Bert Peeters

The syntax of time and space primitives in French

Abstract The paper explores the combinatorial possibilities of the proposed semantic primes of time and space in French. It highlights the need for combinatorial and portmanteau allolexies to express some combinations, in particular, for many of the combinations involving WHEN/TIME.

Applied ethnolinguistics Is Cultural Linguistics, but Is It cultural linguistics?

The claim that “the Cognitive Linguistics movement as we know it today was born out of polemical opposition to Chomskyan linguistics” is unlikely to raise many eyebrows. I made it fifteen years ago (Peeters 2001: 85), using words (“polemical opposition to Chomskyan linguistics”) that weren’t mine — and upper case initials (“Cognitive Linguistics”) that most definitely were. For some reason, a formulation used by John R. Taylor in his contribution (Taylor 1993) to a volume I had reviewed for the journal Word (Peeters 1998) had stuck in my mind.1 I combined it with the deliberate decision, grudgingly accepted by the editors of the volume in which my 2001 paper was published, to call ‘Cognitive Linguistics’ what Taylor and many others referred to as ‘cognitive linguistics’. I was convinced a distinction had to be made between Cognitive Linguistics (upper case initials), the theoretical framework based on and associated with the work of Ronald W. Langacker and George Lakoff, and cognitive linguistics (lower case initials), which extends a lot further and encompasses work that, in its basic premises, is diametrically opposed to that of Langacker and Lakoff. Chomsky himself has referred to his work as cognitive linguistics, even though he appears not to have adopted that naming practice for a long time (Fortis 2012: 6). As I noted in Peeters (2001: 84):

Commencer: la suite, mais pas encore la fin

L’objectif de cet article est de revoir et d’approfondir la description du verbe commencer entreprise dans Peeters (1993b), en profitant de l’enseignement de Georges Kleiber, dont nous exploitons le principe de la métonymie intégrée et l’idée que la construction commencer + objet direct est d’ordre métaphorique. Ce n’est qu’un début, puisqu’on s’occupera avant tout des constructions du type ‘commencer à + infinitif ’. Comme, depuis 1993, d’importants progrès ont été réalisés dans le domaine de la métalangue sémantique naturelle d’Anna Wierzbicka, que notre description avait pour but de faire mieux connaı̂tre, une mise à jour s’impose de ce côté-là aussi.

Narrative Medicine Across Languages and Cultures: Using Minimal English for Increased Comparability of Patients’ Narratives

Narrative medicine is an approach to medicine which seeks to combine with and enhance conventional evidence-based medicine by adding perspectives and experience in medical humanities. The chapter expounds on the importance of effective communication with patients and in particular on the importance of having some structured protocols (scripts, interview prompts, and the like) to encourage more comprehensive and effective patient narratives and to allow for increased comparability between them. It tells the story of an emerging collaboration with Minimal English and an international pilot study applying Minimal English to such protocols.

Basic word order frequencies or manning/parker contra tomlin

Abstract This paper is a reply to Manning and Parkers [Language Sciences 11. 43–65 (1989)] recent contribution in this journal on the basic word order frequency hierarchy for natural languages. It argues that Manning and Parker are wrong when they assume that the majority of previously offered explanations for the hierarchy are to be rejected because of a flavor of Lamarckianism, a theory of biological form which has been discarded by modern biologists. As language is not a type of biological form, there is nothing a priori wrong with an explanation which, rather like Lamarckianism, is based on functional principles. Manning and Parkers own explanation, based on the principles of figure/ground interpretation and on the idea that word order is a linear interpretation of semantic form, may seem convincing to the superficial reader, but implies that meaning exists independent of form. As it does not, their explanation must be abandoned. Moreover, the SOV > … > OSV frequency hierarchy as it stands must be revised in the light of the findings of Tomlin [Basic Word Order: Functional Principles, London: Croom Helm (1986)]. SOV and SVO are numerically even, and so are VOS and OVS. The paper summarizes Tomlins findings and argues that universal principles do not have to have the same cross-linguistic effects.

Lexicography and Conceptual Analysis. By Anna Wierzbicka. Ann Arbor: Karoma. 1985.

Lexicography and Conceptual Analysis is an exercise in semantics rather than a book about semantics. Methodologically, the &dquo;conceptual analysis&dquo; of its title differs from what is widely known as componential analysis. Whereas the latter works with semes, or distinctive semantic features, the former works with a small set of immediately intelligible words which are presumably lexical universals. Hence, what really matters in conceptual analysis is the notion of &dquo;semantic primitives&dquo;, for which Wierzbicka is well known. Conceptual analysis (or &dquo;natural semantics&dquo;) tries to translate the meaning of utterances or expressions &dquo;from natural language into the postulated metalanguage, or into