Language Variation and Textual Categorisation

On articles and multivariate analysis in English

2012-01-10T22:11:00.001+01:00

On January 9 and 10 2012 Prof Marianne Hundt taught the seminar "Variable article use". Marianne Hundt has been Professor of English Linguistics at Zürich University since 2008. Prior to that she held a chair of English Linguistics at the University of Heidelberg. She obtained her MA, PhD and Habilitation at the University of Freiburg and was a visiting scholar at Portland State University, Oregon (USA) and at Victoria University, Wellington (New Zealand). In her PhD Prof Hundt dealt with New Zealand English, and her investigation led to a monograph published by John Benjamins. In her Habilitation in English Linguistics Prof Hundt investigated the English mediopassive construction, and this study was published by Rodopi. Her 2009 co-authored monograph Change in Contemporary English. A Grammatical Study, published by Cambridge University Press, is also well-known in the field. Prof Marianne Hundt has edited and co-edited a number of books with leading publishers such as Cambridge University Press, John Benjamins and Rodopi, and has published extensively in international journals on issues such as new Englishes, the English verbal paradigm, English syntax (relativisation, complexity) and language change in general.
Outline of the seminar: The definite and indefinite articles in English are amongst the most frequent words. However, the contexts where there are used (or at times omitted) are difficult to describe and there is variability across time, regional varieties, text types, etc. In this seminar, Prof Hundt started out by briefly looking at the history of articles in English and then moved on to three case studies. The first provided a focus on article use with institutional nouns like church and university in two major reference varieties, namely British and American English. The second considered diachronic change in article use with single role referents like president and captain in predicate position. The third case study took language contact into account and focus on variable article use in a variety of Indian English. The seminar provided the theoretical background necessary to study variable article use in English. Prof Hundt also looked at issues related to data retrieval and analysis, such as the definition of a variable context and variable rule analysis. Finally, the seminar provided an insight into the specific challenges involved in the analysis of spoken data.

Information structure and word-order variation

2011-06-23T19:54:00.000+02:00

On June 22 and 23 2011 Prof Gregory Ward (taught the seminar "Information structure and word-order variation". Gregory Ward received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985. He is currently Professor of Linguistics at Northwestern University, where he has taught since 1986. His primary research area is discourse/pragmatics, with specific interests in pragmatic theory, information structure, intonational meaning, and reference/anaphora. Recent publications have investigated deferred reference, event anaphora, functional compositionality, generalized conversational implicature and the semantics-pragmatics boundary. With Birner, he co-authored Information status and noncanonical word order in English (Benjamins, 1998). With Birner and Rodney Huddleston, he is co-author of the chapter "Information packaging" in The Cambridge grammar of the English language (Cambridge University Press, 2002). He is co-editor of Blackwell's The handbook of pragmatics (Blackwell 2004). Prof Ward also serves as a freelance linguistic consultant on legal issues relating to sentence and utterance interpretation.
Outline of the seminar: 1. Introduction and theoretical preliminaries. Information Structure (partitioning of information in a discourse into given – old, familiar – and new information). The 'Given-New Contract'. Communicative Dynamism. Topichood. Aspects of information structure: reference (choice of referring expression), cohesion (coherence relations), topic (discourse topic vs. sentence topic), focus (focus/presupposition, common ground), intonation/prosody. 2. Word-order variation. Noncanonical Word Order. Argument Reversal: inversion (discourse-status and hearer-status of the constituents of inversion; is it discourse-status or hearer-status that is relevant?), preposing (subcategorized PPs vs. adjunct PPs, NPs, PPs, VPs, APs; types: focus preposing and topicalization), postposing, right/left-dislocation, wh/it/that-clefts related constructions: passives with by-phrases. 3. A corpus-based analysis.

Corpus linguistics and applications

2011-06-03T23:11:00.001+02:00

On 3 June 2011 Gloria Corpas Pastor (University of Málaga) lectured on “Linguistics with corpus: foundations, challenges and applications”. Gloria Corpas Pastor completed her PhD at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, after which she developed research stays in Exeter, Leipzig, Lancaster and Harvard. She is currently Full Professor at the Department of Translation and Interpreting in Málaga, as well as Visiting Professor in Translation Technologies at the University of Wolverhampton. In Málaga, Prof Corpas is the main investigator of the research group ‘Lexicography and Translation’. She is an active member of AIETI (Asociación Ibérica de Estudios de Traducción e Interpretación), AMIT (Asociación de Mujeres Investigadoras y Tecnólogas), EUROPHRAS (European Society of Phraseology) and EURALEX (European Association for Lexicography). She was awarded the 1995 EURALEX Verbatim Award for her investigation in lexicography. Prof Corpas is part of national and international committees (AEN/CTN 174, CEN/BTTF 138) whose goal is to implement a number of standardized regulations in the field of translation and interpreting.
Abstract: The seminar covered the following issues: 1. The birth of a new paradigm (computational linguistics, applied linguistics, lexical grammars, translation). 2. Key concepts (collocation, colligation, preference, types of corpora). 3. Main applications (concordancers, translation tools). During the practical sessions, Prof Corpas illustrated the theoretical introduction by means of hands-on exercises on translation universals, translation techniques applied to a number of text-types/genres, phraseology, etc.

