SLAV/LING 109 -- Cognitive Linguistics

Welcome to Cognitive Linguistics!

This is an inquiry-based course, which means that instead of me shoveling information at you, I will give you questions to think about or problems to solve. We will discuss our answers and solutions and thereby come to grips with the theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics. This course depends on your active participation, so please dig in and enjoy!

Logistics

Time & Place: MWF 9-9:50 in Dey Hall 402

Instructor: Laura A. Janda (janda@unc.edu; 962-7549; Slavic Dept CB # 3165; office in 312A Dey Hall; mailbox in 425 Dey Hall)

Office Hours: M 10-10:50, W 2-2:50

Textbooks

The following textbooks have been ordered for this course and you should find them in the bookstore:: Dabrowska, Ewa. 2004. Language, Mind and Brain: Some Psychological and Neurological Constraints on Theories of Grammar. Washington DC: Georgetown U Press. (=EwaD in Assignment Schedule); Croft, William and Alan Cruse. 2004. Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge U Press. (=C&C in Assignment Schedule)

Syllabus

This course will involve readings, homework, presentations, a midterm, and a final. 70% of your grade will be determined by your homework and presentations, so you have a lot of control. Also note that you are welcome to work in groups or individually on ALL the homework and presentation assignments. Here are some guidelines and a grading scheme.

Readings. These are noted in the assignment schedule. It is very important to keep up with them, because often you will need to know what was covered in the reading in order to make sense of a homework assignment. Also, if there is something in the reading that doesn't make sense to you, chances are you are NOT alone. Please bring questions with you to class and ask them so that we can all get the most out of the readings. Also, please note that I have chosen entirely new readings this year (in an effort to update the course). This means that I will want to hear from you about how effective the readings were.

Homework. There are 25 homework assignments in the assignment schedule (you can more or less ignore the numbering -- I had to reshuffle them a bit to improve coherence with new readings). You are expected to attempt ALL of them, and to bring some written record of your work to the next class. In other words, if there is homework, please come to class with something you have written or printed out. We will use what you have brought to class to begin our discussion, so your contribution will be very important. During the course of the class, we should be able to resolve the issue or problem in the homework. After this is done, you are welcome to write up a summary of the class discussion and your observations on the assignment, including references to relevant passages in our reading. Your summary should be at least one page long (but no more than two pages). You are expected to hand in a total of 15 homework summaries. Your homework summaries can be turned in at any time (the sooner the better!), except during the last week of classes. In other words, the last day that I will accept homework is April 21. Each homework can receive up to three points, and you are welcome to resubmit assignments that receive less than three points if you wish to improve your grade. But I repeat that all homework has to be in by April 21 in order to receive credit (this includes rewrites). You can also write up summaries of guest lectures and have these counted as homeworks.

Presentations. Select a work on Cognitive Linguistics from one of the authors on my list of approved authors. Books are preferable, but some significant articles may be acceptable. Please send me an email to get approval for your selection on or before January 25. You will give three presentations on the work you have selected. One will be a preliminary presentation (Presentation #1). You need not have completed your reading of the work yet, but you should be able to give a brief introduction of the author (most of these people have websites) and the work. Your presentations can be accompanied by powerpoint slides if you like. Your second presentation is of the same length and format, but will be a complete report on the work, and will suggest some original (small) project that you will undertake on the inspiration of this work. Your final presentation will will recap the main points of the work and present your original project.

Midterm and final. The midterm and final will be brief quizzes on the main concepts covered in the readings, homework, and student presentations.

Grading Scheme. Here is an outline of how the grades will be calculated.

45 points for Homework (= 15 homework summaries x 3 points each)
5 points for Presentation #1
5 points for Presentation #2
15 points for Final Presentation
20 points for Hour Tests
10 points for Final

This adds up to 100 total points.

