Alicia Galera Masegosa

Cognitive Modeling: A linguistic perspective

This monograph studies cognitive operations on cognitive models across levels and domains of meaning construction. It explores in what way the same set of cognitive operations, either in isolation or in combination, account for meaning representation whether obtained on the basis of inferential activity or through constructional composition. As a consequence, it makes explicit links between constructional and figurative meaning. The pervasiveness of cognitive operations is explored across the levels of meaning construction (argument, implicational, illocutionary, and discourse structure) distinguished by the Lexical Constructional Model. This model is a usage-based approach to language that reconciles insights from functional and cognitive linguistics and offers a unified account of the principles and constraints that regulate both inferential activity and the constructional composition of meaning. This book is of value to scholars with an interest in linguistic evidence of cognitive activity in meaning construction. The contents relate to the fields of Cognitive Grammar, Cognitive Semantics, Construction Grammar, Functional Linguistics, and Inferential Pragmatics.

A COGNITIVE APPROACH TO SIMILE-BASED IDIOMATIC EXPRESSIONS

This paper provides a detailed analysis of some of the most frequent simile-based idiomatic expressions from a cognitive point of view. In our study we show the necessity to further develop conventional metaphoric and metonymic analysis into more complex patterns of interaction between the two. Furthermore, several metaphors may also interact in the cognitive processes that underlie the understanding of idiomatic expressions, making it necessary to approach many of our examples making use of metaphoric complexes. We will explore the ways in which motivation and transparency may vary in idioms that arise from the same ontological metaphor, both intralinguistically and cross-linguistically. In addition, we will regard hyperbole as a fairly pervasive phenomenon in simile-based idioms.