Edited by Laura J. Speed, Carolyn O'Meara, Lila San Roque and Asifa Majid
Metaphor allows us to think and talk about one thing in terms of another, ratcheting up our cognitive and expressive capacity. It gives us concrete terms for abstract phenomena, for example, ideas become things we can grasp or let go of. Perceptual experience—characterised as physical and… read more
Edited by Nicholas Evans, Alice Gaby, Stephen C. Levinson and Asifa Majid
Reciprocals are an increasingly hot topic in linguistic research. This reflects the intersection of several factors: the semantic and syntactic complexity of reciprocal constructions, their centrality to some key points of linguistic theorizing (such as Binding Conditions on anaphors within… read more
There is a long history presuming smell is not expressible in language, but numerous studies in recent years challenge this presupposition. Large smell lexica have been reported around the world thereby showing high lexical codability in this domain. Psycholinguistic studies likewise find smell… read more
Previous work on colour lexicons focussed on universal patterns in their structure and evolution. We collected new colour naming data in Japanese and three under-described Ryukyuan languages (Amami, Miyako and Yaeyama) to investigate semantic variation and change in the colour lexicon of related… read more
Majid, Asifa 2019 PrefacePerception Metaphors, Speed, Laura J., Carolyn O'Meara, Lila San Roque and Asifa Majid (eds.), pp. vii–viii | Preface
Our bodily experiences play an important role in the way that we think and speak. Abstract language is, however, difficult to reconcile with this body-centred view, unless we appreciate the role metaphors play. To explore the role of the senses across semantic domains, we focus on perception… read more
Reciprocity lies at the heart of social cognition, and with it so does the encoding of reciprocity in language via reciprocal constructions. Despite the prominence of strong universal claims about the semantics of reciprocal constructions, there is considerable descriptive literature on the… read more
How similar are reciprocal constructions in the semantic parameters they encode? We investigate this question by using an extensional approach, which examines similarity of meaning by examining how constructions are applied over a set of 64 videoclips depicting reciprocal events (Evans et al. 2004). read more