Assignment Schedule

Jan 11: Introduction

What to prepare for next time:: Read article on Cognitive Linguistics

Jan 13: Cognitive Linguistics -- Overview

What to prepare for next time:: Read EwaD Chapter 1: Introduction and Chapter 2: Language processing; Prepare Homework 1: The Source Domains

Jan 18: The Source Domains; Language processing, BNC, Russian National Corpus

What to prepare for next time:: Read EwaD Chapter 3: Language acquisition and Chapter 4: Language in the brain; Prepare Homework 2: Conventional and Novel Metaphors

Jan 20: Conventional and Novel Metaphors; Language acquisition & Language in the brain

What to prepare for next time:: Read EwaD Chapter 5: Language and other cognitive processes and Chapter 6: Biological underpinnings; Prepare Homework 3: Taking Too Much from the Source Domain

Jan 23: Too Much from the Source Domain; Language and other cognitive processes; Language in the brain

What to prepare for next time:: Read EwaD Chapter 7: Words; cf. Wierzbicka's Semantic Metalanguage; Prepare Homework 5: What is meaning? Where does it come from? How does it work?

Jan 25: Meaning; Words

What to prepare for next time:: Read EwaD Chapter 8: On rules and regularity (sections 1-5); Prepare Homework 25: Polish Genitive Singular in -a vs. -u; See data sheet; Pl Gsg answer, Nikiforidou for comparison with Polish Gsg

Jan 27: Polish Gsg; Rules and regularity

What to prepare for next time:: Read either "A metaphor in search of a source domain" + table(for the more linguistically inclined) or "Russian Aspect at Your Fingertips" + table (for the more pedagogically inclined); Print out the matter table and matter handout and bring them to class with you next time.; Come hear a talk today about Cognitive Linguistics! Prof Tore Nesset (University of Tromsoe, Norway) will talk on "A Usage-Based Approach to Morphophonology: Sem Alternations in the Russian Imperative" at 3pm in Dey 304.

Jan 30: Rocks and Sand and Russian Aspect; Demonstration of Aspect in Russian website

What to prepare for next time:: Read EwaD Chapter 8: On rules and regularity (sections 6-9); Prepare Homework 6: Can a computer think?; The Turing Test, Searle's Chinese Room, see also an interview with Searle

Feb 1 : Preparation for Presentation #1; Can a Computer Think?; Rules and regularity cont'd.

What to prepare for next time:: Read EwaD Chapter 9: Syntactic constructions (sections 1 & 2); Prepare Homework 7: Analyze a poem

Feb 3: Analyze a poem; Syntactic constructions

What to prepare for next time:: Read EwaD Chapter 9: Syntactic constructions (section 3); Prepare Homework 8: Metonymy All Around

Feb 6: Metonymy (Geeraerts' Metonymy presentation); Syntactic Constructions cont'd.

What to prepare for next time:: Prepare Presentation #1

Feb 8: Presentation #1 (Cally, Sarah, Kristen, Brian)

Feb 10: Presentation #1 (Quentin, Ashley, Jeffrey, Mirek)

What to prepare for
next time:: Read EwaD Chapter 10: The cognitive enterprise; Prepare Homework 13: Sound Symbolism

Feb 13: Sound Symbolism; The cognitive enterprise; Wrap-Up for Hour Test #1

What to prepare for next time:: Study for Hour Test #1

Feb 15: Hour Test #1

On Thursday Feb 16 at 6:30pm you are invited to a pot-luck reception to meet our speaker, Masako Fidler at my house, 108 Morningside Drive. Morningside is in Carrboro, about 1 mile North of the Weaver-Teeter complex on N. Greensboro Street. Look for Robert Hunt Drive and go one block further and turn right onto Morningside. Go one block and look for a brown house with a red door and big rocks in the yard on the corner on the right. If you prefer, here is a link to a map. (Note that the house is further down the street than shown on the map -- it is at the intersection of Morningside and Spring Valley.)

Feb 17: Guest lecture by Prof. Masako Fidler, Brown U: "Sound symbolic expressions: Are they different beasts from grammar?"

