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211 Research Topics in Linguistics To Get Top Grades

Many people find it hard to decide on their linguistics research topics because of the assumed complexities involved. They struggle to choose easy research paper topics for English language too because they think it could be too simple for a university or college level certificate.

All that you need to learn about Linguistics and English is sprawled across syntax, phonetics, morphology, phonology, semantics, grammar, vocabulary, and a few others. To easily create a top-notch essay or conduct a research study, you can consider this list of research topics in English language below for your university or college use. Note that you can fine-tune these to suit your interests.

Linguistics Research Paper Topics

If you want to study how language is applied and its importance in the world, you can consider these Linguistics topics for your research paper. They are:

• An analysis of romantic ideas and their expression amongst French people
• An overview of the hate language in the course against religion
• Identify the determinants of hate language and the means of propagation
• Evaluate a literature and examine how Linguistics is applied to the understanding of minor languages
• Consider the impact of social media in the development of slangs
• An overview of political slang and its use amongst New York teenagers
• Examine the relevance of Linguistics in a digitalized world
• Analyze foul language and how it’s used to oppress minors
• Identify the role of language in the national identity of a socially dynamic society
• Attempt an explanation to how the language barrier could affect the social life of an individual in a new society
• Discuss the means through which language can enrich cultural identities
• Examine the concept of bilingualism and how it applies in the real world
• Analyze the possible strategies for teaching a foreign language
• Discuss the priority of teachers in the teaching of grammar to non-native speakers
• Choose a school of your choice and observe the slang used by its students: analyze how it affects their social lives
• Attempt a critical overview of racist languages
• What does endangered language means and how does it apply in the real world?
• A critical overview of your second language and why it is a second language
• What are the motivators of speech and why are they relevant?
• Analyze the difference between the different types of communications and their significance to specially-abled persons
• Give a critical overview of five literature on sign language
• Evaluate the distinction between the means of language comprehension between an adult and a teenager
• Consider a native American group and evaluate how cultural diversity has influenced their language
• Analyze the complexities involved in code-switching and code-mixing
• Give a critical overview of the importance of language to a teenager
• Attempt a forensic overview of language accessibility and what it means
• What do you believe are the means of communications and what are their uniqueness?
• Attempt a study of Islamic poetry and its role in language development
• Attempt a study on the role of Literature in language development
• Evaluate the Influence of metaphors and other literary devices in the depth of each sentence
• Identify the role of literary devices in the development of proverbs in any African country
• Cognitive Linguistics: analyze two pieces of Literature that offers a critical view of perception
• Identify and analyze the complexities in unspoken words
• Expression is another kind of language: discuss
• Identify the significance of symbols in the evolution of language
• Discuss how learning more than a single language promote cross-cultural developments
• Analyze how the loss of a mother tongue affect the language Efficiency of a community
• Critically examine how sign language works
• Using literature from the medieval era, attempt a study of the evolution of language
• Identify how wars have led to the reduction in the popularity of a language of your choice across any country of the world
• Critically examine five Literature on why accent changes based on environment
• What are the forces that compel the comprehension of language in a child
• Identify and explain the difference between the listening and speaking skills and their significance in the understanding of language
• Give a critical overview of how natural language is processed
• Examine the influence of language on culture and vice versa
• It is possible to understand a language even without living in that society: discuss
• Identify the arguments regarding speech defects
• Discuss how the familiarity of language informs the creation of slangs
• Explain the significance of religious phrases and sacred languages
• Explore the roots and evolution of incantations in Africa

Sociolinguistic Research Topics

You may as well need interesting Linguistics topics based on sociolinguistic purposes for your research. Sociolinguistics is the study and recording of natural speech. It’s primarily the casual status of most informal conversations. You can consider the following Sociolinguistic research topics for your research:

• What makes language exceptional to a particular person?
• How does language form a unique means of expression to writers?
• Examine the kind of speech used in health and emergencies
• Analyze the language theory explored by family members during dinner
• Evaluate the possible variation of language based on class
• Evaluate the language of racism, social tension, and sexism
• Discuss how Language promotes social and cultural familiarities
• Give an overview of identity and language
• Examine why some language speakers enjoy listening to foreigners who speak their native language
• Give a forensic analysis of his the language of entertainment is different to the language in professional settings
• Give an understanding of how Language changes
• Examine the Sociolinguistics of the Caribbeans
• Consider an overview of metaphor in France
• Explain why the direct translation of written words is incomprehensible in Linguistics
• Discuss the use of language in marginalizing a community
• Analyze the history of Arabic and the culture that enhanced it
• Discuss the growth of French and the influences of other languages
• Examine how the English language developed and its interdependence on other languages
• Give an overview of cultural diversity and Linguistics in teaching
• Challenge the attachment of speech defect with disability of language listening and speaking abilities
• Explore the uniqueness of language between siblings
• Explore the means of making requests between a teenager and his parents
• Observe and comment on how students relate with their teachers through language
• Observe and comment on the communication of strategy of parents and teachers
• Examine the connection of understanding first language with academic excellence

Language Research Topics

Numerous languages exist in different societies. This is why you may seek to understand the motivations behind language through these Linguistics project ideas. You can consider the following interesting Linguistics topics and their application to language:

• What does language shift mean?
• Discuss the stages of English language development?
• Examine the position of ambiguity in a romantic Language of your choice
• Why are some languages called romantic languages?
• Observe the strategies of persuasion through Language
• Discuss the connection between symbols and words
• Identify the language of political speeches
• Discuss the effectiveness of language in an indigenous cultural revolution
• Trace the motivators for spoken language
• What does language acquisition mean to you?
• Examine three pieces of literature on language translation and its role in multilingual accessibility
• Identify the science involved in language reception
• Interrogate with the context of language disorders
• Examine how psychotherapy applies to victims of language disorders
• Study the growth of Hindi despite colonialism
• Critically appraise the term, language erasure
• Examine how colonialism and war is responsible for the loss of language
• Give an overview of the difference between sounds and letters and how they apply to the German language
• Explain why the placement of verb and preposition is different in German and English languages
• Choose two languages of your choice and examine their historical relationship
• Discuss the strategies employed by people while learning new languages
• Discuss the role of all the figures of speech in the advancement of language
• Analyze the complexities of autism and its victims
• Offer a linguist approach to language uniqueness between a Down Syndrome child and an autist
• Express dance as a language
• Express music as a language
• Express language as a form of language
• Evaluate the role of cultural diversity in the decline of languages in South Africa
• Discuss the development of the Greek language
• Critically review two literary texts, one from the medieval era and another published a decade ago, and examine the language shifts

Linguistics Essay Topics

You may also need Linguistics research topics for your Linguistics essays. As a linguist in the making, these can help you consider controversies in Linguistics as a discipline and address them through your study. You can consider:

• The connection of sociolinguistics in comprehending interests in multilingualism
• Write on your belief of how language encourages sexism
• What do you understand about the differences between British and American English?
• Discuss how slangs grew and how they started
• Consider how age leads to loss of language
• Review how language is used in formal and informal conversation
• Discuss what you understand by polite language
• Discuss what you know by hate language
• Evaluate how language has remained flexible throughout history
• Mimicking a teacher is a form of exercising hate Language: discuss
• Body Language and verbal speech are different things: discuss
• Language can be exploitative: discuss
• Do you think language is responsible for inciting aggression against the state?
• Can you justify the structural representation of any symbol of your choice?
• Religious symbols are not ordinary Language: what are your perspective on day-to-day languages and sacred ones?
• Consider the usage of language by an English man and someone of another culture
• Discuss the essence of code-mixing and code-switching
• Attempt a psychological assessment on the role of language in academic development
• How does language pose a challenge to studying?
• Choose a multicultural society of your choice and explain the problem they face
• What forms does Language use in expression?
• Identify the reasons behind unspoken words and actions
• Why do universal languages exist as a means of easy communication?
• Examine the role of the English language in the world
• Examine the role of Arabic in the world
• Examine the role of romantic languages in the world
• Evaluate the significance of each teaching Resources in a language classroom
• Consider an assessment of language analysis
• Why do people comprehend beyond what is written or expressed?
• What is the impact of hate speech on a woman?
• Do you believe that grammatical errors are how everyone’s comprehension of language is determined?
• Observe the Influence of technology in language learning and development
• Which parts of the body are responsible for understanding new languages
• How has language informed development?
• Would you say language has improved human relations or worsened it considering it as a tool for violence?
• Would you say language in a black populous state is different from its social culture in white populous states?
• Give an overview of the English language in Nigeria
• Give an overview of the English language in Uganda
• Give an overview of the English language in India
• Give an overview of Russian in Europe
• Give a conceptual analysis on stress and how it works
• Consider the means of vocabulary development and its role in cultural relationships
• Examine the effects of Linguistics in language
• Present your understanding of sign language
• What do you understand about descriptive language and prescriptive Language?

List of Research Topics in English Language

You may need English research topics for your next research. These are topics that are socially crafted for you as a student of language in any institution. You can consider the following for in-depth analysis:

• Examine the travail of women in any feminist text of your choice
• Examine the movement of feminist literature in the Industrial period
• Give an overview of five Gothic literature and what you understand from them
• Examine rock music and how it emerged as a genre
• Evaluate the cultural association with Nina Simone’s music
• What is the relevance of Shakespeare in English literature?
• How has literature promoted the English language?
• Identify the effect of spelling errors in the academic performance of students in an institution of your choice
• Critically survey a university and give rationalize the literary texts offered as Significant
• Examine the use of feminist literature in advancing the course against patriarchy
• Give an overview of the themes in William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”
• Express the significance of Ernest Hemingway’s diction in contemporary literature
• Examine the predominant devices in the works of William Shakespeare
• Explain the predominant devices in the works of Christopher Marlowe
• Charles Dickens and his works: express the dominating themes in his Literature
• Why is Literature described as the mirror of society?
• Examine the issues of feminism in Sefi Atta’s “Everything Good Will Come” and Bernadine Evaristos’s “Girl, Woman, Other”
• Give an overview of the stylistics employed in the writing of “Girl, Woman, Other” by Bernadine Evaristo
• Describe the language of advertisement in social media and newspapers
• Describe what poetic Language means
• Examine the use of code-switching and code-mixing on Mexican Americans
• Examine the use of code-switching and code-mixing in Indian Americans
• Discuss the influence of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” on satirical literature
• Examine the Linguistics features of “Native Son” by Richard Wright
• What is the role of indigenous literature in promoting cultural identities
• How has literature informed cultural consciousness?
• Analyze five literature on semantics and their Influence on the study
• Assess the role of grammar in day to day communications
• Observe the role of multidisciplinary approaches in understanding the English language
• What does stylistics mean while analyzing medieval literary texts?
• Analyze the views of philosophers on language, society, and culture

English Research Paper Topics for College Students

For your college work, you may need to undergo a study of any phenomenon in the world. Note that they could be Linguistics essay topics or mainly a research study of an idea of your choice. Thus, you can choose your research ideas from any of the following:

• The concept of fairness in a democratic Government
• The capacity of a leader isn’t in his or her academic degrees
• The concept of discrimination in education
• The theory of discrimination in Islamic states
• The idea of school policing
• A study on grade inflation and its consequences
• A study of taxation and Its importance to the economy from a citizen’s perspectives
• A study on how eloquence lead to discrimination amongst high school students
• A study of the influence of the music industry in teens
• An Evaluation of pornography and its impacts on College students
• A descriptive study of how the FBI works according to Hollywood
• A critical consideration of the cons and pros of vaccination
• The health effect of sleep disorders
• An overview of three literary texts across three genres of Literature and how they connect to you
• A critical overview of “King Oedipus”: the role of the supernatural in day to day life
• Examine the novel “12 Years a Slave” as a reflection of servitude and brutality exerted by white slave owners
• Rationalize the emergence of racist Literature with concrete examples
• A study of the limits of literature in accessing rural readers
• Analyze the perspectives of modern authors on the Influence of medieval Literature on their craft
• What do you understand by the mortality of a literary text?
• A study of controversial Literature and its role in shaping the discussion
• A critical overview of three literary texts that dealt with domestic abuse and their role in changing the narratives about domestic violence
• Choose three contemporary poets and analyze the themes of their works
• Do you believe that contemporary American literature is the repetition of unnecessary themes already treated in the past?
• A study of the evolution of Literature and its styles
• The use of sexual innuendos in literature
• The use of sexist languages in literature and its effect on the public
• The disaster associated with media reports of fake news
• Conduct a study on how language is used as a tool for manipulation
• Attempt a criticism of a controversial Literary text and why it shouldn’t be studied or sold in the first place

Finding Linguistics Hard To Write About?

With these topics, you can commence your research with ease. However, if you need professional writing help for any part of the research, you can scout here online for the best research paper writing service.

There are several expert writers on ENL hosted on our website that you can consider for a fast response on your research study at a cheap price.

As students, you may be unable to cover every part of your research on your own. This inability is the reason you should consider expert writers for custom research topics in Linguistics approved by your professor for high grades.

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Top content, bsc / msc thesis suggestions.

Here's a number of proposed areas for thesis work in Bachelor or Master theses. These are areas in which the researchers of the CL Group are actively involved. But the list is of course not complete, and possible topics are described only in part and only very roughly. In case your interest is in language and cognition and you would like to write your thesis in this area, just come along and talk to one of us — but do not come a week before you want to start your thesis. You should get in touch with us at least one full semester earlier, so that we can advise you about suitable classes that lead up to your thesis.

You may also want to look at the list of completed BSc and MSc theses to get an idea of possible topics and you may find more information on some of the topics by looking at the lists of publications on the home pages of the members of the CL staff.

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A generalizable framework for measuring emotion's role in social decision-making

A Systematic Investigation of Feature-Based Visual Learning: Mechanisms and Application

A visual model of collective behavior in crowds

Accent Perception and Adaptation During Lexical Access: Expand, Shift, or Pathway

Action Training Facilitates Perception and Cognition

Ad hoc color–concept mapping and interpreting visual representations

Adults’ and Children’s Sampling Strategy in Active Function Learning

Age-Related Changes in Bottom-Up and Top-Down Processing Mediating Object Recognition

Aging Effects on Task-Evoked Pupillary Responses

An Online Behavioral Research Paradigm Using Amazon Mechanical Turk, JSPsych & PsiTurk: A Pilot Study Assessing Hierarchical Abstract Sequential Processing

Anaphoric Expressions in A'ingae

Are You 'Shore' It Looks Farther Away: Does the Energetic Cost of Walking On Sand Influence Perception of the Spatial Layout or the Affordance for Action?

Attractor Dynamics in Large Scale Recurrent Neural Networks

Behavioral opportunism: Neural and behavioral adaptations to adverse early life environments

Bottom-Up and Top-Down Processes Underlying LC-NA System Activity Revealed by Simultaneous Pupillometry and EEG

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Can you follow your friends? Effects of ensemble averaging, attention, and grouping when following a crowd.

