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Full-Text Articles in Cognition and Perception

On The Polysemy Of The Lithuanian Už. A Cognitive Perspective, Inesa Šeškauskienė, Eglė Žilinskaitė-Šinkūnienė Dec 2015

On The Polysemy Of The Lithuanian Už. A Cognitive Perspective, Inesa Šeškauskienė, Eglė Žilinskaitė-Šinkūnienė

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

Adhering to the principle of motivated polysemy, this paper sets out to demonstrate how the principle works in interpreting numerous senses of the Lithuanian preposition ‘behind, beyond’. The present investigation relies on the cognitive linguistic framework employed, first of all, by Lakoff (1987), Langacker (1987), Talmy (2000), Tyler and Evans (2003), and Tyler (2012), who mainly worked on English, and such linguists as Tabakowska (2003, 2010) and Shakhova and Tyler (2010), who attempted to investigate inflecting languages, such as Polish and Russian. Based on such semantic principles as types of Figure and Ground, their relationship (geometric, functional, etc.), …


Aspects Of Space, Marcus Kracht Dec 2015

Aspects Of Space, Marcus Kracht

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

It is argued that spatial expressions come together with an encoding of the space called "aspect", which changes as we climb up the syntactic tree. The changing nature of aspect is necessary in order to simplify the meanings of elements. What appears to be a rather peculiar property of an element will be perfectly natural once we acknowledge that the elements compute on the space viewed in a particular way. Coordinates are always rooted in the landmark, for example. Thus, for the purpose of the distinction between static and dynamic it is not the "absolute" motion of the figure that …


The Geometry Of Preposition Meanings, Peter Gärdenfors Dec 2015

The Geometry Of Preposition Meanings, Peter Gärdenfors

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

This article presents a unified approach to the semantics of prepositions based on the theory of conceptual spaces. Following the themes of my recent book The Geometry of Meaning, I focus on the convexity of their meanings and on which semantic domains are expressed by prepositions. As regards convexity, using polar coordinates turns out to provide the most natural representation. In addition to the spatial domain, I argue that for many prepositions, the force domain is central. In contrast to many other analyses, I also defend the position that prepositions have a central meaning and that other meanings can …