Adopting a multifactorial analysis, this corpus-based comparative study examines the metaphorical conceptualizations of ENVY in American English and Chinese. All the metaphorical occurrences of ENVY in the two languages were collected from the corpora and then submitted to a detailed semantic and usage analysis. The qualitative and quantitative analyses show both striking similarities and differences in the metaphorical structuring of ENVY across the two languages. Both languages resort to largely the same common conceptual metaphors but use divergent elements from these metaphors’ source domains in their conceptualizations of ENVY. Moreover, a correspondence analysis of the most frequently used envy metaphors in relation to four important factors reveals some noticeable cross-language differences in their behavioural profiles. Based on the corpus findings, this study also explores the motivations underlying the similarities and differences in the metaphorical structuring of ENVY. The results indicate that the similarities are grounded mainly in common bodily experiences, whereas the differences are motivated by either differential cultural experiences or differential cognitive preferences.

Two mouse cursor tracking experiments investigated lexical prediction. Participants heard predictive sentences (e.g., “What the librarian will read, which is shown here, is the…”) and viewed visual arrays with predictable targets (e.g., book) and phonological competitors (e.g., bull) or unrelated distractors (e.g., goat). Participants tasked with clicking on the (i.e., target) object referred to in sentences (Experiment 1), or with doing so interleaved with a cloze procedure (e.g., completing “What the librarian will read is this.”; Experiment 2), made predictive mouse cursor movements to targets. However, predictive attraction to phonological competitors was not observed. Implications for theories of predictive sentence processing are discussed.

This study explored the intimacy-power patterns in Chinese direct criticism and how this may reflect native Chinese speakers’ consideration of rapport management. With data retrieved from BCC, a representative corpus of modern Chinese, the analyses identified the intimacy degree and power relativity of the interlocutors where direct criticism was used. Results revealed that native Chinese speakers use direct criticism mostly in close and equal relationships followed by distant and equal ones; also, direct criticism with different criticizing markers manifests their uniqueness that close and equal relationships appeared more in criticism with “你太(nitai) + adj.”, “我看你(wokanni)” and “你真是(nizhenshi)” while distant and equal relationships appeared more frequently in criticism with “你这(nizhe) + n. /adj.”. These results reflect that native Chinese speakers adopt rapport-maintaining/rapport-enhancing orientations by using criticism more often in close and equal relationships, together with their tendency to ignore rapport, especially in distant and equal relationships. To conclude, this study reveals the patterns of intimacy-power relationships in Chinese speakers’ usage of direct criticism, which reflects their awareness of rapport management. Overall, it provides insights into our understanding of the nature of the speech act of criticism.

Metaphor processing has been mostly researched using the space–valence paradigm, where participants respond to either space–valence congruent or incongruent stimuli. Little attention has, however, been devoted to the role of valence–space associations in bilingual orientational metaphor comprehension. Here, we employed a reaction time method and tested Polish (L1) – English (L2) highly proficient bilinguals, who performed a metaphoricity judgment task to L1 and L2 conceptual metaphoric sentences that were either valence–space congruent (BAD IS DOWN and GOOD IS UP) or incongruent (BAD IS UP and GOOD IS DOWN). The results showed a valence effect, where negatively valenced sentences were evaluated more accurately than positively valenced stimuli. We also found an interaction between valence, congruency and language, such that in both L1 and L2, negatively and positively valenced congruent metaphors were easier and faster to process than those violating the space–valence congruency. Altogether, this study provides a more embodied and experientially grounded approach to studying human cognition, lending credence to the automatic activation of primary metaphorical mappings in the human mind.

The aim of this study is to investigate how pragmatic-conceptual representations can be integrated into theories of first language acquisition. Experiment 1, using a sentence–picture judgment task, examined how children (N = 53, aged 4–6 years) used prosody boundaries as cues for a recursive interpretation when the recursive relatives (i.e., SO and OO)1 were garden path structures. The results showed that children below six-year had a stronger preference for recursive reading than adults under the conjunction-biased prosody condition and that children after six years of birth exhibited an adult-like preference for recursive readings under the recursion-biased prosody condition. Experiment 2 explored whether and how reversibility (e.g., “a dog eats a banana” vs “a dog kisses a cat”) in the action schema affected the production of OO and SO in Mandarin-speaking children (N = 137, age: 4–8 years). The results showed that adult-like production of OO in both reversible and irreversible conditions appeared at the age of six. The adult-like production ability of SO showed a one-year delay in the reversible condition (seven years under the reversible condition versus six years under the irreversible condition). The study suggests that some pragmatic-conceptual representations (such as the action schema) may be precursors of language and serve as a default analysis in language acquisition, while the mapping of the prosody domain onto syntax matures over time.

