Category Archive: Semantics

Multifaceted Living

On the sliding scale of time that gradiently builds and ebbs and recedes I am perpetually being re-context-ed and being iteratively re-inserted into particular frames of reference and spheres of existence.  I am simultaneously (at… Read More

Why I Care About Ontology

In a broad sense of the term, any particular ontology serves as a framework against which we interpret information; think of it like an organized perspective that we use as a lens to… Read More

Schematic Construals in Favor of Ecological Transportation

If you say the admittedly odd sentence “The baby feeds on mother’s milk.” it accesses a parasitic construal for the act of eating.  Pardon any offense this might cause you; I promise to… Read More

Different Uses of “If”

If we don’t pay that ticket, then I will have to go to court. [causal] It would be great if everyone just got along. [idealistic] I wonder if she knows she has jelly… Read More

Primitive Modals in Child Language (Hafta, Wanna, Gonna) As Functionally Equivalent to Auxiliary Modals

Modals represent a perspective of force in relation to the participatory elements of a construction.  In fact, they represent an encoding of force in the relation between subject, verb, and object. Children acquire… Read More

How Novel Constructions Emerge Over Time

Reading Michael Israel’s The Way Constructions Grow taught me some things about how novel constructions actually emerge in a language.  I encourage you to check out this classic article. The -Way construction in… Read More

Bybee’s notion of “exemplar representation”

In exemplar representation situation-specific tokens are decoded and classified as being instance-overlaps with existing exemplars and thereby reinforcing that exemplar instance, or else they are classified as having slight divergence from the existing… Read More

Stone Soup, Bouillon Cubes, and Innovation

In my childhood I think it was the fable about Stone Soup that made me start to think about innovation.  As I learned to cook and came further into the world of soup-lore… Read More

Inherent Narratives in Ad Hoc Collections

Part of my portfolio includes this project called Weaving Narratives: Possessions = Autobiographies, it is an exploration into how any ad hoc grouping of objects has some kind of inherent narrative, albeit a… Read More

Sample Sentences Using Spradley’s Nine Semantic Relations from The Ethnographic Interview

I love James Spradley’s work on ethnographic interviews, componential analysis, taxonomic analysis, and participant observation, but Spradley’s work on semantic analysis has been the most thought-provoking for me theoretically.  Here I list out… Read More

What does Soulwax’s website, DJing, & Construction Grammar have in common?

Soulwax’s website extends an invitation for viewers to participate in DJing as they explore the website.  From my first exposure this has been an amazing experience.  The intuitive guided navigation doubles as a… Read More

Why I Believe in Cut & Paste as a Design Strategy

Cut & Paste is not just a keyboard function.  In fact, R.G. Collingwood coined the term in the mid 1940′s in his book The Idea of History, but being a more formal speaker… Read More

Weaving Narratives: Possessions = Autobiographies

I recently created a short interview about my art project “Weaving Narratives” where I describe the process of reading objects that people own.  I hope you check it out and let me know… Read More

CONTAINER Is an Ontological Metaphor

Ontological Metaphors are metaphors that give shape to abstract concepts and even contribute to the structure of Primary Metaphors.  CONTAINER is one of those metaphors.

Una chiste para ti….

Una dia el pollito va a la casa blanca y toca la puerta hay una persona abre la puerta y dice: “¿que queirres?” y el pollito respondon, “necesito hablar con el presidente por… Read More

Think Like a Bacterium: OSMOS, Naïve Quorum Sensing, & the iPad

I was recently sucked into playing OSMOS on my iPad.  I never play video games (usually I am too busy: wife, art, school, work) but I did happen to spend four hours straight… Read More

A Cognitive Linguist’s Version of The BBC’s 100 Book List

I felt like a loser when the BBC 100 book list (even though it wasn’t actually from the Beeb) was going around because I had only read 5 of the books, so, in… Read More

SWEET! My paper made a Top Ten Download List!