Natural Language Processing: on brains and computers

2011-06-02T23:20:00.006+02:00

On 2 June 2011 Ruslan Mitkov (University of Wolverhampton) taught a seminar on "Natural Language Processing: Challenges and Applications". Ruslan Mitkov received his MSc from the Humboldt University in Berlin, his PhD from the Technical University in Dresden and he worked as a Research Professor at the Institute of Mathematics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia. Prof. Mitkov is Professor of Computational Linguistics and Language Engineering at the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences at the University of Wolverhampton which he joined in 1995, where he set up the Research Group in Computational Linguistics. In addition, he is also Director of the Research Institute in Information and Language Processing. His extensively cited research covers areas such as anaphora resolution, automatic generation of multiple-choice tests, machine translation, natural language generation, automatic summarisation, computer-aided language processing, centering, translation memory, evaluation, corpus annotation, bilingual term extraction, question answering, automatic identification of cognates and false friends, and an NLP-driven corpus-based study of translation universals. Mitkov is author of the monograph Anaphora resolution (Longman) and sole Editor of The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics (Oxford University Press). Current prestigious projects include his role as Executive Editor of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering (Cambridge University Press), Editor-in-Chief of the Natural Language Processing book series of John Benjamins publishers, and Consulting Editor of Oxford University Press publications in Computational Linguistics. He is also working on the forthcoming Oxford Dictionary of Computational Linguistics (co-authored with Patrick Hanks) and the future second, substantially revised edition of the Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics.
Abstract: The talk introduced Natural Language Processing (NLP) as a discipline and discussed NLP applications for Applied Linguistics developed by the speaker and/or his research group. After a brief historical review, the speaker argued that natural languages resent major problems for computers. Basic language processing tasks, methods and solutions were outlined. The speaker then proceeded to selected topics of his recent research which have to do with the employment of NLP methodology in Applied Linguistics and more specifically topics including but not limited to lexicography, translation and translation studies, language teaching (assessment) and language change.

The processing of agreement

2011-05-14T22:39:00.003+02:00

On 12 and 14 April 2011 Carlos Acuña Fariña (University of Santiago de Compostela) taught a seminar on the grammar and the processing of agreement in English and Romance. Professor Acuña Fariña completed a PhD at Santiago with work on the grammar of apposition that would in time gain him an international reputation as one of the world's leading expert on the topic. He doubles as a psycholinguist (leads two current research projects on the processing of agreement) and has published in some of the most prestigious venues, such Cognitive Linguistics, Lingua or Cognition. He currently teaches English Morphosyntax in Santiago.
Abstract: Agreement has become a major challenge for both linguistic theory and psycholinguistics. As Corbett (2006: 116) has noted, it has moved from a peripheral position in grammatical studies to the centre stage. Most theories of language now recognise something equivalent to an agreement phase or operation in the creation of sentential messages, and disputes often arise only when discussing how to embed agreement computations inside a larger context containing further computations. Due to its pronounced redundancy and alliteration, agreement co-indexations are often only explainable if viewed as "dysfunctional", "manifestations of humans' delight in (...) form-focused activities" (Taylor 2002: 332). Yet agreement is present in over 70% of the world's languages and even in the languages where it is not so conspicuous, like English, its operations are central to the structure and the creation of predications (English speakers actually confront the requirements of number agreement at least once every 16 words or so, or once every five seconds; Eberhard 2005: 532-33). Furthermore, as Bock et al. (1999: 331) note, even 4-year-olds use correctly agreeing verbs over 94% of the time in spontaneous speech (Keeney & Wolfe, 1972): "This makes it all the more plausible to view agreement, in its typical manifestations, as one of the automatic mechanisms of normal language production rather than a nicety of carefully prepared speech". In this course, we will examine the psycholinguistic dynamics of agreement and ask ourselves questions like the following:
1. Is agreement an essentially formal or an essentially conceptual phenomenon?
2. Are the grammar of agreement and the processing of agreement 'in good agreement' with each other?
3. Are there cross-linguistic differences in the way agreement is processed?
4. Do we compute agreement differently for gender and number? For semantic gender and morphosyntactic gender?
5. Does the mind, and the brain, react differently to agreement based on either semantic or formal regulation?
6. Is the processing of agreement the same across domains?
The course introduces students into some of the latest experimental research on the topic, and will help them become familiar with the methodologies used in this field, such as 'eye-tracking' and E.R.P.

Themes, rhemes and informative optimality

2010-06-01T23:00:00.005+02:00

On 1 June 2010, Enric Vallduví (Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona) conducted a seminar on information structure, invited by the LVTC research group and the MA degree in Advanced English Studies.
Enric Vallduvi is associate professor in the Department of Translation and Language Science at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. He completed a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania and taught at UCLA (University of California) and the University of Edinburgh. He currently teaches in the degree of Translation and Interpreting at Pompeu Fabra University. He published extensively on the interface syntax-semantics-pragmatics and information theory in general.
Abstract: Information packaging has to do with the dynamics of linguistic communicative interaction. Although present in all linguistic communication, information packaging is manifested mostly in dialog, where there is exchange of information and the information states of communicative agents change constantly. Thus, the dynamics of dialog are essential for an adequate description of information packaging in natural language. The talks will focus on several issues having to do with the realization of information packaging in the light of information-state approaches to dialogue (e.g. GoDIS) and the notion of QUD (question under discussion). The first issue has to do with fragments (short answers), which express rhemes. It has been explicitly proposed that an answer a to a question q may be encoded as a short answer precisely when q is a maximal question under discussion in the active information state: a short answer spells out only the rheme because what it relates to in the context is maximally accessible. But does this mean that, in full-fledged sentences with explicit grounds (rheme-ground partitions), the ground comes as a freebie? Is this how 'may be encoded as a short answer' should be interpreted, i.e., a short answer is just a thrifty but equivalent version of its full-fledged analogue? The answer is no; at least, it is no in many instances of rheme-ground utterances where the presence of an overt ground is obligatory or much preferred. Among these cases, we should include classic cases of focus-fronting (Now they are coming out with a hydraulic crane. CHERRY PICKERS they are called, they are so very easy to upset... vs. #"CHERRY PICKERS, they are so very easy to upset...), but also statements like a deceptively out-of-the-blue Men ARE different on a cover of The New York Times Magazine, the short version of which is a prosaic YES. A second issue has to do with the informational meaning of topics, themes or links as distinguished elements within the ground. It is clear that links have been observed to have specific semantic import (contrast, nonstandard anaphora, etc). What has so far remained as an open issue is what this specific semantic import. Different analyses will be reviewed and we will discuss recent insights from work by Bott (2008) and Vallduví (2006).

