Forum for Linguistic Studies

Inspired by Gongsun Longzi’s “form-naming” idea about word meaning, this paper argues that 1) the internal lexicon contains only the list of word-meaning pairs, with no additional information either as part of word meaning or as a structural level above it; 2) the meaning of word is a minimal C-Form, the identifying conceptual meaning that individuates a concept; 3) C-Form is the interface between word meaning and concept meaning; and 4) a sentence has a minimal semantic content, consisting of the minimal meanings of the words composing it, which is propositional and truth-evaluable, and contextual elements contribute nothing to the meaning of language expressions. This paper adheres to semantic minimalism, believing meanwhile that meaning holism helps in semantics inquiry, since reflection on language meaning differs from language meaning itself.

With the rise of experimental philosophy in the twenty-first century, the past two decades have witnessed the experimental turn in the field of philosophy of language. We delineate in this paper the experimental turn in philosophy of language before distinguishing armchair theorizing from empirical testing and highlighting the complementarity between the two approaches, and then carry out an analysis of the experimental tools and methods available for philosophical experiments with examples by classifying them into three major types, viz., the method of survey, the method of big data, and the method of cognitive neuroscience.

Though many researchers have studied “N₁Adv shi N₂” and “S bi N₁ hai N₂” constructions, none of them have done some research on the correlation between them. In view of it, this thesis analyzes the syntactic coercion of the construction “N₁Adv shi N₂” on the construction “S bi N₁ hai N₂” from the perspective of the Cognitive Construction Grammar. The findings are: the latter inherits from the former the characteristics of nouns as adjectives, generic reference of nouns, and no negation, etc., but blocks the characteristic of personal names with specific reference; the latter partially inherits from the former some characteristics of nouns, such as the nouns referring to people, but blocks the information of geographical and personal names. In addition, the metonymic thinking model link proposed in this thesis has complemented the four types of links between constructions by Goldberg.

Negative answers are common types of responsive expressions to English wh-questions. From the theoretical perspective of Embodied-Cognitive Linguistics (Wang, 2014) and the dialogic view on meaning construction, this study takes English wh-dialogues with negative answers as the research object and regards such dialogues as a special group of dialogic constructions in conversation. This paper gives an account of the embodied properties of the semantic grounding process of dialogic focuses in such constructions, in terms of the types of the semantic grounding and the categories of semantic consistency of focal parts of wh-questions with those of negative answers, with the ultimate goal to decipher the cognitive mechanism by which wh-dialogues with negative answers are produced and construed in linguistic communication. 

This article engages with several recent books about language and literature, with a general focus on the early modern period in Europe. One of these books discusses language study in early modern England. Another examines the histories of words relating to ‘ingenuity’. The third provides a theoretical look at the aphorism with a wide historical scope but with some chapters relating to early modern literature. Each is of general interest for linguistic and literary scholars.

Different from traditional discourse analysis, multimodal discourse analysis (MDA), a systematic analysis of different semiotic modes, utilizing language, images, sounds in a discourse, emphasizes the coordination of both dynamic and static semiotic resources. This study presents the status quo and development trend of the research field through an objective, systematic, and comprehensive review of relevant publications available from the Web of Science Core Collection. Analysis techniques including a descriptive statistical method and a bibliometric method are used. The study quantitatively analyzes the publications in terms of general characteristics, geographical distribution, high-cited representatives, and topic discovery and distribution to illustrate the development and trend of MDA. The research findings are as follows: (1) In the past 10 years or so, international MDA research has presented a significant growth trend, with flourishing research output, interest and diversification of presented subjects; (2) New topics are constantly emerging, with research topics mainly focusing on the development of visual grammar, gesture, digital technologies, conference presentations, metonymy and metaphor, etc.; (3) Research focuses mainly on multimodality, semiotics, conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis etc.; (4) The article also listed a series of important and highly influential literature, countries, journals and authors on MDA during different periods. It is hoped that this paper can provide a reference for the further study of MDA.

Despite the fact that threatening in languages is common in ordinary verbal communication, it has not received much attention from academic studies because of its “negative” nature. Muschalik’s monograph Threatening in English: A Mixed Method Approach, mainly based on the theory of Face Threatening Speech Act by Brown and Levinson (1987), takes 301 categories of threatening expressions in judicial proceedings as the corpus with qualitative and quantitative methods, brings a new perspective for pragmatic research, especially speech act research, and deepens people’s understanding of relevant issues. Initiated by Muschalik’s book Threatening in English: A Mixed Method Approach, the paper is to make a critical review on the studies of threatening in English and propose some new directions for the study of threatening in languages.