Categorizing Dogs’ Real World Visual Statistics

Children's Selective Learning Based on Informants’ Informativeness

Cognitive Control under Reward and Penalty: Mechanisms Underlying Variability within and across Individuals

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• Automatic Analysis of Epistemic Stance-Taking in Academic English Writing: A Systemic Functional Approach  Eguchi, Masaki ( University of Oregon , 2024-01-10 ) Existing linguistic textual measures that investigate features of academic writing often focus on lexis, syntax, and cohesion, despite writing skills being considered more complex and multifaceted (e.g., Sparks et al., ...
• Empirical Foundations of Socio-Indexical Structure: Inquiries in Corpus Sociophonetics and Perceptual Learning  Gunter, Kaylynn ( University of Oregon , 2024-01-09 ) Speech is highly variable and systematic, governed by the internal linguistic system and socio-indexical factors. The systematic relationship of socio-indexical factors and variable phonetic forms, referred to here as ...
• Information Management in Isaan Storytelling  Raksachat, Milntra ( University of Oregon , 2024-01-09 ) This study is an investigation of information packaging or information structure properties associated with selected productive morphosyntactic constructions in Isaan narrative texts. The description and analysis of ...
• Case and Gender Loss in Germanic, Romance, and Balkan Sprachbund Languages  Alhazmi, Mofareh ( University of Oregon , 2023-03-24 ) My dissertation investigates the loss of morphological case and grammatical gender in the Germanic, Romance, and Balkan Sprachbund languages. Crucial language-internal and language-external motivations are considered. To ...
• Influences on Expert Intelligibility Judgments of School-age Children's Speech  Potratz, Jill ( University of Oregon , 2023-03-24 ) Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) make impressionistic intelligibility judgments as part of an evaluation of children for speech sound disorders. Despite the lack of formalization, it is an important measure of choice ...
• Factors that affect generalization of adaptation  Lee, Dae-yong ( University of Oregon , 2023-03-24 ) As there is a growing population of non-native speakers worldwide, facilitating communication involving native and non-native speakers has become increasingly important. While one way to help communication involving native ...
• The Chepang language: Phonology, Nominal and Verbal morphology - synchrony and diachrony of the varieties of the Lothar and Manahari Rivers  Pons, Marie-Caroline ( University of Oregon , 2022-10-26 ) N/A
• L2 Motivation in Language Revitalization Practice  Taylor-Adams, Allison ( University of Oregon , 2022-10-26 ) This dissertation investigates the initial and ongoing motivations of language revitalization practitioners. This study extends our understandings of language revitalization from the programmatic and sociological levels ...
• Indigenous Methodologies in Linguistics: A Case Study of Nuu-wee-ya' Language Revitalization  Hall, Jaeci ( University of Oregon , 2021-11-23 ) Doing linguistic research for the purpose of language revitalization, academic inclusion, and social justice fundamentally changes the perspective, questions, and goals of the work. Framing this research in a traditional ...
• Factors affecting the incidental formation of novel suprasegmental categories  Wright, Jonathan ( University of Oregon , 2021-11-23 ) Humans constantly use their senses to categorize stimuli in their environment. They develop categories for stimuli when they are young and constantly add to existing categories and learn novel categories throughout their ...
• Production and Perception of Native and Non-native Speech Enhancements  Kato, Misaki ( University of Oregon , 2020-12-08 ) One important factor that contributes to successful speech communication is an individual’s ability to speak more clearly when their listeners do not understand their speech. Though native talkers are able to implement ...
• Contingency, Contiguity, and Capacity: On the Meaning of the Instrumental Case Marking in Copular Predicative Constructions in Russian  Tretiak, Valeriia ( University of Oregon , 2020-12-08 ) This study investigates the use of the Instrumental case marking in copular predicative constructions in Russian. The study endeavors to explain why the case marking whose prototypical meaning cross-linguistically is that ...
• Towards Modelling Pausing Patterns in Adult Narrative Speech  Kallay, Jeffrey ( University of Oregon , 2020-12-08 ) The study that is the focus of this dissertation had 2 primary goals: 1) quantify systematic physiological, linguistic and cognitive effects on pausing in narrative speech; 2) formalize a preliminary model of pausing ...
• Teaching Papa to Cha-Cha: How Change Magnitude, Temporal Contiguity, and Task Affect Alternation Learning  Smolek, Amy ( University of Oregon , 2020-02-27 ) In this dissertation, we investigate how speakers produce wordforms they may not have heard before. Paradigm Uniformity (PU) is the cross-linguistic bias against stem changes, particularly large changes. We propose the ...
• Verbal Morphology of Amdo Tibetan  Tribur, Zoe ( University of Oregon , 2020-02-27 ) This dissertation describes the functional and structural properties of the Amdo Tibetan verb system. Amdo Tibetan (Tibetic, Trans-Himalayan) is a verb-final language, characterized by an elaborate system of post-verbal ...
• Investigating differential case marking in Sümi, a language of Nagaland, using language documentation and experimental methods  Teo, Amos ( University of Oregon , 2020-02-27 ) One goal in linguistics is to model how speakers use natural language to convey different kinds of information. In theories of grammar, two kinds of information: “who is doing what (and to whom)”, the technical term for ...
• Nominalization and Predication in Ut-Ma'in  Paterson, Rebecca ( University of Oregon , 2020-02-27 ) U̠t-Ma'in is a Kainji, East Benue-Congo language, spoken in northwestern Nigeria (ISO 639-3 code [gel]). This study contributes to our understanding of Benue-Congo languages by offering the first indepth look at nominalization ...
• Prosodic Prominence Perception, Regional Background, Ethnicity and Experience: Naive Perception of African American English and European American English  McLarty, Jason ( University of Oregon , 2020-02-27 ) Although much work has investigated various aspects of African American English (AAE), prosodic features of AAE have remained relatively underexamined (e.g. McLarty 2018; Thomas 2015). Studies have, however, identified ...
• A Historical Reconstruction of the Koman Language Family  Otero, Manuel ( University of Oregon , 2020-02-27 ) This dissertation is a historical-comparative reconstruction of the Koman family, a small group of languages spoken in what now constitutes the borderlands of Ethiopia, Sudan and South Sudan. Koman is comprised five living ...
• Accessibility, Language Production, and Language Change  Harmon, Zara ( University of Oregon , 2019-09-18 ) This dissertation explores the effects of frequency on the learning and use of linguistic constructions. The work examines the influence of frequency on form choice in production and meaning inference in comprehension and ...

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Cognitive Linguistics

• Online ISSN: 1613-3641
• Print ISSN: 0936-5907
• Type: Journal
• Language: English
• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• First published: March 10, 1990
• Publication Frequency: 4 Issues per Year
• Audience: institutes, libraries, linguists, literary scholars

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Linguistics and English Language PhD thesis collection

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This is a selection of some of the more recent theses from the department of Linguistics and English Language.

The material in this collection must be cited in line with the usual academic conventions. These theses are protected under full copyright law. You may download it for your own personal use only.

Recent Submissions

Information structure of complex sentences: an empirical investigation into at-issueness , 'ane end of an auld song': macro and micro perspectives on written scots in correspondence during the union of the parliaments debates , intervention, participation, perception: case studies of language activism in catalonia, norway & scotland , aspects of cross-variety dinka tonal phonology , attitudes and perceptions of saudi students towards their non-native emi instructors , explanatory mixed methods approach to the effects of integrating apology strategies: evidence from saudi arabic , multilingualism in later life: natural history & effects of language learning , first language attrition in late bilingualism: lexical, syntactic and prosodic changes in english-italian bilinguals , syntactic change during the anglicisation of scots: insights from the parsed corpus of scottish correspondence , causation is non-eventive , developmental trajectory of grammatical gender: evidence from arabic , copular clauses in malay: synchronic, diachronic, and typological perspectives , sentence processing in first language attrition: the interplay of language, experience and cognitive load , choosing to presuppose: strategic uses of presupposition triggers , mechanisms underlying pre-school children’s syntactic, morphophonological and referential processing during language production , development and processing of non-canonical word orders in mandarin-speaking children , role of transparency in the acquisition of inflectional morphology: experimental studies testing exponence type using artificial language learning , disability and sociophonetic variation among deaf or hard-of-hearing speakers of taiwan mandarin , structural priming in the grammatical network: a study of english argument structure constructions , how language adapts to the environment: an evolutionary, experimental approach .

BYU ScholarsArchive

Home > Humanities > Linguistics > Theses and Dissertations

Linguistics Theses and Dissertations

Theses/dissertations from 2022 2022.

Temporal Fluency in L2 Self-Assessments: A Cross-Linguistic Study of Spanish, Portuguese, and French , Mandy Case

Biblical Hebrew as a Negative Concord Language , J. Bradley Dukes

Revitalizing the Russian of a Heritage Speaker , Aaron Jordan

Analyzing Patterns of Complexity in Pre-University L2 English Writing , Zachary M. Lambert

Prosodic Modeling for Hymn Translation , Michael Abraham Peck

Interpretive Language and Museum Artwork: How Patrons Respond to Depictions of Native American and White Settler Encounters--A Thematic Analysis , Holli D. Rogerson

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

Trademarks and Genericide: A Corpus and Experimental Approach to Understanding the Semantic Status of Trademarks , Richard B. Bevan

First and Second Language Use of Case, Aspect, and Tense in Finnish and English , Torin Kelley

Lexical Aspect in-sha Verb Chains in Pastaza Kichwa , Azya Dawn Ladd

Text-to-Speech Systems: Learner Perceptions of its Use as a Tool in the Language Classroom , Joseph Chi Man Mak

The Effects of Dynamic Written Corrective Feedback on the Accuracy and Complexity of Writing Produced by L2 Graduate Students , Lisa Rohm

Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions as Applied to Motivation in L2 Vocabulary Acquisition , Lindsay Michelle Stephenson

Linguistics of Russian Media During the 2016 US Election: A Corpus-Based Study , Devon K. Terry

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

Portuguese and Chinese ESL Reading Behaviors Compared: An Eye-Tracking Study , Logan Kyle Blackwell

Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions to Lower Test Anxiety , Asena Cakmakci

The Categorization of Ideophone-Gesture Composites in Quichua Narratives , Maria Graciela Cano

Ranking Aspect-Based Features in Restaurant Reviews , Jacob Ling Hang Chan

Praise in Written Feedback: How L2 Writers Perceive and Value Praise , Karla Coca

Evidence for a Typology of Christ in the Book of Esther , L. Clayton Fausett

Gender Vs. Sex: Defining Meaning in a Modern World through use of Corpora and Semantic Surveys , Mary Elizabeth Garceau

The attributive suffix in Pastaza Kichwa , Barrett Wilson Hamp

An Examination of Motivation Types and Their Influence on English Proficiency for Current High School Students in South Korean , Euiyong Jung

Experienced ESL Teachers' Attitudes Towards Using Phonetic Symbols in Teaching English Pronunciation to Adult ESL Students , Oxana Kodirova

Evidentiality, Epistemic Modality and Mirativity: The Case of Cantonese Utterance Particles Ge3, Laak3, and Lo1 , Ka Fai Law

Application of a Self-Regulation Framework in an ESL Classroom: Effects on IEP International Students , Claudia Mencarelli

Parsing an American Sign Language Corpus with Combinatory Categorial Grammar , Michael Albert Nix

An Exploration of Mental Contrasting and Social Networks of English Language Learners , Adam T. Pinkston

A Corpus-Based Study of the Gender Assignment of Nominal Anglicisms in Brazilian Portuguese , Taryn Marie Skahill

Developing Listening Comprehension in ESL Students at the Intermediate Level by Reading Transcripts While Listening: A Cognitive Load Perspective , Sydney Sohler

The Effect of Language Learning Experience on Motivation and Anxiety of Foreign Language Learning Students , Josie Eileen Thacker

Identifying Language Needs in Community-Based Adult ELLs: Findings from an Ethnography of Four Salvadoran Immigrants in the Western United States , Kathryn Anne Watkins

Theses/Dissertations from 2019 2019

Using Eye Tracking to Examine Working Memory and Verbal Feature Processing in Spanish , Erik William Arnold

Self-Regulation in Transition: A Case Study of Three English Language Learners at an IEP , Allison Wallace Baker

"General Conference talk": Style Variation and the Styling of Identity in Latter-day Saint General Conference Oratory , Stephen Thomas Betts

Implementing Mental Contrasting to Improve English Language Learner Social Networks , Hannah Trimble Brown

Comparing Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) Frequency Bands to Leveled Biology and History Texts , Lynne Crandall

A Comparison of Mobile and Computer Receptive Language ESL Tests , Aislin Pickett Davis

Yea, Yea, Nay, Nay: Uses of the Archaic, Biblical Yea in the Book of Mormon , Michael Edward De Martini

L1 and L2 Reading Behaviors by Proficiency Level: An English-Portuguese Eye-Tracking Study , Larissa Grahl

Immediate Repeated Reading has Positive Effects on Reading Fluency for English Language Learners: An Eye-tracking Study , Jennifer Hemmert Hansen

Perceptions of Malaysian English Teachers Regarding the Importation of Expatriate Native and Nonnative English-speaking Teachers , Syringa Joanah Judd

Sociocultural Identification with the United States and English Pronunciation Comprehensibility and Accent Among International ESL Students , Christinah Paige Mulder

The Effects of Repeated Reading on the Fluency of Intermediate-Level English-as-a-Second-Language Learners: An Eye-Tracking Study , Krista Carlene Rich

Verb Usage in Egyptian Movies, Serials, and Blogs: A Case for Register Variation , Michael G. White

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

Factors Influencing ESL Students' Selection of Intensive English Programs in the Western United States , Katie Briana Blanco

Pun Strategies Across Joke Schemata: A Corpus-Based Study , Robert Nishan Crapo

ESL Students' Reading Behaviors on Multiple-Choice Items at Differing Proficiency Levels: An Eye-Tracking Study , Juan M. Escalante Talavera

Backward Transfer of Apology Strategies from Japanese to English: Do English L1 Speakers Use Japanese-Style Apologies When Speaking English? , Candice April Flowers

Cultural Differences in Russian and English Magazine Advertising: A Pragmatic Approach , Emily Kay Furner

An Analysis of Rehearsed Speech Characteristics on the Oral Proficiency Interview—Computer (OPIc) , Gwyneth Elaine Gates

Predicting Speaking, Listening, and Reading Proficiency Gains During Study Abroad Using Social Network Metrics , Timothy James Hall

Navigating a New Culture: Analyzing Variables that Influence Intensive English Program Students' Cultural Adjustment Process , Sherie Lyn Kwok

Second Language Semantic Retrieval in the Bilingual Mind: The Case of Korean-English Expert Bilinguals , Janice Si-Man Lam

Evaluating the Effectiveness of a Korean Heritage-Speaking Interpreter , Yoonjoo Lee

Reading Idioms: A Comparative Eye-Tracking Study of Native English Speakers and Native Korean Speakers , Sarah Lynne Miner

Applying the Developmental Path of English Negation to the Automated Scoring of Learner Essays , Allen Travis Moore

Performance Self-Appraisal Calibration of ESL Students on a Proficiency Reading Test , Jodi Mikolajcik Petersen

Switch-Reference in Pastaza Kichwa , Alexander Harrison Rice

The Effects of Metacognitive Listening Strategy Instruction on ESL Learners' Listening Motivation , Corbin Kalanikiakahi Rivera

The Effects of Teacher Background on How Teachers Assess Native-Like and Nonnative-Like Grammar Errors: An Eye-Tracking Study , Wesley Makoto Schramm

Rubric Rating with MFRM vs. Randomly Distributed Comparative Judgment: A Comparison of Two Approaches to Second-Language Writing Assessment , Maureen Estelle Sims

Investigating the Perception of Identity Shift in Trilingual Speakers: A Case Study , Elena Vasilachi

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

Preparing Non-Native English Speakers for the Mathematical Vocabulary in the GRE and GMAT , Irina Mikhailovna Baskova

Eye Behavior While Reading Words of Sanskrit and Urdu Origin in Hindi , Tahira Carroll

An Acoustical Analysis of the American English /l, r/ Contrast as Produced by Adult Japanese Learners of English Incorporating Word Position and Task Type , Braden Paul Chase

The Rhetoric Revision Log: A Second Study on a Feedback Tool for ESL Student Writing , Natalie Marie Cole

Quizlet Flashcards for the First 500 Words of the Academic Vocabulary List , Emily R. Crandell

The Impact of Changing TOEFL Cut-Scores on University Admissions , Laura Michelle Decker

A Latent Class Analysis of American English Dialects , Stephanie Nicole Hedges

Comparing the AWL and AVL in Textbooks from an Intensive English Program , Michelle Morgan Hernandez

Faculty and EAL Student Perceptions of Writing Purposes and Challenges in the Business Major , Amy Mae Johnson

Multilingual Trends in Five London Boroughs: A Linguistic Landscape Approach , Shayla Ann Johnson

Nature or Nurture in English Academic Writing: Korean and American Rhetorical Patterns , Sunok Kim

Differences in the Motivations of Chinese Learners of English in Different (Foreign or Second Language) Contexts , Rui Li

Managing Dynamic Written Corrective Feedback: Perceptions of Experienced Teachers , Rachel A. Messenger

Spanish Heritage Bilingual Perception of English-Specific Vowel Contrasts , John B. Nielsen

Taking the "Foreign" Out of the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale , Jared Benjamin Sell

Creole Genesis and Universality: Case, Word Order, and Agreement , Gerald Taylor Snow

Idioms or Open Choice? A Corpus Based Analysis , Kaitlyn Alayne VanWagoner

Applying Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis to an Unrestricted Corpus: A Case Study in Indonesian and Malay Newspapers , Sara LuAnne White

Investigating the effects of Rater's Second Language Learning Background and Familiarity with Test-Taker's First Language on Speaking Test Scores , Ksenia Zhao

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

The Influence of Online English Language Instruction on ESL Learners' Fluency Development , Rebecca Aaron

The Effect of Prompt Accent on Elicited Imitation Assessments in English as a Second Language , Jacob Garlin Barrows

A Framework for Evaluating Recommender Systems , Michael Gabriel Bean

Program and Classroom Factors Affecting Attendance Patterns For Hispanic Participants In Adult ESL Education , Steven J. Carter

A Longitudinal Analysis of Adult ESL Speakers' Oral Fluency Gains , Kostiantyn Fesenko

Rethinking Vocabulary Size Tests: Frequency Versus Item Difficulty , Brett James Hashimoto

The Onomatopoeic Ideophone-Gesture Relationship in Pastaza Quichua , Sarah Ann Hatton

A Hybrid Approach to Cross-Linguistic Tokenization: Morphology with Statistics , Logan R. Kearsley

Getting All the Ducks in a Row: Towards a Method for the Consolidation of English Idioms , Ethan Michael Lynn

Expecting Excellence: Student and Teacher Attitudes Towards Choosing to Speak English in an IEP , Alhyaba Encinas Moore

Lexical Trends in Young Adult Literature: A Corpus-Based Approach , Kyra McKinzie Nelson

A Corpus-Based Comparison of the Academic Word List and the Academic Vocabulary List , Jacob Andrew Newman

A Self-Regulated Learning Inventory Based on a Six-Dimensional Model of SRL , Christopher Nuttall

The Effectiveness of Using Written Feedback to Improve Adult ESL Learners' Spontaneous Pronunciation of English Suprasegmentals , Chirstin Stephens

Pragmatic Quotation Use in Online Yelp Reviews and its Connection to Author Sentiment , Mary Elisabeth Wright

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Conditional Sentences in Egyptian Colloquial and Modern Standard Arabic: A Corpus Study , Randell S. Bentley

A Corpus-Based Analysis of Russian Word Order Patterns , Stephanie Kay Billings

English to ASL Gloss Machine Translation , Mary Elizabeth Bonham

The Development of an ESP Vocabulary Study Guidefor the Utah State Driver Handbook , Kirsten M. Brown

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Thesis Guidelines

Guidelines for completing the master’s thesis in cognitive linguistics.

