes the notions of "zooming in" and "zooming out", allowing…

This paper is an application of Robert E. MacLaury's Vantage Theory (VT) to the analysis of real life spoken discourse. It utilizes Dennis R. Preston's (1994) modification of MacLaury's VT. It elucidates how cognitive processes of coordinate selection and combination contribute to the on-line construction of category membership in the abstract…

Vantage Theory (VT) and Cognitive Grammar (CG) both rely crucially on the cognitive phenomenon of categorization as well as on the semantic/pragmatic notion of participant point of view in making claims about human linguistic production and perception. In this paper these commonalities of commitment are explored, as are the differences in the ways…

The Polish set of terms for blue includes, inter alia, the following adjectives: "niebieski" "blue", "blekitny" "(sky) blue", "granatowy" "navy blue", "lazurowy" "azure", "modry" "(intense) blue" and "siny" "(grey) violet-blue". The adjective "niebieski" is the basic term; however, it shares some of its functions with "blekitny", which is…

The central claim of this paper is that Vantage Theory is able to provide a much-needed explanatory account of the seemingly unrelated differences between lexical and morphological antonyms of dimensional adjectives in Slavic languages. In a case study, I compare two antonyms of the Russian adjective "vysokij" "high", a morphologically unrelated…

How do people define ethnicity and its membership? Primordialists argue that people group themselves using "primal" or permanent characteristics like physical similarity or a common language, religion, or history. Social mobilizationists, however, see ethnicity as more situational social phenomena, as an informal organization whereby…

The article presents a usage-based analysis of color attribution, i.e. the construal of the relation between color property and an entity to which it is attributed in painting descriptions. The study is based on the corpus of 100 catalog entries written for American art museums. It focuses on the two most frequent morpho-syntactic patterns in the…

The paper investigates Polish punk and hip hop (rap) song lyrics broken down into frequency lists. In an analysis inspired by MacLaury's view of categorization, the construals of punk and hip hop worldviews are shown to vary in the distance of the observer from the world, the width of the viewing frame, as well as the granularity and density of…

Currently, the language sciences place together four different forms of mental activity on one plane of language, which results in confusion. This paper presents arguments from metaphysics, hermeneutics, and semiotics to demonstrate that there are actually three planes of language (a biologically-based information processing plane, a literal…

Variations in sorts of rural Mexican-Spanish "have" verbs were analyzed using two approaches: one which measures subject differences from a standard categorization, and another which directly compares pairs of individual subject's sorts. "The second approach revealed a consistent structure for a subset of the subjects not revealed…

The papers in this document represent preliminary results of a study which is part of a 3-year project being conducted by the Educational Testing Service in cooperation with the New York City Board of Education, with support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. This document is divided into seven sections: (1) Introduction, (2)…

Hierarchies have been identified as determinants of constituent order. The set of such hierarchies is reviewed and ranked as determinants of NP sequencing in English. The effect of a hierarchy in other languages is compared to and contrasted with what is found in English. (Author/LMO)