/pdf/evaluation-national-center-for-research-on-evaluation-2x2yzsdcgc.pdf

Evaluation.; National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing,

1. Preface 2. Semantics as Meaning Determination with Semantic-Epistemic Operations (by Allwood, Jens) 3. Some Tenets of Cognitive Semantics (by Gardenfors, Peter) 4. Function, Cognition, and Layered Clause Structure (by Harder, Peter) 5. From Vision to Cognition. A study of metaphor and polysemy in Swedish (by Sjostrom, Soren) 6. Polysemy and Differantiation in the Lexicon (by Viberg, Ake) 7. Space and Time (by Engberg-Pedersen, Elisabeth) 8. Conceptual Engineering (by Holmqvist, Kenneth) 9. Situated Embodied Semantics and Connectionist Modeling (by Zlatev, Jordan) 10. Name Index 11. Subject Index

Cognitive semantics : meaning and cognition

The grammatical coding of postural semantics in Goemai (a West Chadic language of Nigeria)

H. Clark's hypotheses regarding the acquisition of spatial terms were tested using a task designed to elicit subjects' descriptions of different object arrangements. Children from 3 to 10 years and a group of adults were tested. There was some support for Clark's prediction that the perceptual difficulty of each dimension will affect the order of acquisition of the associated linguistic terms, in that the terms followed the predicted order (1) vertical, (2) horizontal-frontal, (3) horizontal-lateral, in the early years. However, it was concluded that since the horizontal-frontal terms lagged behind the others in later childhood and adulthood, perceptual difficulty alone was not an adequate explanation. In addition, no support was found for Clark's notion that linguistic terms associated with the ‘positive’ end of each spatial dimension will be acquired earlier than those associated with the ‘negative’ end.

How do children describe spatial relationships

The semantics oflexical items manifest in the form back are closely examined and related t o front, face, behind Essentially, \"back\" is where the action and interaction isn't; i.e., it names the intrinsic pari, location, or direction directly opposite where the action and interaction goes on. By defining the back äs \"that pari of a body opposite the interactive-side\"— originally on an anthropomorphic model of the prototypical human being in upright stance confronting the world by looking forward and walking forward—the term is extended to the corresponding proper parts ofvertebrate and invertebrate animals and to inanimate objects such äs houses, cupboards, and Computers. Although some semantic extensions of \"back\" in languages other than English are based on an animal model (are zoomorphic)t the anthropomorphic model is shown to be prior. The anthropocentric \"journey Schema\" is the basis for extending back to abstracts such äs spatial-temporal location, movement, notions offalling behind one's peers, and supporting someone or something. The journey Schema underlies the \"landmark\" model for semantic extensions of'back\" in a number of languages. The paper confirms that the uses and meanings of English back are motivated by our cognitive modelling of the world and that they evidence a powerful anthropocentric image of \"the body in the mind\" ofhumankind. The principal purpose of this article is to examine very closely the semantics of lexical items manifest in the form back. It offers an explanation for the extension of the original human body-part term to other vertebrate and invertebrate creatures, to inanimate objects, to spatialtemporal location, to acts and to movement. Semantic extensions of body-part terms have been discussed for languages from many families across the world by Basso (1967: 351-352), Hill (1975, 1982), Fillmore (1982), Brugman (1983), Svorou (1988), Heine (1989), MacLaury Cognitive Linguistics 6-1 (1995), 11-31 0936-5907/95/0006-0011 © Walter de Gruyter

The anthropocentricity of the English word(s) back

Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics
Society (1975), pp. 196-206

https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/BLS/article/download/2354/2124

Clifford Alden Hall

Papers

Variation in the Use of ‘Front’ and ‘Back’ by Bilingual Speakers