The article explores the metaphorical conceptualization of emotions. Conceptual metaphors are understood here as frames (i.e., structures of knowledge in long-term memory) in their own right. For modeling both the source and target domains of metaphors, the CoMetNet (Conceptual Metaphor Network) project uses frames documented in the German FrameNet-Constructicon project in spite of ad hoc created domains in previous literature. By doing so, it strives for a more empirically motivated description of conceptual metaphors. Drawing on a specialized corpus, it is shown that (1) our frame-semantic approach permits addressing the status of emotion concepts in the conceptual and linguistic system. More specifically, it shows that (2) frame elements (FEs) reflect adequately which aspects are relevant in the conceptualization of emotions and that (3) the complexity of emotion concepts can be thought of as an interplay between (different types of) frames. However, there are still some challenges for CoMetNet, e.g., the frame-semantic description of emotion metaphors that draw on highly schematic and scalar source domains.

Japanese patients often describe their pain with ideophones (sound-symbolic, imitative words), such as biribiri ‘having a continuous electric shock’. However, some manuals for healthcare workers recommend avoiding using these words in their interactions with patients, assuming that they are too subjective. We examined how reliable pain ideophones are in comparison with pain metaphors, such as denki-ga hashiru-yoona itami ‘pain like an electric current running through one’s body’. In Experiment 1, Japanese speakers rated visually presented pain ideophones and metaphors on 15 semantic-differential scales (e.g., strong–weak, momentary–continuous). It was found that the ratings of ideophones and metaphors equally varied between participants. In Experiment 2, Japanese speakers did the same rating task for a selected set of pain ideophones and metaphors presented auditorily in sentence frames. The results show that ideophones were rated more consistently than metaphors across participants, and this was true for various prosodic/morphological variants of ideophones (e.g., biriiit-to ‘having a sudden, great electric shock’, biribirit-to ‘having a momentary repetitive electric shock’). These findings indicate that ideophones can be more reliable than metaphors in health communication, especially when placed in proper context.

This study investigates claims that metaphor acquisition is rooted in the words’ concrete meanings: to be able to use metaphors and other non-literal languages, the child needs to ‘go beyond’ meanings that are conventional and so presumably concrete (e.g., Falkum, 2022: 97). To test if metaphor-related words emerge via their concrete senses and how this reflects child-directed speech, I examined 594 hours of interactional data for three English-speaking toddlers from urban middle-class England, whose speech was densely sampled between the ages of 2;00 and 3;01. The data show that 75%–82% conventional metaphors were acquired via their concrete senses and that the order of acquisition of concrete and abstract senses corresponded with their input frequencies. Overall, when hearing conventional metaphors, 81%–89% of the time children were exposed to their concrete meanings. Contrary to the generic argument that children’s pragmatic reasoning with non-literal uses is impeded by meaning conventionality (Falkum, 2022), my preliminary data suggest that it is influenced by the frequency of exposure to the concrete meanings of conventional metaphors, which leads to a generalised prediction that the most probable interpretation of any new metaphor is concrete (literal). Qualitative analyses further reveal that abstract meanings, when acquired first, were learned in highly emotive contexts.

The H* ~ L + H* pitch accent contrast in English has been a matter of lengthy debate, with some arguing that L + H* is an emphatic version of H* and others that the accents are phonetically and pragmatically distinct. Empirical evidence is inconclusive, possibly because studies do not consider dialectal variation and individual variability. We focused on Standard Southern British English (SSBE), which has not been extensively investigated with respect to this contrast, and used Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) to examine differences in prominence based on accent form and function. L + H*s were rated more prominent than H*s but only when the former were used for contrast and the latter were not, indicating that participants had expectations about the form–function connection. However, they also differed substantially in which they considered primary (form or function). We replicated both the general findings and the patterns of individual variability with a second RPT study which also showed that the relative prioritization of form or function related to participant differences in empathy, musicality and autistic-like traits. In conclusion, the two accents are used to encode different pragmatics, though the form–function mapping is not clear-cut, suggesting a marginal contrast that not every SSBE speaker shares and attends to.

This paper presents a cross-language study of lexical semantics within the framework of distributional semantics. We used a wide range of predefined semantic categories in Mandarin and English and compared the clusterings of these categories using FastText word embeddings. Three techniques of dimensionality reduction were applied to mapping 300-dimensional FastText vectors into two-dimensional planes: multidimensional scaling, principal components analysis, and t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding. The results show that t-SNE provides the clearest clustering of semantic categories, improving markedly on PCA and MDS. In both languages, we observed similar differentiation between verbs, adjectives, and nouns as well as between concrete and abstract words. In addition, the methods applied in this study, especially Procrustes analysis, make it possible to trace subtle differences in the structure of the semantic lexicons of Mandarin and English.