Sociolingusitics and the history of English

2010-05-12T10:36:00.000+02:00

On May 10-12 2010 Professor Terttu Nevalainen taught the seminar "Sociolingusitics and the history of English". Terttu Nevalainen is Professor of English Philology at the University of Helsinki, from which she received her PhD in 1991. She is in charge of the national Centre of Excellence on Variation, Contacts and Change in English and the CoE's research project on Sociolinguistics and Language History. Most of her work is basic research and has methodological, empirical and theoretical objectives. But she has also contributed to textbooks and reference works by writing general introductions to her field of research and research findings, such as her 2006 An introduction to Early Modern English and the 2003 monograph Historical socio-linguistics: language change in Tudor and Stuart England (co-authored by Helena Raumolin-Brunberg). Methodologically, her work comes under the umbrella of corpus linguistics. The empirical work she carries out contributes to sociolinguistic fact-finding by providing baseline information on how the English language has changed in various social contexts over the last six hundred years. This work also contributes to sociolinguistic theory formation, and to the modelling of processes of long-term language change. Some of the questions that have recently occupied her include: how systematically do people participate in ongoing linguistic changes in their community? Do most people participate in them or only a few, and do linguistic changes differ in this respect? Prof Nevalainen is also well-known for her corpus compilation work. She participated in the Helsinki Corpus project and has directed The Corpus of Early English Correspondence team for well over a decade.Her other academic commitments include participation in professional organizations and editorial work. She is Vice President (Research) of the new International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE), Vice President of the Modern Language Society (founded in 1887), and a member of the Board of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME). She is also the editor-in-chief of the new monograph series Oxford Studies in the History of English and the English editor of Neuphilologische Mitteilungen as well as a member of the international editorial boards of English Language and Linguistics, International Journal of English Studies, Journal of Historical Pragmatics, NOWELE, Studia Anglica Poznaniensia, Transactions of the Philological Society, and the online journal Historical Sociolinguistics and Socio-historical Linguistics.
Outline of the seminar: Session 1. Historical sociolinguistics – the bad data problem? Investigating the past stages of a language, historical sociolinguists cannot rely on their own intuitions about the range of linguistic variation available and acceptable to the people they study, but will need to make use of a variety of written data sources. Prof. Nevalainen analysed the information to be gleaned from historical socio-linguistic corpora such as the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) and the Corpus of English Dialogues (CED), and databases such as the Proceedings of the Old Bailey. Session 2. What we can learn from historical sociolinguistics? Over the last fifty years, sociolinguistic research has produced some major generalizations about linguistic variation across languages and language communities. These generalizations are robust enough to qualify as sociolinguistic 'facts'. Historical sociolinguists have shown that many generalizations based on present-day research also hold true for the past, and can be demonstrated for the earlier stages of a historically well-documented language such as English. Session 3. Caregiver language in Early Modern English correspondence. One of the challenges for sociolinguistic research is the development of social practice in children and adolescents. In modern societies, adults provide the major source of influence on child-language variation in infancy, while peer-group impact is more decisive in adolescence. Prof. Nevalainen discussed how caregivers talked about and communicated with children in their personal correspondence the 16th and 17th century.

28th International AESLA Conference

2010-04-18T09:53:00.013+02:00

The LVTC Research Group had the pleasure to host the 28th International Conference of the Spanish Society for Applied Linguistics (AESLA) in Vigo on 15-17 April 2010. The aim of the conference was to reflect on the multidisciplinary nature of most of the current research in Applied Linguistics. It provided a discussion forum for researchers from different (sub-)disciplines whose main objective is the study of language in all its manifestations. Under the leitmotiv Analysing data > Describing variation, discussion focused on the notion of variation and all its potential manifestations in language, on the different data analysis procedures and on the various ways in which such procedures may help in the description of linguistic variation.
In line with the linguistic areas integrated in AESLA, the conference was organized into the following ten thematic panels: Learning and acquisition, Language teaching and syllabus design, Language for specific purposes, Language and psychology, child language and psycholinguistics, Sociolinguistics, Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis, Corpus & computational linguistics and linguistic engineering, Lexicology and lexicography, and Translation and interpretation. To this traditional list of panels was added a special thematic session on genre analysis in ESP texts from a socio-pragmatic, functional and cognitive perspective.
The conference was honoured with the participation of the following internationally recognised experts in linguistic studies:
• Prof. María del Pilar García Mayo (Universidad del País Vasco, Spain), who delivered a speech on “La interlengua inglesa de hablantes bilingües. Perspectivas desde un marco lingüístico formal”;
• Prof. Adele E. Goldberg (Princeton University, USA), on “Learning what not to say: the nature of statistical preemption in a-adjective distribution”;
• Prof. Sylviane Granger (Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium), on “Corpus research, variation and teaching: infernal trio or happy threesome?”; and
• Prof. Ruslan Mitkov (University of Wolverhampton, UK), on “Natural language processing: applications and opportunities for Applied Linguistics”.
With over 350 participants coming from all over the world and 258 presentations, including papers, round tables and posters, the dense conference programme triggered discussion about new trends and lines of investigation and data analysis, which focused not only on the topics that define research in Applied Linguistics but also on the description of variation at different linguistic levels.

Reaction objects in English and Spanish

2009-11-19T15:58:00.008+01:00

Monserrat Martínez Vázquez delivered a lecture on the syntax and semantics of reaction object constructions (Levin 1993) in English and Spanish. These structures include non-subcategorised objects which express a reaction which is realised by means of the verbal action (Pauline smiled her thanks = ‘Pauline expressed her thanks by smiling’). Fom Talmy (1985) it has been claimed in the literature that Spanish as well as other Romance languages, does not tolerate such fused constructions. Prof Martínez Vázquez has developed an analysis based on the CREA corpus (Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual) and offered examples which puts some of the previous claims into question.
CV: Montserrat Martínez Vázquez, Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University Pablo de Olavide in Seville, has held academic and research positions at different Universities (Harvard, Seville, Extremadura, Huelva and Pablo de Olavide). Her main area of research is the analysis of argument structure from a constructional perspective. She is coordinator of a research group on Contrastive Linguistics and has coordinated three linguistics projects funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology. She is editor of the three first volumes of Syntaxis. An International Journal of Syntactic Research and of a series of Working Papers in Linguistics published at the University of Huelva (Gramática contrastiva inglés-español, Gramática y pragmática, Transitivity revisited, Recent approaches to English grammar, Gramática de construcciones and The historical linguistics-cognitive linguistics interface). She is author of Sintaxis inglesa: la atribución (1991) and Diátesis: alternancias oracionales en la lengua inglesa (1998) (winner of the AEDEAN 1998 award for Studies in Linguistics). She has collaborated in the Diccionario sintáctico del verbo inglés (1996) and published articles and chapters in edited volumes on English grammar and English-Spanish contrastive linguistics. Her most recent publications concentrate on the analysis of different constructions from a contrastive perspective and on the metonymic basis of language.

