Ever since Aristotle and Plato ("The Categories"; "Cratylus"), linguists have considered language to be the pairing of form (sounds or gestures or written strings) and meaning. This is true for all meaningful linguistic units from morphemes, through words, phrases and sentences, to discourse. Generally speaking, semantics is…

This paper argues against the assumption that Spanish--and more generally Romance--imperfective past (IMP) is an intrinsically anaphoric tense. It is a widely accepted view that IMP requires a temporal discourse antecedent to be licensed. My aim is to show that such requirement is not actually in force when IMP combines with a stative/atelic…

Semantic variables enable L2 researchers and materials creators to quantify and control the effects of meaning on cognition. However, in recent years, many variables have been normed and published. Parsing the methods employed in norming this myriad of variables and which disparate theories informed their creation can be an opaque and arduous…

Scholars of language development have long been challenged to understand the development of functional categories. Traditionally, it was assumed that children's language development initially relies on lexical elements, while functional elements become accessible only at later periods; and that it is lexical growth which bootstraps grammatical…

Perceptive verbs have important function, especially in Cognitive Linguistics perspective, because these verbs are directly related to real experience. Cognitive linguistics focuses on the study of the relationship between language, mind, and socio-physical experience. Thus, this paper discusses how the lexical semantic characteristics…

This commentary critiques Ambridge's radical exemplar model of language acquisition using research from the Longitudinal Study of Early Language, which has tracked the language development of 30+ children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) since 2002. This research has demonstrated that the children's capacity for abstraction at the grammatical…

This paper provides an overview of the design and motivation for creating the Social Cognition Parallax Interview Corpus (SCOPIC), an open-ended, accessible corpus that balances the need for language-specific annotation with typologically-calibrated markup. SCOPIC provides richly annotated data, focusing on functional categories relevant to social…

Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and…

Children acquire argument structure through distributional evidence, but how does this interacts with event semantics and existing verb knowledge? The current study compares verb learning in adult speakers of Japanese (where lexical causatives span wider semantic categories) and English (where alternation is more restricted). In the Fully…

One of the fundamental issues for a language is its capacity to express argument structure unambiguously. This study presents evidence for the emergence and the incremental development of these basic mechanisms in a newly developing language, Central Taurus Sign Language. Our analyses identify universal patterns in both the emergence and…

This study has two goals. First, we present much-needed empirical linguistic data and systematic analyses on the spatial semantic systems in English and Korean, two languages that have been extensively compared to date in the debate on spatial language and spatial cognition. We conduct our linguistic investigation comprehensively, encompassing the…

A particular status of the English language as the language of international communication and connections between the nearly related English and German languages resulted in the emergence of many interlingual borrowings in the Modern English and German language vocabularies. The paper aims to consider the functioning of borrowings (loanwords) in…

Interpretation is the process by which we find meaning in the things in the world around us: clouds on the horizon, bones, street signs, hairbrushes, uniforms, paintings, letters, and utterances. But where does that meaning come from and on what basis are we justified in saying a particular meaning is the right meaning? Drawing from debates in the…

This article dwells upon the basic unit of cognitive linguistics, which is a concept. Firstly, we provide an overview of major scientific works written by foreign linguists who pay attention to special aspects and lines of research. Secondly, we analyse conclusions on modern problems in linguistics that are drawn in cognitological studies…

The present paper investigates semantics of human body part names (BPN) in languages of different structure. The lexemes under study are characterised by a high level of polysemy, frequent occurrence and primary role in the processes of world perception and categorisation. The empirical data comprise 438 lexemes (expressing 1438 meanings), which…