Our study explores aspects of human conversation within the framework of evolutionary psychology, focusing on the proportion of ‘social’ to ‘non-social’ content in casual conversation. Building upon the seminal study by Dunbar et al. (1997, Human Nature, 8, 231–246), which posited that two-thirds of conversation gravitates around social matters, our findings indicate an even larger portion, approximately 85% being of a social nature. Additionally, we provide a nuanced categorisation of ‘social’ rooted in the principles of evolutionary psychology. Similarly to Dunbar et al.’s findings, our results support theories of human evolution that highlight the importance of social interactions and information exchange and the importance of the exchange of social information in human interactions across various contexts.

Metaphors, arguments and emotional appeals have considerable persuasive power in political discourse, yet they are rarely studied together. To explore the interactions between these interrelated phenomena, we employ three methods of analysis: Metaphor Identification Procedure, Inference Anchoring Theory, and lexicon-based sentiment analysis. Our data come from Polish political debates broadcasted during the 2019 pre-election campaign. We test hypotheses about the frequency of the associations between metaphors, arguments and emotional appeals. Hypothesis 1 predicts that arguments containing metaphors are more frequent than arguments without metaphors, hypothesis 2 predicts that arguments containing emotional appeals are more frequent than arguments without them, and hypothesis 3 predicts that arguments with metaphors and emotional appeals are more frequent than any other combination. The results show that metaphorical arguments do not outnumber non-metaphorical ones (H1 is falsified), and arguments that are both metaphorical and emotional do not outnumber the sum of all other types (H3 is falsified). Emotional arguments are more common than non-emotional ones (H2 is verified). We suggest that when political actors articulate their arguments, they often choose a particular metaphor to evoke positive or negative emotions in their audience.

The semantic literature on negative expressive terms, such as ‘bastard’ and ‘jerk’, converges on two assumptions. First, the content associated with expressives is attitudinal; more precisely, it amounts to the condition that the agent (typically the speaker) has a negative attitude toward the target (that is, the person referred to with the expressive). Second, the use of such terms is felicitous as long as this condition is satisfied, regardless of whether this information is in the contextual background or not. This assumption has been challenged by Cepollaro, Domaneschi and Stojanovic (2021, Synthese), whose experimental studies show that negative expressives impose constraints on the context, contrary to what had been taken for granted in the literature. In line with their work, our goal is to investigate the first assumption on empirical grounds. Our studies show that when person A calls person B ‘a jerk’, participants prefer the target-oriented interpretation (that B must have done something bad) to the attitudinal agent-oriented interpretation (that A has a negative attitude toward B). Additionally, our studies replicate the main results from Cepollaro, Domaneschi and Stojanovic, 2021, Synthese), as well as reveal some unexpected asymmetries between positive and negative evaluative terms, which were used as control items.

Besides being unjustly incarcerated, Sabrina Butler, Kristine Bunch, Ru-el Sailor and Larry DeLisle endured various forms of police mistreatment, as detailed in a collection of transcripts from the Wrongful Conviction Podcast (WCP). Understandably enough, their criminalization had a profound impact on their perception of external and internal realities. Given their unique socio-demographic backgrounds, variations in the discursive patterns of their communicative interactions are anticipated. As extensively analyzed in sociolinguistics, both gender and ethnicity influence how individuals construct discourse; particularly, these traits appear to account for how the subjects under study express their emotions and opinions. This is because they are silenced and unable to directly confront their trauma; often, they are incapable of discussing their feelings or identifying those responsible for these traumatic events. Drawing on Appraisal Theory, this paper investigates the language of evaluation used in these texts taken from the WCP. To this end, our analysis of the data is performed using UAM CorpusTool.

In language production, inhibitory control is assumed to be the primary mechanism responsible for successful bilingual processing. To convey messages in one language, bilinguals must inhibit the unintended language. However, it remains unclear whether the same mechanism works in bilingual comprehension. Following up and expanding on Declerck and Philipp (2018, ‘Is inhibition implemented during bilingual production and comprehension? n–2 language repetition costs unchained’, Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 33, pp. 608–617), the present study investigates whether inhibition is involved in the linguistic identification system during bilingual comprehension with the n − 2 repetition paradigm. This is the second study exploring comprehension with this methodological setup to date. We used an auditory word–picture matching task with Chinese late trilinguals who learned their two non-native languages (L2 English and L3 Spanish) via formal school instruction. Our results indicate that participants responded faster in the n − 2 repetition trials (i.e., when the target language in the n and n − 2 trials matched). That is, we observed an n − 2 repetition benefit effect, a novel finding in this literature that goes counter the n − 2 repetition cost effect reported in previous studies using production-based tasks. In addition, our results underscore the complex interplay between proficiency and use and the resulting dynamics within the bilingual lexicon. We discuss the results in light of the different bilingual representation and processing models.

