This study reports a methodological itinerary aimed at developing a statistically supported investigative procedure useful for the empirical verification of hypotheses in Cognitive Linguistics research. It targets motion–emotion construals and explores the possible conceptual link between upward-oriented movements encoded in some motion verbs and the emotional state of happiness. The results emerging from the observation of two typologically different languages (English and Italian) lend empirically verified evidence for basic hypotheses in cognition and language research regarding the conceptualization of emotions and also for findings in cross-linguistic research on emotion representation.

English speakers expressing futurity have the choice of two primary verb forms, will or be going to (BGT). Previous studies establish that BGT has multiple meanings not associated with will. Langacker (1987) rejected a metaphoric analysis of BGT (time is motion) as inadequate and offered a binary feature analysis. Brisard (2001) expanded on this analysis and argued that manipulating the configurations of binary features explains the semantic differences between will and BGT. However, Brisard’s analysis overlooks the semantic overlap among will, BGT, and the simple present. Moreover, it does not provide a framework that treats will and BGT as part of the larger English modal verb system. Finally, it lacks a persuasive explanation of how the meanings associated with will versus BGT arose. We address these gaps by proposing a polysemy-based explanation that emphasizes invited inferences (e.g., Bybee, Perkins, & Pagliuca, 1994) and embodied experience; a particularly novel aspect of the analysis is that all the meanings of BGT are related straightforwardly to components of the human walk cycle. Further, we argue that the shared future meaning of will and BGT represent inter-lexical polysemy (Evans, 2015b), thus providing additional evidence for the Theory of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive Models (LCCM).

Does the way we talk about events correspond to how we conceptualize them? Three experiments (N = 135) examined how Spanish and Swedish native speakers judge event similarity in the domain of caused motion (‘He rolled the tyre into the barn’). Spanish and Swedish motion descriptions regularly encode path (‘into’), but differ in how systematically they include manner information (‘roll’). We designed a similarity arrangement task which allowed participants to give varying weights to different dimensions when gauging event similarity. The three experiments progressively reduced the likelihood that speakers were using language to solve the task. We found that, as long as the use of language was possible (Experiments 1 and 2), Swedish speakers were more likely than Spanish speakers to base their similarity arrangements on object manner (rolling/sliding). However, when recruitment of language was hindered through verbal interference, cross-linguistic differences disappeared (Experiment 3). A compound analysis of all experiments further showed that (i) cross-linguistic differences were played out against a backdrop of commonly represented event components, and (ii) describing vs. not describing the events did not augment cross-linguistic differences, but instead had similar effects across languages. We interpret these findings as suggesting a dynamic role of language in event conceptualization.

The aim of this paper is to develop a Cognitive Grammar-based analysis of English Copy-raising (CR) constructions such as Richard seems like he is dancing. We argue that the notion of reference-point plays a crucial role in licensing the matrix-subject of the construction. In CR, with the epistemic verbs seem and appear, the matrix-subject functions as a reference-point in relation to the pronominal copy (if a copy exists) in the embedded clause. The aboutness topicality of the matrix-subject in CR is expected, owing to its reference-point property. The epistemic CR construction is acceptable without a pronominal copy if the matrix-subject functions as a reference-point in relation to the complement clause. The same type of analysis is applied to the CR construction with perceptual resemblance (PR) verbs – sound, look, feel, and smell – leading to the conclusion that the strong dichotomy between epistemic and PR verbs is illusory. It is further demonstrated that expletive there-raising in CR is motivated by the same reference-point phenomenon. The difference between there-raising and other CR examples stems from the role of there as a setting subject. Our reference-point-based analysis predicts a metonymic interpretation of the matrix-subject, which we attribute to the connection between reference-point and metonymy.

This study examined how native speakers of Spanish formulated sentences in English as a second language (L2) when randomly ordered words were orally presented. Participants included 206 adult literacy students (70 native Spanish speakers and 136 native English speakers) whose word reading equivalency was at third- through fifth-grade levels. The Word Ordering subtest of the Test of Language Development-3 was administered. Although they showed a similar pattern of performance in the sentence type (i.e., declarative, interrogative, or imperative sentence), the two groups showed a different pattern in the misuse of syntactic features. Pertaining to grammatical features, verbs were the most difficult item for the native speakers of Spanish. The findings of this study were explained through the intricate nature of English verbs as well as unique lexicalization patterns resulting from the typological difference between Spanish and English.

In this study, two modalities of expression (verbal and visual) are compared and contrasted, in relation to their ability and their limitations to construct and express metaphors. A representative set of visual metaphors and a representative set of linguistic metaphors are here compared, and the semantic similarity between metaphor terms is modeled within the two sets. Such similarity is operationalized in terms of semantic features produced by informants in a property generation task (e.g., McRae et al., 2005). Semantic features provide insights into conceptual content, and play a role in deep conceptual processing, as opposed to shallow linguistic processing. Thus, semantic features appear to be useful for modeling metaphor comprehension, assuming that metaphors are matters of thought rather than simple figures of speech (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). The question tackled in this paper is whether semantic features can account for the similarity between metaphor terms of both visual and verbal metaphors. For this purpose, a database of semantic features was collected and then used to analyze fifty visual metaphors and fifty verbal metaphors. It was found that the number of semantic features shared between metaphor terms is predicted by the modality of expression of the metaphor: the terms compared in visual metaphors share semantic features, while the terms compared in verbal metaphors do not. This suggests that the two modalities of expression afford different ways to construct and express metaphors.

This study explores the relation between pain sensitivity and the cognitive processing of words. 130 participants evaluated the pain-relatedness of a total of 600 two-syllabic nouns, and subsequently reported on their own pain sensitivity. The results demonstrate that pain-sensitive people associate words more strongly with pain than less sensitive people. In particular, concrete nouns like ‘syringe’, ‘wound’, ‘knife’, and ‘cactus’ are considered to be more pain-related for those who are more pain-sensitive. These findings dovetail with recent studies suggesting that certain bodily characteristics influence the way people form mental representations (Casasanto, 2009). We discuss three mechanisms which could potentially account for our findings: attention and memory bias, prototype analysis, and embodied cognition. We argue that, whereas none of these three accounts can be ruled out, the embodied cognition hypothesis provides a particularly promising view to accommodate our data.