Kiki, Nikiforidou & Katis, Demetra (2000) “Subjectivity and Conditionality: The Marking of Speaker Involvement in Modern Greek” in Constructions in Cognitive Linguistics: Selected Papers from Fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Amsterdam 1997 (eds.) Ad Foolen & Frederike van der Leek: 217-237. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing Company.

1. Introduction

Meaning is often a matter of construal. – 217

“A foundational claim of cognitive linguistics”, says Langacker (1990b: 5), “is that an expression’s meaning cannot be reduced to an objective characterization of the situation described: equally important for linguistic semantics is how the conceptualizer chooses to construe the situation and portray it for expressive purposes.” – 217

2. Conditional with ama: from simultaneity to speaker involvement

3. Ean conditionals: from concrete to discourse deixis

4. Conditionals with na: grounded conditionality

5. Discussions and conclusion

an important conclusion of this paper is that conditionals, besides expressing relations between premises and conclusions, are also, and perhaps more importantly, expressions of subjective beliefs and attitudes. – 232

Mandelblit, Nili & Fauconnier, Gilles (2000) “How I got myself arrested: Underspecificity in Grammatical Blends as a source for Constructional Ambiguity” in Constructions in Cognitive Linguistics: Selected Papers from Fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Amsterdam 1997 (eds.) Ad Foolen & Frederike van der Leek: 167-189. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing Company.

1. Grammatical blending in the use of syntactic constructions

We develop an analysis of sentence processing as a case of conceptual and linguistic blending (what we refer to as grammatical blending or grammatical integration): sentence generation involves the blending of a conceived event with a syntactic construction; sentence interpretation starts with a reconstruction of the blending configuration. – 167

The syntactic constructions serve as integrating frames, allowing the linguistic representation of complex events as instances of simple clause constructions. – 167

The central idea is that simple sentence structures can be used to linguistically express a complex sequence of events by blending together elements from the event sequence with the simple sentence structure (the ‘integrating syntactic construction’). – 167

By ‘blending’, we refer to a general cognitive operation. This operation includes a cross-space mapping between two input spaces, and selective projection from the two inputs into a blended space, which may then acquire emergent structure through completion and elaboration. – 167

Grammatical blending, like any blending operation, is possible if a correspondence (cross-space mapping) is found between two conceptual structures in the case of grammatical blending, the correspondence is between the structure of the novel conceived event (the one that is communicated) and the semantics of an integrating syntactic construction. – 167

It is up to the hearer to reconstruct the blending configuration, and elaborate its semantics to fit a possible event in the world. This grammatical underspecification of the blending operation leads to what is sometimes referred to as ‘constructional ambiguity’, or at other times ‘lexical ambiguity’ (if the underspecification of the blend is assigned to a particular lexical item). – 171

2. Blending operations in the Hebrew Morphological binyanim system

3. Blending and underspecificaion in French causative-passive constructions

Kochańsa, Agata (2000) “Verbal Aspects and Construal” in Constructions in Cognitive Linguistics: Selected Papers from Fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Amsterdam 1997 (eds.) Ad Foolen & Frederike van der Leek: 141-166. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing Company.

1. Introduction

perfective verb phrases denote whole completed processes, while imperfective ones designate processes in progress. […] imperfective verb phrases may also have repetitive or habitual meanings. – 141

Langacker’s idea that the grammar of a language should be characterized as “those aspects of cognitive organization in which resides a speaker’s grasp of established linguistic convention” (1987a: 57) or as “a structured inventory of conventional linguistic units (ibid), where a unit is understood as any semantic, phonological or symbolic structure mastered by a native speaker to such an extent that it becomes cognitive routine for him. (cf. Langacker 1988a: 11) - 141

Such an understanding of the notion of grammar leads, among other things, to granting the status of a unit to any meaning of a given linguistic structure arising in a specific context of use, provided that this meaning is sufficiently conventionalized for a sufficient number of speakers of a language (cf. Langacker 1988a: 11). – 142

According to Langacker, process type may be classified into two main groups: those that are conceptualized as being bounded in time within the viewing frame and those that are thought of as temporally unbounded. – 143t

According to Langacker, a process type is bounded not only if it inherently involves the conception of a terminal point, whose attainment results in completing the process in question. A process type is temporally bounded simply if its component states are normally thought of as being distributed over a limited span of time and its temporal boundaries are conceptualized as falling within the adopted viewing frame. – 143

It is important to stress here that what matters for classifying a process type as either temporally bounded or unbounded is how this process is typically conceptualized. – 143

A process type is internally heterogeneous if its component states are changing through time. On the other hand, a process type is internally homogeneous if all its component states are “Construed as being effectively identical.” – 143

On the points that he (Verkuyl) raises is that this notion (of homogeneity) is useless is differentiating sentences which are durative in his analysis – such as John pushed a cart – from sentences that he classifies as terminative – such as John ate a piece of fruit-cake. The sentence is classified as durative because it can combine with a for+NP_{span of time} adverbial and cannot combine with an in+NP_{span of time} adverbial. The second sentence behaves in the opposite way and is thus classified as terminative. […] Nevertheless, both sentences are said to be characterized by homogeneity since both cases if x V-ed is true for any interval of time, it is also true for any portion of this interval. Therefore, the notion of homogeneity is said to be irrelevant for aspectual consideration. -144-45

Answer to criticism of this kind is that, first of all, under Langacker’s understanding of the notion of homogeneity, it is only the process instance profiled by John pushed the cart that is internally homogenous. On the other hand, the process instance profiled by John at a piece of fruit-cake is internally homogeneous since in each component phase of this process its landmark (a piece of fruit-cake) gets smaller and smaller as a result of what the trajectory (John) does. Therefore, the profiled relationship between the process participants is construed as changing through time. – 145

The notion of internal homo- or heterogeneity may be useful in explaining the behavior of verb phrases combined with for+NP_{span of time} and in+NP_{span of time} adverbials. – 145

According to Langacker every verbal stem profiles a process type. – 146

Internally homogeneous and temporally unbounded e.g. have black hair.

Internally heterogeneous and temporally bounded e.g. repair a car, read a letter.

Internally homogeneous nevertheless temporally bounded e.g. sleep, read

2. An analysis of the data

According to Langacker, coordination in its pure form, such as coordination by means of the logical and, “reduces to the mental juxtaposition of co-equal structures, on either a simultaneous or an alternating basis” (1991: 472). This means that no relationship between (or among) the coordinated entities constitutes an object of conceptualization but their mental juxtaposition is just a part of the conceptualization process. – 147

3. Conclusions

When a number of verb phrases are coordinated in a sequence, such a construction usually exhibits meanings that go beyond the purely compositional interpretation. One such constructional meaning is the meaning of some temporal relationship, such as simultaneity or sequentiality, between the profiled process instances. – 159

Perfective and imperfective verb phrases are polysemous and, cannot be reduced to a single semantic representation but rather constitute networks of interrelated senses. – 161

The meaning of a perfective or an imperfective verb phrase cannot be analyzed as the sum of the meaning of a verbal stem and the perfective or the imperfective morpheme. This is because the aspectual interpretation of a verb phrase heavily depends on a sentential and discourse context in which this phrase is used. - 162