Semantic equivalence in the affective domain is always a matter of degree, even for the words that may seem uncontroversial. For example, a word may be quoted in dictionaries as the semantic equivalent of another word and be used in practice as its most frequent translation equivalent, and yet those two words may significantly differ in meaning. This study focuses on one such case – that of the English term frustration and its cognates in Spanish (frustración), French (frustration) and German (Frustration). Using data from corpora and self-report, we find that, while frustration terms in Spanish, French and German reflect a cross-culturally stable type of low-power anger, or can denote affective experiences other than anger, English frustration refers to a prototypical anger experience characterized by high power. Converging evidence is presented from two psycholinguistic and two linguistic studies employing elicited and observational data. We offer a possible explanation for the observed semantic differences based on psychological appraisal theory and cross-cultural psychology. The novelties and limitations of our findings are discussed, along with their implications for researchers in the affective sciences.

Scalar inference (SI), e.g., utterances containing some being enriched to mean some but not all, is a central topic in semantics and pragmatics. Of recent interest in the experimental literature is scalar diversity: different lexical scales differ in their likelihood of leading to SI. Studies of scalar diversity have almost exclusively relied on the so-called inference task. In this article, we highlight two shortcomings of the inference task: it biases participants by providing them with the stronger alternative, and it obscures pragmatic inferences other than SI. We offer as an alternative a degree estimate task to investigate utterances containing scalar terms. We validate the degree estimate task, i.a., by successfully replicating a previous finding about scalar diversity: that the distinctness of scalar terms (some versus all) is a significant predictor of it. We then use degree estimates to reassess previous inference task-based findings. Our results show that biasing discourse contexts lead to lower degree estimates (i.e., more strengthened meanings) than a manipulation with only, which contrasts with prior literature’s findings. The article concludes that the inference and degree estimate tasks both have advantages: the former offers a straightforward definition of SI calculation, while the latter avoids explicitly mentioning a negated stronger alternative.

Head and eyebrow movements have been reported as question markers in both spoken (e.g. Swerts & Krahmer, 2004) and sign languages (e.g., Zeshan, 2004). However, the relative weight of these visual cues in conveying prosodic meaning remains unexplored. This study examines, through a kinematic analysis, if (and how) the amplitude of head falling movements varies in statements versus questions, both in Portuguese Sign Language (LGP) and in the spoken modality of European Portuguese. The results show that the head falling movement plays a key role in conveying interrogativity in Portuguese, in varying degrees. In LGP, the head amplitude is larger than in the spoken modality, and the shape of the head movement varies across sentence types, thus showing the primary role of this visual cue in LGP prosodic grammar. In spoken Portuguese, although the head amplitude also differs between sentence types, the shape of the movement over time is always the same (falling), thus pointing to a secondary/complementary role in spoken Portuguese.

These findings not only contribute to the knowledge of the prosodic grammar of spoken and sign languages, but also challenge traditional language processing models, mostly focused on verbal language.

When a word is being translated, its immediately adjacent lexical items may impact the translation of the target word. However, the impact of adjacent lexical items on the oral translation of a target word situated in central vision remains unexplored. This behavioral study used a bilingual version of the flanker paradigm to examine the impact of within- and cross-language semantic effects on oral word translation. Unbalanced bilinguals were presented with a central target word that was flanked by two flanking words on either side. The target-flanker relations were manipulated as a function of semantic relatedness (identical, related and unrelated) and language congruency (congruent and incongruent). The task was to orally translate the target word from L1 to L2 (forward translation) in one session and from L2 to L1 (backward translation) in the other while ignoring the flanker words. Results showed faster responses for forward compared to backward translation. Moreover, in within-language (congruent) but not in cross-language (incongruent) contexts, semantic priming effects were observed in both directions of translation, with the effects being larger for backward than forward translation. Additionally, substantial cross-language semantic repetition priming effects were obtained. The findings are discussed within the framework of a two-process account for oral word translation.

We examined the impact of risk-taking propensity on lexical decision performance in neurologically intact participants. Following the classification of participants into high- and low-risk-taking propensity groups using the Balloon Analogue Risk Task, we assessed lexical decision-making with behavioral responses (RTs, ACC), signal detection measures (hit, false alarm, miss, correct rejection) and qualitative processing using lexical variable effects (number of syllables, first syllable frequency, stem frequency, word frequency) between the groups. As a result, high-risk-taking individuals showed slower and less accurate word recognition, characterized by biased responses toward nonwords and words. However, both groups displayed similar patterns of lexical variable effects in word recognition, suggesting risk-taking propensity does not contribute to qualitative disparities in visual word recognition. These findings highlight the influential role of risk-taking propensity in shaping behavioral performance during lexical decision, emphasizing the need for further exploration of the intricate interplay between risk-taking behavior and lexical decision-making processes.