Causal Categories in Discourse and Cognition

1. Auflage 2009
ISBN: 978-3-11-022441-2
Verlag: De Gruyter

Buch, Englisch, Band 44, 249 Seiten, Format (B × H): 160 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 547 g

Reihe: Cognitive Linguistics Research [CLR]

All languages of the world provide their speakers with linguistic means to express causal relations in discourse. Causal connectives and causative auxiliaries are among the salient markers of causal construals. Cognitive scientists and linguists are interested in how much of this causal modeling is specific to a given culture and language, and how much is characteristic of general human cognition. Speakers of English, for example, can choose between and or between and . How different are these from the choices made by Dutch speakers, who speak a closely related language, but (unlike English speakers) have a dedicated marker for non-volitional causality ()?

The central question in this volume is: What parameters of categorization shape the use of causal connectives and auxiliary verbs across languages? The book discusses how differences between even quite closely related languages (English, Dutch, Polish) can help us to elaborate the typology of levels and categories of causation represented in language. In addition, the volume demonstrates convergence of linguistic, corpus-linguistic and psycholinguistic methodologies in determining cognitive categories of causality. The basic notion of causality appears to be an ideal linguistic phenomenon to provide an overview of methods and, perhaps more importantly, invoke a discussion on the most adequate methodological approaches to study fundamental issues in language and cognition.

Zielgruppe

Cognitive Linguists, Discourse Analysts, Text Linguists, Psycholinguists working on Discourse

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sweetser, Eve

Sanders, Ted

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Psycholinguistik, Neurolinguistik, Kognition
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Historische & Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Semantik & Pragmatik
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Computerlinguistik, Korpuslinguistik

Über Autor(innen)

Ted Sanders, Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands; Eve Sweetser, University of California, Berkeley, USA.