While completing a thesis in cognitive linguistics, students must be continuously enrolled in COGS 651 (typically in the spring and fall semesters) up to and through the oral defense. Students must complete a minimum of 12 credit hours of COGS 651, usually with the same faculty advisor as the instructor of record (it is possible but not advisable to change thesis advisors during the course of the project). Any primary faculty member from the Department of Cognitive Science can serve as a thesis supervisor. As a supervisor, the faculty member will be responsible for the following tasks:

• Evaluating the student’s progress each semester by issuing a grade of “S” or “U”;
• Producing a brief written evaluation for the student’s file each semester along with a final evaluation of the project and defense;
• This abstract typically serves as the thesis proposal , though your supervisor may request a more elaborated proposal;
• Assisting the student in the constitution of the faculty committee , which consists of the supervisor (as committee chair) and two members of the faculty of the university.

What are the Content Requirements for the MA Thesis in Cognitive Linguistics?

All MA theses should follow these specific guidelines set by the Department of Cognitive Science. A defendable thesis must accomplish the following:

• Articulate a clear and original project in the area of cognitive linguistics, broadly construed;
• Consist of a sustained argument of approximately 50 double-spaced pages, not including references;
• Supply a complete reference list and proper in-text citations according to either the citation and style guidelines provided by the APA 6th edition or the journal Cognitive Linguistics (though the student may adopt a different citation system in consultation with the thesis supervisor).
• Find past topics by following the instructions at the bottom of this document . 

What are the Formatting Requirements for the Thesis?

The school of graduate studies specifies the requirements for the final electronic version of the thesis here. Earlier versions of the thesis should follow these guidelines as well to avoid having to reformat.

Thesis Defense, Forms, and Deadlines

All thesis defenses are public and must be arranged according to the guidelines set out in the  General Bulletin  and in compliance with the  timetable  and  formal procedures  set by the School of Graduate Studies. Cogling MA thesis defenses typically run one hour.

The department’s own policy on the conduct of thesis defenses is as follows:

• The thesis supervisor has ultimate and discretionary authority on determining whether a thesis is ready for defense. (This decision can be made without consulting the committee, or it can be made by consulting all or select members of committee.)
• The supervisor also is free to determine the format of the defense, but should communicate their agenda to both the committee and the candidate well in advance of the public defense.
• It is typical, but not obligatory, that a defense begins with a short presentation by the MA candidate, summarizing the project and its significance.
• It is typical, but not obligatory, that each member of the committee is allotted time to question the candidate directly.
• The thesis supervisor determines the order of questioning.
• Final deliberations of the committee occur after the committee has finished questioning the candidate. These deliberations are conducted in camera (privately, with the candidate outside the room but remaining near by).
• The supervisor then calls the candidate back into the room to deliver the results.

Revisions and Unsuccessful Defenses

If there are any required revisions, the committee determines the process, which can include vesting the supervisor with complete authority to oversee and assess all revisions (usually the default for minor revisions); or, each committee member can insist on assessing and approving the revisions (usually the default for significant changes). The examining committee must agree unanimously that the candidate has passed the thesis examination. In rare cases, the committee may decide that the thesis does not meet the requirements for the MA. In such cases, the candidate will work with the supervisor to determine how to proceed.

For a visual guide to help you plan, please see this information for current students.

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45 Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Literary Studies: State of the Art in Cognitive Poetics

Margaret H. Freeman (PhD 1972) is emeritus professor of English at Los Angeles Valley College. She and her husband are currently engaged in creating the Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts in Heath, Massachusetts, where they now live. She has been reading in the field of Cognitive Linguistics since its inception and moderates COGLIT, an Internet discussion list for people interested in cognitive linguistic approaches to literature. She has published articles on cognitive approaches to poetry in several journals and is working on a book-length cognitive guide to reading the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

• Published: 18 September 2012
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The emergence of cognitive linguistics has encouraged the development of new relations between literature and linguistics. Just as literary texts may serve as legitimate data for understanding the principles of language structure and use, linguistic analysis offers new perspectives on literary production, interpretation, reception, and evaluation. Although “literature” in its broadest sense refers to all written texts, this article restricts its scope to the more narrowly focused term used to cover the literary genres of fiction, poetry, and drama, written instances of humor, multimedia forms such as film, and religious writings that display literary qualities, such as the Bible and mystic poetry. All these writings are oriented toward the expressive, the emotive, and the aesthetic; it is here that the more inclusive approach of cognitive poetics may serve as a guide for further developments in the interdisciplinary area of linguistics and literature. This article also explores prototypicality and the notion of literature, conceptual structure in human cognition and narrative, metaphor and blending in literary texts, and embodiment, iconicity, and neurology in literary form and affect.

1. Introduction

In his statement, “Language is the child of the literary mind,” Turner ( 1991 , 1996 ) reverses the traditional view that literature is a special, exotic subcategory of language by arguing that human language capabilities arose from the cognitive mapping projections of parable and story. Although Turner's argument has not as yet received wide acceptance in either field of linguistics or literature (but see Modell 2003 ), the emergence of Cognitive Linguistics has encouraged the development of new relations between the two disciplines (see Geeraerts 1999 for a comprehensive survey of the historical development of linguistic semantics and literary theories). Just as literary texts may serve as legitimate data for understanding the principles of language structure and use, linguistic analysis offers new perspectives on literary production, interpretation, reception, and evaluation (Bizup and Kintgen 1993 ; Hart 1995 ; Jahn 1997 ; Crane and Richardson 1999 ; Jackson 2000 ).

Historically, a certain amount of tension has existed between the disciplines of linguistics and literature. For those of us engaged in bridging the two, the particular form this tension takes—namely, that literary criticism contributes nothing to linguistic enquiry, and vice versa—has always seemed anomalous. However, this anomaly may have roots deeper than being simply a matter of turf wars. Recently, Burrows ( 2003 ) has characterized the split between scientific method and literary criticism as a comparison between Descartes's retiring to his ‘stove’ to contemplate the foundations of knowledge and Montaigne's retiring to his tower to write his Essays :

Descartes's stove and Montaigne's library tower have given us two ways of living and thinking that are at root divergent. Stove people think that you can strip everything away and rebuild reality from precepts; tower people reckon that writing about and exploring or refining beliefs is the best you can do. For tower people, the process of writing and arguing is what thinking is; it is not concluding. (Burrows 2003 : 21)

Though the ways of the stove and the tower may appear fundamentally incompatible, this chapter surveys recent work in applying cognitive linguistic approaches to literature that carry with them both the air of the tower and the heat of the stove.

Literary critics have long been familiar with such topics as perspective, point of view, flashbacks, foreshadowing, and so on that cognitive linguists are just now exploring. One question that inevitably arises is what new insights Cognitive Linguistics provides in literary studies that literary criticism has not already discovered. The corollary, what literary criticism can contribute to Cognitive Linguistics, is almost always never asked (but see Brandt and Brandt 2005a ). In its focus on the processes of literary creation, interpretation, and evaluation, Cognitive Linguistics contributes scientific explanations for the findings of literary critics and thus provides a means whereby their knowledge and insights might be seen in the context of a unified theory of human cognition and language. To this extent, the stove is not incompatible with the tower; to the contrary, neither functions completely or well without the other.

Although “literature” in its broadest sense refers to all written texts, this chapter restricts its scope to the more narrowly focused term used to cover the literary genres of fiction, poetry, and drama, written instances of humor, multimedia forms such as film, and religious writings that display literary qualities, such as the Bible and mystic poetry. All these writings are oriented toward the expressive, the emotive, and the aesthetic; it is here that the more inclusive approach of Cognitive Poetics, particularly as practiced by Tsur ( 1992 , 1998 , 2003 ), may serve as a guide for further developments in the interdisciplinary area of linguistics and literature. As Hamilton ( 2000 : 3) notes, “Cognitive poetics can provide a sensible epistemology for the event of interpretation.”

The past few years have seen an explosion in interest in cognitive approaches to literature. 1 These approaches include the development of methodologies for describing both the production and reception of literary texts. Since the work presented in this chapter describes a symbiotic relationship between literary and linguistic objectives, I have organized it according to challenges common to both. Each section highlights aspects important to literary and linguistic study and describes work that suggests possible directions for future study.

2. Prototypicality and the Notion of Literature

Several researchers have turned their attention to illuminating the nature of literature and its various genres through prototypicality theory as opposed to a classical, feature-based theory of categorization (Meyer 1997 ; De Geest and van Gorp 1999 ; G. Steen 1999b ). From the perspective of literary criticism, the category “literature” has been so enlarged in the postmodern period as to include whatever a particular reader chooses to consider “text,” whether oral or written or even the nonlinguistic “signifiers” of culture. Under these circumstances, G. Steen wisely calls for an empirical research program to develop a taxonomy of discourse, in which literature may be positioned within the domain of discourse in general. He argues for a taxonomy in which “a prototypical approach emphasizes the hierarchical order of fuzzy concepts in a domain, using the same attributes for every level of conceptualization” (1999b: 116). The seven attributes he identifies are content, form, type, function, medium, domain, and language. The more abstract the level, the more certain attributes are unspecified. Thus, the basic level “novel” may be characterized by values of all seven attributes, whereas the superordinate term, “literature,” is characterized by domain (‘artistic’), content (‘fictional’), and function (‘positively affective’), but not by the other four. The advantage of G. Steen's taxonomy is that it quickly identifies when theories of literature mix values belonging to different attributes, as Meyer ( 1997 ) does. In his analysis, the addition of the attributes of medium, language, and form to the term “literature” makes it less superordinate as a category and closer to the level of genre. In Meyer's prototypical definition of literature, works that contain more features would be considered more literary or better examples of the category than those that contain less.

In their focus on the basic level of literary genre, De Geest and van Gorp ( 1999 ) reveal the complexities of applying a prototype approach. They point out that identifying the “best” or more typical example of a literary category is not at all the same as an aesthetic evaluation: “the ‘best’ texts are almost by definition exceptional cases which clearly are, at least in some aspects, atypical” (1999: 43). As the discussion of G. Steen's taxonomy has noted, the greater the superordination of the category, the harder it is to establish prototypical instances; consider, for example, the difference between “poem” and “sonnet.” However, even the lower-level category is more problematic than it seems. Although the sonnet exists at a more subordinate level than the poem and thus might be more readily defined in prototypical terms, De Geest and van Gorp show that it is just as problematic; it would be strange, if not absurd, to consider a Petrarchan sonnet more prototypical than a Spenserian one, or a Spenserian than a Shakespearian. And then, what does one do with so-called sonnets whose rhyme, meter, structure, or number of lines vary from these established forms?

Like G. Steen and Meyer, De Geest and van Gorp indicate that literary texts and genres must be considered along their evaluative and axiological components, considering norms, values, and models, as well as the author's intentions and the reader's expectations. They suggest that the concept of norm has to include not just what is proscribed but what is permitted. One possibility for achieving a prototypical theory of literature would be to adopt De Geest and van Gorp's ( 1999 : 41) recognition that “the so-called ‘prototype’ need not exist in reality, since it is generally assumed to be a kind of hypothetical cognitive construction, a theoretical ‘fiction,’ ” much like Lakoff's Idealized Cognitive Model that structures a conceptual domain. The “prototype” of a literary work would then include in its description an atypical example of its genre.

This rather radical proposal—that the category of literary works needs to accommodate atypicality as prototypical—appears to undermine the very notion of prototypicality theory, so that literary critics might well question the relevance of applying it to literature in the first place. This is one example of the conflict between the stove and the tower. Understanding the nature of literature involves explaining its role in the workings of the embodied human mind. It might be argued that this begs the question: why should the methodology applied to understanding literature (and the other arts) be necessarily a scientific one? Talmy's ( 2000 : 479–80) discussion of the parameter of protoypicality in the context of evaluation provides one answer: it is only by judging with respect to cultural norms that one can determine the relative status of a literary work as conforming to or challenging them. As Talmy notes, “Thus, it appears that certain long periods in Chinese art and literature maintained themselves with great conservatism, while this century in the West has rewarded authorial experimentation” (480). In this light, the expectation that a literary work be atypical may be seen as the prototypical attitude to literature held by contemporary Western critics. Only by looking at literature using the same methodology that is applied to looking at other activities of the human mind can we fully comprehend the nature of the distinctions between creative and conventional expressions and trace the changes in their prototypical status through time.

All the research surveyed in this chapter may be understood as examples of this principle. A case in point is Ravid and Hanauer's ( 1998 ) study of how adult speakers of Hebrew show evidence of having a prototypical theory of rhyme. Their scientific analysis and empirical research confirm literary intuitions about the way readers respond to the kind of rhyme schemes that occur in a variety of poetic texts. One finding that ran counter to Ravid and Hanauer's predictions—that Hebrew speakers tolerated contrasting coda consonants but not contrasting vowels in the post-stress syllable of modernistic rhymes—may possibly signify a dynamic shift of category boundary in process as Hebrew speakers grow more familiar with the rhyming practices of modernist poets. Whether Hebrew speakers in the future tolerate both post-stress consonants and vowels as members of the same rhyme category would be a hypothesis for such dynamic change and subject to further empirical research.

A dynamic theory of prototypicality over time could explain how literary decisions as to what constitutes a literary text are made. For example, though Wordsworth, in his second preface to the Lyrical Ballads , remarked that readers might question whether the poems included could be considered poetry at all, literary critics today perceive them to be classic examples of the genre of Romantic Poetry, a possible indication of category change over time. Evidence for a dynamic as opposed to static construal of prototypes is provided by two studies of prototypicality that involve literary texts. Głaz's ( 2002 ) lexicological study of the concept domain of Earth looks at the use of the term in six novels by Kingsley Amis, alongside data collected from the 1995 editions of The Times and The Sunday Times . Głaz combines Fuchs's ( 1994 ) dynamic model of semantic space with Langacker's ( 1987 , 1991 ) network model to show how the use of a term opens a window onto its entire lexical network, with meaning construed by shifts in both intracategorial and extracategorial tensions set up by the context. Gibbs ( 2003 :38) recognizes that “prototypes are not abstract, preexisting conceptual structures, but are better understood as products of meaning construal.” These include interpreting context-sensitive meaning in literary texts, the judgment of novelty by skilled readers, and the fact that an “embodied view of meaning construal nicely captures at least some of what people see as poetic during their reading experiences” (39). Applying a dynamic view of prototype theory might well serve as a research agenda for understanding how prototypical judgments of literature change over time.

3. Conceptual Structure in Human Cognition and Narrative

The aims of the tower are different from those of the stove. Literary critics focus on the emotional and aesthetic effects of literary works, cognitive linguists on accounting for the way language characterizes meaning. From a cognitive perspective, literary critics are engaged in mapping the meanings of texts from various contextual domains. They are interested in the results of these mappings, not the means by which they accomplish them. Analyses of these means, however, can reveal the principles on which the mappings are made. Exploring general cognitive constraints on mapping provides a framework for evaluating the effect of individual writers who violate these constraints. Research into the cognitive systems and constraints on human language processing provides a mechanism for precise description of the motivations for both literary production and reception. Talmy's ( 2000 : 479–80) work reveals the extent to which the approaches of the stove and the tower may be made compatible.

Talmy's discussion in the final chapter of his two-volume work on Cognitive Semantics is the most comprehensive account to date of the cognitive system that gives rise to literature. Although he uses the term “narrative structure” to describe this system, he does not mean narrative in its narrow sense but in the sense of its function “to connect and integrate certain components of conscious content over time into a coherent ideational structure” (2000: 419). In this respect, his approach correlates closely with Turner's cognitive reversal in exploring the structures of “the literary mind” that distinguish us as human beings.