I checked my email this morning and received a message telling me that my recently distributed paper “Figure-Ground Organization in Attention and Construal” made it on a top ten list for downloads yesterday… Read More

To the woman on the RTA train, there are more than 3 meanings for “present”

As I was riding the train home today I overheard a conversation that made me realize again how people view as odd the things which the linguist views as normal. The woman behind… Read More

Time is Money =/= Money is Time

We all know the metaphor prized by the busy cosmopolitan “Time Is Money”.  I have some thoughts about this that are a little disjointed, but I will try to pull them together in this… Read More

Ground Before Figure Orientation and Divergent Activation in Bruno Mars & B.O.B.’s “Nothin’ On You” Lyrics

Driving home tonight I heard a song on the radio, on the local hip-hop and R&B station, and while the song kind of annoys me, I kind of like it too.  Anyway, this… Read More

A Few Schematizations of Extensions of the Verb PUSH

A Brief Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Summary…

A reasonable summary of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in its tractable form is that different cultures interpret the same world differently and this has an impact on how they both think and construct meaning… Read More

MUST: Polysemous Network for a Closed Class Lexical Item

Here is another network diagram…double click to enlarge…the diagram is an interpretation of the sense variation for the semantics of the modal auxiliary “Must”.  [NB: I included a few obsolete usages that are… Read More

HEAD: Polysemous Network for an Open Class Lexical Item

Take a look at this diagram of a possible interpretation for the polysemous network of HEAD: [Hint: double click the image to enlarge...] The senses for head have both physical and metaphorical interpretations. … Read More

The ICM for STUDENT…as if this was really still a hot topic in Cognitive Linguistics

ICMs structure mental spaces by providing asymmetrical matching or mismatching between concepts, center-periphery models to structure categories, and encapsulated categories to structure to the scope of predication.  Below is an assortment of these… Read More

Grammaticalization via Metaphoric Extension in Tok Pisin

Grammaticalization is a process whereby items in a language change to move (usually) from an open class to a closed class. There are three main types of grammaticalization: 1) metaphorical extension, 2) invited… Read More

howzit!

I recently had a visit to my site from Oahu, where I lived for a while…  I thought I would choose four samples from my memories of Hawai’i and illustrate Talmy’s Reference frames…… Read More

CogDef #1 (cognitive definitions)

I have several friends who are strict Generativists/Formalists and I want to start a little series that summarizes information about topics that sometimes get muddled up in cross-theoretical discussions.  This is the first… Read More

Mashing Ray Jackendoff’s Ontological Categories with James Spradley’s Cultural Dimensions & Wh- Question Words

While I don’t necessarily agree with Jackendoff’s use of the semantic primitives, and while I recognize that this comes from a book that is from the early 80′s, I still want to present… Read More

Lexical Ambiguity Couched in a Formulaic Reference to either Sunglasses or Blindness

Today on the train I overheard one man say to another man: “I got my Stevie Wonders on…I didn’t even see you.” Either he was trying to convey that his inability to see… Read More

Cognitive Mindfulness #17

Reading Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar has been a dense pleasure.  I am currently reading part of it in a volume edited by Dirk Geeraerts called Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings (Mouton de Gruyter).  Consider these… Read More

“Dad Jokes” about ballet and perfume in French

Tonight on the way to the ballet my wife and I were riding in the car with one of her friends.  It came up that my sister-in-law’s roommate’s cat pissed in a cardboard… Read More

Metaphoric Extension of Hunger and Thirst Adjectives

So, this morning as I was coming out of sleep and waking to face the day I remember trying to figure out why the stative adjective for not being satiated and having hunger… Read More

How Spiders Conceptualize Reality

I was working through a homework assignment about developing a language that captures the conceptualization patterns that a spider would have (given the boundaries of its embodied experience), this was a fun experiment,… Read More

Schematization of a research article on discourse metaphors

I am learning about various research methods and so I am reading articles to figure out their basic approach to research.  Here is an article that I have recently read and that I… Read More

Cognitive Mindfulness #15

Ronald Langacker is considered one of the founding fathers of the Cognitive Linguistics enterprise, his seminal work in Cognitive Grammar has influenced pretty much everyone who does anything at all in Cognitive Linguistics.… Read More

Cognitive Mindfulness #14

This comes from the introduction to a book edited by Dirk Geeraerts: If conceptual perspectivization is the central function of a grammar, the typical formal categories of grammatical description (like word classes or… Read More

Language Is a System

Language makes use of ecological elements (symbolic function, communicative function, et cetera) to provide an integrated “tool” with which meaning can be expressed and understood. Being a system implies the interrelationship of components… Read More

Recursion, Björk, Mise en Abyme, Abstraction & the Ontological Metaphor ‘CONTAINER’

Abstraction takes an instance of something and edits out the redundancy and unnecessary elements to leave the basic pattern in a less detailed, but more succinct manner. Abstraction in art seems to be… Read More

Overcome Writer’s Block With Semiotics [Free Download]

I just posted a free download of an excerpt of my semiotics project which will be available as a paperback in September.  I encourage you to check it out and let me know… Read More

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