Alexander Onysko

Cognitive perspectives on word formation

This volume is the first one to illuminate diverse aspects of word formation from cognitive perspectives. Guided by methodological pluralism, the contributions shed light on a variety of issues in word formation theory and on the interfaces between word formation and phraseology, phonology, and inflection. The majority of the studies focuses on individual types of word formation, reframing our understanding of these processes. Overall, the various contributions add to a yet marginal body of research in cognitive word formation and advance our awareness about the benefits of applying cognitive linguistic thoughts for investigating processes of lexical creation.

Exploring discourse on globalizing English

A case study of discourse on anglicisms in German. “By recognizing our uncanny strangeness, we shall neither suffer from it nor enjoy it from the outside. The foreigner is within me, hence we are all foreigners. If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners.” (Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (1991)). Is Kristevas dissolution of the notion ‘foreign’ also applicable to language? The nature of language as a semiotic system of arbitrarily bound units of meaning and form determines the essential foreignness of signifier and signified. As such, every linguistic unit is indeed intrinsically foreign on the level of designation and, thus, there is no foreign language. On the surface of human communication, however, incomprehensibility among speakers can emerge as a criterion of foreignness. The perception of the foreign in language is particularly tied to situations of contact between different language-cultural areas. Such contact can occur internally in a multilingual speaker or can be observed externally as happening in the speech community. In both ways, crucial to language contact is a perceived intertwining of linguistic units from at least two distant, i.e. incomprehensible, codes culturally rooted in diverse speech communities.

Anglicisms in German: from iniquitous to ubiquitous?

THE GROWING international relevance of English has left its traces on the German language. Accordingly, research on the phenomenon of Anglicisms in German has intensified in the second half of the 20th century. The last decade, however, brought such a rapid development in mass communication, including the still wider spread of English, that some traditional views on Anglicisms have been challenged. This article discusses such issues as the problematic nature of classifying Anglicisms, the processes of integration of Anglicisms, and the multi-faceted motivations for their use in German.

Enhanced creativity in bilinguals? Evidence from meaning interpretations of novel compounds

This study aims to contribute to research on whether bilinguals show increased creativity in a verbal task when compared to monolinguals. In line with previous research, creativity is linked to divergent thinking, and a particular focus is laid on figurative associations among the monolingual and bilingual speakers. To investigate potential differences in figurative associations, participants completed a meaning interpretation task of novel English compounds. The task was carried out with 117 monolingual and bilingual New Zealanders, who were split into three comparable groups of Māori–English bilinguals, English monolinguals, and a control group of bilingual speakers in English and a language that is not Māori. The written meaning interpretations are analyzed in two steps. First, a close description is given of the range of associative strategies that participants relied upon when giving meaning to the novel compounds. Second, conceptual metaphor and metonymy theory is applied to tease apart potential differences in the participants’ figurative associations. With the exception of a few figurative processes, the results demonstrate that monolinguals and bilinguals perform similarly in terms of the overall number and diversity of figurative associations. However, a clear contrast between the bilinguals and the monolinguals emerges in the associative strategy of analogical meaning interpretations. Thus, the bilinguals show a significant preference of associating to existing idiomatic expressions and homophones that are related to some of the compound constituents. These findings are discussed for their implications on bilingual creativity. Since the results are based on a comparison of monolingual and bilingual meaning interpretations, the current study offers a new methodological take on investigating the connection between bilingualism and verbal-associative creativity. The study bears further methodological significance as it applies insights from cognitive linguistics to the study of bilingualism.

Figurative processes in meaning interpretation: A case study of novel English compounds

Abstract This article contributes to cognitive semantic research on the construal of figurative meaning in noun-noun compounds. Previous studies in this field have shown a predilection towards using conceptual blending theory in order to describe the process of meaning formation in nominal compounds. Observations have largely been based on analyses of established compounds and their conventionalized meanings. The current paper explores an alternative approach and methodology. A study was conducted in which participants were asked to interpret the meaning of a set of novel noun-noun compounds. These meaning descriptions are taken as an empirical base to investigate figurative interpretations. Since previous applications of conceptual blending theory have highlighted some limitations of describing meaning construal in compounds, and since the relation between conceptual blending and related processes of conceptual metaphor and metonymy has not been clarified yet, the analysis in the current study takes a step back and relies on conceptual metaphor and metonymy. Besides providing an overview of the amount of figurative meaning interpretations given to the different test items, the paper pays particular attention to the methodological challenges of applying conceptual metaphor and metonymy theory in the attempt to capture the figurative nature of the meaning descriptions. A close analysis of selected meaning interpretations provides a first impression on how applying conceptual metaphor and metonymy can pave the way towards a more differentiated understanding of associative complexity in figurative meaning interpretations.

Crosslinguistic influence on headedness of novel English compounds

Abstract This article explores the hypothesis that bilingual knowledge of different compounding patterns can influence the interpretation of a set of novel English noun-noun compounds. The focus of the study is on bilingual speakers who are fluent in two typologically diverse languages: te reo Māori (postmodifying) and English (premodifying). A comparison of bilingual and monolingual participant groups indicates that Māori-English bilingual speakers more frequently rely on the Māori structure of left-headed compounding in their meaning interpretation of English compounds. The implications of these results are discussed in terms of the cognitive process of transfer and additional means of meaning association in bilingual speakers.

The Semiotics of Multilingual Wordplay in Linguistic Landscapes: Communicative Settings, the Hearer-Origo, and Contextual Knowledge

Notions like linguistic vs. social context, or co-text and context, as well as the range of phenomena to be included within these categories have been intensely discussed in previous research. The present paper approaches these issues from a usage-based perspective. I will focus on selected examples of multilingual wordplay in advertising messages in the Linguistic Landscape (LL). Multilingual wordplay appears to be particularly informative, as it implies that several linguistic codes are involved. Moreover, linguistic utterances which form part of the LL are characterised by spatial boundedness and may refer to various kinds of situational facts. In addition, this paper aims at reflecting upon the semiotic and communicative foundations of LL advertising. It will be argued that the messages are mostly characterised by communicative distance between the speaker and the addressees, but that a more immediate communicative setting is often simulated, involving a referential shift to the hearer-origo functioning as the basic point of reference. The spatial boundedness of LL messages can be interpreted from a general semiotic perspective, which underlines the importance of different types of contextual information. I will finally argue that the different types of knowledge involved can be systematised with the help of two distinctions: 1) linguistic vs. extra-linguistic knowledge, and 2) knowledge related to the concrete situation of communication vs. general, situation-independent knowledge.

Joseph Wright’s ‘English Dialect Dictionary’ in electronic form: A critical discussion of selected lexicographic parameters and query options

The digitised version of Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (EDD, 1896–1905) promises to be a lexicographic milestone for English dialect terms and phrases of the 18th and 19th centuries. In a research project in the English Department at the University of Innsbruck, the c.5000 pages of the dictionary have been transferred into machine-readable text and parsed. Our aim is to produce an online version of the dictionary for research on the history of spoken and dialectal Late Modern English. The paper demonstrates the complexity of the entries in the EDD and focuses on the questions of dialect attribution and of the definition of words and phrases as two cases in point. Beyond that, we will provide a survey of the search interface and specifically discuss the implementation of the two issues of dialect area and definition.