Talmy's description of the framework of the narrative cognitive system includes three parts: domains, strata, and parameters. Domains include “the spatiotemporal physical world with all its (so-conceived) characteristics and properties; the culture or society with its presuppositions, conceptual and affective structuring, values, norms, and so on; the producer or producers of a narrative; the experiencer or experiencers of a narrative; and the narrative itself” (Talmy 2000 : 422). Strata refer to the basic structuring systems (temporal, spatial, causal, and psychological) that operate within and across domains. Parameters are the general organizing principles that apply across all the strata, such as relating structures to each other, relative quantity (scope, granularity, density), degree of differentiation, combinatory structure, and evaluation. Explorations of literary works tend to focus on one or more aspects within or across these three areas. With its many examples drawn from literary works, Talmy's system serves both as an exemplary model for the taxonomy of discourse G. Steen calls for and as a way of integrating and uniting into a coherent theory the various theoretical stances of literary criticism.

Although its theoretical framework ties together work on other literary approaches such as text and possible world theories, reader response, psychoanalytic approaches, and so on, the fairly recent appearance of Talmy's work means that it has not yet had a direct effect on cognitive approaches to literature. One problem is the pervasive practice of using different terminology to address similar phenomena. For example, it is unclear how Talmy's theory of domains, strata, and parameters complements or differs from Brandt's ( 2004 ) model for literary text construction. Sternberg's ( 2003a , 2003b ) work provides an extensive analysis and rigorous criticism of various cognitive approaches to narrative theories. However, several studies discussed in this section fall under the framework of Talmy's theory as it applies to perspective and construal by author or reader and mental space projection and deixis.

3.1. Perspective and Construal

There is already copious research on narratology that focuses on the processes of scene construal and perspective from the point of view of author and reader (for a useful overview, see Van Peer and Chatman 2001 ). For instance, the concept of “implied” author comes from literary criticism's awareness of the dangers of assigning “intentionality” to real writers of texts. New Criticism attacked intentionality, in its early phase, because it suggested that the author of a text had a specific intention in mind, which could be accessed by a “true” reading of the text. Post-structuralist critics, in challenging the stability of the text itself, also sought to undermine the idea of intentionality in the writer. However, following new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience, literary critics are beginning to reappraise the roles of writer, reader, and text. With the rise of Cognitive Linguistics came the idea that conceptual metaphorical structure could provide insights into the human mind, so that a natural move is to explore what these structures might reveal about the author's conceptual attitudes and motivations (Holland 1988 ;Crane 2000 ).

Kardela and Kardela ( 2002 ) discuss the conflicting metaphorical realities of the “implied author” and those of the “unreliable” narrator by exploring the extended metaphor that structures the narrative of Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day . In objecting to one literary critic's reading of the novel as having only one narrative perspective, the authors show the need to invoke an implied author to establish the extended conflict metaphor, thereby accounting in a principled way for the degree of unreliability evidenced by the narrator. In a similar manner, Kedra-Kardela and Kardela ( 2000 ) extend the literary meaning of “subjectivity” as representing a character's thoughts and feelings to embrace the notion of the focalizer/narrator's viewpoint, which includes world knowledge, beliefs, and values. By adopting Langacker's methodology of subjective and objective grounding of perspective in scene construal, they are able to show in three stories by Elizabeth Bowen how shifts in scene construal reveal the extent of alienation and reconciliation the protagonists experience with respect to their homes, family, and society.

Reader response theories have focused on the way readers construct meaning from text. Cognitive psychologists have begun to explore constraints on reader responses to literary texts, as indicated by Gibbs and Bogdonovich's ( 1999 ) empirical studies on the role of mental imagery in interpreting image metaphors in literature. Their findings indicate that readers of Andre Breton's poem “Free Union” more frequently respond to image metaphors like My wife whose hair is brush fire by mapping concrete images than by mapping their more complex knowledge about the source domain. They conclude: “People indeed must create concrete imagistic mappings to understand novel image metaphors” (1999: 43). These findings are particularly suggestive when considering exactly what interpretive strategies literary critics use. Interpretations often depend on the critic's choice of image mappings across metaphorical domains (M. Freeman 2000 , 2002a ). Gibbs and Bogdonovich's study is important in showing that “theories of metaphor must distinguish between different kinds of conceptual mappings in explaining the aesthetic qualities of metaphorical statements” (1999: 43).

Compatible with this approach is extensive work by Miall ( 1989 ) and Miall and Kuiken ( 2001 ) on the way readers comprehend and evaluate literary narratives through their subjective experience of emotions and feelings. This “affect,” they argue, is: (i) self-referential , in enabling readers to identify with a story; (ii) cross-domain , in being able to transfer schemata from one domain (such as setting) to another (such as relation between characters); and (iii) anticipatory , in providing readers with the capability of comprehending the narrative's progress. Miall ( 2000 ) shows how the empirical testing of literary notions of canon renewal, style, and empathy in narrative reveals the innate qualities of literary texts.

3.2. Mental Space Projection and Deixis

Some literary studies have used mental space theory to explore creative aspects of literary technique. Harding ( 2001 ) discusses Hemingway's use in one short story of counterfactual spaces in the discourse oftwo protagonists to reinforce the negative affect governing their situation. Irandoust ( 1999 ) cites passages from French literary works to show that tense markers like the past-perfect construction can create narrative perspective through concealed parallel spaces or “reference frames” that enrich linear narrative sequencing with subjective information. Mental space theory and deictic projection can account for a poet's idiosyncratic grammar (M. Freeman 1997 ). Epistolary letters provide clear examples of deictic projection since the letter writer will often project into the imagined reality space of the letter recipient. Readers of the epistolary sections of A. S. Byatt's novel Persuasion are drawn into these projections as their own cognitive abilities trace the deictic triggers that move them from one mental space to another (Herman 1999 ).

Parallel to these literary approaches is the work of the Discourse and Narrative Research Group at the State University of New York at Buffalo on the ways in which narrative deictic techniques illuminate general cognitive processes of human understanding (Duchan, Bruder, and Hewitt 1995 ).

4. Metaphor and Blending in Literary Texts

Metaphor, metonymy, and the figurative tropes of classical rhetoric have always been identified as an integral part of literary texts. The explosion of metaphor studies at the end of the last century has led to fresh ways of conceiving the tropes and to the emergence of coherent views of metaphor and metonymy that are still very much under development. This development is reflected in Kittay's ( 1987 ) seminal work on metaphor, which is situated in the context of the traditionally understood divide between semantics and pragmatics, while at the same time it develops a theory of metaphor closely allied to modern cognitive science. Her theory of “semantic field” spells out the way a “content domain” (analogous to “conceptual domain” or “Idealized Cognitive Model”) is linguistically articulated and forms the basis of her understanding of metaphor structure, especially as it is represented in literary texts. She shows that John Donne's poem “The Bait” has a more complex metaphorical structure than Wordsworth's poem “On the Extinction of the VenetianRepublic” and that metaphor in Shelley's poem “Song to the Men of England” is less successful. Kittay's application of semantic field theory to metaphor anticipates Fauconnier and Turner's ( 2002 ) theory of the structure of multiple domain mappings and also provides suggestive criteria both for determining the distinctions between standard and novel metaphors and for evaluating the relative success of a particular literary metaphor.

Kittay's suggestion that metaphors may be evaluated according to the extent to which the vehicle field restructures the topic field may provide a useful heuristic for the evaluation of literary texts. Recognizing the existence of literary metaphor is a case in point. Cognitive metaphor analyses have revealed the absurdity of the position of some critics that the works of Tolstoy and Jane Austen are nonmetaphorical by revealing just how successful Tolstoy (Danaher 2003a , 2003b ) and Austen (Peña Cervel 1997–98 ; Wye 1998 ) are in tapping the underlying metaphorical systems of all cognitive thought. Fernandes's ( 2002 ) PhD dissertation focuses on metaphors and cultural models which are central to the work of four contemporary Francophone women novelists (Condé, Djebar, Beyala, and Belghoul). Such work extends the concept of metaphor from its use in individual examples to entire conceptual domains.

4.1. The Structure of Extended Metaphor and Its Literary Effects

Lakoff and Johnson ( 1980 , 1998 ) identified the structural schemas and extended metaphors that underlie some of the most basic ways we conceptualize our experiences of life. These extended metaphors, as Werth ( 1994 : 80) has noted, can consist of “an entire metaphorical ‘undercurrent’ running through a whole text, which may manifest itself in a large number and variety of ‘single’ metaphors.” This metaphorical undercurrent brings structural unity to a literary text and contributes to the emergence of a text's theme, as Popova ( 2002 ) shows in her study of the metaphorical mappings of smell in Süskind's novel Perfume . In his studies on conceptual metaphors in Shakespeare's plays, D. Freeman ( 1993 , 1998 , 1999 ) explores the extended metaphors that build the theme of each play on the principle that a theory of metaphor depends upon a theory of mind. His cognitive analyses show how figurative patterns generalize to other patterns, such as plot and scene, and provide interpretations detailed and coherent enough to be compared against competing interpretations.

Studying such structuring metaphors provides a principled way to explain how writers are influenced by the metaphors of their culture while at the same time they are selecting and refining those metaphors to shape their own thinking and attitudes about the world around them. While literary metaphors often subvert conventional and stereotypical cultural attitudes (see M. Freeman 1995 ), Kövecses ( 1994 : 132) concludes that what Tocqueville saw in his travels through America “must have been thoroughly influenced by the unoriginal, ready-made, and subconscious ideas” that constitute the basis of the person metaphors he uses to describe American democracy. That writers adopt certain metaphors from a range of metaphor systems deeply embedded in their culture is explored further in Csábi's ( 2000 , 2001 ) articles on Thomas Paine's arguments for the separation of America from Britain and the immigration experiences of American Puritans.

Like Kövecses and Csábi, Bertuol ( 2001 : 21) is interested in the “influence that common knowledge and beliefs shared by the members of a linguistic community exert on the poet's choice of metaphors.” However, Bertuol is not claiming that this influence determines a poet's choices; if this were true, then it would be difficult if not impossible to explain individual, creative, and revolutionary thinking. His study of the works of Margaret Cavendish, a seventeenth-century poet writing on scientific matters, shows how mathematical knowledge at that time influenced people's views of reality. The cultural choice the poet makes of the seventeenth-century conceptual metaphor universe is mathematics enables her to argue that “ irrationalia , such as female nature and fancy, cannot be penetrated and controlled” (Bertuol 2001 : 37).

Exploring the relations of a writer's metaphorical perspective to his or her culture also provides a means for explaining the extent of a writer's popularity. Kimmel ( 2001 ) analyzes the metaphor of center and alterity in Conrad's Heart of Darkness to see whether it sheds light on “the scope of variation” and “prevailing cultural dispositions” of Victorian England. He concludes that Conrad's use of the metaphor reflects the Victorian psychopolitical mindset of a self-model that Europeans have been subconsciously sharing for a long time and explains why Conrad's novel resonated so strongly with its Victorian audience.

4.2. Creative and Conventional Metaphors

Turner's reversal in claiming the literary mind generated language removes the problem of attempting to discover how conventional language could give rise to creative language. In the case of metaphor, deeply entrenched or conventionalized metaphors presumably began as novel or creative metaphor. However, old habits die hard, and the language, if not the spirit, of much metaphorical work in Cognitive Linguistics tends to reflect a conventional to creative direction, as reflected in two of Lakoff and Turner's ( 1989 ) frequently quoted passages: “Poetic thought uses the mechanisms of everyday thought, but it extends them, elaborates them, and combines them in ways that go beyond the ordinary” (67); “Poetic language uses the same conceptual and linguistic apparatus as ordinary language” (158). Though these statements might appear reductionist, all Lakoff and Turner are saying is that the underlying apparatus or mechanisms of poetic and conventional language and thought are the same, not that the two are conflated. Several studies have explored the extent to which creative metaphors arise from extension, elaboration, and combination in such writers as Henry James (Čulić 2001 ), Eavan Boland and Adrienne Rich (McGrath n.d.), and Hemingway (Strack 2000 ). In a detailed and thorough explanation of conceptual orientation metaphors that combine to create such conventional expressions as down and out to mean ‘destitute and unfortunate’, Sweetser ( 2004 ) shows how the same co-orientations of metaphorical mappings occur in a pivotal speech in Shakespeare's tragedy Julius Caesar . Although she does not specifically claim that such mappings become literary when they form a single complex model, her notion that this in fact is what occurs in Shakespeare's passage suggests one possible way of distinguishing creative from conventional metaphor.

The prevailing assumption in these studies is that a continuum exists between creative and conventional use of metaphor and that devices such as elaboration, extension, and compression account for the distinction between them. G. Steen ( 1994 , 2001b ) challenges this assumption as presumed rather than proven and calls for cognitive psychologists, linguists, and literary critics to work toward a better understanding of how we identify and process metaphor. To this end, G. Steen ( 1999a , 2001a ) has developed and tested for reliability a five-step procedure for metaphor identification that is based on conceptual metaphor theory and blending. Several issues for cognitive research emerge from G. Steen's studies, including how to account for the distinction between conceptual and linguistic metaphor and how to identify metaphorical projections when the target domain is not identified. G. Steen's reliability studies indicate that the technical ability to identify metaphor, especially in literary text, is something that has to be learned, a finding that has implications for both pedagogy and metaphor theory.

4.3. Blending as a Metaphorical Structure

So far as I know, no researcher to date has considered exploring metaphor as a category, though many different types of metaphor are discussed, such as “conventional,” “creative,” “banal,” “extended,” and so on. Many of the arguments over the structure of metaphor may in fact rest in the failure to recognize that there may be many different metaphorical types and structures. As noted in section 4 , Kittay's work explores some of the possible structures metaphor might have. Although Fauconnier and Turner's work on conceptual integration networks or “blending” does not specifically refer to metaphor, all metaphors at some stage in their creation involve blending, so that the analysis of single-, double-, or multiple-scope blending might very well be productively applied to metaphor structure. As in all cognitive linguistic applications to literature, work in this area has only just begun, but increasingly, more researchers are applying blending analysis to literary texts.

Blending provides an elegant explanation for creativity in its theory of an “emergent structure” created by the blend. It explains, for example, the rhetorical effects in haiku texts of juxtaposing phrases by kireji (cutting letters) and kake-kotoba (multiple puns); and it provides a better reading of the frequent use in haiku of personification and allegory through indirect mapping across spaces and recruitment from common cultural knowledge (Hiraga 1999a , 1999b ). Blending reveals the structure of prototypical and borderline allegories, from Dante to Pynchon (Sinding 2002 ) as well as the mixing of genres that can define literary history (Sinding 2005 ). Blending enables F. Steen ( 2002 ) to show how an Aphra Behn novel, by mapping the rhetoric of power onto the rhetoric for love, may have functioned as both literature and political propaganda. Oakley's ( 1998 ) article on conceptual blending, narrative discourse, and rhetoric provides an exemplary account of blending and how it operates in Art Spiegelman's Maus to link the more immediate story of Richelieu's relationship to his “ghost brother” to the larger story of the Holocaust. Matthew's ( 2003 ) dissertation explores temporal compression blends in literature. Coulson ( 2003 ) explores conceptual blending in political and religious rhetoric.

Conceptual schemas and blending also address questions of literary structure and style, such as reconfiguring literary allusion, constructing a lyric subject, establishing the roots of African American poetry, and comparing literary styles (L. Ramey 1996 , 2002 ). In her exploration of the way Edmond Rostand creates “artistically right Form-Meaning blending” in his verse drama, Cyrano de Bergérac , Sweetser ( 2006 ) provides many intriguing suggestions as to how stylistic iconicity creates art. Poetic styles can be identified, described, and compared according to which image schemas are chosen as a structuring principle for a writer's poetics (M. Freeman 2002b ). Tobin ( 2006 ) shows how the emergent structure of a blend can become culturally entrenched and institutionalized over time within a given discourse community.

Recent work by Brandt ( 2004 ) refines and elaborates Fauconnier and Turner's original blending model to articulate the roles of culture, context, emotion, evaluation, and ethics in the creation of meaning. In his discussion of Baudelaire's poem, Les Chats , Brandt shows how his model characterizes literary texts. The model suggests that the dynamic schemas of form and feeling are integral to meaning production and processing and thus supports Langer's ( 1953 , 1967 ) argument that both are crucial in establishing a theory of all art.

5. Embodiment, Iconicity, and Neurology in Literary Form and Affect

Literary critics in stylistics, especially those influenced by New Criticism, structuralism, and the work of the Russian formalists, have long recognized the importance of formal, emotional, and aesthetic effects in literary works. As a natural extension from the principle of the embodied mind and in line with literary critical work in this area (McGann 1991 ), some cognitive linguists are beginning to explore literary “meaning” that arises from formal textural qualities or “pastiosity” (to borrow a term from graphology), where physical, sensory modalities fuse with linguistic and metalinguistic forms (M. Freeman 2000 ). As a corollary to reader response theory in literary criticism, several cognitive studies have begun to use empirical research to determine such literary affects. These include sensory modalities beyond sight and sound, the way language in poetic texts iconically reflects its meaning, and how these might be governed by cognitive constraints in the brain.