2nd English Linguistics Circle postgraduate conference

2009-11-01T16:11:00.003+01:00

The Second ELC International Postgraduate Conference on English Linguistics (ELC2) was held at the University of Vigo (Spain) on 30-31 October 2009. The objective of the conference was to provide linguistics postgraduate students with an opportunity to present and discuss their research in an informal and intellectually stimulating setting.
The conference was organised by postgraduate students from the English Departments of the Universities of Vigo and Santiago de Compostela. It was supported by these two universities and by the English Linguistics Circle, a research network involving the following research teams:
- Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalisation (VLCG; University of Santiago de Compostela; Director: Prof. Teresa Fanego),
- Spoken English Research Team at the University of Santiago de Compostela (SPERTUS; University of Santiago de Compostela; Director: Ignacio Palacios Martínez),
- Language Variation and Textual Categorisation (LVTC; University of Vigo; Director: Javier Pérez Guerra),
- Methods and Materials for the Teaching and Acquisition of Foreign Languages (MMTAFL, University of Vigo; Director: Marta Dahlgren-Thorsell).
ELC2 was honoured to receive three internationally recognised plenary speakers: Terence Odlin, from Ohio State University, Geoff Thompson, from the University of Liverpool, and María José López-Couso, from the University of Santiago de Compostela.
The conference delegates came from many different universities, located both in Spain and elsewhere. There were speakers from the Spanish universities of Santiago de Compostela, Vigo, Seville, Pablo de Olavide in Seville, and the Balearic Islands; the international universities were represented by Hong Kong, Poitiers, Bamberg, Freiburg, Essex, the University of Maria Curie-Skłodowska in Lublin and the American universities of Michigan at Ann Arbor and Louisiana at Lafayette. The various papers covered a wide range of topics: morphology, syntax, phonetics, lexis, semantics, pragmatics, Discourse Analysis, Second Language Acquisition, and many others.
The English Linguistics Circle was also responsible for ELC1, a former edition of the International Postgraduate Conference on English Linguistics held in Santiago de Compostela in May 2008. A refereed volume containing a selection of the papers presented at ELC1 will be published as New trends and methodologies in applied English language research. Diachronic, diatopic and contrastive studies (Linguistic Insights Series; Bern: Peter Lang).

Workshop on the English Noun Phrase

2009-10-03T20:55:00.012+02:00

The First Vigo-Newcastle-Santiago-Leuven Workshop on ‘The Structure of the Noun Phrase in English: Synchronic and Diachronic Explorations’ (NP1) was held at the University of Vigo (Spain) on 2-3 October 2009. The objective of the workshop was to bring together researchers who are currently looking at the English NP from different points of view (theoretical, structural, functional, textual and descriptive). The ultimate aim was to approach aspects in the structure and distribution of English NPs which remain unsolved despite the enormous literature available on the nature of nouns and NPs.
The workshop was organized by the LVTC research team, in cooperation with the VLCG group (Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalisation) at the University of Santiago de Compostela, the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics in Newcastle, and the Functional Linguistics Leuven (FLL) research group.
This workshop was honoured to receive four internationally recognized plenary speakers: Douglas Biber, from Northern Arizona University, William Croft, from the University of New Mexico, Evelien Keizer, from the University of Amsterdam, and John Payne, from the University of Manchester.
The conference delegates came from many different universities, located both in Europe and elsewhere. There were speakers from the universities of Vienna, Osnabrück, Postdam, Lille 3, Perpignan, Paris 7, Helsinki, Geneva, London, Newcastle, Cambridge, Vigo, Leuven and the Kyung Hee University. The various papers presented covered a wide range of topics: morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, Typology, Historical Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, and some others.
The NP1 workshop was meant to be the first one in a series of scientific meetings fully devoted to the in-depth study of the English NP. In the coming years the Universities of Newcastle, Leuven and Santiago will host the following editions of the workshop.

A workshop on the methods and applications of corpus linguistic research methods, by Douglas Biber

2009-10-01T09:17:00.007+02:00

Prof Douglas Biber conducted a workshop on the methods and applications of corpus linguistic research methods.
CV: Prof Douglas Edward Biber is Regents' Professor at the English Department of Northern Arizona University. Previously he was appointed Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics in Southern California University. Prof Biber was visiting professor in Denmark, Japan, Chile, Germany, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, severla Universities in the US, etc. He was the principal investigator in projects on the diachronic relations among speech-based and written registers in English and Spanish, on the computational tagging and grammatical analysis of the Longman/Lancaster English Language Corpus, and on the construction and grammatical tagging of the TOEFL 2000 Spoken and Written Academic Language Corpus and the T2K-SWAL Corpus to develop diagnostic tools for listening and reading texts. As far as his publications are concerned, he is the author or co-author of more than a dozen books and has written around 150 articles and book chapters. Prof Biber is well-known in the scientific community and also in our research group LVTC for his design of a multidimensional multifactorial model of linguistic variation.
Abstract of the workshop: The workshop began with a conceptual overview of the research methods and goals of corpus linguistics, illustrating the kinds of analysis that are conducted from this perspective, and the surprising findings that emerge from corpus-based research, with case studies taken from the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. These case studies further illustrate the unreliability of intuitions and the centrality of register for descriptions of language use. In the second part of the workshop, he turned to a discussion of the major types of research designs in corpus-based studies. This section of the workshop focused on discussion of the different types of observations and variables found in corpus-based studies, and how those design parameters constrain the types of research questions that can be asked in a study. (Similarly, these design parameters determine the statistical techniques that can be appropriately used.) Finally, Prof Biber turned to a hands-on introduction to publicly available web-based corpora and corpus-analysis tools. Specifically, two corpora were introduced – the British National Corpus (BNC) and the MICASE Corpus.