What to prepare for next time:: Read C&C Chapter 1: Introduction and Chapter 2: Frames, domains, spaces; Prepare Homework 9: Objective Reality; You are also invited to Prof. Fidler's talk today at 3pm in Dey 303 on: "Small is beautiful: Or how tiny fragments of sound make a text multi-dimensional in Czech, Japanese, and other languages"

Mar 1: Adopt-A-Word; Categories, concepts and meanings (cont'd)

What to prepare for next time:: Read C&C Chapter 5: Polysemy (through 5.2.4); Prepare Homework 16: Russian ZA-; you need to look at data sheets: 1, 2, and 3.; You're invited! On Thursday, March 2 at 6:30pm we will have a pot-luck dinner at my house, followed by a talk entitled "Neural Origins of the Superorganismic 'Body' of Law and 'Sense' of Equality", by Gail Murrow. See Feb 15 entry for directions to my house.

Mar 3: Guest Presentations by Maya Bringe and Nicholas LeBlanc

What to prepare for next time:: Read C&C Chapter 5: Polysemy (through end)

March 6: ZA-; Polysemy

What to prepare for next time:: Read C&C Chapter 6: Hyponomy and meronymy; Prepare Homework 17: The Czech Dative

March 8: Czech Dative; Hyponymy & meronymy

What to prepare for next time:: Read C&C Chapter 7: Antonymy and complementarity; Prepare Homework 18: Czech až and než

March 10: Czech až and než; Antonymy & complementarity

What to prepare for next time:: Read C&C Chapter 8: Metaphor (through 8.3.5); Prepare Homework 4: Why Can an Idea Be Both Lofty and Profound?

March 20: Lofty & Profound; Metaphor

What to prepare for next time:: Read C&C Chapter 8: Metaphor (through end); Prepare Homework 12: Kinship relations, See Metaphor data 1, Metaphor data 2, Metaphor data 3

March 22: Kinship relations; Metaphor

What to prepare for next time:: Presentation #2

March 24: Presentation #2 (Mirek, Jeffrey)

March 27: Presentation #2 (Cally & Brian, Ashley)

March 29: Presentation #2 (Quentin, Kristen, Sarah)

What to prepare for next time:: Read C&C Chapter 9: From idioms to construction grammar; Prepare Homework 21: Implicational Maps for Simultaneous Temporal Location; See data sheet

March 31: Simultaneous Temporal Location; Idioms > construction grammar

What to prepare for next time:: Read C&C Chapter 10: An overview of construction grammars (through 10.2.1); Prepare Homework 19: What's a vowel?; See data sheet; See vowel synthesizer

April 3: Vowel; Construction Grammars

What to prepare for next time:: Read C&C Chapter 10: An overview of construction grammars (through end); Prepare Homework 23: Czech Facultative Animates

April 5: Czech Facultative Animates; Construction Grammars; Review for Hour Test #2

What to prepare for next time:: Read Croft&Cruse Chapter 12: Conclusion: cognitive linguistics and beyond; Prepare

April 7: Hour Test #2

What to prepare for next time:: Read C&C Chapter 11: The usage-based model (through 11.2.5)

April 10: Guest Lecture by Professor Tore Nesset, Tromsoe University, Norway

What to prepare for next time:: Read C&C Chapter 11: The usage-based model (through end) and Chapter 12: Conclusion; Prepare Homework 26: Russian Nominative Plural in Stressed -a; See data sheet 1, data sheet 2, data sheet 3, data sheet 4

April 12: Russian Npl; Usage-based model (cont'd.)

What to prepare for next time:: Prepare Homework 20: Front and Back in Space and Time; See data sheet; Homework 24: Polish Nominative Plural Forms

April 17: Czech Facultative Animates, R Npl

What to prepare for next time:: Prepare Final Presentations

April 19: Front and Back; Polish Npl

April 21: Class cancelled

April 24: Final Presentations

: Sarah Jones "Ferdinand de Saussure"; Miroslav Styblo "Semantic Translation"; Ashley Reed "The Way We Think about Fanny Fern"

April 26: Final Presentations

: Kristen Lacefield "World View"; Cally Harris "A comparative study of two works on the origin of human language"

April 28: Final Presentations

: Jeffrey Ringhausen "Raymond Gibbs Revisited"; Quentin Read "German Compound Nouns: A Schematic Network"

The FINAL EXAM is Monday, May 1 at 8am in Dey 402

Be there or be !