5.1. Sensory Modalities of Embodiment: Empirical Research

Certain general cognitive constraints have been shown to govern figurative use. In a series of psychological experiments, Todd and Clarke ( 2001 ) were able to show in a principled way the cognitive similarities and differences between simile and metaphor, with simile being harder to process. In simile, synaesthesia, and zeugma, Shen ( 1997 ) found that Hebrew poets across different schools and periods prefer mapping from the more accessible term. They provide psychological evidence from empirical experiments to support this constraint. Whenever the two terms in simile differ in their relative concrete and abstract levels or degree of salience, the preferred direction of mapping is from more to less. In zeugma (Shen 1997 ) and synaesthesia (Shen and Cohen 1998 ), poets were found to prefer naming the more prototypical term first and to prefer mappings that went from senses more closely related to the body, such as touch and taste, to those less closely related, such as sound and sight; readers found these easier to understand. Gibbs and Kearney's ( 1994 ) work on poetic oxymoron produced similar results. Shen ( 1997 : 67) concludes that studies such as these show “not only that poetic uses of figuration constrain our cognitive system, but that poetic figures are themselves constrained by general cognitive constraints.”

5.2. Iconicity of Form and Meaning

Embodiment takes on a special form with respect to structural and visual iconicity. Recent research on signed languages has given cognitive linguists crucial new insights into the relationship between form and meaning: it is almost impossible to ignore the pervasive iconicity present in signed language structure. Taub ( 2001 ) makes the first major advance since Charles Sanders Peirce in building a modern cognitive theory of the nature of iconicity, applicable equally to linguistic and semiotic systems in any language. Applying her theory to American Sign Language (ASL) poetry as well as to the structure of ASL grammar, Taub's chapter on Ella Mae Lenz's work provides new insights for both literary and linguistic theorists. Wilcox ( 2001 ) centers on the issues of productivity and creativity in the use of metaphor in ASL and analyzes the unique role of visual iconicity in the poetics of a visual-gestural language.

Hiraga's ( 1998 , 2002 , 2005 ) discussion of the metaphor-icon link in poetic texts provides a cognitive account of how iconicity and metaphor can be fused in grammar and language. Hiraga shows how two poems by George Herbert and Percy Bysshe Shelley differ in degree and types of iconicity. Herbert's poem exhibits imagic iconicity overtly, while Shelley's poem exhibits diagrammatic iconicity covertly. Hiraga's thesis is important because it suggests one definition of poetic language: foregrounding metaphor-icon links makes language poetic because form and meaning are closer together in literary than in nonliterary language in the sense of sharing and sometimes fusing sensory features. In this sense, Berntsen's ( 1999 ) discussion of the “embodied” nature of modernist poetry may be extended to all forms of poetic language, regardless of school or period.

Recent research on iconicity in literature (Nänny and Fischer 2003 ) suggests that the iconic relation between form and meaning may very well be a defining characteristic of literary texts. Ljungberg ( 2001 ) explores the way iconic patterning in Margaret Atwood's poetry and prose draws the reader into participatory relationship with the text. The icon's potential for abstraction (Ljungberg 2004 )is beautifully captured in Moretti's ( 2005 ) study of maps, graphs, and trees in developing abstract models for literary theory.

5.3. Neurological Constraints and Affordances

A more general view of human cognition is taken in Danaher's ( 1998 ) study of metonymy in Gogol, where Danaher draws attention to the need for cognitive linguists to step beyond their conventional boundaries of showing how cognitive systems motivate and constrain linguistic structure to explore the fundamental principles which underlie human cognition itself. Benzon ( 2000 ) explains the ability of the neural self to animate imaginary characters in literary fictions. Zunshine ( 2003 ) provides insight into Virginia Woolf's style by exploring findings on autism and cognitive experiments on our ability to imagine representations of mental states. Richardson ( 2001 ) reexamines from a cognitive neuroscience perspective the extent to which literary Romanticism was historically deeply implicated with research and speculation on the brain.

Some cognitive psychologists have begun to explore aspects of literary form and affect from a conceptual-emotional perspective. In addition to Miall's and Kuiken's work mentioned in section 3.1 , Getzand Lubart ( 2000 ) explain creative metaphor in terms of emotional information processing. Their Emotional Resonance Model of creative associative thought reveals how “feeling tones” or “emotional traces, acquired through self-involving experiences, play a key role in the production and interpretation of creative metaphors” (285). Getz and Lubart show that whereas the conventional metaphor X is a burdock meaning ‘X is a prickly person’ has little creative potential, Tolstoy's feelings about seeing a burdock one day created an emotional trace in his mind that became linked with his memories of the Chechen leader and thus provided the potential for creative metaphor in his story Hadji Murat . The role of emotion in memory (Modell 2003 ) is reflected in literary stylistics work, such as that of Brearton and Simpson ( 2001 ) on language, form, and memory in Michael Longley's poetry and McAlister's ( 2006 ) essay on trauma and identity in Helen Weinzweig's novel, Basic Black with Pearls . The importance of feelings in situational context in developing the dynamic schemas that serve to construct meaning can be seen in Brandt and Brandt's ( 2005b ) elaboration of the original blending model.

6. Further Applications

This chapter has focused primarily on studies of literary texts inspired by the work of cognitive linguists as defined in this Handbook . Following is a brief survey of related research.

6.1. Multimedia Art Forms

Several researchers have begun to explore these cognitive processes in other art forms. Zbikowski ( 1999 , 2002 ) applies blending to the analysis of early nineteenth-century art songs. A text-music blend creates a much richer structure than is provided by text or music alone. His blending analysis of different musical settings of Wilhelm Müller's “Trockne Blumen” shows how the music constrains our interpretation of the text to produce somewhat different descriptions of the miller's character and motivations. Forceville ( 1999 ) considers conceptual structural metaphor across verbal and pictorial domains in the novel, screenplay, and film versions of Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers . He shows how both Pinter in his screenplay and Schrader in his film employ pictorial metaphors to support the underlying metaphor colin is a child , which describes the novel's adult protagonist. An even more integrative approach to multimedia dimensions is Narayan's ( 2001 ) research on comic books, which describes multiple embeddings in blended spaces where such narrative elements as focus and viewpoint are sometimes created jointly by images and “voice-overs.”

Rohrer ( 2005 ) defines mimetic blending as a blend that self-referentially embeds itself into subsequent blends and shows how this iterative chaining serves as a literary device in Mario Vargas Llosa's novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter , and its film version Tune in Tomorrow , to provide metafictional commentary on issues such as the ability of art to create fictive emotion. The use of grammatical voice in a dynamic discourse situation in a Tagalog video melodrama reveals the underlying scenarios that affect whether or not the agency of the participants will be profiled (Palmer 1998 ). Palmer's study suggests that cognitive analysis may reveal how emotional discourse in literature is governed by the social and power relationships that give rise to dramatic conflict and resolution.

6.2. Religious Texts

Tsur's ( 2003 ) latest contribution to his theory of Cognitive Poetics studies “how religious ideas are turned into verbal imitations of religious experience by poetic structure” (7). Ranging widely over metaphysical, baroque, and romantic poetry, Tsur explores all the many different aspects of human cognitive processes in a comprehensive and detailed manner to show how poets attempt to represent the ineffable.

One of these ways is of course through metaphor, and the articles in Boeve and Feyaerts's ( 1999 ) edition of Metaphor and God-talk provide a cognitive linguistic perspective on religious discourse. Other book-length studies include discussion of an extended metaphor describing the deity in the context of Hebrew cultural beliefs and practices (Sienstra 1993 ) and a study of the Bible through metaphor and translation (Feyaerts 2003 ). From another perspective, M. Ramey ( 1997 ) reviews the religious preconceptions of biblical exegesists that govern their interpretations of St. Paul's views on the body and the resurrection and suggests that a blending analysis of particular Pauline passages in the New Testament comes closer to Paul's eschatological and ethical stances. Van Hecke ( 2001 ) explores polysemy or homonymy from a cognitive perspective in a Biblical Hebrew verb and root to provide new insights into the way Hebrew functions. In 2002, a Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences colloquium brought together scholars in Hebrew semantics, biblical studies, and Cognitive Linguistics to discuss “The Book of Job: Suffering and Cognition in Context,” which resulted in the publication of several cognitive articles (van Wolde 2003 ). Noteworthy in that volume is Geeraerts's ( 2003 ) analysis because it not only argues for an ironic reading of the controversial speeches of God in the Book of Job, but suggests ways humor in a text can be characterized and described.

Humor in general has caught the attention of cognitive linguists as evidenced by the large number of proposals submitted to the Eighth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (Brône, Feyaerts, and Veale 2006 ). The cognitive structure of jokes and their reception are explored in several cognitive studies (Coulson 2001 ; Coulson and Kutas 2001 ; Goel and Dolan 2001 ). Feyaerts ( 1997 ) shows how metonymic extension patterns provide a constant renewal of the humorous expressive meanings in the conceptual domain of the German terms for stupidity.

Conceptual metaphor approaches reveal how writers create literary humor through manipulation of conventional metaphorical schemas (Sun 1994 ) or by juxtaposing literal and metaphorical meaning (Jurado 1994 ). Jurado, for example, shows how the Roman poet Horace exploits the orientation metaphors good is up and bad is down to argue that ‘up’ is ‘good’ as long as it does not literally go too far. Donald Barthelme's short stories are a good example of how the interplay between the literal and the metaphorical structures humor. In “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby,” Barthelme plays with what would happen if we actually responded literally to the notions of common metaphorical expressions like going too far and I'll kill you for that . This interplay between the metaphorical and the literal to create humor is further explored by Jurado and Gregoris ( 1995 ) in several examples from the Roman dramatist Plautus.

6.4. Dreams

Another aspect of written texts is the prolific and extensive work on dream research. With the development of new methodologies in neuroscientific studies of the brain, several researchers have begun to explore cognitive linguistic approaches to dream content analysis. Notable in this area is Domhoff's ( 2003 ) study that presents a new neurocognitive model of dreams using empirical research and including an extensive bibliography of related research.

6.5. Literary Translation

The task of translating one language into another poses a great challenge for translators of literary texts. Here, Cognitive Linguistics provides a special contribution. Tabakowska's ( 1993 ) study applies Cognitive Grammar principles to literary translation. Defining translation equivalence in terms of units larger than a single sentence, Tabakowska notes that these units overlap with Langacker's notions of image and scene construal. In a series of case studies, Tabakowska shows how Cognitive Linguistics contributes to the art and practice of translation by (i) providing systematic explanations for the ease or difficulty of translation; (ii) describing the techniques of style through “pairing individual dimensions of imagery with particular linguistic means” (1993: 130); and (iii) identifying the reasons in some cases for the impossibility of translation. She concedes that “it takes a poet to translate poetry” (133) but argues that Cognitive Linguistics can help provide better understanding of the images and techniques in poetic text.

Wójcik-Leese ( 2000 ) also employs Langacker's theory of scene construal to analyze the strategies of free verse composition and to provide principled reasons for preferring one translation over another. Focusing on free verse as a visual, rather than phonic, form, she applies Figure/Ground orientation to the structure of a Polish poem by Adam Zagajewski to show the importance of the formal elements of ordering and placement of words and phrases, along with delimiting punctuation. Translators, she suggests, ignore the significance of such formal patterning at their peril.

Understanding conceptual metaphoric networks might also help translators achieve greater equivalence in their translations, as Holm ( 2001 ) shows in analyzing two translations into Danish of the Spanish poet Garcia Lorca. Holm claims that Cognitive Linguistics provides a better possibility for assessing not just whether a given translation of a metaphor can be said to provide the “equivalent effect” in the target language or not, but what the “effect” consists in and by which criteria “equivalence” can be achieved.

Typological differences in languages affect narrative style with implications for literary translation. Slobin ( 1996 ) compared the verb-framed language of Spanish with the satellite-framed language of English in verbs of motion in ten novels. He discovered significant differences between the two languages with respect to rhetorical style, descriptions of movement, and relative allocation of attention to movement and setting. He notes that “Spanish speakers and writers have apparently developed a ‘rhetorical set’ that favors separate clauses for each segment of a complex motion event” (1996: 217). When he compared translations of the novels, he found that Spanish translators faced greater problems than their English counterparts did. In a subsequent paper, Slobin ( 1997 ) enlarged his study to include other satellite-framed (Germanic and Slavic) languages as opposed to verb-framed (Romance, Semitic, Turkic, and Japanese) languages, with similar results. He is careful to note, however, that cultural factors can modify the sharp distinctions of linguistic typology that he found in his studies. These studies serve as a model for Cognitive Linguistics approaches to literary translations.

7. The Poetic Challenge

Like cognitive linguistic approaches, Cognitive Poetics attempts to describe how poetic language and form is constrained and shaped by human cognitive processes. Tsur's theory of Cognitive Poetics is more inclusive of the cognitive sciences in general than studies in Cognitive Poetics that draw from linguistics and stylistics (Stockwell 2002 ; Gavins and Steen 2003 ) and therefore provides one way of evaluating the directions such studies should take.

Cureton, ( 1992 , 1997 , 2000 , 2001 ) and Tsur ( 1992 , 1998 ) both challenge Cognitive Linguisticsʻ failure to attend to the formal aspects of literary works, such as the temporal dimension of meter and rhythm. Although differing in their theories of rhythm, both believe that rhythm is a general cognitive process and make significant claims about the formal and prosodic features of poetry that need to be explored in order to fully account for the role of rhythm in human cognition and language.

Conspicuous by its absence in this chapter is the role of phonology and phonetics in poetic discourse. In its infancy, Cognitive Phonology has not yet reached the stage of providing theoretical and methodological applications to literature. However, since literary iconicity often depends on sound patterning, as Alexander Pope showed more than two hundred years ago in his Essay on Criticism , cognitive studies of phonetic iconicity in poetic texts could contribute much to a cognitive theory of phonology.

Brain studies of connections between the emotive qualities of the senses and their aesthetic effects indicate additional potential areas for exploration of the affective dimension of poetic language. In his appraisal of what it would take to have a “cognitive science of poetics,” Hogan ( 2003b ) takes us back to a Sanskrit theory of poetry based on aesthetic response being the result of experiencing rasa (usually translated, according to Hogan, as ‘sentiment’ but akin to emotion, with no precise English language equivalent): “These rasas are evoked in a reader by words, sentences, topics, and so on, presented in a literary work. This is, of course, in part the result of literal meanings. But it is also, and crucially, a function of the clouds of nondenumerable, nonsubstitutable, nonpropositional suggestions that surround these texts” (2003b: 51).

The poetic challenge we face is to incorporate these formal and affective aspects—Langer's ( 1953 , 1967 ) “form” and “feeling”—into an adequate, productive, and plausible theory of aesthetic creation and response. Until we do, we will not be able to claim we have fully accounted for human cognition in language.

8. Conclusion

Can stove and tower people communicate productively with each other, or are their approaches, as Burrows ( 2003 ) suggests, “at root divergent”? A symposium held at the GettyMuseum in spring 2002 brought together cognitive scientists and art historians to discuss “Frames of Viewing: The Brain, Cognition, and Art.” Stimulating and insightful as these discussions were, proceedings were marred by the contempt shown by some art historians for what they saw as the crude naïveté of the cognitive scientists in their approach to the arts. Certainly, the expertise in sophisticated analyses evidenced by art historians, musicologists, and literary critics should not be ignored. As the research discussed in this chapter reveals, researchers have been quick to see the advantages of applying cognitive linguistic research to the literary arts; unfortunately, there is no indication that the reverse is true. So far as I have been able to determine, with the exception of discussions of cognitive poetics and stylistics (Semino and Culpeper 2002 ), there have been no critical exchanges with existing literary theory, nor any indication that the Cognitive Linguistics approach is recognized within the field of literary studies or that literary studies can contribute to cognitive linguistics. This may change with the publication of results from the conference at the University of Helsinki in 2004 on “Cognition and Literary Interpretation in Practice” (Veivo and Polvinen 2005 ) and the results from the 2005 Cognitive Poetics Workshop at the University of Tel Aviv ( http://www.tau.ac.il/~tsurxx/Workshop_folder/WorkShopSite.html ), although I am not optimistic. It is sobering to note that the recent special issue on New Directions in Poetics of the Publications of the Modern Language Association includes no mention of Cognitive Poetics.

Despite this disheartening comment, the work reviewed in this chapter strikes a more positive note and is just a sample of research being accomplished. Researchers are already showing that Cognitive Linguistics can contribute to literary theory by providing insight into such matters as the changing status of literary appreciation through time, the evaluation of quality in both literary texts and criticism, the empirical testing of literary choices and judgments, and the development of a theory of literature. More broadly, the emerging field of Cognitive Poetics, which includes these approaches, has already shown that the literary mind is indeed fundamental to the processes of human cognition.