Constructs and constructions

2009-05-26T22:02:00.005+02:00

Gert Webelhuth taught a seminar on "Sign-based Construction Grammar: an overview and application", by invitation of the LVTC research group, in which he introduced the philosophy underlying the constructional approaches and described Sign-based Construction Grammar.
CV: Gert Webelhuth is Professor of English linguistics at the Department of English in Göttingen. After completing an MA and a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Prof Webelhuth lectured in different institutions in the US, among others, UCLA, Maryland, Cornell, Wisconsin, Stanford and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He will soon be appointed as Full Professor of English linguistics at the University of Frankfurt. His research is focused on syntactic theory and analysis, in particular, the interface between syntax and semantics/discourse-text structure, predication, corpus linguistics, and psyco- and neurolinguistics. He is interested in the cognitive representation and the computation of linguistic form, meaning and use. Out of the list of his publications, let us mention his books Lexical and Constructional Aspects of Linguistic Explanation (1999, CSLI, co-edited by Jean-Pierre Koenig and Andreas Kathol), A Theory of Predicates (1998, Stanford: CSLI, co-authored by Farrell Ackerman), Government and Binding Theory and the Minimalist Program: Principles and Parameters in Syntactic Theory (1995, ed., Blackwell) and Principles and Parameters of Syntactic Saturation (1992, Oxford University Press).
Abstract of the seminar: Sign-based Construction Grammar (SBCG) is a new framework created at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. It combines the advantages of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar and Construction Grammar. The workshop presented an overview of SBCG without prerequisites and discuss its motivations as well as its relationship to transformational grammar. More information about the framework at http://lingo.stanford.edu/sag/papers/theo-syno.pdf.

Cartography of the English clause

2009-04-28T21:00:00.004+02:00

Liliane Haegeman conducted the seminar “Cartography, intervention and the left periphery in English”, in which she paid attention to the revision of Rizzi’s cartography as well as to consequences which the placement of adverbials has for the syntax of the clause.
CV: Prof Liliane Haegeman completed her BA and PhD degrees at the University of Ghent. After that, she became Full Professor at the Universities of, first, Geneva and, later, Charles de Gaulle (Lile III). Currently, she is Full Profesor at the English Department in Ghent. Prof Haegeman has taught courses which cover, among others, topics in English and general linguistics, syntactic theory, comparative syntax and the syntax of Germanic languages. In her research she tries to couple empirical data and syntactic theory in such a way that the former can either corroborate or refute findings which have been favoured by the theory of grammar. Her investigation has been focused mainly on dialect variation (with special reference to English and West Flemish, which is her native language), agreement properties of conjunctions, sentential negation, the expression of the possessor relation and register-based variation (especially ellipsis). Currently she is interested in the analysis of the structure of the left egde of the clause and the syntax of adverbials and its implication for the functional articulation or the “cartography” of the sentence. Liliane Haegeman has written and edited a number of specialised volumes in Routledge, Blackwell, Cambridge University Press, Mouton de Gruyter, Kluwer, Longman, etc. She is the author of more than 100 articles and book chapters in prestigious journals and publishing houses. She belongs to the editorial committees of, among others, Linguistic Aktuell/Linguistics Today, Lingua, Syntax and Linguistic Inquiry.
Abstract of the seminar: Starting from the idea that all structure is formed according to the X-bar format it was shown that the simple clause structure in terms of CP-IP-VP is insufficient to capture the empirical data of English. The lectures focused on the CP layer and provided arguments for decomposing CP into an articulated hierarchy of functional projections which encoded concepts related to information structure/discourse anchoring. After a general presenation of the articulated CP as proposed in Rizzi (1997), additional evidence was provided from English to support the proposal. The cartographic approach to clause structure has elaborated a highly articulated template of projections in the CP domain. However, the status of the template in linguistic theory may be questioned. In particular the question arises whether, for instance, the sequence Topic> Focus does not follow direction from Information Structure, old information preceding new information. Alternatively, the sequence can be made to follow from an enriched theory of intervention (Abels 2008, Haegeman 2008). In this respect, the status of the lower topic, following Focus, raises interesting questions. It will be shown that the availability of the lower topic in some languages and its absence in others can be derived from intervention effects. Some clause types seem to have a reduced left periphery; adverbial clauses are a case in point. Two approaches to account for this reduced left periphery were examined, one closely cartographic which postulates that the relevant domains are reduced and lack a particular stretch of the CP-layer, another which explores a theory of intervention to derive the observed patterns.

Functional Discourse Grammar: An Introduction

2009-04-21T20:00:00.012+02:00

Lachlan Mackenzie, from the VU University Amsterdam, conducted a five-hour seminar in which he presented a functional-typological approach to language.
CV details: Lachlan Mackenzie was initially trained in his native Scotland but his career was centred in the Netherlands, where he retains the position of Honorary Professor of Functional Linguistics. He has worked as a Consultant in Languages and Linguistics, with an experience of over 30 years. His skills and expertise are primarily in European languages, with a specialization in English linguistics. Throughout his career, he has actively collaborated with universities and research centres across Europe. He is now based in Portugal, working as a researcher at the Institute for Theoretical and Computational Linguistics (ILTEC) in Lisbon. His current investigation there focuses on the relation between Functional Discourse Grammar and dialogue.
Lachlan Mackenzie combines his research at the ILTEC with the work derived from his position of Research Manager of the Santiago-based international research programme SCIMITAR, a programme investigating the grammar-discourse interface from the perspective of language typology, information processing and language acquisition; with the editorial work of the major journal of functional linguistics, Functions of Language; and with a range of undertakings in Functional Discourse Grammar.
Lachlan Mackenzie has published extensively. Three of the latest titles deserve special mention:
Gómez-González, M.A., J.L. Mackenzie & E. González-Álvarez (2008). Introduction. In Gómez-González, M.A., J.L. Mackenzie & E. González-Álvarez (eds.), Languages and Cultures in Contrast and Comparison. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. xv-xxii.
Gómez-González, M.A., J.L. Mackenzie & E. González-Álvarez (2008). Introduction. In Gómez-González, M.A., J.L. Mackenzie & E. González-Álvarez (eds.), Current Trends in Contrastive Linguistics: Functional and Cognitive Perspectives. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. xv-xxii.
Hengeveld, K. & J.L. Mackenzie (2008). Functional Discourse Grammar: A Typologically-based Theory of Language Structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Abstract of the seminar: Functional Discourse Grammar is a functional-typological approach to language that views language as organised top-down. Four levels of organization are distinguished: interpersonal, representational, morphosyntactic and phonological. Each level is structured hierarchically into layers, taking the Discourse Act as the basic unit of analysis, which can be combined into higher-layer units and decomposed into smaller units. The four levels of analysis interact to render linguistic forms. These levels are linked to a conceptual, a contextual, and an output component. The theory tries to strike a balance between fuctionalism and formalism. This theory is contained in the 2008 book mentioned before, Functional Discourse Grammar: A Typologically-based Theory of Language Structure.

