Constructions in Cognitive Contexts : : Why Individuals Matter in Linguistic Relativity Research / / Franziska Günther.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DG Plus DeG Package 2017 Part 1
• VerfasserIn: Günther, Franziska,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter Mouton, , [2016]; ©2017
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Series: Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] , 299
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (XX, 494 p.)

In what ways are language, cognition and perception interrelated? Do they influence each other? This book casts a fresh light on these questions by putting individual speakers’ cognitive contexts, i.e. their usage-preferences and entrenched patterns of linguistic knowledge, into the focus of investigation. It presents findings from original experimental research on spatial language use which indicate that these individual-specific factors indeed play a central role in determining whether or not differences in the current and/or habitual linguistic behaviour of speakers of German and English are systematically correlated with differences in non-linguistic behaviour (visual attention allocation to and memory for spatial referent scenes). These findings form the basis of a new, speaker-focused usage-based model of linguistic relativity, which defines language-perception/cognition effects as a phenomenon which primarily occurs within individual speakers rather than between speakers or speech communities.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- List of figures -- List of tables -- Abbreviations -- 1. Constructions in cognitive contexts -- 2. Setting the theoretical scene -- 3. Construing spatial scenes in German and English -- 4. Attention, ‘ception’ and language: Basic considerations -- 5. Constructions as [form-construal meaning]- associations -- 6. Spatial language, cognition and perception: Methods and hypotheses -- 7. Experiment 1 – linguistic interaction with spatial scenes: Patterns of language- and speaker-specific variation -- 8. Experiment 2 – linguistic and non-linguistic interaction with spatial scenes: The role of cognitive contexts -- 9. Conclusion: Constructions, cognition, cognitive contexts and beyond -- References -- Appendix -- Author index -- Topic index