I am grateful to all those who sent me information about their cognitive work in literary studies, without which I would not have been able to write this chapter. I also thank Eve Sweetser for her contributions, especially regarding ASL work, the editors of this volume, and Beth and Don Freeman for helpful suggestions on earlier drafts. Needless to say, all errors of commission and omission are mine.

1. A growing body of literature reflects the current interest of cognitive linguists and literary scholars in the ways Cognitive Linguistics can illumine literary texts and the challenges and opportunities literary texts raise for Cognitive Linguistics. Special issues of the Journal of Pragmatics (1995) , Poetics Today (1999) , Language and Literature (2002) , and the European Journal of English Studies (2004) have focused on cognitive approaches to metaphor in literary texts; other special issues on cognitive approaches include Journal of English Linguistics (2002) , Style (2002) , Poetics Today (2002, 2003) , and Language and Literature (2005, 2006) ; articles now regularly appear in such journals as Language and Literature, Literary Semantics, Metaphor and Symbol, Mosaic, Poetics Today, Style , and the Journal of English Linguistics . In addition to the citations mentioned in this chapter, there are books by Turner ( 1987 ), Spolsky ( 1993 ), Bex ( 2000 ), Semino and Culpeper ( 2002 ), Hogan ( 2003a ), Popova, Freeman, and Freeman (forthcoming), Brône and Vandaele ( 2009 ); and three textbooks: Stockwell ( 2002 ), Gavins and Steen ( 2003 ), and Kövecses ( 2002 ). Associations that have sponsored special sessions and disciplinary areas featuring cognitive approaches to literary texts include the Poetics and Linguistic Association (PALA), the Modern Language Association (MLA), the International Cognitive Linguistics Association (ICLA), the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), the International Association of Literary Semantics (IALS), the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics (IAEA), the Western Humanities Alliance (WHA), and the University of North Texas annual Languaging conference. Several Web sites include information on cognitive approaches to literary texts, such as the home page of the coglit discussion group http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~cxr1086/coglit/ , blending at http://www.wam.umd.edu/~mturn/WWW/blending.html , metaphor at http://www.let.vu.nl/ pragglejaz, literature, cognition, and the brain at http://cogweb.english.ucsb.edu/Culture/WoF/eventsrtc.html , iconicity at http://home.hum.uva.nl/iconicity/ , and the Cognitive Poetics Project at http://www.tau.ac.il/~tsurxx/index.html . Further links are available at these Web sites for additional related research.

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Topics in Cognitive Linguistics

• Preface |  p. ix
• I. Toward a coherent and comprehensive linguistic theory
• An overview of cognitive grammar Ronald W. Langacker |  p. 3
• A view of linguistic semantics Ronald W. Langacker |  p. 49
• The nature of grammatical valence Ronald W. Langacker |  p. 91
• A usage-based model Ronald W. Langacker |  p. 127
• II. Aspects of a multifaceted research program
• The relation of grammar to cognition Leonard Talmy |  p. 165
• Where does prototypicality come from? Dirk Geeraerts |  p. 207
• The natural category MEDIUM : An alternative to selection restrictions and similar constructs Bruce Hawkins |  p. 231
• Spatial expressions and the plasticity of meaning Annette Herskovits |  p. 271
• Contrasting prepositional categories : English and Italian John R. Taylor |  p. 299
• The mapping of elements of cognitive space onto grammatical relations : An example from Russian verbal prefixation Laura A. Janda |  p. 327
• Conventionalization of cora locationals Eugene H. Casad |  p. 345
• The conceptualisation of vertical space in English : The case of tall René Dirven and  John R. Taylor |  p. 379
• Length, width, and potential passing Claude Vandeloise |  p. 403
• On bounding in Lk Fritz Serzisko |  p. 429
• A discourse perspective on tense and aspect in standard modern Greek and English Wolf Paprotté |  p. 447
• Semantic extensions into the domain of verbal communication Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn |  p. 507
• Spatial metaphor in German causative constructions Robert Thomas King |  p. 555
• Náhuatl causative/applicatives in cognitive grammar David Tuggy |  p. 587
• III. A historical perspective
• Grammatical categories and human conceptualization : Aristotle and the modistae Pierre Swiggers |  p. 621
• Cognitive grammar and the history of lexical semantics Dirk Geeraerts |  p. 647
• Subject index |  p. 695

Cited by 32 other publications

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Linguistics

Main bic subject, main bisac subject.

Theses/Dissertations

Since 1999, most theses and dissertations submitted by graduate students at the university are published online in the UGA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Database (ETD) . This page is a list of recent theses and dissertations produced by graduates of the University of Georgia M.A. and Ph.D. programs in Linguistics, with a link to the UGA ETD page for the pdf file.

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Richard Moses Katz Jr . Ph.D. 2016. The resultative in Gothic Advisor: Jared Klein

Martin Jakub Macak . Ph.D. 2016. Studies in classical and modern Armenian phonology   Advisor: Jared Klein

Judith Allen Oliver . Ph.D. 2016. When fingerspelling throws a curveball Advisor: William Kretzschmar

Andrew Michael Paczkowski . Ph.D. 2016. Toward a new method for analyzing syntax in poetry: discriminating grammatical patterns in the Rigveda Advisor: Jared Klein

Jennimaria Kristiina Palomaki . Ph.D. 2016. The pragmatics and syntax of the Finnish -han particle clitic Advisor: Vera Lee-Schoenfeld

Calvin Ferst . M.A. 2016. Walhalla: language shift in the garden of the gods Advisor: Joshua Bousquette

Maisy Elizabeth French . M.A. 2016. When orthography and phonology collide: an examination of the effect of orthography on the phonetic production of homophones Advisor: Margaret Renwick

Karen Elizabeth Sesterhenn . M.A. 2016. An overview of the phenomenon of doublets in English Advisor: Jared Klein

Steven Slone Coats . Ph.D. 2015. Finland Twitter English: lexical, grammatical, and geographical properties Advisor: William Kretzschmar

Xiangyu Jiang . Ph.D. 2015. Ultimate attainment in the production of narratives by Chinese-English bilinguals Advisor: Liang Chen

Rachel Virginia Nabulsi . Ph.D. 2015. Burial practices, funerary texts, and the treatment of death in Iron Age Israel and Aram Advisor: Richard Friedman

Tomoe Nishio . Ph.D. 2015. Negotiating contradictions in a Japanese-American telecollaboration: an activity theory analysis of online intercultural exchange Advisor: Linda Harklau

Xiaodong Zhang . Ph.D. 2015. A discourse approach to teachers? beliefs and textbook use: a case study of a Chinese college EFL classroom Advisor: Ruth Harman

Michael Reid Ariail . M.A. 2015. Language and dialectal variation in request structures: an analysis of Costa Rican Spanish and southern American English Advisor: Sarah Blackwell

Eleanor Detreville . M.A. 2015. An overview of Latin morphological calques on Greek technical terms: formation and success Advisor: Jared Klein

Luke Madison Smith . M.A. 2015. External possession and the undisentanglability of syntax and semantics Advisor: Vera Lee-Schoenfeld

Scott Lee . Ph.D. 2014. The phonetics of intonation in learner varieties of French Advisor: Keith Langston

Laura Brewer . M.A. 2014. Cognitive connections between linguistic and musical syntax: an optimality theoretic approach Advisor: Keith Langston

Courtney Ann Macer . M.A. 2014. Relearning heritage language phonology Advisor: Margaret Renwick

Tiffany Strickland . M.A. 2014. Eat their words: a corpus-based analysis of grocery store discourse Advisor: Jonathan Evans

Julia Catherine Patterson Sturm . M.A. 2014. Idiomatization of preverb + verb compounds in the ?g Veda Advisor: Jared Klein

Kenneth Jeffrey Knight . Ph.D. 2013. L1 English vocalic transfer in L2 Japanese Advisor: Don McCreary

Heather Lee Mello . Ph.D. 2013. Analysis of language variation and word segmentation for a corpus of Vietnamese blogs: a sociolinguistic approach Advisor: William Kretzschmar

Hugo Enrique Mendez . Ph.D. 2013. Canticles in translation: the treatment of poetic language in the Greek, Gothic, Classical Armenian, and Old Church Slavonic gospels Advisor: Jared Klein

Nicole Elizabeth Siffrinn . M.A. 2013. Using appraisal analysis to map value systems in high-stakes writing rubrics Advisor: Ruth Harman

Mark Raymund Wenthe . Ph.D. 2012. Issues in the placement of enclitic personal pronouns in the Rigveda Advisor: Jared Klein

Ellen Marie Ayres . M.A. 2012. Influences on gender agreement in adjectives among adult learners of Spanish Advisor: Don McCreary

Marcus Paul Berger . M.A. 2012. Parallel hierarchies: a minimalist analysis of nominals and gerunds Advisor: Vera Lee-Schoenfeld

Kelly Patricia Dugan . M.A. 2012. A generative approach to homeric enjambment: benefits and drawbacks Advisor: Jared Klein

Kristen Marie Fredriksen . M.A. 2012. Constraints on perfect auxiliary contraction: evidence from spoken American English Advisor: Lewis (Chad) Howe

Anastasia Nikolaevna Sorokina . M.A. 2012. The dynamics of bilingual mental lexcon: the effects of partical conceptual equivalence on acquisition of Russian as an L2 Advisor: Victoria Hasko

Allison Rebecca Wachter . M.A. 2012. Semantic prosody and intensifier variation in academic speech Advisor: Lewis (Chad) Howe

Sam Zukoff . M.A. 2012. The phonology of verbal reduplication in Ancient Greek: an Optimality Theory approach Advisor: Jared Klein

Radia Benzehra . Ph.D. 2011. Arabic-English/ English-Arabic lexicography: a critical perspective Advisor: Don McCreary

Satomi Suzuki Chenoweth . Ph.D. 2011. Novice language learners? Off-screen verbal and nonverbal behaviors during university synchronous Japanese virtual education Advisors: Kathryn Roulston & Linda Harklau

Willie Udo Willie . Ph.D. 2011. Lexical aspect and lexical saliency in acquisition of past tense-aspect morphology among Ibibio ESL learners Advisor: Lioba Moshi

Renee Lorraine Kemp . M.A. 2011. The perception of German dorsal fricatives by native speakers of English Advisor:  Keith Langston

Erin Beltran Mitchelson . M.A. 2011. Implicature use in L2 Advisor: Don McCreary

Justin Victor Sperlein . M.A. 2011. A Phonetic Summarizer for Sociolinguists: concordancing by phonetic criteria Advisor: William Kretzschmar

Garrison E. Bickerstaff Jr . Ph.D. 2010. Construction and application of Bounded Virtual Corpora of British and American English Advisor: William Kretzschmar

Paulina Bounds . Ph.D. 2010. Perception versus production of Polish speech: Pozna? Advisor: William Kretzschmar

Alberto Centeno-Pulido . Ph.D. 2010. Reconciling generativist and functionalist approaches on adjectival position in Spanish Advisor:  Sarah Blackwell

Janay Crabtree . Ph.D. 2010. Roads and paths in adaptation to non-native speech and implications for second language acquisition Advisor: Don McCreary

Jeff Kilpatrick . Ph.D. 2010. The development of Latin post-tonic /Cr/ clusters in select Northern Italian dialects Advisor: Jared Klein

Joseph Allen Pennington . Ph.D. 2010. A study of purpose, result, and casual hypotaxis in early Indo-European gospel versions Advisor: Jared Klein

Aram Cho . M.A. 2010. Influence of L1 on L2 learners of Korean: a perception test on Korean vowels and stop consonants Advisor: Don McCreary

Frances Rankin Gray . M.A. 2010. It's like 120 milliseconds: a search for grammaticalization in the duration of like in five functions Advisor: Don McCreary

Magdalene Sophia Jacobs . M.A. 2010. The decline of the French passe simple: a variationist analysis of the passÉ simple and passe compose in selected texts from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries Advisor: Diana Ranson

Nathan Loggins . M.A. 2010. Mandarin loanword phonology: a case study of three English mid vowels Advisor: Keith Langston

Caley Charles Smith . M.A. 2010. The development of final [asterisk]/-as/ in Pre-Vedic Advisor: Jared Klein

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PhD Program in Cognitive Science of Language

Join our world-class Languages & Linguistics Department to continue your study of language structure, language processing and the neural basis of language in the Cognitive Science of Language PhD Program.

Our courses are so hands-on and application based that you end up developing a unique and valuable skillset, which ends up leading into a variety of career paths that would otherwise have been difficult to grow accustomed to.

Meliha Horzum '20

Honours Cognitive Science of Language

About the Program

Based in the Department of Linguistics and Languages, the PhD program in Cognitive Science of Language is interdisciplinary and includes faculty from Humanities, Science, and Health Sciences. The program has a strong research orientation with expertise in cognitive science, corpus linguistics, neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and theoretical linguistics. The program introduces students to the issues in those fields that form the nexus of linguistics, cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience, and trains students in the research methods employed to study them.

Admission Requirements

A MSc in the Cognitive Science of Language or an equivalent Master’s degree is required for entrance into the PhD program. Some applicants may require additional courses in core areas (e.g. linguistics or cognitive science) in order to be eligible for admission. Each application will be evaluated on an individual basis.

Language Requirement

In order to ensure language diversity and breadth, the Department has a second-language requirement for the PhD degree, in addition to the general Graduate School requirement of English proficiency. Candidates should have, as a minimum, intermediate knowledge of a language other than English, defined as having passed the equivalent of two (2) full year courses. Candidates admitted without this requirement will be expected to pass the equivalent of two (2) full year courses or to pass a Qualifying Exam. The Department will evaluate each student’s language preparation at the Admission stage.

Application Process

The official electronic transcripts should be sent from the issuing institution directly to our department’s email: [email protected]

The online application portal for our graduate program in Cognitive Science of Language unlocks November 1st each year for September admission only. 

THOSE WHO SUBMIT  THEIR  COMPLETED APPLICATIONS (BOTH DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL) BY THE JANUARY 31ST DEADLINE WILL HAVE FIRST CONSIDERATION.

• Complete the online application -> McMaster University Application  
• Statement of Interest (identify the faculty member you wish to work with)
• Writing Sample (any type of academic writing i.e. term paper, thesis chapter)
• Two academic references (McMaster University uses an Electronic Referencing System. By entering the email address of your referee through the online application, the system will automatically send an e-Reference request on your behalf)
• English Language Proficiency (if English is not your native language)
• Official transcripts of all post-secondary academic work completed to date (transcripts must be sent directly from the issuing institution to our Department, please include English translation if applicable)
• Official copy of your TOEFL or IELTS scores or any other evidence of English proficiency (TOEFL: minimum score of 92 (internet based), 237 (computer based) or 580 (paper based), minimum of 20 per band; for the Faculty of Engineering a minimum score of 88 (internet based) or 213 on the (computer based) or 550 (paper based)  IELTS (Academic): minimum overall score of 6.5, with at least 5.5 in each section)
• **NOTE** Applicants from outside of Canada should begin the application process as early as possible to allow time to obtain all necessary documents.

Program Timelines

Students entering with a MSc in the Cognitive Science of Language are required to complete three half courses plus one pass/fail module. If the following courses were not completed in the MSc program, they must be included in the PhD program of study:

• COGSCIL 730 / Language Analysis Methods: Phonology and Morphology
• COGSCIL 731 / Language Analysis Methods: Syntax and Semantics
• COGSCIL 726 / The Cognitive Science of Language Ph.D. Lecture Series must be completed in Year 1 of the PhD program
• Plus additional courses approved by the student’s supervisory committee to total three half courses

Students entering with a Master’s degree but not an MSc in the Cognitive Science of Language are required to complete seven half courses plus one pass/fail lecture series module as listed below. The Lecture series must be completed in year one of the program.  

Required courses:

• COGSCIL 721 / Fundamentals of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language
• COGSCIL 722 / Contemporary Issues in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language
• COGSCIL 726 / The Cognitive Science of Language Ph.D. Lecture Series  
• Plus additional courses approved by the student’s supervisory committee to total seven half courses

The Comprehensive Examination is intended to ensure that the student develops competence in a subfield of Cognitive Science of Language beyond the focus of the thesis. In consultation with the supervisory committee, the student will identify a topic for the Comprehensive that is distinct from the thesis topic.

In most cases, the Director of the Comprehensive will not be the thesis supervisor. The student and the Comprehensive Director agree in writing on the nature of the deliverable for the Comprehensive and on interim and final deadlines. At a minimum, the Comprehensive consists of a written paper and oral examination of the topic of the paper. The paper may consist of a literature review, proposal for a research project, report of a research project or report of a teaching project. The scope of the project should be such that it can reasonably be completed within one semester. The paper will usually be 20-30 pages long.