Old English morphology and databases

2009-01-13T21:00:00.006+01:00

Javier Martín Arista delivered the lecture "From the dictionary to the lexical database of Old English: theoretical, methodological and descriptive aspects" by invitation of the LVTC research group. In his talk, Dr Martín Arista discussed the theoretical, methodological and descriptive aspects involved in the compilation of the lexical database of Old English Nerthus (www.nerthusproject.com), and paid special attention to the role played by the units and processes of word-formation in the organization of the lexicon of an old Germanic language such as Old English. He also dealt with the methodological underpinning, including headword definition, database structure, field definition and relations, and raised several issues that relate to the questions of the graduality of word-formation processes and the directionality of derivation.
CV: Javier Martín Arista is associate professor at the University of La Rioja. He holds a PhD on SVO and Passive Order in English: Synchronic, Diachronic and Typological Perspectives (University of Zaragoza, 1994). He has been a visiting scholar at the Universities of Sheffield (1996), Pennsylvania (1999), SUNY Buffalo (2000) and Amsterdam (2001) and has delivered lectures by invitation at several European and American universities, including Newcastle, Strathclyde, Sheffield Hallam, Queen Mary-London, Copenhagen, SDU-Odense and Toronto. Dr Martín Arista has published more than fifty book chapters and articles in journals specialising in theoretical linguistics, English studies and diachronic studies (co-author of Nuevas Perspectivas en Gramática Funcional, 1999; co-editor of Lingüística Histórica Inglesa, 2001; co-editor of Deconstructing Constructions, 2009), and has supervised a number of doctoral dissertations in theoretical linguistics and Old English derivational morphology. He has taken part in many research projects in synchronic and diachronic linguistics, and is currently the leading researcher of the research Group in Functional Grammars at the University of La Rioja. Javier Martín Arista is editor of RæL-Revista Electrónica de Lingüística Aplicada.

On compounding and lexicalism; metrics

2008-11-28T21:26:00.004+01:00

Heinz Giegerich, from the University of Edinburgh, taught a five-hour seminar on various aspects of morphophonology and English metrics.
CV details: Heinz Giegerich arrived in Edinburgh in 1979 and has been Professor of English Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and English Language since 1997.
Since completing his own PhD in 1983, on the theory of Metrical Phonology in relation to German and English, he has supervised a number of PhD students and has taught extensively at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. His own research focuses on theories of phonological representation and derivation in relation to English and German. He has published a number of articles and books on English and German syllable structure, stress and rhythm within the theory of Metrical Phonology, as well as on the problem of constraining phonological derivations. More recently he has worked on the Lexical Morphology and Phonology of the two languages, developing the theory of 'base-driven lexical stratification'. His on-going resarch is increasingly concerned with morphology. Alongside 'real' research, he has for many years been interested in making the outcomes of research in English linguistics accessible to undergraduate students. He is currently preparing a long-overdue second edition of English Phonology (Cambridge University Press, 1992). For Edinburgh University Press he has founded (and is now General Editor of) the Edinburgh Textbooks on the English Language, a new series of introductory texts dealing with all major aspects of English Linguistics, and he has recently launched a new journal, Word Structure.
Abstract of the seminars:
27 November.- In these lectures, Giegerich looked at proposals to divide the grammar into two major modules – the syntax and the lexicon – and the latter into two ‘sub-modules’ or ‘strata’, in order to then analyse a number of phenomena that seem to straddle the divide between these modules – traditional ‘compounds’ and some Adjective-plus-Noun constructions not usually treated as compounds. To finish off, Giegerich discussed the generally assumed difference between compounds and phrases in terms of stress, and challenged the idea that compound stress is determined by structural geometry – “stress the right-hand element if and only if it branches”. He argued that these assumptions are wrong, and that phrases can have fore-stress or end-stress while compounds can have fore-stress or end-stress, in order to conclude that tree geometry has nothing to do with any of this, but the semantics does.
28 November.- The first lecture focused on the link between speech prosody (‘rhythm’) and verse prosody (‘metre’) in English. Giegerich showed that in English, accentual metres are ‘good’ and syllabic metres are ‘bad’, and that the principal characteristics of the successful verse forms in English derive from the fact that English is a stress-timed language. The second lecture focused on Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. Giegerich argued that, while most poems have two levels of interpretation – namely what the text says and what the poem ‘means’ – this particular poem has three. He showed that in Stopping there is a distinct level of interpretation containing what the text doesn’t and indeed refuses to say, and that the poem’s ‘meaning’ depends on this level.

On grammatical reanalysis

2008-05-23T18:37:00.005+02:00

Wim van der Wurff, from Newcastle University taught on "Grammatical reanalysis: conditions and consequences" in May 2008.
Cv details: Wim van der Wurff, who holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam, teaches English historical linguistics at the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics in Newcastle, and carries out research on diachronic syntax, grammaticalisation, tense/mood/aspect systems and also on other non-historical areas such as second language acquisition, academic writing or English in Europe. He has co-authored the book The syntax of early English and the "Syntax" chapter in A history of the English language, both published by Cambridge University Press. He has edited a special issue on word order in the history of English in the journal English Language and Linguistics (Cambridge University Press) as well as the recent volume Imperative clauses in Generative Grammar (John Benjamins).
Abstract of the workshop: Van der Wurff has discussed the nature of (various types of) reanalysis and the way it underlies some of the major grammatical changes that English has undergone in the early and modern periods. At a theoretical level, these analyses have been used to probe the interaction between language system and language use in change. More specifically, Wim van der Wurff dealt with the concept of reanalaysis and actualisation, the lexical item withall, the expression do nothing but + V, the easy-to-use construction, relativiser/demonstrative that, the change from OV to VO word order in the history of English, the decline of V2 and the role of double modals (might could) in some dialects of English.

