There is broad agreement among evolutionary linguists that the emergence of human language, as opposed to other primate communication systems, is characterised by two key phenomena: the use of symbols, and the use of grammatical structure (Tomasello 2003). In this paper, we show that these two defining aspects of language actually emerge from the same set of underlying cognitive mechanisms with...

the present study aims at discussing whether metaphors in the qur’an, revealed more than 1400 years ago, are dead, moribund or live and how these three types of metaphors have been translated in three english and three persian translations of the qur’an. the results reveal that among 70 metaphors examined, while only about 32.85% are live metaphors, about 67.14% are moribund, but none of the ca...

In research writing, one of the challenging questions is about extent to which methods need be succinctly summarised in introductory sections. To answer this intriguing question, Swales’ (2004) genre-based analytical framework was used examine frequencies method summaries (MSs) article introductions (RAIs) two major social science disciplines, namely Ethnic Studies (ES) and Industrial Relations...

In Cognitive Linguistics, meaning resides in conceptual-ization and grammar is seen as being meaningful. Cog-nitive semantics provides an array of well-motivated de-scriptive constructs allowing a revealing description ofsemantic and grammatical structure. The linguist ev-idence sheds light on human conceptual abilities thatneed to be accommodated in models of cognitive ...

Previous work has shown that large scale subcategorisation lexicons could be extracted from parsed corpora with reasonably high precision. In this paper, we apply a standard extraction procedure to a 100 millions words parsed corpus of French and obtain rather poor results. We investigate different factors likely to improve performance such as in particular, the specific extraction procedure an...

The objective of this work is to automatically determine, in an unsupervised manner, Spanish prepositional phrases of the type preposition nominal phrase preposition (P−NP−P) that behave in a sentence as a lexical unit and their semantic and syntactic properties cannot be deduced from the corresponding properties of each simple form, e.g., por medio de (by means of), a fin de (in order to), con...

Children have difficulty comprehending novel verbs in the double object dative (e.g., Fred blicked the dog a stick) as compared to the prepositional dative (e.g., Fred blicked a stick to the dog). We explored this pattern with 3 and 4 year olds (N = 60). In Experiment 1, we replicated the documented difficulty with the double object frame, even though we provided more contextual support. In Exp...

The trope of the "body politic" is reproduced in a Bengali popular court, or moot, not only through explicit submetaphors of that master metaphor but through a grammatical example of what Peirce called diagrammatic iconism. The iconism of reduplicated verbs with reciprocal meaning became pivotal in the metacommunicative negotiation of the agenda of a rural Bangladeshi moot. Such forms of iconic...

This paper introduces a proposal aimed at enriching the framework of translation process research with a systemic-functional linguistics perspective for investigating instances of effortful translated text production. Drawing on the concept of grammatical metaphor and its potential for modeling both monolingual and multilingual text production, it examines ongoing meaning construction in transl...

3D virtual worlds are networked environments designed using the place metaphor. 3D virtual worlds as Computer-aided Design (CAD) tools have shown promising potentials in areas such as design simulation, distant team works as well as interdisciplinary design collaboration. Recent developments in collaborative 3D virtual worlds focus on interactivity, flexibility and adaptability. Rather than cre...