The Comprehensive Director identifies at least one other faculty member; together, the Director and these other faculty members constitute the Comprehensive Exam Committee. (Comprehensive Directors are encouraged to recruit Comprehensive Examiners from beyond the Department of Linguistics & Languages.) The Comprehensive Director advises the student on the preparation of the paper. The Comprehensive Exam Committee determines whether the paper is ready for an oral defense, and conducts the oral examination. The oral examination consists of a brief presentation by the student regarding the content of the paper followed by questions from the Committee. The Comprehensive Exam must be successfully completed within 20 months of entering the PhD program.

All students are expected to attend the talks in the Cognitive Science of Language Lecture Series, where scholars from around the world in the fields of Linguistics, Psychology, and Cognitive Neuroscience discuss their research.

Tuition & Program Fees

Visit Graduate Studies to learn more about tuition, supplementary fees and everything you need to know about being paid as a Teaching or Research Assistant. Tuition fees are assessed on a term by term basis, depending on the number of courses a student takes or if they are paying by term.

Faculty of Humanities Adjustments guidelines

The McMaster Graduate Scholarship (MGS) is the most common form of scholarship support available to graduate students in our program. The MGS ensures that students receive a guaranteed minimum level of scholarship support. Adjustments to the MGS will depend on other available scholarships.

The Faculty of Humanities Adjustments guidelines policy is available for review.

REVIEW THE POLICY

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LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR GRADUATE SUPERVISORS

Research your passion in Linguistics & Languages with supervision from our world-class faculty.

SEE OUR CURRENT AND FORMER PhD STUDENTS

Supplemental information.

Graduate Courses in Linguistics and Languages

Course outlines 2023-2024

• Cogscil 6LB3 – Advanced Phonetics and Phonology
• Cogscil 6XX3 – Topics in Linguistic Theory
• Cogscil 712 – Reading Course (Linguistics)
• Cogscil 713 – Reading Course (Cognitive Science)
• Cogscil 722 – Contemporary Issues in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language
• Cogscil 726A – The Cognitive Science of Language Ph.D. Lecture Series

Winter 2024

• Cogscil 6G03- Language, Sex and Gender
• Cogscil 6NN3 – Cognitive Neurolinguistics Lab
• Cogscil 713 –  Reading Course (Cognitive Science)
• Cogscil 721 – Fundamentals of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language
• Cogscil 726B– The Cognitive Science of Language Ph.D. Lecture Series
• Cogscil 731 – Language Analysis Methods: Syntax and Semantics
• Cogscil 734 – Issues in Syntax

Course outlines 2022-2023

• Cogscil 6D03 – Computers and Linguistic Analysis
• Cogscil 730 – Language Analysis Methods: Phonology and Morphology

Winter 2023

• Cogscil 6AS3 – Topics in Advanced Semantics
• Cogscil 6EL3 – Experimental Lab in Cognitive Science of Language
• Cogscil 6LC3 – Advanced Morphology and Syntax
• Cogscil 726B – The Cognitive Science of Language Ph.D. Lecture Series
• Cogscil 749 – Lab Visual Language

Domestic MSc students usually receive a funding package consisting of a teaching assistantship and scholarship. The total value of the funding package ranges from $16,000 to $19,000 per year.

Currently all domestic PhD students receive a funding package of $23,500 per year, usually including a teaching assistantship of 260 hours plus a scholarship.

McMaster Graduate Studies Scholarship Information

The School of Graduate Studies provides funding to our graduate students so they can devote their time and energy to the successful completion of their studies.

The new uniform guidelines on Adjustments of the McMaster Graduate Scholarships for students winning major merit-based external or internal awards can be found here  (effective May 1st, 2024)

External Graduate Scholarships

All eligible students are also strongly encouraged to apply for external scholarships such as the Ontario Graduate Scholarship and Canada Graduate Scholarships.

Ontario Graduate Scholarship

Note that applications must be submitted directly to the institution(s) where you plan to pursue graduate studies. The deadline is normally in the fall, before the application deadline for graduate school. 

Canada Graduate Scholarships-Master’s Program

Graduate Scholarship – As with OGS, applications for the Canada Graduate Scholarship must be submitted through an eligible institution. The deadline is usually December 1, before the application deadline for graduate school.

All applicants and current students will be considered for funding support from McMaster, including TAships.

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The Department of Linguistics & Languages welcomes scholars from around the world to participate in the Cognitive Science of Language Lecture Series. The lecture series is a forum where all are welcome to attend talks by established researchers on recent innovations and current trends in Language and Cognition.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Linguistics cognitive'

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Dutra, Elaine Cristina Pereira. "Tradução e Cognição: Interfaces." Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, 2009. http://repositorio.ufes.br/handle/10/3704.

Saka, Paul. "Lexical decomposition in cognitive semantics." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/185592.

Popovich, Derek J. "Arabic root forms of degree adjectives and cognitive semantics." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case157272463024508.

Vogel, Sarah K. Vogel. "Constructing Life: The Resultative Construction and Social Cognition in Moral Argumentation." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1534242803827082.

Antony, Michael Verne. "Consciousness, content, and cognitive architecture." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/13729.

Jones, Robin Michael. "Linguistic and Cognitive Processing in Adults Who Stutter." The Ohio State University, 2006. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1396286306.

Jin, Lifeng. "Computational Modeling of Syntax Acquisition with Cognitive Constraints." The Ohio State University, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1594934826359118.

Johnson, Barbara Denise. "Modeling Cognitive Authority Relationships." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2016. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc955042/.

Nunes, Valeria Fernandes. "Narrativas em Libras: análise de processos cognitivos." Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 2014. http://www.bdtd.uerj.br/tde_busca/arquivo.php?codArquivo=6442.

Hayes, Elizabeth R. "The pragmatics of perception and cognition in MT Jeremiah 1.1-6.30 : a cognitive linguistics approach." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.432143.

Mitchell, Heather Lynn 1968. "Cognitive-linguistic processing demands and speech breathing." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/278341.

Makni, Fawzi. "Teaching polysemous words to Arab learners : a cognitive linguistics approach." Thesis, University of the West of England, Bristol, 2013. http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/20032/.

Nogueira, Priscilla de Almeida. "Gramaticalização da construção \'quase que\': motivações cognitivas para o uso da construção de incerteza." Universidade de São Paulo, 2014. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8142/tde-11122014-180858/.

Stein, Edward D. "Rationality and the limits of cognitive science." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/13126.

Ignacio, Luana de Fatima Machado. "Compreensão de manchetes sob a perspectiva da mesclagem e da metáfora conceptual." Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 2013. http://www.bdtd.uerj.br/tde_busca/arquivo.php?codArquivo=5344.

Reichgelt, Han. "Reference and quantification in the cognitive view of language." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1985. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/20138.

Bianchi, Dylan Mila. "Know-how as the cognitive basis of skill." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/113780.

ValÃrio, Yvantelmack Dantas. "Argumentation and Metaphor: an approaching Language Argument Theory and Cognitive Linguistics." Universidade Federal do CearÃ, 2007. http://www.teses.ufc.br/tde_busca/arquivo.php?codArquivo=3682.

Zhao, Tinghao. "The Perceptual Basis of Abstract Concepts in Polysemy Networks – An Interdisciplinary Study." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1511400502977642.

Hayes, Elizabeth R. "The pragmatics of perception and cognition in MT Jeremiah 1:1-6:30 a cognitive linguistics approach." Berlin New York de Gruyter, 2008. http://d-nb.info/988076853/04.

Hammer, Sjobor Athon. "Face, Space, And Anxiety: An Ethnographic Study of the Kansas Historical Society's Social Media Usage." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1428009790.

Meylan, Stephan Charles. "Representing Linguistic Knowledge with Probabilistic Models." Thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2018. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10931065.

The use of language is one of the defining features of human cognition. Focusing here on two key features of language, productivity and robustness , I examine how basic questions regarding linguistic representation can be approached with the help of probabilistic generative language models, or PGLMs. These statistical models, which capture aspects of linguistic structure in terms of distributions over events, can serve as both the product of language learning and as prior knowledge in real-time language processing. In the first two chapters, I show how PGLMs can be used to make inferences about the nature of people's linguistic representations. In Chapter 1, I look at the representations of language learners, tracing the earliest evidence for a noun category in large developmental corpora. In Chapter 2, I evaluate broad-coverage language models reflecting contrasting assumptions about the information sources and abstractions used for in-context spoken word recognition in their ability to capture people's behavior in a large online game of “Telephone.” In Chapter 3, I show how these models can be used to examine the properties of lexicons. I use a measure derived from a probabilistic generative model of word structure to provide a novel interpretation of a longstanding linguistic universal, motivating it in terms of cognitive pressures that arise from communication. I conclude by considering the prospects for a unified, expectations-oriented account of language processing and first language learning.

Pinheiro, Raquel Martins Melo. "O frame aula: uma análise sociocognitiva do discurso docente." Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora (UFJF), 2009. https://repositorio.ufjf.br/jspui/handle/ufjf/2758.

Xia, Xiaoyan, and 夏晓燕. "Categorization and L2 vocabulary learning: a cognitive linguistic perspective." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2011. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B46287929.

Hamrick, Phillip. "The Effectiveness of Cognitive Grammar and Traditional Grammar in L1 Pedagogy: An Empirical Test." Connect to resource online, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ysu1212177577.

Mueller, Nicole. "The agent and related categories in early Welsh and early Irish with special reference to narrative texts : aspects of marking and usage." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1992. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.334143.

Ackerman, Lauren Marie. "In uences on Parsing Ambiguity." Thesis, Northwestern University, 2015. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3741393.

The primary goal of this dissertation is to characterize the relative strength of two of the influences on the parser’s behavior during ambiguity resolution: coreference dependency formation and verb frame preference. I find that coreference dependency formation exerts a stronger influence on the parser than does verb frame preference, even when verb frame preference is maximized in transitively biased frames.

Previous studies have shown local attachment bias initially directs the parser to an embedded object analysis in sentences like (1), in which the DP Annie’s melody is locally ambiguous between the embedded object (EO)/matrix subject (MS) analyses (Ferreira and Henderson, 1990).

(1) Whenever she was trying to casually hum Annie’s melody was beautiful.

Additionally, (1) contains a cataphoric pronoun she which triggers an active search for an antecedent, whereby the parser seeks the antecedent only in grammatically sanctioned positions, such as where the antecedent is not c-commanded by the pronoun (Kazanina et al., 2007; van Gompel and Liversedge, 2003). In (1), the closest potential antecedent is Annie. However, it can be the antecedent only if the DP that contains it is analyzed as the MS, thus outside the whenever-clause and not c-commanded by she. A bias toward an early cataphoric dependency formation could lead the parser to analyze the ambiguous DP as the MS. In (1), there is a bias toward a MS analysis from the antecedent search in addition to a bias toward the local attachment EO analysis.

I find that, regardless of the transitivity bias of the verb in the position of hums, the parser forms a dependency between the pronoun she and Annie. This indicates that dependency formation can supersede verb frame preferences and any default preference the parser may have toward local attachment (Phillips and Gibson, 1997). Moreover, I also observe effects attributable to both the MS and EO parses. This suggests that the parser builds both alternatives and maintains them in parallel. From this, I conclude that the parser prioritizes information from an ongoing dependency search over lexical properties during ambiguity resolution.

Foster, Maha Saliba. "Visual Speech Perception of Arabic Emphatics and Gutturals." Thesis, University of Colorado at Boulder, 2016. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10151052.

This investigation explores the potential effect on perception of speech visual cues associated with Arabic gutturals (AGs) and Arabic emphatics (AEs); AEs are pharyngealized phonemes characterized by a visually salient primary articulation but a rather invisible secondary articulation produced deep in the pharynx. The corpus consisted of 72 minimal pairs each containing two contrasting consonants of interest (COIs), an emphatic versus a non-emphatic, or a guttural paired with another guttural. In order to assess the potential effect that visual speech information in the lips, chin, cheeks, and neck has on the perception of the COIs, production data elicited from 4 native Lebanese speakers was captured on videos that were edited to allow perceivers to see only certain regions of the face. Fifty three Lebanese perceivers watched the muted movies each presented with a minimal pair containing the word uttered in the video, and selected in a forced identification task the word they thought they saw the speaker say.

The speakers’ speech was analyzed to help explore what in their production informed correct identification of the COIs. Perceivers were above chance at correctly identifying AEs and AGs, though AEs were better perceived than AGs. In the emphatic category, the effect on perception of measurement differences between a word and its pair was submitted to automatic speech recognition. The machine learning models were generally successful at correctly classifying COIs as emphatic or non-emphatics across vowel contexts; the models were able to predict the probability of perceivers’ accuracy in identifying certain COIs produced by certain speakers; also, an overlap between the measurements selected by the computer and those selected by human perceivers was found. No difference in perception of AEs according to the part of the face that was visible was observed, suggesting that the lips, present in all of the videos, were most important for perception of emphasis. Conversely, in the perception of AGs, lips were not as informative and perceivers relied more on cheeks and chin. The presence of visible cues associated with the AEs, particularly in the lips, suggests that such visual cues might be informative for non-native learners as well, if they were trained to attend to them.

Kline, Valerie. "Category Specific Semantic Impairments." Thesis, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2016. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10003760.

Category-specific semantic deficits (CSSD) result in the inability to recognize, recall, and/or remember objects from a particular semantic category. There is a common pattern of impairments observed in CSSD patients that is reviewed in Section One. In Section Two, I used a tempo-matching speeded word verification task to investigate the early stages of semantic memory to examine the similarities between healthy participants under time pressure and the patient data. Specifically, I sought to produce in the latter the reversal of the basic level effect found in CSSD, and to examine healthy participant data for other CSSD trends. The speeded methodology generally failed to replicate the reversal of the basic level effect, except for several specific items at the shortest response deadline. The final study in Section Two examines the effect of semantic relatedness on this task. Three types of semantic relatedness each reduced the speed and accuracy of responses relative to unrelated conditions. Section Three provides an overview and discussion of the results. The failure to replicate the reversal of the basic level effect suggests that speeded classification of neuropsychologically relevant stimuli does not share a common etiology with CSSD.

Kazi, Marisha S. "The Effect of Gestural Priming on Semantic Feature Frequency." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1491825566290727.

Lakey, Holly. "The Grammar of Fear: Morphosyntactic Metaphor in Fear Constructions." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/20415.

Lindes, Peter. "OntoSoar: Using Language to Find Genealogy Facts." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2014. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/4133.

Perkins, Lisa. "The impact of cognitive neuropsychological impairments on conversational ability in aphasia." Thesis, Boston Spa, U.K. : British Library Document Supply Centre, 1993. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=1&uin=uk.bl.ethos.335014.

Ferreira, Flancieni Aline Rocha. "Processos cognitivos subjacentes às interpretações em Libras da música Aquarela." Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 2015. http://www.bdtd.uerj.br/tde_busca/arquivo.php?codArquivo=9299.

Yuan, Wenjuan. "A cognitive poetics of kinaesthesia in Wordsworth." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2013. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/28585/.

Gao, Hua. "A cognitive-functional investigation of questions in Chinese." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2005. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B3473790X.

Collins, Michael Xavier. "Cognitive Perspectives On English Word Order." The Ohio State University, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1343315752.

Parker, Jeffrey. "Inflectional Complexity and Cognitive Processing: An Experimental and Corpus-based Investigation of Russian Nouns." The Ohio State University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1467904555.

Levin, Alexandra. "Writing Out Your Feelings: Linguistics, Creativity, & Mood Disorders." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2017. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/963.

Salinas, Barrios Ivan Eduardo. "Embodied experiences for science learning| A cognitive linguistics exploration of middle school students' language in learning about water." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 2014. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3634266.

I investigated linguistic patterns in middle school students' writing to understand their relevant embodied experiences for learning science. Embodied experiences are those limited by the perceptual and motor constraints of the human body. Recent research indicates student understanding of science needs embodied experiences. Recent emphases of science education researchers in the practices of science suggest that students' understanding of systems and their structure, scale, size, representations, and causality are crosscutting concepts that unify all scientific disciplinary areas. To discern the relationship between linguistic patterns and embodied experiences, I relied on Cognitive Linguistics, a field within cognitive sciences that pays attention to language organization and use assuming that language reflects the human cognitive system. Particularly, I investigated the embodied experiences that 268 middle school students learning about water brought to understanding: i) systems and system structure; ii) scale, size and representations; and iii) causality. Using content analysis, I explored students' language in search of patterns regarding linguistic phenomena described within cognitive linguistics: image schemas, conceptual metaphors, event schemas, semantical roles, and force-dynamics. I found several common embodied experiences organizing students' understanding of crosscutting concepts. Perception of boundaries and change in location and perception of spatial organization in the vertical axis are relevant embodied experiences for students' understanding of systems and system structure. Direct object manipulation and perception of size with and without locomotion are relevant for understanding scale, size and representations. Direct applications of force and consequential perception of movement or change in form are relevant for understanding of causality. I discuss implications of these findings for research and science teaching.