Measuring ‘functionality’ in functional grammars

2007-12-11T13:00:00.001+01:00

Prof Christopher S. Butler lectured on "Criteria of adequacy for functional theories of language".
Cv details: Holding an MA (Oxford) and PhD in Linguistics (Nottingham), Prof Christopher S. Butler was Professor of Linguistics at the University College of Ripon and York St John (a constituent college of the University of Leeds) until 1998, when he became Honorary Professor at the Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Wales Swansea. His main research activities are: (i) theoretical and descriptive aspects of form, meaning and use, within the framework of a functional approach to languages, mainly English and Spanish. A major publication in this field is his (2003) Structure and Function: A Guide to Three Major Structural-Functional Theories. Part 1: Approaches to the Simplex Clause. Part 2: From Clause to Discourse and Beyond (John Benjamins); and (ii) the use of computational and statistical techniques for the study of English and Spanish, through the use of corpora (1985, Statistics in Linguistics. Blackwell).
Abstract of the lecture: The aims of this lecture have been to offer a view on what criteria of adequacy a functionalist theory of language should set for itself, to assess a small set of structural-functional theories with respect to such criteria, and to suggest some steps the functionalist community might take towards achieving higher standards of adequacy. Prof Butler began by reviewing the main claims which underlie functional theories, and then discussed a set of criteria of adequacy which can be derived from these claims. These criteria, however, are still subject to different interpretations, two distinctions -- between theories of grammar and theories of language, and between pattern and process models -- being particularly relevant to the debate. Having argued that we need theories of language which include process as well as pattern, Prof Butler characterised, in terms of the criteria of adequacy, a set of approaches which have been described as structural-functional, and then suggested that in order to attain higher levels of adequacy, functionalists need to be more open to work in theoretical approaches other than that which they themselves espouse. He looked at three types of relationship: between functional theories and cognitive and/or constructionist theories; between functionalism and formalism; and between theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics/ psychology of language. Finally, some problematic issues were raised for future discussion.

Linguistic change: diachronic parallelisms and sociolinguistic universals

2007-11-15T22:52:00.005+01:00

Prof. Juan Camilo Conde Silvestre, Professor of English Philology at the University of Murcia visited the LVTC research unit and lectured on linguistic change and historical sociolinguistics.
Cv details: Juan Camilo Conde works as a Full Professor of English Philology at the University of Murcia where he is in charge of courses on Medieval English language and literature, historical linguistics and history of the English language. Within these fields, his particular research interests are Old English literature and the application of sociolinguistic methods to the history of English. He has published widely on these matters, his most recent publication being Sociolingüística histórica (2007), the first handbook on historical sociolinguistics published in Spanish and aimed at a wide range of specialists and academics.
Abstract of the lecture: This lecture offered a systematic evaluation of the problems posed and the solutions presented within the larger field of historical linguistics by Historical Sociolinguistics (HS) and its most recent research mechanisms. More specifically, two issues were dealt with in detail: HS as a means to explain linguistic change and HS's contribution to the diffusion of the different linguistic changes that took place in the evolutionary stages of a given language. The issue of (socio)linguistic universals was also tackled.

Acquisition of English syntax by L3 learners: a generative perspective

2007-10-31T13:59:00.000+01:00

Prof. María del Pilar García Mayo has conducted a short seminar on the acquisition of English syntax by L3 learners.
Cv details: Prof María del Pilar García Mayo is Full Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the Universidad del País Vasco / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (Spain). She holds a B.A. in English Philology from the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Iowa (U.S.A). Her research interests include second language acquisition both from a generative and an interactionist perspective. Specifically, she has done research on the acquisition of English syntax by second and third language learners in instructional settings and on the relationship between input, interaction, negotiation and L2 learning, focus-on-form and task-based learning. Her work has been published in numerous scholarly journals including both at an international and a national level. Her work has also appeared in different edited collections published by Georgetown University Press, John Benjamins, Mouton de Gruyter and Multilingual Matters. She has co-edited two books (Age and the Acquisition of English as a Foreign Language, Multilingual Matters 2003; EUROSLA Yearbook 5, John Benjamins) and has been a guest co-editor of a special issue of the International Journal of Educational Research on the role of interaction in instructed language settings. She has also edited the book Investigating Tasks in Formal Language Settings (Multilingual Matters, 2007) and is the author of English for Specific Purposes: Discourse Analysis and Course Design (2000)
Abstract of the seminar: Prof García Mayo introduced the main theoretical assumptions of Universal Grammar within the field of the acquisition of first (L1), second (L2) and third (L3) languages. Once some methodological considerations were presented to the audience, María del Pilar focused on some syntactic aspects evinced by spoken and written productions included in the database which is being developed by her research unit at UPV/EHU, namely negation, long-distance relativisation, pronominal reduplications, verbal declension, etc. The database comprises material produced by Basque-speaking learners of Spanish (L2) and English (L3).

Gradience in the inventory of grammatical categories in English

2007-06-23T21:16:00.000+02:00

Prof Bas Aarts (Professor of English Linguistics and Director of the Survey of English Usage at the Department of English Language and Literature, University College London) kindly accepted our invitation to conduct a seminar on "Mixed constructions in English" in May 2007.
Cv details: After completing a BA and an MA at the University of Utrecht, and an MA and a PhD in English Linguistics at the University of London, Bas Aarts entered the Department of English Language and Literature, University College London, where he was appointed Professor of English Linguistics in 2003. Since January 1997 Bas Aarts has been the Director of the Survey of English Usage, an internationally recognised and highly regarded centre of excellence for research in the area of English language and linguistics, founded by Prof Randolph Quirk in 1959. The book Exploring natural languge: working with the British component of the International Corpus of English, on the ICE-GB project, which was completed under Prof Aarts’ leadership, was co-authored by Gerald Nelson, Sean Wallis and himself and in 2002. Bas Aarts is a founding editor of the scholarly journal English Language and Linguistics (Cambridge University Press). He is also a member of the editorial board of Studies in English Language (Cambridge University Press). Well-known are his monograph Small clauses in English: the nonverbal types (1992, Mouton de Gruyter) as well as the collective volumes, which he has co-edited, Fuzzy grammar: a reader (2004, Oxford University Press) and The handbook of English linguistics (2006, Blackwell). His textbook English syntax and argumentation (1997, 2nd ed 2001, Palgrave Macmillan) is used in many Universities around the world.
Abstract of the seminar: The course focused on the phenomenon in English where constructions display properies of more than one grammatical pattern. Three types of mixings were distinguished and discussed in detail, namely mergers, blends and fusions. Prof Aarts argued that mergers are ‘on the hoof’ coinages, while blends and fusions can be dealt with in terms of constructional gradience. During this seminar, Prof Aarts described the model of gradience developed in Aarts (2007) to deal with blends and fusions.
[Reference
Aarts, Bas (2007) Syntactic gradience: the nature of grammatical indeterminacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.]

