As a kind of indirect and coded language, metonymy not only inspires others but also helps one to reach goals set by cultural standards, society values, practices, and beliefs. Metonymy's rhetorical power comes from its ability to change meaning from a literal interpretation to an intended conceptual message, therefore enabling communication both…

This paper analyzes some of the ambiguities that arise among statements with the copular verb "is" in the mathematical language of textbooks as compared to day-to-day English language. We identify patterns in the construction and meaning of "is" statements using randomly selected examples from corpora representing the two…

The lives of Kala people are deeply intertwined with marine and riparian environments on which their livelihoods depend. To document linguistic and environmental knowledge in these communities, as part of our community-based, collaborative language documentation project, we utilized three main interdisciplinary documentation methods: (1) River…

This dissertation concerns the acquisition of the interaction between lexicosemantic properties of verbs and syntax, focusing on symmetrical and asymmetrical verbs in different syntactic structures. Based on linguistic evidence, it is shown that two conceptual categories, Mutuality and Number, interact to give rise to four event-types: Single…

Learning statistics requires learning the language of statistics. Statistics draws upon words from general English, mathematical English, discipline-specific English and words used primarily in statistics. This leads to many linguistic challenges in teaching statistics and the way in which the language is used in statistics creates an extra layer…

Previous studies demonstrate that lexical coding of colour influences categorical perception of colour, such that participants are more likely to rate two colours to be more similar if they belong to the same linguistic category (Roberson et al., 2000, 2005). Recent work shows changes in Greek-English bilinguals' perception of within and…

Patterns of conceptualization reflected in figurative language are motivated by embodied experience, and comparisons of emotion metaphors in English, Mandarin Chinese and other languages have shown widespread similarity in such metaphors cross-culturally (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, 1999; King 1989; Yu 1996; Kovecses 2005). Nonetheless, we can also…

Understanding the syntactic structure of a sentence is a necessary preliminary to understanding its semantics and therefore for many practical applications. The field of natural language processing has achieved a high degree of accuracy in parsing, at least in English. However, the syntactic structures produced by the most commonly used parsers…

We test the claim that acquiring a mass-count language, like English, causes speakers to think differently about entities in the world, relative to speakers of classifier languages like Japanese. We use three tasks to assess this claim: object-substance rating, quantity judgment, and word extension. Using the first two tasks, we present evidence…

This dissertation investigates constructional alternation among the English verb- "at," verb- 'away-at," and verb- "away" constructions. The primary purpose is to lay a fundamental conceptual framework on the interrelation between how we perceive a "situation" in an "external" world and how we construe it as an "event structure" in a…

This article discusses some apparently paradoxical behavior of the English demonstratives "this/these" and "that/those" as determiners of proper nouns and as metaphorical signals of epistemic and affective stance within the proximal-distal opposition. It is argued that the apparent paradoxes are actually cases of shifting perspectives or points of…

Innovative computer technology has sparked a revolutionary change in the area of language analysis. Individual researchers are increasingly likely to access huge corpora containing several hundred million words and to analyze the data using highly developed language analyzers via the Internet. Sketch Engine is one of such online language…

The applicability of Vantage Theory (VT), a model of (colour) categorization, to linguistic data largely depends on the modifications and adaptations of the model for the purpose. An attempt to do so proposed here, called Extended Vantage Theory (EVT), slightly reformulates the VT conception of vantage by capitalizing on some of the entailments of…

The authors investigated linguistic relativity effects by examining the semantic effects of grammatical gender (present in Italian but absent in English) in fluent bilingual speakers as compared with monolingual speakers. In an error-induction experiment, they used responses by monolingual speakers to establish a baseline for bilingual speakers…

We investigate a possible universal constraint on spatial meaning. It has been proposed that people attend preferentially to the endpoints of spatial motion events, and that languages may therefore make finer semantic distinctions at event endpoints than at event beginnings. We test this proposal. In Experiment 1, we show that people discriminate…