Gao, Hua, and 高華. "A cognitive-functional investigation of questions in Chinese." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2005. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B3473790X.

Peverada, Christopher. "Effects of sociocultural embodiment on use of RUN." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1301598994.

Dornelas, Aline Bisotti. "Construções de movimento fictivo em Português do Brasil: cognição e corpus." Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora (UFJF), 2014. https://repositorio.ufjf.br/jspui/handle/ufjf/4638.

Ploch, Stefan. "Nasals on my mind : the phonetic and the cognitive approach to the phonology of nasality." Thesis, SOAS, University of London, 1999. http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/28526/.

Franco, Joana Bortolini. "Significado corporeado e significado como uso: uma investigação das relações entre a linguística cognitiva e a filosofia de Wittgenstein." Universidade de São Paulo, 2014. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8139/tde-22052015-103908/.

Baker, Christine M. "Effects of bilingualism on working memory ability." Thesis, California State University, Long Beach, 2013. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=1522557.

Much evidence exists in support of the notion known as a bilingual advantage, the idea that some bilinguals benefit from an executive functioning system superior to monolinguals. The majority of research investigating the bilingual advantage lies in metalinguistic awareness, conflict resolution, and inhibition; however, this thesis examines working-memory abilities by comparing the performance of English monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual groups in a dual task paradigm, taxing lexical retrieval and memory maintenance and manipulation. Participants were asked to perform a lexical retrieval task eliciting high-frequency abstract nouns or adjectives while simultaneously memorizing an accumulating list of target abstract words to be later recalled. Although no difference in immediate recall between language groups was found, bilinguals remembered significantly more target words 5 days after testing. Evidence suggests that bilinguals may build new memory representations that are more resistant to decay than monolingual memory representations.

Chu, Carolyn. "Accent-based implicit prejudice| A novel application of the implicit association test." Thesis, San Jose State University, 2013. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=1541496.

In the present study, implicit attitudes toward accents were examined. The most common method used to study accent-based perceptions is by self-report questionnaires, which measure explicit attitudes. To my knowledge, no previous study has examined implicit accent-based attitudes. In the present investigation, auditory stimuli were used in a novel application of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure implicit accent attitudes. Participants were randomly assigned to listen to a passage read in one of three foreign accents (Mexican, Chinese, or British) and the same passage in a Standard American accent. Participants also completed the Speech Dialect Attitudinal Scale, which measured explicit accent attitudes, and the IAT, which measured implicit attitudes toward the foreign accent relative to the Standard American accent. Implicit and explicit measures were counterbalanced. Results showed that participants had more favorable implicit attitudes for the Standard American accent than the Mexican accent and a mild preference for the Standard American accent compared to the Chinese and British accents. Implicit and explicit accent attitudes were largely uncorrelated. The examination of implicit attitudes in the current investigation complements previous accent research, which focused on explicit attitudes. Examining aspects of both implicit and explicit accent attitudes will lead to a more in-depth understanding of how accents affect individuals' perceptions, feelings, and judgments.

Grey, Sarah Elizabeth. "A neurocognitive investigation of bilingual advantages at additional language learning." Thesis, Georgetown University, 2013. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3590106.

This study investigated bilingual advantages at additional languages learning by comparing early, highly proficient bilinguals to monolinguals' learning of an additional language in adulthood. The study used both behavioral and neurocognitive measures (event-related potentials) and tested subjects along the trajectory of learning from low to high experience across two exposure contexts: with or without grammar information on the language. The results of the study showed that behavioral results varied as a function of exposure context - performance differences were found when subjects were not provided with grammar information but were absent when such information was provided. The neurocognitive measures revealed differences in processing between bilinguals and monolinguals, especially at low levels of experience. This too varied as a function of exposure context, as well as linguistic structure.

Meador, Diane L. "The minimal word hypothesis| A speech segmentation strategy." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 2013. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3600287.

Previous investigations have sought to determine how listeners might locate word boundaries in the speech signal for the purpose of lexical access. Cutler (1990) proposes the Metrical Segmentation Strategy (MSS), such that only full vowels in stressed syllables and their preceding syllabic onsets are segmented from the speech stream. I report the results of several experiments which indicate that the listener segments the minimal word, a phonologically motivated prosodic constituent, during processing of the speech signal.

These experiments were designed to contrast the MSS with two prosodic alternative hypotheses. The Syllable Hypothesis posits that listeners segment a linguistic syllable in its entirety as it is produced by the speaker. The Minimal Word Hypothesis proposes that a minimal word is segmented according to implicit knowledge the listener has concerning statistically probable characteristics of the lexicon.

These competing hypotheses were tested by using a word spotting method similar to that in Cutler and Norris (1988). The subjects' task was to detect real monosyllabic words embedded initially in bisyllabic nonce strings. Both open (CV) and closed (CVC) words were embedded in strings containing a single intervocalic consonant. The prosodic constituency of this consonant was varied by manipulating factors affecting prosodic structure: stress, the sonority of the consonant, and the quality of the vowel in the first syllable. The assumption behind the method is that word detection will be facilitated when embedded word and segmentation boundaries are coincident.

Results show that these factors are influential during segmentation. The degree of difficulty in word detection is a function of how well the speech signal corresponds to the minimal word. Findings are consistently counter to both the MSS and Syllable hypotheses.

The Minimal Word Hypothesis takes advantage of statistical properties of the lexicon, ensuring a strategy which is successful more often than not. The minimal word specifies the smallest possible content word in a language in terms of prosodic structure while simultaneously affiliating the greatest amount of featural information within the structural limits. It therefore guarantees an efficient strategy with as few parses as possible.

Bourque, Michelle A. (Michelle Anne). "Bilingual lexical organization in compound vs. subordinate normal subjects : an examination of the processing of cognates vs. noncognates." Thesis, McGill University, 1995. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=23385.

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What Is Cognitive Linguistics?

A new paradigm in the study of language and the mind..

Posted July 12, 2019 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

Cognitive linguistics is a modern school of linguistic thought that originally began to emerge in the 1970s due to dissatisfaction with formal approaches to language. As I explain in my book, Cognitive Linguistics: A Complete Guide , it is also firmly rooted in the emergence of modern cognitive science in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in work relating to human categorization, and in earlier traditions such as Gestalt psychology .

Early research was spearheaded during the second half of the 1970s by the so-called "founding fathers" of cognitive linguistics: Ronald Langacker , George Lakoff and Leonard Talmy .

Langacker, during this period, began work on his theory of Cognitive Grammar, then dubbed "space grammar." Lakoff was working on a related approach to grammar that came to be dubbed Construction Grammar, as well as a semantic basis for grammar, termed "linguistic gestalts." This notion later evolved into his theory of conceptual metaphor theory, developed with philosopher Mark Johnson .

During the 1980s, Lakoff, influenced by his colleagues Charles Fillmore and Eleanor Rosch at University California, Berkeley, began applying new approaches to categorization, in particular, Prototype Theory to modeling linguistic representation in the minds of language users. This gave rise, among other things, to a new "cognitive" approach to semantics, especially lexical semantics. Meanwhile, Talmy was engaged in developing a theory which he termed Cognitive Semantics.

By the mid to late 1980s these approaches, together with research from other leading researchers, most notably French-American researcher Gilles Fauconnier , had coalesced into a broad research program that adopted a broad empiricist and non-modular approach to language and mind, that came to be called "cognitive linguistics;" in essence, the various theories shared a common impulse to model language and human communication in ways that were cognitively realistic, rather than adopting the modular, computational view of mind inherited from early research in cognitive science.

And by the early 1990s, there was a growing proliferation of research in this area, and of researchers who identified themselves as "cognitive linguists." In 1989/90, the International Cognitive Linguistics Society was established, together with the journal Cognitive Linguistics. In the words of the eminent cognitive linguist Ronald Langacker this "marked the birth of cognitive linguistics as a broadly grounded, self-conscious intellectual movement."

The Cognitive Linguistics Enterprise

Cognitive linguistics is described as a "movement" or an "enterprise" because it is not a specific theory. Rather, it is an approach that has adopted a common set of guiding principles, assumptions and perspectives which have led to a diverse range of complementary, overlapping (and sometimes competing) theories.

The cognitive linguistics enterprise is characterized by two key commitments. These are:

• The Generalisation Commitment : A commitment to the characterization of general principles that are responsible for all aspects of human language.
• The Cognitive Commitment : A commitment to providing a characterization of general principles for language that accords with what is known about the mind and brain from other disciplines. As these commitments are what imbue cognitive linguistics with its distinctive character, and differentiate it from formal linguistics.

The Generalisation Commitment

Cognitive linguists make the assumption that there are common structuring principles that hold across different aspects of language; moreover, they further assume that an important function of language science is to identify these common principles.

In modern linguistics, the study of language is often separated into distinct areas such as phonetics (sound production and reception), phonology (sound patterns), semantics (word and sentence meaning), pragmatics (meaning in discourse context), morphology (word structure) syntax (sentence structure) and so on.

This is particularly true of formal linguistics: a set of approaches to modeling language that posit explicit mechanical devices or procedures operating on theoretical primitives in order to produce the complete set of linguistic possibilities in a given language.

Within formal linguistics (such as the Generative Grammar approach developed by Noam Chomsky ), it is usually argued that areas such as phonology, semantics and syntax concern significantly different kinds of structuring principles operating over different kinds of primitives.

For instance, a syntax module is an area—a neurological system—in the mind/brain specialized for structuring words into sentences. In contrast, a phonology component of the mind would be concerned with structuring sounds into patterns permitted by the rules of any given language, and by human language in general.

This modular view of mind reinforces the idea that modern linguistics is justified in separating the study of language into distinct sub-disciplines, not only on grounds of practicality but because the components of language are wholly distinct and, in terms of organization, incommensurable. This is a view I critiqued in my earlier book, The Language Myth .

Cognitive linguists typically acknowledge that it may often be useful, for practical purposes, to treat areas such as syntax, semantics, and phonology as being notionally distinct. The study of syntactic organisation involves, at least in part, the study of slightly different kinds of cognitive and linguistic phenomena than the study of phonological organisation.

However, given the Generalisation Commitment, cognitive linguists disagree that the modules or subsystems of language are organised in significantly divergent ways, or indeed that distinct modules or subsystems even exist in the mind/brain.

The Cognitive Commitment

The Generalisation Commitment leads to the search for principles of language structure that hold across all aspects of language. In a related fashion, the Cognitive Commitment represents the view that principles of linguistic structure should reflect what is known about human cognition from other disciplines, particularly the other cognitive sciences ( philosophy , psychology, artificial intelligence and neuroscience ).

Hence, it follows from the Cognitive Commitment that language and linguistic organisation should reflect general cognitive principles rather than cognitive principles that are specific to language.

Accordingly, cognitive linguistics rejects the modular theory of mind that I mentioned above. The modularity of mind is associated particularly with formal linguistics, but is also explored in other areas of cognitive science such as philosophy and cognitive psychology, and holds that the human mind is organised into distinct "encapsulated" modules of knowledge.

While there are different versions of the modularity thesis, in general terms, modules are claimed to "digest" raw sensory input in such a way that it can then be processed by the central cognitive system (involving deduction, reasoning, memory and so on). Cognitive linguists specifically reject the claim that there is a distinct language module, which asserts that linguistic structure and organisation are markedly distinct from other aspects of cognition.

The Field of Cognitive Linguistics

Cognitive linguistics has its roots in theoretical linguistics. Today, cognitive linguists no longer restrict themselves to the narrow remit of theory construction: ideas, theories, and methods from cognitive linguistics are increasingly applied to a wide array of aesthetic, communicative, developmental, educational and cultural phenomena across a wide array of disciplinary contexts including the behavioural, biological, cognitive and social sciences as well as the humanities. This is a testament to the broad appeal and applicability of the range of ideas and theoretical frameworks that have emerged within the cognitive linguistics enterprise.

Cognitive linguistics has two main foci. The first constitutes a focus on the way in which knowledge representation—conceptual structure—is organised in the mind. Given the core commitments of the enterprise, cognitive linguists hold that language reflects cognitive organisation. Consequently, cognitive linguists deploy language in order to investigate conceptual structure.

A clear example of this is the conceptual metaphor theory. Conceptual metaphors are claimed to be units of knowledge representation, in the mind, rather than being linguistic in nature. Yet, as language reflects conceptual organisation, their existence is revealed by patterns in language: patterns in language reveal patterns in the mind, an issue I address in my book: The Crucible of Language.

Of course, as language provides a somewhat partial window on the mind, cognitive linguists invoke the notion of converging evidence. Behavioural studies from experimental psychology have been deployed in order to provide converging evidence for the psychological reality of conceptual metaphors, for instance. The upshot is that cognitive linguistic theories, that have deployed language as the lens through which cognitive phenomena can be investigated amount to models of the mind.

The second constitutes a focus on language: After all, cognitive linguists, like other linguists, study language for its own sake. But again, a consequence of the commitments of the enterprise, language is held to reflect general aspects of cognition. And as such, language can't be artificially separated from the conceptual phenomena that it in large part reflects and is shaped by. One concrete manifestation of this is that language is held to reflect more general, organisational properties of cognition, such as embodiment and the nature of categorisation.

Another is that aspects of language that are treated as discrete and encapsulated in formal linguistics, such as grammar, cannot be treated as such within cognitive linguistics; cognitive linguists take a broadly functional perspective: language emerged to facilitate communicative meaning. Hence, grammatical organisation, which supports situated meaning, cannot be artificially separated from the study of meaning, which it is specialised to facilitate.

Within cognitive linguistics, the study of language often exhibits either a focus on semantics, or on grammar, although there is typically no hard and fast division between the way the two are studied, despite the specific focus adopted. In practice, the division arises due to the focus of a particular researcher, or of the research question being investigated, rather than due to a principled division.

The area of study involving cognitive linguistics approaches to semantics is concerned with investigating a number of semantic phenomena. One such phenomenon is linguistic semantics, encompassing phenomena traditionally studied under the aegis of lexical semantics (word meaning), compositional semantics (sentence meaning), and pragmatics (situated meaning). It also encompasses phenomena not addressed under these traditional headings, such as the relationship between experience, the conceptual system and the semantic structure encoded by language during the process of meaning construction.

Cognitive linguistics approaches to grammar take the view that a model of meaning (a "cognitive semantics" account), has to be delineated before an adequate cognitive model of grammar can be developed. This is because grammar is viewed within the cognitive linguistics enterprise as a meaningful system in and of itself, which therefore shares important properties with the system of linguistic meaning and cannot be functionally separated from it.

Cognitive grammarians have also typically adopted one of two foci. Scholars including Ronald Langacker have emphasised the study of the cognitive principles that give rise to linguistic organisation. In his theoretical framework, Cognitive Grammar, Langacker has attempted to delineate the principles that serve to structure a grammar, and to relate these to aspects of general cognition.

The second avenue of investigation, pursued by researchers aims to provide a more descriptively detailed account of the units that comprise a particular language. These researchers have attempted to provide an inventory of the units of language. Cognitive grammarians who have pursued this line of investigation are developing a set of theories that can collectively be called construction grammars, or sometimes constructionist models. This approach takes its name from the view in cognitive linguistics that the basic unit of language is a form-meaning symbolic assembly which is called a construction.

It follows that cognitive approaches to grammar are not restricted to investigating aspects of the grammatical structure largely independently of meaning, as is often the case in formal traditions. Instead, cognitive approaches to grammar encompass the entire inventory of linguistic units defined as form-meaning pairings.

These run the gamut from skeletal syntactic configurations such as the ditransitive construction, e.g., The window cleaner blew the supermodel a kiss, to idioms, He bent over backward, to bound morphemes such as the -er suffix, to words. This entails that the received view of clearly distinct "sub-modules" of language cannot be meaningfully upheld within cognitive linguistics, where the boundary between cognitive approaches to semantics and cognitive approaches to grammar is less clearly defined.

Instead, meaning and grammar are seen as two sides of the same coin: to take a cognitive approach to grammar is to study the units of language and hence the language system itself. To take a cognitive approach to semantics is to attempt to understand how this linguistic system relates to the conceptual system, which in turn relates to embodied experience. The concerns of cognitive approaches to semantics and cognitive approaches to grammar are thus complementary.

The following diagram provides a schematic representation of the main theoretical foci of cognitive linguistics.

Evans, Vyvyan. 2019. Cognitive Linguistics: A Complete Guide . Edinburgh University Press.

Evans, Vyvyan. 2015. The Crucible of Language: How Language and Mind Create Meaning . Cambridge University Press.

Evans, Vyvyan. 2014. The Language Myth: Why Language is not an Instinct. Cambridge University Press.

Vyvyan Evans, Ph.D. , is a language and communication consultant. He received his Ph.D. from Georgetown University.

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