Prof Hubert Cuyckens lectured on diachronic clausal complementation

2006-11-30T16:21:00.000+01:00

Prof Hubert Cuyckens, professor of English language and linguistics at the University of Leuven (Functional Linguistics Leuven Research Group), visited the LVTC research unit and taught the research seminar "Aspect of clause complementation in English" at the University of Vigo in November 2006.
Cv details: Hubert Cuyckens studied Germanic Languages (Dutch and English), with a specialization in linguistics at the University of Antwerp. After obtaining his MA in 1979, he worked as a research fellow of the National Fund of Scientific Research and then as a teaching assistant at the University of Antwerp. He completed his PhD in 1991, and stayed on at the University of Antwerp combining his research into the semantics of prepositions with an almost full-time job as a teacher of English. In 1997-98, he spent one year at the University of Hamburg as a Humboldt Research Fellow. Since October 1998, he has held a tenured appointment at the University of Leuven as a professor of English language and linguistics. His recent research and teaching is mainly concerned with issues in the diachrony of English, from a cognitive-functional and usage-based perspective. Hubert Cuyckens is the (co-)editor of several volumes in the domains of lexical semantics, cognitive linguistics, and adpositions. He is co-editor (with Dirk Geeraerts) of (2007) The Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics.
Abstract of the seminar: This seminar dealt with the distribution of complement constructions (CCs) involving to-infinitives, gerunds and that-clauses in the various periods of the history of English (from Old English to Present-Day English) and looked for the factors determining this distribution. It provided an account for the change and variation in CC distribution patterns from a diachronic perspective, thus going beyond the synchronic, primarily semantically based accounts mainly advocated in the cognitive-linguistic paradigm. It was also shown that the distribution of CCs at any stage of the history of English (including Present-Day English) is motivated by the interplay of various factors, with semantic motivation constituting only one factor, albeit not the least important one). Specific topics included:
- aspects of the emergence and diffusion of the for...to-infinitive
- adjective complementation
- that-clauses and gerundives compared
- the diffusion of gerunds in Late Modern English.

Prof Adele E. Goldberg taught on Construction Grammar at the research unit

2006-05-12T17:45:00.000+02:00

Prof Adele E. Goldberg was invited by LVTC to teach a seminar on Construction Grammar and to lecture on "Constructions: The Nature of Generalizations in Language" at the Faculty of Philology and Translation in Vigo in May 2006. [Watch the lecture...]
Cv details: Professor of Linguistics at the University of Princeton, Adele E. Goldberg obtained her PhD in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently Editor-in-Chief of Cognitive Linguistics (Mouton de Gruyter) and has been the Associate Editor of Language (Linguistic Society of America) from 2002 to 2005. Well-known are her monographs Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure (1995, University of Chicago Press) and Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language (2006, Oxford University Press).
Abstract of the seminar: This course emphasized the commonalities among words, idioms and more abstract syntactic patterns in that all are pairings of form and function. This emphasis allows us to draw many parallels between language and other cognitive processes such as categorization, parallels that in turn raise the issue of whether language may emerge from a combination of general cognitive abilities, without requiring a unique language faculty. We ask: How do children generalize beyond what they hear in order to learn their rich and complex knowledge of language? How can we explain the fact that there exist generalizations that hold across languages? Specific contents:
1. Exemplars, prototypes, extensions, metaphor
2. Surface generalizations
3. How and why constructions are learned
4. Explaining generalizations: island constraints and scope, crosslinguistic generalizations in argument realization.
A new theoretical approach to language has emerged that allows linguistic observations about form-meaning pairings constructions -- to be stated directly, providing long-standing traditions with a framework that allows both generalizations and exceptional cases to be accounted for fully. Constructions, including morphemes or words, idioms, partially lexically filled and fully abstract phrasal patterns, are understood to be learned on the basis of the input together with general cognitive mechanisms. An emphasis is placed on subtle aspects of construal and of surface form. Cross-linguistic generalizations are captured by appeal to general cognitive constraints together with the functions of the constructions involved.

Prof Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza, metaphors and metonymies

2006-04-30T22:35:00.000+02:00

Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez stayed in April 2006 at the LVTC research unit and delivered a seminar on "New Developments in Cognitive Model Theory".
Cv details: Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez is Professor of English Philology at the University of La Rioja. His teaching and research interests are focused on S.C. Dik’s Functional Grammar and, more recently, on cognitive modelling approaches. Among an extensive list of publications, one would underline his monographs Introducción a la Teoría Cognitiva de la Metonimia (1999, Método) and Metonymy, Grammar, and Communication (2002, Comares, co-authored by J.L. Otal Campo).
Contents of the seminar: 1. Theoretical preliminaries. Idealized Cognitive Models. Operational and non-operational models. Conceptual prominence. Cognitive operations. 2. Classifying metaphor and metonymy. Perspectives and criteria. 3. Constraints on metaphor and metonymy: The Extended Invariance, Correlation and Mapping Enforcement principles. 4. Conceptual interaction and conceptual integration. Metonymic chains. The Combined Input Hypothesis. 5. Levels of description. Primary, high and low level models. 6. Cognitive models and grammar. High-level metaphor, high level metonymy and grammatical processes. 7. Metonymy and anaphora. The Domain Availability Principle. Domain Precedence. Domain Combinability. The Constraint on Metonymy Anaphora. 8. Situational and non-situational models. Pragmatic inferencing and operational models. Illocutionary constructions.